#to endless amounts of people in my inbox asking for the reader getting sick and dca caring after them

[xitsensunmoon]

Uh oh

[cassandraclare]

Jessa/Wessa ship wars

teenagefunbouquet said:Isn't it enough Tessa&Jem got a wedding comic, two kids (and you say more), a lifetime as the only mates for each other and your most explicitly written sex scene After the Bridge? Wessa are the most popular and we get nothing, every wessa moment is shared with Jem while Jessa get to be alone, Wessa fans got no "anticipation" like jessa fans are getting now everyday you give them a book in jem's pov or a short story or a new kid. it feels like wessa is dead.

I’ll be interested in people’s thoughts on this. (I left the username as is since it’s a blank account, probably created to ask this question, so no one’s really getting hurt in this minor drama.) Most of my long and somewhat crabbish post is under the read more.

First, let me reply with the obvious, which is the Jessa rebuttal: “Isn’t it enough that Will gets to be Tessa’s first love and Jem only gets to be her second? Isn’t it enough that Will and Tessa had sex when they thought Jem was dead? Isn’t it enough that there’s a whole series about Will and Tessa’s kids but we only find out that Jem and Tessa had a kid in a short story? Isn’t enough that Jem and Tessa have spent half their relationship looking for a kid who’s related to Will, not either of them? Isn’t it enough that Will and Tessa got two biological kids they got to spend eighteen years raising and Jem and Tessa only get like two years with Kit? Jessa are the most popular, but half the stories in Ghosts of the Shadow Market happened while Will was still alive! And now Wessa fans are getting content every day and have two more books of Wessa being married and doing cute stuff to look forward to. Every day they’re getting a special edition of a book with a whole short story about their wedding. It feels like Jessa is dead.”

Not that I believe any of that either: I think both complaints are equally silly and selfish. But they are complaints rooted in the same logic, which is “My ship is the best and most popular, and every time I see something that in my mind supports the ship I hate I feel angry and diminished, and rather than perhaps examining those feelings I’d like to vent them on other fans and the creator.”

So. My feeling about this is: I am sad to see there is still some kind of a ship war here. As far as I am concerned...

the Wessa/Jessa ship war ended in 2012 when we found out Tessa loved both boys equally and would spend a lifetime with both of them. The end. Quibbling about irrelevant details like how many kids each couple has subsequently or examining closely the explicitness of their sex scenes seem bizarre and pointless. It has nothing to do with how books and stories are made, or how they work, or what functions they serve. At this point it’s like you decided your favorite football team could definitely beat another team, and you spend all your time obsessing about it even though they will never play against the other team because the other team is a hockey team.

When I see people say that “Wessa got” something or “Jessa got” something, it makes me cringe. It reduces stories that are about other things, often friendship, to being about a ship war I am not a part of. (Not every story or book in which a couple appears is a story about that ship. Sometimes they’re just grouting their shower or fighting a demon.) Wessa and Jessa are not dueling pop stars fighting over who gets to perform on the Tonight Show. In fact, they are not fighting at all, which is part of the underlying problem. People are used to love triangles where two guys are fighting over a girl and are jealous of each other. Will and Jem are not jealous of each other. They are not fighting over Tessa. To believe that it lessens Will and Tessa’s relationship that Jem is around and alive, or that it makes Jem and Tessa’s relationship better that Will is dead, is a fundamental misunderstanding of these characters and the story they are in. You are trying to shove a square peg into a round hole, and it will cause you endless misery and frustration.

For instance, claiming that “every Wessa moment is spent with Jem.” Well, that’s ridiculous. Obviously, Will and Tessa spent an enormous amount of quality time alone together in TID. (Otherwise, you would have no investment in this relationship in the first place. There’s a reason you’re attached to it.) Jem did not attend their wedding. He is around in Chain of Gold mostly in his role as a Silent Brother: tending the sick, helping James, bringing news. He is not around during the scene where Will and Tessa make love, or when they kiss and cuddle in the drawing room, grossing out their kids. (I had to fight very very hard to retain even one scene of Will and Tessa alone: in a normal YA book, you would never see a sex scene between the parents, from their point of view.)

The problem is not that there is no “Wessa content” to “anticipate.” The majority of Wessa fans are happy to enjoy stuff like the wedding story or the Wessa moments in TLH. The problem is that the person asking this question will only accept a TLH book in which Jem isn’t mentioned at all as “Wessa content,” and since that would be a fundamental and appalling betrayal of the story and characters — something I would never write and never consider — they will forever feel they are not getting what they deserve.

