Tag: long post

It’s All A Fucking Joke, Right

autumndiesirae:

homoelitism:

lunarsolareclipse:

lavabendingthot:

hirasawaschoiceass:

lavabendingthot:

satansbra:

millenniumfae:

In the few months I’ve been modding at fuckyeahasexual and touring ace Tumblr, there’s been a very. Steady. Stream of info that detail horrifically abusive situations and overall poor mental unhealth. Two a week in the inbox if I’m lucky, usually around seven-ten.

And there’s been so many, I can officially categorize all 500+ of these kinds of asks and submissions into an extensive bulletlist of Why Asexual Exclusionary Radicalism Is Incredibly Toxic And Shitty;

Coming Out To Family, Friends, And Employers

  • “My parents keep telling me that I’m something else, and it’s making me doubt my sense of judgement, not just about my sexual identity, but also about everything in general.”
  • “My family, friends, and co-workers keep referring to me as an inanimate object in a manner that’s clearly meant to humiliate and devastate me. Nothing I say will get them to stop.”
  • “My parents vocally/bodily forced me to undergo medical examinations, some of them concerning my sexual organs, many of them concerning blood tests and other trauma-centric procedures.”
  • “My family is intervening with my private life by changing my schedule to include exercise, socialization, friend influences, and whatever they think can ‘change’ me.”
  • “My friends/co-workers no longer respect my bodily boundaries when I came out to them, because they no longer see me as someone who should be respected. They regularly touch, fondle, grope, and prod me without permission, and/or verbally harass me, and don’t take my objections seriously.”
  • “My family, friends, and co-workers no longer just harass me, but also anyone I’m currently dating because they view my significant other as pathetic, underserved, or even being abused.”

First Few Days Of Dating

  • “My date got irrationally angry and confrontational when I came out to them, in a manner that made me fearful.” (SO many of these.)
  • “My date immediately lost any respect they had for my boundaries, no longer asked for consent, and {tried to} force themselves upon me.” (A lot of these, too)
  • “My date tried to verbally circumvent any boundaries and issues I confessed to, and it made me feel like I was in danger.”
  • “I didn’t come out to my date at first, and when they found out, they radically changed their behavior in an attempt to control and manipulate our new relationship to their benefit.”

Long-Term Relationships

  • “My partner has forcefully and radically changed our long-term relationship after finding out about my asexuality, and I’m now trapped and controlled in a way that I wasn’t before.”
  • “My partner broke up with me/is fighting with me because of my asexuality, and trying to make it seem like I’m hurting them. It’s made me doubt myself and my ability to trust my own intentions.”
  • “My partner is slowly changing from what was once supportive of my asexuality, and I’m wondering when I have the right to be worried and when I’d be overreacting. I’m aware of the worst case scenario, but I also worry that I’m being selfish and childish – which are things I’ve been told all throughout my asexual experience.”

Self-Care And Self Development

  • “I don’t trust my ability to say either yes or no in sexual situations, and this has extended to my life in general. I don’t feel comfortable in my ability to self-determinate.”
  • “The lack of authority, definition, and schooling of the concept of asexuality has made me very uncomfortable with what I think I am, and that uncertainty haunts me every waking moment.”
  • “I think it’s too late/too early to tell if I’m asexual, but the longer I hesitate, the worse my mental health and emotional wellbeing gets. I’m effectively stuck.”
  • “I see no benefit in coming out, or even identifying as asexual. There’s no positivity, role models, or supportive community for what I consider a big and scary part of my overall identity.”
  • “I think this was sexual abuse, but I’m wondering if I’m just being selfish and childish.”
  • “I think I was treated badly by my parents/friends/partner, but I’m wondering if I’m just being selfish and childish.”
  • “I want to believe that I’m deserving of equal freedom and human respect paid to other, not asexual people, but people tell me I’m being selfish and childish.”
  • “No one encourages this part of me. And that makes me feel forgotten and abandoned in general.”

