Worst response your books have ever gotten?

[Hans.Trondheim]

…
I can’t resist…

Hans.Trondheim uses Psychic!
It’s ineffective!
TheMonotonePuppet uses Dark Pulse.
It is super effective!
Critical hit!

At that point, I will An Hero myself. (Old Hans)

New Hans will just be crounching on one corner screaming "GRIMDERP!!! GRIMDEEEEEEERRRRRRRP!!!"

 

[TheMonotonePuppet]

At that point, I will An Hero myself. (Old Hans)

New Hans will just be crounching on one corner screaming "GRIMDERP!!! GRIMDEEEEEEERRRRRRRP!!!"

 

[Jerynboe]

Oh. And since I went off on a tangent I might as well respond to the actual thread.

On my first story, a smutty isekai harem fanfic, I recieved multiple complaints about my MC not being more overpowered, making any mistakes ever, and not immediately mastering multiple martial arts. For context, he had the ability to rapidly learn any magic system and had been uploaded into a big beefy fighter man’s body, but that didn’t immediately translate to him having any combat experience or skill because I wanted him to have room to grow. This was, apparently, unacceptable.

 

[ThisAdamGuy]

going hard and building your own version

That's closer to what my skinwalkers are. They're a race of shapeshifters who live in the parts of the world humanity hasn't "corrupted." Wendigos aren't made via cannibalism, you specifically have to eat a skinwalker's heart to become one, and after that you're essentially immortal as long as you eat one person a month and don't get set on fire. The skinwalkers and wendigos had a war, the skinwalkers won, but it reduced their numbers so thoroughly that they went into hiding and passed into myth. The reason they have such a bad rep (in my story) is that they were so closely related to wendigos that eventually stuff from one myth got mixed up in the other.

 

[Golden_Hyde]

Well, I did tag my work as "isekai" and "harem", so I got the thirsty idiots feasting on my Shonen Nakama LN POS.

Such genres tend to attract idiots who can't understand what they read, and just wanna jack off to words.

no wonder why harem tag got the bad rep by the other side of the spectrum. Luckily, I'm going to change that reputation soon enough(?)

 

[CarburetorThompson]

I asked on this forum if I should post one of the drafts I had been working on along with a quick description, and the only reply told me that ‘it sounds like shit’ so I didn’t end up posting it

 

[PancakesWitch]

That said, this is my worst reply received, and funny, too. Goes to show how some idiot named Melvin Wong is so thirsty for some horny shit...

View attachment 34511

Also, Imma add my brother's experience with a "fantasy writers' group".

Bro wrote an anachronistic fantasy novel and submitted it to the group for some feedback. Got panned, mainly because members can't think of anachronism in fantasy.

This all the while they kept writing rape fantasies about furry and yandere stuff.

Thats really funny because Royal Road shadow bans your book if you include sex scenes, and edgelord gore stories never do well. Royal Road is actually the home of the most generic LitRPG Apocalypse slop imaginable, actually. Anything else that isn't some guy between their 20 to 30 fighting monsters for dozens of chapters inside a dungeon that spawned in their backyard or in a ruined city isn't welcome there.

 

[Clo]

What about the voice inside your own head that keeps whispering everyone is just being nice and placating you?

It's probably the worst I received so far.

 

[ArcadiaBlade]

I remember writing a doomsday novel here which got me my first 1 star. The criticism was okay but what I didn't expect was that the day the review was posted, I was immediately hit with a blackout for like 2 days with maybe 5 days without internet.

I came out with an idea for developing the story but after reading the review and the date posted, I immediately put it into hiatus that it became my taboo novel from that day on.

While I'm a bit of a logical person, I am quite unlucky and tend to trust my instincts telling me to stop writing.

 

[Rezcore]

Yay! I get to weigh in on something that I am an expert in: the Culture War. A lot of people like to say "that's appropriating their culture". This is usually said by blue haired land whales. But.... every culture Bit off of Europe's Industrial Culture, use an Internet invented by whites, if we can't use the things made in other cultures, then the internet is gonna be whiter than a clan rally. Let me be very clear, I'm a 5'10 blonde white dude, I love wearing my Hambok my fiancé got me, I love the culture she grew up in. My best friend moved to Nigeria, he's accepted, even if he does glow at night...

I'm not sure where that was going, but whenever someone brings up cultural appropriation, ask them, why they speaking English, they aren't English

 

[CharlesEBrown]

First to address the title: The worst response is NO response.

That said, I hope the skinwalkers were at least assholes. The Navajo take that shit pretty seriously and Skinwalkers seem to be essentially their ultimate baddies. Not that they talk about it much; they are kinda taboo to discuss with outsiders. Tbh it’s more of a dick move to ask questions about them of a random Navajo person than it is to write about them in good faith.

