May 24TornadoF6
A response to your review at https://www.fanfiction.net/r/11963158/

I appreciate the advice. I will take that into consideration, but the only reason i haven’t added content is because i don’t really want to get started until i find a co-author. also i’ll send you the form when oc’s start getting accepted.

May 24NextNewAge
A response to your review at https://www.fanfiction.net/r/11962686/

Thanks for the info. :)

Also, if you haven’t noticed, none of my stories are ‘canon’. I don’t enjoy using characters that are already made up, like Ash or Brock. If you are looking for ‘canon’ stories, please click on Filters, find the characters you want, and press Search. That usually works when I use stories.

May 24Quinnquerer
Thanks for the excellent point about capitalizations. It hadn’t occurred to me to think about the names of pokemon like that before, but it does make sense. I’ll be sure to change them shortly. (I’m keeping Pokeball and Pokecentre the same, though, since those are brand names in this universe.)

This is my first published work, so I’m happy that I’m already getting some kind of interest (and even constructive criticism!) for my story.

May 25Okay, this is a major departure from my previous tone, but it’s going to leave a really bad taste in my mouth if I don’t come out and be straight with you here, so this PM is something that I think I need to say. And, honestly, you probably need to hear this too.If I’m meant to take your review as written, you didn’t read past the first two sentences of my story. You would only have the impression that my piece started with the trite cliche of the protagonist waking up if you didn’t read on from the first line and see the phrase “I was already awake…” (which then led on to a couple of pieces of action that established things about Janet’s character and affected events that happened closer to the end of this chapter, not that you’d care).

And see, it doesn’t actually matter that there is the possibility that (if that rant about the cliche of starting a story with waking up was copied and pasted like the first half of your “review” turns out to have been) you actually did read on from there. Because no matter how you slice that particular cake, the end result is the same: you clearly don’t care about my story. And if you don’t care about my story, you don’t care about reviewing my story.

That brings us to a major question: why did you even bother?

Because I’m fine with people making the choice not to read my story at all, and I’m fine with people who take a look at it and decide it’s not for them, and I’m fine with people making surface points– like you did in the first paragraph of your “review”, about capitalising the names of pokemon– without reading much further. I’m even fine with people getting things wrong about my story, and getting angry about stuff that they thought I put there but didn’t really intend: normally, writing a review at least means that they care, right?

Except, of course, when the review itself betrays your total and utter disinterest in the story you purport to be reviewing. If what “you” said about literally having seen that “waking up” cliche hundreds of times is true, I suspect that it is beginning to influence what you see. You see the words “alarm clock” in the first line, you think “Oh man, it’s another one of those stories!”. You bust out your repertoire of quotes from “Farla”. “Let’s see, what do I do when they use that cliche… oh look! There’s one for this exact situation!”

Anyway, I guess I’m being too self-involved here. This shouldn’t just be a “gotcha!” post I’m writing for my personal vindication about some mean words that some anonymous person on the Internet sent me. See, I took the liberty of checking out your profile after it occurred to me that “you” hadn’t actually read my story, and I was particularly interested in your justification for ripping parts of your “reviews” from reviews written by Farla. (Notice the placement of scare quotes there.) You claimed that you did it to keep yourself “sane”, and prevent yourself from “lashing out at people”.

That’s… man. On one hand the irony between what you think you’re achieving with these canned quotes and the effect you’re actually having is kind of funny, in a darkly humourous way, but on the other hand it’s kind of sad that you consume yourself like this. Don’t get me wrong– I don’t mean “sad” as in laughable, I mean sad as in actually unfortunate. Regardless of what you said about trying to be as polite as possible in your profile, I can tell you right now that nobody likes to be told that their writing is made up of “horribly, horribly overdone” cliches and starts off at a point that is so “incredibly dull and boring” that the speaker has outright given up on your story. There are just… so many better ways to say the kind of thing that you want to say. This Farla person you’re copying off might know how to read, but they’re not someone you want to write like. Looking through the stuff they’ve said, they’re either extremely bad at monitoring their tone, or just don’t give two shits about the effect that their words have on others. Nope, not a good person to copy and paste from at all.

So you don’t want to write the reviews, and very few people want to read them. What’s the remedy?

I honestly think that you should just stop. Stop making reviews, or if that step is too drastic for you, at least don’t try to construct one for every single story that catches your eye for a fraction of a second. Maybe actually look for a story that you can READ, and try to write a review for that. I imagine it’s a lot more pleasant that way, for both the author and the recipient of the review. All those people who fill their stories with words that don’t accomplish anything will get by just fine, regardless of whether you’re there to point out their excesses or not.

And even though there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with saving generic responses for specific issues that are often repeated in your field of choice (which honestly both of the things your “review” mentioned are, even if one of them didn’t actually apply to my specific story– at least not in the example that you seized upon), I absolutely think you should either find a better role model than the person who wrote the material you have now, or modify what you have even more. You can be SO much more polite than “horribly, horribly overdone”– I notice that these canned responses consist of very concise and brusque sentences (outside of when they insult the writing of the reviewer), which definitely helps sell the impression that you’re short on time and patience, but you know what? Since you’re going to be reusing the same dozen or so paragraphs over and over again, you’re not actually saving time by making the sentences you’re copying and pasting as curt as possible.

Basically: you’re a hypocrite whose cliche-based approach to reading makes it really easy to dismiss stuff as trite and overdone and you need to stop doing that if you want to read like Farla can. Also, make an effort to be less rude in the future, or just stop writing reviews in general.

May 25Whispers Of A Mad God
A response to your review at https://www.fanfiction.net/r/11963232/

Thanks! Edited.

May 28ArcaineSD
A response to your review at https://www.fanfiction.net/r/11969441/

Thank you for your review. I see what you are talking about. I’ve decided to take down the story to make adjustments and proof read it better.