Wolf of the Woods

this genuinely makes me so mad. some of you really don’t deserve fanfics. at all.

comment like this, besides the ai witch hunt, is one of the reasons why fanfic writers don’t want to post their fics anymore.

we write for free. whenever we can. whenever we have time. whenever we’re not too exhausted by life and responsibilities. we write for our own enjoyment. as a hobby. not a job. we update whenever we can. whenever we want. we do not owe anybody anything.

one of my favorite fics was updated after literal 13 years. but the point is that fanfic writers do not owe you anything. whether a fic was abandoned forever or updated after a decade or two is not something you as a stranger has a say in.

stop being entitled. stop treating fanfic writer as a content farm or a machine that produces contents for your enjoyment.

Yes, this person is just disappointed. Their disappointment is not, by itself, entitled. It's about the context. Saying "it's been 3 years..." to the author, in the context of an ongoing query about whether there will be more, with (again, i cannot stress this enough) zero mention of the fic they've already read, says two things. Some readers think one of those things is an unspoken expression of enjoyment (because if they didn't enjoy it, why would they ask?) but they're incorrect. What is actually says is (1) "the work you've put into this isn't enough for me to comment on," and (2) "I hoped you'd give me better news and I hoped you would write faster than this."

I hope you're able to see the entitlement in that framing. For what it's worth, I'm sure this commenter didn't MEAN to sound entitled. I'm sure they didn't mean to be rude! As far as "more plz?" comments go, this is on the tame end of the spectrum. But again, the problem is not the disappointment. The problem is how they're expressing it and who they're expressing it to.

For many creators, it’s stressful when you promise to update something and then fail to do so. It can get to the point that thinking about the project becomes anxiety-inducing, only exacerbating the issue. In which case, a pointed comment like this one is not helpful.

like. imagine you are grace. you have a life you enjoy where you get to teach kids you’re fond of about a subject you love. you’ve been hanging out with your friend marissa weekly for years (!) and you have a lot of peers on project hail mary who you respect and even have fun with. but! you’re also like 40, and you know how the world works - at the end of the day, at the end of the project, all of those people will go back to their parents and families and partners. the people whose names are on their emergency contact forms and birth certificates and marriage licenses and apartment leases. no matter how much you care about them, and no matter how much they care about you, there is always someone else in their life who is Above you, and Before you, because That’s How The World Works.

so like… yeah. lmao. aroace grace not opening himself up all the way because he anticipates pain and wants to avoid that is a kind of protective hedging that i find very likely for him to engage in? even if he opens himself up to the people around him, the fact is that most of those people will only reciprocate to whatever degree they/society deem acceptable for friendship, even if they like him a lot.

Of course, it is still incorrect, so how about I fix the error!

"There's a gimmick blog right behind me…"

Should be:

someone five minutes ago without time stamps on, a dream in their hand, and a goal in their heart:

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.