sholio | How (not) to comment on fanfics

Crossposts: http://sholio.livejournal.com/566855.html

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How (not) to comment on fanfics

So let's say you read a story, really enjoyed it, and want to tell the author how much you enjoyed it! What you DON'T want to do is make the author unhappy, angry, or dread your name popping up in their inbox.

1. Best feedback!

Basically you can't go wrong with all variations on:

- This story was great!
- I really enjoyed this story.
- Thank you for writing this!
- I loved the part where [thing that happens in story]
- Quotes of your favorite bits from the story. (Authors love having favorite bits quoted at them. Trust me on this.)
- Very nice!
- ♥ ♥ ♥
- I liked this.
- You nailed the character dynamics.
- The character voices are great; it really sounds like them!

.... and so forth. Long comments are always loved, but just a simple "Great story!" will do very nicely and make your author happy. If you want to leave long thinky feedback, authors LOVE comments (well, at least I do) that talk in depth about the choices made in the story, the way the characters dealt with things that happened in the story, cute or funny bits, how you felt about the ending, and so forth. But short is also fine; don't feel bad about just saying "Great!" or "Fun!" and leave it at that. We like those too!

Personally, I also love comments pointing out typos, canon inconsistencies, talking critically about my storytelling choices, etc, but not everyone does; you should query via PM before offering concrit to someone if you're not sure.

And when in doubt, there is always the Kudos button on AO3.

2. May not be taken as you intend: complimenting the story by obliquely comparing the source canon unfavorably to it. (Although, see also this thread in the comments where there is a great deal more discussion of this, which is making me think about the issue a bit differently!)

Okay, I freely admit that this may be an unusual pet peeve. As with concrit, some authors probably don't mind; I'm sure some love it. But my Jennifer Keller days in SGA (and now with Peter and various female characters on White Collar) has given me with a general dread of this kind of feedback. It's not really one comment like this, it's the gloomy inevitability of a bunch of them, especially when writing about an unpopular character.

The thing is, I know that people mean well, and in these examples (all based upon actual feedback), the unfavorable comparison is slight enough that I don't think most people even thought of it as that unfavorable. And I certainly don't want to single anyone out and make anyone feel bad for having said something along these lines. This sort of feedback is not the worst thing ever, but is perhaps best saved for stories where you know that you and the author are on the same page about the show's writing or the portrayal of Character X, because otherwise you're basically saying "I think your story is very OOC" and that's not really as much of a compliment as one might hope for.

Examples:

- I wish the writers wrote [x] like this.
- I would really love [character x] if they were written on the show like you write them!
- This is the version of [character x] I fell in love with in season one.
- This brings back what I used to love about the characters.
- I wish this part of the show actually had happened like this.

Basically: I know people mean well with this kind of thing, and most authors probably don't mind (or may like it), but please be aware it may be taken as less of a compliment than you intend. Again, knowing the author agrees with you on whatever point you're making goes a looooong way toward avoiding an accidental insult. If the author thinks that Character X's portrayal on the show is inconsistent and misogynistic, then they will probably like hearing that they've done it better; but if they love Character X on the show and tried to write her as faithfully as possible, then it's not very complimentary to hear that they've failed.

3. Don't EVER do this unless you know the author agrees with you: talking in detail about qualities you dislike in the show or the character.

If you know the author is on the same page with you about this -- if the two of you have talked about it, or if they've just recently written a post on how much they hate the writing this season -- then go for it. Otherwise, this is basically the feedback equivalent of coming into someone's squee post and harshing on it. Don't do this. Or, at least, don't be surprised if you get snapped at if you do. Because you are being rude.

