Sounds like a wonderful place, hell yeah!

I've had a couple characters in my books who are good at telling me what to do with them, the rest are lazy bastards who want me to sculpt their life choices like it's my responsibility or something.

Yeah, absolutely! My neck, too. Took a couple weeks to get used to the new posture and stop making a bunch of typos, but I don't ever plan to go back.

Also, I highly highly recommend a vertical mouse, that made a huge difference too.

Haters are always gonna hate. Get your petty revenge by creating anyhow, and enjoy watching them get even madder.

It's no skin off my back if someone just plain doesn't like my writing- no artist who has ever lived creates universal art. Bad reviews and negative quality judgements are an inevitability.

It's when others decide they're the arbiters for what is worthy of exploring in art that I get annoyed.

I can't even count how many negative and one-star reviews I've gotten for having lots of queer characters in my books- but everytime I do, I hit a mental button that reads "make it gayer."

(Are some things harder to create meaningful art about? Sure! And that's without even getting into certain sensitive, difficult topics that make it extremely challenging to avoid minefields. In the end, though, that all still comes down to skill, research, and thoughtfulness.)

Creating art is its own reward, in the end. It can be difficult, frustrating, and exhausting, but there are few more rewarding human activities- especially in this era of encroaching AI bullshit.

Ayuuuuuuuup.

I waffle on whether automatically assuming protagonists are in the right/good guys is a related phenomena, but that's also definitely folks just liking the characters too.

Take LoTR. The reason evil exists in the books is because the creator is singing new creations into existence and Melkor wants to co-opt the song. It’s the reason Sauron’s armies are twisted forms of elves. The evil in LoTR CANNOT CREATE, they can go “this thing looks like this other thing”

Ayuuuuuuuup

Well, I've gotten plenty of wrong book spam emails before, but this one's just especially egregious

Ayuuuuuuuup

I'm a big Predator fan anyhow, but this was something special!

The issues driving capitalism to short term thinking far predate executive bonuses as an institutional force driving corporate behavior- hell, the causes of crises of capitalism make up a big chunk of Marx's writings. Short term thinking is the historic norm under capitalism sans intervention.