You remember that weird “human AU” fic about the guy who was just like a gardevoir because he was bullied for wearing dresses? The author flipped out at me for calling it original fiction, but shockingly, we actually made it to a peaceful resolution.
ManaketeSmoocherA response to your review at https://www.fanfiction.net/r/12267334/
Okay so
First off, I got excited to get a review because I almost never get those so thanks for the shocking disappointment
Second, your review was rude as all fuck and completely unnecessary
I don’t write these for other people, I write them for myself and just decided it’d be fun to put them online. The characters are based off of Pokemon, and that’s enough to make it fanfiction in my eyes. You have no right to be telling me this should be put somewhere else.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody have a male gardevoir other than Wally in the original Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald games, but they changed that out for a gallade as soon as they made ORAS. You’d be lying if you said most people don’t think of gardevoir as female, because there’s so much awful fanart of it out there. So don’t even try to tell me it’s ‘against Pokemon canon’ that people would discriminate against him for wearing dresses, especially when this is an AU. Besides, I wasn’t using this to ‘write about an issue’ at all, it’s just a part of his backstory. People bullied him. Now they don’t. It’s not important anymore, but it still happened, and it hurts to talk about.
I don’t know if you enjoy going around and leaving rude reviews on people’s writing, or if you even realize you were being rude, but if you look back at your ‘review’ I’m sure you’ll realize there isn’t one bit of constructive criticism, and that I have absolutely nothing to gain from it. That’s what reviews are supposed to be. They’re supposed to have some form of constructive criticism, or mention something they liked about the story to boost the authors confidence and tell them they’re doing something right, because writers and artists generally care VERY MUCH about people liking their work, and a bad review like yours could honestly make someone want to stop trying.
I personally don’t care what you think, because I have friends who actually appreciate my writing that I spend so much time brainstorming and thinking about, but somebody else might be hurt instead of frustrated by a ‘review’ like this.
You’ve done nothing to convince me to move my work to a different website. All you’ve done is convince me I should definitely keep it here if out of nothing than pure spite, because I am honestly angry with your review and how unnecessary it was.
Dec 10
[I don’t write these for other people, I write them for myself and just decided it’d be fun to put them online.]
Then why do you care what I think of it?
I don’t care what you think of it. I care that you took time out of your schedule to leave a useless review, and that pisses me off. What’s the point in leaving a review if all you’re doing is telling the person their writing doesn’t belong where they posted it? It’s not like you benefit in any way.Reviews are a vehicle for expressing one’s thoughts on a story. If you don’t care what I think of the story, why do you care that I left a review expressing what I thought of the story? If you really don’t care, you are free to ignore it.The only reason I’m replying is because leaving a review like that with nothing constructive to say may make someone stop trying to write.If this theoretical person is so emotionally fragile that such a mild review makes them want to stop writing, then they clearly are not emotionally stable enough to be posting their work publicly, and should step away for their own health. Self-care and all that.Some people literally can’t find any confidence in their abilities without people encouraging them. I just don’t see the point in leaving negative reviews with nothing good or constructive to say. Self care can be really complicated when it comes to mental health, and it sort of seems like youre taking that too lightly, but who am I to talk.Dec 10[Some people literally can’t find any confidence in their abilities without people encouraging them.]
Yes. And a public forum is probably not the best fit for those people.
There are also some people who cannot improve without external input, and who actively engage in public forums in pursuit of it. “Good” and “constructive” are relative terms. I personally believe that my review was constructive.
All I really gathered from your review was thatA) my writing basically isn’t even fanfiction and
B) I should put it on a different website
I fail to see how that’s constructive
Dec 10I believe the story could be improved if it was retooled into original fiction and placed in a mundane setting, and that’s what I was trying to express. I apologize if I couldn’t get that across.
[my writing basically isn’t even fanfiction]
Also, this is a very strange sentiment I’ve been seeing a lot lately. Do you believe that saying a story isn’t fanfiction is an insult?