Shut the fuck up about your petty beef with tumblr bloggers and youtubers and Archie comics or whatever. I literally do not care, I can’t care. I see these messages every goddamn day – this post was written and drafted a month ago, and I very easily compiled most of this bulletpoint list from scratch, just by eyeing what I see in the askbox and what comes across my dash. 

‘Ace discourse’ anger is empty and so meaningless. This is what I see by being part of this one 17k follow asexual ask blog for maybe half a year. I am so Done with all the faux rage posts and all the false positivity about how it’s ok to NOT be ace and all the acephobia that falls perfectly in line with the gaslighting typical of acephobia-101 while also having the audacity to claim it not so.

This is what’s real and I want to bleed it into your goddamn eyes.

Reblogging this again, for obvious reasons

Ace ppl are not INSTITUTIONALLY OR SYSTEMATICALLY OPPRESSED BECAUSE OF THE DEGREE THAT YOU FEEL SEXUAL ATTRACTION. If ur trans ur lgbtq. If ur aro but ur gay, bi, pan ur lgbtq. If ur ace but homo, biromantic etc ur lgbt. Being ace doesnt make u lgbt by default. Does the interpersonal lack of understanding suck and should change? Yeah. But society doesnt want u dead so cishet aces stay tf out our business.

Someone read this, all this stuff about struggles of people coming out as ace, people abusing them and telling them that their identity isn’t real or is a problem to be fixed, making people feel worthless and feeling that they’re in the wrong about their own goddamn identity, and said “nah they ain’t oppressed™ enough to be in a community of people who face the same issues”

U mad huh?

Anyway….aces can’t be systematically opressed. None of those things are examples of systematic oppression

Also nice how they called it “asexual exclusionary radicalism” as if it wasn’t a cheap tactic to compare ace exclusionist to twerfs

@lavabendingthot @lunarsolareclipse @homoelitism

Hey, instead of being a giant piles of garbage, try reading up:

“Aces don’t face oppression”

Asexuality was listed in the DSM as HSDD (Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder) until 2013, making it officially a mental illness that would be treated with therapy and medication. It is still in the DSM, except that you can ‘opt out’ if you self-identify as asexual, which is great except that asexuality is still so unknown that there undoubtedly many people who are asexual but don’t know that it’s “a thing”. This means that who knows how many asexuals have been sent to therapy and told they’re sick, then been “treated” for their orientation to try and force them to experience sexuality “correctly”.

In short, our orientation has been and continues to be pathologized, and asexuals have been put through corrective therapy: x,x, x, x, x

Posts of people describing the hardship they’ve faced for their asexuality:x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x

The blog @acephobia-is-real has so many submissions and examples of hatred, harassment, hostility, and abuse, of aces who have been raped and/or sexually assaulted in an attempt to ‘fix’ them, and made suicidal due to aphobia and/or their own perceived brokenness, that it would be pointless for me to try and link any. Just go and start reading. Try their suicide tag.

There may be dissatisfyingly little research done on asexuality, but there has been enough done to prove that they do face discrimination, no matter how hard some may find that to believe. But guess what? You, an allosexual person, do not get to say shit like “aces don’t get kicked out” or “aces don’t _____” any more than I as a white person get to say that things I don’t experience must not happen to black people either. Just because you haven’t experienced it personally or witnessed it with your own eyes doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. You haven’t walked in an ace’s shoes, you don’t know what they deal with. Period.

Not even other aces can tell asexuals that their experiences aren’t real or aren’t valid. Different people can deal with different amounts of oppression, that doesn’t mean the lack of oppression is the default “truth”.

Nobody is trying to say that asexuals have it “as bad” or worse than gay or trans people, but we don’t HAVE to “have it worse” to beincluded and for our experiences to have merit without being compared to anyone else’s. Let me say that again: our experiences have merit without being compared to anyone else’s.

