18 / 56
Sep 2022

next, they're gonna ask if you've ever been on a date or something. Then try to dig up all the personal stuff about you and mock you for it. Best part is that it doesn't really matter.

I say fuck em. Honestly here and webtoons. Bl does thrive so I say. Let the haters seeve whilst seeing you thrive as an artist and writer.

Dont ever let them get you down. It comes from a place of jealously and at the end of the day small minded crabs in a bucket mentality. In other words I mostly see that vitriol from losers :joy:.

I never really gotten a critique that honestly maybe me upset... I guess other than "draws my characters too androgynously" a long time ago

Yeah.

I'm a woman and bi, and most of my relationships have been with other women. I've only dated a couple of guys ever. I did write a GL once but the only thing it attracted was a bunch of horny guys complaining for action or asking what page the sex scenes were on so they could skip to it (and there weren't any sex scenes). It really didn't attract any other sort of reader. So that was a massive turn off for me. Still, I wanted to write romance and my experience with 'straight' romance is so limited, it was awkward for me to try (and I did try). So finally I went with a BL because I felt BL relationships were a little more similar to what I was used to. It's probably weird sounding, but that was just more comfortable for me.

There are pervs in the BL community as well, but I just feel like it's a bit less toxic. It's definitely gotten better over the years.

But the homophobia is really hard to handle sometimes.

Ironically I had NO idea how popular BL was until I started publishing my own story, lol. I starting looking into the BL fandoms/communities just because it was becoming the only place I felt safe to share it, at first. You know when you're in that early stage where you're nervous to share your work and how people will judge you. I'm a little more jaded now, but there's still a pretty big population of people who will automatically insult, downvote, and otherwise attack your work if they realize it's BL. I've deleted a number of comments like "ew gay" and I barely have any comments to begin with.

C'est la vie, we must continue on.

Yeah, I can honestly relate though for different reasons. I'm an ace woman and the further something is from my own experiences in terms of relationships the easier it is to write. I can more easily detach myself from BL than from hetero or GL romance stories. Now it's become easier to write those as well as I get more experience with the genre but BL was and still is a subgenre that feels safe to explore romance genre tropes in and such.

Very well said. I think that's probably why it attracts a lot of women in general as readers, but I can only guess. Either way, ever since I started exploring the genre I've found some really amazing stories, so I hope it continues to grow.

That’s a def yikes. Being flirtatious doesn’t equate to being a rapist so I don’t know where the person got that idea. Also what someone finds triggering or offensive Varys from person to person so in general, I wouldn’t really listen to that type of criticism

Not sure how "weird" this is as a feedback, but I got a character design critique about a year ago and the stand out line was that the character looked like a "supporting character." Which I thought was funny, especially since the character was the MC, and sort of an off way to critique a design, at least to me. And some of the 'fixes' they offered really solidified to me that context is very important in critiquing a character design.

There was no strange critique, but on another platform I got a weird review. The reviewer liked my novel, but what was strange was that they completely made up their own story about what is gonna happen XD Like I have my two main chars and my genre is BL, so yeah that these are the ones to become a couple I thought was clear, but nope not to them. They planned a huge dramatic scenario about my MC will get together with some villain that hasnt shown up yet and this isn't gonna end well and so my novel won't have fluff in it and wont have a good ending. (all not true XD) That was what they stated in the review after like uhm just a few chapters I had posted at that time.

I honestly didn't know whether to laugh or cry XD

This isn't a critique I've gotten from other people, but I have "Baby Got Back" syndrome. I can't tell you the number of times I've had to redraw character's hindquarters because I accidentally gave them a fat booty.

Someone didn't much care for my series. They found it too childish but they described it as it being for hyperactive 6 year olds. I told them that later on my comic goes into depression and trauma (plus the swearing), I later found out they only read the first 10 pages and a lot of their criticisms were fixed later on in the series. When I told them this, they suggested deleting half of my series and uploading it as a separate series. I was 200 pages into my series, and it seems so unnecessary to try to reupload 100 pages especially if the later pages make call backs.

I heard there are people who will delete their series and reupload it hoping it will get more tracken the 2nd time. Yeah, stop recommending this to people. Focus more on promoting your series.

The strangest critique is the one that made me a better writer and what MADE this critique weird was that it was supposed to be a negative.

So, I shared my writing and this person said my script was "too 90's".

TOO 90's. Like it was from that era. WHAT. But... then I realized I was really into films like Predator 2 and Robocop so I just... ignored him and embraced it. This helped me embrace movies that people THINK are horrible.

