Don't Stop Coal Now!

[coalcube]

Tonight I'm gonna have myself a real coal time
I feel alive
And the exchange I'll turn it inside out, yeah
I'm floating around in agony
So, (don't stop me now)
(Don't stop me)
'Cause I'm having a coal time, having a coal time~


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Comments

Re: Who Got Coal

[(Anonymous)]

op

to be clear i don't think this was malicious at all and i didn't get a no homo vibe. no hate to my author, just mild disappointment ;)

Re: Who Got Coal

[(Anonymous)]

nc

Sympathies, coalie, I got something similar and I share your mild disappointment! It would have been such an easy thing to fix if the author had cared to do so.

Re: Who Got Coal

[(Anonymous)]

Your author didn't do anything that requires fixing. If you're going to be butthurt if you don't get your ship, you need to stick to exchanges where you match on ships.

Re: Who Got Coal

[(Anonymous)]

+1

Re: Who Got Coal

[(Anonymous)]

+2

Re: Who Got Coal

[(Anonymous)]

Right?! This is a character matching exchange, not a ship exchange. You requested A and B, and you were given A and B. Unless you DNWed A & B, which fairly certain the mods would discard as trapping your writer, your writer did nothing wrong. Optional details are optional for a reason.

Re: Who Got Coal

[(Anonymous)]

NC

Unless you DNWed A & B, which fairly certain the mods would discard as trapping your writer

I can't imagine that they would, as long as writing the characters solo isn't also a DNW. As other comments have noted above, if the recip DNWs A&B but is okay with A/B or solo-A or solo-B, the writer isn't being trapped into anything. Since the exchange is OR matching, the writer was already offering to write solo-A or solo-B when they offered both of those characters.

It doesn't sound to me like the writer did anything wrong in this case, but I do think the recip could DNW friendship fic for this pairing in the future.

Re: Who Got Coal

[(Anonymous)]

Yuletide is AND matching, coalie.

Re: Who Got Coal

[(Anonymous)]

DNWing what you match on is iffy at best.

Re: Who Got Coal

[(Anonymous)]

CYRT. Apparently my meaning wasn't clear. This is an and matching exchange, which means if I request "A" and "B", you had to have offered "A" and "B" or All. If I then say, "I want only A/B, and A & B is a hard DNW," that's trapping my author, since they didn't sign up to write A/B, they signed up to write "A" and "B".

Re: Who Got Coal

[(Anonymous)]

Actually they signed up to write A alone, B alone, or A & B.

So yes, "you must include both A and B, but DNW A&B" would be boxing in. "But DNW A&B, but gen focusing on A is good" is not trapping the author into writing something they didn't offer.

Re: Who Got Coal

[(Anonymous)]

+1

Re: Who Got Coal

[(Anonymous)]

CYRT - Ach, you are 100% correct, and I have no idea why I said YT was OR matching. My half-asleep brain was apparently interpreting "OR" from the perspective that the *writer* was offering to write any of the characters they offered, and was never guaranteed to match on all of them, so in theory the writer had to be willing to write just A or just B. But yeah, that's not "OR matching," obviously.

/clearly should not be participating in coal threads on this little sleep

Re: Who Got Coal

[(Anonymous)]

Yuletide is not and has never been OR matching, and even if it was, OP would still be a shitty recip. You can't DNW half the characters you requested unless your writer writes you the ship you want, which is what OP intended - they only wanted A/B or solo A, not solo B or A&B.

The only bright side is that since Yuletide isn't OR matching, they couldn't be matched to someone who only offered B.

Re: Who Got Coal

[(Anonymous)]

DA

Mild disappointment isn't being butthurt. If you expect your recip to worship the ground you walk on, maybe you're the one who should reconsider their exchange involvement. (Or, you know, actually write what they say they want instead of going ODAO.)

Re: Who Got Coal

[(Anonymous)]

They called it coal (or at least posted in the "who got coal" thread). I would not consider that mild butthurt. IMO "coal" is fic that's actively bad in some way.

Re: Who Got Coal

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

I guess it's a matter of definition? To me, ODAO fic is automatically coal.

Re: Who Got Coal

[(Anonymous)]

How do you know it was ODAO? Totally possible they carefully included many of the recips likes or prompts. Just not the pairing.

Re: Who Got Coal

[(Anonymous)]

SA

FWIW, I've got coal once in 17 years of doing Yuletide (and that wasn't ODAO).

Re: Who Got Coal

[(Anonymous)]

ayrt

I guess so. I would call that an extremely broad and more or less useless version of the word.

Re: Who Got Coal

[(Anonymous)]

No, that's a weird way of looking at it. ODAO means anything you didn't specifically prompt for, which could be something you like even more than your prompts.

Re: Who Got Coal

[(Anonymous)]

Calling it coal and acting like the writer must just not care because they obviously should have known that writing the two characters that were requested was bad is more than mild disappointment.

Re: Who Got Coal

[(Anonymous)]

+1 the weird part here is acting like it's obvious to everyone that if someone asks for A/B they are implicitly DNWing A&B when in fact the general consensus is closer to ship-goggleable A&B being a fine way of navigating such a request for authors who can't write the ship as long as there's no obnoxious "no-homo" going on.

Re: Who Got Coal

[(Anonymous)]

+2

Re: Who Got Coal

[(Anonymous)]

Yup. Author did a good faith effort. Yuletide is not a ship exchange, gen is always a possibility