Reviewer credibility, Comments on an OT

[farla]

Firstly, something to think about: if a person reviews your story and says it's the greatest thing ever, and they also review a story so full of spelling and grammatical errors it's illegible and say that's the greatest thing ever, does their opinion matter?

I say no. For this reason, surfingpikachu05 loses all shreds of credibility. If it tells you it likes your story, please, quickly look it over for plot and mechanical errors. For an example, look at this story's reviews. (Bonus game! Find the story (posted the same day) that surfingpikachu05 gives an identical review, and win the right to weep at the sad, sad world of online people)


On OTs, today I read several chapters of an OT story, Back to the Beginning. It's pretty cliche (with the 'losing at a gym, training, and returning to win' cliche, the 'injured pokemon don't get caught' cliche, the 'trainer wins most battles and is on an equal level with others' cliche, the 'trainer is so great and nice' cliche, the 'getting abused pokemon' cliche...) but what is nice about it is that the trainer gets mostly normal pokemon. She starts with a charmander, and catches a pidgey, spearow, nidoran male, rattata, caterpie and weedle. Admittedly she's also given a totodile (by a member of an anti-pokemon-abuse group, and yes, the story does mention this is rare because they don't like just anybody), gets rid of the pidgey by giving it to someone else and trades the spearow for a special-color hoothoot, so her team doesn't necessarily keep the more mediocre pokemon. I think the same thing will probably happen to some of the other pokemon (rattata, perhaps). But it's still good to see OT fiction that involves normal pokemon.

Comments

[kddreams.livejournal.com]

A person's opinion doesn't matter because they are being stupid and probably don't care. They just review because they want people to read their stories, as that was something I use to do back in the days of my writing career.

[farla.livejournal.com]

Well, the weirdest thing about this one is that it gives the most favorable reviews to bad stories. I saw it review one story with a lot of chapters with just, roughly, 'great story! Update soon!'...on the first chapter, indicating it hadn't read the story. And it did that a lot for more decent stories. There seems to be some sort of ratio. The amount of fawning praise is inversely related to the actual quality of the story.

[plasmabomb.livejournal.com]

Interesting little loop here. A few hours or so before I post my character on oc_analysis, I join your C2 community. While today, you comment on my character. Afterwards, I recieve an update on the community only to realize it was *your* community I joined and you who commented on my OT. Thinking this was kind of funny, I clicked onto your LJ and found that you wrote an entry about a story I commented on (badly, o'course) the other day.

Interesting, indeed.


Have you taken a look at surfingpikachu's bio? She has roughly 46 reviews (no wonder) on her one rather uninteresting story - all of reviews being of the "suck-up" breed.

The story itself is... sad... Funny that all the reviewers happen to share the same trait.

I wonder how she'll react if she actually gets a bad review... Heh. *ideas*

[farla.livejournal.com]

Quite coincidental.

Yes, I've seen the bio. I noticed it a while back when it started reviewing, but the most recent reviews are so ludicrous they were finally worth commenting on. Still, it is a pretty smart little annoyance, managing to get a 9.4 review-per-chapter average. That's more than almost all stories in the category.

As to bad reviews, this one seems like a pretty cynical creature. It reviews only to get reviews, and the reviews it gets are just as empty. So perhaps it might not care what anyone has to say, only its review total. Still, one won't know unless one tries.