Yeah, please don’t challenge me with a surprise MCD.
It’s not the “surprise” that’s the problem. It’s that it violates the form.
Romance stories, as currently defined, be they novels, novellas, or short stories, have one inviolable rule: There MUST be a happy ending. If you write a love story between characters that has a tragic ending, it is not a romance story in the accepted sense and should not be labeled as such. You can’t just wrap a fish stick in a chocolate candy wrapper and expect people to be happy when they open it.
I dare ANYONE to say that Romeo and Juliet is a romance instead of a tragedy. 😛
That’s like 90% of the problem exactly. People think they’re the one Special Bean out of the entirety of human history who has written a masterpiece that should be exempt from the standards everyone else has come to expect.
You’re not being groundbreaking. You’re being an ass.
(and they look like igoramuses while doing so)
And those Delusional Special Beans need to drop the “but tv and published books aren’t tagged!”
Motherfucker, there’s a reason I’m reading fanfic on a website with an in-depth tagging system, and not trolling the library or flipping through Netflix.
This whole thing reminds me of the “literary fiction” crap I had to put up with in college. According to the program directors “literary fiction” was the height of writing and while most profs wouldn’t tell you to your face that your were wasting your time and talent by writing romance or scifi it was heavily implied.
But literary fiction is, for the most part, depressing, pedantic crap hell-bent on creating characters no one can like doing boring shit before they ruin the lives of everyone they care about. (Encouraging, I know.) And it’s hard to get attention writing “MarySue and GaryStu Fuck Up Big Time Because They’re Trapped In a Loveless Marriage” for the 1700th time so you’d wind up with edgy 20-somethings writing the same basic thing but this time in a genre. I knew folks who had never picked up a Romance novel in their lives and decided to write “romance” b/c that’s popular, right? They can totally write a depressing love story! See, it’s about how love isn’t enough and two people who care deeply about each other will eventually be torn apart by death and/or infidelity! It’s realistic! Next they’re going to write a fantasy novel where all the magic in the world has been sucked out and the hero is on a quest to restore it only to fail b/c you can’t go back to some mythical past full of hope! See, it’s cutting edge!
It’s cynical is what it is.
If I wanted to read a tragedy, I’d read a tragedy. Sometimes I just want a little hope. Is that such a bad thing to want? I want to see characters I can love fall in love. I want to see them succeed. I want to see happiness. I don’t want to be reminded that life sucks under the guise of “art”. Like, if you want to write it, cool, do that, but don’t sell me a bitter pill while telling me it’s bubblegum. Tag your shit and tag it correctly. Know your genre conventions.
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