astercontrol:

giving your fiction a title containing a very uncommon word or phrase is good practice

not just (1) for ease of promotion and being found by your audience

but also (2) as preparation against the eventuality that you, and/or your fiction, may someday be considered unbearably awful by a large percentage of people, and then your choice of title will be committing yet another unforgivable harm against non-fans who want to be able to block your work from their whole online experience without blocking common and necessary ordinary words.

…expanding this thought now

To include character names as well as titles, because turns out people frequently talk about characters without mentioning the title of what they’re from

And to include, “most people don’t think your work is awful exactly… it’s actually pretty cool as far as I can tell… but it’s also overwhelmingly popular among people who 1. are also into one of my own obsessions, that I do wanna follow them for, and 2. are somehow allergic to tagging their fandom posts”

meaning that, if I can’t find a way to filter it, my options are limited to 1. “unfollow some of the few people who actually share my special interest,” or “wade through five pages of Not My Interest for each post of Yes My Interest”

currently the latter is still preferable to me. gonna see how long that holds out.

this applies to a few things right now, but special shoutout to the property with characters whose names are single letters. great choice there. really.