#but also does anyone want texting/socmed/epistolary fic recs because oh boy do i have recs

[snickerdoodlles]

texting fics for the fic tropes ask?

somehow A++ and a big fat red F at the same time LOL

okay so like. you may not know this about me, but i love social media fic (ik ik, hold your shocked gasps til the end). i absolutely love epistolary stories in general--i am a huge, huge fan of outsider POV and unreliable narrator tropes, and epistolary stories are so well suited to one or both of these things. epistolary stories put either a very, very narrow telescope on and/or a very broad/vague/heavily filtered overview of a narrative and i love reading between the lines and teasing out the story that way. plus, especially with a lot of neat ao3 works skins (which i...don't use because im lazy 💦), a lot of these stories play with the traditional way to tell a story and explore narratives told through different types of media, often very punchy types of environmental storytelling, and more, which is so cool to me. i'm not even talking about all the ways epistolary fic can play with character voice, and the differences between speaking vs texting, conversation habits across mediums, etc!!

chat fics...sometimes manage the above.

unfortunately though, many also often fall into referential humor traps and like...sitcom storylines (i'm not sure if that made up term makes sense lol). my point though is that some chat fics are really just treated like those incorrect quotes blogs but in a format that can be posted to ao3. and i already have a lot of irritation with incorrect quotes--it's very rare that a genuinely funny joke can just be ripped from its original context and still be funny, and a lot of people use referential humor as a crutch because they're scared of writing their own humor/jokes. but the thing is, the more references you use, the more you isolate and/or narrow your audience because not everyone is going to know what you're referencing; and it's one thing as a reader to skip over one joke you don't recognize, it's another to skip over multiple jokes in a row that make no sense to you. this goes doubly for chat fics that rely primarily on memes, which are esp flavor-of-the-week references whose original context gets lost almost immediately. and then on top of the humor crutch, a lot of these fics forget that like...epistolary stories still have a narrative? they still have a plot? you still have to explain how the characters started talking to each other, why they're still talking to each other, wrap it up in a good end goal, etc. and a lot of fic just...doesn't. i have zero interest in reading a fic that throws everyone into a groupchat with zero regard for how the individual characterizations, just to ramble out a bunch of ill-fitting references with no end goal or point in sight. sighs

so yeah! epistolary/social media/texting/etc fics are almost always the first set of tags i run through when i first enter a fandom tag and i'll often read those first over everything else because when they're done right, they're so. good.

but if there's no explanation to the how or the why, or zero regard to characterization or voice, or too many memes, i'm immediately out and will probably even mute the story so that it's easier for me to navigate the tags in the future 😂

.❤.

send me a fic trope!