#if you post something publicly like on ao3 please use baseline proper syntax and grammar

[centipedve]

man wdk why maybe we're just pretentious and cranky right now but whenever people respond to common writing advice with "you can write whatever you want" it's like. yeah obviously. but the people who seek out writing advice and should care about it tend to be the people who need it.

not as in They're Bad but as in a large portion of people who write aspire to be published and to be published your work needs to be marketable and to be marketable you need to follow the rules, save if you deeply understand them and can break them in a manner which retains readability. we mean there's also self publishing but if you get any readers at all your reviews will suffer and as a result your sales will suffer.

there are some publications which take more experimental work but once again you need to understand the rules to break them. there's a big difference between "knowingly breaks rule for a specific purpose" and "makes a bunch of mistakes that will annoy readers at best" and it can be very easy to tell. sort of like the art style vs mistake thing. you can be aware when something is "wrong" but implement it in a way that makes sense and is cohesive with the rest of your work, and you can also just draw the thing wrong. it doesn't matter if you don't plan to do shit with your art so make as many fuck ups as you want but if you aspire to get a job with it then sorry man you're out of luck.

maybe we're just unsympathetic too wdk. cuz apparently people need reminders they can suck shit. you can suck shit 👍 does not change anything about writing advice though or make it less valid in the grand scheme of things.