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Is it appropriate to criticize someone else’s fanfiction publicly? Why or why not?
Yes, including places they are near-guaranteed to see it, i.e. their comments
Yes, but only somewhere they aren’t guaranteed to see it, i.e. your own tumblr
No, not at all
Other
Publicly here involves anything that anyone in a broader community can see without having to join, say, a discord server. You can be more specific in the tags. If your answer would change based on which fandom or community the fic belongs to, vote for the option that best reflects the community most open to public criticism of an author’s work.
usually no. the exception is if author explicitly states they are open to critique on that work. but generally? absolutely not. fanfic is not part of the professional writing world; people do it for fun. I for example like to develop my skills as a writer bc its my career but even then I’ll ask for critique from friends but I do not appreciate randos saying how gross they think something is or that they don’t like my use of the british english ‘ou’ syllable.
Especially bc most layman critiques aside from being potentially annoying or hurtful are also just useless in doing what a critique needs to do. Like if you are critiquing a purposeful stylistic choice on my part all that tells me is that you don’t like it. If it’s not a grammatical mistake or any other kind of real mistake then your input is functionally less than useless. If you misinterpret my characters, that’s entirely on you. Most laymen won’t catch obvious mistakes that need to be edited out of more professional work and will focus on personal preference to guide their criticism.
There are words I don’t like too but when I critique word choice it will usually be because it sets a different atmosphere than the author intended or because it’s unintentionally repeated as a crutch word far too often. Or because someone pulled a ‘buttery butter’ and smiled happily.
Conclusion: unsolicited critique is not only hurtful to hobby writers but useless and pulls the focus of improving your writing onto the wrong things– suggesting that you should change your ideas rather than enhance and improve how you show them. Even as someone who edits as a job I would not critique a piece that the author didn’t ask for it on. It’s rude.
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