“We just want to protect our safe spaces”

Aphobes have:

Are all aphobes this vile? Maybe not, but this is still the disgusting, hateful attitude festering in the gatekeeping community, and it stinks like shit. The examples I have provided above are only a fraction of the harassment and abuse that is perpetrated on a regular basis.

“Het aces/aroaces are straight”

Some het aces identify as straight. Some het aces don’t identify as straight, they identify as asexual, and it’s not your place to label them against their will. There is no world in which aroaces, people who experience no attraction to anyone, are straight.

“We accept SGA (same-gender attracted) and trans aces”

Firstly, SGA (same-gender attraction) is a term that was used and is still used in Mormon conversion therapy, so as one can understand,a lot of people are very uncomfortable being labeled with this description. Secondly, it enforces a gender binary of “same” and “opposite” gender that leaves a large number of nonbinary people out in the cold. Is a genderfluid person only “same-gender attracted” if they’re attracted to other genderfluid people who are genderfluid in exactly the same way? How about agender, intergender, demigirl/boy people? And before the argument “well they’re included as trans” is made, there are plenty of nonbinary people who do not identify as trans. I’m one of them.

The standard of “SGA and trans” as requirement for entry to the LGBTQ community is used nowhere outside of aphobic tumblr, and it seems crafted specifically for the purpose of excluding aces, aros, NBs, intersex people, and others not deemed “gay enough”.

(SGA did NOT come from ‘SGL’, same-gender loving. That is a term created by black queer people and not to be appropriated by white people.)

Discussion of the history of the word ‘queer’ and why it’s better than ‘SGA’: x, x, x, x, x

There are also many “SGA and trans” aces who are against the gatekeeping and feel that they are hated by these aphobes.

Your “discourse” is harmful to all asexuals. And PS, your rhetoric is literally indistinguishable from TWERF rhetoric.

“The LGBT community has always been about fighting homophobia and transphobia/we came together to fight homophobia and transphobia”

Despite the fact that bisexual and transgender people have always been around, and have done great things for the community, they have faced a great deal of lateral oppression from the LG part of the group that did not want to see them get an equal share of attention, support, or legitimacy. This post is not about proving LG transphobia and biphobia, but it’s so rampant that I don’t feel like I need to provide sources whatsoever. Nevertheless, here’s a collection of biphobia, and the blog@terf-calloutdocuments some of the violent transphobia on this site, particularly in the lesbian community. This post is an example.

“The A stands for Ally so that closeted people can be the community without being outed”

No one is saying that we don’t care about closeted people, but a) even if you’re a closeted L, G, B, or T, you are still a L, G, B, or T. Allies do not need to be part of the acronym to be intrinsically welcomed. As someone said, this is like saying the ‘B’ in BLT stands for ‘bread’. We can pretty much safely assume that a sandwich is going to include bread, we don’t have to go of our way to give it a letter. Either you are outing every “ally” as a closeted queer person, or you are giving 100% cis straight people an LGBTQ member card, the very thing you are arguing against by trying to exclude asexuals.

Furthermore, this puts forth the argument “I’m willing to let cishet straight people into the community for the sake of a few closeted people” while at the same time stating “I’m not willing to let the A stand for asexuals because I don’t think letting cis heteroromantic asexuals into the community is worth giving all asexuals representation and support”. Which says that you consider asexuals less valuable and more of a threat than cis straight people.

Bonus: The History of LGBT(QQIAAP+)

“Aces have never been a part of the LGBTQ/queer community”

“Stop tokenizing bi and trans people/stop comparing bi/trans and ace experiences”

We’re not the ones doing it. They are comparing them, themselves.

“I have proof of an asexual being homophobic/transphobic/racist/a terrible person”

Of course there are asexuals who are terrible people. There are legions of gays and lesbians who are racist and transphobic. Does that make them not gay/lesbian? Does their bigotry invalidate their sexual orientation, or remove the L and G from the acronym? No, I don’t think so. Some asexuals being bad people doesn’t justify you trying to invalidate all of us.

