Fanfic moaning

[galadhir]

It's very odd how it always seems to go this way: You write what you think is one of your best fics ever, and it gets absolute silence from readers. You write a throwaway thing that you don't think is much good, and it gets more comments than you could have imagined.

I'm currently doing the first thing of those. I think 'Visitation' is really good. And more than that, I'm actually enjoying writing it to the extent that I am excited about it and rotating it in my head like I used to do with stories back when I was a proper writer. But I post it and... crickets.

Meanwhile I've just come off what I thought was a rather pointless piece of kid-fic, and that was getting twenty comments per chapter.

And it wouldn't matter so much if I had any idea what made one more popular than the other. Is it just that this one is in Xichen's pov instead of Jin Guangyao's? Is it that JGY is dead in this one, and it might take him a few years to come back? IDK. I cannot have become a worse writer in the space of the two weeks between one fic and the next, so it must be the subject matter and not me, but it is a bit baffling and discouraging.

Never mind. Visitation is for me, so I'm going to continue to write it for me. Whether I continue to post it or not is another matter.

Comments

[galadhir]

Ouch. If they don't like the character, why read the story?

I know, right! And it's especially bizarre because I thought nobody could possibly hate Xichen, who is a genuinely kind man trying his best to understand and help everyone. (Sometimes he fails but that's because the world of the narrative is against him.)

Xichen's soulmate is the final villain of the fandom, Jin Guangyao, who I also write, and I was 100% prepared for pushback on my JGY stuff, because it makes sense for him to have haters. But poor Xichen whose only crime was being deceived? It's very strange.

(To be fair, if you're reading the book entirely with the POV that the heroes are infallible and anyone who disapproves of them must be evil, then you can get to a position in which Xichen is either stupid or bad.

1. He doesn't want his younger brother (one of the heroes) to throw his lot in with a necromancer who uses ghosts to kill people and who is rapidly becoming public enemy number one.
2. When his brother does publicly fight against his own elders in defense of the necromancer, Xichen allows him to be punished for this. (Because the punishment keeps him safe from the judgement of the world and allows him to re-enter the world later with his reputation unblemished.)
3. Xichen is in love with a guy who turns out to have murdered his way to the top of the cultivation world, who becomes the final villain of the piece, and he asks his brother (and the necromancer, now hero) to show him proof before he will believe their words about it.

So, you know, he's never really much more than lukewarm about the novel's main romance, and for a long time he's the villain's biggest fan. Which when I put it like that is probably enough to make people hate him. But they're wrong! He's just trying to do his best in a very flawed and horrific system.

[watervole]

What you're saying makes complete sense. I would have though that background would make Xichen a layered and interesting character.

Sadly, as you say, may people expect characters to know what the viewer knows about who is good and evil. But they are not omniscient - they do not know how the story ends.

[galadhir]

Esactly - you really have to take into account what the character knows, and what their intentions are, and that requires taking an emotional step backwards from the immediacy of what is going on in the story. For some reason I've never been able to like heroes, so that part comes easily to me, but I daresay it's harder if you can always expect your favourite characters to triumph in the end, because you think that's what storytelling is all about.