What are some of the dumbest critiques/reviews your stories have received?

Like the tittle says, lets share some of the more stupid destructive reviews you have received as a fanfic author.

In my case, I write stories for My Hero Academia, and most of them are romance fics with genderbender. Especifically, I took some yaoi (M/M) ships I found interesting and just writed one of the two characters as female.

I know that kind of stuff is sometimes critiqued. But I only do it because, though I like the dinamics between both of the characters, I dont have enough knowledge writing M/M to flesh out those pairings if I tried to write them with their original genders.

Now, I understand to maybe be critiqued for that. But just a while a guy literally left comments in practically all my stories scolding me and calling me a coward for not writing M/M, as if I had commited a sin or killed his family for not writing yaoi.

It was really bizarre.

For better or worse, people get invested in this stuff. "Don't like, don't read" may be an annoying mantra but the spirit is true enough. I don't have much experience reading or writing M/M myself, but I don't imagine the dynamics being all that (necessarily) different than straight pairings, outside of the tropes associated with slash, but those are optional. Still, write what you want to write, of course.

I don't think I've ever gotten a review I found "dumb", but I did get one early on for one of my fics saying to "be careful" with my pairing, since they're Just Friends in canon, which I thought was a bit odd. I understand not wanting a good dynamic spoiled, but isn't that a given for most shipping? I wonder if that person's still reading it.

I have a Jojo/Naruto Xover out, and I no longer have the ability to count on one hand how many of the guest reviews on FF.Net are asking for me to put their OC/Mary Sue in. It got really annoying, and at one point I mentioned how I should be legally obligated to do a musical number on why I will not add their Mary Sue to the story. The only other thing of note was somebody begging me to do their crossover idea, which I personally couldn't fathom doing since that's their idea, and if they want it to go a certain way then they'd need to do it, since I'm not a mind reader.

Edited by Locksoli on Mar 17th 2020 at 4:32:18 AM

Someone who wrote TERRIBLY wanted me to co write with them... which basically meant they wanted me to write out their idea.

Another critique was someone saying I didn't know how to write in a characters voice; subjective, but SORT OF fair as it was an early story. But then again, I was showing characters who'd gone through a wringer.

Another hated how I'd framed their favourite character, turning her from genki girl into grief wracked person under trauma. Ah well!

Someone commented on a crossover I wrote and suggested using stat boosting items from one side of the crossover so that a character from the other side could get back powers he’d lost. That was not something I had any intention of reversing, and even if I had wanted to, I wouldn’t have done it like that. The same fic also had people telling me how they thought I should handle a mid-fic internal reveal that I was leading up to. One person actually wrote out a whole scene for me. I’m not sure what they were expecting.

There was also something on a Pokémon one-shot that was a weird mix of backhanded compliments, actual complements, and being upset that I wasn’t writing a Dark Fic or doing things according to their headcanons. Looking back, there were things I could’ve handled better in that story, and would if I were to rewrite it. It wasn’t really a dumb review - it was condescending and nitpicky, but there were parts of it that may have been in good faith. It was just really jarring to find at the time.

Edited by SapphireBlue on Mar 17th 2020 at 8:25:46 AM

The worst review was nothing but an ellipse:

"..."

And that's it....multiple times....across multiple chapters. I ensured I did not approve those reviews, because they were dumb. A waste of space. And by God, if you're going to be that asinine, then log in and own that stupid review instead of hiding behind the facade of 'Guest.' Then you have the permission to pop that review in, because then everyone will know who you are.

As for an actual dumb critique actually happened to both my game fanfics for Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy VIII. I got slammed for supposedly 'nerfing' the heroes/protagonists of both games and it was 'highly unrealistic' that they'd be trounced so easily and that they could have easily won against armies of thousands, because THAT'S JUST WHAT THEY DID IN THE GAMES! Well.....guess I didn't really think out a good plan on how exactly said new villains could tackle end-game protagonists from both games enough did I? Actually, I did. I ensured that each new villain introduced was endgame material and legitimately provided a threat that would challenge a supposed 'walking army' from the games. If I did not present a challenge or crisis for the game protagonists to solve, then what was the point of the fanfic? They'd resolve the issue within half a chapter then go about their slice of life fic thereafter. It'd be boring. The higher the stakes, the more important the payoff in discovering how to overcoming these seemingly insurmountable villains. Like you didn't think I had already planned out in advance the overall solution before setting finger to keyboard about how the heroes would win? Of course I did, I'm just having fun roping the reader along with me for the reveal.

