Wanderer Of The Moonlit Night

Healthy vs Toxic Criticism

[ mediocre mature warning and triggers related to judgements, mental health, etc; target audience: all Book readers and Authors ]

2:46pm
17 November, 2022.

I wrote this part after seeing people being unable to understand the difference between a good and toxic criticsm and often mixing up and being unable to guess which is right or not. I hope this part clears some of your doubts.

Firstly, you should know that criticism is not a bad thing if it's done with valid reasons without any prejudices on someone's work/act. Everyone has a right to complain something they find wrong but provided there's a base of evidence and valid reasoning involved in it. Criticism can often be a good way to suggest changes to things which need more improvement, it can actually help the author or person do their work better in future, but people should also be wary that a toxic way of criticism can demotivate someone to the point they give up on their art or even create quarells and drama, you should know what you're doing when you're trying to criticise something.

Secondly, in things like fantasy genre, fiction and creative arts and such stuffs people shouldn't be overly dependent on scientific laws and logic. If everything was based on logic not everyone would be happy, you need to understand everyone has their own tastes and interest something which u like may not be likable for someone else and something you dislike may be good to someone else. Different genres suit different people. There's nothing cool about having everything based on exact same laws, traditions and logic.

But the big mistake people do is, consider others tastes as bad if it's not same (Don't do it!)

While people normalise and glorify wrong habits and bad things in story which is actually bad. As a lot of audience want to be like their story protagonist or something and character growth etc really matters a lot. If you make your main protagonist(s) do wrong stuffs and glorify it as a good aspect in them, like some ppl do with cigars (it's absolutely bad for health and minors who see such movies and story end up smoking thinking they seem cool), bad boy in love stories, falling in love out of lustful reasons, drinking alcohol and drug addiction as a hot thing which actually makes minors thing that's right and they end up doing it too to look like their fav character. A lil disclaimer at the beginning of movie or story is not really enough. You should make sure that if you have an audience you should make stuffs that aren't much offending or misguiding to a majority of them, especially the fact people make a joke out of mental health disorders and romanticize crimes and sin (like ppl glorifying rape and bullying in stories where a girl is sexually harassed by someone and falls in love with her kidnapper out of Stockholm syndrome or whatever this is very very wrong to romanticise such things you know. Just coz it's a fiction doesn't means you can just glorify any bad things )

Every person has a freedom to write, do, say and express whatever he wants but one should be wary of the fact that misguiding and normalising wrong habits for main protagonist is not a good thing. At least show in your story something like these aspects end up creating problems for them or whatever that would be better than ignorance of aspects. A work which glorifies such things are often targetted for criticism by many and one shouldn't consider it as hating if the people are making valid points of criticism.

Also do add a mature and trigger warning in your works whenever you have sensitive or mature topics related to self harm, violence, bloodshed, gore, sex, nudity, bullying, etc; it goes to a point of demerit when people write such things without a warning. There are lots of minors and people who may find those topics triggering to them. It's always good to have a warning put in your works.

Now coming to the main point of this article. There's a difference between criticizing and hating. Ppl should understand that if they write or do something wrong in some aspect someone might point it out or criticize. Be it a story or whatever. if people are doing it just as a way of review/feedback or opinion it's ok ppl shouldn't call it as "hating on em"