u/SwimmerIndependent47

Hi all! My wife loves Romantasy. I love Fantasy. We really want to buddy read a fantasy / Romantasy book that’s a great blend of both. I don’t mind romance but while I am typically NLOGuys(TM), like most guys I don’t think I can handle it dominating the pages. (Ew gross female stuff🤮 )

What’s a great a book we can both read and be satisfied 😉with? I don’t mind some romance. Like kissing and hand holding is fine. Missionary only. I don’t want her getting ideas.

Thoughts???

The Professionalization Of Dramione Fanfic Is Making It Suck

I am in several writing communities for Dramione writers and I am noticing a trend that is making me very sad: Writers are getting burned tf out.

Why? Because a hobby that started out as a way to practice a skill, connect with others, share ideas, and have fun has become an unpaid side hustle.

Do you want your fic read? Well then, honey, you better at least learn Canva. But then again, if you’re going to do that, you might as well also buy an iPad and an Apple Pencil, and learn Procreate, so you can have a dedicated Instagram for the art you MUST have for your fics.

You also need a tumblr. You also need a TikTok. You also need to be active in Facebook groups and Reddit communities. You should look into how indie book writers market their work, and do as much of that as you can fit in around your normal life and job and family.

And that’s just the marketing.

You also need to have a creative writing degree—an MFA, if you can snag one—because people will apparently bitch and moan that too many children are writing fanfic, and oh no, now there will be more???? And where is my expected free indirect speech in this Dramione??? Why are you telling and not showing???? Why haven’t you paid a copy editor to make line edits??? How do you expect anyone to read this story about sexy Draco Malfoy if it’s not even good enough to file off the serial numbers and submit it to literary journals???

For the love of Merlin! Fanfiction is allowed to be “bad!” Fanfiction is allowed to be weird! You can have too much description! You can put them in a white room! You can go too hard at a metaphor! You can have plot holes! You can have scenes that are too long! You can skip the boring bits!

People I adore who were once passionate, prolific, happy writers are going quiet. The pressure to write perfectly, edit perfectly, market perfectly, and keep producing no matter what else is happening in their lives is simply too great.

Fanfiction is *not* meant to be a path to internet fame or a book deal. All these expectations are sucking the joy right out of it, and it’s also contributing to the rise of AI fics and AI art, because people are afraid to be bad, and weird, and unprofessional about it.

Can we just go back to what it was all about at the start? Can the only litmus test please be, *did you have fun writing it?*

🫠 I am just very tired.

Long time copy pasta maker, first time OC poster. So after feeling personally attacked by the post on one of the non-jerk subs defending Daggermouth, I decided I would read it out of pure spite (despite previously deciding to pass). Yall this is so bad. And when I say it’s bad, I say it as someone who voluntarily read Nocticadia last year (pre rage read). I say this as someone who read that really terrible plastic girl/crow boy book and thought, might as well go back and read the other 9 and the 2 spinoffs (0/10 do not recommend the other 9. The spin offs are kinda fun). I say this as someone who powered through Kiss of the Basilisk in a matter of days. Up until now, the only rage read I’ve DNF has been Blood of Hercules (seriously fuck that shit). But this task? This task of reading and viciously tearing apart Daggermouth might be insurmountable. Not because it’s hard to jerk, if anything the opposite. A new jerking opportunity appears multiple times a page.

Anyway, here are my thoughts on chapters 1&2 presented as a stream of consciousness angrily typed into my notes app:

Chapter 1

“Not for belief in justice, but for proximity- proximity to power” power is italicized. Groundbreaking.

2 pages in and already there are 5 em dashes. Did a robot write this?

“It was law in NFH that any person who betrayed the heart was executed publicly” has 2079 highlights. Is this a difficult concept for most readers to grasp? Do people find this profound?