Edited by Darkflamewolf on Mar 17th 2020 at 12:24:23 PM

Yeah, i understand perfectly what you mean. Deal with powerlevels on RP Games stories is always hard and people dont seem to understand that they are a malleable concept.

Like in FFVII the protagonists kill huge monsters and eventually a damn Winged Angel but in some parts of the game they are caugh up and made prisoners for random soldiers with fire weapons... That doesnt seems to make sense if the protagonist are that strong, but maybe they arent and its just something you assumed by yourself.

Edited by ErinTesden on Mar 17th 2020 at 12:39:22 PM

That will always have to go to the guy who nitpicked misplaced vegetation. That wasn't actually in the story, mind you, just what an animal in the story was named after. An animal that only featured in a few sentences.

SapphireBlue's Pokémon review summary sounded familiar, so I went and looked it up, and my top suspicion was confirmed instantly: it was a "write more like Farla" reviewer. You know what you're in for the moment the first line of the review criticizes the fic for capitalizing "Pokémon" or any of their species.

I do this in my one fic because I always felt like it was grammatically correct. Even if it wasn't, I'd still capitalize 'Dragonite' and 'Gyarados' because I'd need them to stand out. I haven't ever gotten a complaint about it though, so I'd imagine it's not meant to be a problem.

Edited by Locksoli on Mar 18th 2020 at 1:37:58 PM

I feel like with something like that, it’s a matter of personal preference. That’s not something I’d usually say about grammar, but this is more in the vein of Capital Letters Are Magic, and that’s a thing in a lot of published books.

Edited by SapphireBlue on Mar 19th 2020 at 11:14:24 AM

I mean, it does make sense. I wouldn't be capitalizing dragonite or pikachu because it'd just be a name of an animal in their world quite like how we don't capitalize bear or fish or bobcat. They don't need capitalization.

For me, the issue has never been the standards for capitalization in the English language. It comes down to two things for me:

• These are words that have never been used uncapitalized in any medium other than fanfic. At this point, it feels wrong to not see them capitalized, and the capitalization doesn't change the meaning or make the sentence any harder to parse.
• People are specifically going around leaving negative reviews for people who follow the franchise's capitalization rules. And when I said "other than fanfic", I meant "other than those people's fanfics"; I honestly don't come across many Pokémon fanworks that use their standard. Thus, the situation feels less like an attempt to correct an error and more of a "my way or the highway" approach from a particular subset of the fandom, which makes it easier to conclude that they are the actual problem.

I feel like we're getting off-track here. I didn't mean to start a whole discussion about this.

I've also ended up with the "don't capitalize names of Pokemon" even though it is correct if you take even one look at the games!

Dude called my story dry. That was it. No elaborating, no suggestions on what to improve, just "god damn this story is dry".

Okay, dude didn't think it went anywhere. That doesn't help me nor does it do anything for anyone, IMO. I don't delete my reviews and comments though, unless they have spoilers that aren't tagged, or they have things like homophobia, racism, transphobia, etc. in them.

The review no longer exist as I scrapped the original version to rewrite it but in my legend of Spyro fanfic that was written as it feel more comfortable in my native tongue(french more precisely french canadian), I got a review from a guest that read my story via Google Translate that was really badly written and weird telling me that the guardians are jerks, that my wind guardian Aeria who was only honest despite what was said being harsh and genuinely trying to help was mean and also rambling to not make it another fic where Cynder is the main character..Uh my only intention was find a way to make a plot. I had no way to explain my intentions as it was a guest but it affected enough that I made rewrites that led to me sending not just Cynder in the continent where Spyro got exiled but Aeria coming with her to try to find him to avoid making her feel unsympathetic.

It seemed it worked because I got no review on fanfiction.net since..though it is a shame that I never got reviews and that's the only one I ever got because the french fandom of Spyro seem to be dead, especially the legend part of it.

Edited by fyra on Feb 3rd 2021 at 7:05:24 AM

This feels like a complaining thread.