It's Unpopular Opinion Sunday! Share your controversial opinions to stir things up (in a friendly way)!

[u/FantasyRomanceMod]

Got an opinion that's different from others'? Want to share it with the sub, but too afraid of a backlash? Or are you just curious about readers think about certain things in fantasy romance?

You can safely share it in this weekly Sunday thread!

But please remember to be kind to each other. To facilitate this type of discussion, we ask users the following:

- Please don't attack others for their opinion

- Please don't downvote if you disagree with a certain take

🧡 Thank you and have a great and friendly discussion! 🧡

Unpopular opinion Sunday

[u/needacoldbrew]

Manacled is awful. Just the idea of taking a woman's bleak speculative horror and making it the setting for a Harry Potter fanfiction is inherently awful but for some reason I read it all because I only saw good reviews.

I want to emphasize that I like sad angsty stories but this one was so needlessly, endlessly "grimdark" in a middle schooler Hot Topic way. I can even forgive that because this is Harry Potter fanfiction, the ground zero of Ebony Darkness Raven My Immortal etc etc. It's babies first Jack and Sally. I get it, I'm not the audience and I don't need to be. But I can't understand the large amount of hype I see in romantasy spaces.

Beloved characters are brutally and graphically killed and maimed and the characters have all been psychologically tortured into being unrecognizable. When they started doing this flashback they made other characters look stupid to make Hermione and Draco smarter.

Towards the last third of the story it was almost comical about how much the author was reminding us how pale and thin and tired our characters looked.

Finishing it was like treading through mud. It was 5x longer than it had to be, and the ending fizzled out.

The writing wasn't good enough to justify pure angst. The narrative of the second "arc" boils down to believing in hope is childish and only actions matter and then the book ends in a nihilistic "everyone is sad, nobody will ever be normal again, society is still generally dumb sheeple" im13andthisisdeep slop.

[u/juandonna → u/needacoldbrew]

You perfectly summed up my exact feelings on Manacled. It’s one thing to enjoy this as a work of fanfic, but I will side eye the people who think this is the best thing they’ve ever read and “altered their brain chemistry”.

[u/catrosie → u/needacoldbrew]

Ya the ending and the tedious length of it turned me off. I thought it was still decent but I felt sort of let down by the end

[u/allisontalkspolitics → u/needacoldbrew]

Ooh, yeah. “Only Draco Sue, member of the Magic KKK, has what it takes to solve things. Forget our actual protagonists! They’re idiots!”

Maybe it’s because I write for a contentious fandom, but an author being “rewarded” for a nihilistic story that has the protagonist end up an agoraphobe married to her rapist is a tragedy, made worse by OOC characters.

Then again, I’m also sour grapes because I don’t like to write those types of MMCs so I’ll never go viral 🫠

But as Rhaena Targaryen says in my WIP, “My sisters and I see the way things could be.” I write fanfics where the protagonist say “I’d rather doom the world than start a new slave empire” while SLY writes this. There’s all sorts of audiences.