Asker: if you think that it’s somehow better for Jem and Tessa that Will is dead, that they “get” something that Will and Tessa don’t by having had something awful happen to them, then I do not even know how to begin to speak to you. What has always been meaningful to me about Will, Jem and Tessa is that they all loved each other equally. If that is not the case, then they are not people I am interested in writing about. If that being the case makes you not want to read about them, then you are free to stop — please do — but the story is not going to become something other than it is because you feel your ship is the “most popular.” (Which it is not in my experience, the ships are about equal, and I don’t know why it would matter if it was.)

In After the Bridge, which is not an explicit sex scene but rather a short story that contains sex (they exist!) Will is mentioned thirty-two times. Here’s an example:

“Jem swallowed, running his fingers up and down the blade. “He had only just died,” he said. She didn’t need to ask who he was. There was really only one He when it was the two of them speaking. “I was afraid. I saw what happened to the other Silent Brothers. I saw how they hardened over time, lost the people they had been. How as the people who loved them and who they loved died, they became less human. I was afraid that I would lose my ability to care. To know what this knife meant to Will and what Will meant to me.”

If you think Will isn’t present in Jem and Tessa’s relationship just because he’s dead, you’re wrong. He’s mentioned constantly. (And if someone thought that made it not Jessa content, I would have the same discussion with them: If Jem and Tessa didn’t care about Will, I wouldn't care about them.)

As long as there has been fandom, there have been ship wars. Social media has added a new dimension to that, which is what you’re doing here: the ability to run to the creator and complain, hoping they’ll side with you or give you what you want.

Here’s the problem: it’s really really toxic to have been involved in a clearly vicious ship battle for years. It will destroy utterly your ability to read or enjoy the canon you’re arguing about. I’ve been there, I’ve had friends be there. If you think it’s a point for Jem and Tessa that Will is dead, if you went into Last Hours thinking Jem wouldn’t be in it, that is a sign of a profound detachment from the actual reality of the canon books. You are not interacting with what I am writing or the characters as they are. You are interacting with the fight you are having. That is why your discourse has spun so far off from the books it no longer resembles what is actually happening in them, and demands such extreme gestures to be appeased — like leaving Jem out of Lost Book when he’s actually from the city the characters are visiting, or cutting him from Last Hours even though it would be unrealistic, cruel, and a disappointment to the vast majority of readers.

Dismissing every single moment Will and Tessa have together in TLH because Jem is alive somewhere and it’s bothering you is a recipe for you to be miserable. Clearly you didn’t enjoy the Wessa wedding, or the Will and Tessa love scenes in Chain of Gold. Clearly you consider Jem and Tessa having children not to be a reason for happiness but rather bitter rage even though it is totally irrelevant to Will and Tessa’s past relationship. The only thing that would be satisfactory would be a rewrite of Clockwork Princess in which Jem was run over by a tank and Will and Tessa didn’t care and were happy and got married and we never had to hear about Jem again. But because that would require time travel and a rewrite of Will and Tessa as vile assholes, that is not a thing you are going to get. If you are determined to always be miserable about the reality of what this story is, than the only result of that is that you will always be miserable.

There is never going to be a winner of this love triangle. It isn’t that story. No amount of anything I do is ever going to change that: no short stories I write, or content I produce, or books or sex scenes or longform poems about either couple will change the fact that both Will and Jem ended up with Tessa and she loves them equally. If you want a “somebody wins” kind of love triangle, there are other books that will provide that for you. These will never be those books.

So why did you write this long screed, Cassie, the rest of you might be wondering, and fairly. Three reasons. One is that there are other questions that are carbon copies of this one (as in, written by the same person/small group of people) cluttering up my inbox, and I want to put a stop to the idea that this kind of thing is going to be acknowledged as a valid comment or complaint. It’s not. Second, we have all been driven bananas by quarantine and I am no exception. The third is that this is the last time I am going to address this kind of ship-fight-disguised-as-question. Any further demands for me to favor one Tessa ship over another will be responded to with a link to this post. In the end I’m hoping this will be a time saver once we’re all allowed outside again.

[anoceaninthesun]

What do you think of reviewers who post at the last chapter and say, "I usually review only on the last chapter. I like your story blah blah blah" Doesn't this common habit among the fandom readers take away any motivation for writers to update frequently? I feel there are more reviews for people who update once a month, than people who update once in three days.

This is interesting because despite the main way I interact with fandom spaces being from writing fanfics, I generally don’t get asked much about my opinions on reviews, despite having loads of them. Caveat to my response is I speak mainly from my own experience with maybe brief generalizations I feel fanfic writers would more or less agree on.

