if we look at the original timeline (aka annabeth and percy being born in 1993) then 2009 was a big year for annabeth bcus not only did the battle of manhattan take place and she finally started dating percy, but also minecraft came out and i think that would be a big deal to her

My one and only valentine

fellas is it gay to always have your eyes on best friend turned arch nemesis displayed constantly in official illustrations

i find them everywhere in everything

everyone say thank you creator of spider punk for creating a spider punk playlist

here it is if anyone wants to give it a listen!!!

also it's not like you can't read your regular generic romances. romances can also have themes and important discussions and well developed characters. but the problem is nowadays books are wholly churned out to be tropey & be the next 'booktok fave'. all the characters look the same and it's like junk food in the form of fiction. it's saturated with snarky one-liners, your 6 ft tall love interest with abs who worships the female protag, a few 'spicy' scenes, some cutesy tropes heavily reliant on plot devices & add to that a few 'romantic' lines by the male li and you're set to be the face of booktok for approx. 2 weeks 'cause then a new book has to take your place lol. and the readers of those books don't even remember the names of these characters they read because it's all the exact SAME. and what pisses me off even more is how every story now is simplified to tropes. even the ones written with great care & thought put into them. the amount of times i have face-palmed when someone shelves tsoeh or tsoa as a 'romance' is unbearable. they forget what the book actually talks about and focus on so very redundant things that it destroys the joy of reading. there is no meta commentary, no metaphors, no symbolism, no analysis of any text, no themes especially if they are in the romance/fantasy romance genre.

and the worst part is how people defend this saying 'let people read what they wanna read. they read to ENJOY books.' which is like do you think you can't enjoy dissecting characters & their motives? do you think people don't enjoy identifying & writing metas about the themes & metaphors in a story? do you not enjoy it if a simple story actually serves as a medium for a larger conversation? the anti-intellectualism happening right now regarding books is sickening. it's bleak & soulless & i hate to see art becoming a mere product made for consumption only.

Late to the party, so I'm adding to this a bit, I'm so sorry if the points below have already been made.

A huge — and unfortunate — reason for this recent phenomenon is the mainstream-ization of fandom culture. Now before I say anything else, I'd like to note that this is not an attack on fandom in itself; that would be hypocritical of me since I am a fanfic writer myself.

To begin, we should look at why fandom has become even a little mainstream at all. Well, like all "niche" cultures, it started out as a hobby mainly enjoyed by queer people, neurodivergent people, and people of colour. I'm sure that even today, there are people you and I know that see fandom as "cringe" and "gay (in a derogatory tone)".

So what changed?

As with all things, fandom firstly slowly became exposed to modern social media. Which, of course, is part of the original point with BookTok and BookTube being (rightly) dragged through the mud. But, apart from becoming a victim of overconsumerism, what happened was that fandom slowly became something that more people were aware about. And do you know what that means?

It means that the proportion of white and cishet people in fandom increased exponentially, especially in the last five years.

Now, that's not a bad thing at all when taken on its own. The thing is that fandom, specifically, is seen as a place for wish-fulfilment, where you can read stories and write stories specifically tailored to your wants and fantasies. Think about it — on AO3, you can search for, say, a rating (Explicit), a ship (e.g. Bakugou Katsuki/Midoriya Izuku) or a specific character or person (say, Shinsou Hitoshi) or a trope (such as Praise Kink). Once you've filtered to your satisfaction, you get hundreds upon thousands of stories with your beloved characters in finger-lickin' (whether literally or figuratively) situations. If you have the time and the energy, you can even write stories like that for other people (and yourself) to enjoy.

Which results in authors having written 78 stories for a particular fandom or ship or trope, and at this point, you have a lot of good food.

Now, a lot of people find this kind of fanfiction unsatisfactory — yes, the characters are interacting in the way they want them to, but they can't see themselves in the characters, and thus the experience is not as immersive as they would like.

