Fanfiction Feedback Mission Statement
As advertised. I’ll try to be brief.
I’ve read a lot of fanfiction in the past year, chiefly in the Miraculous Ladybug fandom, after only briefly flirting with fiction during high school. But I’ve been remiss in not giving a lot of feedback to authors and creators. Recently, there’s been some pushes from creators and the community to have active fans provide more feedback, as a way to encourage engagement and support, and as a way to promote the creation of more work from authors that may need the encouragement. I feel this movement is very good, and I want to help.
But my reluctance to provide feedback is for none of the frequently given reasons.
If you’re reading this at all, I’m surprised you’re here, but by now you have an idea of my conversational tone. It’s dry. It’s just not obviously congruent with the very warm and welcoming space the fandom has carved out for itself. That disconnect is just spackled over the core of my discomfort:
In short, if I’m not speaking the lingo, I come across as just a critic.
For me, the most sincere compliment I can pay a piece of work is to face it honestly, engage with it, and then talk about my experience with it. But I communicate that experience through the language of literary criticism (or what pieces of it still remain after college), and coupled with my tone, people don’t think I like their work. This is tragic to me, because if I’m putting words on a page, it’s because you’ve evoked a strong positive reaction somehow. If I instead have overwhelmingly negative reactions to your work, I’m not your audience so I just leave. (Also, please believe that I know the difference between constructive criticism, nitpicking, and spite.)
I can do better. I can sound kinder. I can provide more encouragement and reinforcement. I can reflect on what is and isn’t appropriate to comment on, relative to how an author presents themselves in their work and their notes. I can learn to do better, in this particular capacity, and elsewhere in life. But now I’ve written this here, to plead my case.Â
That’s it. Thanks for listening.
I didn’t know how to gracefully connect this dot, but it’s not unrelated so it goes down here: A nontrivial part of my anxiety here is feeling like I don’t belong in the space. Fanfiction has been a historically female medium. The spaces I have gravitated to on Tumblr have seemed primarily female if not primarily genderqueer, bath, and beyond. I’m just a double Pisces hetero male trying not to rock the boat and trying instead to keep the peace.
