thoughts on the boundaries of sexual content in fantasy

Aggy B. said:

My general rule of thumb is that critique helps us improve, and praise helps us keep going.

Trust me on this, if you don't have the latter the former becomes very difficult. (And I'm stubborn as f*ck so I plug away on stuff long after I should probably quit. But I've known folks who have walked away from writing for a long time because all the feedback was negative.) Do not dismiss the value of hearing someone say "I enjoyed this." Even if there are things they recommend you improve. Even if there is nothing they recommend you improve.

Click to expand...

^So much this.

The most valuable distinction, I think, is not between praise/criticism, but between substantive/superficial. Someone saying "I liked it/I didn't like it" is never as functionally useful as someone saying "I found your characters really three-dimensional and realistic" or "your pacing in the action sequences was painfully slow," though as Aggy says above they still have emotional value. If you think of those as two axes of a graph, most bits of critique will fall somewhere along these lines (and a full critique will hopefully range across the board):

Superficial Praise: makes us feel good, which sometimes is what we need to hear to keep going, but is not directly useful to improving the work;
Superficial Criticism: makes us feel crappy in the short term, is also not directly useful, but gives us something to fight to prove wrong (stubborn writers FTW);
Substantive Praise: lets us know what we're getting right, at least from that reader's perspective, which is absolutely important to improving a work and recognizing areas of strength going forward
Substantive Criticism: lets us know what we're getting wrong, again according to that reader, which tells us what we may need to work on both in our immediate project and to keep an eye on as we move forward with other works.