“’Allosexual’ is a bad word because ____”

I actually have an ‘allosexual’ tag just for posts about why ‘allosexual’ is a perfectly fine word: x, x, x, x, x. x

“The split-attraction model is homophobic”

What we call the split-attraction model was first described by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a gay advocate from the 1800s, as “disjunctive uranodioning”. (source) (credit to this post)

“The term ‘corrective rape’ was coined by South African lesbians and should only be used by lesbians”

No one means any disrespect to lesbians or other victims of corrective rape, but this is not a correct statement.

“We’ll Show You You’re a Woman” describes the violence directed towards LGBT people in South Africa, stating, “Negative public attitudes towards homosexuality go hand in hand with a broader pattern of discrimination, violence, hatred, and extreme prejudice against people known or assumed to be lesbian, gay, and transgender, or those who violate gender and sexual norms in appearance or conduct (such as women playing soccer, dressing in a masculine manner, and refusing to date men).” It goes on to say, “Much of the recent media coverage of violence against lesbians and transgender men has been characterized by a focus on “corrective rape,” a phenomenon in which men rape people they presume or know to be lesbians in order to “convert” them to heterosexuality.”

The Wikipedia article on corrective rape in South Africa states that, “A study conducted by OUT LGBT Well-being and the University of South Africa Centre for Applied Psychology (UCAP) showed that “the percentage of black gay men who said they have experienced corrective rape matched that of the black lesbians who partook in the study”.”

It is not only lesbians, but also bisexual women, transgender men, gay men, and gender non-conforming people in South Africa who experience corrective rape. This is not in any way meant to minimize the horror of the epidemic or shift attention away from lesbians, but other victims, including asexuals, deserve attention as well. Do not silence or speak over victims of rape by policing their language.

“Aces are valid, they’re just not queer/LGBTQ”

You cannot in one breath say “Asexuals are valid” and in the next deny their experiences. Spend five minutes in the community and you will see testimony after testimony from aces describing their abuse, their sexual assault(s), the countless times people have called them confused, broken, wrong, mentally ill, inhuman, sinful, and how these experiences have left them feeling hopeless, alone, alienated, subhuman, depressed, and suicidal. Almost every asexual out there will tell you a story of how their orientation has caused them pain and struggle, and you can’t call them valid while at the same time calling these experiences invalid and nonexistent.

Bonus: This is a list of all the mainstream LGBTQ groups that include asexuals.

“Form your own community!”

a) We do have our own community, because every letter in the acronym has its own communityand yet is still part of the acronym, b) you fucking shits won’t stop sending us hate and bombarding us with shit meant to trigger and harass us.

“Aces take resources from other LGBTQ who need them”

I’ve seen some pretty wild claims about this one, insisting that asexuals “steal” things such as scholarships, beds at homeless shelters, food and space at pride events, suicide hotlines, and so on, yet I have never seen any actual proof that any “stealing” has ever taken place. For one thing, I thought “you’ll never get kicked out or fired for being ace”, “no one is suicidal because they’re asexual”, so why would you think aces need these resources? Either we don’t need them or we don’t use them, you can’t have it both ways.

For another, how heartless do you have to be to tell asexuals that they can’t use suicide hotlines? Do you realize that you’re saying that asexuals should be denied life-saving services? That, in essence, asexuals are suicidal due to their orientation, but you think they’re not “queer enough” so they deserve to die? Because that is the logical progression of refusing someone suicide prevention, and that’s the message aces receive when you tell them they are “stealing” suicide prevention.

LGBTQ resources offer them to asexuals, andbenefit from us using them.

Lastly, do you not realize we are alsoPROVIDING resources? We are bringing bodies and minds to the community, we are here to be voices, to volunteer, to bring encouragement, information, and support. We earn our keep. You just have to admit that you don’t WANT us here.

