A Star-Forged Ruby

6.-thoughts on critique

6. thoughts on critique

It…depends? 

I think critique can be separated into two categories: critique of what I’m doing and critique of how well I’m doing it. And both of these can be done well or poorly. 

For instance, if someone comes to (say) A Hostile Work Environment and criticizes it for not addressing Bucky’s experience of violence and abuse at HYDRA’s hands…well, yeah. It doesn’t. That’s not what the fic is about. I mean, it features peripherally, but that was a conscious decision that I made when I was writing and it’s sufficiently integral to what I was trying to do with that fic (oh, who am I even kidding, “what I was trying to do” = get you hard and/or wet, did it work?) that criticizing it is basically saying “you should have written an entirely different fic.”

On the other hand, I’ve written stuff that had really deeply fucked up consent issues going on that I didn’t recognize when I wrote it, and having people point that out to me was incredibly helpful both in terms of making me a more conscientious and careful writer (and person generally) and in making the rest of the fic a lot better in those regards.

So when it comes to what I’m doing, critique about things I’ve done on purpose is not particularly useful to me (okay, it wasn’t your cup of tea, that’s fine) but critique about things I’ve done by accident is very helpful. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which is which, and how you phrase your critique – and your relationship with the person you’re critiquing, whether you’re friends or if they even know who you are – matters enormously in how it’s received. 

Now, in terms of how well I’m doing it, kind critique is always welcome but it isn’t always helpful.

I’m thinking of a particular piece of criticism I never gave because I didn’t think it would be helpful. It’s for a fic in an old fandom I’m no longer interested in, so I’ll be kind of vague, but: a lot of the action of the fic revolved around the main pairing having really really awful sex in their arranged marriage. Like, monstrously painful. And Poor Suffering Woobie A not complaining, and Kind Of Oblivious Woobie B not figuring out that something is wrong and falling in love anyway, and it’s this whole thing. (They get it together eventually.) So towards the end, the awful sex is revealed to have been due to Designated Villain, who gave Woobie B some terrible sex tips before their wedding night!

I’m like 84% sure this was intended to absolve Woobie B of the responsibility for the awful traumatizing painful sex – it wasn’t his fault! he was mislead! – but it really didn’t. It would have absolved him for the first time, maybe. But every time after that, when it was clear that Woobie A was miserable, he could easily have figured out that something was wrong. So it didn’t make it any better that he had been doing this all along, and Designated Villain had already done plenty to prove that he was Super Evil, and it just felt a little bit wrong. But it wasn’t a big deal, and it was a plot point that I didn’t think the writer was going to go back and change, and I didn’t know the writer at all, and it didn’t seem like it was going to impact stuff going forward, so I didn’t say anything.

So, critique of how well I’m doing it is helpful when it concerns things I might change going forward. Telling me what works for you, or doesn’t, in how I’m writing my 4F stuff is really, really useful. On the other hand, I’m probably never going to revisit the characterizations of Steve and Bucky I used in Secondary Function so critiquing that is less relevant to me (but still interesting, because I have my own critique of it and I’m curious how it compares!). 

So, um, that’s a lot of words, but basically as long as your critique isn’t “I wish you had written something different than the thing you intentionally chose to write” I think it’s great, and if you can’t tell if it was intentional you can say that too. 

Make me say nice things about myself.