not having a sneer at ppl who like those, btw. it's just. it was late. and i wanted something heroic and fun. and i kept faceplanting in marshmallowy-soft romcoms. it was frustrating. so many fics where every event that influenced the characters' development has been neatly excised, all their fascinating personal conflicts replaced with utterly generic and arbitrary no-stakes kerfuffles -- or worse, they keep the angst and orneriness they picked up in canon from like, being murdered a few times, but now there's no reason for it, they're just randomly an asshole. i suppose the appeal is to let beloved characters be safe and see what they're like when they're safe. but usually, unless the writer is an absolute master, what they're like when they're safe is: oc's with canon names.
...was...was there at least a prologue to kind of sort of justify this. Is it a postmodern work. What is this and why.
yeah, the prologue didn't count as a chapter number, so now they're all offset by one. it drives me bonkers. just number the prologue as 1, not zero, for crying out loud, you know how the ao3 software does things.
I do wish sometimes that you could turn chapter numbering just... off. I don't bother titling mainline chapters in the college AU I'm working on because I know I'm gonna run into this problem since I have intermission pieces where I switch POV--and that's gonna ruin any possible number scheme I went for otherwise. I understand now why so many authors just shunt all of that stuff into another work under the series tag instead.
I’m still so baffled that people don’t tag their mundane AUs, tbh. I love them to bits when done well (and it honestly disappoints me that most of them aren’t), they’re most of what I write, but they’re sure as hell not for everyone. Have some courtesy, people!
I can see how it would be really frustrating as a writer to not have control over how things like prologues are indexed. As a reader, I’m honestly so glad this isn’t something writers control. I want to go to part 6, not Intermission: Daybreak II. Is that before or after chapter 6? I don’t want to have to worry about that, I just want numbers, in order, with no surprises.
ALSO, tagging them makes them easier to find for people who do want to read them? It’s a win-win situation!
This isn't really a problem for my works personally, but I do really wish that authors had more freedom and control over this. Things like indexing are important for structuring purposes...That's something a creator should have control over...
yeah, if you wanna get artsy fartsy with it, you should be able to. i say artsy fartsy in my fondest tone, btw. if you wanna write a non-chronological epic with six conflicting POV's, title it "of [noun] and [other noun]", and organize it into 'books' with prose poetry intermissions, more power to ya. i love your flourish. and if i want to write a galloping pulp adventure with 64 tiny chapters, and break it into four sections for convenience, and not have them come up as "chapter 1: 1 - 18", i should be able to. and approximately four hundred thousand other authors should be able to exempt their prologue and epilogue from the displayed number count. but we ain't live in that beautiful world, my darlings. and so this guy needs to call their prologue chapter 1 so my head don't pop.
And it's also great for omnivores like me! I lean towards the dark and weird, but I'll read lots of different types of fic. I do usually want to have some clue about the genre before I launch in, though. If I'm expecting a nihilistic dystopia where everyone is sad forever, a sweet character piece featuring a lesbian awakening is gonna leave me a bit wrong-footed no matter how fantastic it is.
I'd be the Philistine using scripts to put the numbers back into the fics in utopia, because I remember author names and fic names pretty well, but I draw the line at trying to remember chapters by name. Books can get away with it because they generally have page numbers. Homestuck was confusing enough where it didn't start at one and every number in the sequence was not utilized. It made it more complicated than I liked to pick up where I left off. I don't particularly care if there's no natural sequence and the numbers are arbitrary, but I reject the artistic expression of not having a chapter 7. Should you be able to do that? Yeah probably, but I reject it. If you want to label your chapters with the Greek alphabet, I respect the notion but I also reject it as a reader experience. When I try to find a link for someone to the amazing thing that happened in.... uhhhhhh was it sigma.......... or what is that letter I don't know Greek??? Yeah, I'll cry.
It seems like it could work so long as you index it in order - if this means assigning a number behind the scenes, so be it, but let people display whatever they want. Optionally, let people toggle the numeric chapter titles, so the people who want simple numbers can get them, and others don't have to be bothered by 'Chapter Seventeen: Act II Chapter 4 Part C' and just see the names in linear order. Given this is functionally what they're *already* doing...
i know i should have expected maya/ritsuko to be background lesbianed because one of the characters is literally a background character but that doesn't mean i'm still not really annoyed that they're tagged in fics centered around shinji. stop tagging ships that aren't the focus of your work. please.
... When one starts reading a crossover advertising as one of the characters an adult Harry Potter, one generally expects to find a character who is recognizably Harry Potter, rather than an original character with the same physical description and name. ... The real Harry Potter would never ignore the two hookers he’d just killed, even if they were vampires.
Writer, I love this story so, so much. But why do you have to have your dialog in italics? Without even quotation marks? No, I don't care it's supposed to be one huge flashback and that's why you're doing it. (I suppose I should be glad *all* of it isn't in italics?)
The story is so good I am willing to suffer the italic dialog. I'mma still gonna complain about it though.
apparently i’ve lost patience with exchanges like this: character A: wow, these cool things you’re making/doing are really good/special! i can’t believe you’re letting me try/see this! omg, you took my suggestion last time! ooh, are you making/doing these things for someone you like? character B, looking right at A: ...yes. character A: whaaat? really? oh. i... actually, B, you know what? you should really be making/doing these special things for the person you like, not me. i’m gonna go. character B: :( i don’t often like miscommunication at the best of times, but it turns out this cliche just really bugs me now (enough to exit an otherwise fun/fluffy one-shot, just now.)