But... how is your story... feeling like it's in a certain era.... a negative? I've heard compliments from anime where people are like "THIS IS SO 2000'S! I LOVE IT!" "OHHHH THE SYNTH! THIS IS SO 80'S! I LOVE IT!"

One of my 'friends' who is planning a fantasy series took a look at some of my shorts. He's the kind of person who would call themselves a snoot, and grammar has always been a weak point for me.

Anyway ~
He gets back to me and instead of proofreading help I get a lecture about how apparently short stories aren't real stories, like how a teaser trailer isn't a movie - it's just there to whet the appetite for the real story.
So yeah he ended saying that I had 'promise' and let him know when I actually started writing.

I have not brought up writing around him since.

What a bastard! Your writing is amazing man. It's really haunting and interesting and they're on some gatekeeping nonsense.

I don't receive many complains that I could call weird, most of the time is critiques over small things that usually are even just minusculous even on the same critique but except for one that I've received some time ago

It was literally what happened to darthmongoose

It happened with a female character of mine as well who is not very femenine either, funny thing tho, the Critique about the Story was supposed to be about the story, but that lasted almost... two lines? Then there was a long pharagraph narrating from the experiences of the person detecting trap characters in anime, about how naturally "people label characters and need to categorize them properly", or well, very rodundant and almost beating around the bush, oh wait, according to them I was getting this completely wrong

To this day I don't get much what they meant by the critique, except that after an agitated exchange they claimed "Oh no, I just wanted to say that your character was confusing" or that "I was just letting you know in case you didn't realize it" but to me it felt that they tried to be very carefully probably to avoid problems, to tell me to draw bigger breasts or curvy bodies.


Another weird critique that I had was of some random dude on Webtoon Spanish complaining over Scarlet Society, about how crappy as a story it was, that he could do such a better story and that I shouldn't waste my time with it, that my art was so much better for such a horrible story and the guy was like that for at least 5 episodes and really started to annoy me. He went about how he could write such a better story with just his feet and a lot of ridiculous babbling. Even, this guy was so inept that he didn't catch that some of the characters of Scarlet were homages to already existing characters of shows that the author, the previous artist and I like, same for other references that I did but according to him "the author doesn't know how to create characters and so she steals them" which is totally wrong, since ever since I took over I've modified the original designs to make them look more unique and different from one another (And it literally shows from chapter 4 to chapter 7, not a big gap)

I literally told him that I'm an artist for hire, and if he has the cash I can draw his story after all I don't say no to long term paid gigs, but if he only knows how to complain but doesn't show a portfolio or anything of the like is the same as bluffing, that if he was so jealous that no artist partnered with him was probably because his story wasn't that great or his personality was really scaring people away. Still waiting for the famous script that I MISSED :weary::ok_hand:

Tho, he admitted being jealous lmao but then proceeded to call me ignorant and that I would regret it eventually :upside_down:

Before I started writing my novel, I'd write shorter stories with the same characters and post them separately. In one story, a character mistakes a nonbinary character for another gender. The nonbinary character's friend tries to correct him on it, but their other friends are like "Shh, don't out them." This is one of the first scenes in the story.

I got a comment saying that I shouldn't have put that scene so early on, because (paraphrasing) "Most people aren't going to care for pronouns in the beginning of their sci-fi story." Looking back on this, I think part of it is a misunderstanding. I wrote that scene knowing it wasn't meant to be the introduction to these characters. This commenter wouldn't have known that.

I was going to defend the comment more, but looking back at what I wrote, I think it's fine. That character's pronouns weren't even the thing that was being corrected, so I don't know where that came from. Anyway, I'm probably still going to include that scene when I get to that point in my novel.

Yeah, it's a weird thing. Some readers get very angry if a character doesn't have strong gender presentation perfectly in line with their gender identity.
It's almost like they need to know the gender of a character first, so they can decide up-front things like: "Can I allow myself to think this character is cute/hot, or should I manage and suppress my feelings to make sure I only categorise them as cool/aspirational?"

It's like... "Mate... it's a drawing. If you're horny about the drawing, you're horny about the drawing. Your weird hangups about your sexuality are none of my business. I'm not going to make her more femme-presenting just to assuage your terror at your attraction to a lady who has some boyish elements to her presentation bringing you close to the realisation that you might actually be a bit more attracted to men than you want to admit to yourself."

A lot of people would be a lot happier and a lot cooler if they just acknowledged that they're a little bit Bi/Pan and that it's pretty normal and very commonplace, and just freaking chilled out a bit. :sip: