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2025

Notices Yuletide

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Recip said that it was a rewording of their prompt and contained character bashing.

Earlier in the thread people who tracked it down said parts of the fic were directly lifted from the request word for word (not just 'following the prompt to write the fic') and that one of the characters had been made a flatly evil caricature.

I haven't read it because I don't know the fandom so I can't verify.

"parts of the fic were directly lifted from the request word for word"

I've received gifts like this before. It's a skill issue by the writer. It's a disappointing gift but if I got an EPH for every disappointing gift I've received I'd nearly double my gift count. "Thank you for writing for me" is a complete sentence.

Hey, adastreia. Try rewording what you've said better so you don't make it sound so obviously like yourself.

Hey aurae. Go jump in a lake.

Oh, aurea accusations are here!

DC

It's also not a sentence you have to write in response to a gift you think is that terrible. EPH or not, rejection is a viable option.

The insistence (both from the mod and you) that the recip should thank the author and move on is weird af

If nearly 100% of your gifts have been disappointing I don't know why you'd even sign up to get them. That's just stupid.

Also it's "x is a complete comment". Nobody says comments need to be complete sentences lol.

I'm ngl, with the way some people talk about disappointing gifts and the rate they get them, I wonder if they're just that unlucky, if I'm just that lucky, or if they have very strict preferences they don't express. Sure, not every gift is a transcedental experience, but less than 10% of my total gifts have been actually bad.

I wouldn't say most of my gifts are disappointing because my expectations are mid and I generally get mid (that's what mid means after all)!but they're not transcendental for sure. "Good" is a toss-up.

I don't think I have super specific requirements but I read really widely so "good enough to reread" requires more than just "competent fic in my favorite pairing". There's always actually good fic being posted somewhere else.

I sign up because I like writing to prompts and if I don't have the deadline and the specific other named person I will disappoint if I don't, I don't do it. ADHD is fun. The chance of getting a great gift I really like is like a bonus gacha prize, like somebody mentioned up thread.

(Yes, I could pinch hit, but in the exchanges I enjoy, early pinch hits I can write don't last, and I don't have the time to sit haunting the pinch hits. Plus I like sharing my prompts and seeing if they do inspire a good fic.)

The people who are constantly disappointed and also seem to only do exchanges for the gifts... Idk. Some people just enjoy having something to complain about.

Most of my gifts have been bad, imo, but that's because I'm very picky about fic quality and you can't DNW bad or clunky writing. My gifts are on average better than the fics I find when searching AO3 for my ships, but that's not saying much. This is why I mostly stick to pinch hitting or treat writing.

I guess, if I'm rating them objectively, a lot of my gifts are bad, but that's only because most fic writers are bad, in general. They've almost all been earnest attempts at incorporating my likes and prompts and creating a story I'll enjoy, so that's enough for me. Plus, looking at the stories most participants like and rec... let's just say that I'm not in exchanges because I trust my fellow authors' discerning taste.

My gifts have improved dramatically since I started baiting my favorite writers in tiny fandoms to the point where most of my gifts are now very good to excellent.

Before that, it was the Wild West out there.

I just had a look through my gifts, roughly 300 of them over the many many years I’ve been doing exchanges, and came up with some stats:

~1%: so bad I refused them. I didn’t ask for an EPH, technically they filled the letter of my request by writing the characters I’d asked for but there was nothing I liked about the stories and a lot I hated.

~10%: Disappointing. Didn’t hate these, but there wasn’t a lot to like either. Badly written, lots of typos, characters felt off.

~60%: Pretty good! Enjoyed them as I read them, left an enthusiastic comment. Basically, I had a nice time but I never really thought about them again.

~25%: Stunning! Loved them a lot, left enthusiastic comments, and in some cases have left multiple comments as I’ve gone back and reread them. These get reread, recced, and thought about a lot.

~4%: Incandescent. Perfection. Still talking and thinking about them years down the line. Downloaded and saved in my “favorites” folder. Reread often because I think about them so much. Loved and treasured.

I think on the whole I’ve been pretty lucky, or maybe I’m just easy to please?

Ooh, that's the dream!

You made me curious! Not enough to go back through my entire gifts page but, of the last 25:

* they are split exactly 50/50 whether I even remembered getting them at all (this may have as much to do with other shit going on at the time as fic quality. but it does say something about how much I care about what's on my gifts page...)

