coaltide | Coal All The Way

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2019

Coal All The Way

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Okay? Doing it on purpose is actually worse. Matching criteria are the main thing that's not a suggestion here. You match on A and B, you write about A and B.

How? If coalie liked the fic and it didn't break any rules, what is the actual thing the mods are supposed to do with this information? What is the practical outcome of telling them that you're hoping for?

Mods to author: "Hey, looks like you're unaware of this rule! This is the rule!"
Author: can't pretend they didn't know next time
Mods: check that author's fic immediately at deadline next time, send pinch hit if required

Yeah, except that both characters are in it. The other's just in a very small role. There is no rule that says that both characters have to have equal screentime.

Should both characters appear in 100% of the fic? 75%? Could Character A appear in 60% of the fic and Character B be in 40%? 66/33? 75/25? At what point would you report the author for not understanding how the rule works?

DA

In the story in question, doesn't one character appear in basically a no dialogue quick walk-on, though, so it's like a 99.9/1% ratio? Or he has one line and disappears or something? I don't understand how it's so contentious to say that in "and" matching, that's not how it should be done.

It seems possible the author didn't know the rule and tossed the character in there thinking they were being magnanimous by including the other requested one ever so briefly, or they knew the rule but didn't want to write that character and thought if the one showed his face for half a second, nobody'd blink.

By now, somebody needs to find that fic. Because I want to see this percentage with my own eyes. For all we know, OP exaggerated the lack of character B.

Yep. I come down on the side of "a quick walk-on is not acceptable," but that's for an actual quick walk-on. Maybe this isn't. I find it a little hard to believe that the recip still liked the story much if it didn't include the characters they expected to be in it. And if they did like it, maybe they weren't that invested in having them both anyway, so why worry about it?

+ 1

Also my personal opinion is that the minimum ratio should be at least 20% for the least important of the requested character. 10% is pushing it and single digits the mods should look into.

I may be baised since I only like shipfic so most of my fic and gifts are equal or near equal in screentime but if someone asked for a gen day in the lives of Big Bird & Ernie, you can’t just have 15 scenes or Burt and Ernie running errands with one 50 word paragraph where Big Bird runs into them at the bank and asks how they’re doing.

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(Anonymous) - 2019-12-26 01:38 (UTC) - Expand

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(Anonymous) - 2019-12-30 02:16 (UTC) - Expand

Think of it this way. A fic is tagged with both Ernie and Bert. As a Bert fan, would you be disappointed in how small Bert's role is?

....it depends, do I have a size kink for Bert?

For me, I would report if character B was in 20% or less of the fic. In this case, it's really egregious.

Coalie should have had in their letter “you don’t have to use both characters”. Coalie clearly knows that they didn’t, and if they weren’t so cool this really could have ruined someones Yuletide and ended up in more work for the mods.

Yes it’s lucky this worked out fine but don’t you see that just because one person can drive 200 MPH and not get in an accident doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be speed limits? The absolute worst thing this author will get is a heads up warning. Letting the mods know about issues before they happen saves authors and recips. These are the same mods that will mediate questions from treat writers, obviously they are going to be open and encourage these types of mod alerts.

This ice-cold take. You're making the weird assumption the author serially goes around only writing one character in people's requests, rather than considering that maybe coalie's prompts just kind of sucked and they were doing their best.

It doesn’t matter if the prompts sucked, that is what ODAO. You still can’t turn AND matching into an OR fic.

The flip side of this wank is the Die Hard fic that was all about John’s wife and not the requested John/Matt ship.

Well if Matt was mentioned in passing, god forbid the recip mention it to a mod, I guess, because he's not required to actually have a line or anything to count as being in the fic.

Sometimes I just don't know.

But it's not an "or." That's the point. One character is there in a very small role. The requirements are met. It's a technicality that means you're maybe not getting quite what you wanted, but it's still one that A) you know the mods aren't really going to give a shit about and B) that you know doesn't really matter in the scheme of things. So really, you just want to have a tantrum.

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(Anonymous) - 2019-12-26 00:51 (UTC) - Expand

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(Anonymous) - 2019-12-26 01:16 (UTC) - Expand

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(Anonymous) - 2019-12-26 01:23 (UTC) - Expand

Maybe next year I'll go around writing 49 treats with only one character requested just for the lolz.

Yes, a course of action that produced a fic their recipient likes is worse. A+ reasoning skills.

The reason why they broke the rule doesn't in any way change the resulting fic.

You don't seem to be grasping that they didn't break the rule. Check the Yuletide rules. Nothing says that every character has to be a main character with equal attention.

Except both characters are featured in the fic, just not equally, and the recipient liked the fic. Technically no rules were broken, and more importantly, the recipient got a fic they admit they like.

Do you think telling the mods costs money or something?

If you’re sure the author did nothing wrong then the mods will smile and say thanks to the recip and do nothing. The author will have no idea it happened.

Why are you so against this happening when you’re sure the author is in the clear???

Because I think that it's churlish and shitty for coalie to do this for a fic she likes.

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