I was very happy to receive my first comment on a fic I posted back in March, A Shortage of Priests, in the fandom 本好きの下剋上 - 香月美夜 | Honzuki no Gekokujou | Ascendance of a Bookworm Series by Kazuki Miya.

I wrote it for the Kink Lucky Dip 2024 challenge, and although I hadn't read the manga, I had watched the whole anime and thought I could do a decent job with the requested pairing, Ferdinand / Benno. 

My gift recipient never left a kudos or a comment. It made me sad, wondering where I had gone wrong. I thought I had done a pretty good job, incorporating many of their requests and likes into the fic. But I thought maybe they didn't like my depiction of Ferdinand as asexual, and that's okay. Gift recipients don't "owe" the creators their thanks; that would be too transactional. They should only give a kudos or a comment if they want to. And they didn't want to. 

Anyway, my feelings were hurt, and then no one commented on it at all for months, making me feel like I must have really missed the mark more than I thought. 

But the other day I finally received a comment on it! They said they enjoyed it, but I got some things wrong in lore. Not too surprising since I had only seen the anime. 

I replied saying I'd be curious to hear what I didn't get right, but not committing to rewriting it. If the issues were big, I didn't want to try to scrap and rewrite after I already gave it to someone. A small tweak here or there, fine, but nothing too huge...

The commenter was kind enough to reply with a few things I didn't get quite right. Some of them are small and easily fixable, but one of them undermines the entire premise of my story. 😭

So I'm feeling pretty cast down about that. I don't think I could have known any better just from watching the anime. Still, maybe the oversights / inaccuracies are why my gift recipient never clicked Kudos.

At this point I think I'll tweak a few small things, but just ignore that the whole premise for my fic is fatally flawed.