Response is gonna be a bit... long
EnderDracolich wrote:Well, as a reader. I gotta give my 2 cents. (I'm also a writer, and I am a member of the Felarya community - but I'm taking a stand in defense of a reader's right to enjoy a story without an unpleasant twist)
Sorry, but I can't agree with that sentence even just on premise - 'cause what makes an "unpleasant twist" in the first place is wholly subjective; ya can't really "take a stand" for something that dependent on context from both the kind of story/setting used and the individual person-to-person basis of the reader themselves.
EnderDracolich wrote:I just went and read that story for the first time (wasn't in the Felarya community when it was written), and it was VERY out of tone with Felarya. If I had been a fan of Calina and had read that, as a canon story, when it came out... I would have left the Felaya community AND the Vore community entirely.
I kinda feel this view's an overreaction - for me, it's the total opposite. The vore scene wasn't any different from others; the pred's enjoyment of it wasn't any different; the slice-of-life scenes weren't any different - literally the only thing different was that it's a character we knew getting eaten - and not even a protagonist at that; just a popular side-character. I could get not liking them dying or being sad about it, but to say it was "VERY out of tone with Felarya" is an exaggeration, IMHO.
EnderDracolich wrote:Some people don't like their beloved protagonists being killed - regardless of it's merits as a form of storytelling - and those people shouldn't be derided. They should be allowed to have spaces and stories that they can enjoy without the fear of having to deal with that kind of stress... and Felarya should be such a space. With a handful of (generally disliked) exceptions, protags don't die in Felarya.
But that right there's the problem; by all accounts THEY were the ones deriding FS, not the ones being derided. And in all fairness, I think that line of thought's a tad... well, frankly put, it sounds entitled. Felarya's a bloody jungle - law of the jungle stuff happens; random crap happens; bad luck happens. To say it shouldn't purely on the basis of "it should be my perfect fantasy world" is IMHO kinda disrespectful to both the setting and the writers in it - and to expect every single story to go perfectly the way you want it is the same as not having an entertaining story in the first place, if it never takes any risks or turns. That predator-affiliated protags usually don't die in Felarya (and Calina argubaly wasn't one in the first place) doesn't equate to that being a law, nor should it IMHO.
EnderDracolich wrote:I can see why it would cause people to get upset, and why it would fracture the community.[/code]
I don't get why it'd fracture the community THIS way. I could get people being sad or disheartened, but people were straight-up calling FS a bad writer for it - some even personally insulting his capacity for writing. He didn't change the story 'cause it was disliked - he changed it 'cause the conflict around it got so toxic that he basically had an emotional breakdown in one of his journals. IMHO, this self-imposed "protags don't die in Felarya" rule isn't worth doing that to someone, especially not a guy who helped build the place.
EnderDracolich wrote:Felarya is not built around protagonist deaths, nor is it built around shock, horror, or tragedy. So... inserting that kinda content into a Felarya story is gonna have a pretty easily predictable result.
The irony with that, though, is it kinda feels like the
total opposite; if anything, Felarya stories are built ENTIRELY around "protagonist deaths" and around "shock, horror or tragedy" - 'cause those are the perspectives of the characters the readers follow. 9 out of 10 times, the story's protagonist is someone who's gonna get eaten - especially in FS' stories, as the "Lost in Felarya" series proved - and we're taken step-by-step through their feelings of shock, horror and tragedy. Literally the only thing different in Wem's that it wasn't some random one-off.
EnderDracolich wrote:It's like... slipping ghost peppers into somebody's ice cream; if you like spicy food, that might be great, but if you're looking for a sweet treat and get it by surprise, it's gonna be terribly painful and upsetting.
The problem with that analogy is Felarya was never guaranteed to just be "a sweet treat" to begin with, much less mandated as such - and if you have the same thing over and over in the first place, you'll get board of it. It's both a false expectation and an unfair burden on the maker to blame them for it, much less hit them with the kind of insults I saw in those comments.
EnderDracolich wrote:To me, it seems unfair to point fingers at the readers, and say they're responsible for scaring writers into not writing.
Putting aside how mistaken I think that is, it's still unfair to demonize and harass the writer for it - like I said before, it wasn't that people didn't like the story that made him change it; it's that he and others were getting personally attacked, over something he'd done dozens of times with other characters. If you don't like stories where protags have untouchable plot-armor, that's fine - but don't insult people for it.
EnderDracolich wrote:The actual writing of that story was equally inadvisable. It doesn't fit the tone of Felarya at all.
