if you don't like shonen tropes, why are you reading fanfic for a shonen series???

[edenfalling]

Two reviews I got yesterday for "The Way of the Apartment Manager"

Chapter: 11. Chapter 11
From: Guest
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:Why can people never keep their OCs believable?

I mean, if a story starts with a washed out genin that has not trained for half a decade, OF COURSE they will start beating Uchias and Hyuugas in the 1vs1 fights. I mean, its ovious. Cannot be any different.

Now if this ends up also in an OC Kakashi pairing, than ths stealth mary sue self insert is perfect. No better way to fish for compliments than start pretenting to be pathetic, after all (remember that 4 weeks ago in story, she was not eable to hit anything moving with a kunai?)

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Chapter: 16. Chapter 16
From: Guest
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:Ok, the whole team was promoted. As if it had not been so obvious from the first time the "missfit team" did meet.

Booring.

Sorry, I was expecting something different form the story (and the good I head about it). Not 14 chapters of yet another stupid chuunin exam which is aced by Team OC.

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*sigh* *carefully does not correct the glaring spelling and grammar errors* *is totally petty enough to point out that said errors exist and are not being corrected*

Dear Guest,

Thank you for reviewing anonymously so I cannot respond to you directly. It's a very efficient method for starting a productive conversation!

It may have escaped your attention, but "The Way of the Apartment Manager" is fanfiction for a SHONEN manga. So yes, of course the "misfit team" is going to learn to work together and overcome obstacles, and the "washed out genin" is going to beat strong opponents. That is how the genre works. In fact, I did my damndest to make my story feel like it could slide right into the manga, so that lack of "something different" you are complaining about? Was deliberate. Because shockingly enough, I like the manga.

(Incidentally, I will bet a hundred dollars you would not be bitching if the main character were a boy or man who was in the manga for all of two pages but followed the exact same arc that Yukiko, a female OC, does.)

As for Yukiko being a "stealth mary sue self insert" who I am using to "fish for compliments" -- well, yes, she does share a number of traits with me. So does Naga. So does Iruka. So do Kakashi, Naruto, Yusuke, Taizen, and pretty much every character in the story. It's hard to write people if you can't find something in them to identify with! Interestingly enough, that does not mean any of the characters are self-inserts.

If I were going to insert myself into Konoha, I'd be a librarian, a civilian teacher, or maybe a waitress. My life would be boring as fuck, and I'd be a nameless off-page casualty in an epic moment of somebody else's life... unless I was smart and got off my ass and moved out of town, because an exciting life is the last thing I want. Boring lives are much more comfortable. (Also, I would not adopt Naruto. I know my flaws, and two of the big ones are selfishness and apathy.)

I freely admit I am using Yukiko and her story to fish for compliments, though. If any writers say they aren't fishing for compliments on their work, when their work is publically posted on a site with a free review mechanism available, they are lying through their teeth.

Thank you for sharing your opinions on my story. Hopefully you will find something you enjoy reading more, or even write something yourself! Maybe you could work on a story in which Naruto turns out to be a misogynistic serial killer and the entirety of the manga is a hallucination induced by Sasuke, who is an investigator trying to find the location of Naruto's last victim (Sakura) before she starves to death in a sex dungeon. Perhaps that would be "different" enough for you. :-)

Sincerely,
Liz

Comments

[branchandroot]

*slightly boggled* Okay, this yoho scores a ten, even on the "asshole commenter" scale. Man. I don't think that's excessive snippiness at all, seems just about right.

[lexicology]

Ugh. People whose reviews amount to, "I didn't want to read this kind of story" always suck.

[edenfalling]

I don't even care that much about the Mary-Sue thing. That's just general internet idiocy. What gets me is that the person clearly saw from early on that the story was not to hir taste, and yet kept reading, and then felt a need to tell me, not that I'd written a bad story, but that I'd picked a bad genre to write in. And I'm just sitting here thinking, why??? Who has the time to waste reading something you're not enjoying, and then why get mad at me when you're the one who decided to inflict it upon yourself? *headdesk*

[edenfalling]

Yeah, I always sit there and say, "Then why did you read it?" Because really, who has time to waste on stuff you're not enjoying (or at least getting some kind of value from)? Not me, that's for sure!

[branchandroot]

Yeah, I remember a very similar jerk who read all through After, with several comments complaining about how omg there is /romance/ in the politics, ewwww, and I'm thinking: wtf, it says so on every single chapter, and there's pairings listed, how is this a surprise? And why are you still reading?!

Some people, honestly.

[lynati-1.livejournal.com]

The last paragraph of your reply made me choke on a sip of water.

Commenters on fanfic use the term "Mary Sue" as an insult against any original character they dislike for the sole reason that they KNOW that, accurate description of said OC or not, it will (most likely) piss off the author. (Because who enjoys being insulted?) Not all original characters are author inserts, and not all author inserts are at the Mary Sue level. Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure "stealth Mary Sue" is a contradiction in terms.

I like Yukiko. She did feel like she could have been living in the village hidden by leaves.

And if the OC team never had a success, if the story was just chapter after chapter of them failing to meet their goals, it probably would have been so depressing it would lose some of its readership no matter how well it was written. As it stands, well, you already said it; it's following the form of the genre its parent work was written in.

[rthstewart.livejournal.com]

Bitch all you want, girlfriend. The big point is, as you say, hello, this is the trope you are writing, that is the point of the story, and if you want something where everyone fails over and over, WHY are you reading and continuing to read this one and then sharing your gripes with the rest of the world.

I know it's really aggravating when you get reviews like that. Critique comes with the territory. We know that when we post. But stupid critique is especially grating. And anon stupid critique even more so.

I'm sort of depressingly pleased that someone else besides me drew the nasty, though.

