>>122 My comment about you designating your rape scenes as filler wasn’t a jab at you or a comment about you being, as you put it, “fucked in the headâ€. I’ve had more time to examine this and rape scenes as filler presents two problems: 1) It designates the story as almost entirely filler. You have been using the comments as footnotes to explain glaring flaws and confusing aspects of the story much too frequently. If you’re legitimately trying to tighten up this fic and grow as a writer, you need to focus on integrating these clarifications into the story rather than falling back on gratuitous porn and then backtracking post-chapter. Thus far the fic is essentially a slew of porn scenes very loosely tied together with some shoehorned plot points, and if the porn scenes are filler then it makes for an extremely insubstantial story. It's weak writing at a fundamental level. 2) It’s a very poor handling of the material. You have said yourself that you intend the rape in this story to be ugly and uncomfortable, but the pornographic core of the writing combined with the gratuitous (and, frankly, masturbatory) tone of the rape scenes are not conductive in achieving that. The way you have written the scenes thus far do not lend them any kind of gravity other than sheer squick factor. Your treatment of such a hugely charged subject matter as rape comes across as clumsy at best and callously oblivious at worst, and that rustles the hell out of a lot of folk's jimmies. I think it’s really important to acknowledge that people rape. Real life, breathing, complicated people are rapists. Flattening out your villains and making them one-dimensional and inhuman not only pushes this story into the land of bizarre porn fantasy, it also seriously devalues the real-life horror of sexual assault. I think that devaluation, intentional or not, is where a lot of the hatred for this fic stems from. Saying that “most rapists don’t" have motive does the opposite of legitimize the gratuitous rape in the context of this story. If you’re trying to give this fic any kind of depth, that’s not the direction you want to go. Anyway. From what I have read you struggle with achieving the correct tone for your scenes and communicating your characters’ motives, so it would be wise to work on that and resist the temptation to devote yet another paragraph or ten to pornographic detail. You also seem to assume that individual characters are totally interchangeable with generalized archetypes. I'm not quite sure how to clarify this extremely important distinction but hopefully someone else will address it. I hope some of this will be useful to you.