Do not leave criticism in fanfic comments. Even if it’s constructive. Even if you’re “just being honest.” This is not traditional publishing, and you should not treat fic in the same way you treat traditionally published works. AO3 comments are not Amazon reviews.
If you want to offer the author criticism, please follow the steps below:
Contact the author to see if they even want your criticism (their vision and intention might be different than yours; this isn’t for-profit publishing, so there’s a chance the author has no desire to make their fic anything than what THEY want it to be. Moreover, unless you’re some kind of literary genius, it’s possible that they might not give a fuck about your opinion)
If they do, provide it in a private forum so that they have the opportunity to accept or reject your criticism outside the public grounds of AO3 comments (what I mean is: CRITICISM IN COMMENTS IS FUCKING HUMILIATING)
Do not be offended if they don’t accept your criticism
Thank them for their time and for listening to you speak your peace
Some additional notes:
Do not leave negative criticism/hate/wank on a WIP (or, see above: ever). Some people are enjoying the story and negativity might (will) make the author fall out of love with what they’re writing such that they don’t want to finish it. Also, you owe it to the author, who is writing FOR FREE, to hear them out to the end of their story in case they end up fixing what you were criticising.
Do not leave a comment telling the author why you stopped reading the fic. The author isn’t going to fix it and it’s just going to make them sad and feel shitty. Seriously, these types of comments are everywhere and they help NO ONE.
If you read something in a fic you don’t like, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD JUST STOP READING IT. Please don’t let yourself believe that the way you see fic is the way fic ought to be. Everyone likes different things. It’s okay to exit silently. It’s the polite thing to do.
Do not point out OOC. Ever. Period. End of story. Interpretation is the entire point of fanfic. If you don’t like someone’s interpretation, DO NOT READ IT. You’re not the IC Police.
Avoid backhanded compliments. Please don’t start a comment with, “To be honest I hated this at first, but…” or anything similar. If there is an insult in your comment that is turned positive somehow, it is still an insult, and it is still hurtful.
Please please please, I am begging you, readers of fanfic, to take into consideration that fanfic authors are not celebrities, even if you think they’re super popular and amazing writers and you get hearts in your eyes when they acknowledge you. If you cut them, they will bleed. If you talk to them, they will listen. If you tell them they suck, they will believe you.
Be kind to fanfic authors. They do what they do because they love to do it. Don’t take that away from them by leaving tactless or rude comments.
It’s the time of the year again when this post from 2015 needs a reblog.
AO3 comments are not Amazon reviews!
Ask before you give out constructive criticism. Because some people like that kind of thing, or even want it. I certainly don’t, but that’s my personal opinion. If they want constructive criticism, they’ll ask for it.
As we sit on the cusp of changes to the Internet, after your other activities to support Internet freedom, archive your
fandom stuff.
Save the electronic files of your favorite online fandom works. Consider print-outs of your favorite online
material. And save paper
ephemera from fandom events.
Why save? Because you put the effort into a fanwork. Because you may be surprised when a fandom stays alive for years, or gets revived, or when an academic asks to cite your work. Because it’s stupidly hard to find items on Tumblr. Because, lo, in ages past, many fandom archives have risen and fallen, taking favorite fics off the ‘Net. Because it made you happy, makes you remember. Because you never know.
What can
you save?
Fanart
Stories you wrote
Epic comments on stories you wrote
Stories you love that other people wrote
Meta and meta-related discussions
Translations others did of your works
Physical items: paper ephemera, clothing, accessories, art prints and drawings.
Behind the cut…saving from Tumblr and AO3, delving into lost web sites, how to save computer files for the long term, and why I’m glad I saved physical fandom items from 10+ years ago.
So I am going to add onto this because there is, in fact, a professional archival interest in preserving fandom as well. I’ve spoken with some people about this before, but here’s the bottom line: PROFESSIONAL ARCHIVISTS WANT TO PRESERVE YOUR STUFF! HELP THEM DO THIS!
There are pre-existing fandom archives. Where are they?
The University of Iowa Special Collections. U o I is partnered with the Organization for Transformative Works (which runs AO3) to help collect and preserve fandom. They’re one of the biggests out there. Here are some of their existing collections
Pete Balestrieri, who curates the collection, is the man to talk to about this. Please consider giving him your stuff!
The Library of Congress has been archiving select webcomics, and now maintains the Web Cultures Archive which includes sites like Cosplay Paradise.
These are the big institutions doing collecting, but the archival profession and fandom need to start talking more. Born digital material is always at risk, and at present, it is mostly Western fandoms being preserved! Moreover, some facets like cosplay are currently overlooked, and that is something that needs better documentation!
Also don’t forget the Browne Popular Culture Library at Bowling Green State University, the oldest and largest library of its kind in the US!