Enter reader-insert fiction. Where you are the main character, free to see yourself in situations as far-fetched as having an anal-sex orgy with the brothers Hemsworth, or being sold to One Direction, or going on a date with Eraserhead from My Hero Academia. The thing with reader-insert fanfic is that requires a very specific sort of writing in order to be even remotely enjoyable. You need a reader-character that is generic enough that a large number of people can relate to them, and you need a (usually male) love interest that is extremely attractive and willing to bend to the reader's whims. Because, after all, reader-insert fanfic is supposed to cater to the reader's fantasies.

Now, the mainstream-ization (I don't know the actual word for it) of fandom culture means that you have cishet white people that are getting more and more interested in fanfiction and fanart. Which now means that they want this same content IRL.

Authors like Colleen Hoover, as well as the publishing houses that employ them, are capitulating on this opportunity. The point here is that the main target of romance novels by western authors is cishet white women. What kind of character would a cishet white woman see herself in? Another cishet white woman. And what kind of character would she be interested in? Of course, a cishet man.

Racism, colourism and every sort of -ism enter here, because the male love interests in these books are usually made to cater to the "conventional beauty" standards of white America — hence why user lithoerally's six-foot tall male love interest with abs who worships the female protagonist is usually also blond (or black-haired if you want him to be a Bad Boy TM) and blue- or green-eyed.

This also explains the overabundance of tropes in these books. It's the phenomenon where readers confuse fiction with original works; they want something "comforting" and "familiar" from everything they read. It's destroyed the ability to challenge oneself with new kinds of books, new kinds of literature, books by authors from other countries. Hell, even romance novels by POC are ignored because people are too scared to read books with love interests that are outside their white "conventional" beauty standards!

And the worst thing? If you take one of Colleen Hoover's books, and replace every non-dialogue use of "I" with "you" and the protagonist's name with "Y/N", it would read exactly the same as a 0-rupee original One Direction waala fanfic on Wattpad. Fucking disgusting.

When I grow up and have kids, if they bring Colleen Hoover's, or Emily Henry's, or SJM's stories home, I'm making them do a one-week fandom history research project.

literallyyyy @sokkasboomeraang

THIS!! it's the way in today's day and age, anti intellectualism has been so much more predominant than ever. if 10-15 years ago i asked someone who considers themselves "an avid reader" their analysis of their favorite book their analysis and interpretation, even if it was something generic YA, they could still provide context and value to that literature (like op stated, harry potter, and not to defend that hag of a woman,) could still be given more to it than just a hashtagged trope and a boiled down aesthetics moodboard.

i think this is inherently because of a tiktok, and social media in general. we need that dopamine rush, content to the brim media packed and handed to us in 15 seconds. no one has the time to read anymore, no one wants to spend their time plowing through heavy language (archaic or old words) anymore, no because you need everything fed to you, the description the words characters need to be flat because we as people dont like critical thinking anymore. so yea, thats why we've ended up with describing eyes as "insert shade colored orbs". because i dont think anyone would take the time to comprehend anything more complicated. authors like colleen hoover and other "modern romance" authors who now reuse their fanfiction from wattpad have this cult of social media dependent impatient people leading their army of fast consumed packed and ready media. theyre ready to defend their faves till the ends of the earth, ready to call the classics "pretentious" because dare you spend more than an hour on analysis of something. we're in a war against time everyday, and unfortunately several have already lost.

(I edited it lol)

the world wasn’t ready for them… for what they could’ve been

if a character means enough to me i will truly never stop thinking about them. i just retire them into a little back room in my brain and periodically bring them out to stare at them under a little light

lesbian 4 bi

apart from literally being about a guy who got bitten by a spider and got superpowers the most unrealistic about the amazing spiderman was that NOBODY had a crush on peter. fym 2012 andrew garfield goes to your school, is a top student, skateboards, wears glasses and takes pictures and NOBODY likes him. LIES.

Stop making that face!!

But tonight he is alive. And as he stares up at the sky, there are twice as many stars as usual.

(The two headed calf by Laura Gilpin)