Musing: general - Concrit

[wilderthan]

I'm notoriously bad at getting concrit, and I'm not much better at giving it. I don't like to hurt people's feelings, and I don't trust my own opinions. When I do give concrit, I tend to point out any spelling/grammar errors and typos, and to pick out a few phrases that I really liked, or a little element that I loved

Comments

[heyheyrenay]

Is it fair to say that I think so many people might be bad at critical feedback in fandom because interpretation is just so subjective? I mean, original work, people have to take just the work, with anything derivative just by writing you're invoking a reader's memory and emotions about a source that you're interpreting just like they did. And sometimes people don't see "this didn't scan for ME", they just see, "Your interpretation is wrong."

Admittedly, some people are bad at making it so it's subjective, but I'm starting to think the fault is just with totally subjective things like canon. What is canon, anyway. Because the answer is different for everyone, I think there's a difference.

I like your solution, though, I might steal that. I guess for me it ends up being harder because most of the things that ping me out of stories have to do with bad fanon, which you can't convince people is bad if they think it's good, and flow, which is actually the number one thing that makes characterization not work for me! Which is retarded, I guess.

Fandom is a dangerous place, you could say!

[wilderthan]

I think that's fair to say, yeah. That's another thing about the whole taking it out of the teacher-student environment I didn't actually think of -- the stuff I present to them is obviously original and even if it was fanfic they wouldn't know the characters (unless it was one of them and Firefly, but that's because I bought him the boxset). I mean, fans vary wildly as to whether they even agree on something as simple as, I don't know, the eye colour of a certain character. Which adds more difficulty to concrit in a fandom situation, like you say, because people think there's room for your interpretation is wrong.

And that's true, too. Like, some people probably think it's canon that Nooj actually loves Leblanc, while others definitely think um, no, not really. Just to think of a random example.

I dunno, if you can say "this is just me, but...", then I think that covers your ass. I mean, some people love original work for reasons that make no sense to me, and I hate said work for reasons that make no sense to them. (Not Harry Potter. I have many reasons for that. But other things.) People need to realise that one person's opinion =/= all people's opinion, and if you say "it might be just me, but..." then you'd've done your part to making sure that's clear, y'know?

(That's... general you, mostly in that last paragraph. And just one way to go about it. I'm sure there are others.)