Exactly, Lily.
Why would anyone want to read a fic where the author is so openly rude not only to the casual reader who may or may not review but to their actual fans who for whatever reason review every chapter like a lost puppy...
I just don't understand how or why readers will allow themselves to be bullied like that.
...It's
not considered a mind game, that's why.
Rally the hue and cry. Get the war drums out and fight the power. There's someone being grossly negative and manipulative to others. Call it a mind flayer (ha!). To fight the power, nobody else must get involved; guaranteed others will be sucked in and destroyed... but there's
got to be someone wholly immune to this peer pressure to tell that pig off!
...No thanks; I worry about the things that
I might do wrong.
You know, most if not all of my peeves come from being the writer--not reader--of the fan-fiction. Complaining about the bad examples you have read without having grotesque oversight for your own material isn't boosting your skill. If I complain about something, it's usually about what I've done and I've tried real hard to change that stuff. I care little about others' bad form so long as they go away when others finally criticize them (possible reason why this thread is kind of distracting us from writing bad authors the kinds of reviews they truly deserve).
I don't post new material for my stories through a minimum review cap requirement like these apparent review whores described thus far, but conversely, to this very day, I have not gained a single consistent reader who will read
beyond the initial few chapters and offer
any sort of insight... offer
any confirmation of having read
anything from my story... without having me ask them through polite correspondence (which I believe I really shouldn't do, period).
I hate spam with a passion like everyone, and didn't want to sound utterly harsh, although my dark sense of humor--mistranslated across shores and sexes
as usual--transmitted no end to bitterness. When Pied said she read my material as a "polite gesture", a piece of me fell out and onto the floor. I've yet to vacuum it up.
Of course, I did Pied a service (when she asked) and nixed anything in my author comments in my main project that implied a
demand for reviews. But I wrote them specifically because
I demanded reviews... not just written messages proving frequent readership... reviews that could
help me! I mean, I wanted insight and feedback on what worked and what didn't, and seriously hated to badger others about it. I had second thoughts when I asked Pied, too (though if I didn't, I might not be posting here at all right now!).
Now I hear of
this practice.
I might have seen it once or twice. No, I refuse to demand reviews solely to increase the stupid review counter. It's tempting to consider it an emblem of prestige but in doing so, there are countless underdogs who write beautifully and expertly, and yet get no fanfare, no nods, no communication... no sense of being in the community at all! It sucks to be on the fringes of the culture you're interested in and want to participate in... but you get no signs of ever actually making a thimble print there. In the behavioral condtioning branch of psychology, they call this 'negative reinforcement'.
Do you blame people for pulling little games to see if anyone notices them?
If you get reivews, you're encouraged to show them what you got (reviews do that, regardless if they point out flaws). But if you're doing your best and hardest to create something cool and entertaining, but only receive little or no feedback of any sort... and what you do get comes off with a negative vibe... why would you want to continue writing?
What is the incentive?It's not selfish to want reviews. If you hate people going for the popularity, they're the type who are interested in what they can grab--what they attain. But the rest are interested in personal development--how to improve. Unfortunately, if you don't have a
steel mirror handy, you can't see where the bullet exited through your backside; no chance at a solo suture job
there. Grover the freaking muppet insisted that we cooperate for good reason.
My peeve of non-attention (as a counterpoint to the legality of mind games when desiring reviews) is fueled from outright jealousy, but I never really spoke about it for fear of drawing bad attention to myself. I'll take
any kind of attention at this point; or maybe I just have a higher tolerance for miserable crap... though I have my limits....
The name-pairing thing gets me, too. It just seems lazy to me. Like, you can't press a few more keys on your keyboard to end up with "Cloud/Tifa"? If it's because of a character limit in summaries, I can let it slide, but otherwise it just annoys me. Like "Brangelina."
(Before I begin, let me remind you that fanfiction.net has a character cap for summaries, and certain punctuation marks won't even appear. I've messed with my summaries enough to know; it may account for abridged name-pairings as clotifaerith, etc).
I despise pairings.
The main characters in my FFVIII story are Seifer, the Library Girl, and Fujin (third/first-person point of view) respectively. The semi-OCs share the spotlight and not dominate it regardless of their purpose or function in the story. Oh... and
no "pairings" take place, all traces of romance or even romanticism utterly abolished; no fluff, no angst. (Yeah, don't repeat to me that's why my story doesn't get attention; not every story is an idealized romp and the genre
is Horror/Fantasy for God's sake).
I hate pairing stories because the title summary gives the plot away.
Unless there's a wicked alien pairing that's still plausible, count me out. For the ulterior gripe, these things are so oppressively popular that I've heard practically everyone who's read my story explain why I can't get a dedicated readership: because of
these stupid little stories!
And trying to capture what happens when the sole survivor of White SeeD tries to grasp with everyone in his unit getting killed in action--with Ellone as his strongest link back to sanity--ain't exactly the "pairing" story these teenage pigs want to read about. Maybe my attempt at realism with human relationships throws them off.
Give me a freaking break.
I can go on about the readers' stupidity to fall for miserable little games that some fan-fiction authors employ, but stupidly enough I still give them the benefit of the doubt too. Naturally, I kick myself in the head before anyone else's head gets kicked, as I have yet to publish a story featuring exceedingly popular characters. It'd feel like selling my soul, but I'd get reviews, right? But oh, that's not exactly a failing on my part now is it!
It's a gripe concerning fan-fiction in general--one of its crucial elements--of how people are more inclined to write about the characters than the worlds or of the concepts that made those worlds and characters so cool.
I'm gravely sorry for the ninety-minute rant here, I really am. Go ahead and spite and nitpick every last detail in the text all you want, I really don't care. I leave myself open for rebuttal and I'm going to get swatted,
fine. But at least I learn from bad behavior and nix things from my material--spent months repeatedly revising the chapters of my project until I started punching the monitor repeatedly in rage. (I wasn't even done drafting the rest!). I remember the early days of wondering if my techniques work but wondered if I stepped on people's toes while searching for those answers. It's not like I have a
complete lack of sensitivity here, right?
And when I hear that people will badger for reviews in some kind of popularity contest, I discovered another adversary not wholly my own. The practice indirectly detracts from my progress so much that it inspired this diatribe which--yes, it's true--I revised once or twice to ensre maximum readability (and slice out bad language). If I asked for reviews aggressively, 96% of people in fan-fiction seem to have a problem with that. I'd love to have reviews... just not for that purpose. Popularity is not an issue; the ability to entertain with my power to write--the strongest creative link I got--
is.
In the meantime, the sensation of feeling very cold and alone in this world continues....
P.S. If you want to nip the review-seeking whores discussion in the bud, another gripe I have relates to the debate between heavy detail and lengthy passages (Peptuck and I share this trait) with more sparse styles that fan-fiction authors popularly employ. Another grievance over my material relates to length (this thread reply proves it in spades), but is it truly deserving of hate? Some peope don't fill in the blanks with their own mind as readily as others, so you have to keep that in mind when drawing the details in there. Where do we draw the lines?
P.P.S. I'll delete "Cigs in a Store." Apparently political incorrectness is a lost art out here. Don't get me started about that.