Such as:

- I would rather have your version of [character x] than the abusive caricature on the show.
- I don't know why the writers have made [character x] such an obnoxious bitch this season.
- I hate how awful [character x] is. [goes on for a paragraph about how awful Character X is]
- [Character x] is so nasty and emotionally manipulative, I don't know why everyone else puts up with him.
- The writing is horrible this season; I wish [your story] was how things had happened instead.
- This story reminds me of the show I used to like, before this season ruined everything. [goes on for a paragraph about all the many ways the show has been ruined]

I'm going to pick on one particular comment as an example of the latter sort just to indicate that I'm not being hypothetical with these examples. From a sweet, character-positive h/c episode tag to the most recent White Collar episode, may I present the following comment: ....your story makes me feel better, because Peter was being nice instead of incredibly emotionally abusive. Even though Peter doesn't know Neal heard, it will have a dramatic impact on Neal's psyche that Peter basically told Jones that he regrets taking Neal on. I don't like this emotionally abusive cycle Peter is on.

I've gotten a few of these too. Unless your objective is to make the author await your username in their inbox with the joyous anticipation normally reserved for dentist visits and large spiders in the bathroom ... do not do this.

The above is totally subjective and non-definitive, obviously. And most of the feedback I've gotten lately has been absolutely lovely! But this sort of thing was a big reason why I left SGA fandom, and seeing it happen in White Collar is very sad.

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Ahahaaa, this is probably something I would do well to be more aware of. >.> Probably especially because I tend to be That Guy who starts writing fic because I resonate more with my conception of what the canon (or aspects thereof) could be than what I actually see presented.

I agree with you here, 100%. There's a very big difference between commenting on a community post, and commenting on fic.

The comm is the place where the show/movie/book/other-awesome-thing is discussed in comments.

The comment section attached to the fic one just read is where one states thoughts related directly to that story; commenting on canon runs at a tangent, aka, derailing and it's a no-no.

To add to your points, I know that a lot of writers really REALLY dread getting comments where someone says, "Hey, think about putting your version of Character X in a story with [character]/crossover with this show/an apocalypse fic with zombies! It'll be so cool!" That's not cool, man. DON'T DO IT!

I usually just deal with the points you mentioned, and with the sort of thing I described– I say *exactly* why that suggestion ain't gonna fly in my writing world.

However, a lot of writers feel that they're always supposed to be nice to people who comment. I think there are some commenters who abuse that, just so that they can have their say. I hope this post pokes ~~some~~ many of them in a tender spot.

Thanks for this post.

–N

Well, I think it's mostly just a matter of gauging whether you're inviting discussion with someone who wants to have one or someone who's there for a different reason, I guess. I know it's a tricky minefield. :P

People who know me can usually get away with WAY more than strangers because we've already got a history of talking about stuff, so getting a paragraph of their crunchy thoughts on the fic vs. canon is likely to lead to a productive discussion on female character representation on TV, All The Ways Stargate Screwed Up Aliens, or whatever, as opposed to someone going "I like your version of Carter so much better than the one on the show; GOD, THAT CARTER, WHAT A BITCH EH!" in a fandom that's notorious for being toxic about female characters, you know?

ETA: There's now a comment thread over on LJ that goes into more depth on where I was coming from with this post, if that makes any difference!

Edited 2014-01-14 01:08 (UTC)

Hah, yes. Since I don't write much Peter (note to self: fix that), and virtually no Peter&Neal, I've missed out on all the lovely Peter hate you and

frith_in_thorns have been getting, but I write a fair amount of Sara and Kate, so yeah. I haven't gotten any of type three, luckily, but plenty of type two, and while, yes, I know it's intended as a compliment, it's like, "You don't Kate? Great, you and many others. But since I wrote a story about her, you might be able to guess that I do." And most of these comments would be so easy to reword to leave out the drive by sniping.

(Embarrassing fact: I found an old Yuletide story I had commented on in which I totally did the "I don't like character X in the show, but I like him here." I was so embarrassed I nearly edited the comment, but it was a year or two old, and I figure it would have looked weird.)