And outside of the big active collaborations between between fandom and major special collections libraries, more and more university libraries and archives are offering free workshops on Personal Digital Archiving. If you’re not in school or there’s no local group offering workshops in your area, lots of archives and archival organizations now have guides online sharing strategies, tips, and sometimes even suggested freeware programs you can use to get started. While the guides are typically geared towards archiving/preserving stuff like family digital photos or research papers you wrote in school, you can easily apply the same strategies to preserving your fanworks and other fandom stuff.
Here’s a small sample of resources to get you started:
OMG. I don’t feel like actually getting into it on the actual post, but I just passed by a post about how fic writers should welcome criticism in comments because friends who beta your fic aren’t experts.
Setting aside the fact that I could easily have every fic beta’d by English PhDs and professional writers if I wanted (some fandoms are crawling with them)…. you know who really isn’t an expert, in my experience?
Random assholes commenting on my fic. They never seem to actually know any more about writing than I do (usually they don’t have any fic of their own posted, wow, what a shock). Nor are they well-intentioned. Oh, I’m sure they tell themselves they want to “help me improve,” but as soon as I disagree with them it becomes clear that they are far more interested in being right (always about something completely subjective) than in helping me grow as a writer.
Now, I’m lucky – I’ve only gotten a handful of truly negative/critical comments (besides like, typos or requests for tags/warnings or that sort of thing). But when it does happen, it goes the same way every. Damn. Time. I have never gotten one that I actually agreed with after serious reflection, and when I tell them hey, I’ve thought a lot about this and I like the way I did it, they never back off and say “Ok, well, just thought you’d like to know my perspective” or something. No, they’re fucking offended that I disagreed, because apparently I’m the only one in this scenario who is supposed to accept (and agree with) all criticism. Criticizing their criticism is not allowed.
It costs you $0 to not comment on a fic. Sometimes it can be hard, I know, when the characterization SUPER bugs you or the plot uses your PET PEEVE to add drama, and you want to tell them so so badly. But just… don’t. Just don’t! Unless the author has specifically said they want constructive criticism, they probably don’t want your feedback.
And here’s the thing – unwelcome feedback almost never convinces anyone to change a damn thing. Just assume that yours won’t be the magical 1% that does and move on. Complain about the fic privately to a friend if you need to get it off your chest.
i’m so here for the five-minute-rule of basic manners as applied to fic – like if it can’t be fixed in five minutes or less, don’t ever say it, because you’re just being mean.
got spinach in your teeth or your shirt’s inside? sure. got a typo or misspelling? sure.
wearing something you’re pretty sure the boss won’t like to a big meeting? maybe, but carefully and kindly. consistent but easily-fixed grammatical errors that may make readers stop reading really quickly? maybe, but carefully and kindly.
i really don’t like this and that and i just thought you should know how much i hate it? probably don’t ever, ever do that.
Exactly. No fic writer is ever going to redo their entire plot and characterization because a single commenter didn’t like it. This is one thing that makes it clear that these people don’t know jack about writing – the way they argue as if they expect me to actually rewrite my story based on their feedback. They clearly have absolutely no idea what that would actually mean, and how difficult it would be. It’s worlds away from pointing out a typo.
(They also have no concept of how egotistical it is for them to assume that their opinion is what I should base my decisions on – not my beta, not the many other people who have commented with the exact opposite of what they just said, and definitely not me.)
Yo ok what if there was a Cinderella story where Cinderella is a trans woman and that’s really why her stepmom treats her like shit and won’t let her go to the ball and when the prince and his men come around looking to try the slipper on every woman in the land her stepmom tells the prince there aren’t any women left in the house because she insists that Cinderella is a man, but Cinderella comes out and the prince recognizes her and says something along the lines of “well I’d say that’s a woman if I ever saw one”
“Ella is transgender. She’s known since she was young; being a woman just fit better. She was happier in skirts than trousers, but that was before her stepmother moved in. Eleanor can’t stand her, and after Ella’s father passes she’s forced to revert to Cole, a lump of a son. She cooks, she cleans, and she tolerates being called the wrong name for the sake of a roof over her head. Where else can she go? An opportunity to attend the royal ball transforms Ella’s life. For the first time, strangers see a woman when she walks down the stairs. While Princess Lizabetta invited Cole to the ball, she doesn’t blink an eye when Cinderella is the one who shows. The princess is elegant, bold, and everything Ella never knew she wanted. For a moment she glimpses a world that can accept her, and she holds on tight. She should have known it wouldn’t last. Dumped by her wicked stepmother on the farthest edge of the kingdom, Ella must find a way to let go of the princess and the beautiful life they shared for an hour. She’ll never find her way back. But it’s hard to forget the greatest night of her life when every rose she plants is a reminder.”
