All the Queen's Bitches

[keiramarcos]

So, I think my position on nitpicking is pretty well known. I certainly don't tolerate it with any kind of good grace or manners and I've been told by several asshats that it makes me "ungrateful and horrible". Whatever. That's not actually the whole point of this post... it's this:

Did you know that I've received emails from FIVE different authors since January telling me that they actually stopped posting their fan fiction on the Internet because of nitpickers?

The thing is that nitpickers don't piss me off anymore. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that my "give a damn" on the subject of nitpicking is broken. I mean my "give a damn" had a great fall and all the queen's bitches don't stand a chance in hell of putting it back together again. Just so we're clear. Right. Moving on.

Maybe I'm using the wrong term here because I don't mean people, who out of the good nature of their hearts, point out typos when they are asked for. I mean people who offer unwanted critique. I mean people who think if you don't run over to your site and correct the problem they had with your fic that you will forever be viewed as ungrateful and cruel and a no-good, horrible bitch.

It's just sad, really, that these asshats actually run people out of the fandom with their crap. Really sad. Fandom is supposed to be fun, right?

Comments

[ladyholder.livejournal.com]

It's just sad, really, that these asshats actually run people out of the fandom with their crap. Really sad. Fandom is supposed to be fun, right?

You would think. But some people just want to rule he world & suck *all* the fun out of it. Assholes.

~L

[keiramarcos]

WORD.

[booffra.livejournal.com]

Oh wow, I was just in tears from that clip - I haven't seen it before. I am also so mad that people are being so horrible and driving great authors away. The annonomyity on the Internet is sometimes such a bitch as people seem to feel free to say things they would NEVER say to someones face. I hope these authors are still able to creatively express themselves, even if they are just emailing amongst friends.

[seventhpack.livejournal.com]

to be really evil start a nitpickers list and along with their net name post who they ran off. They could then have they joy of being nitpicked to death by irate fans.

[kelly-girl.livejournal.com]

That's horrible. I hope those authors post again in the future and ignore people who love to go around giving out unwanted advice.

[wdlwbt.livejournal.com]

I jusst can't resist:

[wdlwbt.livejournal.com]

Well that didn't work.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFG9dwolo3Q

[daneffew.livejournal.com]

I never ever understood how anyone could tell an author what to write or how to write it.

I have been reading fanfic for nearly 30 years and it still astounds that people have the gall to do that. I would never presumed to even come close to thinking that I would be able force an author to write a certain way. I know if an author writes something I have no interest in I just go to something else.

A few years ago one of my favorite authors starting to write about RPF about a different music groups. I was disappointed that they weren't writing in her previous fandoms but I would never tell her not to write in them. I go back every 6-8 months and see if they have posted any I am interested in and if not oh well.

That is life. Pro writers do the same thing. Write something you love for 3-6 books and then start something brand new and you can't stand it. But you would not dare to tell them what they can and can't write, why should fanfic writers be different?

I have only ever written one email complaining about a story. And it was about the lack of spellchecking. OF course I was ignored. But I liked the story and just had to say something that most people would have given up on it after a couple of chapters because of the typos. I just remember spending an hour spellchecking just so I could read it.

Once a story in on the web it is finished. 99 percent of authors are not going to change it just because you don't like it. Tough. Suck it up and move on. Don't like then stop reading it and don't embarrass yourself by trying to change the authors mind about how to write. It won't happen. You'll just piss them off and maybe they'll stop writing all together. Which would really suck.

[quadratur.livejournal.com]

But you would not dare to tell them what they can and can't write, why should fanfic writers be different?

Actually some people are doing that. Neil Gaiman once posted an interesting blog-post dealing with the entitlement and demands of readers.

It's also happening a lot in the m/m romance field.

But sometimes I have the feeling that fan fiction writers are held to a much higher standard than professional writers. Maybe due to the perceived intimancy of lj/dw?