[askerian]

Wow, what an asshole. I have nothing else to say, the rest would be swearing. Hssst.

*hugs you*

[monkey5s.livejournal.com]

I have to admit, I was more bemused than anything at these. And I will have to take issue with the labeling of Yukiko as a Mary Sue- because she just doesn't fit that profile.

But honestly, why ON EARTH would ANYONE post their fanfic if they weren't hoping people would read it - AND ENJOY IT? And, yanno, tell the writer they did. Complaining that they expected "something different" from the story is just... umm, stupid? Weak? Idiotic? Lame?

But I, too, will refrain from mocking the errors in the comments. Even if they are trashing one of my all-time favorite Naruto stories.

[red-volpe.livejournal.com]

People are stupid sometimes. I'm sorry you had to deal with that.
...that's an oddly specific example you gave there. Is there a story behind that? xD

[edenfalling]

The last paragraph of your reply made me choke on a sip of water.

Yeah, uh, sorry about that?

I understand that the term "Mary Sue" has somehow come to mean "any character I dislike," but I've always figured it meant a character who warped a fictional world around him- or herself. Which I tried really hard to avoid doing with Yukiko -- in fact, she falls fairly neatly into a pattern seen over and over in the manga, where Naruto inspires a new character to change and grow and become a better person. About the only mismatch is that she doesn't start out as an enemy and Naruto doesn't beat her in a fight... though he does do the "you're stupid!" argument thing and the "I have faith in you!" thing, so. *shrug*

I write depressing tragic things too, but "Apartment Manager" was my happy AU. The impetus behind the story is to give Naruto a better childhood, and why would I want to pour angst all over that? Sometimes people just baffle me.

[edenfalling]

Yeah, I'm like, "It is indeed glaringly obvious from early on what kind of story I'm writing, so if you don't like that kind of story, why keep reading?" And then why get annoyed at me for writing that kind of story? If you thought I'd written a bad example of that kind of story, okay, fine, tell me the specific points where I fell short and we can discuss it, but if your only criticism is that you wanted a different kind of story, just... grow up and go away. Especially if you can't even be bothered to sign a pen name to your reviews. *sigh*

I keep wondering why you get so much vitriol for your work, and the only thing I can think of is that maybe it's because people feel it isn't glaringly obvious what kind of story you were writing? You're not writing Pevencest and so on -- and you obviously respect Aslan a great deal -- so maybe the religiously narrow readers think you're one of them and then feel personally betrayed when you contradict any of their doctrinal blinders? And then they talk amongst themselves and piling on you becomes a sort of self-righteous crusade. Which is not very Christian -- have they never heard of turning the other cheek? -- but stupidity and hypocrisy are kind of the price of doing business with humanity. *deeper sigh*

[edenfalling]

I am not hugely upset over the whole "Yukiko is a huge bitch Mary-Sue!!!" thing because that's just the internet being the internet and I know to ignore that kind of attack. What annoys me is the whole, "Your story is dumb because it's a genre I find stupid and boring" thing. Dude, if you don't like the genre, don't read it. This is not rocket science. But don't attack me for writing a type of story you dislike. If I wrote a bad example of a type of story, that's one thing, but these reviews are like... Okay, it's as if I brought a nice beef stew to a potluck dinner, and after sitting down and eating the whole thing, the anonymouse said, "Oh by the way, I'm a vegetarian. Why didn't you make fried eggplant instead, you dumbfuck." To which I would say, nobody made you eat the stew! There were lots of other things available, many of them more to your taste. Why didn't you eat them instead?

*headdesk*

[edenfalling]

I basically translate Mary-Sue accusations as "I am a misogynistic dickhead and don't like female characters with agency" and/or "I only want to read about canon characters, how dare you imply that there are more people living in this world than the ones Kishimoto already made up," and/or "I want to piss you off and this is a quick way to do so." In this case, the anonymouse is basically saying that ze dislikes Yukiko because she acts like a shonen protagonist... to which I say, she acts like a shonen protagonist because she IS a shonen protagonist. Duh. And also, all her growth is catalyzed by Naruto, so she fits very neatly into a pattern established by the manga itself.

In retrospect, possibly the "fishing for compliments" line was meant to suggest that if Yukiko is a self-insert, then instead of hoping readers like my story, I am using it as an emotional crutch to hope readers like me, or at least a fictionalized and idealized version of me. Which is so bizarre it didn't occur to me until a day later, because who even thinks like that? I want people to read my story and think, "Wow, Liz is a good writer!" not to think, "Wow, I like character X and Liz wrote him/her, so Liz must be just like Character X -- I wish I were Liz!" *headdesk* The logic of that escapes me utterly.

[edenfalling]

The stupidity of humanity is an immutable fact that could be used to power starships. *sigh*

No story, I was just trying to think of something as counter to the general theme and feel of the pre-timeskip manga as I could, and I guess I kind of fell halfway into what might be a translated-through-internet-osmosis version of the plot of The Cell (which I think is a bad movie starring Jennifer Lopez or something).

[rthstewart.livejournal.com]

Fandom can be so weird. When I was writing in Star Wars I got a lot of negative about the fact that Jedi drank alcohol. Pre-marital sex wasn't an issue. In Narnia, the merest hint that a character had sexual experiences before Christian sanctified marriage gets me vitriol. Though I got really, really slamed on TV Tropes recently too in a different vein. So yeah, I know that you really shouldn't feed the trolls and that weird people are weird and what are you going to do, but still it isn't pleasant.

In this case, s/he made a point of continuing to read and vent along the way. Though, I guess I've gotten that too, come to think of it. The person gets on a roll and wants to continue to vent his/her unhappiness.

::Pats:: Yeah, been there, done that, got the t shirt.