Subject: Actually, sort of, but you've got a point.
Author:
Posted on: 2011-04-30 23:41:00 UTC
I sincerely doubt he's actually interested in becoming a better writer: a lot of things about his second story reek of trying to kiss the ass of near-on everyone in fanfiction.net's ME fandom if you have a clear idea of what he was like and why he took down the original story in the first place. While his first story was still up, he consistently ignored concrit, to the point that he didn't even reply to some people. The only things he responded to were snark/political statements in a review, and he almost always attacked the views of the other person he was talking to, even when they were on the same side of the spectrum. He repeatedly denied the conservative subtext his first story had, so it probably means he's blind to the myriad problems in his writing. And as of this posting, many of the problems that were independent of the conservative subtext (such as poor pacing, no sense of narrative structure, bad/stereotyped characterizations, and implausible things happening according to the canon he's working in) are still present in this new story of his, and they don't show any signs of going away.
Also, the biggest reason he took down his first fic was because he couldn't take the hatedom that had started accumulating around it. Trust me, he told several people (including myself) that it was the biggest reason why he took it down in a series of PM's. He actually worded it more like he wanted to quit, so I was amazed that he even posted the second story to begin with.
What he's referring to is nothing in any actual reviews I wrote: it was general hostilities that occurred between the two of us. And he started the fire, I didn't: I left a review saying that 'hey, there are too many political overtones and it's to this thing's detriment'. It was pretty calm, collected, and fairly constructive.
Of course, when I cited the Tea Party and the Vietnam War as two examples of reasons why America wasn't the greatest nation in the world as his pro-America undertones were saying, he went to town tearing me apart for "liberal" views that I never actually said I had. (He literally opened that reply with "How dare you accuse the Tea Party as a bad thing".) That led to a mildly snarky reply where, honestly, I said a thing or two that I probably shouldn't have said. In the reply to that, though, he had the nerve to say that he respected my opinion, when it was clear that he really didn't. That was where I stopped giving thought to being polite and got outright hostile with him, so what followed after that was what he's referring to. I think stating that I had an overreaction is putting it mildly, now that I think about it. But for me, there's a special place in hell for people who attack your views and then say they respect them. That pretty much fueled the hostilities, as well as the fact that I refuse to be respectful to anyone who can't be bothered enough to treat people's opinions with any form of respect (especially when they deny their disrespect).
I think a large part of why I saved the documents after he took it down was actually kind of personal, as was reuploading it to the internet. Thinking about why I was so pissed off about it, I realize I have no need to constantly re-upload stuff. So... I took it down from Googledocs.
But if you think I'm the only one who took things out of hand, that's not actually true: he overblew some things about the whole fiasco too. He claimed that I had called him a facist, a bigot, and a racist despite the fact that I never used any of those terms to his face or otherwise-- and he knew it, too.
If we do meet on neutral ground... he might strangle me anyway. Mostly because I'll start the conversation by scolding him rather harshly for the naming habits of his characters. But know that I won't scold him because they're inherently awful: it's more because said habits are extremely dangerous to him and to other people he knows IRL.