worse yet: fics that also have incredibly vague titles and don't even have a summary. one in particular i stumbled over has no summary, is >60,000 words long with 50/? chapters, and is literally just named "Tautology."
Mimicking of summary phrasings on published books, most likely. It's similar to some of the shit I've seen on the covers of romance novels. Summaries are very hard for a lot of people, so I can see why people would ape formats seen on published books.
I don't follow the "plot question??? (the answer is yes)" or the "so a certain [x] finds themselves in the company of a certain [y]" phrasing, but yeah, I totally riff my summaries off of some of my favorite romance novels. If it works for getting published, it works for me. (That said, venturing back to ff.n reminded me of HOW ANNOYING incredibly short, vague summaries are on anything longer that ~5k words. Below that, I'm willing to give it a go without being sure what I'm getting into.)
Agreed on the length thing. Honestly, short vague summaries on shorter works is one of the main ways I pick which of those short things to read. So long as it's like an evocative, artsy vagueness that grabs at me. And for really short shit like...how involved can your summary really be. Especially if it is like proper drabble length. Though now I am thinking of a like 2500 oneshot that I read solely because of its title. It had like a two sentence at best super dull summary. But that fucking title. It said all you needed to know. It grabbed you by your collar and was like 'You're going to read this because you know you need to with a title like this.' The title for the curious was Mayo Dreams Cum True. It was a Splatoon fic. Grabbing audience attention can be a weird art.
YOIBF was complaining the other day about the plethora of fics with summaries like, quote, Like, thanks, that's helpful.
That format could like reasonably work if they made it a tiny bit specific to the couple and it was like, I dunno, a summary for like a collection of drabbles or poems. But as is it's a bit Too Vague and also...I'm going to guess this wasn't for like a drabble collection centered on a single ship but like. Something that isn't that and warrants more explanation.
Reader-Insert is now interacting extensively with Thirst-Object; PoV, Thirst-Object. Strike that bit where I said it was non-excruciating. Damn summary sold me on the Normal Citizen PoV angle, too. Thirst-Object is not a Normal Citizen, therefore the well of my interest has gone dry.
I don't mind a little bit of the kind of flowery or uninformative summary as long as it's like followed by something that gives me something more specific about the fic. It can kind of set a tone or mood and that can be nice. But if there's nothing else, especially for something longer? I'm gonna nope on out of there
The fact that I was supposed to be planning a courtly fantasy romance and it's taken a sudden swerve into cosmic horror.
This is more of a preference thing than a genuine problem but I am sick to death of mutual pining. Especially if it's based on a wacky misunderstanding where both characters just suddenly can't comprehend the other party liking them. It's like the part of me that hates Rom-coms and the part of me that hates teen drama had a fistfight. Maybe it's all the My Hero Academia fic, teen romance lends itself to teen drama. Yesterday I read something where one guy goes up to the other guy and is like, "Hey we don't interact much, but I think I've got a crush, want to go out for smoothies?" and the other guy goes "Well I've never thought about it but let's give it a whirl" and it was cute and it was like a breath of fresh air. Spoiler: Unrelated Hanahaki complaints Also Hanahaki skeeves me out. Like if someone had coughing flower disease at me but I'm not interested in them, do I just get to watch them die? Becuase I've had guys have crushes on me, and I'm not attracted to guys, and those guys dying of Hanahaki won't magically change my orientation. I guess it's just like soulmate tropes if they were lethal. Down with compulsory romance! Let me be an unattached goblin, free in the wind!
oh god, mutual pining based on dumb misunderstandings can suck a whole bag of dicks. and ooc Being A Chickenshit Disease, too. if i had a dollar for every time i've tabbed out of a fic because a character who, in canon, has the sass and attitude of an extinction level meteor, suddenly starts acting like a shy and self-loathing fourteen year old for the sake of pasted on romantic tension, i would order a pizza with it right now. damn.
"I'm going to randomly make these characters homophobic because I need an excuse to dislike them." ???
Re: friendzone disease, it's apparently rampant in Yuri on Ice fandom (for... pretty obvious reasons), so YOIBF keeps finding particularly bizarre permutations of it (and we end up going on 40-minute conversations about all the worldbuilding implications). In my opinion the funniest one is still the one where Victor was somehow stealthily carrying an oxygen tank and taking huffs on it when Yuuri wasn't looking. The one that got the Badfic Friend Award For Least Skeevy Worldbuilding had it not be dangerous unless it lasted more than five years, so celebrity crushes weren't life-threatening health emergencies and no one was particularly concerned that practically everyone got it in high school. I still think it overall makes WAY more sense in psychological horror or high-concept sci-fi than it does in romance, though, because, well. There is so much in its implications.
I've written hanahaki for a oneshot for the Guro Challenge, but I had it functioning similarly to above and not as a thing EVERYONE had. As an actual AU where this is normal, it's creepy.
One of the first ones YOIBF found had it happen only in Japan, to everyone there, and the surgery had only been invented recently, and I was like, "...How would Japan not be an unpopulated wilderness because half the kids in any given attempted migration wave died of flowers."
honestly, i think if falling in love made you puke flowers and die, most people would be callous jackasses from sheer self-preservation.
