What does one do when you get a review that isn’t properly bad but isn’t good either? I mean, it’s not constructive criticism, nor a “this is bad writing” or “you went OOC”, but more like “meh, it’s something”. What kind of review is that? If you don’t have anything nice (or at least useful) to say, just don’t say anything!

Long rant ahead. Feel free to ignore, I’m just venting.

I am an architect-type of writer. I pick a plot, then build and plan, merge and re-plan and build more. I think an awful lot about my stories. Everything has a meaning and a purpose. Sometimes it’s to move the plot, sometimes is to move feelings. Telling a thing like that is almost offensive to me.

It comes only second to reviews that tell you “oh, it’s a good story, except you should have made this thing this way because I think my idea is better”. Like... no? Write your own story with your idea if you think it’s good, this is mine and I use my ideas. Are some of those unoriginal? Who cares? If the story works, the idea is fine. Also, if I write a fanfiction, it’s often because I want to show my own take of the original story, so, again, I make choices for exact purposes.

Other than that, when the fanfiction in question is a crossover, changes are necessary to merge the two universes and I must pick some decisions on how to work around some problems. Namely, in this case: I am writing a Sailor Moon/Boku no Hero Academia crossover. (I took the bone idea from another ff (with the permission of the original author) and I’m having fun writing it. The premise is that when the Inners came back from the future they ended up in the BnHA world merged into it, and Usagi found out she is All Might’s daughter. It was such a good idea and the original author wasn’t updating, other than she split UsaMamo (one of my very first OTPs before I even knew what an OTP was) and made Usagi a little too rough for my taste, so...) I started writing my take of it and before I realized it, I had a base outline and seven chapters ready. When the chapters became nine I started publishing it and slowly I gained a little follow, which is lovely, but not quite the point.

I’m not the kind fishing for attention, I write first and foremost for myself, but I like sharing my words and my ideas, eventually finding like-minded people, that’s why I post them online. Otherwise I wouldn’t even go throught the trouble of writing in English (which is only my second language), I mean, I am Italian and a literature student too, it would be so much easier to produce 3000/4000 words per session/chapter in my mothertongue instead of struggling for 1500/2000 in English, no? I am much more eloquent in Italian and I sure as hell wouldn’t make stupid grammatical mistakes, I wouldn’t struggle to find the words, I could use complex syntaxis like in latin and so on. My Italian writing is another thing.

BUT some reviews criticized my use of guillemettes (those: «») for dialogues, which is the standard for books here; they told me to use Grammarly for my mistakes (not even that terrible, once the damn programm checked it was moslty typos and a few improperties) and now this? A “you are improving, one couldn’t ask for more”? What the hell does that even mean?

I had to make a precise choice in order to write this ff in a way that was congruous to the original material: tone down everything. Lexicon, syntaxis, descriptions, emotions, everything is stripped to a minimum in order to not make it too heavy for the reader, but also for me. I did it this way to produce more scenes and more interactions between the characters, to move the plot faster than I usually do, because my normal pattern would have made my job longer and harder and the story itself would have been less enjoyable in comparison to the sources.

But sure, tell me it’s “good enough”. That my efforts to write in a language that I don’t hear and speak everyday aren’t enough. Tell me I have to adapt to your formatting instead of mine (which is ridiculous, because you’d never mistake thinking and speaking if I use different marks, while using only the “” is damn confusing). Tell me that the way I fix the holes the author created almost intentionally in a story still ongoing such as BnHA are “close enough” to the source that doesn’t clear it. Tell me I should have given a character I love and cherish and have known my whole life long different traits because it’d look better if she was battle-oriented when she never was.

Whatever. I’m writing this for me and for the ones who can appreciate it just the way it is. I did too many concessions already by tuning down my style and writing in a language that isn’t mine to begin with.