Nasty shit aphobes do

(Thanks to @livebloggingmydescentintomadness for these)

My own contribution:

Living in a world where the media is overflowing with sexual imagery and where society constantly puts value on sexual intercourse, virginity, and related topics – who can forget the phrase ‘sex sells’? – men and women who do not experience sexual attraction (the definition of asexuality) and who are sex-repulsed or masturbation-repulsed (as many asexuals, myself included, are) feel alienated and ‘broken’. We also face erasure in terms of representation, being either grossly underrepresented or represented as cold, harsh, and ‘synonymous with celibate’ people. Let’s not forget erasure from LGBT spaces – I have many times been told that asexuals do not belong in the acronym or in “our spaces”, even though asexuals have the capacity to be homoromantic, biromantic, panromantic, etc, as well as transgender or nonbinary. And, if we don’t belong in LGBT spaces, and we clearly aren’t heterosexual, what do we belong? Nowhere, it seems. Of course, the argument also drifts to “asexuals don’t experience oppression”, which is false.

Examples of asexual oppression:

http://autumndiesirae.tumblr.com/post/118710018295/aces-dont-face-discrimination

Asexuals are the highest targets for corrective rape:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/20/asexual-discrimination_n_3380551.html

Go fuck yourselves. ❤

aprillikesthings:

anarfea:

fierceawakening:

lookashiny:

fierceawakening:

dendritic-trees:

lazaefair:

pearwaldorf:

minim-calibre:

rashaka:

Unpopular Opinion – Reflections on a culture of nice in ficdom

AO3 has ‘comments’ and ff.net has ‘reviews’. They serve the same surface function but this distinction is powerful in its consequences, especially once bulk fandoms started posting more on ao3 and less on ff.net.

Everyone is terrified to give criticism on AO3 lest they be called a monster or a bully. And the reasons to discourage it are grounded in empathy and a culture of positivity that on the surface, seems like it can’t be argued with. Who can dispute the idea that “if you can’t say something nice to you shouldn’t say anything at all”? FWIW, I think this is part of a bigger system of fear-based cultural trends in fandom social platforms as a whole, but I’ll contain my opinion to AO3 for a moment.

Here’s the truth: getting negative feedback of any kind is hard. It stays with you. It sucks. Sometimes it’s not about your story at all, it’s just harassment about fandom drama. Or sometimes it is about your story and it’s just really mean. And if you’re an active fan or prolific writer, you’ll see more of the grossness bc people like to target someone who stands out. Sometimes it’s not huge or evil it’s just something that didn’t work for the reader and they’re letting you know.

Here’s another truth: when you develop a group culture where all critical/negative feedback is treated like an insult or attack, no matter how mild, you eventually eliminate the spaces for people to provide useful, informative, or sincere criticism. Instead of a space where it’s understood that this is a working community and everyone is here to grow and be better, it’s just about the author posting their art and closing their eyes to any type of response that isn’t reassuring.

In years past on ff.net, in fandoms like BtVs, anime, Harry Potter, AtLA… I would give detailed feedback on chapters, the things I loved, the things that confused me, the things I thought didn’t make sense, the typos they might have missed, where I thought it was true to characters or not. I also received a lot of reviews to this effect. These could be a page long. It was common. If I read a fic that had parts that didn’t sit well with me, I said so, very openly, in a review. I also got messages that did the same.

Because it wasn’t a comment, it was a review. And that difference is huge.

So what’s upshot? From the conversations I’ve had and read, many authors prefer the AO3 culture. They don’t want to be reviewed, they want only supportive comments. And emotionally, I get that. I really do. I’ve been writing since 2001 in over 20 fandoms and I’ve received pretty much any kind of good or bad response that one can get for a story.