[half-vulcan.livejournal.com]

You know what? *APPLAUSE* Well said! It is called fan fiction for a reason. It is fiction, a story someone wrote. It is not meant to be taken literally and I thought this was supposed to be fun. Apparently people feel that the anonymity of the internet gives them the freedom to be overly critical or foist their unwanted opinions on others. I have learned that most of these over obsessed people are mental or 16 years old.(random number)

I don't want to hear "Dean would NEVER do that", "Castiel is better than Gabriel" or "Severus Snape would never "love" Harry the way I have written him" The story is what the author wanted it to be. Read it, like or not, get over yourself and move the fuck on!

I read a great deal in Trek, Supernatural and Harry Potter fandoms. I have only written a few HP fics and my Harry is always over 20. I get much shit about some of my stories because I don't do kiddie porn. WTF? So I should write my Harry as a 17 yr old boy having explicit sex with a 40 yr old man and be ok with that? Why? If that is what you want to read don't read my stuff. No brainer right? I got tired of the ignorance and abject stupidity so I stopped writing publicly, friends locked my journal and I lurk.

I do comment the wonderful stories I read but if I can not find something positive to say I don't comment. I do not feel the need to self aggrandize by telling the writer their story sucked, they misspelled words or correct grammar or characterization.

Basically some of the fans need to get a grip and a life and perhaps step away from the computer for a moment. Thanks for letting me rant. I really just wanted to agree with you and say "Bravo" but I could not stop typing.

[keiramarcos]

Number Six. I think I'm going to keep a count and see how many authors I can find that have done this because of mistreatment or just asshatery in fandom.

[surevesta.livejournal.com]

I completely understand!

Actually one of the reasons why I don't participate in SPN's fandom anymore is the fact that "anons" were going after various writers--regardless of skill level and nitpicking their works to death. While I didn't care one way or another if they attacked my works I saw a lot of writers I had befriended extremely hurt by it. Most of the critiquing was on an anonymous community, but still.

The last time I sent a message to another author was due to a character popping up in a scene just after they had left to go elsewhere the previous scene (turns out they used the wrong name on accident or something).

One of my friends got a comment on a story tonight because someone was complaining that her AU fic that took elements of greek mythology wasn't greek canon because the character she had playing Athena (who was dead at the beginning of the fic to begin with) had brown eyes and EVERYONE just knows that Athena had blue eyes (the eyes were never even mentioned)! -- A little overkill, don't you think? I told her to reply and say that if it really bothered them then they in that AU she either wore contacts or had blue eyes rather than the actresses brown.

I think a lot of commentators do this sort of thing out of jealousy.

Personally, I love to read other peoples worlds... and often I spend some time wonder what might have gone differently in x fic if b had happened instead of c... or wondering how (for example) canon!nBSG characters would react to the culture of Earth in your Ties that Bind fic series. I feel no need to tell an author that their fic would have been sooooo much better if they had only done a different plot twist! (I can imagine it and play it out in my mind perfectly fine!). I'll critique if someone asks me to and beta if asked... otherwise I'll just sit back and enjoy the ride...or if I don't like it I'll go find a different one. *imagines a carnival*

[alliegator.livejournal.com]

You know, your nitpicker demonstrates a point. 'Canon' is often more flexible than people realize. Athena, known as Grey-eyed Athena, was written by Homer as having alternatively grey or blue eyes. Which, as far as Greek myths go, is the closest we have to 'canon'. The awesome thing about fandom is that it brings all these people together with varying interpretations of canon. The infamous Shore Leave Back-rub Scene from TOS is undisputably canon. Now, for one person this scene makes it canon that Spock disapproves of Kirk's horndog ways on the bridge. For another it makes canon that fact that Spock regularly gives Kirk back-rubs, and displays his sense of humor by allowing him the misconception that Spock is the one doing to rubbing. Both interpretations 'canon'. IDIC. Variety is the spice of life. One man's junk is another man's treasure. So asshats, suck up and deal.

Also: any nitpicker that reads and fails to comprehend that "AU" stands for "Alternate Universe", meaning the author is justified doing whatever the fuck they want, is clearly to dumb to pay mind to.

