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Depends on the volume, TBH. Like when I decide to trash an email address when my inbox is flooded with spam that I’m accidentally deleting legitimate emails too.

*Clicks link* “OH MY GOD! JERSEY CITY!”

In the past couple of days, I’ve received five “nonsense reviews” that look like this: From ANON - on October 06, 2021NKGfAy cgrngykbkdod, uwuuwppwtogw, [link=http://dbghcmuhsqds.com/]dbghcmuhsqds[/link], h**p://hgavtlargcnu.com/ There’s no obvious rhyme or reason to which stories are getting them, as some are in Cartoons and some are in Originals (the only 2 archive sections in which I have stories posted). A recent post from @InBrightestDay suggests that he’s getting them, too. Anything to be done besides deleting them?

I came back to about 30. Have been through deleting. Like others, I do prefer keeping my anonymous reviews open!

Huzzah! Worked Now

I’ll try again. If it works this time, cool! If not I’ll PM to you there George.

I’d love to see you tackle some space battles in the future. But getting yer start with Gundam, it does show, and yes! Action scenes are always fun to write (least to me). And thank ye as well, I do pride myself in my action scenes. It’s tricky aye. Sometimes it helps to have those little details pushed in elsewhere, so you can concentrate on the flow of stuff in the moment. Certainly! I’m glad you did lamp shade it in the end, and it certainly allowed for a bit more depth to things. Made it read better to me at least. It’s nice to see more of the Non-Action guy that’s not just comic relief. I’ve not played enough of Evil Within, but I can see the influence and aesthetic, while still being very much your own thing. It was very very cool, and as you said, visceral. Very visceral. And yes. Fuck that guy.

Yeah, those were the types of links you didn’t want only a condom for protection, you’d need EVERYTHING covered in latex before you even dare to click.

I’ve gotten three: two on WitS and one on The Least I Can Do over in Books. I’ve deleted them, and thankfully had the same thought as Bronx when it came to the links. I don’t really want to turn off anonymous reviews, as I’ve gotten several genuine reviews from fans who simply don’t have an account, so I’ll just keep deleting them as they pop up.

True that. And in retrospect, I realize that it wasn’t a terribly good idea for me to include live links in my original post. I have removed them.

Sadly, the only way to deflect them is to turn off anonymous reviews, which is an account-wide function and not just by the story. But @Desiderius Price is absolutely right about not following the links. Delete the reviews, and click NOTHING. As I sweep the archive, I delete things like that on sight.

I’m guessing spam (the least nefarious idea), and you definitely should NOT follow those links, wherever they may lead is likely a place you don’t want to go.

Ok, so I looked back to see where I’d last responded to @Sinfulwolf’s reviews, and it turns out I’d somehow neglected to do so since her review of Chapter 9. So I have several reviews to respond to, not just one. First, Chapter 10. I have included this sentence of the review purely for the sake of irony. Thank you! I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned this elsewhere in this thread, but I got my start writing Gundam fanfiction, and writing the action scenes has always been fun. I should probably write another space battle one of these days. Not to spoil anything I’ve started reading recently, but you write some pretty intense action scenes yourself, so that’s a serious compliment. I definitely see what you’re getting at. It is a tricky sort of balancing act, and I’m not sure I’ll ever entirely master the “detail versus flow” thing, but I will try! Thanks again! Your comments did make me really think about why I was writing this the way I was, and made me realize that while it’s somehow socially acceptable for a male protagonist to have a love interest who’s a noncombatant, it doesn’t seem to be done the other way around. I guess we’ve gotten to the point where a large segment of the population will accept women as action heroes, but at the same time there are boundaries on masculinity we’re reluctant to push. The Non-Action Guy, as TV Tropes puts it, is often played for comedy rather than just accepted as viable. The traps are another example of me trying to follow stuff @JayDee set up in WoH, expanding on a quick line and working to figure out what “the traps of Hell” might be like. While I like the matter prism from Chapters 11 and 12 is cool in a very “high magic” sort of way, there is something about the aesthetic of the fractal impalement trap that I think works on a visceral level; I may have mentioned The Evil Within as an inspiration before, but that trap is something I can sort of imagine being in the first game, crawling through a maze while spikes grow toward you with metal rasping noise. And once again I am really glad at how popular Luzurial’s “Fine, I’ll let you talk to my boss” moment is. Because, as I said when I read (some of) MRaD, fuck that guy.

I got two more reviews for WitS, though, which I can respond to before work. Well, Cthulhu fhtagn. Note that these aren’t the entirety of the reviews, but the rest are links to...somewhere (I didn’t follow them). As this is rather obviously spam, I’m deleting these.