Huh, I've never gotten one of the latter two types of comments on a fic of mine, and I'm really grateful now. I'm wondering if this is due to the fact that I tend to only write fic about closed canons. I'm sorry you're experiencing that kind of comment - what a squee-harsh indeed!

Thank you very much! :) I don't really want to poke anyone, exactly; I think a lot of people don't realize that their compliments might be less than complimentary -- but yeah, I think you're right that there is an etiquette difference between commenting in a community vs commenting on fic (unless you know the author is okay with it, of course!).

Yeah, there was some interesting discussion in the comments on the LJ side and I realized that I have done that exact thing with tropes before. :/ I imagine I've also done it with characters/pairings -- I don't think I'd realized 'til I started getting a lot of those sorts of comments myself that it might not be taken well.

Awwww, thanks. :) Yeah, I think you're right that it probably happens more in open canons -- they are more volatile, generally!

[...] I think a lot of people don't realize that their compliments might be less than complimentary [...]

This. And also, compliments are complicated things, unless one sticks to the good old rule of KISS. "I really enjoyed this, and thanks very much!" will always be taken as a compliment. Unless (as you say) one knows the writer, it's best to stick to simple compliments.

There's another bit of etiquette that a good many commenters often either seem clueless about/just ignore: Con-crit. Unless one knows the writer, or is blatantly invited to offer con-crit, DON'T DO IT! However, even invitations sometimes gang awry: I actively solicit con-crit, but I expect people to take note of certain tags, namely "AU" and "Fix-it fic." I still get people that ignore those and comment on my deviation from canon. IDEK.

Commenting etiquette needs, perhaps, to be talked about more than it is.

Hi, can we link this at metanews?

Sure!

Very interesting! Chalk me up as another who assumes that "I wish this was canon" or even "I wish this had happened in canon instead" as implicitly complimentary. A lot of this may be a preferred-fanfiction-genre thing: if I'm reading a what-if-they-did-X-instead-of-Y AU, and you wrote a what-if-they-did-X-instead-of-Y AU, then it seems likely that we're both at least a little unsatisfied with how X turned out in canon, OR we're both the sort of people who like looking at how choices alter consequences. In that context, this feedback pretty clearly means "I think you have a great grasp of how Character A would react to differing circumstances".

(The "what I used to love about the characters" stands out to me as a potential exception in this group -- that one has definite overtones of 'I don't like them anymore', although again, if you're still reading fanfic about them then it seems rather obvious that the love hasn't faded completely, you're just annoyed by their recent actions.)

Even more broadly, I believe there are two kind of giant "supergenres" whose readers have really different expectations: gen fic & pairing-centric fic seem to come with vastly different implicit goals! Being mostly a gen fic writer, you might be able to comment on it more in depth, but -- speaking as a fic reader (and writer) who's primarily pairing-oriented -- I see certain patterns.

You mentioned that, with the second type of comment, it's

best saved for stories where you know that you and the author are on the same page about the show's writing or the portrayal of Character X, because otherwise you're basically saying "I think your story is very OOC"

Most pairing-fic fen are involved in what they do with the basic, underlying assumption that something will be altered from its canon state: 99% of pairings fic gets written about either isn't canonically confirmed, or is in a different stage in the canon than it is in the fic.

Naturally, we don't want to be "OOC," and that's an insult when it's said outright... but we don't generally take comparisons to canon as a marker of OOCness, because we've gone in a direction where we may not have canon characterisation to go by. (Slash fen, especially - many, many of the canons we work from don't have any canonical groundwork for how Character A would respond to same-sex attraction.)

I posit that there may be some crossed wires happening in these situations wherein the readers of pairing-oriented fics end up reading the works of a gen-fic writer (and a gen-fic writer ends up reading the feedback of pairing-fic readers); the readers are assuming that the author is aware of the implicit "while different from canon as we know it, we're both okay with that" grounding, and that creates the potential for pitfalls when they're actually speaking to an author who doesn't have that grounding. The reader thinks they've obviously left a comment on how great the author's characterisation is; the author thinks their characterisation is obviously so different from the canon they were attempting that people can only like one or the other.

