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Am I the only person who really likes video game bestiaries?

They make it so that all the enemies you fight have at least tiny shreds of lore associated with them; they turn the endless procession of fodder mobs from basic-gameplay-loop contrivances into notional parts of a world where stuff is going on, and they provide springboards for imagination and daydreaming. A couple of sentences can turn a collection of palette-swapped pixels with an annoying attack pattern into something that sticks in your thoughts.

I miss bestiaries.

The novel I’ve been trying to write for the last couple of weeks weeps, watching me walk past my laptop and sitting at my desk to play video games instead

voice acting as a profession is so funny because you'll see someone being like "voice actors need to be paid better! like [obscure person you've never heard of]" and you're like "oh I wonder who that person is, maybe I've heard them voice a character" and you look it up and it turns out they voice 137 characters in Futurama and 94 characters in The Simpsons and 96 characters in Adventure Time and every one of the My Little Ponies and 27 characters in Arcane and 96 characters in Kim Possible and 4 characters in Phineas and Ferb and 296 characters in Dexter's Laboratory and all of the main cast of Fairly Odd Parents and at least 6 characters in every Pixar movie and almost every animated depiction of Superman and 473 SpongeBob characters and they've been in every installment of Mass Effect and Halo and The Elder Scrolls and Fallout and Call of Duty and they were in Star Trek and Law & Order and they were 12 characters in the MCU and they also invented t-shirts and the colour green and they got paid a sum total of $3.27 and a mothball for all of it combined. then you go burn down David Zaslav's house with him inside

We all making grandpa cry btw

I think one of the dumbest things people do is complain about video games not being “Hard Enough” for other people.

Can’t stand someone having fun? Having a good time? A good fun time playing a game?

i do love that you can name pets pretty much anything. with children you have to be reasonable but with pets you can just do anything. you can name your tortoise panopticon

me when a movie is bad: 👎

me when a movie is good: 👍

me when a movie is mediocre:

Dear Fandom readers - an etiquette fail

AO3 is not goodreads. It is not the NYT bestseller list.

You paid no money to read these stories. They are, in fact, a labor of love, done on the off time in the off hours of people who are writing for the joy of writing and the joy of the story.

Your ratings are not appreciated. Not by other readers, who don't know you from adam. Not by fandom-savvy passerby.

And not, in fact, by the author. Who again: Wrote this for fun. In their spare time - around work, around family and friend commitments. Around the rest of their lives. Fandom clout almost never "pays off" in any monetary gains, in any form of physical or financial security.

So please stop "rating" us on something we do for joy.

Today, a fellow fanauthor shared this with me. It was not on any story of my own, but they understandably needed a moment to go "wtf" and process it all. With their permission, I now share this with you.

You won't find this comment on AO3 anymore, by the by.

I have... a lot of issues with this. First of all being something that would be a C-grade in any US school system is not a "Good Rating" for most folks, but many of my issues would be the same even in this commenter had rated this a 10/10.

It boils down to this:

Why are you grading us on something we all are here to do solely for fun and personal enjoyment? Why does it have to be good?

Why can't it just be a labor of love and of joy to be good enough for you, dear commenter?

Do I, as a fanauthor, want to write well? Sure! I do want to write good stories. But I didn't ask random readers to grade me on them. Not in bookmarks that I can easily check, and certainly not in my comments section. And I never will want them to. Every author I've talked to agrees. Is there someone out there who might want this? Sure. Most likely, even! The human experience and desires are broad and varied. But in my experience, if they do exist in Fandom, they're the vast minority. So please:

Don't.

okay but there is something disquieting about this urge to cast fan writers as altruists. they give us all this for free!! well, no.

they’re sharing

it’s a key difference in perception. fic isn’t given. it’s shared. it’s part of a fandom community— in which readers are also an integral part.

it’s probably inevitable mission creep from the increasingly transactional nature of the internet and fandom-as-consumerism, which was always gonna happen after corps worked out how much bank there is to make from those weirdo fan people

but like. fandom is sharing. i think we’ve lost that somewhere.

people have already talked about this but there is something so depressing about like....having a female character who's suffered unimaginable trauma and now her only character trait is Strong. she's so Strong and Powerful and that means she has Agency, right? right?

and like, well, no, not in and of itself??? like, you gave her trauma, DO something with it. don't just pay it lip service but then go "and now she's okay because she's so Strong and Can Fight or whatever". what even IS strength. are people who don't survive traumatic situations automatically weak by this logic? what are we doing here