(((Digimon Is Forever)))

i don’t like to rant here but i need to get this off my chest: short fics are NOT low effort. i cannot stress this enough. you can have your reading preferences, we all have them, but dismissing thousands and thousands of stories because the word count somehow correlates to effort and/or quality really grinds my gears. again, personal preference is fine, but explicitly saying low word count ‘screams low effort’ is dismissive at best, and just plain snobby at worst 

packing a punch in 3k or 2k or 1k or 100 words is not easy. it is a skill, it takes effort, it takes practise, it is not easy

(also, like, so what if you don’t put some arbitrary amount of effort defined by some random stranger into your art? effort doesn’t necessarily equate to quality, and quality is subjective, anyway)

i don’t mean to shame anyone who doesn’t want to read short fics (that’s totally fine), nor anyone who can only write long fics (again totally fine)—different strokes for different folks and all that—i’m just very tired of the attitude i keep seeing where word count is equated to quality and effort

i should add that i’ve not encountered this attitude from anyone here, but i’ve seen it increasingly elsewhere, and i’m frustrated, and also very sorry for ranting

(i think i might go through my downloaded fics and make a rec list (or several) of all the AMAZING shorter fics i’ve read and loved sometime over the next couple of weeks, just to do something positive with this frustration)

If you're mentally ill, chronically ill or otherwise disabled, do yourself a favor and consciously work to dismantle the "if you're too sick to go to work you're also too sick to be on the computer" mindset which got drilled into most of us during childhood. You don't have to deny yourself joy. You don't have to directly or indirectly punish yourself for not being able to do certain things. It doesn't help anyone. All it does is make you even more miserable than you have to be. So make sure you don't punish yourself for being sick. Make sure you don't subconsciously sabotage yourself with the idea that you have to be punished for not being abled. Make sure you embrace the joy you can find instead of denying yourself out of unnecessary guilt.

Autistic people with stereotypically nerdy interests are amazing, wonderful human beings who deserve all the love and respect in the world 💜