Full disclaimer: I've probably left at least one "wow, I wish this was how canon had gone!" comment somewhere along the way. (Oh, HP fandom, sometimes I miss you: we had such a convenient shorthand for "we both agree that canon let us down and needs to be fixed" in the "EWE" label!)

The "I don't usually read ____, but" comment, on the other hand, I've always felt was a little odd. (Unless, of course, it's followed by the reason that the commenter elected to read it this time. "I don't usually read Harry/Draco, but my friend recced your story to me because I love fics with detailed, believable worldbuilding... and she was totally right, you did an amazing job!")

I don't think it's just a slash vs gen thing, because I got vehement agreement on this from at least one mostly-slash writer, and disagreement from a gen writer or two.

... still, I do think it probably comes down to differing approaches to canon, or perhaps just different goals on the part of the writer -- some people are trying to reproduce canon as faithfully as possible, and some people are trying to interrogate and/or fix canon. And it's not necessarily the same for a writer across their entire fanfic-writing "career". One thing I mentioned in the LJ comments is that you can often get a read on the sort of comments that the writer is expecting from the story itself -- that is, I've written some stories that were heavily critical of canon (mostly in Stargate fandom) and I really wouldn't be surprised or unwelcoming to get comments discussing the source critically; but I think those comments would be less welcome on a story that's just 2000 words of adventure/friendship fluff, if that makes any sense?

Oddly, I hadn't realized until it came up in the discussion on the LJ side that I've both left and received comments of the "I don't usually read ____, but" variety, and it never quite pinged me the same way -- though I know some people hate comments of that sort.

And honestly, I'm pretty sure that I've left comments of the "I wish the writers handled this character as well as you do" variety. The thought never even occurred to me that it might be received in less than a positive way until getting a whole slew of comments like that on one particular character/pairing in a past fandom, and eventually I started getting really frustrated -- especially since this was coupled with a lot of meta in the fandom about how the character was a Mary Sue/flat/badly written/inconsistent/etc -- because it started to feel like people were questioning my more positive interpretation of the character, even if that's not how it was meant. Still, I know people mean well with comments like that; it is a compliment, and I do take it as such. It's just that sometimes I have to wince and remind myself that it's meant to be complimentary and suck it up to answer politely, and I don't think people really want to be producing that reaction with something that's supposed to be a compliment, you know?

... but that's true of real-world compliments too, come to think of it. You don't always know how the person is going to react, especially if an attempted compliment happens to hit a sensitive place, but it's still okay to give compliments. :)

Govgal, like a spider in a way :)

Fictional male character, certainly not someone it's legit to interpret as abusive, how dare you.

I don't agree with your priorities, Sholio.

It's interesting, I was just trying to leave a comment on a White Collar fic that dealt with Neal's time in prison, and the very first thing I wanted to say was that most prison fics didn't work for me, but this one did. I don't know if it's the same thing, because I wasn't saying that prison fics were bad, just that most people don't write them in a way that, for me, meshes with canon. Either way, I reworded slightly.

And, hah, just after saying that I've missed out on the Peter hate because I don't write much Peter&Neal, I posted the fic I wrote for you for fandom_stocking, and... yep. I'm tempted to actually engage and point out that I like Peter, but I'll probably just say thank you for the comment and drop it.

(It's not quite what you're talking about, but I had a problem before where someone took a shot at Alex in the comments of one of my Neal/Sara fics. It's not quite the same problem; rather than "If I write character X, there's a good chance I like them," it's "Just because I write character X doesn't mean I hate character Y," but it still leaves me unsure of how to respond.)

I don't think sholio was implying that you can't/shouldn't interpret the character's canon actions as abusive, so much as that the comments section on another author's fic post isn't always a good platform for having that discussion.

complimenting the story by obliquely comparing the source canon unfavorably to it.

