Critique banned on AO3

[igenlode]

I'm guessing this explains a lot...
https://paganinpurple.tumblr.com/post/710083135096913920/ao3-etiquette-updated

It would seem a whole new kind of AO3 reader/writer is emerging and it is becoming clear not everyone quite understands how the website community works. Here is some basic guidance on how most people expect you to go about using AO3 to keep this a fun community archive that funtions correctly:

• No critisism unless the author has specifically asked or agreed to hear it (so use your notes to say if you want some constructive feedback). Even constructive critisism is a no-no unless an author note tells you it’s okay. No, posting it online is not an open invitation for that. Many people write as a fun hobby or a way to cope with, among other things, insecurity and just want to share. Don’t ruin that for them. I’ve seen so many authors just stop writing coz they can’t handle the negative emotions the critism brings, and it’s only meant to be a fun thing shared for free (pointing out tagging errors is not included in this).

Comments

[pedanther]

Back when I first started posting fanfic online, the only way to do it was by sharing with small groups of like-minded individuals where generally everybody knew each other at least a bit and there was an understanding about what we were all there for. Posting a fic was like passing it around to a group of friends and asking what they thought, and we generally didn't mind if the response was critical because it was being offered among friends in an understood spirit.

I don't comment on fics the same way on AO3, because AO3 isn't like that. Posting a fic on AO3 is more like standing up to deliver the story in front of an auditorium full of strangers. I don't offer criticism in AO3 comments even if the author is someone I know well, because the auditorium full of strangers is an audience to the comments as well as the fic. (If I know them well enough to have a less public way to contact them, I might say something to them that way.)

I absolutely would not, under any circumstance, consider it appropriate to go up to a complete stranger and tell them in front of the entire internet what I thought was wrong with their fic.

[igenlode]

Back when I started in fanfic, it was being produced by the writers for the benefit of the (non-writing majority of) readers, not by writers to exchange amongst themselves; in practical terms the economics of print zines would have pretty much made that impossible. And the writers weren't in any sense 'friends' of the readers -- they were names on the bottom of a typed page that might in some cases recur often enough to become recognisable, and you bought zines on the basis of reviews or because you trusted the editorial policy of that particular zine.

In order to get published *at all* you had to write at a sufficiently high standard to pass whatever the editor's criteria were, because no-one could afford to lose money putting out a zine full of bad grammar and plot holes -- and there were amazingly few typoes given that the submissions literally had to be typed to fit by the editor with little or no ability to make corrections! In the course of submitting stories for publication I was required to completely rewrite the start of my first story (it needed it; the revised version was much better), to resubmit another story with changes to make it compliant with known canonical fact (I had made a couple of unintentional howlers), to alter the actions of one character in accordance with the editor's opinion that said character was likely to take responsibility directly rather than potentially get someone else into trouble (she was right, and as a bonus the pacing of the scene was improved), and a different zine would only accept my final story if I agreed to omit the end of the last scene altogether and stop at a more dramatically effective point... that one I did argue about, but if the editor didn't agree then the zine would eventually come out with someone else's story in that space instead. Submissions were very definitely not treated as the authors sharing their inner selves in a 'safe' environment -- they were treated as serious literary aspirations.

When I was first posting fics online you didn't get any feedback *at all*, unless the reader felt so impressed or frustrated by some aspect of your story that he was moved to email you directly via your website contact details, which happened with vanishing rarity; people located fanfiction online via keyword Web search, and success consisted of getting onto a popular recommendations list for that fandom, where the compiler might provide a sentence or two to explain why this story was being recommended. (Something which you would generally only discover via your own searches online!)

The first fandom archive I encountered was set up on the zine model: they didn't publish *anything* that had not first been through a rigorous beta-reading and editing process. There were limited submission days, and any new author was assigned an official beta-reader whose job it was to get them to fix any chapter before it could be uploaded. (If you demonstrated consistent high quality over multiple chapters you could get a free pass to upload without revision... but you were quite likely to find yourself recruited to serve as an official beta-reader in order to increase throughput!)

The next archive I encountered, a few years later, was fanfiction.net, which required (and still actively requires) writers to sign up to a set of rules that pledge them to respect the reviewers ("If someone rightfully criticizes a portion of the writing, take it as a compliment that the reviewer has opted to spend his/her valuable time to help improve your writing") and actively encourage members to critique one another ("Respect your fellow members and lend a helping a hand when they need it. Like many things, the path to becoming a better writer is often a two way street")... not merely in order to *join* the site, but every single time they wanted to upload a new fic. The whole ethos was that you were supposed to provide (and get) free spell-checking, grammar suggestions and other canon services via the review section, as opposed to just "upload more plz". And at least in my experience you were pretty much invariably commenting on strangers, not on people you already knew via your social media circle (social media not really being a thing in those days -- I was on dial-up!)

There was definitely not a culture of 'critique is banned because authors might be insecure'; yes, posting it online *was* an explicit invitation for people to point out errors. (Someone reviewed one of my old stories pointing out that I'd accidentally got a character's name wrong about ten chapters in; I wasn't furious with her for telling me, I was dumbfounded by all the other people who had apparently failed either to notice or to tell me about it during the several *years* that chapter had by that point been online, never mind the fact that I'd managed to miss it myself in multiple proofreadings!)

This era of fanfiction also included active 'sporking' communities of stories that fans considered to be particularly awful -- certainly not a subculture of identity exploration, "safe spaces" and "author as part of community discourse", as was claimed as part of a very similar attempt to shut down supposedly unsanctioned (i.e. that can't be curated by the author) discussion of fanfiction on Goodreads a few years back.
The "no critisism unless the author has specially agreed to hear it" movement gets perceived outside Tumblr culture as fanfiction writers not only appropriating other people's original creations (and using them for porn, which is the general image of fanfic...) but then, bewilderingly, claiming immunities that are not accorded even to those original creators, who not only don't get to control reader opinion on their works but get a lot of flak if they are caught trying. Views from outside the walled garden: "this makes me and other readers feel slighted/not good enough because we aren't in the clique" and "You may request how fans should interact in your fandom but you do not get to dictate" :-(

Trying to define fanfiction as a super-special form of fiction that is created for the writer and not for the reader (who, let us remember, has to slog through all those *Character PoV* headers, mis-formatted dialogue, epithets used endlessly in place of character names, and all the other ills perpetrated in the name of fan-fiction largely because people are imitating what they see online) doesn't really do anybody any favours. Personally, I wouldn't bother to leave critique on a story that wasn't at least reasonably promising, because there isn't a lot of point; the cases that are going to end up missing out are the writers like I was, who have talent but could be so much better...