u/MasterPalpitation8

I’d like to understand my reaction to Laurel as a character, because I feel like my opinion on her is very different from the norm (I see a lot of love for her on here). First, I’m a mom, so I’m looking at her through peer eyes. And I see some very nasty parenting. Obviously slapping Belly, but also grabbing her and tugging her after the engagement announcement—if you can’t control your anger enough to keep your hands off your child, you’re shit: end of story. But beyond that, she’s a controlling mom who can’t seem to enjoy her child finding her own likes (ex: being a huge downer about Belly being a deb). Her reaction to the engagement was over the top inappropriate and tactically stupid to boot. Yet she’s also cool with all the adults getting stoned while home with minors (emergency trip to the hospital needs a driver??? etc), and she’s only mildly irritated when Belly gets alcohol poisoning as a minor. She sets awful examples in her adult relationships, because she’s a controlling and disrespectful co-parent to her ex. I just don’t see why everyone loves her. I get that she loves Belly, and I get that she was fighting through grief, but in my view she’s also a really, truly bad mother. What am I missing that the rest of you see?

Paper rock scissors. Rochambeaux. Roshambo. Whatever you call it, you know how to do it. Properly. As do we all. But my dudes, these kids do not know how to do it properly. Everyone knows it should be 1-2-3-shoot. This is sacrosanct; this is law. But these kids, man, they are running around doing 1-2-shoot. No 3 whatsoever. I swear to god. I don’t know how we failed them.

I ran a bit of an experiment and posted the same Bella/Edward story (just shy of 100k words) on these two sites to see where I found the best fit as a writer. The results: I got far more comments, and much better quality comments (more detailed, lengthier) on fanfiction.net than I did on Ao3. The ‘kudos’ mechanism on Ao3 left me cold; after putting so much effort into a chapter, it was frustrating to receive a ton of kudos without a lot of comments, because kudos can’t help me improve. I’ve heard a lot of readers prefer Ao3, but in my admittedly limited experiment, I felt that the fanfiction.net community did a better job of ‘feeding’ the author. So I think I’ll be moving forward posting only on fanfiction.net because maintaining both is more administrative work than I’m looking for. This is only my experience, though. I’m wondering how other authors feel about these two sites/communities if you’ve tried both?