C.R.E.A.M

[coalcube]

Coal ruins exchanges around me - spitey spitey fic y'all. 

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Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I'm excited for requests to be visible for lots of reasons, but one is that I enjoy the "rank all the requests" game so much more than the 3T1L game. It's less about criticizing the requests and more about which ones turn my personal crank.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't mind showing up in 3T1L, but the ranking game always makes me wish I could opt out.

[(Anonymous)]

I mind showing up in 3T1L because I immediately become self conscious people will think it's me who posted it.

I didn't! I spent a while thinking about posting a 3T1L, but chickened out!

And then I got posted anyway so I get all the weird irrational embarrassment without even having overcome it and chosen it myself!

[(Anonymous)]

I usually solve this my responding and making it clear that I'm skipping my own. But I also don't mind generally if people think I posted it.

Ranking games frustrate me because people are judging my letter on completely subjective basis that are fairly irrelevant to me (and stuff that's impossible to change usually) but the criticism still smarts. In 3T1L, someone might say "this DNW is unclear, and that link is broken", which is helpful. Ranking games are like "I'd love this person because we share an id, but this other person's letter sucks because they ship my NOTP and their taste in kinks is terrible", and I don't see the point in that at all. I don't need randos to detail why they would or wouldn't want to treat me.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh yeah I hear. Letters pre assignments does feel more like actual constructive criticism, vs just opening up opportunities to be mean...

(I got ranked lowest on a ranking game for a prompt the ranker hated and thought was obnoxious to even request, and what I have to comfort myself with for that one is clearly someone else didn't agree because they wrote that exact prompt for me as a treat and it was AMAZING)

[(Anonymous)]

Ayrt

My letter was in the ranking game two years ago and there were two commenters. One's criticism amounted to "their prompts are too vague" and the other's was "those prompts are too specific; they have a clear idea what they want and it's not what I want to write". Both of them were equally critical about the single other requester and concluded that they wouldn't want to treat any of the requests in the fandom.

Like... thanks guys, good to know that! Don't know what I would have done without that information.

[(Anonymous)]

Every year we get a lot of people (or a loud subgroup of few people) who wonder why they don’t get treats. The ranking game exists to explain why people in their fandoms (who are on coal/meme) do or don’t treat them. Knowing why can help you change things up in your letter to imitate those who do get treats. It can also be confirmation that you’re out of step with a fandom and if you chose requesting A rather than B in a coin coss, maybe next year it’s worth requesting B.

If you still get treats/people get into your fandoms to be assigned to you/etc then coalie, while your ego may be weirdly bruised despite you swearing you don’t really care what they say, literally who cares? People who rank you highly clearly exist, they just aren’t here/didn’t play. People who are ranked highly and yet still don’t get treats can assume that their fandoms are full of authors who don’t really treat or who prefer to treat their other fandoms more.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

If you still get treats/people get into your fandoms to be assigned to you/etc then coalie, while your ego may be weirdly bruised despite you swearing you don’t really care what they say, literally who cares?

I never swore that I don't care what they say? Obviously, I do care, or else it wouldn't bother me.

And yes, I get treats, but that's not the point. The point is that "if this person enjoyed different things than they do, I would treat them" is not helpful whether or not they get treats in general. It's just one step away from picking a number of letters at random and saying "meh, I wouldn't treat any of them; I don't like their fandoms".

And it's kind of even worse when you have people say "amazing letter, I'm totally gonna treat them" and then you end up without treats because despite their best intentions, the coalie proclaiming their excitement didn't get around to it.

It's great if you like the ranking game, and obviously I can't stop people from discussing my requests, but I still wish there was a way to opt out.

[(Anonymous)]

It seems like you have a problem disentangling your personal self-worth from your requests and the casual determination that one person online wouldn’t write for them. Touch grass, etc.

The ranking game is consistently the least wanky and is inherently subjective. If someone felt amazing because they were ranked highly it would be similarly a touch grass moment. The point is to see the different things people like and look out for when treating and not to crown or shame. If you aren’t interested then ignore it.

One person saying “too vague” and the other saying “too specific” is a reflection on them, not you as a person or even your letter, and is the whole reason why people look forward to it every year. We enjoy seeing all the differences in what people look for and don’t like the critique of 3T1L or bad/good letters thread where subjective opinion is treated as objective or even desired/solicited.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

Maybe stop reading things into what I said. My "personal self-worth" isn't affected just because I think something is pointless and it annoys me.

Considering how defensive you get about other people hating something you enjoy, the "touch grass" advice is particularly hilarious.

We enjoy seeing all the differences in what people look for and don’t like the critique of 3T1L or bad/good letters thread where subjective opinion is treated as objective or even desired/solicited.

Cool. And others feel differently.

[(Anonymous)]

The ranking game exists to explain why people in their fandoms (who are on coal/meme) do or don’t treat them.

And one of the explanations is that the treater in question just doesn't vibe with that request, man! Which IMO is a nice perspective to have. It's not personal or about you, the person with the requests.

[(Anonymous)]

DC

See, the thing I like about the ranking game is it's clearly presented as being subjective and about the ranker, not the requesters, whereas the 3T1L game is just as subjective most of the time but pretends to be ~constructive criticism, possibly for the benefit of the requester. All the time's my letter has been "constructively critiqued," I've found the criticism to range from useless to bad.

I'm not going to critique your letter, because chances are good that whatever I dislike another person will like, and vice versa. I am, however, happy to daydream about treats I might like to write and think about what in a letter makes me want to treat or not.

[(Anonymous)]

I always think of the 3T1L threads as a way to self-rec with plausible deniability...