Preemptively putting that out there so everybody knows that if a fic set in Japan features high schoolers drinking alcohol willy-nilly, it's a charge.

And neither are beavers and red pandas, all of which I've sadly seen in badfics set in Japan. Also, before any of us goes on to commit another instance of Bad Biology, true pandas are not native to Japan either.

It's green like everybody else. I asked a group of actual Japanese people about this myth and they confirmed it's false, and no less than 5 top Google search results on 青信号 all say it's green, so you can consider this particularly weird myth busted.

Bad and good sex scenes exist in Japanese fanfics, but there's this one pet peeve that I observe much more frequently in Japanese fics than in ones written in English – while bad English smut is often characterized by weird things going on in the narration, bad Japanese smut is mostly in the dialogue, with many authors' just spamming crying noises, especially badly spelled and punctuated ones, in place of actually describing the acts. Think overly extended vowels (aaaaaah), ellipsis abuse, glottal stop abuse (strings of っっっ or ッッッ – how the heck do you extend a glottal stop?), long vowel mark abuse (strings of ーーー, especially after anything other than katakana or after a friggin' glottal stop), liberal sprinkling of the dakuten mark, especially after vowels and consonants that can't be voiced (think あ゛あ゛あ゛), and – this is my favorite – actual use of special symbols (heart marks in dialogues, I kid you not), coupled with annoying frequency in a single scene. All these goofs make the scene ridiculous very quickly, and can take all the unironic enjoyment out of an otherwise well-written sex sequence.

(To be continued)

But what about that popular Hetalia fanon that gives Hong Kong the human name "Kaoru" even though he clearly isn't Japanese? Also, what are other acts of misrepresenting a real culture beyond language (stereotyping, extreme historical inaccuracy, conflating close but different cultures, We All Live in America) called among the PPC?

I'm sorry if this reply is getting long, but one thing that annoys me personally as a Japanese speaker is translation convention'ed fics where the characters are really speaking Japanese, but make wordplays that are impossible in Japanese. I once came across a fic where a character mistakes being asked about "hanging out" as being asked to kill herself, even though hang out and hang are two completely different words in Japanese.