How do they do in trouble if they're not logged in? They made sure to make their comment as meaningless as possible with a write-in username that was a string of numbers. Really doing a great job to convince me they're not a bot.
yeah, well, maybe ao3 tracks ip addresses. some sites do that. that could get them in trouble. or what if you'd done the same to a logged in user who's comment didn't satisfy you?
And they didn't make it 'meaningless on possible' - you're reading in a lot more malice than I think was intended. For them, they might've been used to a place where it communicated a great deal. This is down to a mismatch where what they thought was a good comment to leave does not line up with what you expect. And that does not mean that either party is WRONG but it does mean that it wasn't someone going 'gee i am going to take time out of my day to write some gibberish, for no reason other than to annoy this guy!' And treating it as such is pretty unfair!
I don't think ao3 tracks IP addresses, and it's pretty unlikely that the person commenting in with a name like 3892743 is going to be harmed by reporting it as spam, especially if it isn't connected to an ao3 account. You do need an email account to comment though, I think? Don't quote me on that.
'cause it is scarily close to what you did do. and it really sounds like you did what you did just 'cause you were mad and wanted to get back at the commenter, not out of a genuine belief that it was actual spam.
Mostly, people in this comment thread already shared, "I have trouble using words to communicate, but I still want to let the author know I read and appreciated their work by doing more than leaving kudos," so this response to a comment that didn't meet some sort of invisible guideline known only to yourself by becoming angry at it and reporting it is, I think, being seen as punishment for a social faux pas that could potentially be directed at us in the future. Noooot a very reassuring thing to post in a forum full of people who already suck at social. We all work hard on our fic and want better feedback. Sometimes getting better feedback requires work on your part. A better response to '!!!!' might have been to reply in a similar fashion ('???') or ask directly for clarification (" '!!!' is a pretty strong reaction, is it good or bad and what part made you respond this way?")
to be excessively real and emotional too early in the morning: I have half-written and deleted far more comments than I have actually posted them, terrified that they were not good enough, and the confirmation that there are actually people who will flip out and hate you over something seemingly innocuous does not make a good environment for feedback
the key is still "didn't do". and with a message as impersonal, vague and signed in a way not indicating any tangible identity, there was no one to get back at, just a "comment that made me have a drawn out anxiety attack for absolutely nothing, made me feel mocked for my effort, and all i want is to not look at this accursed comment anymore". it was literally the only comment i ever got i had any issue with because i could not divine anything from it whatsoever (look, a problem understanding a communication, evil people also have them!) and i had no way of telling if it was a real person or not. and if i can't tell, it's spam to me. anyway, you don't need to shiver in fear and ascribe motivations to me any longer, i deleted my account since then, so everyone is safe from the scary monster.
I get labeling yourself as scary and evil when confronted with other poeple's displeasure is a defense mechanism, but it's a really cheap one that refocuses the conversation away from actual engagement or communication, so could we please not.
For clarification I won't report people for comments that annoy me for not saying more. And the only ones I get snippy at are things like someone whining about incest in my very clearly tagged as incest fic. I can't say my day wouldn't be soured by just !!!!! though. Because it's just not enough. Like it's nice that people liked my thing but I want to actually talk about my thing. I hate the little bubble of no one ever saying shit about things I make. It's honestly why I prefer sharing my poetry among certain friends over other works because they say things. It's usually not a big drawn out thing and it doesn't have to be, but at least people say what they felt. I do really like long drawn out things though. It is my preferred thing. I know it's no one's job to do that for me, but I'm still just fucking depressed at the sheer lack of anything.
