In honor of my other webcomic, Negative One, hitting 20 years as a webcomic this month, you get a So You Write comic based on a real thing that happened. Heh.
Obviously it’s simplified and doesn’t capture the actual nuance of the conversation I had with this person, but yeah, I once got an e-mail like this, explaining to me with Utmost Seriousness that a story featuring a missing child where she isn’t found safe and sound and returned to her parents “didn’t make sense” and that my stubbornness in writing a story with this sad plot was driving my readers away. This reader was quite polite and sincere, but they were adamant: I was making a HUGE mistake writing what I was writing; that I must be “married to” a plan I’d written for the story that I felt compelled to miserably carry out even though it was obvious the story should go a different way, and that the reader was certain my other readers would all feel the same way.
Furthermore, I was not adhering to the correct way to write stories, was refusing to listen to feedback from readers (which responsible authors really should take into account), and should provide some way of disclosing to readers ahead of time that they’re not going to get what they’re all going to want. (This reader explained to me that they truly felt I should post spoilers of the future story so no one would be harmed by not getting the ending they wanted in the story. They would certainly all be reading to get the plot point they wanted, and I had a responsibility to reveal that it wasn’t going to go that way.)
Obviously I was baffled by this weird entitlement–no, readers don’t get to tell me what I have a responsibility to write!–and I was pretty confused by the suggestion that I owed people full disclosure of future events, not to mention the reader’s belief that I was knowingly writing the story in a way everyone would hate. I’m pretty sure that if I’ve written it to be devastating when characters experience tragedy, I’m doing something right! But on top of that . . . you’re welcome to stop reading any story you’re not enjoying, for any reason!
I sometimes have strong feelings about stories–we all do, right? That’s why we write!–but I’d never dream of e-mailing the author of an ongoing story and telling them what they should be doing with their plot. I’m good at offering feedback when it’s solicited, and I love posting book reviews when I read completed books (some of my reviews are negative), but I can’t say I’ve ever felt entitled to explain to another author that they should be writing a different story than the one they chose to write.
(And if you think an author wrote an awesome story up to one point and then ruined it, or corrupted the story with an element they should have left out, or just wish they would have written it how you would have . . . yeah, that’s what fanfiction is for!)
I understand your point that an author should be able to tell their story the way they want to, regardless of whether it is a fairy tale happy ever-after ending or a tragedy. That is fully understandable for something like a book or movie where the audience is passive (not participating in or interacting with the storyline).
I would add that the more interactive the storytelling is the more the other participants’ opinions matter, so someone who is Game Mastering a tabletop Role-Playing Game (RPG) should be taking their players’ opinions and preferences into account. There are some semi-interactive webcomics where the readers’ comments have an effect on the storyline and those cases are somewhere between a book and a RPG.
Yeah! Interactive storytelling is a whole other thing! And honestly, if I’d gotten a lot of feedback about an aspect of an ongoing story that told me people weren’t enjoying it or were upset about something (outside of, you know, the story having something sad in it), that might have been different. But I do not ask for ANY interaction in a developmental sense, and though comments are open, there’s nothing in the comic that encourages that kind of participation.
This reader literally wrote me a huge screed about how I had a responsibility to write the story to their specific tastes (and assumed they represented the wishes of my readers in general), and tried to say that actually I was making a mistake with the storytelling–that I didn’t understand my own story. (There was a misconception this person had that’s too complicated to explain here–the reader believed the conflict could be solved by something they believed was in the story, but it wasn’t accurate at all.) I actively solicit feedback for my novels and short stories, and am always happy to take people’s feedback into account if I’m asking for test readers, but “don’t write this storyline because I don’t like sad stories” doesn’t fall into that category. There was even a weird follow-up where this person said they stop watching TV shows if it doesn’t go where they want/expect, but if it’s an older show where they can go read an episode summary, they’ll go spoil major details for themself to see if it eventually does what they want, and only when reassured that it will do the plot they want will they consent to continue the show. They explained this to me and then said I had “a responsibility” to provide the future spoilers to my audience in the same way in case they all felt the way this reader did, and that if I don’t respect my audience enough to care about their feelings, I was going to lose the majority of my audience.
It was a very weird conversation.
Sad stories, unavoidable negative events, difficult decisions, or moral dilemmas in interactive or semi-interactive storytelling are something that need to be handled with caution. A couple of webcomics that come to mind are “Prequel” and “Dungeon Eyes”. I actually did stop reading one of those two, but I didn’t feel the need to send the author a rant about why.
I understand your points and it sounds like an odd situation with unreasonable expectations, but now you have me thinking about what sorts of things an author does have a ‘responsibility’ to warn the audience about in advance. A quick and obvious example is a warning about ‘adult’ content – for instance, if there’s going to be a highly detailed (or possibly illustrated) s#x scene in the middle of a comic/book and it isn’t advertised as p*rn or a romance novel then there really should be some sort of warning, especially if the comic/book otherwise looks like it might be targeted at a teen demographic.
While a story just having some sad events or even a tragic ending may not really need an audience warning, some sorts of bad events or themes that might ‘trigger’ someone such as r@pe, @busive rel@tionships, or su!cide might be worthy of some advance warning to the audience. An example of a reader warning from webcomics that comes to mind is: https://chimeranlegends.thecomicseries.com/comics/304/
I think the classic example of a sad story and modern tragedy is Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman”. That’s also one of the few examples I can think of where a main character commits su!cide (proper heroic sacrifices are much more common in stories).
Yeah exactly! People should feel perfectly justified in avoiding content they are not interested in or are no longer enjoying! The difference is in recognizing the issue as “this is not for me” instead of “this story is Wrong because it isn’t what I would prefer to read.”
I think content warnings for adult content or common triggers are great, and I think they’re especially appropriate when we’re talking about immature or marginalized populations. Violence and “adult situations” make sense to warn about. But of course it’s also impossible to know everyone’s potential triggers.
And in my specific case, the person writing to me didn’t seem to be talking about getting triggered, at least. They just said it was too sad. (Which is odd, since they objected to the “missing child who actually doesn’t get found” storyline but didn’t object to a very similar “young adult main character leaves home forever to never ever see her loved ones again” situation, which was also very sad and involved family separation.) The reader just didn’t want this thing to happen. I on the other hand was intentionally writing a story about moving forward in life after such things do happen.