I don’t think I am or should be above critique. I’m at critique, craving those rare moments where someone will sit down and send a long meaty email for me to chew on as I rewrite… And knowing how how rare it is.

I’m not getting critique so much as harassment people then claim is critique as if there’s anything I can learn from unintelligent racists spending years lying about me…

Take the reaction to the woobification article. People called me racist, said I hated abuse survivors, said I had internalized homophobia and didn’t understand queer coded villains. Those aren’t criticisms and they’re not true in the slightest. They also hold no basis in what I actually wrote. Few critical (negative) engagements with my work actually address my work?

What I did see was people pointing out that a separate true crime article would’ve been better and that it felt weird to include it in the article about fictional villains.

And you know what? They’re not wrong. I didn’t do a good job talking about Jeffrey Dahmer the person becoming a character to fans and that’s something to consider working on.

But the ad hominem attacks, lies, accusations of bigotry… Were the vast majority of the engagement with my article. Primarily, people chose to misrepresent my article as being anti villain (and therefore racist, homophobic, anti trauma survivors, etc) without reading it in the first place or by cherry picking sentences out of context and building their own nasty narrative out of it.

But even when I write something tender and mild like the Goncharov article, People go out of their way to insult me and misrepresent my work (“stitch thinks everyone who likes Goncharov is racist”). They are exceedingly cruel and gleeful about it. They lie about me and share other lies. They aren’t actually engaging with me as a person (human) or my work as work.

People have rarely pointed out actual issues with my writing. They’ve never commented about issues that could be fixed. There’s no engagement with my words, only that I’m the one saying them so they should be silenced. Out of all of the people pretending I think so highly of myself that I don’t want to be criticized, how many of them have actually criticized my work in actionable ways that acknowledge my work and goals? How many of these people have actually acknowledged that they’ve poured their personal problems with me into their engagement with my work to mask that this is petty misogynoir?

It’s complaints about my tone, the topics themselves, and a heaping ton of lies and misrepresentation delivered earnestly because people will choose to ignore harm if the harm is wrapped nicely… Even in cases where people are actually and openly wishing harm on me and calling me slurs…

And it’s not criticism.

We know, from the gamergate days, that bullies legitimize abusive towards marginalized creators by framing their ceaseless harassment as critique no one else is willing to give. It’s just wild that people can and do see people maliciously misinterpretating my work in the most uncharitable way possible without ever asking anyone who actually reads my work (or me!!) for clarification…

And decide that I’m being thin skinned and resistant to critique for being upset that people are lying about my meticulously planned out work, calling me names, mocking bad things that have happened to me, and misrepresenting my words.

If I got actual critique, I’d try to take it on board because that is what I do when I get that stuff. But you cannot truly believe the vicious harassment, mockery, and misrepresentation I’ve been getting for years constitutes as criticism in general, much less something I need to adhere to.