And again, I just can't agree with that - literally the only thing different was that it's a character we actually knew getting eaten, and that alone ain't enough to justify claiming the tone was different. Hell, I'd go so far as to say the TOTAL OPPOSITE - that what set people off was Calina dying in a way no tonally different than a random, rather than the tone of how it happened having "changed" in any way.
EnderDracolich wrote:So... yeah. If that story and the aftermath had a dampening effect on writing in the community, all parties involved are equally culpable.
Again, that's the problem though; the tone DIDN'T deviate from the setting - at all. Out of the few who stayed civil, they expressed more discontent that Calina died as if she was a nobody rather than the fact she died at all - to say he'd "subvert something that already exists" feels like misjudging it and Felarya's tone since,
EnderDracolich wrote:Frankly, if you intend to write a story, in an established setting, that deviates strongly from the tone of the setting... just don't. Go write your own setting, and make it clear to potential readers that shocking content might happen. Don't subvert something that already exists, and which other people enjoy.
But it's
not that the situation was any different, IMHO; if anything, it's that it
wasn't any different a vore-death than what the "prey-of-the-day" characters got that seemed to upset people. It was not a case of "subvert something that already exists" - it's that what existed was used on a recurring character rather than a rando and people seemed to be disappointed or underwhelmed in general, which wasn't enough to justify the utter hatred some people were dishing out over it.
EnderDracolich wrote:Your characters are one's own to do with as one wishes... your reader's emotional well-being, however, does not belong to you. You should NEVER intentionally write a work of fiction with the intent to upset and distress your readers by subverting their expectations.
Repeating myself here but, honestly, this sounds a very entitled mindset. IMHO, the writer ISN'T responsible for the reader's "emotional well-being" - hell, you're kinda shooting yourself in the foot here because, if "your reader's emotional well-being, however, does not belong to you", then neither should all the blame for their negative reaction belong to you either You can't always predict that kinda shit, dude, much less be accountable for it - if every writer everywhere was directly responsible for every single reader's emotional state after the fact, fiction in general would not exist because there would always be SOMEONE out there who might have been impacted by it negatively. It's the reader's own prerogative what they think and their own feelings that dictate what they feel from it, not the writer's - and whatever they feel, they should never act like it's the writers fault for it. Especially since FS admitted in comments & journals that they didn't even intend distress in the first place - what happened to Calina was basically a result of an over-trusting Milly befriending someone she probably shouldn't with bad consequences.
EnderDracolich wrote:Some people can't handle that kinda stuff very well. Myself included.
Again, kinda shooting yourself in the foot here - you're admitting this is more the
reader not being able to handle it well, rather than the
writer being responsible. The writer tells the story - they may have things they do or do not want to convey, but they aren't solely responsible for everything and anything any reader feels because every person is different. It's one thing to dislike what a story did or didn't do, but it's another thing to take it as a personal insult the way some people seemed to, and I really can't understand trying to justify that mindset the way you've tried here.
EnderDracolich wrote:I write sad shit. Writing sad shit is fine. But it should be labelled, not wrapped in happy, colorful, lighthearted packaging.
And I think that line of thought's misguided when it comes to Felarya - because IMHO, it never had just a "happy, colorful, lighthearted packaging" in the first place; most stories I've seen in it take place from the PREY, not the pred, and as a result the tales are rarely ever "happy, colorful" or "lighthearted" for anyone outside the preds. 9 outta 10 times, "sad shit" describes what happened to anyone not a giant.
EnderDracolich wrote:EDIT:
To be clear, I'm not pointing fingers at French Snack.
It's quite clear that hurting people's feeling wasn't his intention with that story.
Perhaps he should have known better, but it was an honest mistake.
But an honest, harmful mistake is still harmful, and it's not fair to point fingers at the readers and say "they acted badly" when the content itself was legitimately shocking and out of tone with the setting.
All parties, perhaps even the community as a whole, are equally culpable.
Not - just - the readers and their reaction.
This block is something I agree with in premise, but not for the reasons you state. Whether we personally think of what FS wrote or what we perceive Felarya should be, fact of the matter's that it's not a view-disagreement that caused the fracture - it was the behavior, the people stooping to flat-out insults and harassment that were the issue. On that front, you CAN kinda point fingers at the readers even just with a cursory glance at the comment sections - if they'd simply disagreed with it, I doubt there'd have been an issue... but the problem's that they didn't. And by that same logic, it likewise doesn't feel fair to me for you to point fingers at FS yourself and say he should be held accountable for it all - it just comes across like trying to move the goalpost on who to blame.