My intention was to write fanfiction. As someone who does write original fiction, I don’t see it as an insult, but the fact of the matter is that I view this as fanfiction, as everything about all of the characters is based off of their Pokemon counterparts. I just haven’t written in every little detail that makes them like the Pokemon.23h agoBut that’s what I’m getting at — for all intents and purposes, it is not fanfiction. It’s clearly inspired by Pokemon, but that’s not the same thing as being Pokemon.
You asked me, at the beginning, why I made such a review — the answer is that I found it annoying to get original fiction when I was looking for fanfiction. The Lion King is an adaptation of Hamlet, but people would be pretty confused and annoyed if you said to come to watch Hamlet and turned on the Lion King when they showed up, no? It’s the same here. It’s awkward to run into surprise original fiction about human OCs loosely based on pokemon.
If you weren’t looking for a human AU, why did you click on my fanfic in the first place? I very clearly put in the summary that it would be a human AU. It seems to me that you weren’t looking for what my fanfic was offering, so why did you decide to read it in the first place? I very clearly stated that it was a human AU, and a high school AU at that, so what were you expecting from a human high school pokemon AU fanfic if not what I wrote?With your Lion King/Hamlet example it’d be like seeing “Oh, this is a disney lion AU” and still deciding to go see it expecting it to be Hamlet.
“Human AU” usually means “about the canon characters”. There are legitimate human AUs that actually connect to the Pokemon ‘verse in meaningful ways. Yours is not one of these. It does not belong in this category and it’s inconsiderate to claim it’s a legitimate Pokemon fic, because that forces readers to sift through it and similar stories to figure out if it’s even relevant to their interests.The only thing “Human AU” means is that the author is taking characters that are not human and turning them human. It’s clear now that you weren’t looking for OCs in the first place, so I still don’t understand how after reading my beginning author’s note you still decided to sit and read the fic (and type out a really long review…) if it was CLEARLY not what you were looking for.Nobody forced you to read my fanfic. I’m not forcing you to do anything, so I don’t even really understand what you mean when you say I’m ‘forcing’ people to sift through my work. If you mean that when you search whatever it is that your searching, you’re not liking all the results and are having to choose what to actually read, that’s a normal thing. And you were… still the one who decided to read it?? You could have ignored it in much less time than it would have taken to read it and write a review.
secs ago[The only thing “Human AU” means is that the author is taking characters that are not human and turning them human.]
Actually, people around here often use it to mean the human cast without pokemon or known pokemon characters into humans. Making up your own pokemon characters and then running that through an AU filter just leaves you with… what, a few aesthetic similarities? At most, you’re writing AU fanfic of your own fanfic that doesn’t exist.
[I don’t even really understand what you mean when you say I’m ‘forcing’ people to sift through my work.]
You put it in a place where people looking for one thing will have to sort through it to get to what they’re actually looking for. If all that mattered was labels, then why have categories for fanfic at all? People don’t post their Batman fanfic here and say it’s okay because they put BATMAN AU on it.
10h ago
also sorry i can’t even take that example seriously because now all i can think about is Ash being batman and everything is basically batman except there are pokemon. That would be a weird crossover fic tho
I’ve relabeled my stuff though, so nobody who looks at it will have any doubt as to what it is as it now very clearly states that it’s just my OCs as humans (the exact ‘label’ I put at the beginning of the summary is [i don’t even know what to call this tbh… it’s just my pokemon OCs but as humans in a high school settingish]). You can now just easily scroll past it and not bother looking at it as you would treat any other fanfic you definitely wouldn’t want to read. I’m not going to take it down, though, because I have friends who would like to be able to access my account to read my writing, and taking it down would mean they wouldn’t be able to read it.
Some of their friends’ reviews on their fic indicate that they are from AO3, which I think is interesting. It’s taken a while for me to notice, but they are definitely a different breed of crazy over there. Notice how affronted they are at the concept of getting a review at all and their insistence that I censor myself for the good of the hypothetical author who can’t take care of themselves, yet they refuse to block or disengage with me despite obviously seeing red the whole time. The only other person I’ve seen like this is that KnightsKing weirdo; most other obnoxious authors just instantly block or refuse to engage with me at all. Cynically, I would argue that it’s AOOO’s lack of a block feature that prevents these people from realizing disengagement is an option; I wonder if this person is even aware FFN has a block feature.
