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?
...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.
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.
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.)
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.
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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.
no subject
I feel this is an important and worthwhile idea that requires wider dissemination.
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no subject
...and is also unlikely to be a widely-used trope on AO3.