Oh, the Drama of it all!
Just the tale of me and somebody who pissed me off.

So a few days ago, I was wandering the vole-infested wilderness that is fanfiction.net, and stumbled across the following:

Old Memories, New Dreams by Tsume Yamagata reviews
Naraku is dead, and the Shikon no Tama is near completion. But Enemies aren't the biggest problem anymore... Love is! A fic about betrayal, choices, pain, and loyalty. Inu-Kag Mir-San. OMG! Chapter 6 is up! R-R this and I will R-R one of your stories!
Inuyasha - PG-13 - English - Romance/Angst - Chapters: 6 - Words: 25304 - Reviews: 45 - Updated: 9-23-03 - Published: 6-25-03

Normally, I consider review-pimping of any sort to be a big, red 'AVOID THIS FIC AT ALL COSTS' flag, but on that particular day I decided to tempt fate. So I read the fic, found it surprisingly better than I would have expected, and left the following cheerful but honest review:

Very nice! Inuyasha and Kagome are both in character, and your prose is an enjoyable read. The one thing I'd complain about is the POV switches. Most people prefer for you to choose a point of view and stick with it... if you're writing in the third person, you can enter various characters' heads, but even then it's still better if you stay with one character for an entire scene. I hope that was helpful!

So having posted that, I sat back to wait for the response. Which fic would she review? Would it be Late? Would it be Docagast? Would she be nice and honest in return? Would she scream "OMG THIS IS LYKE SO AWESOME RITE MORE!!!eleventyone"? Would she flame my ass and report me for imaginary abuse? Ohhhh, the suspense!

Well, today I finally got my reply... and in fact, the lazy bum didn't review one of my actual stories at all. Rather, she reviewed The Meeting of Aragorn and Arwen, and here is what she said:

You really have a gift. Please keep writing, not only songs but stories. Thank you for your review. The reason I chose to include the switching POV's was to better illustrate the physical actions of a character. It gets a little odd to describe a quickly beating heart from third person, and do it well. I think it's just a better why to get to the character without overusing she and he... Plus it's tons of fun! Thanks for the advice though. Bye!

Now, I suppose I can't blame her for the piece she chose to review... it was up to her, after all. What I can blame her for is that she spent 3/4 of the review talking about her story, so this afternoon, I emailed her:

First of all, thank you for your review and for your compliments... although I'm betting that's going to be counted as a pretty lame way of getting off on the right foot, which is what I'm trying to do here. This email is not a flame... just a statement.

Nobody seems to agree with me, but I consider it very rude to discuss your own story in a review of somebody else's (I have recieved several reviews that basically consist of somebody just pimping their own story, and I hate that). If you wanted to discuss what I'd said about your story with me, you really ought to email me or contact me on AIM.

As for what you said about the POV switches, I understand the motivation behind them... but if I wanted to show something like that, I would tend to make two seperate scenes out of it. Perhaps first I would have Kagome talking to Inuyasha and tell it in the third person but through Kagome, describing her thoughts and reactions but not Inuyasha's. Then I would do a follow-up scene in which Inuyasha thinks about the conversation, and discuss how he felt about it. That would be a little less choppy and would avoid the switching from third person to first and back again.

If you want to continue this conversation, that's great... but please let's do it by email or AIM (my SN is 'Ironychan') instead of in comments. The ff.net TOS says that the comments are not to be used as a messageboard anyway.

- Irony

Let us all sit back now, and wait for round four! Will she be reasonable? Will she be angry? Will she respond at all? You'll have to wait for the next exciting episode to find out!