The way they talk about the story is so bizarre, too — “Besides, I wasn’t using this to ‘write about an issue’ at all, it’s just a part of his backstory. People bullied him. Now they don’t. It’s not important anymore, but it still happened, and it hurts to talk about.” They’re talking like the character is a real person and not a construct. Are they projecting onto the character that much, or are they really just that ignorant of literary themes and techniques?
So weird.
You have a white paragraph in one of your posts.
Could be a habit. Public forums tend to encourage doubling down attitude since arguments are often less about discussion between two individuals and more about presenting your stance before an audience.
Could be a defense mechanism. “Why are you so fixated on it? It’s not important, it’s just a thing that happened.”
Though being unaware of writing 101 concepts is also likely. It’s pretty common across fandoms to treat characters as real people, and it’s actually somewhat rare to find people discussing them from the writing perspective.
I’d say it’s weird for someone who writes about OCs as opposed to defined canon characters since they would be aware of the background work going into creating them, but I think that many young writers start from daydreaming before actually putting their ideas on paper… ah, screen? In which case, I can see them remaining ignorant of it. Daydreaming products are more emotional constructs than intellectual ones, so they feel more independent from conscious writing decisions.
I associate that “mention it and leave it” style of character background with trying to normalize/increase representation. Like, a fic might have one of their characters mention that they’re XXY once and then never bring it up again except to maybe factor it into their physique.
I’m not actually clear on why that’s bad from a literary standpoint. Is it something like Chekov’s Gun, where if you introduce something people are going to expect it to be relevant? Typically the intent behind the strategy I outlined is to help normalize the background detail so that the fact that someone is like that eventually isn’t stand-out information. I’m not sure whether it’s a good idea to do that to abuse, however, because it is sometimes nice to acknowledge that someone who was abused might not react the same way as you to certain things.
Mmm, I get what you’re talking about, and I agree that demanding a narrative reason for a character to belong to a group marginalised in real life is a wrong attitude. That just leads to there being next to zero characters deviating from the “default” (the “default” usually being white straight cis male with zero disabilities) or tokenism where characters belonging to group X are defined solely by being X.
As such, I can’t object to, say, a character who just happened to be gay but whose narrative role has little to do with being gay.
There are some ways to fuck it up, mostly revolving around dealing with prejudice of some kind (this blog has seen enough complaints about how sexism appears to be a universal phenomenon, no matter the society, no matter if a story takes place in the far future, which is related to the normalisation of abuse you talked about), but for the most part normalisation of marginalised groups through exposure is an admirable practice.
What is weird to me here is a seeming attempt to downplay it in a discussion about a story, outside of its confines.
I get why you would want to be subdued within the narrative itself, characters who just happened to be X but whose main purpose is to be heroes/wise mentors/sidekicks/whatever the story needs work better for the purposes of normalisation, but I feel that outside of the story it should be possible to talk about such things plainly.
I suppose it’s possible that the author got burned one too many times by bigots and learned to automatically assume defensive stance, but that ties into my theory about a defence mechanism.
But what’s weird is that this story very much did draw attention to it, and it was a major component of the story. But they claim they weren’t trying to draw attention to it despite that so who even knows.
I’m not sure how plausible the defense mechanism idea is, either — AOOO would be unlikely to criticize it at all, and you see how aggressive they are here; they’re definitely not cowering and trying to avoid a discussion.
AOOOO’s founding culture was lj-based, but it got most of the tumblr crowd because you’ve got tagging to pose about how good you are.
I would assume what happened is because everyone on tumblr polices everyone with whatever buzzword they can grab, so any objection is you saying “I don’t like this ever and will do whatever it takes to destroy you for doing it” so obviously the only response is to just reach for the nearest opposite reason and start bludgeoning back about how NO U R TEH PROBLEMATIC.