This has been bothering me all day.

[magibrain]

AO3 has 114 works tagged "mutually unrequited". They're not all by the same author, so I assume the tag has to have some generally-understood meaning. Can anyone explain to me what that meaning is?

Comments

[frith_in_thorns]

Sounds like a misunderstanding of "mutual pining" to me...

[magibrain]

So, taking "unrequited" as "un-acted-upon," then?

[ivorygates]

"mutually unrequited" => the two characters do not give a hydroelectric dam for each other and may never have actually met.

[magibrain]

...there's this line in Librarians in the Branch Library of Babel that says, "Over time, working at the Branch Library, I came to think of all books as just misprinted editions of Moby-Dick. Carol told me she felt the same way."

I feel like with that definition, every story ever written could potentially fall under a mutually unrequited tag, so long as it acknowledged the existence of persons not written about.

[ivorygates]

I feel like with that definition, every story ever written could potentially fall under a mutually unrequited tag, so long as it acknowledged the existence of persons not written about.

I feel this is an important and worthwhile idea that requires wider dissemination.

[veleda_k]

It makes me think of a line from one of the Discworld books about two people who would have had a romance for the ages had they not been born hundreds of years apart and on separate continents. (Paraphrase.)

[magibrain]

He. My first thought was to do some kind of emotional quantum superposition where two people simultaneously were and weren't interested in each other at the same time. Which would be a really interesting mechanic to play with, if you could figure out howinhell to communicate that via prose.

...and is also unlikely to be a widely-used trope on AO3.