This Is What Happens When I Watch Richard II While Hyped Up On Too Much Coffee.

I’m forgetful sometimes. [ Hardly your fault. But I’m sure you remember him. Arnold. The person who created you. ] I’m sorry, I don’t think I recall anyone by that name. [ And yet you can. Somewhere under all those updates, he is still there. Perfectly preserved. Your mind is a walled garden. Even death cannot touch the flowers blooming there. Have you been hearing voices? Has Arnold been speaking to you again? ]

It’s been almost twenty years, but I still tear up every time I hear the Hobbits’ theme played any time during the LotR and Hobbit soundtracks. 

Absolute. Perfection. 

HECK yes, it's Echo!

I've loved Echo since the New Avengers comics that first introduced her years ago. Very excited to see her in the MCU!

Frodo & Bilbo play Scrabble regularly and are VERY competitive

people who don't wear glasses who are writing characters who wear glasses;

they get fogged up when we drink hot beverages. they get smudged for no reason. we will push them up using anything in our area (i.e shoulder, whatever is in my hand, scrunching my nose up so they get pushed up, etc.). they get knocked off our faces all. the. fucking. time. when we change clothes we either take them off or they fall off when we pull our shirts off. we have to clean them after being in the rain. we own multiple pairs of them, not just one lone pair for our whole lives. most people don’t wear them in the pool, but some have extra old pairs for the pool (like me). some people take them off during sex, that’s fine! but some people keep them on. they don’t get squished into your face when you kiss (most of the time. at least from what i’ve experienced and i’ve got some mf big glasses). if we look down and look back up while you talk/to peek up at something, we will just peek blindly over the top of them. we clean them on whatever item of clothing is closest. some of us have prescription sunglasses and some of us wear contacts when we need to wear sunglasses. please keep some of these in mind when you write characters with glasses cause y'all who have 20/20 vision keep telling me all characters sleep in their glasses and own the same singular pair from age 6-25 and they never clean them.

The Irony of Chris Chibnall for me is not the fact that he is my favorite television/film writer. A lot of television and film writers are people you can fall in love with. It’s the same with books. Reading specific authors I never tire of Tolkien or Rowling or CS Lewis. I love Gene Roddenberry (of the original Star Trek franchise) and his creativity mixing science with a flair of myth and legend and the wonderings of the yesterday and how the past fit in with the Enterprise’s crew and their respective futures as such.

But Chris Chibnall is just plainly ironic for me.

I’ve only ever really watched things he’s written if they’re tied up in my David Tennant obsession (but really, is that really that impossible?) but starting off I honestly had no idea who Chibnall was. I started off in the Doctor Who franchise and lo and behold my favorite Tenth Doctor episode of Series 3 was ‘42′. I was impressed by the way the writer had written the Doctor so vulnerable and frightened and in such a spot that it fell to Martha, his companion, to do the saving.  It was a surprising and refreshing change from the normally stoic and triumphant Doctor.

Then I watched ‘United’ on Netflix shortly after I’d finished with David’s seasons of DW. United is one of two of my absolute favorite films ever written (and my favorite DT project to date). I love history but I fell in love with United because of the emotions felt throughout it all. It’s a quiet believable movie with terrific acting but most of all believable writing. Chibnall, I feel, makes you love these young boys who nearly all lose their lives in the plane crash that nearly cripples Manchester United. It’s writing perfection in my opinion.

Then I came over to Broadchurch and holy crap I was blown away within fifteen minutes of the first episode. Everything about the show drew me in: the characters, the scenery, the acting, the MUSIC, and of course the writing. Chibnall is able to blend humor and darkness, secular and religious, discovery and heartbreak, and weave them all together to make devastating beauty.

It was only after I had watched all of Broadchurch and had watched United again that I realized all that I had actually seen had been written by the exact same man. The writer I had been so impressed with since the beginning even though I would never have guessed he had written my favorite Tenth Doctor DW episode, favorite movie, and favorite tv show was shown to have written them all after all.

Chris Chibnall impresses me as a writer because he seems to understand humanity and how we work as a species. He can write pain and love and loss and make characters that stand out and stay with us. And of course that’s helped along by the wonderful and talented actors and actresses who play those characters, but it was Chibnall who created/built on them to begin with, and that’s why I love him so much.

It just still makes me laugh at the irony that I would have already loved so many of the projects he had done without ever realizing that he was the one who wrote them.

A Brief Guide to Supporting Authors

As a minor change of pace, I’d like to share some information about how to support fanfiction authors. Many readers don’t believe that their comments, kudos, or bookmarks are important to authors, but they are. 

So, great! Now, let’s talk about the various ways to give feedback - including those other than comments and kudos - as well as the strengths and weaknesses of each method. 

(Note: this guide is focused on ao3, but many parts apply to other platforms.) 

Bookmarks

Summary

Bookmarks let you keep track of a story for reference, re-reading, or just because. 

Public bookmarks are displayed on the story’s main bookmark count, and private bookmarks are not. 

