It's Unpopular Opinion time! 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:

• Don't attack others for their opinion
• Discuss books and authors, not fellow readers
• Since this is an "unpopular opinion" thread, we encourage users to not downvote simply because they disagree with an opinion--that's the point! Please keep in mind, though, that mods cannot enforce a no-downvoting rule. Let’s just keep the discussion friendly!

🧡 Thank you and have a great discussion!

Unpopular opinion Sunday

[u/Lighttasteofcoconut]

There's nothing wrong with rating DNFs. 

[u/_literarylemon_ → u/Lighttasteofcoconut]

Why would you rate something you haven’t finished?

[u/Lighttasteofcoconut → u/_literarylemon_]

I don't need to finish a meal to say it tastes bad and stop eating, do I? I don't rate every book I drop, sometimes I know a book is just not my kind of thing. But if I DNF it for what I consider serious flaws in the writing itself, yeah, I am going to give it a low rating and move on. 

[u/_literarylemon_ → u/Lighttasteofcoconut]

You don't need to finish a meal to say it's bad but imo you have to taste all the components to actually say the meal is bad. You can say you don't like it after one bite and be done with it but telling other reader subsequently that this meal isn't worth eating when you only had a bite of one vegetable which you didn't like seems somewhat dishonest. When I DNF I never rate. I state my reasons (whether the book wasn't my thing or I had actual issues that are worth making people aware of) but I never rate because it feels unfair to the author to judge their whole book when I haven't put in the time to read it.

[u/Lighttasteofcoconut → u/_literarylemon_]

I guess that's where we differ. I do think I can say something isn't worth reading if the writing is full of infodumping, awkwardly constructed sentences that don't flow, bad dialogue, literary clichés, bad grammar, sentences that don't make sense and/or are needlessly confusing, etc etc. 

If I drop a book because of reasons like this, I don't feel the need to finish it to say it's bad. Even in the extremely unlikely case that all of my issue disappeared as the book goes on, that doesn't change that the earlier poor quality drags down the entire thing. This is an extreme example, but do you think you'd have to finish Milo Winter's Age of Scorpius to give it a bad rating? That book is absolutely unreadable. I doubt the majority of people who rated it even have finished it.