First time I encountered Skinwalkers was in a "Living Death" (Horror-based D&D in the 1890s game) module "Skinners" - they were nasty. Only time I ever killed off a PC and had the entire party (even the player) say: "That was nasty but completely appropriate"

Who wants a genuine eldritch horror smut scene, after all?

Only the morbidly curious, that’s who.

::raises hand tentatively:: (no TENTATIVELY not TENTACLY).

I kinda take the stance that the more you show your work, the more you have earned the right to use the creature. Either by going hard and building your own version that is entirely unique like a certain puppet said, or integrating the IRL culture’s beliefs into it. This goes double if there is another entity from your own culture that would have worked roughly as well.

Jim Butcher in the Dresden Files, for example, does angels pretty much perfectly from the POV of me, a Christian. The main angel character we see is a behind the scenes chess master who seems to be completely, earnestly benevolent. He manipulates events books in advance to make sure that all things work together for good. Everything looks like a coincidence. He’s just straight up not allowed to interfere with free will or its fruits directly, and whenever he is given any leeway he makes the most of it. He FEELS like how angels are implicitly assumed to behave by most Christian’s I know. That makes it extra good and I feel very seen.

From what I’ve heard, his use of skinwalkers is also considered generally good because hot damn Shagnasty (Dresden’s nickname) is truly horrifying and very very evil. I imagine there are people who hate his inclusion as an antagonist, but I’ve never seen evidence of their existence and I’m 90% sure at least half of them are non-native busybodies if they do exist.

After accidentally buying the same book twice at used bookstores (and it was one of the few adapted almost faithfully for the TV series - Fool Moon), I stopped reading the Dresden books. Loved the character, but some of the things I'd heard from fans made me skeptical (apparently Butcher had originally tried to sell the books as a Hellblazer story for DC's Vertigo imprint, and then, when they turned him down, to Marvel as a "counter" to DC's John Constantine, and finally converted it to a novel series after they rejected it; allegedly around book six or so it was more of a superhero story than the hybrid noir-ish detective/wizard he originally presented as)

 

[Hans.Trondheim]

Thats really funny because Royal Road shadow bans your book if you include sex scenes, and edgelord gore stories never do well. Royal Road is actually the home of the most generic LitRPG Apocalypse slop imaginable, actually. Anything else that isn't some guy between their 20 to 30 fighting monsters for dozens of chapters inside a dungeon that spawned in their backyard or in a ruined city isn't welcome there.

I think this one's from before they enacted/enforced the smut ban? Back then, Royal Road was filled with images of ladies with exploding bosoms.

 

[PancakesWitch]

I think this one's from before they enacted/enforced the smut ban? Back then, Royal Road was filled with images of ladies with exploding bosoms.

Those were better times honestly. Now everything has become so sanitized...

 

[Hans.Trondheim]

Those were better times honestly. Now everything has become so sanitized...

Unpopular opinion, but lotsa western sites are now afraid of even mere skin tones. I got lots of artwork getting banned coz NSFW, though in reality, there's just a lot of skin tones.

Like this one:

 

[aToTeT]

The conversation basically went like this:
"It's offensive to use creatures that are part of another culture's beliefs in a make believe setting."
"You're writing about a gay romance between an angel and a demon."
"So?"
"Are you a Christian?"
"I don't believe in God."
"More people believe in God than believe in skinwalkers."
"Christianity is the white man's religion."

Woman has never been to black church.

So many pretty hats on prettier old ladies, so much passion up front and all around, and my God, the hymns? They’re straight up Gospel.

Mmn. Love it.

I been to a lot of churches. Methodists preaching hellfire to the gays, gay Methodists preaching gods love for everyone — a hyper-regimented Catholic service where not a word was spoken in English and I wasn’t to participate in the hymns, but they gave us pamphlets that came with the translations and the schedule of what was going down, and that was cute up until they did the communion thing all drinking out of the same damn cup (no, the little cloth wiper doesn’t make that okay).

I’ve been to a few Baptist baptisms, violin recitals in a Lutheran church, and though I never sought out the Church of Latter-Day Saints: they came to me.

Black church is by far the best church experience, spiritually speaking.

Saying Christianity is the white man’s religion is like saying Italians are white.

I wouldn’t say it in Italy.

Spoiler

Also, there’s more of the Eastern Roman Empire in Christendom than there is Holy See — see where Nicaea happens to be.

Furthermore, the religion is centred around a Jewish man before 2 thousand years of very long history turned the Jews white.

Europeans may have bleached the nativity scene (hate it, narrative doesn’t make sense — just proselytising to the poor) and added snow to it… but it is set in Bethlehem, in Israel, in the Middle East.

What I am saying is that religion is for the religious; regardless of creed, colour, or intellectual capacity.

There are 2 billion of them within most Christian reckoning.

There are considerably fewer people who believe in skinwalkers, wendigos, and Quetzalcoatl.

If you don’t make anything culturally relevant that defends them in the court of ideas: you will lose them to the ideas of others.