To the first part of the question, um, well honestly even if infrequent I guess I’d prefer to see people review throughout. This is because my fics tend to be longer. I do often get reviews from people along the lines of “I would’ve stopped to review sooner but I just got so caught up in binging I waited until there was nothing left to read, whoops” I get that sometimes that’s true. If it’s a really thoughtfully constructed longer review than I guess I’m good with that. If it’s 36 chapters published in the span of two years with over 200,000+ words (which is where ASiT currently sits) and you give me maybe two lines....yeah, I can say you likely aren’t exactly my favorite person when I open your review. 🤣

But this is because I spent two years cranking this out piece by piece and the returned investment is already so little I feel two sentences to sum up all that’s been read and processed and hopefully enjoyed, is less than the bare minimum. So in summary on that less is never more for longer works in my opinion. If you’d like to leave shorter comments here and there that are chapter specific as you read it makes a lot more sense for me.

Yes, lazy reviews in short absolutely do drain away motivation. I’ll just bluntly come out and say that. By lazy I mean the specific kind of reviewer often admits they thought it was okay to keep reading and not review, not even at the end, and they tend to pop up only when there hasn’t been an update in a while. That’s....yeah.

Personally I hardly ever do every three day updates. When a story is in its infancy and I’m trying to get a feel for how it’ll take off so I’m cranking out these short chapters consecutively you may see me do that with little regard to how many reviews the chapters are getting as long as it ups the word count, which in turn often makes the story easier to find and generates attention....but on longer works I strongly advise against trying to do updates weekly. Why? Well on systems like FFN (Fanfiction dot net), this will actually not move your work to the top of the system when the page refreshes.

Due to an outdated algorithm they have, one of many, it has to be like 8+ days between chapters before updating will cause your story to float to the top of the fandom’s page of recently updated fics. So for example if you update every three days, people already following and favoriting may be alerted but new readers just scrolling through not using tags won’t see it because it’ll have been buried. So yes people who update monthly absolutely do usually (notice italics) get more traffic than people updating much, much more frequently. Updating that frequently can also give readers a sense of entitlement in my experience and the experiences of other writers I’ve heard from.

Chapters get cranked out soooo steadily and quickly that many people won’t feel it necessary to post feedback. They’re not being made to wait and for some (for sure not all but many!!) readers the wait is all they care about. If they’re not waiting/ “being inconvenienced” then they’re not going to comment. That is their sole reason to want to reach out to you to remind you in some way, sometimes politely and sometimes rudely, that they’re still waiting.

That being said, we are most definitely not machines. I know when I discovered fanfic I was barely in double digits and when I clumsily posted my now long-ago-deleted first work, I could hardly be considered a teenager. Now I am an adult, albeit not a very old one, and my priorities have for sure shifted and the free time I found in abundance even in high school, is a lot more limited. I’ve got a lot going on at any given time. A lot of things require me to devote myself to them pretty thoroughly.

Social lives don’t make themselves; you have to work to keep cultivating those no matter if the relationship is platonic, familial, romantic or otherwise. Animals tend to be less likely to bite the hand that feeds them (not that they have in my case) when you spend time raising and training them and then keeping up that bond—not that anyone asked but right now my whole thing is experimenting with fruit salad combos I made myself to see what my new baby bird likes, and renovating his cage so he’s constantly stimulated enough not to try to figure out the locks😂😂.

I’m gearing up to try to kill myself with school again by going for a D.PH next fall (which means I need to apply now and that in itself is a long and expensive process) because living even remotely close to three decades (which is what I would be when I finally finished it) is overrated anyway. If that doesn’t work I can always shave about the same amount of time off my life with emergency disaster management work. So what I’m saying is, all the stuff that young adult me has been juggling for the last three years or so, ten or fifteen year old me would have no clue about in terms of priorities. She could read fics and write fics, read fics and write fics in a cycle.

People want me and writers who are just as busy as me to update frequently, so make it worth our while. Show us why you, the readers, are worth devoting a probably limited chunk of our free time to keep happy with a craft we’ve honed (in my case professionally with the help of degrees), when we could be doing literally anything else. I don’t advise people slaving away at a keyboard to put free fics out there every three days and then getting discouraged when it’s not received as well as they’d like, when nothing is wrong with updating monthly, or hell, even every six months if that’s all your personal schedule allows for.

Sometimes I do surprise updates sooner than expected when a reader has really made my day with a solid review that encouraged me to jump start my writing process or when something has gone well in life and I turn to my writing or when I myself am sick of not finding what I wanna read and want to see more of what I’ve written admittedly partially from wish fulfillment put down to page. But never count on that a writer will feel generous for nothing, is my advise to readers. And if you, anon, are a writer, or some of my aspiring fellow fanfic writers see this, again, go at your own pace to avoid burnout. It’s a really fun hobby that has undoubtedly brought me endless joy but existential rewards aside it can be thankless. You will feel unmotivated and unappreciated at times.

Especially when reviewers roll in after long absences on their parts to feed you a line about why they hadn’t reviewed for a while until you chased them out of your inbox with a broom for badgering you between updates. Hopefully this wasn’t too rambling to get something from. Thank you for the ask.