Sleepy Reader

- Authors started using mental health as a shortcut for depth and complexity instead of actually writing layered characterization.

- People forget that complex characters are subjective, every character can feel complex depending on the reader's perspective, experiences, and psychology, sometimes a character everyone calls simple can feel deeply layered to someone else because of how they interpret motives and behavior.

- Romance books forgot the romance part, half of them are just trauma Olympics with a kissing scene every 200 pages.

- A lot of authors genuinely don't know how to write independence, ambition, intelligence, confidence or emotional maturity without turning the character insufferable or preachy.

- The normalization of female suffering as female empowerment went way too far. A woman surviving endless abuse, humiliation and pain is not automatically feminist writing or strong characterization (yes readers, rebbeca yarros and sjm I'm looking at u 😒)

- We desperately need more male characters written as individuals with dreams, fears, flaws, personalities and identities outside of being obsessed with the FMC.

- Strong characters are not automatically the smartest, most powerful, coldest, sweetest or most traumatized. Strength comes from narrative impact, consistency and how well they move the story and themes.

- As someone who studied psychology for three years, most mental health representation in books feels performative. Mental illness is not a Pinterest aesthetic mixed with one Google search. (Yes Chloe Walsh I'm side eyeing you)

- And if the book markets itself mainly with strong FMC as the selling point… there's a 78% chance I'm running.

- Authors need to stop treating characteristics traits like a personality label. Sarcastic, witty, sweet, grumpy, cold....etc are not full personalities, they're t.r.a.i.t.s. Human beings are contradictory. Someone can be sweet as an angel and sarcastic at the same time. A grumpy man can love pink, flowers, baking or cheesy romance movies. A quiet character can still be chaotic internally. Complexity comes from contradictions, habits, fears, values and reactions not from assigning one aesthetic trait and calling it depth.

- Slow burn only works if something is ACTUALLY burning.

- A lot of feminine FMC hate discourse ignores the fact that some authors genuinely write hyperfemininity in a male gaze way (let's be real almost all FMC newdays are male gaze badass or no)

- People started treating criticism of books like personal attacks instead of normal literary discussion.

- Authors need to stop treating healing like a reward given by romantic love alone.

- More books need platonic intimacy. Not every emotional connection has to become romantic.

- Chemistry is built through observation, understanding, tension and emotional rhythm, not just..... Whatever u guys are saying or reading

- The number of pages does not determine good writing. A well written 300 page slow burn can have more emotional depth, tension and development than an entire dragged out trilogy because what matters is how the plot, pacing and characters are carried, not how long the story is. Booktok turned long series into some kind of proof of quality, acting like ''this eight book enemies to lovers will ruin every other romance'' when half the time it's just repetition, filler, recycled conflict and marketing. More pages do not automatically mean better development and if readers start treating length as the standard for quality instead of actual storytelling, pacing, characterization and emotional impact, then genuinely good writing is doomed.

- An angsty, dramatic, tragic, complex relationship does not automatically have more depth or meaning than a soft, healthy, sweet relationship. Suffering is not the only form of emotional depth and love does not need constant pain, toxicity or emotional destruction to feel impactful. If people start believing that only chaotic relationships are meaningful, then we reduce romance to trauma instead of connection, growth, understanding, trust and emotional intimacy. Sometimes the quietest relationships carry the deepest emotions because real depth comes from the writing, the emotional layering and the characters themselves, not from how much they hurt each other before kissing.

Your characters are allowed to be bad people. Your story is allowed to have no moral lesson.yyour ending is allowed to be sad. The villain can win. The good person can do something unforgivable. The lovers can destroy each other. You are allowed to write the thing that no one asked for and everything that everyone told you doesn’t work and you are allowed to not explain yourself.

One- as OP said, your characters can be bad people, they can do bad things. There doesn't have to be a reason or a moral. You can make them bad if you want to. No other reason needed.

