Wholesome Rage: The one I'm most terrified of crosslinking with FimFiction

Let's lob the proverbial grenade through the door and get this over with, ey?

Comments

[Shakespearicles]

I like you.

[Keystroke Cascade]

I enjoyed this very much, thank you for making such excellent and amusing content!

[Tethered-Angel]

I find critics are a good way of gauging how much I'll like a movie. If they hated it, chances are it was pretty good.

[Shrink Laureate]

I have, several times, bought a series or movie on the grounds of a bad review by somebody who clearly didn't get it.

[Thought Prism]

See, this is why I don't write reviews/critiques unless I am specifically asked to. Good feedback takes time to produce, to ensure it's done right. At the same time, I don't think that bad reviews are the worst type of commentary. Yes, they can be highly detrimental to an author's self-esteem. But if they're actually looking for ways to improve, blind praise can sometimes be even more frustrating. Case in point, I'm working on an original screenplay right now, and I let my mom read an in-progress draft so she could help me figure out what I could add or change. Apart from catching a few typos, the extent of her feedback was "Wow, you're super talented!" That tells me literally nothing, and I was rightfully annoyed.

[Bradel]

A couple quick reactions:

What use is ‘better’ if it saps a creator’s drive and personal motivation to create?

Very little, honestly.

And why is criticism somehow purest when it comes to anonymous internet strangers, as if seeking criticism solely from people you trust and respect is an inferior decision?

I'm actually okay with the "anonymous criticism is purest" sentiment, but I've blogged before (...long ago...) about my belief that writers who want to be good at the craft should subscribe to the notion of "Death of the Author", and that a written product should always be able to stand up on its own without reference to the rest of a writer's oeuvre. Now, I would say that lots of writers aren't overly concerned with writing well or delivering a more professional product—and that's fine. People create for different reasons. Some of us create out of a striving toward technical mastery: we want to learn to be good at the relevant skills of creation. Some of us create for our own pleasure and outside input on the product is largely meaningless. Some of us create, as you said, for popularity. That last case is tricky, though. There's no necessity that work be good in order to be popular. I'm sure we can all cite many examples of work we consider bad-but-popular or good-but-unpopular. The Transformers movies are very high on my list of bad-but-popular.

I think someone looking to improve their craft benefits from (1) getting anonymous criticism and just as importantly (2) knowing how to deal with anonymous criticism. (1) because, at least in my opinion, good work should still be good in a vacuum where preconceptions about authorship and quality are eliminated. Even Joyce can be argued to be good in a vacuum—because you don't have to know it's Joyce that wrote something, you just have to be able to see the intricacies of the games he plays. (2) is critical because anonymous criticism greatly increases the chances that commenters are going to have no idea what you were going for with your creation. That's fine, there's really important information in that fact. But if those commenters can't tell where you were going, any advice they give about how better to get there is suspect. Learning how to process comments and extract the relevant information that can actually help you see how to improve your own work is a skill for creatives to learn.

But, again, not everyone is looking to improve their craft. If someone's goal is to maximize popularity on a particular work, then the craft-improvement approach is slightly mistargeted and it may be more effective to get a non-anonymized perspective that's more in keeping with how an audience will actually approach your work. Lots of creatives do expect their audience to be conversant in their other work, and that can allow for a lot of craft-weakness to be overlooked—which allows one to deliver more of what audiences may be looking for in a tighter package. Fanfiction is actually a perfect example of this. Fanfiction always allows for craft-weakness on character and setting building, and greatly increases the word-efficiency with which one can tell stories about those characters—because a fanfiction audience can always be assumed to know the important characters and settings already. It's not morally wrong to have those sorts of craft weaknesses in a work. It's a creative choice. It's a creative choice that doesn't lead to improvements of craft in those areas, but if one doesn't have that improvement of craft motivation (or a desire to generalize outside of a creative niche), then the lack of opportunity for improvement in those areas may be meaningless to the creative.

Why is positive reinforcement seen as condescending, or outright dishonest?

It isn't, in my opinion.

There are many linguists who argue that there would be no arguments in a purely logical constructed language, because clear terminology would eradicate the need for disagreement. [They are] wrong, but they make a good point.

Oh God, they are so, so wrong. I'm not convinced they make a good point, either—but it is true that common, well-defined terminology can be useful, even if the notion that we're all automatons that will identically process relevant inputs is risible. It's a thing one could debate if everyone also got exactly matching sets of inputs from conception onward. But that ain't happening.

(Oddly enough, this is the bit that got me writing this giant monster comment. That sentiment attributed to linguists is just so softheaded that I felt an overwhelming need to... umm... comment on it.)

This is because commentators try to serve two masters at the same time: To the artform, to advance a discussion about what makes art good or bad or meaningful, and to their own audience, who they want to entertain.

