coaltide | One Wank After Another

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2025

One Wank After Another

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.

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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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Yuletide Discord for Hippos & Exchanges After Dark for namespace ~~drama~~ 18+ discussion.

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I've received amazing art gifts. I don't like getting "bad" art gifts where I think "I could have drawn that" or "I don't actually know what I'm seeing". I don't know if tracing is ethically bad or not. However, I don't like getting art where it looks weird and then later someone who knows more about art tells me that that's because the artist traced something and didn't really understand what they were tracing.

It seems hard to be an artist in an exchange. It seems like it takes far more work to make good art than it takes me to write a 1k fic, but also, I don't want to ask for art and get really disappointing art.

I think this is about how I feel. I'd be totally fine with a sketch type of art, or pencil art, or whatever else is wank du jour, as long as it was done by someone who was about as skilled at art as most exchange participants are skilled at writing (which is to say, at a pretty solid amateur level). I rarely find people giving writing that is technically bad in the way that people give technically bad art; I think most bad bfe writing gifts come from being bad fanfiction (characterization, etc) and not bad writing, simply because 1000 words isn't long enough to get into truly bad pacing or plotting snafus.

I rarely find people giving writing that is technically bad in the way that people give technically bad art; I think most bad bfe writing gifts come from being bad fanfiction (characterization, etc) and not bad writing, simply because 1000 words isn't long enough to get into truly bad pacing or plotting snafus.

You say this like someone who's never received a gift from one of the infamous badficcers. I've received a lot of terrible fic that's basically unreadable. Bad art is just eh pretty colors, thanks, and I can move on with my life. Bad fic makes me wish I could grab it, cover it with red pen, and give it back with "Corrections expected by end of day tomorrow" at the top.

I still wish that that time Obsessive_Reader7 posted a Heart Attack gift with a note saying constructive criticism welcome, I'd taken them up on it. It would have taken hours, but maybe things would be different?

But there's not many people who give that kind of bad fic, and they are immediately infamous for it.

+1

The word 'most' was in there for a reason!

Bean10 is the only badfic writer I'd say who really compares with someone giving elementary school level scribbles.

I'd put biblioscribler in the mix. Giveb was clearly a social experiment of some kind in both art and writing.

karrenia_rune is in there, too.

It's my feeling that tracing is ethically bad in some of the same ways that AI is bad. If the dataset for AI was comprised entirely of works that were in the public domain or released under CC0, and you specifically had to opt in to having your stuff scraped for training, a lot of the objections would go away. (You'd be left with the workers' rights concerns about people being automated out of a job, which to me is personally more pressing, but also isn't unique to AI.) If you're tracing a stock image that allows it, your own reference photo, etc, you are ethically in the clear, but will probably run into problems now or down the line where you don't understand what you're drawing.

I can draw, but I never offer to match on art requests because you're right, it takes more time and effort (for me, at least) to make an art piece I would feel good about putting into an exchange.

It blew my mind when one of the long-exchange mods, I think it was fffx, asked if they should reduce the art minimum for the equivalent of 10k, and it was an artist saying no, keep it at 40 panels for a comic.

Forty panels is roughly seven pages and seven pages is roughly a hundred, hundred and ten hours of drawing. Ten thousand words is maybe fifteen hours. These do not seem equivalent effort.

I also think the art minimums are badly calculated, but "Ten thousand words is maybe fifteen hours" sounds wild to me. 50 hours, maybe.

You only write three words a minute?

I could write a pretty decent 10K word fic in a day, but only if I had been thinking about writing it for like a month before hand. That's like a fifth of a word a minute on average.

CYRT

Not talking about myself. I'm a slow writer - I need way, way more than 50 hours for 10k. I type fast, but crafting the story and making the phrasing come out in a way I find satisfying takes the longest time. I write 100 words, then delete 50 (or sometimes 150), and sometimes I spend 10 minutes before thinking of what I want the next sentence to be. Or I spend an hour researching flight plans to write one paragraph about blorbo's travels. Like, I could spew out 1k of rambly thoughtless nonsense in an hour or less I guess, but I wouldn't want to gift that to anyone.

DA

I wouldn't really count brainstorming and research time because, while it's definitely part of writing time, it's so extremely variable depending on the needs of the fic that it's just hard to put an average to. (And also past a certain point, Wikipedia spiraling about cement because you wanted to look up cobblestones doesn't really count as progress towards the fic)

CYRT

It's impossible to count pure writing time because often the "brainstorming" happens in the middle of a sentence. If you type three words, and then think five minutes about how to continue that sentence and then go back and delete the three first words, that's very much part of the writing process.

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2025-12-09 16:56 (UTC) - Expand

Since we're all basing this on personal experience, a 10 page comic is ~30 hours of just drawing time for me. 10k is about 120 hours worth of writing time. Both of these things require effort, but I have 4 months to do it in for FFFX. Things aren't equally the same amount of hard for everyone. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

As an artist who participates in FFFX, I kind of vibe with it, because I always overshoot the 40 panel minimum by quite a lot. A lowered minimum won't actually help the fundamental problem of scope.

+1 lol

I don't know about bad but tracing feels lazy. It's like the equivalent of a fic where someone's just writing out a scene from canon. Sure, you technically produced something, but I'd rather have a genuine badfic or stick figures comic where there's some spark of inspiration even if it's incomprehensible.

I see what you mean, but at the same time, I think if you tried to ask a mod for EPH for canon rehash not a one would give it to you.

DC

On the other hand, if it contained sufficiently large chunks of directly plagiarised canon text with very little added, they probably would? So I guess it's down to where you feel tracing falls on the analogous spectrum between "copy-paste 900 words directly from canon and just add a couple extra sentences in there" vs "canon rehash but in the writer's own words". (My instinct is probably somewhere in the middle, which is admittedly not particularly helpful in drawing a line.)

DC

I think the plagiarism issue for canon rehashs is just relevant for written canons. When you rehash a scene from a movie or a TV show, it will obviously copy the dialogue 1:1 (otherwise it wouldn't really be a rehash) but the narration couldn't be lifted from canon. That doesn't necessarily make it a better gift.

Hmm. Maybe the comparison holds up, but I'd sure prefer a technically competent canon scene or traced art rather than ~inspired badfic or really badly drawn art.

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