If no one else was interested in breathing their own life into your culture: it will be lost to the passage of time.

Cultural Appropriation reeks of Blood and Soil to me. If the Navajo of today are terrified of white people making a caricature of their culture: they’d better hurry, because that is a battle they will lose if they don’t construct a cornerstone that demonstrates why their version is better…

Just look to Christendom: it is hard to count the number of differing views that arise, die, and change over time. Ideas that do not stick are not preserved: they disappear from the world.

Fair? No. Ideas believed by more people with more actionable methods of spreading them: dominate culture.

But if you will not allow members of other cultures to spread interest in your cultural artifice in your stead: you should do it yourself. If you do not, you should not expect it to survive, and if it does despite your failure to demonstrate its power as an idea, it will probably be in the shallowest possible examination (see: Ra, Svarog, Baba Yaga)

What's the worst reaction you've ever gotten to one of your books?

For me, it was probably when I got kicked out of a fantasy writer's group for writing a book about skinwalkers fighting wendigos. Because not including cultures other than your own in your stories is racist, but the moment you do include them it's cultural appropriation. The best part is, the group member who was the most vocal about kicking me out was writing a gay romance about an angel and a demon. The irony was entirely lost on her.

View attachment 34509​

Real cute cover btw.

I take the stance that you can't claim one group's mythology is off limits but it's open season on another's. If people are allowed to write stories like Good Omens, Marvel's Thor, and Percy Jackson and the Olympians despite not believing in the religions that spawned them, then the rules should be equally accepting of something like Skinwalkers.

Good Omens is real damn good.

It’s a shame about that one fellow though. Apparently he’s a bad egg, a shame, I think he wrote Coraline too, something I really like.

Maybe it’s a different guy tho.

For contrast, JK Rowling’s canon for Skin walkers is that muggle medicine men spread malicious rumors about native wizards, painting them as horrible monsters that should be exiled at the least and preferably killed on sight. Thus declaring that the Wizarding World cultural and religious leaders were a bunch of charlatans with very few exceptions. Which… Yeesh. Unironically worse than just not explaining anything imo.

WITH THAT SAID, I’m not a web fiction cop and I don’t consider even lazy cultural appropriation to be a big deal. I just feel like it can be done better or worse.

Oh Joanne… you’ve done it again. I must have missed that section behind the wall-mounted stuffed slave heads, “Bad blood will out” said in the voice of a half dozen characters, and her unrelenting disgust for fat pigs on a painful diet of grapefruit while demonstrating the least amount of temperance in her main characters diet of chocolate, cake, and more chocolate cake in amount enough to break an Owl for a few days.

 

[DeepWater]

Sounds like the type of woman to falsely accuse guys of rape during college.

 

[RedMuffin]

"Christianity is the white man's religion."

That statement is wrong on many levels.

Who wants a genuine eldritch horror smut scene, after all?

Only the morbidly curious, that’s who.

Unpopular opinion, but lotsa western sites are now afraid of even mere skin tones. I got lots of artwork getting banned coz NSFW, though in reality, there's just a lot of skin tones.

Like this one:

View attachment 34537

That's sexual. Not projecting.

 

[Jerynboe]

After accidentally buying the same book twice at used bookstores (and it was one of the few adapted almost faithfully for the TV series - Fool Moon), I stopped reading the Dresden books. Loved the character, but some of the things I'd heard from fans made me skeptical (apparently Butcher had originally tried to sell the books as a Hellblazer story for DC's Vertigo imprint, and then, when they turned him down, to Marvel as a "counter" to DC's John Constantine, and finally converted it to a novel series after they rejected it; allegedly around book six or so it was more of a superhero story than the hybrid noir-ish detective/wizard he originally presented as)

Fool Moon is, IMO, one of the worst books in the series. Not awful in isolation, but the weakest entry unless you are very very sensitive to jokes about attractive women’s bodies, in which Blood Ties is probably worse.

As far as the superhero thing… sorta? Changes, book 12, very much earns its name and serves as a big breakpoint. It’s kinda a slow transition as Harry is dragged into progressively bigger and hairier situations and gets personally stronger, but he’s more Batman than Superman. Investigation is still his primary job most of the time, and there are usually people who could cream him in a straight punch-up.

 

[CharlesEBrown]

Good Omens is real damn good.

It’s a shame about that one fellow though. Apparently he’s a bad egg, a shame, I think he wrote Coraline too, something I really like.

Neil Gaiman co-wrote both Good Omens (with the late Terry Pratchett) and Coraline (well, the script at least - with Tim Burton; IIRC, the story it was adapted from was a short story written by someone else entirely) - Gaiman is a weird guy (have met him twice and chatted with him a few times on Twitter before it became X), but not a bad egg as far as I know..

 

[DeepWater]

That statement is wrong on many levels.

Christianity is pretty integral to the story of Europe (white people) so you could definitely call it the white man's religion.