Browsing Reddit, I came across an extremely effective post about why some creatives respond very poorly to criticism, or even for those of us who respond well, why it can feel like an attack even though in your head you know it isn’t.
Criticism creates a mental conflict, but not always that kind.
Imagine if you wrote a final essay for your literature class, really
did your best on it, turned it in, and the teacher gave it 100%. Elated,
you take it home to show it off to your dad. Your dad says “You got a
D? You really should have tried harder.” You think WTF, you squint at
the paper and you’re pretty damn sure it says 100%, A+, Good work. But
your dad says “No, it clearly says 63%, D-, disappointing.” Then you
start to realize you’re living in some kind of warped reality where your
dad sees something on the paper completely different than what you see,
and you start wondering if you even know what’s real anymore.
This is what it feels like to get a criticism. It casts into doubt
your own definition of “good” which is probably the basis of your entire
creative process. It’s not even an issue of admitting weakness.
Admitting weakness is easy. What’s not easy is having your instincts
cast into doubt and not knowing whether to trust yourself anymore.
Do I trust this critic?
Do I trust myself? Some combination of the
two?
Do I stand by my decisions or not?
Do I make changes even though I
don’t understand how they will help?
Will the changes completely
undermine the artistic vision I wanted for this?
Will it defeat the
whole point I was going for?
I can’t feel the emotional reasoning behind
making changes, so how will I know if my change is for the better or
worse?
Is the critic just not the right audience for this? Is the critic
biased? Is the critic just having a bad day?
Should I ignore them
altogether, and just keep doing this for the people who like it?
Are my
fans wrong and simpleminded?
Am I even doing anything of significance?
Should I give up here?
These are all questions which artists ask
themselves when they receive criticism. They’re tricky, ambiguous
questions that don’t always have a correct answer. Many newcomers don’t
even know how to approach these questions, so criticism can often feel
like a personal attack even if both sides mean well.
That’s not to say that criticism itself is bad, but if you get a
better idea of what a criticism is doing psychologically to the
receiver, you might find yourself offering more effective, well-received
advice.
This ties in pretty closely to the advice I often give on this very blog, about how to deal with negative feedback; above all, trying not to dwell on it. Before you give any response, always take time to calm down.
This is a pretty universal problem that affects all creatives across all media. You’d have to be as emotionless as a stone to not fall prey to it occasionally.
Part of being a writer is building up creative confidence. This is the faith in yourself to be able to write something and put it out into the world, and to know, deep down, that this work has value, to you and to your audience.
You may, later, discover that this work isn’t all that good, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that it was a stepping stone to the person you are now, and the work you’re producing today.
Whenever you create a piece of work, make sure you internalise why you made that work. What it meant to you. It doesn’t matter if that work was a prize-winning literary novel or a scrawling of Vegeta from DBZ drawn in pencil on lined paper. If the work expresses something you can’t contain, something you have to get down on paper, over time you’ll develop the creative confidence to accept that even if it’s “bad”, that isn’t what’s important. The end result isn’t as important as the work itself.
Creative Confidence isn’t something you just develop overnight. It takes work. It’ll probably take a few embarrassing moments too, and those will be the hurtful types that’ll lead to “arguments you win in the shower” 5 years later. It takes different durations for different people. However, if you work at it, it’s something I believe is within the reach of everyone.
I know discourse is the word of choice in fandom nowadays but I kind of wish we would have stuck with “fandom wank” because it carries the implication that the anger involved culminated into effectively nothing and that the act was wholeheartedly masturbatory in nature rather than for any greater cause.
I saw this post about an hour after I saw a post that said, essentially, “There should be a word for that thing where [exactly describes ‘squeeing’].”
I feel like the time has come to produce something like this:
Squee: The noise you make when something is so good that all you can really do is squeak or squeal. A high pitched sound of delight, often accomanied by hugging yourself or others.