Alright! The last review from @GeorgeGlass I won’t go into this too deeply, as a future story may have a scene addressing the topic again, but this is definitely an overriding philosophy on display here: science and philosophy (religion included) are two ways of looking at the world, and if both religion and science are equally valid, as is the case in this story, then at the points where the two touch, they should overlap without conflicting. I personally like the effect when you combine the two. This comes up in Chapter 3 with Luzurial’s happiest memory being 13.6 billion years ago, fusion igniting inside the first star, when Luzurial explains that lower-ranking angels look like the mortals of whatever planet they’re assigned to and so on. It’s something I really enjoyed doing with the story. I had so much fun with that. Credit must also be given to @JayDee, because way back in the day, I was actually just going to have Luzurial get a new sword when she regained her wings. However, during conversation with JayDee, they mentioned that the sword is actually a part of Luzurial, like a shard of her soul, so at that point she had to get it back, and the idea of using the flaming whip like that was way too good to pass up! I thought about that, and I admit this has to do with the mental image that resulted. Holy water is water that’s been blessed by a priest, and when I considered it being standard use against beings like this, I had the image of a bunch of priests on like an assembly line, blessing holy water in huge quantities...and I started chuckling at the image. So yeah, holy water is made in relatively small quantities, but it’s for a very personal reason. So...I am very sorry about that. I wish there were some manner of explanation I could give you, but the simple fact was that I didn’t think of it. I can’t begin to explain why I never thought to have her say it in the denouement. Doesn’t make me look particularly intelligent, does it? Again, I’m sorry. Thank you again! The Hell scene wasn’t something I’d planned from the beginning but evolved out of the storytelling. It all started with that bit in Chapter 4 where I was sort of summing Eparlegna’s character up through dialogue, and then later with his dialogue with Kevin in Chapter 6 he kept insulting Lucifer and I started to have thoughts... Thank you for the reviews, and I’m really happy you enjoyed it.

I still stand by that We got biological syringes walking around.

Ok, so I was away from home for a while, but we have some more reviews for WitS from @GeorgeGlass! This is definitely an area where the compressed timeframe of the story affected how fast it moved. This whole thing takes place over about a week, and I had a hard time believing Eparlegna would wait too long to make his move. Given that, I definitely ended up having Luzurial come to her decision faster than if the story had taken place over, say, a month. I was definitely aware of what you’re talking about, which was why I stretched the timeline out by one more day, so that Luzurial had around an entire day to think about what she was going to do, rather than, say, a few hours. Thank you! That kind of came from JayDee. In Whore of Heaven, the barrier is described as looking vaguely like smoke, so I figured there might be a sense of that as it expanded, and with the agents driving away from it I was kind of reminded of the pyroclastic flow scene from Dante’s Peak. Correct. I didn’t think I’d be able to create a Sloth monster that was actually threatening, but figured out I could make it work if it sapped the energy from people around it. The Gluttony creature you only hear about, from the elevator shaft, actually has a little bit of extra story behind it. I remember talking in the review thread for one of @InvidiaRed’s stories about insect mouthparts and the proboscis, and posting by way of example a wheelbug up close to show it. Invidia was like “Well THAT’s terrifying.” I couldn’t resist having a creature design with a similar organ and have someone else take Invidia’s “Well SCREW that!” attitude toward it. Thank you again! I was rather fond of that one. *shakes fist at the sky* JAAAAAYDEEEEEE!

Another review from @GeorgeGlass, this time for WitS chapters 4-6! One does wonder about the insurance claim there… Kind of reminds me of that bit from Big Trouble in Little China where Jack Burton is trying to figure out what to do concerning the loss of his truck due to supernatural forces. “...And I don’t want to hear ‘Act of God’.” The Charnel Spider does seem to be something of a fan favorite. Because none of this would have happened without JayDee giving me permission to write it, they got an advance copy of every chapter before posting, and I remember being really excited to show them the Charnel Spider, due to the...well, I guess it really being kind of fucked up horror imagery. I wasn’t really sure how to portray an Envy-based monster. The problem there was that the obvious solution, shapeshifting to be what it wants to be, was something that, if I recall correctly, Fullmetal Alchemist had already done with the homunculus Envy. The idea of, instead of copying what you want, taking it from someone else, was sufficiently creepy to me (“I wish I had skin like that...so I’ll just take yours.”) that I went with that. I’m glad the confrontation was reminiscent of WoH, as this was probably the part of the story where I was most dedicated to evoking some of the feel of JayDee’s first story. Thanks again for the review!

Ok, so, I’m working on a few different things, and I just now happened to go to my gmail account and oh crap @GeorgeGlass left a WitS review two days ago and I didn’t notice it! Well, let’s rectify that. Thank you! The “castrate him with a spork” thing made me chuckle a bit as well. I mentioned this in the AN, but the tentacle scene was the first one I’d ever actually written, so I was definitely nervous. The positive reception it’s gotten has been very encouraging. Finally, I’m glad you enjoyed the little bit of payback Hobbes gets. I knew what I was going to do to Barbara, and I just kind of wanted to give her...I don’t know, something, some little moment where she gets back at him at least a little. Glad you’re enjoying the story so far, and I hope it continues to be fun for you!

I had a very close relative die in the summer and it’s kind of broken me too, as self-centred as it sounds when they’re the one who died, but I gotta try and move on a bit. Hoping to catch up on reading soon, especially the new halloween story jam you’ve got going on.