Yeah, that's just a problem. I think I'd go so far as to say that if one is generating any of your six types of commentary and branding on anything other than that specific type they're shooting for, it's likely to yield a problem of this type. If you sell your analysis on the quality of your analysis, then criticism of your analysis should push you to be a better analyst. If you sell your analysis as rubbernecking, then no one should particularly expect you to be better than any other rubbernecker, because rubbernecking is what sells the YouTube ads.

This is what I would tell you, and you can take this advice or not take it. Its truth is not dependent on your willingness to believe it, so your reaction isn’t super relevant. But goes like this: you will be an observer – that is to say, not a creator – forever, until the day you find a way to stop using creative people as a proxy for your own stunted drives. You can emerge from this cocoon you’ve made, or you can die inside it, half-formed.
– Jerry Holkins

Rather than quote from the wealth of stuff in the back half of the essay, for which I find it hard to find a good single extract quote, I think it's easier to skip to the end and this final sentiment.

To me, it feels like "criticism" perhaps doesn't actually belong in your hierarchy. I don't understand the way in which it's meant to be different from "analysis", except perhaps in that criticism (alone of all those levels) is perhaps not meant for public consumption the way you're defining it? There's a bit where you talk about how maybe criticism should be directed at the creator privately so they can choose whether to deal with it or not.

But this, and the Holkins quote above, both feel like they're missing the fact that commentary actually is a creative act in and of itself. Otherwise, there'd hardly be room to be worrying about whether commentators' "characters" are well-developed or just creator inserts, which is what a lot of your discussion on that point seems to come down to. Commentary does not exist purely for the benefit of the original creation, it exists in conversation with that creation. The audience for commentary is expected to have some familiarity with the work in conversation, of course—that, or the commentary should provide an effective summary on all relevant points. But this is just another example, in my opinion, of the craft-betterment problem above. Plenty of commentators have established personas, styles, and audiences; and are happy to stop doing the work of being in good conversation with the works they're addressing in favor of providing their audiences with more of the persona and style that audience is looking for. Efficiency of presentation. And I do think it's the case that if you're in a position of craft-weakening the "in conversation with another work" part of commentary, you've reached the point of doing it badly.

I would say that the point of commentary (like the point of fanfiction) is to provide an entertainment product in conversation with some other work. Generally, commentary is designed for everyone except the original creative. And here, again, the notion of criticism you suggest doesn't seem to fit in with the rest of the commentary divisions you outline, to me. Rubbernecking, highlight reels, reviews, analysis, and meta-analysis all seem like they're outwardly directed. Criticism, as you've defined it, does not.

That's fine, I have no problem with that—but I think that goes hand in hand with the need to acknowledge that most people providing what could validly be called "criticism" in the public sphere are actually falling into the "analysis" or "meta-analysis" level as you laid it out. And when someone is providing analysis, whether they're good or bad at it, fundamentally that's not directed toward the original creator. That said, I'm exceedingly confident that there are many people around, here and elsewhere, who are in fact creating "public criticism for the author", i.e. criticism blogs that aren't meant to really be analysis and are directed at the author. I'm not quite sure how to categorize those; are they bad analysis? Regardless, anyone doing that seems to be missing the point much like how you argue CinemaSins is missing the point. Saying you're doing analysis and selling yourself on rubbernecking is bad practice. Similarly, saying you're doing criticism and doing anything else (which you basically have to be doing if you're engaging in "public criticism", as I'm understanding this hierarchy) is making a similar bad practice category error.

As for whether there's a place for negative reviews in fandom, I remain on the fence. I grok your point—what's the rationale for calling attention to things you didn't enjoy on the reviewing level when there's essentially no chance your audience will encounter them without you bringing them up? But, again, reviews are fundamentally not meant for the creator—as much as we creators may love to see our work reviewed. And I think there is a place for rubbernecking in fandom, because it's a fundamentally different way of being in conversation with other works. Heck fanfiction.net had to ban MST3K-style fics back in the day, so there's clearly a tremendous fannish impulse towards that sort of thing and it seems a bit pearl-clutchy to declare that [thing fandom members really want to do] is an inappropriate activity for fandom. But is there a place for negative reviews? That I'm less sure about. For sufficiently well known fan works (e.g. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Past Sins, Fallout: Equestria) I think negative reviews clearly still make sense because one can assume that the review audience is conversant with or wants to be conversant with the work. But if no one other than the reviewer is conversant with a work or likely to become so, then it becomes less clear to me that reviewing remains a valid approach. Again, though, "less clear". I don't think this is necessarily an easily settled question, especially since I think sufficiently well known fan works definitely admit negative reviews.

Anyway, tl;dr same as always, I think that commentary is not directed at creators and should not be judged based on how it makes creators feel.

[Georg]

To be really and truely honest, I'm in it for the ego. The first negative comments I got (well, for the first few years) were like little blades of lemoned steel thrust into sensitive nerve endings. It made for good incentive to improve my writing.

