fan art of a canon ship I like is the exception.

Or

You know

Straight up pwp goodness

Because unless the work is explicit in nature we aren’t going to see what goes on in the bedroom

Granted, most of my ships are m/m so that’s a given

Like, YOI it’s bloody difficult to find fic not staring Victor and Yuri and that’s fine

But, I wanna see what the other characters get up too.

honestly mood

i don't often like romance-focused stuff in general since it depends on me caring about that specific pair of characters, and it's pretty rare for a ship to trigger that level of brainrot in me that i wanna read fic and whatnot so wanting to read a book or whatever about two random characters is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I know one ship that did =P

Fanfic is where I do look for the romance angle, if I’m honest.

It’s just how my brain is wired. Physical books? I’m looking for action and/or humor. Or the mystery behind a murder

I’ll often skip sex scenes

But fic? That’s where the romance is much better written in my opinion

lmao i think it's partially also that i tend to be drawn more to side characters over main characters, and while i can find fic for my favorite ships involving side characters easily, it's harder to find romance media wherein the main characters have that side character feel

main characters are often less extreme in personality traits and whatnot because it's easier to appeal to a broader audience with a more middle-of-the-road character rather than risking turning some people off because they dislike the main character

writers tend to get riskier and more creative with non-main characters

i've seen so many random romance books and manga and whatnot where i'm basically skimming the main story by the end just waiting for the fun interesting minor character i liked more to reappear and get their B plot romance

S a m e

--I think that’s what killed my enjoyment of Solangelo, the canon was just not as interesting as what fandom came up with before it was released.

My ships are never canon because lol shounen but I get it

stuff like solangelo often falls into the trap of lazy writing where it's like "people will ship it because it's canon" so all the setup and development of the dynamic gets skipped

and i think that's even more common with canon queer content these days because younger fans care more about canonization of a ship compared to those of use that grew up knowing ours ships would never be canon and just shipping whatever we liked

yeah... they're imitating the straights now.

tinybro The thing about the Solangelo book, from what I remember, is that what development we did see just... didn't work for any real teenagers at all.

Like I can see Nico not rushing in for a kiss, but their first kiss was like, four months into their relationship.

and I'm like? okay, maybe Nico would want to hold off, but four months?

It just... smacks of purity culture

it kinda feels like the worst of both worlds to me, because it's simultaneously asking us to believe two teen boys would wait for months for a kiss, but also that nico would be cool with openly dating a guy like just a few months after he had to be forcibly dragged out of the closet?

i feel like the exact opposite would be more believable, that they first kissed relatively early on but kept the fact that they were dating a secret for a good while and had various comedic shenanigans in the process of trying to keep the secret lol

the secret gets out because they were kissing in the pegasus stables and blackjack was complaining to percy about his friends making out in there

Y e a h. I’m willing to buy the relationship being very new as of The Hidden Oracle, but it apparently wasn’t? I don’t remember I have to try rereading the book

There were technical issues with the book I didn’t care for which made it hard for me to get through but there were some things I liked but at the same time, plenty I didn’t