[syble4.livejournal.com]

One thing I've learn in all my years in fandom is (gads that makes me sound old...darn it, I am.) : There will always be assholes in fandom, any fandom. They are entitled, pissy, spoiled brats that get off on being noticed and argued with. The only way I know to fight them, is to ignore them. It's the one things they just can't stand.

It's also true that good people suffer because of them and fandoms have been flaid and broken by these degenerates.

It just makes me so sad.

[bellalaine.livejournal.com]

All writers need to know that its perfectly fine to put some sad assed wannabe know it all in their place. There's no reason to feel bad, there's no reason canon whores need to use writers to feel good about themselves.

[keiramarcos]

It's times like this when I wish LJ had a "like" button. lol.

[fanarts-series.livejournal.com]

I don't understand why you let them borred you.
You are amazing, they suck at a cosmic level and "point à la ligne".

The last time that i check you are in a free country, free to write what you want. There are enough countries where you don't have this freedom, so let your imagination working and tell them to fuck themself.

ASSHOLES !!!!

In a other word, how is your mum, good i hope and sorry to ask again why do you think about the sentinel art, without respons i'm going to think that the stuff sucks !

[keiramarcos]

Oh. I loved the art. I thought i sent a note :-(. I'm so scattered brained lately. My mother is driving me bonkers. I had to go all over town today looking for a book she wanted because she didn't want to wait for me to order it on amazon or whatever. SIGH.

[makowe_pola]

Same goes for fanarts- you can't even imagine how many times I drew Spock too green or even drew something that I liked not from fandom that somebody expected. At first it bothered me, but now I have only one answer to that: I drew it for my own amusement and pleasure. Unless that person pays me, they have no right to tell me I did something wrong and against their tastes >> And then I promptly block them from commenting ever again. Of course I exclude good critique from this that actually helps me develop my skills and this I welcome.
Though yes, it's a shame when someone stops posting in public because somebody else took all the fun from sharing with other fans.

[rivkaesque.livejournal.com]

funny story regarding TOS. The reason Spock is so pink is that they kept shading him in post-production. The original intent was for him to be visibly green, instead of pink, because of his blood. they finally gave up on the green makeup because people had gotten used to him pink. So you're actually closer to the original intent than TOS!

[seadragonlady.livejournal.com]

Good morning from Brit Land. Just to add my thoughts on the subject. If a reader can't say something positive they should just keep their fingers well away from their keyboards.
As for the cannon fanatics. If it was not written into the scripts by the shows writers then to pick the nit myself, it ain't actually cannon which doesn't really allow much wriggle room at all so why bother.
The beauty of fic like yours is the *what if they did this & I have them not do that factor* it is magic and why I follow my fav authors through numerous fandoms that I would/have never watched and any other authors that they rec. By the way can't you buy stuff in bottles to nuke nitpickers? Oh wait that's for the nits, not the pickers. Pity.

[christella2.livejournal.com]

hi fellow brit
is it just me?....i love when someone takes canon from something and turns and twists it to something new and different. i always thought that was what imagination was for and can make great fan fiction.....but again is it just me????

[cathepsut.livejournal.com]

>they actually stopped posting their fan fiction on the Internet because of nitpickers?
It's a shame that people can't get that it's supposed to be fun and a not a grammar lesson.

[manic-bookworm.livejournal.com]

That makes me sad. I hope those authors learn to love the writing again and post in the future.

[steffi nickels (from livejournal.com)]

What I regret most not only that a$$holes like that drive established writers out of the fandom and into hiding. It's also that they scare off newbie writers and thus make us reader miss out on a potential new favorite author. :-(

[anneruane.livejournal.com]

Any asshats who complain about anything that gets put out there for their *free* entertainment should just shut up and go write their own stuff. Then maybe they'll get an appreciation for the work authors do and leave us all to exercise our free speech as we see fit.

[moonjean2009.livejournal.com]

It really is sad that people are leaving because of that. Like you said it's supposed to be fun and when you get harassed it become tedious. I'm happy you don't care we would miss you terribly.
It amazes me all the time that people are cruel to others over something that they volunteer to read. I mean no one if forcing you to read if you don't like it. Common decency, kindness, common sense are the basics of humanity, some people are missing fundamental things and it's really sad.

