Abt that unsolicited ‘concrit’ on fanfic thing

My personal opinion is that you should never offer unsolicited critical feedback to people, and you should only offer it publicly at all under specific circumstances. Why?

- Very few people actually know how to give ‘concrit’. They think it just means saying there were surface errors, or they didn’t like how someone was characterized. That’s not concrit. That’s not useful, at all. That’s an amateur review from someone with little to no relevant expertise.

- Especially where it regards fanfiction, you can’t know who you’re speaking to. You can’t moderate tone or intensity of criticism based on their experience and relative skill level. It’s possible that harsh or even moderate critique could make them stop writing forever. Why? What is the point of taking away someone’s joy in that manner? So that the commenter can feel satisfied that they corrected them? That’s cruel and childish.

- Usually fanfiction is published in only one place— maybe three or four, at most. Why should authors be expected to put up with negative criticism in the ONLY place their work is available? Are published authors expected to attach one star Goodreads reviews to their bookjackets?

- If you genuinely wish to help someone improve their writing, you can do so by speaking personally with them and offering your help. The assertion that criticism from a stranger whose opinion they don’t value and whose qualifications are unknown is going to make them better is disingenuous. If someone is sincere in their desire to assist an author in progressing on their writing journey, they should demonstrate that through investing appropriate time and effort. Otherwise, there are many places to complain away from the author’s sight. The only thing accomplished by doing so in front of them is making them feel bad— and if that is someone’s intent, that’s reprehensible.

Anyway. I’ve never gotten useful concrit in my comments or my bookmarks, and I expect I never will.

For something to truly be constructive criticism, you have to know what the creator's intentions were with the piece (were they trying to have it be romantic? comedic? angsty in-depth character exploration?) and you have to know what their writing goals are (to eventually publish professionally? to get into a zine for the character they love? to just have fun and enjoy themselves?) and you have to know something about their background/experience with writing, as well as having a relationship where the person trusts you to give feedback to them that might be difficult for them to hear. Reading a stranger's fanfic on the internet, you aren't likely to know what their goals/background are, and you certainly don't have a relationship of trust with them where they're likely to listen to your feedback and internalize it and not find it rude or demoralizing.

I feel like we keep going round on this topic, and we never get anywhere, because the pro-leaving-concrit camp ultimately boils down to one argument that you can't really fix with logic: "I believe I should be able to punish people who write in ways I don't like."

Exactly that. I've gotten stalkers, impersonators, hate-blogs, bash-fics, and literal threats against my physical health for refusing to write specifically for the tastes and wants of the "critiquer". In a lot of ways, it boils down to "But I want you to write it for meeeeeee!"

Is there a way to get the queue button back

Btw much as I love to make fun of twitter and reddit's business decisions, I have 0% trust in tumblr's management to not go a similar route so this is your gentle reminder that you should regularly go to your blog settings to export your blog. That's a fancy way of saying you can download a backup of your blog so if everything goes down you'll still have a backup of your posts & convos.

It's gonna come as a surprise to most of you, but if you don't want to do that for whatever reason you're allowed to not reblog this post. I'm not holding a gun to your head here I'm just trying to spread the word for people who do want a backup of their stuff.

Also, made this guide for backup Tumblr blogs (ft. export blog method, and python 3 script method):

WHY YOU SHOULD WRITE HORRIBLY:

1. You’ll never write anything if you don’t

Ok!

The road to good art is littered with sketchbooks full of embarrassingly bad art. No choice about it. That’s learning.

Actually that no punctuation plot hole ooc wattpad fanfic written by that 12 year old will ALWAYS be better than character ai. And I love that 12 year old btw

NJ Democrat senator Cory Booker takes the floor in protest of Trump/Musk, "saying that he will keep going “'as long as I am physically able'.”

“I rise with the intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able,” Booker said at the outset of his remarks. “I rise tonight because I believe sincerely that our country is in crisis.”

“In just 71 days, the president of the United States has inflicted so much harm on Americans’ safety; financial stability; the core foundations of our democracy. “These are not normal times in America. And they should not be treated as such in the United States Senate.” -source

I am posting this at 2:30am EST. He has been speaking since 7PM EST. This link (at this moment) is to a live stream.

FUCK YEAH, JERSEY!

So very proud of my state at the moment.

