Why was I depressed the last few days? · 2:49am Apr 4th, 2015
So, as you may or may not know, See Twilight Slowly Read a Book came out yesterday. And, well, this story is by far the worst I have. This isn't for writing or how the story is or how it did, but it has a bunch of bad memories attached to it. So... I guess this is a venting blog, mainly about the mods. Before anyone PMs them though, know that I have deleted the one sentence per chapter version and never plan to make it again, so there will be no revival of that style from me.
So, to begin with, let us start with original sin.
Meeester approves Twilight slowly reads a book.
Seven months later, I write a sequel, and submit it the night before April Fools. In the morning, Cheshire has told me it was rejected for format, and no correlation to MLP. He stated that he would only need to change 200 words (in a 1k story) to make it non-MLP related, and that was enough for that justification. That irked me. I got that cleared up though, and then it got to format.
One sentence per chapter was the problem. The style Meeester had approved, was the problem. When I told them there was precedence, Cheshire told me that if I tried to submit again as it was, they would take down the original for consistency.
This was when I got angry, but then unbelievably depressed. I tried to fight. I waited 18 hours for a response from Obs before messaging El, who said he would deny such a cumbersome story. Once Obs finally got back to me, he said that it was a mistake, a mistake made by Meeester, for a whole fucking like this, not just one detail missed, and that they would not let it set a precedent. Further more, he was afraid that people would copy/abuse the style.
After seven months, I don't think anyone has. I told him that. I also told him that if someone updated their fic 50 times, one sentence at a time (using his example of abusing it), that the fic would die right there unless that was the style for the whole entire thing. I mean, if Past Sins just randomly had ten of its paragraphs changed into single sentence chapters, would you have finished it, or told the author to go fuck off for killing immersion and flow?
He told me that he would not listen as he was not the one to approve the original, nor reject the new one. So next step, talk to Meeester. Now that I had talked to practically half the staff, I was told by him the only way it would be approved is to be put into its current state. By that point, I had had three times where my chest had tightened and tears had come to my eyes because of the hypocrisy, dismissals, and over all feeling of futility as me trying to be fun was being curb stomped.
Anyways, new episodes of MLP tomorrow. I've been avoiding as much as I can, btu from what I've seen... high hopes, extremely low expectations. Have a nice night everyone.
The mods are usually assholes.
Do you not like the show anymore?
2942704 I did a whole month of S4 reviews, ending with the fact that about half of them were meh to me, and how another half were actually bad in my opinion. Add on top of that the 11 months we have waited and Rainbow Rocks, something I consider to be the worst thing ever produced by MLP, and I know that this can't live up. I will not be able to go into an MLP adventure ark and come out saying that it was all I wanted. If it does happen, awesome, but I'm hoping for something tolerable at this point, and knowing how this will end doesn't help.
2942704 However, I do still like the show, just... I do believe it is in a decline.
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Is it because Lauren left?
I haven't had much experiences with the mods but are they really like that? The only mod I met was Eldorado when I first submitted my fic and he was pleasant. He helped cleared up some things for me concerning the rules about a fic. Sorry you had to go through that.
2942734 Fuck no! I still say that Season 3 actually kicked a decent amount of ass. To me, the real transitionary season is S4, and that is because they are trying to be something they aren't. They're trying to be serious and dramatic more often, fitting in more stingers and longer plot lines, even though they are a Slice of Life kids show. Now, I don't dislike the adventure arks, but you really did fuck up when your five episodes dedicated to your overarching plotline were, in order, god awful, god awful, one of the best things to ever come out, jingling keys in our faces because apparently we are three, and good, but very boring.
2942735 Normally they're okay, mainly because you don't actually have to deal with them, but they do lack a certain... tack I suppose. That, or empathy. I mean, did you find their recent April Fool's joke funny? At all? Did you even know it was a joke?
2942741 Personally, I prefer good dramatic episodes like Twilight's Kingdom to slice of life episodes like Putting Your Hoof Down or Rainbow Falls.
How the absolute Hell was the Tierek battle boring?!
2942752 I listed five, which were Rarity Takes Manehatten, Rainbow Falls, Pinkie's Pride, It ain't easy beeing breezie, and the Leap of Faith. Honestly, I often times feel like Tirek takes up so much of the episode, that even with the other five episodes there, the box doesn't feel like a payoff for an overarching plotline, but a mcguffin made right there, and is treated much like it, which in fact worries me. Whenever it wasn't about Tirek, past the first ten minutes, it was about the box, and the box scenes sucked the life out of many of our characters. If you go look up my review of it, I say that the main thing that makes Twilight's Kingdom enjoyable is the fact that the villains enjoy themselves while our main cast just seem to be there, knowing that they can't do much because of the mcguffin not being there. That last point really worries me because we know a Mcguffin is how adventures in MLP end, so unless they decide to throw that out the window, we constantly have to set up newer and bigger mcguffins, instead of having the characters working to get the elements of harmony, or learning that they can't use them, so they act without them. For me, that was a big strength of Return of Harmony one. Sure we all suspected that EOH rainbow blast would be the end, but because they didn't have to set up the elements and their powers, they could simply have a goal and work towards it without the exposition or added drama of "How are we going to beat them?"
And to me, you stated the wrong episodes, because can you seriously tell me you like Crystal Empire over Party of One or Lesson Zero, or even Pinkie's Pride, because those are SoL too and don't take themselves too seriously. Also, and I botched mine by this sin on purpose, do not compare one of a genre's strongest examples against its weakest, because of course you will say you like the stronger genre better.