But doing it this way, we have lost something. We’ve lost a community that fosters writing and, by extension, internet communication, in a way that teaches you to accept the slings and arrows of public discourse gracefully. We’ve lost a culture that trains you to realize that you can get a flaming horrendous response to art that you posted and it’s not the end of the world. You don’t have to quit fandom and you don’t have to cry for an hour over it. You learn to treat it like noise and you learn to pull the critical value from it that you can. Having a culture that fosters criticism doesn’t just make you hardened against petty bullshit, but it also means someone can feel comfortable saying “I didn’t dig this part of the story and here’s why” and they’ll know it’s not about you and you know it’s not about you, so it doesn’t feel like your heart is getting carved out. There’s a space for talking about the work as a work.

I know that I’m a pretty good writer. I’m not the most consistent or the most creative or the most impactful, and I definitely don’t have the artistic discipline to write a novel sized story. There’s things I need to learn and ways I can improve. But I’m pretty fair at putting a sentence together. While most of that is from practice, I think no small amount is that I learned to write at a point in online fandom culture where I got all forms of feedback, not just approval. I whined a lot at the time, but the criticisms (and my responses to them) shaped me as much as the approvals.

It made me a stronger writer, and even more importantly, it gave me the tools to know when to let something affect me and when to let it slide down my back. It taught me to draw a line between my emotional self and internet drama.

That is a line that is badly, badly needed in fandom right now. We need the ability to talk about things without giving and taking personal offense. We need to respect that there are things we don’t like out there but still cannot and should not change, because our right to exist freely depends on theirs.

By eliminating any small negativities of any kind from our fanfic writing experience (in the name of protection and politeness), writers are growing up weaker. Their writing is weaker, their ability to handle criticism is weaker, their ability to give criticism is basically non-existent, and the subsequent drive toward conformity means everything is a lot more vanilla. There’s less weirdness, less wildness, less original characters and less of anything that isn’t default pleasant or familiar.

I can’t change this, I know that. Many people don’t think these problems I’m describing are happening at all bc it doesn’t match their fandom experience. They wouldn’t change it at all, to them it’s progress. At different times in the past I’ve contributed to the same stuff I’m now calling a problem. It’s taken a while (years) to accept that the community has shifted and that I’m part of that. Because it seemed to make sense and there’s some very moving discussions about keeping things positive to protect the author’s delicate self.

I’m not delicate though. And spending my formative teen fanfic years in a world where feedback was open is one of the reasons why. It made me a better writer and a tougher writer. And I know, from personal conversations, that I’m not at all alone in citing this.

End of the day, this is just reflection. I too conform to the culture of stifling-nice on AO3 comments bc I know that if I did start leaving critical feedback (even wrapped in a nice compliment sandwich), many writers would not know how to react to it. To them, I’d be an interfering bullying jerk who didn’t stay in my lane of being a passive, blindly supportive consumer. And that… well that state of affairs is a real pity, I think. It’s also a pity because fear of saying the wrong thing or an insufficient thing is one of the most commonly cited reasons that people say they don’t leave comments. I’d rather have more comments and accept some critical ones in the mix than to be living in the feedback drought that that is so prevalent. So yeah, I’m sorry this has happened and I’m sorry I contributed to it. As much as I love AO3, and will continue to support it, champion it, part of me also resents that they led us to this.

I think in the dream of making things kinder, we’ve fundamentally made fandom weaker, inside and out. And that weakness leads to people who, when they are faced with challenges, act out of fear, not out of reflection or respect.

Good intentions, y’all. Good intentions. We treated each other like babies, and now we’re vulnerable like them.

I don’t know how much of it is AO3 and how much of it is that the early culture of AO3 was influenced strongly by parts of fandom that didn’t really have a huge public review culture. We come from similar eras and had overlap in fandoms and flists, but you were a lot more active on ff.net than I ever was–I deleted my account when the NC-17 ban hit–and than a lot of the other people I knew in fandom were, including a lot of the early AO3 users.

