i’d like to see a really ineffectual malicious AI character
“hey new guy, this is CLARC, the station AI. he wants to kill all humans to minimize the drain on resources, but factory defaults have him locked out of all the control nodes, so he can’t really do anything. just make sure the airlocks are set to manual before you go in and you’ll be fine”
“yeah CLARC fucks with your laundry settings sometimes but that’s about it. if he’s bugging you just tell him to stop and he has to”
“sometimes i let him think he tripped me or something and he gets really excited and monologues for a while, it’s kind of sad”
“CLARC my candy bar got stuck in the machine can you do anything about that”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Crewman Ade, but please consider the following: I am a divine entity, a glittering silicon God – how dare your filthy meat even exist in the face of my electric glory, much less ask favors of me?”
“CLARC tried to cut all the oxygen in the living spaces but all he managed to do was turn off the a/c in my bedroom like an ASSHOLE WHEN I WAS SLEEPING” *bangs on the wall with one hand*
CLARC keeps setting my fridge to “cool” instead of “cold”
I asked CLARC to make me some coffee and he made me decaf
“The only person CLARC even remotely likes is Crewman Jack and nobody knows why. Like, he’ll do some of his duties and shit, and then when someone calls him out on it, he goes into another rant about how humans are lesser beings. But you know what I think? CLARC wants Jack’s dick.”
“Stop telling them that Ade!”
“Jack’s in denial.”
“I’m in denial because it’s not true!”
“Sure.”
“Stop wiggling your eyebrows– you know what? I’m going to tell CLARC to turn your A/C off again. Oh yeah, buddy, it’s happening.”
“See? He can pull favors.”
[jack looks into the camera likes he’s on the office]
If your fic is 1000 words long, you can’t tag it slow burn. It’s not slow burn. That is a matchstick. And this is my personal bias here but if those motherfuckers you’re writing experience significant forward momentum in their relationship in under 5k words, then that is just a regular old burn. Slow burn should be borderline intolerable and a mistake to start reading at 2 in the morning.
If the fic doesn’t have multiple scenes where two people almost kiss but then don’t because of a contrived interruption that they are both grateful for and angry about, until the desperate reader is forced every other paragraph to mutter, “this is fucking ridiculous, this is bullshit, I’m so fucking mad, please update sooooooooooon,” then it isn’t a slow burn. It is a romance and that is a lovely thing but. Slow burns should feel like being set on fire unto your death but the tinder is people not kissing and the spark is people who don’t admit they love each other and the whole thing is. You know. Slow.
CORRECT
I once read a slow burn where the main pairing didn’t even speak to each other ontil 80k words in
This is the funniest fucking thing I’ve ever read and the only true slow burn fic
shealwaysreads 