On Wed, 17 Mar 1999, Nick Leifker wrote:

You know, after all of the Akane-bashing and Ukyou-bashing I've seen
going over the FFML in the last day or two, all in the name of 'fic
writing, I'm left with one question:

Do you really hate these creations of ink and pen so much?

I'm surprised that someone as passionate about their writing as you is
surprised that other people get passionate too.  One of the hallmarks of
successful fiction is that it gets people involved...a story generally
isn't a success unless the reader actually cares about what is going on.
But that caring usually means playing favorites to a greater or lesser
degree, because almost no one can like every character in a series
equally.

Which means sometimes we do love or hate characters who are only pen and
ink, or only electrons.  If we didn't care about them, we wouldn't ever
make it through the stories.  And we certainly wouldn't write them.  If
you try to tell me you don't love and hate some of your characters, I
won't believe you, because I've read your work and it shows through.  It's
natural to readers and natural to writers.  Now if it reaches the point
where we start stabbing each other to death, then we've gone too far, but
any writer certainly needs to CARE about what they're writing about.


 John Walter Biles :  MA-History, Ph.D Wannabe at U. Kansas         
ranma@falcon.cc.ukans.edu       
rhea@tass.org              http://www.tass.org/~rhea/falcon.html
rhea@maison-otaku.net      http://www.maison-otaku.net/~rhea/

Bailesu:  But the plot had so many holes, I could fly the Yamato through
it.