I suspect whether or not most authors appreciate comparisons like that depends a lot not just on the quality and consistency of the canon, but also on the tone of the canon (do a lot of well-written but horribly distressing things happen, as in Game of Thrones?) and on the kind of fic it is (though not always - back in 2009, Marvel comics canon had become so unrelentingly grim that people were quite literally reviewing deathfics with "I wish this had happened in canon instead of the current storyline").

If a fic is openly labeled "fixit fic" or isn't labeled as such but still has characters avoid some terrible canonical fate and instead get a happier ending, authors are probably going to be more amenable to "I wish canon had happened like this" comments. I personally have gotten a lot (well, for smaller fandom values of 'a lot') of "I wish this was canon" comments on fixit fics that resurrected characters that canon had killed off, and suspect most of those were less bashing of canon and more expressions of affection for the killed-off character.

Basically: what

elspethdixon said.

If you want to write fic, meta, etc. contextualizing Character X as an abusive bastard or Character Y as a heartless man-stealing bitch -- hey, go for it! Everyone's interpretation of canon is different. I have no say in what people do in spaces other than mine, nor do I presume to. (Actually, I enjoy reading meaty, thoughtful meta that takes canon to task for various things.)

However, taking that argument into the spaces of people who appear to believe differently and haven't invited that discussion is, IMHO, rude. Doing it when people flat-out ask you to stop is even ruder. (See also: SGA fandom and its shipwars.)

Edited 2014-01-17 01:20 (UTC)

*nods* Yeah, I think a lot of fic (and the tags, pairings, etc. that the author chose) tends to suggest what sort of comments the author is expecting. A fic labeled "Fixit" that resurrects a beloved dead character, or one in which the character killed off Main Love Interest and paired the character with someone else, is obviously implying a certain view of canon, whereas a happy fluffy canon-compliant h/c fic is probably implying a certain OTHER view of canon ... Not that I think people have to be mind readers (or that authors have a right to dictate what sort of feedback they get, for that matter -- once it's out there, it's publicly available) but, if one assumes that the commenter actually wants to make the author happy and not leave them thinking ".... wtf?", sometimes a certain amount of reading between the lines is useful.

One thing that came up over in the LJ comments, too, is that fic comments, like fic itself, are in a larger dialogue with the fandom, which is influencing the kind of comments people leave and the way the author reacts to them. For example, I don't think I had a particularly bad reaction to the first couple of "I wish X in canon was like X in your fic, because I can't stand her in canon but I love her here!" comments that I got on a certain character. It was the gloomy predictability of knowing that my cheerful 1000 words of X/Y fluff was going to generate a ton of comments along those lines, combined with the fact that I was one of the few people in the fandom defending her, so the "... X is badly written but your X is much better" comments started to feel like a value judgment on my tastes, even when I knew (on a rational level, anyway) that they weren't meant that way. Saying something like "Usually I think X/Y is a terrible pairing but ..." or "I hated season 4 but this fic is pretty good anyway" or even the milder "This is much better than canon; I wish you wrote for the show!" implies a lot of things about the commenter's fannish allegiances (whether we WANT it to be that way or not) -- sometimes only because it's easier to make that kind of comment about fannishly unpopular characters or unpopular plot twists without fearing backlash. (I remember once being warned by one of my betas to change a particular scene that showed a certain very popular character in a bad light, because she was worried I'd get a lot of hate for it. As it turned out, I didn't change the scene and no one said anything about it ... but it stuck with me as a really clear example of how some characters receive WAY less criticism in fandom, because people always stand up in defense of the popular characters -- while less popular characters are open season.)

... oh no, you summoned them. :( Sorry you're having to deal with that. (Although in some sense it's almost validating that it's a fandom-wide issue and not something that exists in my head ...)

And yeah, I've been in that position too, when people assume that writing Pairing X must mean you're a hater of Pairing Y. Um ... no? One doesn't imply the other.

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