SimonDoom
Kink Lord
- Joined
- Apr 9, 2015
- Posts
- 15,736
Short version?
Imagine that, in the Non-consent section, two popular story sub-genres were "Man has sex with a woman with dubious consent, then either faces the consequence of his actions or has a change of heart and ends up in a loving, consensual relationship with her" and "Man has sex with a woman with dubious consent, then kills her and dismembers her corpse, with the process described in loving detail".
Oh, and sometimes you wouldn't know which kind of story you were reading until page 3 of the 4th chapter.
You'd end up with a lot of angry comments from people who were fundamentally repulsed by the story they were reading and wanted to share their negative feeling with you, and "Hey, that's my fetish" or "But that fits with the category's description!" probably wouldn't cut it.
On a pretty basic level, LW is a struggle between people who want to read interesting stories that involve extra-marital sex (often as a source of conflict in the story), and people who want to masturbate to particular fetishes.
Longer version?
Porn-without-plot "stories" that have no purpose beyond masturbatory fodder for someone who precisely shares your kinks is going to get a poor reception in LW, especially the further to the end of the swinging -> sharing -> cuckoldry spectrum you go and the smaller the audience who shares your specific kinks is.
Masturbatory fodder with a BDSM focus (especially hardcore emotional sadomasochism), which has male/male content, or which is focused on a specific fetish, is likely to get savaged, because Lit has categories for those things, and it's not LW, so (a) a large chunk of the LW audience isn't looking for those things and may or may not be actively repulsed by them, and (b) the people who are looking for those things aren't necessarily reading LW.
The more a story comes off as a cry for help, the more of a negative reaction you'll receive. If, to someone who doesn't share your fetish, the story reads like a husband trapped in an abusive relationship with a sociopath who is, at best, mildly fond of the husband she has no respect for, while he's turning to the reader and saying "Suffering shows how much you love someone, right? Deep down, we have something special, don't we?", then you're going to get negative feedback from people who have sufficiently bought into your work on a narrative level that they sympathize with your characters, but whose reaction (since they don't share your fetish) is orthogonal to what you were going for.
If your work is a thinly-veiled essay on how (a) white men are inferior beings fit only to work to support their wives and those wives' black lovers, (b) women are naturally more sexual beings then men, so the natural order is for wives to take lovers, and/or (c) the truest form of love is a master/slave relationship in which the slave-husband takes his rightful place sucking his wife's lovers' cocks (posted outside of BDSM), then you will receive comments that are not-so-thinly-veiled essays on how you're full of shit.
Stories that are actual stories will do varying degrees of well in LW.
Yeah, you'll probably get negative feedback no matter what you do, since LW has a more-engaged readership than other categories. However, if you have a plot and characters that make sense, a higher percentage of the negative feedback will be less "This story is a piece of shit" and more "This story is secretly a tragedy, because the natural consequences of the actions in this story would be X, Y and Z" and "I disagree with the actions the character chose to take on a personal level" sort of things... which, honestly, I'd consider to be gratifying as an author, because they're implicitly buying into the reality of your work and engaging with it on a narrative level at that point.
I don't agree with this at all. I think this misses the point completely.
Stories in which husbands share their wives with others automatically get viciously criticized and downgraded by a large contingent of LW readers regardless of how well they are written, or whether they have elements of BDSM, or fetishes, or any of the other things you discuss. None of that matters. All that matters to these readers is that they can't stand to read a story in which a wife has sex outside marriage and it's portrayed as a positive experience. That's it. It's that simple. The comments on stories and the data concerning how stories score in this category prove that. Your answer avoids this truth. As KeithD pointed out, even stories recognized for their excellence get far lower ratings in the LW category than in any other category. LW readers are, on the whole, not more discriminating, but less. A sizeable number of them downvote certain kinds of stories in a knee-jerk way.
The assumption underlying your viewpoint appears to be that wife-sharing can never be a positive experience. That's simply not true. Perhaps it is not in many cases, but in some it is. It may not be your cup of tea, but it's presumptuous and false to suggest that stories that depict wife-sharing positively get downvoted because their authors refuse to acknowledge that "the natural consequences of the actions in this story would be X, Y and Z." The reality of sex is too complex to be able to say that with any confidence.