i don’t think people really get how little feedback fanfic authors actually get? like the effort to reaction ratio is so abysmally skewed here that a fic nearly 50,000 words long takes an entire year to amass like. 16 comments. someone reblogged a fic i wrote at 4 am and tagged it with a 5-word compliment and i can’t stop thinking about it, not because it was so nice but because half the time you post a fic you’re going to hear nothing and anything feels like so much
fandom culture is so, so good about giving artists the credit they’re due, but we gotta start doing that for writers too. you’ve got no idea how much people put into their stories and get maybe a handful of reblogs and a dozen-odd kudos. that’s not enough. writing is an endurance sport and y’all need to start giving fic writers a reason to endure it and improve their craft. encourage writers like you encourage artists. reblog fics, leave tags, leave comments, acknowledge that these stories do not just spring into being for your entertainment.
every single damn writer i know feels like at least their readers see them as a machine. that’s gotta change.
I always see these kinds of posts and think that fanfic authors specifically don’t understand how little feedback fanartists get xD
And also think, more seriously, that people in both ‘groups’ here see the popular versions of the ‘other side’ and assume it’s standard. Cause what this post describes is the experience of 95% of fanartist and 95% of fanfic authors. The point of ‘give authors more feedback’ is good but the comparison doesn’t work cause you already get the same amount of feedback as the vast majority of fanartists.
There’s something to be said for the engagement time of reading a fic vs looking at art that comparing views is not a very equivalent metric (so 1 view of fic = 20 for art in terms of that etc) and that to the extent you can compare it art takes longer than fic.
People are bad at giving feedback I agree with but I’m not quite buying ‘people are bad at giving feedback to fanfic specifically’ – personally I get more feedback on fic than art tbh (and like my arts better than my fic)
fearlessstateofmind backup 