People are missing the point. The problem with these people is not that they think everything is about them. It's that they think every book is meant to be read as self-insert fanfic.

They lack basic literacy. They've been trained that there's one way to read and it's self-insert coffeeshop AU

April 03, 2026 - 16:55 UTC

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Maybe y'all don't remember this, but there was a huge movement in the book community like 10 years ago around people who were only reading fanfic bc nothing else gave them the good feelings.

And now those readers are the main target audience of commercial genre fiction.
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Trad needed /them/, not the other way around, so those readers did not *learn* how to engage with literature; *trad* learned how to sell fanfic.

So that's what's happening now. Fanfic books up the wazoo and whole swaths of readers not realizing they never learned to read original books.
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yeeeeeeeeeep
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What’s “AU”?
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"coffeeshop au" is shorthand for "coffeeshop alternate universe" and it refers to a romance trope in fanfic where characters from a story (typically an action-filled, non-romance one) end up in an "alternate universe" where one or both of them works at a coffeeshop & they have a simple romance
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