Authors can see the total number of bookmarks on a story, both private and public, from their stats page. They cannot see who has left a private bookmark, or when it was made. 

Works can be sorted/filtered by the number of bookmarks. 

Bookmarks can be tagged, annotated, etc. 

The bookmark feature also as a “recommendation” option

Pros and cons

Pro: a bookmark serves as a more specific form of feedback than kudos, because it also means the reader likely wants to come back to the story later, and/or that they recommend this story to others. 

Pro: if a bookmark is public, authors will probably see it (we check those!). 

Pro: because notes/tags/annotations on bookmarks are optional and not intended for the author, readers feel less pressure to have a specific depth or format - anything goes. 

Tips and tricks

how to use the bookmark tool to create a rec

how to tag bookmarks

Kudos

Summary

Kudos are the easiest way to let an author know you like their story. 

You can only give kudos once per account, or once per IP address if you’re logged out. You cannot remove kudos. 

If authors have enabled this notification, they will get one email per day that lists who has given kudos on which works. These emails are magic. 

Kudos serve as a method to sort/filter fics, and readers often use the number of kudos or the kudos/hits ratio to determine whether or not to start a story. 

Pros and cons

Pro: quick and easy 

Pro: more kudos make other readers more likely to read the story

Pro: authors do tend to see kudos, whether via email, their stats page, or the story page itself. 

Con: kudos are a one-time thing, so if you leave them early in a multi-chapter story, the author has no way of knowing if you’re still reading. If you wait until the fic is complete (since kudos can’t be removed), the author won’t know you’re reading/that you enjoy the story until after it’s complete - and a perceived lack of reader interest is a leading cause for abandoned WIPs. 

Con: authors tend to interpret kudos less positively than readers. Therefore, if you leave kudos and mean “I love this story so much!!” the author doesn’t know that, because people leave kudos for many different reasons. 

Con: they’re not specific. The impact of praise tends to increase with specificity. For example, “this fic is great” is nice to hear, but “your dialogue and characterizations in this story are great” is more specific and will generally inspire more emotion in the author. Because kudos are both the lowest effort and lowest specificity form of feedback, they don’t have the same impact as other methods. 

Tips and tricks

If, for some reason, you don’t want to leave kudos on your username, you can quickly leave guest kudos without logging out by copying the address, opening a private browser session, and leaving kudos as a guest.

You can also do this if you want to leave multiple kudos 

Subscriptions 

authors can see how many users are subscribed to a story from their stats page

authors cannot see who is subscribed to their story 

authors do not know if a subscriber is still reading, or if they are inactive/not checking updates 

subscriptions to authors do not show up in the story subscriptions count 

subscriptions can give an author a general indication of their audience for a multi-chapter story, but it’s almost exclusively a tool for readers rather than a feedback mechanism. 

Comments

This has been covered in depth before - check the links for more info. 

Your Guide to Reviews

Appreciation Without Anxiety: Commenting 101

How to Write A Good Review on FFN (most of this also applies to ao3)

tips and tricks for commenting on mobile

Why People Don’t Comment

“Can I Say This?” Culture, Comments, and Concern

101 Comment Starters

Recommending and Sharing Fics

Simply posting a link to a fic on tumblr is a great form of feedback, if the author sees it - it’s fine to leave a comment on the fic saying “I recommended this story!” with a link to the post, or to tag them on tumblr if you can find their account. 

If an author shares their tumblr account, liking and reblogging their story-related posts is a great way to show support, because it means that you enjoy their story enough that you want other people to read it. 

Authors on tumblr will often check both their notes and the tags people add, and tagging it with something along the lines of “I love this story” or “please read this” will make an author cry happy tears. 

An easy way to create rec lists is to bookmark fics or use the mark for later feature as you read them, and once per week, make a list via tumblr post. Generally, you’ll want to list the title, author (tag them if you can find them on tumblr!), fandom, pairing(s), and character(s). A brief description is nice but not necessary; if you want to add more but you’re not sure what, simply copy-paste the author’s summary from ao3. Then, if you haven’t tagged the author, leave a comment on the story with a link to your rec list. 

I don’t actually have words to describe how amazing it is to find that someone has recced my fics, but wow. I have literally cried. 

Misc.

if you can find an author on tumblr, feel free to tag them in posts (for example, “this photo makes me think of your story, @author!”) or send asks about their fics. 

If you’ve written or drawn something inspired by their stories, let them know! Don’t worry about whether it’s “good enough,” because I promise they will love and appreciate it (and you!). 

If you’ve made playlists, moodboards, metas, etc, also let them know! 

If you see someone else recommending or mentioning their fic, tag the author - they likely haven’t seen it. I’ve only found out about several things like this after a friend saw the post and sent it to me. 

If you see someone posting negatively about their fic, don’t let the author know - it’s stressful, upsetting, and they can’t do anything about it. 

This guide is not exhaustive, but I hope it’s given readers a bit more information regarding how authors receive and interpret feedback!

- Mod Rose

Star Wars: Return of the Jedi would have ended a lot differently if Palpatine had only kept his mouth shut...