Intense hatred for the apparent plethora of urban fantasy books which spend more wordcount on the heroine's jean size and menstrual cycle than on the actual interesting parts.
Is it just general period bitching because she has to be edgy and pms or like Idk her werewolf bf sniffing the air like "we shouldn't fuck tonight, you're ovulating"
I have to admit that I'm prone to purple prose myself, but holy shit this reads like some kid who was never taught three-syllable words organically and now thinks they're a short route to sounding smart XD
As is "lonesome terraced house" - how is it lonesome if it's stuck to other houses? Good point, I was distracted by "civil parish of dwarf population". It took me about five minutes to figure out they weren't talking about a population of Tolkienesque dwarves, they were just too pretentious to say "village" or even "small population".
This is what happens when you look up the wrong sense of a word in the thesaurus. See The Eye of Argon and the part where Grignr descends a staircase to its posterior.
Does anyone else get those weirdass ads on YouTube that are like for some God awful supernatural bodice ripper thing? They're all like 'my name is Luna half moon and I'm horribly abused as the bitch of my pack' and 'my fated mate thinks I'm garbage'? Like I haven't given into morbid curiosity yet and clicked anything but the skip button, mostly because it all sounds so fucking depressing?? Why does YT seem to think I like DOMESTIC ABUSE in my werewuff novel, jesus tiddyfucking christ on a penny farthing. Also?? They're like in HS?? why Just Why.
Not on Youtube, but I do occasionally get them when playing mobile games. The weirdest part to me is that the ads are for whole platforms that allegedly host lots of stories, but the story they quote in the ad always seems to be miserable het femsub a/b/o. The ads for romance comic platforms have a much wider spread of story types, so like, what even?
I downloaded one or two of them and while it isn't very good quality, it reminded me of the angsty-with-a-happy-ending stuff me and other people my age wrote on ff.net when i was younger. It was fun and nostalgic. I try not to take anything too seriously with regards to questionable content. I see it as one of those "let's make a character miserable and then make them happy" kind of situations. But i still have fond memories of my ancient cringy stories, lol.
I have no problems with the existence of miserable angst het femsub a/b/o, it's just extremely weird to me that it's what these platforms put in their ads every single time. As a person not privy to their ad data, what I would assume is that they need an excerpt that's extremely tropey to make the genre clear (popcorn romance/erotica) and has a big emotional hook to make people want to see what happens next. "My destined mate hates me! ;_;" does meet that qualification, but so do plenty of other story types, and yet I've never seen one of these ads that's even using, like, arranged marriage drama, or "I went to work for this hot rich guy but he has some sort of mysterious secret!" or even just het femsub a/b/o with the classic bodice ripper dynamic where the excerpt focuses on a male character being pushy-flirty and the female lead is going, "I was so scared and uncomfortable but it was also super sexy." It always seems to be "main character is abjectly miserable," and not an excerpt that gives any hint about whether this is the kind of story where that's going to stop or not. And of course there's a readership for that, but I feel like they might get more takers if there was some variation!
Aargh. Self-published thing with random misplaced commas. I hate those. Every one is like a tiny speed bump.
Maybe this is a silly gripe, but stories set in America but written in extremely British idiom when none of the characters are British are aggravating. Just set it in England, FFS.
The tradition of the britpicker/ whatever you call the other national equivalents really seems to have died out in both fandom and published fiction.
An old acquaintance's comment on one fanfic comes to mind: "The characters are the most American-sounding British people I've ever seen, except for the actual American character who is the most British-sounding American I've ever seen."
