Ophelia
unpleasant
Y'all might be in different points in your lives than the average fanfic author, methinks.
You can pry my 200k SI, second person romance with [insert anime character here] fic from my cold, dead hands. 😋
Y'all might be in different points in your lives than the average fanfic author, methinks.
That...strikes me as rather arrogant? Slow-burn is a genre. Calling the entire genre of drawn-out romance bad for being drawn out is like...have you considered that's you're just not the audience, and to look for more concise stuff?50-70k words is a good novel length; there's nothing wrong with doing a romance novel-length romance.
200k is really too much, but that's because it's too much for, well, almost any single thing. And dragging out a romance, where the core of the appeal is these characters getting together, over like 3-4 novel's worth of words, is just not good writing? If you're doing a romance work where the characters actually get together within the first 50k words, and the further stuff is about the now-established romance, that's a different beast to 'these characters are going to get together, i totally promise, what do you mean i've written literally ten books worth of words about how they haven't got together'.
That...strikes me as rather arrogant? Slow-burn is a genre. Calling the entire genre of drawn-out romance bad for being drawn out is like...have you considered that's you're just not the audience, and to look for more concise stuff?
Like, I can't stand slowburn, but I know what technique looks like, and I know when someone is going for a thing. A lot of those stories are not about establishing a romance. They're about the agonizing process of getting over yourself and your circumstances and occasionally your trauma or your stupidity and actually becoming happy. The story ends with the romance happening, because it's about the long journey of actually getting there. There's good and bad ways to actually implement this, but the thing itself is not automatically bad writing just because being concise is what you value in a story.
50-70k words is a good novel length; there's nothing wrong with doing a romance novel-length romance.
200k is really too much, but that's because it's too much for, well, almost any single thing. And dragging out a romance, where the core of the appeal is these characters getting together, over like 3-4 novel's worth of words, is just not good writing? If you're doing a romance work where the characters actually get together within the first 50k words, and the further stuff is about the now-established romance, that's a different beast to 'these characters are going to get together, i totally promise, what do you mean i've written literally ten books worth of words about how they haven't got together'.
200k is really too much, but that's because it's too much for, well, almost any single thing. And dragging out a romance, where the core of the appeal is these characters getting together, over like 3-4 novel's worth of words, is just not good writing? If you're doing a romance work where the characters actually get together within the first 50k words, and the further stuff is about the now-established romance, that's a different beast to 'these characters are going to get together, i totally promise, what do you mean i've written literally ten books worth of words about how they haven't got together'.
I basically agree with all of this, which makes it so goddamn annoying that I get annoyed at romance-heavy storiesThere's something so wonderfully agonizing about the yearning of a long ass slowburn. It's not the only kind of romance i read, but the people who are masters of it really understand the power of delayed gratification.
One thing that i dislike though, is the canard that romance isn't plot. Romance novels have plots, they have twists, they have character development and themes and all the other juicy stuff. Plot isnt equivalent to going places and having action scenes. I think some people are so condescending about romance- no its not just purely motivated by sex drive or a desire to smash characters together like dolls. Some the best character writing in fanfic ive written has been romance. The best romance stories are also inherently character studies. And just because a story is primarily about two characters bring inna relationship doesnt mean it cant be about other things as well. I've read some of the most nuanced depictions of bipolar disorder, childhood trauma, alien worldbuilding and queer family dynamics in a fic where sollux captor falls in love with dave strider- characters that dont even talk in the story they're from. It fucking owned.
It's fine to not like something but its annoying when you fail to properly explain the actual appeal as well. Leave that to the people that actually enjoy it. You won't see me trying to explain why people love milsci so much.
The more I grow older the less I can stand long form fics in general. Get to the point because I have other things to do in my life too. I love the main theme but stop throwing in a bunch of extra stuff. Save that for your next fic or something.The more I grow older, the less I can stand getting-together romance.
I'm an established relationship kind of person
I'm just sick of 90% of everything also being romance and/or smut.I think this entire issue is swerving back around to the old 90% rule.
Maybe we should make a "Tropes you'd like to see more in fanfiction" thread.All I want is painful love in fanfiction. Doomed, star-crossed, one-sided, give it all to me!
Maybe we should make a "Tropes you'd like to see more in fanfiction" thread.
I honestly don't have a lot of patience for the vibe, is all it is. I need other stakes, romance alone isn't enough to carry 200k words, in general.Heck, as long as it's engaging, intentional, and not contrived, I don't care about slowburn fic. I might've written one myself in the long ago, halcyon days of yore.
sometimes it's also just a structural problem. Like, honestly? A big part of why I think writing Wormfic took off like it did, even when people engaged with the actual themes and characters is somewhat uncommon, is that Wildbow's specific arc structure is actually really really good for automatically outlining your story to a degree. I could be wrong, but like, my own fanfic is 5 arcs, roughly 10 chapters apiece at 6000ish words per chapter, adding up to roughly five novellas, each following the one before it and building on what was established.I mean... I may be biased here because, uhhh, yeahhh... ... but I don't think the comparison to printed novels really holds? Basically, fanfic has set its own standards. And I don't even mean the ludicrous 1m+ words fanfics. Those are outliers. But I think a length of around 300-400k words for a completed longfic is pretty standard on Ao3 or ffn. So, if you have 300,000 words, and it is focused on that romance, then 2/3 of that length being them coming together seems... pretty normal to me, t bh?
I mean, you say "where the core appeal is these characters getting together", but in fact, most romances are about the getTING together, not about the being together. Which of course definitely is its own can of worms, it also definitely is how it is. So considering that process is the focus, spending 2/3 of a work on that focus seems perfectly fine to me.
Here it is, for those wondering.
Maybe we should make a "Tropes you'd like to see more in fanfiction" thread.
That is what I was suggesting we make.There is also the Pet Delights in fanfiction thread, for those wanting the exact opposite of this thread.
Sounds like half of the problems people have with Amber.