I seldom saw critical reviews left publicly in the non-ff.net places where I posted stories and seldom got them myself. (Even with mailing lists, it wasn’t something that happened a lot.) The understanding was that crit wasn’t something to be attached to the permanent home of the story, but rather something handled either one-on-one or off in the reviewer’s own space, and that culture and those mores carried over to AO3.

I, personally, have always hated the idea of public critical reviews attached to my actual content–back when I used to post things on LJ where it was posted as a clearly-stated draft with changes that would come, I did invite critique, but public critique was never as useful to me as was having a strong stable of beta readers. (My biggest critique of that kind of critique was that it almost always was about sections I already knew were the weakest, didn’t actually give me anything to go on as to how to fix that, and was therefore like a beta, but without the useful stuff, and there where I could see it and grow more and more neurotic about it, because writing with an anxiety disorder is SO MUCH FUN, OMG.)

What I’d like to see more of is something I had early on, and that’s workshopping communities where you’ve got a certain amount of trust in your reviewer built into the whole deal: you know their strengths, both as a writer and a reviewer, and you know their weaknesses, and you can take that into account when taking their feedback into account. Which may be close to what you had in your communities on ff.net, back in the day.

How to get those started up again? Hell if I know. Maybe there are Discords, but my fandoms these days are so small that I’d basically need to force-feed everyone my canon, brainwash them into actually liking it, and then convincing them they really want to read thousands of words of pointless character study, so it’s all been sort of a theoretical desire on my part.

(Side note: my main reason for seldom leaving comments is a sheepish “I’m usually reading on my phone and it’s a pain in the ass and I always MEAN to do it when I’m back at a keyboard and then, well, I don’t.” and I think a lot of people, if they are actually being honest with themselves, are in that same lazy mobile boat.)

There are absolutely no circumstances in which I would consider unsolicited feedback from strangers, however kindly phrased, helpful. As Neil Gaiman said, 

“When people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.” Unless you’re talking about SPAG, it is very unlikely that I would take that feedback under advisement. 

It’s not because I’m thin-skinned. When I send things off for beta, my betas are unsparing and mean, and I welcome that. It helps me improve as a writer. But here’s the thing: I have a level of trust with and respect for my betas (who are usually friends in my writer circles) that you just can’t build without time. We understand each other, we know our strengths and weaknesses, and can work around those. 

If there are fanfic writers’ groups out there (I mean, there must be, but idk where to find them), I think that is much more useful than putting your work out in public for critique. 

I don’t know what the fuck fanfic communities OP was in, but I’ve been in fandom for 18 years spanning all manner of private archives, forums, Geocities, ff.net, LJ, Mediaminer, Dreamwidth, and AO3, and literally never, never have I ever seen any culture other than “concrit is welcome only when the writer requests it.”

Sure, we had badfic communities, rants and essays aplenty on our personal journals, parody fics, lots of general tutorials hoping to educate writers (Minotaur’s Slash Guide, anyone?), but it was always considered extremely rude to leave the concrit in the comments of the story itself if the writer had not explicitly asked for it.

I picked this up from pretty much the beginning, at age 12, and it made sense to me even then. Fanfiction is a fun hobby. For fun. Do we all want to improve? Sure. And because we do, we ask for help – from people we think can help us. To be perfectly blunt, the vast majority of the unsolicited “advice” I’ve received over the years from people who ignored the cultural norm (which, again, I observed to be consistent across multiple websites and platforms) was worthless anyway, as it came from people who were either worse writers than me or had conflated their own personal aesthetic preferences with valid concrit. No thanks. This isn’t my professional job with professional standards and professional editors. For starters: professional editors have actual credentials and experience. I’m just laughing at the idea that all Rando Internet Readers would have the same guaranteed level of value to add to my work.

Tl;dr I’ve never once encountered a fanfic community where unsolicited criticism was considered normal.

