emmaofmisthaven:

I’m not one to complain a lot about fanfictions and my job as a fic writer, but I just received the rudest pm on ff.net and it has my skin crawl so pardon my French (ah!) but I’m just so fucking done rn and I need to say it:

Fanfiction writers aren’t your little bitches.

We have the hardest job in the fandom, because the creators can’t acknowledge us for legal reasons. Journalists make fun of us all the time by reading excepts out loud to embarrass actors, or plainly make fun of fangirls. We can work on a piece of writing for hours to barely be read, let alone acknowledge by the fandom. We have to adapt all the time — to the characters, to the plot, to the character development — so we get it right, so we offer the best fanfics possible. People don’t leave reviews, people don’t share our fics even if they love them, people don’t truly acknowledge and celebrate our hard work.

Being a fanfiction writer is just. so. freaking. hard.

So the very least you could do is show some fucking respect. The very least you could do is add a “hello”, “please” or “thank you” when you send a message to a fic writer. The least you can do is being polite when you send a fic writer a prompt (a prompt, may I add, said writer will spend time and energy on, just for you, just to make you happy) instead of just throwing your idea at our face like “pairing + idea”. The least you can do is take five seconds of your time where I took five hours of mine to add a kind word about the chapter I just uploaded instead of a “more!” or “update soon!” that makes me wonder why, why it wasn’t enough, why you can’t focus on what I just gave you.

Fanfiction writers aren’t just fingers, we aren’t prompt-fillers and writing machines. We’re bloody human beings, we pour our soul into our writing for little recognition and little love, and it’s so emotionally demanding more often than not. Because we need to look deep into ourselves to find the right words, the right feelings, the right everything. We’re emotional and we crave recognition, and we’re a little broken, too.

So please, please, stop treating us like shit.