You know, with all the language throughout Star Wars about “giving in” to the Dark Side, how the Dark Side makes you more powerful, how the Dark Side makes you age strangely and destroys you, it sure doesn’t sound like an “opposite side of the coin” so much as the “deeper end of the pool,” like it’s actually the true form of the force and being a Jedi is about keeping it tamed so it doesn’t eat you the way it actually wants.
the force is entropy
Eldritch Jedi pls
This is one of the reasons i love the second Knights of the Old Republic game, wherein one of the major characters (who defines herself neither as Jedi nor Sith) actually views the Force this way, saying “I hate the Force. I hate that it seems to have a will, that it would control us to achieve some measure of balance, when countless lives are lost.”
It’s also the game that gave us the two most entropic, eldritch characters in the franchise: Darth Nihilus, whose dark-side-borne ability to feed on the Force and consume life itself has twisted him into a half-living “wound in the Force”, more presence than flesh
and Darth Sion, whose entire body is a ruin, his flesh nothing but ragged scar tissue, every bone and muscle broken and torn, kept animated by will alone as he forces himself, second by agonizing second, to exist
I wish there were more horrifying perspectives on the force like that
This is one of the reasons the term “Light Side” never felt right to me, even before it was used in any official media; The Force always struck me more like an ocean than a binary concept: the deeper you go, the darker and more crushing it gets — at a certain point becoming an effectually consistent darkness — and while light filters down and fades for some distance, if there is a truly light “side” it’d be the surface.
Which isn’t to say “the Force is evil unless you flounder about near the top” — just that it’s a natural force, and as such is something you need to respect and be adequately prepared for. (Take electricity, for example: super awesome and pretty dang useful, but OH HOLY SMOKES don’t try and harness it unless you REALLY know what you’re doing!)
In this sense, being tempted by the Dark Side is less a case of “Hey, I wonder what’s on the other side of this coin it looks pretty cool haha oh whoops I’m Space Walter White now,” and more one of “The deeper into this thing you go, the harder you’ll need to fight to resist the ever-increasing pressure, to remain whole, even to just see whatever the heck you’re actually doing.”
(which is why Jedi training is so important: those padawans gotta build themselves a mental Deepsea Challenger!)
seriously though it would be an enormous help if more people understood that autistic brains/bodies (and some other conditions too) very VERY frequently don’t process sensations and emotions in normal ways and INSTEAD replace them with bodily and emotional responses that are total nonsense in an NT context
like i have chronic pain, i have an always-on headache that used to be around a 2-3 on the pain scale and is now a 6-7 most days. but periodically i find that instead of actually feeling a level of pain i can rate, i have a series of puzzling physical sensations like nausea that miraculously get better when i take painkillers and go lie down in the dark. because they were actually pain signals. pain signals that got turned into something else at some point in my body. so i have days where i feel GREAT and pumped to do stuff and then i’m like WHY AM I NOT FUNCTIONING WELL and i go lie down in the dark for a while and it gets better?? because i was actually at an 8 which is Can’t Function levels for me, but 90% of that pain was invisible to me, turned into nausea and manic energy and weird sudden mood shifts instead of “pain”.
I don’t experience normal thirst signals most of the time, either. I get cravings for ice cream and lime popsicles and watermelon instead of being thirsty. I had to learn that “i suddenly desperately want ice cream” is my body’s way of saying “put some water in this bitch”.
I also get nausea instead of hunger signals a lot of the time. nausea is one of my body’s favorite go-to signals to send, in general, so it can mean almost anything. when my stomach turns i have to go through a checklist of possibilities to figure out what i’m actually feeling. this is a big reason i eat a lot of snacks. it’s step number 3 or 4 on my “why do i feel sick” list and happens at least once a day.
and anyway this shit is important for non autistic people to know because we can’t always tell you what we’re experiencing, but also sometimes we can get really upset and overwhelmed with trying to even understand what we’re feeling. doctors especially need to know this. how can i tell you what’s wrong with my body when my body doesn’t know how to use its own language for communicating what’s wrong? when it routinely sends me a mishmash of signals that are totally useless for figuring out the problem? it’s not impossible but it requires an understanding of just how different the place i’m coming from really is. you can’t get anywhere by treating me just like an NT patient.
but most people aren’t even aware that “body signals” are a real tangible thing that can be effected and “go wrong” when your brain and body are built weirdly. literally any process in your body can be broken, that should be obvious, but people are so oblivious to the things their body does automatically that they aren’t aware they exist, and therefore don’t know they can break. it’s really important to make people aware of these functions. there are so many disabilities that happen when a hidden function breaks and it’s impossible for abled people to grasp those disabilities without comprehending that that’s an actual thing their body does for them.
setepenre-set 