I'd rather have !!!!! than nothing, but I'd rather have "*quoted line* This line [really hit home]/[was really funny]/[gave me feels]" than that, and a more detailed "this is why I liked reading this/this made me think about [X]" than that.
yeah, we can, because i'm done having a conversation about this. everyone is taking offense at one incident they weren't involved in and that will not happen again and reading frustration not directed at them as directed at them, and not to mention basing arguments on things that didn't happen - and we also clearly have different definitions of spam. on forums i grew up hanging around, even one word messages would be considered spamming and if it they were reported as such, and no one found that cruel. some people let it go, some didn't if they were all about keeping their threads clean, but no one wanted to ruin someone's life over it. it didn't really occur to me to check ao3 rules for specific definiton of spam since the wide one was so ingrained in my head. it's also my understanding that kudos are for people who don't know what to say, and i treasured every single one. i'd rather have a kudo or nothing than obsessing over what awful things someone just said on my fic for half a day and then realize this? i drove myself sick over this? i don't want to look at this anymore oh god. i don't even know what this says! why would someone do this! and this may sound very flimsy but i didn't realize i could delete it another way. i literally didn't. yeah, that sounds stupid, huh? that one might've been handled better. i offer genuine apologies to anyone this story of my impulsive behavior that one time offended, since that was the furthest from my intention, but i'm going to stand by not knowing what a bunch of exclamation points from someone i'm not sure is a person means. though i will admit that while it fit the definition of spam i was taught, it might've not fit the one in the specific setting. in technical terms. and i'm not some demanding judgy demon, i just want to know if you mean a good or bad thing. i would have tears in my eyes from a simple "nice". leave a plus sign, anything! and damn, getting a quoted line from my fic was the height of my dreams. even if it was just the quote and the exclamation marks, that'd mean something...
as long as I'm not interrupting: the way suicide is handled in fan fiction 90% of the time is really not cool gang
Holy fucking shit this. Another related thing, I hate most mental hospital AUs. With a severe passion. Brainbent's the only one that I found to be accurate in any fashion. I love when people comment on my form. Like even if they aren't positive about it I still love knowing that people sat down and thought about it and then told me something like "Holy fucking shit Aondeug why do you keep repeating this exact sentence fucking verbatim". Form is probably the most important thing about writing to me besides tone and the thing I put the most work into. So hearing people point out aspects of how they are analyzing my form with things like "hard to follow and dream like" means a lot to me. Admittedly these are some of the hardest comments to actually manage unless you are crazy like me and spend your life obsessing over the form of writing all day. But you'd be amazed at just how much you as a reader actually know about form and how much you can say about it without formal training.
I was talking about this in the young justice discord the other day but there's like, this huge subgenre of fanfiction I like to call Bad Things Happening, where the point of the story is to hurt a character as much as possible. A sizable amount of these also involve shipping, where half the pairing has the Bad Thing happen and the other half feels bad for them and they get together so the sad person can be healed and comforted which...that's not how it fucking works and is actually heinously unhealthy i have experience So many times suicide is just a stock Sad Bad Thing. (Abuse and rape, especially rape, also get this heavily, but I've got no experience there myself so I'll keep my foot out of that mess.) And so many times it's like - it seems like they go out of their way to pick a character that is the least likely to do something like that based on canon? Like sometimes it's justified with some romanticized bullshit about how "sometimes the happiest people are the saddest inside," but it doesn't work like that? Suicide is an incredibly extreme reaction and most people, even people with anxiety and depression (and those are the favorites in fanfiction, never anything else, except for really poorly portrayed PTSD) will never experience suicidal ideation, their entire lives! (Hard to believe when you've been thinking about killing yourself since age 10 or so, but that's what they tell me) There are pretty much never not signs, people don't just up and kill themselves for no reason. Sometimes it's like the author picked characters out of a hat - "YOU get suicidal depression, and YOU get PTSD, and YOU get to be the one who's violently homophobic for no adequately explained reason except cheap drama." On that tack, the characters involved in this type of thing are nearly always male, since if there's one thing fandom loves it's pretty men and their pretty, pretty pain. I don't think there's a problem with that in and of itself, but I do take issue with the fact that the majority of