It's so true that negativity about the thing someone loves can be really hurtful and damaging. I think there's also a difference between negativity and valid criticism, and it can be difficult sometimes to distinguish between them and also cope with receiving the latter. Early in my career as a fanfic writer, I wrote an AU fic set in America in the 1700s. One of the characters was a black woman, who in canon loved a white man. In the fic, I initially chose to ignore the racial attitudes and discriminatory laws of the time and had the two characters love each other without any problems, as happened in canon, although I tried in other respects to make the fic historically accurate. A reader pointed out to me the racially insensitive problems with this approach and rightly stated that by investing a similar level of research, I could have depicted the relationship in a historically accurate way, showing the problems but also the fact that there were many cross-racial relationships at the time.
I initially felt really terrible about the whole thing, and it was hard to receive that criticism. I'm sure it was also hard for the reader to speak up about it, because it would have been easy to attack them for it. Hopefully, I handled it in a relatively mature way. It was an important learning experience for me, exposed me to a lot of perspectives on race that I had never encountered, and led me to rewrite the fic and take a new approach.
So I think that there can be a place for some criticism in fanfic, although it requires respect and politeness on both sides for it not to blow up into something nasty. But negativity simply for the sake of being negative or expressing a dislike for something another person enjoys does poison things.
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winterfish
no subject
Date: 2019-11-21 05:44 am (UTC)I initially felt really terrible about the whole thing, and it was hard to receive that criticism. I'm sure it was also hard for the reader to speak up about it, because it would have been easy to attack them for it. Hopefully, I handled it in a relatively mature way. It was an important learning experience for me, exposed me to a lot of perspectives on race that I had never encountered, and led me to rewrite the fic and take a new approach.
So I think that there can be a place for some criticism in fanfic, although it requires respect and politeness on both sides for it not to blow up into something nasty. But negativity simply for the sake of being negative or expressing a dislike for something another person enjoys does poison things.