That could apply to a ton of fics, especially Equestria Girls or humanized fics. Hell, with rules this insanely tight, anthro fics should never be passed at all. This is absurd.
Wow. Just, wow. What happened to grandfather clauses? I don't see the mods tearing all the ancient fics that are below 1k words from the site. Maybe I shouldn't mention it, though, lest they start doing just that (though this looks as though this is out of spite). What the hell is happening around here? This site is going to go general fanfiction soon. Shouldn't that mean the rules get less tight, not more? Yet, I keep seeing people getting rejected for bullshit. Yeah, I said it, this is bullshit. This violates no rules. It's bizarre and awkward by standard story definitions, but that's all.
That's the closest rule you are to breaking, but it doesn't say anything about only having one sentence per chapter. Instead, what we have here is an invocation of this part of the rules:
Which nobody can argue against. But seriously, so what if people copied the style? Why is that harmful to anybody anywhere? Why is that a bad thing to have on the site? If someone were updating every day with one sentence a chapter, the most one could claim is update bumping abuse, but it's a real, functional update, so it would be baseless. But yeah, nobody is going to do that.
... well, actually, I'm tempted to do that now, just to see what would happen. But I wouldn't be if it weren't for this fiasco. If I did it, if anybody copied this style now, it'd be because the mods just said not to.
So yeah, you never got rejected for breaking rules, that much is obvious. You got rejected because the mods don't like the formatting style. Now, yeah, it's a bizarre formatting, but that's not the point. The point is that if this keeps up, if the mods keep getting tighter and more restrictive to content, we may end up playing host to even more of an uncreative wasteland than we already do. If they're banning strange styles, that's creativity being snuffed out. Like that fic with invisible letters you had to highlight to see, based on how a changeling is invisible. That was clever. If this keeps up, we may not see new and interesting experiments like that anymore. This makes me sad. But I suppose I can always just leave; I'm sure nobody would miss me much.
Sorry for your trouble and your loss of a fic. Oh, and sorry for rambling.
2942795 No man, I do like the support, and with all you just said, you may now see why I got so depressed at what was happening. I'd lost my fic for what felt like no reason, especially since the guy everyone knows as a prick amongst the moderators allowed the first one and they're saying her was wrong. So yeah, kind of depressing.
Also, never feel bad for rambling. I love discussion and debate, so I will always encourage commenting on my blogs. Shame no one decided to speak much when I reviewed RR or S4 though.
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... well, I could try to fix that a bit, I suppose. It would certainly be a heavy contrast in viewpoints, by the look of it.
2942902 Eh. For some, yes, but that would be it. Perhaps instead we will find merrment in my S5 reviews, instead of dredging up old blogs.
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. Well played.
Too late. But yes, Season 5 is upon us, so let us discuss it as it comes... which means I'll have to follow you to keep up. You tricky devil, you
2942951 Yay! Well, I do know you like my work at least, though far more of my stories are simpler in their styles.
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It's just part of my writing philosophy: It is much easier to make someone laugh in SoL than it is to make them give a damn in a drama.
Anyways, sorry if I came off as rude. It's all just opinions, and I can't say that I've never had a show get worse over a bit I really loved. *cough* Doctor Who! *cough*
Sorry, must be something in the air.
Oh and one last thing: I actually hate Crystal Empire for failing to actually make me care about the characters, IE failing to be a good drama. I have a review, but be warned: Spelling errors EVERYWHERE.
Okay. I'm going to clear the air here. Likely get into trouble, but I still need to say it. As you realised you weren't getting your way with me, you bounced to other staff in an attempt to get your story passed and to complain about my decision. This lead to careful deliberation about your formatting and its relation, given its minimal style. So I'm going to explain in a little better detail why it failed.
Firstly, it's relation. A story such as this, being as minimal as it is, requires more than just character names to be considered related. To be considered "related" the story must have substantial interaction with MLP content (names, places, vocab, etc.). Given that each chapter only had, perhaps, 5-6 words, saying that it wasn't related wasn't considered excessive.
Secondly, the formatting. Probably the biggest issue here, the formatting was not something I considered to be a proper story format. Despite its apparent use in children's books, there are two main reasons why it doesn't work in both this setting and the way it was presented. One, there were no illustrations. This was one of the first reasons why I failed it despite your insistence on it being styled on a children's book. One-sentence chapters (despite the second reason) could have been somewhat okay if illustrations accompanied them. But they didn't. Two, and this is the bigger of the two reasons and the main reason why we asked you to cut it down to one chapter, the story as it was put too much of a burden on the servers. Having to load 180-something chapters for multiple readers, flicking through them rather quickly would put unnecessary strain on the site, hence us asking you to cut it down to size.
Lastly, yes, mistakes were made in approving the first fic, and I will also openly admit that I could have handled our earlier interactions better. However, your outright refusal to accept my decision and then widespread complaining, followed by trying to garner sympathy in your blog, post submission, frustrates me.
Look, I needed to get this off my chest. This whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth, and I wanted to clear the air. I'm not going to sugarcoat it though, I still stand by my decisions and reasoning. I just want to put this past me, but after seeing this blog post, I had to speak up.
2998281 And I made this blog post so I could get it off my own chest, so I'm hoping that this helped you, and I am sorry for how ornery I had been as well. I should have been more patient and understanding as well. For that, I do apologize.