Fandom meanderings
Jul. 16th, 2006 07:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
graculusI'm not sure where this whole 'fandom is a community and so we all ought to be nice to one another' thing comes from - it's certainly so far removed from my experience of human beings that it boggles my mind a bit. Certainly there are wonderful people out there, with whom I'd gladly claim commonality, but there are also people who I consider to be quite frankly a waste of skin. Perhaps they're not the people they represent themselves as online - I hope not, for the sake of their friends and acquaintances out there in the offline world - but only they know whether what they do behind the mask of internet semi-anonymity represents who they really are.
Anyway, getting back to what spawned this rambling... reviews and the making of them. I'm afraid I lean heavily towards the 'get the hell over yourself' line of thinking when it comes to the trembling flowers of internet authordom. If someone saying they didn't like what you wrote, or that the characters were wildly OOC, is enough to make you throw away your keyboard then good luck to you in some other endeavour.
Welcome to real life, dearie, and fandom as a subset of that - it's full of people who are likely to think you're stupid and/or deluded and/or deranged anyway because of what you think. And some of them might even tell you so, given the opportunity, in much less kind ways than a passing review on something you freely admit to having knocked out in 20 minutes and posted immediately.
It's quite possible you toiled over that particular story, burning the midnight oil before you shared the creation of your god-like literary genius with us, only to be scorned by cruel unappreciative people! OMGWTFBBQ! *cough* It wouldn't matter what you write, because someone out there is going to love it regardless and a bunch of us will be thinking 'someone take this person's keyboard away from them' even if we don't say so out loud. That's how it goes - the spectrum of responses to anything.
If your ego is too fragile to cope with the possibility that one single person out there might be saying what you consider to be mean things about what you've produced, there's an easy way of preventing that - don't put it online. Seriously, share it with your friends, so they can tell you it's the greatest thing ever and stroke your ego all you like. Us, we're not your friends. We're your potential readership and we don't have to like it. That doesn't make us right and you wrong (or vice versa), it just makes us different people. That's how mankind works, folks, like it or not.
Anyway, getting back to what spawned this rambling... reviews and the making of them. I'm afraid I lean heavily towards the 'get the hell over yourself' line of thinking when it comes to the trembling flowers of internet authordom. If someone saying they didn't like what you wrote, or that the characters were wildly OOC, is enough to make you throw away your keyboard then good luck to you in some other endeavour.
Welcome to real life, dearie, and fandom as a subset of that - it's full of people who are likely to think you're stupid and/or deluded and/or deranged anyway because of what you think. And some of them might even tell you so, given the opportunity, in much less kind ways than a passing review on something you freely admit to having knocked out in 20 minutes and posted immediately.
It's quite possible you toiled over that particular story, burning the midnight oil before you shared the creation of your god-like literary genius with us, only to be scorned by cruel unappreciative people! OMGWTFBBQ! *cough* It wouldn't matter what you write, because someone out there is going to love it regardless and a bunch of us will be thinking 'someone take this person's keyboard away from them' even if we don't say so out loud. That's how it goes - the spectrum of responses to anything.
If your ego is too fragile to cope with the possibility that one single person out there might be saying what you consider to be mean things about what you've produced, there's an easy way of preventing that - don't put it online. Seriously, share it with your friends, so they can tell you it's the greatest thing ever and stroke your ego all you like. Us, we're not your friends. We're your potential readership and we don't have to like it. That doesn't make us right and you wrong (or vice versa), it just makes us different people. That's how mankind works, folks, like it or not.
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no subject
Date: 2006-07-16 06:50 pm (UTC)I'm the complete opposite. I love detailed reviews, both good and bad. I don't care at all about concrit - as has been mentioned already, concrit is for the author and reviews are for the reader. I'm not sure why bad reviews are called anti-recs all of a sudden, but I find them invaluable and appreciate them tremendously. I may not agree with all of them, (just as I often think Roger Ebert has his head up his ass yet watch his show every week) but I still read them eagerly.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-16 07:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-16 08:58 pm (UTC)The same applies to bad reviews, though. I go to see films which get really quite bad reviews in The Guardian, because I know that I have radically different taste to the guy who writes the reviews and I can tell pretty accurately from his write up whether I'll like a film even if he hates it. Conversely, I can be pretty confident that if he's raving about something, I'll be desperately bored by it.
Fanfic is the same. Someone's perfect story could me someone else's ridiculously OTT melodrama; some people have bulletproof kinks they'll read and love, no matter how many typos a story has; and some people just get a kick out of really bad stories. So even bad reviews can be a source of geniunely appreciative new readers.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-16 09:06 pm (UTC)