FluffyCow posted:
FluffyCow posted:
Battan gets sure gets a lot of hate huh?
I'm not sure they are getting that much hate, but to be honest, I find this short story pretty bad.
It was 2 comments here and your "but" follow up statement makes 3 lmao
It's also that I see a fair amount of hate for her around the forums. I get that her work isn't for everyone but she has grown a lot on me over the years. Also I don't think this work was bad personally, it's a cute little short comic with a comedic scenario. I think calling it bad is overkill, but ah well everyone has their opinions lol
Calling someone not liking a story "hate" seems a bit extreme? Similarly, "bad" isn't a particularly intense descriptor for something you don't think is good.
Personally, I think the story is kind-of meh. The "Damn it" at the end is a bit funny, but Reina immediately falling for her once she makes eye contact through the book shelf, after not caring through all her stalking also feels a bit like an anticlimax. It also leaves the discomfort from the stalking undressed, which detracts from the ending.
I feel like the story could have been better if it was about half as long, making it punchier, putting less focus on the stalking, and making it easier for the joke at the end to carry it. Alternatively, it could have gone longer and actually explored each of the character's emotions a bit more, allowing the body of the story to carry more weight. As it stands, it's a bit of an awkward middle ground.
I think I didn't have as nearly as many problems as others did with this comedic little story. In my opinion it was cute and I love the art, that's about it. Also if someone thought the story was bad that strikes me as adjacent to hating it, but I suppose that depends on how one defines "bad" and "hate", maybe for you and the person I was responding to bad doesn't equate to hate. I don't think it's that extreme to hate something that you think is bad, but maybe that's just me.
Anyways, you have a lot of reasons you don't like the story, and that's fair. If people don't like it, think it's bad, hate it, or however you want to describe it that's fine. I enjoyed it more than some people like yourself, and you liked it less. Not the end of the world and no point in arguing. Also I want to apologize for any rudeness on my end.
I think your overall take is pretty reasonable, but I'd caution against equating thinking something is bad and hating on, or viewing them as adjacent to each other.
For starters it removes a lot of nuance from the conversation by collapsing the range of possible opinions down to a binary. Either you like it or you hate it; either its great or its awful. In reality, that's not true, there's an entire spectrum of opinions between those extremes and even within that spectrum, people can feels differently about different parts of the work. For example, I found the overall story kind-of meh, but Battan is an excellent artist with a distinctive style. If we were just talking about aesthetics, I'd say she did a great job.
In a similar vein, when just thinking something is bad is synonymous with hating it, you lose the ability to coherently talk about people who legitimately hate on on a work or artist. I'm sure you know the type of person I'm talking about; the type who's rude to other posters, generally vitriolic and not interested in the engaging with the discussion beyond loudly declaring how awful everything is. It helps to be able to distinguish that from more reasonable criticism. Because you do legitimately want to be able to call that out and put a stop to it.
Finally, calling any criticism hating is, itself, toxic to healthy discussion. When you do that you're effectively dismissing the other poster's opinion as excessive and unfounded. You're saying that they're not worth engaging with and then demonstrating that stance by responding to their presumed mental state rather than the content of their post.
To be fair, I don't think you intended to come off like that, based on your responses, but it's hard to not get that impression from your initial post. Like you said, people can have different opinions about how good a work is and it's not really worth arguing about it, but I do think it's worth discussion those opinions, both the positive and the negative, because that's how you discover new aspects of stories and learn more about art as a medium.
