My Thoughts about "Disliked Headcannon" Stories · 3:16pm Jan 23rd, 2018
Eyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!
Just a few days ago, I finished publishing Princess Twilight's Escorts. It was a project I started a little after the movie had come out, and the story had to go through some refinement before I published it. Here is the story in question:
I am normally not one to look at the negatives, but some things need to be looked in the eyes. Direct your attention the red thumbs-down area. As of the publishing of this blog, it has 7. At first, when the unexplained thumbs-downs came, this bothered me to no end. I tried to deny its effect, but doing that would not be healthy; better to admit when something is wrong.
But then I noticed something; something that was missing during the barrage of pointy thumbs:
COMMENTS!
Not one person who chose to disapprove of my Caramel x Twilight paring gave no input as to why they chose to rate my story the way they did. And by taking a gander at the comments, I got a very positive reception.
This is also equivalent to my other story, What Hurts More.
This was finished a year ago. And boy did the thumb-downs really affected me then. I was a mess when it came to seeing the rating. Sure, there was some legitimate criticism, but what lies at the core of the issue was that... well, I re-read the entire story and saw nothing coherently wrong with the plot. There are a good amount of grammatical errors that make me scream, "How did I do that?!" but again, the story was good (at least). In fact, I did some math by averaging the total views and the least viewed chapter using this formula: least viewed chapter/chapter one, or 483/983. The answer: 49.3%
Now, why is this so-called "math" important? Because that answer equates to the approximate amount of people finishing What Hurts More. I finished this story last year, and I was shocked when I did my simple equation on the story. Approximately, almost half of the readers who began finished a 30k word story.
That is a very great number.
I was so focused on people not liking my story when in reality people were very interested, or at least, wanted to read the story. Not to mention, What Hurts More did get constructive criticism, but nothing too harsh, and I will admit there were some things to fix. I once hated this story because of its so-called "bad rating." But now I see more than that. I see a completed story that people wanted to finish.
If no one is giving constructive feedback as to why they disapprove of your headcanon, if your story has one, do not be swayed by it.
This story may have a lot of thumbs down, but I looked through the comments of this story and saw no real negative reception; just a bunch of red thumbs that don't like the FlashLight paring. If you are writing a story about any paring, be it a crack-ship or a more realistic one, remember that a comment is MUCH more valuable than a rating. Do not let it slow you down because of a few ratings. And on a side-note, if a person does comment and says something stupid like, "This ship will never work," though they may be right, it does nothing to fix the story, nor is it reliable feedback. Some stories involve Celestia and Chrysalis hooking up. That sounds crazy, but some have managed to make the story successful.
So don't be discouraged by a less than liked shipping. Rely on worded feedback and not a rating system. The shipping wars are savage. Equip your ship with a solid foundation by not being so affected by a thumb down. Write to your heart's content.
Freak, out.
