fanfiction

[jdphoenix]

There's a twitter discussion going on right now about favoriting versus reviewing stories and since 140 characters isn't nearly enough for me I'm posting my full-blown thoughts here.

Comments

Reviews

[ffsuburbs]

This is probably not the comment you were expecting, but I went to post what I had written and saw that you had already put something up about the discussion. So here are my thoughts

Re: Reviews

[cherryblosomjen]

Your reply really touched my heart, Kendra. I think it took a lot of courage to come out and voice your feelings. But real friends tell each other the truth, even when it hurts. And you know what? You're right

Re: Reviews

[jdphoenix]

I love this comment, it's everything that needed to be said on the subject.

I only disagree with you on one point: this has been going on much longer than a week. Every month or so someone will bring up favoriting. The frequency (and attitude) with which it is done make it clear that the problem does not lie with the favoriter, but the authors. (How many times has someone said favorite alert can be turned off and been ignored?)

When we discuss this with each other people begin feeding on one another's bad feelings and anyone who tries to be reasonable and take a step back gets pushed aside in the hubbub.

That being said, I don't think there's anything you could have done. I think overall yes, one or two people might have realized they were getting out of line but those weren't the people who would have done anything public. But anyone who was going to say or do anything was always going to. (It's like anti-drug programs. The kids who listen are the kids who wouldn't have done drugs anyway.)

[cherryblosomjen]

Personally, I just think of it as a compliment when someone favorites. It kind of gives me a feel for which of my stories are still being read and which ones have pretty much died off (in terms of interest; my lack of updates kill my stories in a whole separate way ^_

[jdphoenix]

Sometimes that stops me from either reviewing or favoriting, which is kind of a shame.

Thank you! I should have said that too. There are a lot of stories I love (from PHM people mostly because I know how we get) that I will never see again because I didn't have a review (and people would be just as mad if all I said was "great story") and I know that if I favorite without reviewing there's a chance someone will get mad.

And you didn't lose me at the end. It brought me back to one of the reasons all of this really bugs me: we're writers. If everyone else could do it, we wouldn't be awesome. We shouldn't expect readers to write, it's not in their job description.