If your fic is 1000 words long, you can’t tag it slow burn. It’s not slow burn. That is a matchstick. And this is my personal bias here but if those motherfuckers you’re writing experience significant forward momentum in their relationship in under 5k words, then that is just a regular old burn. Slow burn should be borderline intolerable and a mistake to start reading at 2 in the morning.
If the fic doesn’t have multiple scenes where two people almost kiss but then don’t because of a contrived interruption that they are both grateful for and angry about, until the desperate reader is forced every other paragraph to mutter, “this is fucking ridiculous, this is bullshit, I’m so fucking mad, please update sooooooooooon,” then it isn’t a slow burn. It is a romance and that is a lovely thing but. Slow burns should feel like being set on fire unto your death but the tinder is people not kissing and the spark is people who don’t admit they love each other and the whole thing is. You know. Slow.
CORRECT
I once read a slow burn where the main pairing didn’t even speak to each other ontil 80k words in
This is the funniest fucking thing I’ve ever read and the only true slow burn fic
clint barton is the kind of guy who can hit a fly from 100m away with a bow and arrow but if you yell think fast and throw something at him he will not catch it and it will hit him in the face
The enjoyment I get from removing the wax packaging from a lil cheese wheel is immediately aligned with entertainment zoo animals get when they have to solve a puzzle or get into a box to find a treat. I’m just an ape and the babybel cheese people are my enrichment team
I think about this post a lot. I talk about it a lot. It’s to the point where, at work when we don’t like someone, we go, “that person is NOT on my enrichment team” because apparently the biggest insult, we think, is that that person is not successfully zooing us.