Squick: A fic/art/concept/topic that is repellent to you, so you reject association with it and instead retreat to your personal comfortable spaces- all the while remembering that someone else’s comfort is not your own.
YKINMKATO: Also called “kink tomato.” Abbreviation meaning “your kink is not my kink, and that’s okay.” Used to explain why you are rejecting art or fic brought to you by someone else. A solid mantra to recall instead of sending flames in people’s comments
Flames: The comment equivalent of anon hate.
AMV: “animated music video” or “anime music video.” Often, this is stylized to fit a specific fandom, such as a “PMV” (pony music video) in my little pony. May also be referred to as a lyricstuck.
Filk: Combination of the words “film” and “folk,” this is a music genre, to which “fan songs” and “fan parody covers” belong. If you don’t really understand what this means, take a quick listen to American Pie, then compare Weird Al Yankovic’s Saga Begins
BNF: Big name fan. You know that one person who is just so fuckign popular in your fandom? Their art is always on your dash, everyone knows their fics? Being spoken to directly by them is basically being noticed by everyone ever’s senpai? That’s what these people are called.
DL:DR; Not unliked the teal deer (tl;dr, or “too long, didn’t read”), DLDR means “don’t like? Don’t read!” It’s a reminder that you are under no obligation, ever, to expose yourself to uncomfortable (or, squicky), or potentially harmful (or, triggering), material. Not ever. If you don’t actively like something? It’s not worth your time. Skip it.
Gen: or “genfic” “genart” etc. Fan works which contain no or very little romantic content. Often these are styled after the canon material, and may be called “episodic” ro “slice of life” in addition.
Lemon: Work containing strong pornographic elements
Lime, or Citrus: Work containing mild or implicit pornographic elements
Sockpuppeting: The surprisingly common scenario of someone making a bunch of fake accounts/sideblogs to send themselves reviews or hate, to try to increase views or drama surrounding a work. The accounts they make are called Sockpuppets.
WAFF: Warm and fluffy feelings. A genre of fic that exists just to be therapeutically sweet. Nowadays, usually just called “fluffy.”
Schmoop: Take WAFF and somehow make it even more syrupy. You’ll know it when you see it.
Whump: Imagine if you will, a hurt-comfort fic. The comfort might be considered WAFF. The hurt? That’s the whump.
Wapanese: When white autors pepper their anime fanfic with random, tonally inappropriate japanese words.
Anthropomorfic: Nowadays we just call these “humanstuck” or “humanized AU.”
Wank: Wildly disproportionate drama that crops up because someone wrote/drew/did something that someone else didn’t like. Seriously, I cannot begin to express the fiascos that have come about from all this. Just… Just go look at this.
Plot bunny: Story ideas that you probably won’t ever actually deal with, but that multiply entirely out of control, creating huge worlds in your head that you’re probably not going to write. But hey! You might! And until then they make great sideblogs/askblogs/tumblr posts.
Casefic: Fanfics that try to create an episode-like feel for procedural and crime dramas, moster of the week shows, etc.
Jossed: When popular fan theories and fanon are addressed in the canon of a series, and whoops, turns out we were all very, very wrong.
Kripked: When popular fan theories and fanon are addressed in the canon of a show and, hot damn, we fucking called it.
Secret Masters: The people who run the websites/ communities/etc that we all do our fanning on. Less relevant now that we have things like tumblr, but when everyone had to run their own archival and social sites for each fandom, it was more important to pay our respects to the strange and powerful beings that brought us all together and gave us our fannish homes. Think the staff of AO3, for example.
Bashing: When a writer purposefully writes a specific character as a horrible, horrible person so that they can throw them out of the storyline, usually to allow their OTP to get together without trouble. Distinct from fridging in that it doesn’t require the character to die, but rather to be such a screaming harpy that they get rightfully removed from the main characters’ lives for being an abusive hell beast. Generally, a type of character hate. Be wary of people who bash women, queer people, and POC with consistency: they are not safe to be around.