[Mini Minrie]

I write because I like to, when i have time and am not distracted, of course. I'm twenty-seven. I've been writing for a long time, long before I entered highschool, and even won an award for an essay i wrote back in fifth grade, however little that matters now. I've been on the internet for a long time, grew up with 4chan, and faced criticism in many facets of my life. You will receive hate, you will be praised, and you will be criticised the moment you put yourself or anything you do out for other people to see. Not all comments will be good, nor will they all be bad or neutral, but they will happen regardless of whether you want them unless you block yourself away from it through disabling such features.

If you put yourself out for others to see and do not protect yourself from the things you don't want, then you better be able to handle what comes with it, especially if you aren't all that great at what you're doing. If you have an ego about yourself or your work, prepare to have it shattered. People are opinionated, have their own ideals, and will generally let you know if you don't align with them.

You have options, especially now, to protect yourself, but you also will then have to worry about the consequences of those. The first will be keeping your work to yourself or among close peers, which won't give you the validation you want. You can disable comments, but then people will think (probably rightly) that you don't want and/or can't handle criticism which leads to other assumptions and turns people away. You can also disable ratings, but most people won't read a story that doesn't have decent or invisible ratings. They're all double edged swords, but also the only way you can protect yourself without solidifying your own thoughts against feedback.

Just my two cents. I'm all for posting what you want as long as you take the measures to protect yourself or can deal with the comments if you don't. If you can't do either, maybe putting your work out there for others isn't the best thing you could be doing.

Edit: Detractors and critics will always be there and it's how you react and use their comments that will shape your success or failure. Even bad criticism or negative reviews can help you improve yourself.

[Shrink Laureate]

It's worth noting that the level of commentary and opinion on Fimfiction is vastly more polite and positive than anything seen out on the open internet. We may have our little dramas sometimes, but they don't even compare to the hatred spouted on an average day on some sites.

It's one of the reasons I'm here, and one of the reasons I write at all. Proper feedback, including honest and substantive criticism, can be useful to an author, but a stream of clueless vitriol doesn't do anybody any good.

[Bradel]

4951067
I am realizing, very belatedly, that I completely misread the "anonymous" part—that you were talking about criticism from anonymous internet strangers, not Writeoff-style criticism where creators are anonymized. (I have no real excuse for making this mistake; your wording on the point was perfectly clear.)

I don't think there's any real reason why someone ought to care what anonymous internet strangers think about anything, unless their opinions seem worthy of merit in their own right. But that's the whole point of anonymized anything, isn't it? That it turns everything meritocratic because one has nothing to judge by but the content itself.

Creatively, though, I'd far rather get feedback from people whose skills and/or opinions I know I respect—which seems in accord with your attitude on the point—because if I'm trying to get feedback, I don't particularly care to have to do the meritocratic calculus on every piece of criticism vs. just hearing from people whom I already know to be able to provide useful feedback.

(So I agree with your position on all three rhetorical questions in that paragraph, I think—and it looks like I just sort of accidentally wrote a mini-blog in your comments section about an unrelated matter... )

[Murcushio]

Not that criticism isn’t useful — it certainly is! — but in people’s belief that the criticism they give is inherently beneficial to creators, disregarding the effect it can have on their mental health or drive to create. This can’t be disregarded as irrelevant, or purely a character failing on the part of creators.

The hilarious, in the "you gotta laugh or you'll cry" sense of the word, is that back on the blog post itself, the very second comment is by a lady who has absolutely nothing substantive to say, but rather spews a bunch of slurs about your worth as a human being and essentially implies you're a malingering liar.

And I mean, wow. Just wow. There are times when it is appropriate to do that. But you didn't write a few thousand words about why the white race is superior, or why AIDS is god's punishment for sodomy. You wrote a post abut the ethics and functionality of criticism, with specific reference to abuse and bullying.

The Internet may not be a series of tubes but some days I think it is composed of pure, 100% uncut irony.

As far as Jerry Holkins goes... Holkins is a hell of a writer. A hell of a writer. But I can't help but feel the whiff of hypocrisy from him on this topic.

An enormous part of the way Tycho and Gabe made their bones in the industry was as people who rip apart others works without mercy, hesitation, or restraint. A tremendous number of their comics are just that, three-panel drive-by shootings of games, books, movies, TV, and the creators of such, and a tremendous number of those comics are accompanied by newsposts which are the equivalent of backing up after the drive-by so you can spit on the corpse.

Fuck, one of their most famous comics was literally just them pointing and laughing at Daikatana. Nothing more, just pointing followed a long, loud jeer.

And both of them have had a lot of trouble backing off, as opposed to doubling down, when its VERY clear they've put their foot in it and have been called on it.

Hypocrisy doesn't necessarily make someone wrong, and Tycho is often clear-headed about the media environment in which he operates. But their credibility on this score is... very thin. They don't have much of a leg to stand on when it comes to the vicious cutting-down of content creators publicly when the seed of their multi-million dollar media empire comes largely out of doing precisely that.

[MrNumbers]

4951506

I think they made huge strides on that post Dickwolf saga - not how they they reacted to the initial criticism, which was Bad, but how they reacted to their reaction.