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[igenlode]

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From 25/02/2022 to 26/02/2022
       The Writing on the Wall  Hits:  +0  Kudos:  +1  Bookmarks: +0
           High City on a Hill  Hits: +17  Kudos:  +1  Bookmarks: +0
            A Child of the Law  Hits:  +0  Kudos:  +0  Bookmarks: +1
          The Sons of Éléonore  Hits:  +3  Kudos:  +1  Bookmarks: +0
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Apparently AO3 has the same 'issue' as FFnet in that it's possible for someone to bookmark/favourite a story without actually registering any page hits on it (which is a slight pain from my point of view, because it means that I can't simplify my stat-checking script to only output data where the number of page views has increased, but have to do an IF...AND...AND...AND. But I did strongly suspect it as a possibility, which is why I put the triple check in to start off with.)

I've noticed that my own visits to AO3 pages never show up either on my own story statistics (which could just be clever detection of the IP address) or on anyone else's, so I'm guessing that they are using some kind of JS-based page view detection, and that whenever somebody views a page with JavaScript disabled then it doesn't register on the system. But a favourite or bookmark involves manual interaction on that user's part, so shows up as a 'ghost' visit :-p

And they like Hertha as a character in her own right! I was afraid they wouldn't like this chapter at all because it was effectively all OC backstory (and an OC with some fairly 19th-century views at that, rather than the standard modern teenager dressed up...)

Comments

[watervole]

I'm so glad they like her!

I think it's really important to have characters who are right for the historical period.

[igenlode]

You do inevitably start to identify quite personally with a character after spending a year or more inside her head, so it's a bit nerve-wracking to put the story out there and realise that other people may in fact not share your feelings about her. And to remember that this doesn't necessarily mean that they are judging you, the author -- although, to be honest, unless you were consciously trying to write a villain character (and generally speaking even if you were, since the aim is to show the villain as someone who makes sense from their own point of view, e.g. writing Lucille from "Crimson Peak"...) if readers have a hostile reaction to your protagonist it probably does mean that you failed :-(

But the 'Phantom' fandom does have a long history of people writing self-insert and/or fix-it OFCs whom nobody but the author is particularly invested in, and most of them do tend to get passed over by the readers on principle. So having people actively pick out your OFC protagonist as the element that they liked about the story is a tremendous relief (and compliment!)

Ironically Jos Perlman of "The Daaé Case" actually was a lot closer to being an inadvertent self-insert...