coaltide | Coal Rivalry

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2025

Coal Rivalry

All the things Coal said, running through my head.

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The only communication they need to hear at this point is "bean10, we all know this is your fic because you suck more than anyone else who has ever done yuletide, don't sign up again."

The end. They can't be helped. Their fic cannot be meaningfully fixed. They need to stop.

CYRT

Yes.

I suspect the message will come, though, because it's clear the mods attempted some sort of intervention this year and it's clear (to coalies at least! hopefully to mods) that the intervention did not work.

I'd still take a Bean10 fic over an Untherius fic. Look at how many people kissed his ass over his stupid coffee fic last year. You get crap and he gets to be smug about it.

(But no one should have to accept taking either of them.)

(But no one should have to accept taking either of them.)

Hmmm...perhaps we can all add:

DNW: non-standard capitalisation

Hot take, but I think if someone signs up to an exchange expecting to write using non-standard capitalization, they should ask through the mods if that's okay and be prepared to hear no. It should be opt-in as much as interactive fiction is opt-in.

Double hot take(?) but I think non-standard capitalization should be opt-out instead of opt-in if the canon has non-standard capitalization.

More controversial, and yet reasonable! I agree, a fic that follows the style of canon should be opt-out not opt-in. Though it is still fine to opt out of it, like all the people DNWing first person for first person canons.

What was the ass kissing over the coffee fic?

Untherius’ fic last year was Folgers coffee ad fic except as a sort of parody of fantasy quests. I thought it was dreck. Other readers disagreed.

DC

Oh gosh, the LotR thing? I forgot...

No dewclaws??

You know what, gonna go ahead and +100 this one. A bad gift sucks, but a bad gift that readers other than recip are fawning over is adding insult to injury. (Thinking of the Untherius fic, this year's EPH-causing fic, and a fic in the same category I received in a different exchange that I'm still salty about.)

Okay, but that's more like arguing good writers should be banned.

A bad fic has everyone agreeing with you, but the better the writer, the more likely they'll make something widely lauded even though it's what you personally don't want.

What a wild take.

CYRT

I don't think it's quite a question of good writers because I don't consider the LOTR x Folgers Commercial fic to be well-written, and the EPH-causing fic is IMO extremely mid as well. What makes them irritating as gifts is that they were clearly not written with the recipient as the main intended audience.

If an author gets a lot of positive comments they're being treated as a good writer.

The EPH fic wouldn't have been in violation if it'd been written for a BNF rather than the recipient but used canon characters to do it, but the recipient would be just as annoyed while having to watch other people praise it.

If it's something nobody likes because the author's terrible, you'll never face a gift you don't like that has other people gushing and reccing it.

CYRT

The EPH fic wouldn't have been in violation if it'd been written for a BNF rather than the recipient but used canon characters to do it, but the recipient would be just as annoyed while having to watch other people praise it.

I'm not sure why you state that with such certainty. Canonical character or not, it's a gift that spends most of its wordcount and focus on an unrequested character and his headspace. The fic is basically setup and punchline for how this unrequested character discovers the requested characters - whom, I must stress, he clearly barely knows and has no emotional connection to except that they're major political players - are a couple, and how this mildly shakes him. There's also an exorbitant amount of page space wasted on things like describing every person present in the procession or whatever, including more unrequested characters, which must be fun to read if you like the POV character and want to see his take on things but entirely the wrong choice to make for a fic supposed to focus on something else.

Regardless, I'm not even sure what point you're trying to make because I never suggested banning "good" writers, pft(???) I just said that it stings worse than an objective badfic gift. This is just a data point for all the coalies who insist that getting badfic would ruin their exchange, even if they were double-assigned and received a nice gift in addition to the badfic gift.

A bad gift sucks, but a bad gift that readers other than recip are fawning over is adding insult to injury

Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I don't see why that matters. A bad gift and a bad fic are not necessarily the same thing. Something can be a bad gift for me but still a fic that makes other people happy.

The crux of the matter is whether that happens accidentally and the author tried to give a good gift and failed, or whether the author just plainly didn't give a fuck about making something I could enjoy. At this point, I think it's pretty clear that both Bean and Untherius are in the second category.

CYRT

I was absolutely thinking of the second category too. I don't really notice or care when I receive popular gifts that don't quite land, but there's a certain kind of gift that feels like the author wrote it for their usual audience or their friend or just themselves, and didn't stop to think if it matches the request more than on a technicality. In that case, it's extremely aggravating to see gushing, and all the comments and bookmarks over the EPH fic squeeing about "Omg it's our boy Hiscarion" are a good example of that - or the fic I received that included a bunch of elements I didn't ask for and consider pretty opt-in, and after reveals I felt like the author had just written their usual fare for their followers and treated my request as a glorified prompt. That kind of thing.

Did people know who it was and were asskissing because by dewclaws standards it was a big improvement, or was it just an unremarkable fic enjoyed by a couple people but not by you, and then it turned out Dewclaws Guy wrote it?

This is what I want to know.

Surely the latter. Many praising comments were during December.

dc, but IIRC it got a fair amount of attention during the anon period because it was reasonably competently written and any longfic for the Folgers commercial is going to get readers and recs. I don't think it was widely guessed as being his until reveals.

At least one coalie guessed the author by Dec 25: https://coaltide.dreamwidth.org/8520.html?thread=18963528#cmt18963528

On Jan 1, coal was noting that Everyone called the Untherius fic: https://coaltide.dreamwidth.org/8520.html?thread=19400776#cmt19400776

Out of curiosity, I checked and out of the 9 non-recip comments on the Folgers fic, 3 were signed up for Yuletide that round.

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