* Of the assignment-fills:
3 were very bad and only just barely not EPH-qualifying, but they aren't DNWs and I think they were all sincere attempts so I didn't refuse them.
6 were bad but not standout bad.
11 were perfectly fine, enjoyed them, left a sincerely enthusiastic comment, but not standout in any way or enough my thing that they're any sort of favorites (but some of them *were* deeply beloved by other people so I consider that a good outcome anyway).
4 are favorites.
1 was transcendentally good.

So the odds of something really good are about 1 in 5, the odds of something notably bad are a bit under 2 in five, the odds of fine but unremarkable are a bit over 2 in 5, and well over half were fun to get. Not quite as good as yours but not super far off. But definitely not high enough that it would be worth doing exchanges if I cared about getting a good fic enough to give a crap about a replacement for a bad one.

My own attempt:

In an effort to eliminate bias due to things like "I duped a really good writer into writing for me multiple exchanges in a row", I rolled a number to randomly pick 1-2 gifts off each page of my gifts and looked at 10 gifts over multiple pages.

OK, just ok: 2
Decent fill but missed the mark, will not be rereading: 2
Good: 5
Transcendental: 1

Not bad, I guess!
I have received pretty terrible gifts but I guess not often enough to be caught in a semi-random sampling of ten works.

I did this version also:

Terrible, contemplating refusing it: 1
Bad: 2
Pretty good but I won't reread: 2
Good, I have reread/relooked at them and will do so again multiple times: 3

I have no memory of receiving this gift: 2

Fun exercise! For me:

5% Bad, but never EPH- or rejection-worthy bad.
15% Meh. Didn't quite hit. Mostly technically sound but ODAO.
40% Good! Same as you. Left happy, glowing comments, but probably won't reread.
25% Excellent. Have reread and recced.
15% Exceptional. Still think about them years on, have written or considered writing sequels to, have befriended the author due to the fic, have printed out snippets for my "writing inspiration" wall, etc. 15% feels like a lot of weight on this end of the scale, so either I have really good luck, or am just accidentally baiting great writers. Notably, all but a couple of these have been treats, so I'm leaning towards the latter case. It probably also helps that my fandoms tend to be smaller and older.

Part of me wants to do this exercise but I'd have to do it logged out and from another browser. Rather than rejecting and dealing with anons poring over why I rejected/if I deserved an EPH, I muted the authors or added the titles of the fics to AO3 Savior. I can't even see a third or so of my gifts which was the entire point of making them vanish.

. ...well I guess we know you're at ~30% bad enough to reject at least. Are you really unlucky or just much much pricklier than everyone else in this thread?

Re: Mod Cabal

(Anonymous) - 2025-09-28 23:17 (UTC) - Expand

I got a gift recently that I thought was pretty bad only for it to vanish on reveals because I had already muted the author. I laughed.

dc

It really, really depends on the fandoms you're in. If your fandom is more obscure and/or skews older, you have a better chance of getting good gifts. If you're in a fandom full of teenagers, antis, and other wankers, best of luck to you.

There are a handful of writers and artists across my fandoms who have made wonderful gifts for me over the years and I always appreciate my luck when they make something for me. Most of my gifts aren't by those people. Most of the writers in my fandoms are mid at best, and they're not going to do their best when they're signed up for five exchanges due in the same two week period. A lot of what I've received over the years is first draft crap with tenses all over the place, misspelled main character names, and stories that end at wordcount in the middle of the sentence. Once I got a gift that literally just restated five of my prompts with enough padding to get to 1001 words; they called it a Five Times and posted. It makes the times I've received something well-written, in-character, and about the characters I asked for all the more precious.

That's beside the point. Literally nobody in this whole wanky thread has said that the EPH request definitely deserved an EPH. If I were the mod in that situation, without reading the fic but from the way it's been described, I agree I would probably come down on the side of not granting an EPH.

The whole drama is about the way the mod handled their rejection of the EPH, including statements like "Did they think I wouldn't check lol" to other mods on a shared server.

Deliberately or not, you're moving the goalposts and that's really tiring.

Not word for word. More like a clumsy rephrasing, which isn't surprising since the gifter is not a good writer.
Not going to put the recip on blast by sharing the fic but... I read the fic and it didn't deserve an EPH. That said, it doesn't mean the recip deserved to be mocked and insulted in a server of 100+ members. That was just shitty and disrespectful.

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