seriousfic

Feedback is a vast and complicated thing, so we'll only cover two aspects of it today. The first is BNF Feedback.

BNFs are generally renowned for their skill in writing, drawing, vidding, or whatever sphere of fan activity they're in. Therefore, having them comment favorably on your work tends to elicit a feeling equivalent to, if you're a guy, Indiana Jones complimenting you on how rugged and manly you are, or if you're a girl, Brigitte Bardo mentioning how impressive your feminine mystique is (and/or that she wants to make out with you). Unfortunately, BNFs tend to form exclusively feedback-sharing cliques with other BNFs, who are in the best position to appreciate this feedback given that the only other comments they've gotten are twenty or thirty measly comments on how great they are. And maybe a dozen or so recs. And a free laptop. So there's not much equality in the realm of Small Name Fan/Big Name Fan comment-getting. As you can imagine, this tends to contribute to the perception of BNFs as evil skanks.

Not pictured: Obesity, virginity.

The second aspect of feedback we'll cover is the nitpick. The nitpick is a different thing than concrit. While concrit is often solicited ("Hey, would you like to know about all the stuff your fic did wrong?" "No thanks, I would just like to stay awake at night thinking about what I could've done wrong."), nitpick just comes out of nowhere. It's understandable. We're all fans, after all, and we're trained to notice when the text gets something wrong. But in our zeal to "help," we can forget that it's equally important to let people know what we liked about their work. As nice as it is to be able to fix a typo, it's much nicer to know, yes, the reader did pick up on that subtext and wants to lick it because it's so tasty and delish.

If you get a comment that's only nitpick, the proper response is to include a "smiley face" icon (of the SQUEE/GLEE variety) and say "Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?" This leads the commentator know (in a gentle, but firm fashion) that their concern must have been blown out of proportion to serve as the entirety of a comment, that it is seen as proper by the conventions as fannish society to include a "spoonful of sugar" (i.e. squee) with the "medicine" (i.e. concrit) to help it go down. Lastly, it also indicates that you are a clever and witty individual worthy of having sexual intercourse with several attractive parties of your preferred sex.