Quoth the Raven

don’t comment “when” or “will there be a next chapter” or “will you continue this?” quite frankly, these type of comments can sound like you’re demanding from your favorite writer, even if it may not be your intention.

if you’d love a sequel or are wondering when or if the fic will be updated, try something like “I love this so much!” *bonus if you explain why you love the fic or what you love about it* and then add something along the line of “if there’s a part 2 of this, I would be so excited / would absolutely love to read it!”

the trick is to avoid a blunt question like “will there be a part 2?” or “it’s been so long. when will you update?” etc.

honestly, DON’T ever comment something like “it’s been ___ months, ___ years” or “I don’t think the author will continue this lol” that’s one of the most effective ways to make sure your favorite author doesn’t come back to your favorite fic, and it’s just so… dishearteningly rude.

it doesn’t matter if it’s been months or years since the author’s last update, demanding and rushing them will most likely NOT give you the result you want.

reminder that fanfic authors are humans with lives and jobs outside of writing fanfiction, especially when fanfic is something they do in their free time out of love and passion, and you — the reader — get to read their works for free.

rushing and demanding will only make it sound like ‘a task that needs to get done’ for your favorite author, and it sucks out the joy of writing out of love and passion. it can be so discouraging for the authors.

fanfic authors don’t owe you anything.

even if they completely abandon the fic, it still doesn’t give you the right to be rude to them or to ask why they stopped writing or to coerce them into giving you what you want.

I can never say this enough; fanfic authors write in their free time, FOR FREE, out of love and passion. and you get to read their works FOR FREE because they’re kind enough to share their love for their comfort characters with you.

they don’t owe you anything.

it’s okay if you’re wondering when or if they’ll post something new, but it’s not okay to rush or demand from them.

comments are mostly what motivate authors into writing faster, so if you want your favorite authors to post more, comment about what you love about their works, express your gratitude to them for giving you these amazing fics for free, but don’t be an entitled reader by rushing or directly asking when they’ll update.

The usual abuse narrative you see in fandom is a story about absence.  The lack of safety.  The lack of freedom.  The lack of love, or of hope, or of trust.  They try to characterize the life of an abused kid, or an abused partner, based on what’s missing.  They characterize recovery based on getting things back: finding safety, discovering freedom, and slowly regaining the ability to trust–other people, the security of the world, themselves.

That doesn’t work.  That is not how it works.

Lives cannot be characterized by negative space.  This is a statement about writing.  It’s also a statement about life.

You can’t write about somebody by describing what isn’t there.  Or you can, but you’ll get a strange, inverted, abstracted picture of a life, with none of the right detail.  A silhouette.  The gaps are real but they're not the point.

If you’re writing a story, you need to make it about the things that are there.  Don’t try to tell me about the absence of safety.  Safety is relative.  There are moments of more or less safety all throughout your character’s day.  Absolute safety doesn’t exist in anyone’s life, abusive situation or not.

If you are trying to tell me a story about not feeling safe, then the question you need to be thinking about is, when safety is gone, what grows in the space it left behind?

Don’t try to tell me a story about a life characterized by the lack of safety.  Tell me a story about a life defined by the presence of fear.

What's there in somebody’s life when their safety, their freedom, their hope and trust are all gone?  It’s not just gaps waiting to be filled when everything comes out right in the end.  It’s not just a void.

The absence of safety is the presence of fear.  The absence of freedom is the presence of rules, the constant litany of must do this and don’t do that and a very very complicated kind of math beneath every single decision.  The lack of love feels like self-loathing.  The lack of trust translates as learning skills and strategies and skepticism, how to get what you need because you can’t be sure it’ll be there otherwise.

You don’t draw the lack of hope by telling me how your character rarely dares to dream about having better.  You draw it by telling me all the ways your character is up to their neck in what it takes to survive this life, this now, by telling me all the plans they do have and never once in any of them mentioning the idea of getting out.

This is of major importance when it comes to aftermath stories, too.  Your character isn’t a hollow shell to be filled with trust and affection and security.  Your character is full.  They are brimming over with coping mechanisms and certainties about the world.  They are packed with strategies and quickfire risk-reward assessments, and depending on the person it may look more calculated or more instinctual, but it’s there.  It’s always there.  You’re not filling holes or teaching your teenage/adult character basic facts of life like they’re a child.  You’re taking a human being out of one culture and trying to immerse them in another. People who are abused make choices.  In a world where the ‘wrong’ choice means pain and injury, they make a damn career out of figuring out and trying to make the right choice, again and again and again.  People who are abused have a framework for the world, they are not utterly baffled by everyone else, they make assumptions and fit observations together in a way that corresponds with the world they know.

They’re not little lost children.  They’re not empty.  They’re human beings trying to live in a way that’s as natural for them as life is for anybody, and if you’re going to write abuse/recovery, you need to know that in your bones.

Write one to ten pages (I usually do 5 for major character, 1 or 2 for side characters) as your character. Anything they would say, opinions, diary entries, complaining, etc.

Ooooh I have collected some helpful things to maybe include:

adopting slang from people they are close too/love interest

do they have a raspy voice? High pitched? Overly sweet? Commanding? Figure that out.

to make characters have their own voice vary rhythm, word choice, use of profanity, how much they talk about themselves or others, their politics.

Take some dialogue and ask if readers would be able to tell who is speaking with no context.

Write an AITA post from their point of view.

Identify what role your character has, a leader? a follower? a disrupter? a rebel? an antagonist? a peacemaker? How does that change the way they speak?

bikes are quiet- if the zombies react to loud noises, they won’t hear you on a bike the way they might hear you in a car. bikes don’t need gas, meaning you won’t be stranded if you run out. bikes are much, much easier to maintain than a car- there’s no computer that can short out, no fiddly engine bits that could kill you if you mess with them wrong. you can learn how to maintain a bike with a couple weeks’ worth of classes. almost every adult knows how to ride a bike, and without cars on the road, it’d be much safer to do. 

what i’m saying is

Fandom Problem #15,206:

I have kind of a hypothesis that a lot of fandom problems re: media literacy come from the fact that many fans don't approach new media on its own terms, but rather as a blank slate for Blorbo projection. They don't view the characters as new unique characters, they just view them as placeholders for their favorite Blorbos, and judge the characters for how well they serve as an analog to their Blorbo. And when they fail to be a 1-to-1 recreation of their favorite Blorbo and are instead a completely different character, they declare it bad writing.