“His mask covering his face” glad the author cleared that up. Otherwise I would have wondered what body part could possibly be covered by a mask

“He looked neither left nor right nor at the condemned. Only straight ahead- watching, observing.” Was looking directly behind him an option? Can he turn his head all the way around like Regan in exorcist? Also holy redundancy Batman

“Elaborate customs and laws were created around masking, making it illegal for lower rings to look upon any of the elites unveiled faces” 2274 highlights. Why do people highlight? I always assumed it was because they wanted to easily return to a passage for rereading (either because is good or will be relevant later and they don’t want to forget). Who is rereading this?

“The dagger-mouths owned the boundary and they did not take kindly to the Avery’s coming into their ring” 2745 highlights

“He hated the dagger mouths with every atom of his being.” 2527 highlights

I’m so glad this author is just info dumping all the important details into the first chapter. Thank goodness for her declarative writing style. How else would I know that the MMC hates the dagger mouths (murderer AND contract killers) if she didn’t explicitly tell me?

Did she decide to also throw in ruthless mercenaries and hungry for blood incase the very next sentence incase we didn’t understand the contract killer part?

Chapter 2

“FMC shouldered into wolf’s head like a bullet entering a bone” so she flew directly at the building at over 500mph, crashed through the wall like the koolaid man, and then had to be removed by a doctor?

“Read the crowd the way a butcher might inspect the next carcass—- efficient, unsentimental, already hungry for the cut” I would argue that hunger is a sentiment. Also, what is the author trying to convey here? That the FMC, like all butchers, has very high job satisfaction? The crowd at the bar is full of her coworkers, where does the author think butchers meat comes from?

Why does a bar smell like antifreeze? Is it run out of an old pickup truck? Is there a car in the parking lot perpetually leaking radiator fluid?

The head of DMs and FMC are talking about killing the presidents son so loudly that a random person a table over hears and threatens to take the gig? Even if you trust every person in that bar, why alert anyone who isn’t necessarily to this obviously precarious gig? Something tells me they might not be very good assassins.

Now she’s literally announced it to the entire bar so they know how tough and capable she is

Oh good, now we’re getting the same lore dump but from FMC in case we already forgot the lore dump from the previous chapter. Good thing so many people highlighted the important bits

“His family was the hammer and people like her were always the nails.” I don’t think I can take anymore nonsensical similes or heavy handed metaphors.

So glad the author told us that this job would be a suicide run for literally anyone else, but it’s the only type of job FMC takes. Otherwise how would we know she’s not like other girls?

One paragraph: stay alive by being blank, hands visible, no clear intent
Next paragraph: projecting the unspoken threat that the only thing the would receive if they messed with her was a shallow grave
So to survive in this world you have to be both completely un intimidating, and pose no threat, while simultaneously posing the biggest threat imaginable. Got it. This book can’t even keep its own rules (that have been info dumped) straight for a single page

Can someone explain the actual purpose of the maintenance tunnels between layers/rings/sections (fuck now shes got me using multiple words to describe the exact same thing) littered with many convenient secret access hatches? What kind of maintenance are they doing inside a wall that requires a tunnel, let alone one with multiple (hard to defend) entrances?

i don’t know where else to say this but i have not stopped thinking about it.

last week, i got on a flight from nyc to japan (14+ hr trip) and the woman next to me (i was in the middle. she was at the window) opened chatgpt and asked it to create a books worth of harry potter fanfiction. she then saved it as a pdf to her apple books app and read this ai generated harry potter fanfiction. for 14 hours straight. did not put it down.

i’m not sure if this fits the rules for this sub, but it’s so bizarre to me. if you like harry potter fanfiction, great. more power to ya. but go on ao3 or wattpad or something 😭

edit: it was erotic fanfiction. can’t believe i didn’t mention that.

I just finished reading A Lady of Rooksgrave Manor which features five (or six depending on how you look at it) different male love interests which is definitely the most I've come across. Now I want to know what's the greatest number of guys you've seen falling all over themselves to be with one lovely lady (and the book too, for research purposes 😂)?