One Wank After Another

[coalcube]

A blank assignment is a funny thing, isn't it? When you have it, you don't appreciate it, and when you miss it, it's gone.

Wednesday 10 December: Default deadline (9pm UTC)
Wednesday 17 December: Assignment deadline (9pm UTC)
Wednesday 24 December: Main collection works reveals (9pm UTC)
Thursday 25 December: Madness collection works reveals (9pm UTC)
Thursday 1 January: Author reveals, end of event (9pm UTC)

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Comments

Re: Unpopular Opinion Time

[(Anonymous)]

DC

The thing is, you can put what's most iddy to you (down to the most trivial details like what pet names you want your OTP to use) in your likes or in your DNWs. Either way, the information is there. If the author wants to write that, they probably will, right? Why isn't that enough?

And now we're back to something I personally find more interesting as a talking point, yay!

I think my own requests are like this - tldr

- I have a very short list of DNWs, and my prompts are a few cheerful paragraphs rather than likes. And this works for me. However, I am probably ticking other boxes some coalies find undesirable. My system works for me because I care less about getting a gift than successfully completing a writing challenge. There are things I don't put in my DNWs that would probably ruin a gift for me, but I focus my DNWs on things I see as a real risk. If I get something else unpleasant (hasn't happened yet) either I roll with it or I would assume it's an author with extremely different ideas to me; either I would get their bizarrely weird edgy take OR I'd get the very bland thing they could write if I'd thrown a DNW book at them. Eh. Some coalies (or maybe just ffa nonnies) would say I'm being unfair to my writer by potentially setting them up to write something in good faith I'd dislike. Call me when it happens.

-I think it's hard for people to talk persuasively about what they like, and people who have mastered this skill underestimate how difficult it is for others

-When people get awful fic or see awful fic in the wild they often add DNWs to protect themselves and so DNWs seem to accrue to people who've been doing exchanges for a while. Meanwhile, it's seen as risky to shorten your DNW list because it can signal that you now welcome something you previously forbade

-It's hard to generalize the right DNW strategy because it's so dependent on the quirks of people with whom you share fandoms.

Re: Unpopular Opinion Time

[(Anonymous)]

CYRT

Those are good answers, though I have to admit it was a bit of a leading question on my part. "I'm putting it in the DNWs because it's an easier way to make sure I get what I want" is an understandable motivation, but the part I didn't want to say for fear of sounding too judgy is that I think it's a bit rude.

Although, maybe this is inconsistent of me but I don't mind anyone with long DNW lists when it comes to smut, because even tiny details can have so much impact to whether a smut fic is hot or just completely unreadable to you. But when it comes to more neutral or less emotionally charged elements, I do have trouble believing that (like other coalie said), something like a brief OC appearance is a genuine gift enjoyability dealbreaker.

Re: Unpopular Opinion Time

[(Anonymous)]

CYRT

The coalie who finds OCs an unpleasant distraction from the characters they want to be completely absorbed in seems like a good example for this discussion, actually. Personally, I think I'd react better to "I can't get enough of these two, please spend as much as possible of your story with a laser focus on how they feel about each other and act towards each other," than "DNW: OCs, unrequested characters."

Re: Unpopular Opinion Time

[(Anonymous)]

/that coalie

Phrasing it positively is nice, sure, but "I can't get enough of these two, please spend as much as possible of your story with a laser focus on how they feel about each other and act towards each other" doesn't actually say "I absolutely don't want any OCs in the fic", so I'd be sacrificing clarity here. And I might get a perfectly good faith fic from an author writing me my faves just the way I love them and include OC mentions because I didn't explicitly say that I don't want them, which would suck both for them and for me (and it would be my fault because I wasn't being clear).

Re: Unpopular Opinion Time

[(Anonymous)]

CYRT

Sure. Though if we were genuinely workshopping a positive phrasing because you wanted one, we'd obviously want to polish it a bit.

I guess the part that I'm still not getting is: if you direct your author to just absolutely wallow in A reacting to B and B reacting to A, and they make a good faith attempt at it, and there are mentions of OCs existing ... that truly ruins a gift for you?

That's still the part where I'm just - huh.

Re: Unpopular Opinion Time

[(Anonymous)]

CYRT

I mean, depending on how much I love the fic otherwise and how big the OC appearance is, I would just copy and paste the fic into word and delete the OC scene, and it would be okay. But it would negatively affect the initial reading experience.

Re: Unpopular Opinion Time

[(Anonymous)]

CYRT

And it's specifically OCs not unrequested canon characters? Based on what you said in reaction to the two short examples elsewhere, I got the sense that you aren't nearly as distracted by the appearance of unimportant characters you know. But if an OC shows up, you overanalyze 'am I supposed to care about this character as a character or will they continue as a mechanism'.