So as I've been working on writing, I looked ahead on my schmoop_bingo prompts. One of them is "anniversary - one partner sick". My immediate thought was to go back to the post-apocalyptic universe of Strength that I'd gone to with Connection and Defeat. But then I came up against something that caused me to pause.

Cause if I did go back there for that prompt, Buffy would die.

After all, Defeat has the fallout of a nuclear explosion, and Buffy's clearly sick. It's not explicitly noted, but I wrote it so that she has leukemia as a result of exposure to radiation. She proposes marriage to Spike, though. For the next visitation to the verse, it makes sense to me that she'd die.

But...well, I suppose the connotation with "schmoop" is that the fics will be fluffy. But that's not exactly my take on the term. I'm not good at writing fluff, despite my love for reading the genre. So I like my schmoop_fics to have something of an edge to them.

"Schmoop", to me, is just a sign that there'll be overwhelming romantic shippiness of some sort. This, obviously, can include fluff as couples do couple-y things (Say, eating pancakes together or something syrupy like that). But it can also refer to a character, say, having a long monologue about how much they love their partner as they die. That would be schmoop. It would be sad schmoop, but schmoop nonetheless.

Though I'm kinda wondering if I'm alone in my interpretation of schmoop. Are most people expecting pure fluff when they read a schmoopfic? If so, I'd feel kinda bad about delivering a deathfic (even though I'm surely gonna warn).

So, schmoop, guys? What's it mean to you?

Um...should this go under a cut? Does this count as potential fic spoilers for a hypothetical fic that's as of yet unwritten? I have no clue on the etiquette on this one.

Edit: My minority opinion, let me show you it. Think along the lines of Buffy killing Angel in Becoming Pt 2 or Fred's death or Wesley's death for schmoopy death scenes. At least, I find them schmoopy. But I appear to be working from a different definition of "schmoop" than most people...