It sounds like you guys are still friends, which is good. I still have mixed feelings about my former friend. We started talking during the pandemic and she made me feel "valid" as a writer. But then I realized she was a toxic, pick-me girl who only wanted to be around "yes" men. I'm better off without her.
Yes, but just because people are always confusing opinion with critique, confusing who criticism is meant for, and operating under the belief that they're owed an audience.
If someone wants me to improve then they MUST put in the work to show me how they think it can be done. That is a critique. If they don't then it's merely opinion and a creator is within their right to entertain or dismiss it as they see fit.
Criticism is a form of opinion writing isn't meant for a creator. It's meant for the audience. Foolish is the creator who pays attention to it and assholish is the critic who brings it to them.
If someone is going to come up to a creator unsolicited, they should come up correctly. It's rarely done correctly and the end result is a waste of pixels.
Thanks for sharing this experience. I can relate to it since my project is like yours a sort of one person moonshot. I'm creating a website that teaches Japanese using what's called the 'nature method'. In other words it does use translation. Here is a screenshot of the first page to give you an idea.
So far I have created 100 pages and it covers for now about 500 words. My plan is to at least triple that. I made this because this is the kind of resource I wish existed when I started learning Japanese.
General consensus in the field is that it's nearly impossible
Same as in my case. I have even read comments saying it would be something 'undesirable' (I still wonder why lol).
Just because something is hard to do, doesn't mean it cannot be done.
Indeed.
Congrats for what you've achieved. It's sad you lost friends on the way.
I totally get it. For what it's worth, I think your app is a cool idea, and I can easily understand it. You have the hiragana for monkey, with the kanji below (which is cool, because most apps don't teach kanji at all) and I think katakana for the banana?
Yeah, one thing I've come to realize is that the people most likely to put you down or try and dissuade you, are often the people who either couldn't go through with something themselves or have some other sort of confidence issue and they're just projecting out of spite.
Once you develop a style which is "different" from the mainstream you can expect that the audience checking out your art is always going to be very polarized. My style looking the way it does has always brought unwanted critisism no one has asked for. For about decade and half I was received very mixed feedback. People who don't wanna hate mostly appreciate the huge amount of work I put into my drawing and just go with they don't like the style so much which is fine.
There was one incident which has hurt me for a long time and I even thought of canceling myself as an artist lol There was an anthology of comics and I happened to be picked to so the cover. I was glad that I'd be basically the "face" for the book and put back then as much effort as I could. NONE of the covers before me got basically only negative comments. Esp one comment sticked out from the crowd where the guy mentioned that children in pre-school draw probably better than me. I felt really hurt. I knew who were those people behind this. I wrote a private message and got back basically a statement that everything I do is bad 
It's a memory which sticks to me for years now and has still very bitter effect on me. It hurts always the most if you put your heart and soul into something, feel kinda proud and then you get smacked by people like that.
I use to get extremely harsh criticism, I realize I have a color blindness between subtle reds and greens. So people unintentionally would criticize my use of it. I didn't think it'd be just me until 3-4 years ago.
When I was a teenager, my art would be placed on a Snark website, where people would often point, laugh and make fun of my work at the time due to how my anatomy was since I was still trying to teach myself on how to draw bodies properly. My characters were colored drastically and I'd often use bold colors because it makes it easier for me to differentiate between characters n such. My writing wasn't /bad/ per say, but it was definitely something a teenager would do. But more often than not back then I was told, "Your art will never go anywhere, you suck, why are you so bad at XYZ", recently the harsh criticism I've gained is "Why are you so bad at backgrounds" in the middle of a call of my own comic discord, and it was someone legitimately shaming me out of anger and what felt like jealousy.
I´m really sorry to read. That´s really mean.
I don´t know how old you are now but I´m 47 and I had zero anatomy knowledge when
I was 40 and then started learning every day and I have been doing that for 7 years now
and it´s still really hard for me. It just takes a lot of time and anatomy, balanced / dynamic
figures is not easy
I prefer to not talk about my age :). There's been a lot of age shaming on the internet for people who are older than 20 lately for some reason, which also has caused others to criticize my artwork since 'I'm not good enough at the age of what I am'
I respect that and I wasn´t aware about the age shaming but I can imagine, just tried to give you a heads up
Yeah, I had some harsh critic not that long ago on my episodic God of Gears on Mythrill, but it just confused me more than anything. I know I'm not everyone's cup of tea and I'm fine with that. They left the review on episode 99... They read 99 episodes almost 99,000 words before they wrote this.... They found 1 typo and chose that hill to die on. It was corrected later, and I have no issue correcting typos if you let me know. But 99 episodes...
I can only really ever think of once, where a teacher said that my explicitly emaciated character (because they are a refugee living in a food crisis, this was and had to be explained as part of the assignment) was "too thin to be attractive" and made me change it for the assignment... He only did this for female characters (he made everyone change their female characters if they didn't look like they were from LoL).
Other than that I've had a lot of criticism, some harsh, some more kindly worded, some made me cry, but never really unjustified. There's always been something to gain from all the criticism I can remember even when it was difficult to swallow. The only really unjustified criticism is when it's given in direct contradiction to your stated goal and they have no explanation as to why your stated goal would be bad. Usually even criticism I disagree with or end up not taking I can see where they're coming from if they explain their reasoning and I gain a better understanding of their point of view.
That doesn't seem like criticism, more like this person was looking for a reason to release their anger and pedantry but found nothing wrong with your book for 99000 words (which is impressive). To be this disgusted with what is we can presume the first typo in the book says a lot more about them than the work.
Probably. I did reply and politely say there are other books/editor will fix typo thanks. They said they only gave my book a try because of free episodes. It's only free until the 30's I think (I will add more free as more seasons come out), but still that's only 1/3 of what they read. It was just confusing, and I think you're probably right. Each episode is about 750-1500 words hence the around 99000 words at that point.
The only one I can honestly think of came from a person with a certain attitude about them that was only focused on bringing others down. I'll admit to being a dum dummy and taking the bait when asked to post my work because I always do it when asked as I believe it to be somewhat shameful not to. But he was quick to point out the most minor of inconsistancies and was hilariously oblivious when it came to noticing the most very obvious of mistakes.
It did the opposite of what was intended, like testing the armor. I got an ego boost. The attempts at using critiques as insults don't really get by me since i'm all too familiar with it, instead it just made him appear frail and envious.
I guess I wouldn't consider anything he said harsh because I couldn't take anything he said seriously, but I think about it from time to time because I have honed a sort of knowledge of understanding the point of critique over the years. I am the furthest away now from thinking joe schmoe is qualified can give an artist an informed opinion or constructive criticism if they don't have that experience- because it has happened so many times, especially with this guy.
closed Apr 12, '23
