I have liked and even loved dynamics that get labelled as slow burns but that I don't quite read like that. Meet Uglies are good examples for it because they often involve the characters greatly disliking each other for a while lol, but that doesn't mean they aren't important and influential to each other from the very beginning, iykwim.

And I think it's more than doable to keep the tension in a dynamic even if physical attraction is openly admitted/something is actually done about it early on. There's a reason why I love exes ships, for example.

Añaldkfjasfl yeah. Some types of miscommunication can be genuinely well done, but especially in fic it's... not. And I can have more sympathy for it if the characters involved are younger, but sometimes it's with grown adults who are at the very least somewhat emotionally competent in canon! Where they show no problems pursuing relationships they want! So it's hard for me to buy that whatever fanon romance is involved actually matters to them (wouldn't they do something about it?).