Reblogging and adding the livestream link from Senator Booker's YouTube (the other one was glitching) . It is almost 4am. He is still going STRONG. If you are watching and plan to go to sleep, turn the volume down and leave it up so that the "watching" number reflects the involvement of people supporting him.

If he can LITERALLY stand and protest as a single voice, we can keep it playing and symbolically stand with him.

Senator Booker is on Hour 13 and going STRONG

If you read the fic, leave the kudos. Leave a comment too, if possible. Just do it. It takes a few seconds of your time and it means the world to the writer.

Sincerely, me who just got told that my writing feels like watching a blockbuster movie. I don't care if they were sincere or not, I'll be thinking about that comment for the rest of my life and every time I feel bad about my art, I'll remember that someone once liked it.

When I tell you that I have read fanfic characterizations so OOC that they'd classify as an original character, trust me I have read THOUSANDS. But you know what I don't do? :) Tell the author of those fanfics that they might as well classify that character as an original character if they're going to write them like one. Because that's fucking rude. People don't owe you your preferred characterizations. The back button is free.

I’m pretty sure that Australians don’t have more then maybe 30-50k MAX people on tumblr. Like American had some 30 million users in 2020 (aka basically probably peak over the last 7 2018-2025) while Australia only has 26-28million people depending on who you ask (27 to be safe) so I’m just genuinely curious how many of us there must be on here.

If you Currently live in OR were born / raised in Australia and ID as (born/raised + ID, as I know a lot of born/raised here don’t ID as Aussie) you are Australian in this poll!

Please reblog for bigger sample size

Normalize leaving unhinged comments on ao3 fics you like. I'm tired of being the only one brave enough to write "I am chewing on this fic" in the comment section. Be weird. Authors will love you for it

god keep ur fucking kink meme shit out of ao3 tag y'all make this fandom even more insufferable than it already is and thats saying something!!! The kind of shit y'all post require a fucking trigger warning it doesnt belong in a safe space

Hello! I see there’s been some confusion! Allow me to clear something up: AO3 is not a safe space.

Let me repeat that. Archive Of Our Own is not a safe space, not in the way you mean it.

From the AO3 Terms of Service:

Why does the Archive have a goal of maximum inclusiveness?

What kind of content do you allow?

The ratings/warnings policy is really minimal. Why is this?

The stated desires/goals when AO3 was conceived and initially developed can be found here, on a livejournal post from @astolat (founder of VidCon, Yuletide, and AO3, and all around fannish legend). In short, the goal was “allowing ANYTHING – het, slash, RPF, chan, kink, highly adult.” 

And that, in fact, is precisely what AO3 hosts. You see, AO3 is a safe space for fanfiction. It’s a safe space for people to explore all kinds of fannish content without fear of banning, deletion, or legal reprisal. It was founded, designed, and developed to be a safe space for fandom and fannish works.

There also seems to be some confusion about the nature of safe spaces vs. trigger warnings. A fannish work that merits a trigger warning isn’t something that doesn’t belong in a safe space. The trigger warning is what MAKES something a safe space despite the presence of fannish works that merit warnings.

Something else to consider: there are many other things that include het, slash, RPF, chan, kink, and highly adult material, in addition to incest, pedophilia, infanticide, necrophilia, rape, bestiality, sadism and violence, adultery, and all manner of other things. 

So holding individual women (because that’s what fandom primarily is, women exploring their sexuality in a safe forum filled with other women doing the same) accountable for their fictional exploration of things that a) exist in real life in genuinely damaging forms, b) have significant impact on women themselves, thus leading in some part to the urge to explore those things safely, and c) have existing in movies, television, popular culture, the Bible, and in all of literature since literature began? Well, that’s just an extension of the same culture that polices women’s sexuality in the first place and drives them to find safe ways to explore it.

Ding ding ding we have a winner 🙌🏼

AO3 was pretty much meant to be a safe space …  FOR WRITERS.

FOR WRITERS TO POST PRETTY MUCH ANYTHING AS LONG AS IT IS ADEQUATELY WARNED FOR AND MEETS THEIR CLEARLY POSTED CRITERIA.