Two- it doesn't have to be good, it just needs to be written. On my last book i literally wrote the words "dumbest version" on the top of the page because I had seen some advice to do that. It changed everything. I stopped trying to make it perfect, I just tried to make it. Period. Full stop.

ALL YOU BITCHES ARE MALE-CENTERED. AS FUCK. I CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE!!!!!!!!!!!!

it is genuinely rare that i come across a “nakshatra observation” post or even general sidereal observations that don’t regurgitate these same bs pop astrology talking points. meanwhile, so much of the “discourse” still revolves around male validation, desirability politics, and internalized misogyny, and pretending to be “ascended.” you people are just repackaging the same patriarchal mindsets y’all claim to critique in pseudo-spirituality and calling it “empowerment.” but if the topic is still surrounding men, and especially women’s proximity to men, ESPECIALLY in the vapid and meaningless ways y’all discuss it, then guess what that makes all of you?

let me reiterate again, ALL of y’all are male centered and pick mes as fuck, because the entirety of most content i see on this app has to do with the most shallow and superficial aspects of vedic astrology. i thought we left that shit on twitter. #getoveryourselves

I think MXTX wrote it this way specifically because it's reiterated over and over again how bad of a writer Shen Yuan thinks Airplane is, so the narrative style is more similar to/mimetic of weekly published, amateur webnovels. As someone who has, unfortunately, read a good amount of stallion novels/harem novels, a lot of them read this way, as well, especially the xianxia and wuxia ones if they're Chinese. So, I guess it was MXTX's way of further subverting genre tropes. It may also be her/the story itself mocking Shen Yuan because he rants that Airplane's a horrible writer, despite Shen Yuan paying money for and reading every single chapter. He's a pretty typical kind of dude-bro found in Chinese fandom spaces, only a slightly more elevated version of those guys who are adults but mostly just watch/read shounen and only care about powerscaling and barely understands the story's characters and themes (or women or romance, as is the stereotype). Her follow-up books usually stick pretty closely to third-limited, but it could also possibly be mistakes because it was her first published novel. If I had to guess, this would have to be the explanation, maybe.

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Rebecca Thorne wrote She-Ra fanfic before writing Tomes & Tea.

Matt Dinniman wrote GI Joe and Transformers crossover fanfic before writing Dungeon Crawler Carl.

Pierce Brown wrote Greek Mythology fanfic before writing Red Rising.

Andy Weir wrote Ready Player One fanfic that later got canonized by Ernest Cline before writing The Martian.

There are a lot of people who say that their creativity was destroyed by roleplaying with AI, but a lot (not all) of them seem to be under the impression that it would be bad to rewrite the scenarios that they roleplayed with chatbots into fics. Of course writing is going to seem hard when your "ai recovery" group is telling you that you have to be super duper careful when writing about your favorite ideas/prompts/scenarios, because you used them for an AI roleplay before, and what if you accidentally copy an idea?

Yeah don't intentionally rip off other people's stories beat for beat, but what happened to the "oh boy, two cakes" mentality? I think that being too worried about accidental idea theft is doing more harm than AI sometimes.

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The solution here is to block all AI shills and also people having meltdowns about their AI recovery group on the grounds that all of that is extremely tedious and adds nothing to one's dash.

GenAI sucks because it is bad at art, coding, etc.

It ~destroys creativity~ the same way not doing anything creative for a while makes your creativity muscles flabby.

The rest of this is standard n00b writer problems that are incurable. "What if my idea isn't original?" "Where do you get your ideas?" "What if two romance novels have the same plot?!?!?!?!"

Fuck ideas.

Execution is what makes or breaks art.

The actual problem is that these people never built up their art skills in the first place. They haven't lost anything, but they feel like they have because they're being forced to confront the fact that making things takes effort, and one's immediate effort today doesn't lead to one being skilled today.

I don't coddle any other flavor of n00b crying about ideas over craft, and I won't coddle this set either.