[tamstercmt.livejournal.com]

I love being one of the Queen's Bitches! LOL

I've ranted several times about this. People just don't seem to get it. Some of the best writers I've ever read are in fanfic. Even getting back at these people by nitpicking their comments would just go over their heads.

If I really like a story I make a point of leaving positive comments. Catch people doing right. Hearing something positive can make or break someone's day. Some people think they're being righteous when they do this shit. Personally I'd like to shove their righteous up their asses.

Ok, I'm done now. How's everyone? Had your coffee yet? :-)

[auntbijou.livejournal.com]

Yeah, what Keira said!

I know exactly where one of my writer's block issues stems from. There are two people on my f-list that I know in RL, one of whom is a woman I've known for years, and whom I love and respect a great deal. They approached me at a party and after praising my writing and telling me how much they love my fanfiction, blah, blah, blah, and then dropped this huge bomb on my head.

They told me I shouldn't be writing fiction at all. I should write family humor, like Erma Bombeck.

O_o??

"Oh, don't get us wrong, we really like your slash stories, they're really good, but you're sooooo much better at humor, and there's such a niche for it, you should stop writing that and focus on the humor!! You could be another Erma Bombeck!!"

To say that's thrown me for a loop would be like calling the almost total destruction of San Francisco in 1906 a "seismic disturbance."

You'd think I'd learned to disregard my friend's opinion after the debacle that happened after I asked her to look over a novel I'd written for feedback on the pagan elements I'd included in it, and was told after three months that she was in the process of "re-writing" it for me, since it was "awful."

You know what? Now that I think about it, I'm beyond pissed off about this. Why am I letting this get to me??? GAAAAAH!!!!

Sorry, didn't mean to get into this confessional, because really, what I wanted to say was sometimes, I read something that makes me want to beg to be the author's beta, but I don't, because I would never presume to do that for someone I didn't know, but I would never consider telling someone what to write, even if I thought it was absolute crap. That's just plain rude. If I can't comment positively on it, I don't comment at all.

*goes off to wreak havoc on the weeds in her garden and wrestle with the demons of writer's block*

[keiramarcos]

The only thing worse than someone who tells you what you should be writing is this person:

"Oh, you're a writer? I've always wanted to write a book."

[drace-hunter.livejournal.com]

to the Asshats, please refer to video:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfg9dwolo3q>

[drace-hunter.livejournal.com]

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[quadratur.livejournal.com]

I have some weird relationship with nitpicking. Typos and such don't bother me, especially not when it comes to fanfic. Okay, sometimes I feel tempted to offer my help as a beta-reader but most of the time I don't. If the story as a whole is good I can deal with some typos. None of us are perfect and in the end fanfic is a hobby for the writers and something we all get for free. I care much more when it is a professional publication, but even there I can forgive typos.

Same when it comes to interpretations of characters or events and such things. Every writer has their own individual interpretation of such things and to some extend that is what fanfiction is about. Variations of a theme. Why should I make myself and someone else miserable just because I think character X should twitch left instead of right. The writers interpretation is as valid as my own and might even offer me new insights.

The stuff that really bothers me though is sloppy or non-existing research, especially when it involves other countries/cultures and languages. It sometimes feels like a slap in the face. Fandom is international and it shouldn't be that hard to find someone willing to translate a few sentences into another language or to explain that there are no skyscrapers in area X or that there are no longer any border patrols between Germany and France.

But I no longer say anything. In the past I occasionally offered my help in a PM or e-mail and was either ignored or slapped down. Now I no longer bother to read these writers. There are enough other good writers around who try to do research or ask for help.

And like you I have seen numerous writers be driven out of fandom by these nitpickers who want things in one specific way, forgetting that fanfiction is a hobby done out of joy and love. I always want to tell these readers: Try to imagine what fandom would be like if all writers (and artists) had enough and stopped writing, or stopped sharing their writing?