IT LITERALLY EXISTS TO PROTECT FANWORKS FROM BEING CENSORED, THREATENED BY LAWYERS, OR TAKEN DOWN OR ALTERED AGAINST THE WRITER’S WILL. THIS APPLIES TO ALL WORKS THAT MEET ITS TOS. ALL OF THEM. YES, INCLUDING AND ESPECIALLY THAT REALLY ICKY ONE.

THAT IS LITERALLY ITS PURPOSE FROM THE VERY BEGINNING. IT WILL NOT CHANGE ITS PURPOSE AND SUDDENLY DECIDE SOME KINDS OF CENSORSHIP ARE OKAY NOW BECAUSE SOME PEOPLE YELL.

If this makes anyone personally uncomfortable, there’s a very easy way to avoid that. Just don’t use AO3. Problem solved.

I guess I should be glad that we have built a world where young fans can be so deeply ignorant of fannish history that they think that the mechanism of repression they’re invoking wasn’t originally built and used to silence them, and so easily could be again.  Their assumption is that they are entitled to have fandom feel comfortable and safe for them; it literally does not occur to them that within their own short lifespans you had to have separate and sometimes secret lists and archives for slash because “nobody wants to see that” and “it’s gross/against God’s will” and “what if the children see it!!!”  (I remember a man knitter having to quit the freaking knitlist because he took such shit just for referring to his partner as “DH/DB” (dear husband/boyfriend) the way the women knitters did theirs.)  And even within the slash community…the very first Smallville slash mailing list tried to ban strong language and graphic content.  A rebel splinter had to break off and found ClarkLex to publish all kinds of stories.  That was only in 2001!  

I know it’s a good thing that we’re now in a world where indignant young people have no idea how vulnerable they historically have been and still are in this particular context.  The time before: that was worse, for many people.  But it’s still very tiring to see.

Please, indignant young people, do start up your own archives where the Problematic Content is banned.  You’ll be setting each other on fire within the year over just where the line is to be drawn.  And advancing your actual cause not at all. 

AO3 is big and easy to use and I have seen some fucked up shit there.

Fandom is becoming mainstream. We need to reconsider if “because you CAN write it, no other reason necessary” is a good philosophy these days. It may be that AO3 needs to reconsider its philosophy and possibly change.

Excuse me? What’s wrong with writing something “because I can”? What other philosophy do you want us to adopt? Let’s see if this fits mainstream criteria of normalcy, of “good” and “moral”?  And the answer to that is: NO. A huge big NO. This is why AO3 was created after LJ strikethrough in 2007 - because we wanted a space where it didn’t matter how weird or kinky or fucked up a story is. Where it didn’t matter that it’s not mainstream. Where we wouldn’t be judged, nobody could delete our stuff and nobody could try holding us legally accountable simply for writing something that’s not to their tastes (as long as there is no actually illegal material). 

Why would they “need” to do that? For what reason? AO3 is precisely what we need - apparently now not only to ward off attacks from outside fandom as it used to be, but from inside fandom as well.

“It may be that AO3 needs to reconsider its philosophy and possibly change.”

NO. Ao3 doesn’t *need* to do a damn thing. If you (and plenty of other people, evidently) think that fandom needs a more mainstream, sanitized space/archive go ahead and make it happen, the source codes are out there (and good luck deciding about how clean is clean enough).

I have seen this exact response given over and over again -make your own space, go on and do it yourselves- and it’s always ignored or treated like a dismissal. It’s NOT a dismissal, this is how everything in fandom gets created. This is how ao3 was created: a bunch of people wanted it enough to make it happen. We donated money, time and workto make it happen. And the folks at ao3 did such a good job that the result is now the biggest and most well known fandom archive. But it was born from a bunch of people who wanted to give fanfics a safe space and were willing to work for it.

Every time I see people huffing and ignoring the perfectly logical suggestion to “get together and create the fandom space that you want” I can’t help but think that they just don’t care enough about their ideas to be willing to put in the work (and if so, why should we care enough to do their work for them?) or worse, are just in it for the joy of policing and shaming others

THIS.

We didn’t like how it was done elsewhere, so we built AO3. You don’t like how AO3 does it? WELL GO BUILD YOUR OWN SPACE INSTEAD OF DEMANDIG AO3 TO DO AS YOU PLEASE! DAMN IT!

This entitlement is so disgusting.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

As we say in Danish, “if you don’t like the smell of the bakery, you can eat somewhere else.”