“Let not light see my black and deep desires.”

STUDIO GHIBLI + CITYSCAPES

STUDIO GHIBLI + YUMMY !

sambucky + letterboxd reviews (insp. x x) bonus:

Idk if I fall totally on either “side” here but I don’t really like the implication that fanfiction itself never explores deep themes. I’ve read fanfiction that made me sit down with myself and ask questions about how exactly I was defining myself relative to my experiences. Fanfiction writers are writers, writing about human experiences and societal themes whether they mean to or not, and not every instance is successful, but not every book is successful.

People knowing there are certain emotions that tend to pull them into stories isn’t new. I’ve had books recommended to me because someone knows how I feel about characters who were doomed before a story starts, or stories with unconventional ways of wrangling with death.

I think it’s okay if people recommend their friend a book because “you’ll like this character because they really want to prove themself,” the way casual book recs tend to go, latching onto something you know is an emotional hook your friend likes exploring. I see literally no problem, then, with the equally brief and snappy selling point being “you’ll like this because you like enemies to lovers angst.”

I get frustrated by posts that reduce the concept of a recurring theme or trope to something that just goes the same way every time, sure. And yet: recommending each other books via AO3 tags is “I think you will like this book because it contains something you like.” People are seeking the emotions they want from literature, and some are using familiar language to draw themself into a different set of media that they want to get to know better. (Others are probably already reading a lot of published books!)

I see no conflict with wanting to read a certain kind of story because you like that kind of story. We’ve acknowledged, in fact, that anything describable as “enemies to lovers angst” won’t, in fact, be that simple. So reading a lot of books that qualify as that will explore different themes and angles every time, right? This is as ~doomsday~ as me wanting to read a lot of books about characters navigating whether or not they’re their world’s definition of human and whether or not that matters.

We all have stories we like to seek out. We all already use labels that do not fully represent the complexity of the stories within them: I want to read a tragic romance, a comedy of errors, a bildungsroman. Chill out.

Translating works between mediums *always* comes with interpretation and adaptation. There’s a whole field of literary discourse around that. Hell, a professor at my university accepted a shitpost as an assignment because it distilled a play into a single image.

And frankly, ao3 tags give so much information about themes and deliver them in an accessible way. The goal, after all, is to *promote* reading, not gatekeeping so hard you push people out of reading for fun.

Sure, it might not say “forbidden enemies to lovers angst”, but it might well say:

The Montagues and the Capulets have been at war for generations, so when a Capulet girl falls for a Montague boy, the two teenagers know that they must keep their love a dead secret. But after Romeo gets caught up in the rising tensions between their two families, the couple are torn apart. As the story spins towards its tragic conclusion, Juliet must decide how much she is willing to give up.

… Or something of the sort, which basically gives you the same information— that they are lovers, that their love is forbidden and that a lot of sad stuff is going to happen.

I’ve always assumed this whole “books should use AO3 tags” thing to be at least partly a backlash to the current trend where more and more books seem to be scrapping the blurb altogether and replacing it with just a series of quotes:

“A dark gem of a book"— some famous writer.

“You’ll read it again and again"— a journalist.

WINNER OF AN AWARD YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF

“Wtf is it about tho"— an increasingly desperate reader who just wants to know it it’s worth buying a copy.

It’s like saying ‘with all due respect but’ - usually that just means kiss my ass you’re an idiot and here’s why your wrong.

So… with all due respect- Go fuck yourself.