cool and unusual punishment

unpopular opinion

Warriors fiction on Wattpad has become incredibly formulaic.

I can summarize 80% of it in a matter of bullet points:

-one word title (probably an SAT word or something from the dictionary of obscure sorrows)

-"aesthetic" cover that looks like every single cover on wattpad with some cat wide-eying the camera with the cover in fancy font over it 

-one sentence summary probably along the lines of "x isn't okay" or "x is a monster" 

-lowercase chapter titles/text or 

<////a thousand of these things/////>

-actual idea or concept is credited to at least one and possibly up to three other people because thinking of your own ideas for a story is really hard 

-look how genetically correct my cats are 

-main character has one or multiple mental disorders which form the crux of their personality

-content warnings fucking everywhere because this story, man, is just so dark and goes over so many topics (tm) 

-we spend hundreds of words just showing off the rogue's gallery of nb/gay/trans etc. cats because wow look how progressive the warriors fanfiction i wrote is (characters are never fleshed out beyond being nb/gay/trans etc. and are never mentioned again) 

-bonus points for short story and by that i mean the total text is probably a few hundred sentences because what an original idea

If you enjoy writing these things, you should write them. Really, it doesn't matter what I think of your (incredibly oversaturated) idea for a fanfiction...

but there seems to be this notion that just by doing these things, your story is somehow well written, and I'll admit, it sure as hell pulls the votes/reads in. There seems to be this notion that making your main tortured as all get out is super fucking progressive and yeah, we can all agree that LGBT+ representation is good. People with disabilities/disorders deserve to have representation in media.

But I mean, you're preaching to the choir here. If that's the whole point of your story, and it's one saving grace is how progressive you are, you will earn the scorn of anyone who disagrees with you and the praise of an echo chamber. We deserve reputation, but we also deserve good reputation, and we deserve stories that are worth telling. 

All that aside,  doing the above isn't new or inventive and it's just as old as any other, more despised "cliche" in fandom. Guides will rattle on and on about how to avoid this, or strive for that, but that's all they are really: guides. Following every guide you read and compressing them into a singular book will not guarantee you a perfect book, only ingenuity and practice will do that. There are some obvious things that are just standards of practice, like grammar, that OF COURSE will make your story better,

but at the end of the day,

no, your story isn't "significantly decreased in quality" because your character has one sock, or because your OC failed one of those "character raters". Who cares? The Warriors fandom on here is an aggressive echo chamber full of people trying to mimic people who are mimicking people and all of them are stuffing creativity and what a "good" story is into the box, when in reality, creativity is the goddamn opposite of that.

If you're reading all this and you think, "but that IS my story," then go ahead. go tell it. 

but seriously, don't let reads or votes or trends define your style.

because that's boring.

and the worst thing any story can be

is boring.