@alyssa in fanfiction taking a phrase and putting the second half of it in parentheses is an incredibly cliché trope for fanfic titles

the quote above is a well-known line from a sappho poem; formatting it like a clichéd fanfiction title (and i did get this from a title of a fanfic) is really, uh, how do i put it…

1) unnecessary, because the line was perfectly fine the way it was before, and they could have just used that as the title directly

2) anachronistic, which would be acceptable if this was a fanfiction ABOUT sappho, maybe as a teenage girl in a modern setting (but it was not)

3) aggravating, because it doesn't even fit the format well (the second half is way longer than the first, causing the whole thing to feel unbalanced) which distracts from the poetry of the original line (which did not depend on that kind of symmetry)

although a fair bit of my aggravation comes from the fact that this is SUCH a common and overused title trope; if it weren’t, there would be no reason for the author to have made this choice; the impression is that they liked this line (understandable) and liked that title format (i disagree but whatever) and just mashed the two together without ever stopping to think about whether that actually worked

@Lady ah yeah i didn't recognize it as a common title trope but did recognize it as probably sappho and i put in way more effort than it should have required (nobody cites which surviving fragment of her work they're quoting! it appears to fragment 102, at least in the numbering used on both digitalsappho.org and the specific translation being quoted) to try and figure out how what you might be objecting to in the translation lol