‘Squick’ also has an alternate horrible meaning for Harry Potter fans who were in fandom a while back. Dear god.
Also:
Purple prose: Fic that is excessively flowery and complicated. Basically the “me, an intellectual” meme. If it has the phrase “cerulean orbs” you know it’s purple prose.
Beige prose: The opposite of purple prose. Basically, the plainest (and, if done wrongly, the most boring) type of prose.
R&R: Read & review. Back from when fic comments were called “reviews” and there was no such fucking thing as the kudos button.
*wipes a tear away* I feel so vintage.
Know your history children.
important history lesson
*stares out. breaks fourth wall*
Lemons.
For all you young’uns out there.
Also, I’ve seen people tag a ship-focused fic both M/M and Gen on AO3. Just because it also features friendships doesn’t make it Gen! If the main focus is a romantic relationship, do the Gen readers (which is not me, but they do exist) a favor and don’t tag it Gen.
^^^^^^^ THIS. filters are only useful if things are tagged correctly and i can’t search for non-ship fic when everything is tagged for both ship AND gen 😦
please for the love of god tag responsibly and don’t make people who are looking for non-romance fic suffer
I miss proper gen, and the expectation of it in specific places. I wish that was still a tag that followed specific conventions
I actually had a look at that fandom wank link, and it reminded me of another term that’s gone a bit by the wayside:
TOSsed: when an online community was kicked off a platform for (real or alleged) violations of the Terms of Service. This was not infrequently the result of complaints about queer content specifically.
Never forget why we needed an archive of our own, folks.
In corollary to the “If the drive is romantic don’t tag it gen” thing, if there are romantic relationships but they exist as total background nonsense (example: Character A asks her parents to put together a Princess AND Pirate theme birthday and wacky hi-jinks ensue trying to book a fairy princess actress and a schooner shaped bouncy house on the same day, both parents love each other but wish they’d share details like who ordered the cake) THAT’s gen, not het or slash. Don’t tag it as het or slash, you’ll drive away the pure-gen readers who actually want confetti-canon crisis fics.
That means free access to Photoshop CS2 – and that already has most of what you could ask for, really.
All you have to do is create a FREE ADOBE ID.
I am not sure about commercial use, but MAN. FUCKIN’ SWEET DUDE
Reblogging for the greater good.
I’m unlikely to pick it up as I honestly never use PS anymore, but here everyone who follows me. Free stuff.
oh wow this is perfect i was just lamenting that i’d have to buy creative suite for my new laptop WELP
Signal boost for any of my followers who need art programs!
The cs2 programs date back only a few years, and still have much of the functionality of today’s more modern ones. The differences between most of the versions are little more than slight modifications or additions of minor features, and UI changes. Go for it guys!!
** Permissionto post from their pages was granted by the artist Don’t remove credits & don’t repost/edit the art Please, rate and/or bookmark their works on Pixiv too **
based on the youtube footage i’ve seen, i believe the objective of the lindy hop is to attempt to murder your partner by shaking them out like a bed sheet. seems like…fun?
just thought about it, and here’s something we don’t talk abt in the bnha fandom.
aizawa. his quirk isn’t rly offensive, its more of a disabling type quirk. we know he attended UA with present mic, but how did he get in?
assuming aizawa faced the same trials as izuku and bakugo, he would’ve faced off with those giant robots yes? and bc those robots don’t technically have quirks like shinso, aizawa couldn’t possibly have used his quirk against them.
so then, two possible conclusions:
1, he went into general studies, or business, or support class before transferring over, or…
2, he defeated them without the use of his quirk at all, which after seeing the end of season one i have no doubt believing aizawa could actually do it
thoughts?
3rd possibility- He may have come to the UA by recommendation like Momo and Shouto did.
Or the test could have also changed over the years and the robots are a newer addition.
A Beautiful Monster 