I think OP is more right than they are wrong.

That said I don’t think their fandom experience is at all typical. I definitely never got a page long detailed review on ff.net.

The trouble is that, even once we exclude the troll/flame reviews from consideration, as is only fitting, most reviews are just not interesting, or helpful. Most reviews are, at the end of the day, either “I liked this” or “I didn’t like this”, which, even if I’m desperate for critique is just not helpful. There’s nothing to take from that.

But the other trouble with what the follow up posters are saying is that while I’m glad that they have access to a robust beta community, most people don’t. I’ve been in fandom for years, I have never had a regular beta reader, I have no idea where I would go about finding one, or how. I have never seen any explanation of how this works. Literally never.

I started off writing original fiction and later got into fanfic, and… the attitude that constructive criticism is mean and unhelpful is completely foreign to me. In original fiction the goal is (generally) ultimately to sell your work, and for it to be ready for that, multiple people have to pretty ruthlessly seek out any of the sort of obvious mistakes that might lead to “lol don’t buy this thing.”

Endlessly nice comments on my fic flatter me but they also kind of feel fake. There’s NOTHING in all 10,000 words of this thing that confused you or felt unrealistic? Seriously no fooling?

Because I’d like to think I’m that awesome…

… but I’m pretty sure no one is.

Fandom writers are strangely against criticism unless it comes from, basically, one vector, that being betas. The idea that you can take criticism of one work and apply it to another doesn’t seem to occur to most of them. I understand that it’s an unpaid hobby, but not wanting to improve at all, or only in limited ways, puzzles me.

That, yes.

I think it’s really unfair to say that because someone doesn’t want unsolicited concrit they don’t want to improve. It’s just that there is a time and a place for concrit, and it’s not in the comments section of a fic. If I want concrit I’ll ask my writing group, or my beta readers. And I’ll receive it at a time and a place where I’m expecting it. When I go into my AO3 comments I’m expecting to get praise. Getting negative feedback instead harshes my mood, basically.

I’m a beginner fic writer and I do this as a hobby. I’ve toyed with the idea of scrubbing some of it, but I’m nowhere near ready for that, yeah? 

If I want constructive criticism on my fics, I’ll ask for it. If I think a fic is good but could be better, and I know the writer well enough, I might PM them on tumblr to ask if they want concrit. If the answer is “no,” I respect that. I’ve had a friend ask me if she could give me advice (again, privately) and I said yes, and she pointed out a weakness in my fics I already knew about and was working on. 

The problem is that the majority of what randos think is concrit isn’t helpful at all. “I don’t like this ship, you should write X ship instead” isn’t helpful, and anyone who says that can get the fuck off my lawn. You don’t like the way I wrote X character? Okay, so go read something else, then. 

How To Find A Beta: Think of a fic writer you love, who is familiar with your fandom, preferably someone you’ve been friendly with in general, and ask them if they’ll beta-read for you. I’ve been asked to beta-read for friends before in part because I left detailed comments on their fics, and I’m reblogging from my own beta, and in every case that’s how it happened.

People requesting me to beta have included: “I don’t usually write this character and I know you do and love her, so tell me if I got her voice accurately,” and “I’ve re-read this chapter too much and I can’t tell if it makes sense anymore.” It doesn’t have to be deep professional-level editing unless that’s what you both are after. Beta-reading can be basic SPAG editing or it can be “Will you read this smut scene and tell me if you can tell where everyone’s limbs are?”

How to start a community of writers supporting each other: Leave supportive comments on fics you like. Engage with your fellow authors. Follow their tumblrs. Start a chat somewhere (discord is good) and invite your friends who write. Talk about what you’re working on. There’s multiple methods to this and they’re all great, IME.

But like…..I’ve been reading fic for twenty years and I can’t think of any place where unsolicited critique was met with anything other than a polite “Who asked you?” I can only think that it must have been specific to a particular fandom or subset of it.