pairings in this genre are m/m - I don't think it's really okay to have gay relationships all be based in pain and suffering, if only because it's so poorly done. (Don't start a relationship with a person fresh off a suicide attempt like...what the actual fuck is wrong with you? It will just be a fucking universe of heartbreak for both of you. You cannot cure suicidal depression with the power of love. This has been a PSA.) It would be okay if it was showing how such a painful thing affects an already-established relationship...actually, I don't think I've ever seen that, I don't know if it exists? The characters always just get together because of the Bad Thing. Oh yeah and like I said above, fucking bonus points if internalized homophobia or homophobic bullying was the impetus for the attempt in the first place. Double if there's no canon reason for this to exist. Triple if, as above, a character is turned into a homophobic asshole for the sake of the plot, and quadruple if it's explicitly character-bashing. If you're going to write an issue that actually affects a lot of people, have a modicum of respect and decorum and don't write stupid melodrama. Actually, that goes for everything in this post. (also unrealistic psych hospitals, as Aon said, unrealistic recovery, pilling on the cheap drama around this to "raise the stakes", eeeeeeeevil psychologists and eeeeeeeeevil medication, or worse, no care at all and the character inexplicably is released to the care of their lover alone, and the person being magically okay after this and cured forever. ugh) Spoiler: personal and maybe triggering even in stuff that's realistic, things get left out that I think, at the risk of sounding gatekeeping, you can't know about unless you've been there. Like, it is really, really hard to kill yourself, on both a physical and a mental level. no matter how much your mind wants to die, your body wants to live. The moment when I realized what I'd just done...I don't think I've ever been so terrified before or since. Having gone right up to the edge, been on death's doorstep, lifted the damn latch, only survived because of medical care tantamount to a miracle...yeah, I lived that drama, and it was shitty and horrible for everyone involved. It's a really complicated set of emotions that I don't expect anyone to fully understand unless they've been there. And...I don't want to speak for anyone since maybe not everyone had that moment, but if you want to write a realistic suicide, if your character has even a moment to think about what they've done to or are about to do to themselves...I'd like to see that moment of blind, animal, terror. which is what saved my life in the end.
Honest question: so where does 'knowing all of this is unrealistic and would never work in real life but really enjoying it anyway and liking to write it because it soothes your anxious mess of a soul' fit in? I genuinely want to know, because that's where I stand; I am perfectly well aware of the sheer levels of ridiculous unhealthiness a lot of my favourite tropes would fall into if they played out in the real world, but that doesn't stop me from enjoying them in fic and stories because I desperately need reassurance that Everything Will Turn Out All Right a lot of the time, and it's nice to imagine for once that it might.
actually...I know how I made it sound, but I have really similar feelings. The reason I was able to talk about those tropes at such length is because I keep deliberately seeking out these kinds of stories. Because...I like reading it. I want stories that hurt enough to feel real but are still soft and safe enough to make me feel alright in the end. I want so badly to believe that the power of love or friendship or positive thinking or a mental health system that actually works can save someone. I like the fact that stories end and that it's not like life where you deal with it long after you're out of the hospital, into months and years in the future. The problem I have is that a lot of the stuff I turn up is just so egregiously unrealistic and bad that I can't get the emotional release from it. It doesn't help that most of the stuff I find is just so poorly written that it being unrealistic is a secondary consideration. But like even with well-written stuff...I think I have a particularly low tolerance for what I consider "unrealistic" for stories about mental illness and suicide, because it's something that's kind of terribly close. The uh, interplay of romance and suicide is something that makes me desperately uncomfortable for my own reasons, and I can more than understand how someone would really love and want to read about that trope. Pain and love are twined together, and everyone wants to be saved, and it more than makes sense that people want to write and read those stories, even if they would be pretty painful and not fun in real life. I'm not trying to say that all these stories have to be perfectly realistic, unflinching portrayals of suicide, and I'm sorry if I came off that way. (There have been memoirs and such that I've read that made my skin crawl because they were too, too realistic with the sense of...hopelessness, even after you survive. Anyway.) I like unrealistic tropes and getting to feel like things will be alright too. I just wish more authors were less callously shitty (and I'm gonna come out and say it) ableist when writing about suicide.