Ungrateful bunch.

[ladymina.livejournal.com]

Word, sloppy research can sometimes put me off a story.
Though mainly when the sloppy writer boasts how much research they did on that country!
Like "I did weeks of research on getting the stuff in England right and making it feel English"
- Yeah, no, England does not use the Euro, they use the Pound, you still drive on the left side of the road, and the Autobahn as a kind of legal racing grounds is not in England but in Germany! Oh yeah and the legal drinking age is not 21.

I don't care about some mistakes like that usually, because I can never write totally correct US settings because I have never really experienced that culture, but making a big deal about having researched a country for your fic and then using the wrong currency ... that is the point where it gets absurd.- And I stop reading.

I usually only leave cc when the Author asks for it.

What gets me too though, is when people misspell character names regularly and have similar named characters that start to meld together.
One of my first fandoms was Tamora Pierce - Song of the Lioness Series, they have a character called Roald and one called Raoul, and someone mixed those up every third paragraph into something that could have been both - it makes getting a story very hard when Roald is the King of the country and Raoul is a fellow of the heroine who is a mere noble boy, (page, squire, knight) who hates having to attend to balls and the like and has no hand for politics. It would make quite a difference to the story if the blunder with the diplomatic mission to Tusain came from a green knight or the King.
So that ones I did drop a comment ... a nice one asking her to spellcheck those names to avoid confusion, but still kinda nitpicking.

The Truth

[pingback-bot.livejournal.com]

User mikes_grrl referenced to your post from The Truth (http://mikes-grrl.livejournal.com/151764.html) saying: [...] her post reflects my feelings on this subject 100% and is worth a read: All the Queen's Bitches [...]

[kathana-grey.livejournal.com]

Eh, I hope this makes sense:

I'm not a professional writer myself, thereofre I lack the basis for a real comparrison. From what I observed, I think one of the main differences between professional writing/fan reaction and fanfic/fanreaction is not that pros are better writers. I've read a lot of fanfiction by people who do it as a hobby that was much better than most of the books in the library in the same genre.

And there are a lot of books on the shelf that suck on a fundamental level IMHO. But they have, before a potential member of the paying masses handed over some coins to buy them, been approved by a publisher, no matter if the decision maker did so because he was drunk, was post coitaly stupid from the blow job he just received by the author, or if he/she really likes the book, or his superior wants it because it fits in. Whatever.

Now, readers will still take the time to write scatching reviews but there are coins missing in their purses. It was their decision to spend them and hey, they spent them on a published work, some official critic might have written a gushing review in some important journal about modern literature (or Romance Novels today ^^). People find it harder to let loose without restraint against some 'certified author'.

Fanfiction where the author is directly assesible and is, in the asshats' eyes just a step up from the reader himself (who is still on the drawing board to plot this new, sensational fanfic that will revolutionize the fandom and be picked up by the producers and made into an episode and...)? One click, no searching google or looking it up on that official information collum on the book sleeve? Squeeeeeee!!!!! Let's hand out some pearls of wisdom!

I think I would be just as hurt by really negative feedback for a published work, but the status of pro might scare off some of the riffraff.

*goes away to write more filthy, self indulgent kinky centaur porn* And no, I don't expect to ever see Gibbs with two cocks prancing around on four hooves.

(sry for the delet/repost but I posted the wrong version of my rant first first. Ooops)

[spikespet7.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry this is continueing to happen.....I've trying to lean more constaint to try and make my reviews not sound like I want anything changed, but how the scene effects me...and cliffhangers of sorts brings out the "Oh god please don't go there" even if you do go there it does not make me want the story changed....but more like avoidance, LOL....

I've not been unlucky (or lucky) enough to write such earth shattering wonderful stories that have brought them to my door so I don't know how it feels or how I would deal with them.

My hope is that you never pull your stories, but if it's bad enough that 5 authors already have...it saddens me greatly....

Kimber

[keiramarcos]

I'm actually more inclined to tell someone to go fuck themselves rather than delete my site and crawl in a hole. Which is probably not nice but there it is.