u/plutootherwise

After over two decades of reading fanfiction, I've come to be very, very familiar with what I want in a fic. The fics that I want more than anything are 100k+ fics containing an equal mix of action/adventure and romance/smut, though I'm aware that that's a *lot* to ask. Usually I just settle for 60k+ romance/smut that might have—at most—a single action scene. :P

Having read these kinds of stories for over twenty years and noticing certain patterns in fic writers, I've developed a test to see if I'm going to like a fic, particularly if it's a wip when I start reading. I open the entire work and I ctrl+f for the word 'kiss'. If the characters kiss each other—or explicitly fantasize about kissing each other in the case of pining and slow burn fics—in the first 50k words, then it goes in the read pile.

Usually, for all the stories that I've marked 'good' and 'reread', the kissing will occur in the first 10k words, and often in the first chapter (for those stories that start spicy, take a rocky turn for a bit, and then have the characters come back together at the end).

But if the fic—especially if it's a wip—doesn't have that then I usually don't even start it. Some people are patient enough to wait 500k+ words for the first kiss (my partner comes to mind, her motto being "I don't want them to get together, I want them to want to get together and *suffer*") but I just don't have the patience for it.

tl;dr: What habits have you developed to help you choose what to read, what not to read, etc? Do you meticulously read all the tags? Do you try to go in blind? Do you only read fics that contain the word jambalaya?

It's easy to get emotionally bogged down with all the seemingly imminent disasters just over the horizon as well as the slow disasters we're currently living through, but I can't meaningfully impact any of those things, so I'd like to stop worrying about them.

Recently, I've been using Pragmata (AKA robo-daughter dad simulator) and Dungeon Crawler Carl (AKA Maybe the Alien Apocalypse is as Funny as it is Horrifying) to ease my tortured soul in spite of the fact that the second (maybe both?) is pretty explicitly about how companies exploit people for profit.

So, what's something (it doesn't have to be media, it could be your dog) that's brightening up your life in these interesting times.