Have you ever had critiques/feedback that you disagreed with? If so, why?

I agree it's hard to find authentic voices for most anyone pre-1900 who wasn't a writer. This thread is looking at research for speculative fiction rather than historical fiction, so the standard isn't as exacting by far - but there are a couple of approaches that I've found useful:-

- court records. In the UK, there were certain courts (Assize courts iirc?) where ordinary people's witness statements were recorded word-for-word (e.g. https://news.dorsetcouncil.gov.uk/dorset-history-centre-blog/2021/05/14/stories-from-the-dorset-assizes/).

- some criminals get given a voice by the media. For the US, Billy the Kid springs to mind. For all that it's embellished, it's also the society making a sincere attempt to remember who someone was as well as what they did. Which in a way can be truer than the historical truth. Sometimes first-hand accounts make it through as well (e.g. https://jackshuster.blogspot.com/2012/05/first-hand-description-of-billy-kid.html) And sometimes modern psychiatrists can build an interesting picture of a criminal from what's since been learned about modern people with similar patterns of offending. And for this type of exercise, historical accuracy is less important to the research than its finding something the readers can relate to.

I turned up this from 1962 for the Harpe brothers - https://archive.org/details/spawnofevil0000unse
I don't think it was mentioned on the wikipedia page when I looked there, but it's a historical novel about them by a historian so it might be interesting to compare with Rat Teeth. The things I'd note is this author doesn't try to go into their psychology or voice, and he gets 40 pages out of them by focusing on the victims. What they contribute to Rat Teeth's backstory isn't at issue - in speculative fiction backstory is totally artificial: it's only ever a device for conveying voice. I looked at this site https://allthatsinteresting.com/harpe-brothers and wondered if there is something approaching a character motive in the Harpes, to do with mocking human society. They actually strike me as quite different from Rat Teeth (if he is "devoid of ideology" as per Outline #1) - because they don't just amorally kill people as a means to an end, they do it in ways they find funny. Their idea of a practical joke: "we killed your baby lol". They seem to have spent their every waking moment being the opposite of what a reader relates to: so I'd suggest there might be good storytelling 'dna' in their story for an antagonist, but it's difficult to see what they could contribute to a protagonist. Perhaps interesting again to compare Patrick Bateman: as not having a particularly historical or realistic basis, so much as being a pretty pure literary construct serving a satirical project.

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It strikes me that this thread is divided between supporting the OP's character design, and discussion of critiques generally. So I'll split this post likewise.

I wonder if there is a self-limiting factor to the critique. If the critique coming through is of low quality, it starts to become more fun to write critiques than workshop entries.
The spirit of the age leaves huge tensions between:-
- "reviews" vs. "critique"
- "civility" vs. "be assertive"
- "constructive" vs. "natural"

On the first of those, most people come online with a genre already in mind. Let's say vampire romance. They've read sufficient vampire romances to have formed a good idea of the rules and how it works, but (i) they haven't read many books about vampire romances, and (ii) there aren't enough critiques of vampire romances on the market. Not that I've looked but there's going to be a real big drop-off after Bram Stoker... and I'd be surprised if there is much more than Anne Rice and Stephenie Meyer covered if we want accessible/readable secondary literature on vampire romance. Someone must have done a good 'state of the nation' review of the genre as a whole, but it's not reaching enough would-be vampire fiction writers. What people read is reviews - which are a cousin of critique - and they want positive ones.

Turning to the second of my points, everything now from schools into workplaces is 'positive reinforcement', especially online. I don't necessarily mind that, I find it an interesting challenge to make everything polite. It's just become a genre requirement of critique. It just means honesty (which is the vital thing) takes longer.

Which then feeds into the third point: if critique is serving the author's improvement of the work, constructively, well of course it should be super-polite. If we're not working with finished/polished thoughts who are we to say "show-don't-tell"? No-one's so talented that we deserve to kick another writer off their own mental throne - and perish the thought, it's one of the few spaces anyone still has any freedom. This leads back in to the first point: one of the distinctions between review and critique is that reviews pass judgement: they must say "read", or "don't read" where a critique can have any objectives it sets itself: e.g. to help readers access the beauty present in a work. In its natural, wild, form, critique can't be constructive because the book's already finished. And I believe it's this wild discipline of critiquing finished work that everything else cascades down from - whether it's the ability to review something, or the ability to suggest improvements, or to beta-read, or to edit.

I have only seen a couple of dummy critiques in the workshop so far, and I just think "why waste the opportunity to do a sincere one?" It's tantamount to letting someone get back to the safety of their house with the self-affixed "kick me" sign still on their back. It's failing to utilize a faculty. It's hastening the return to the anguish of making the novel longer. And that's quite apart from the fact that showing oneself to be some sort of freeloader must undermine the value of the feedback on the very workshop entry it's trying to pave a way for.

But I feel there is a more pernicious risk: critiques that are substantial but don't achieve honesty. (I think that applies to most of the OP's reddit commenters just because that site squeezes them into making their points too briefly). The positive reinforcement all around us makes it harder to realize when we haven't read something properly, or when we can't. Not only might we be more widely-written and widely-read in some genres than others, or more trained or practised at ranging around: there will always be individual writers we'll just never get. Being tired or bored at the computer, and especially being positively reinforced from all sides, can lead to (I won't say poor, but) misplaced critiques being posted. Including by me. And everyone's truth is true now, and all critiques are polite, so the writer on the other end of them ends up picking their favourite.

I think most people would get more from the exercise if they submitted shorter passages at a second draft stage.

I hope the OP will put a Rat Teeth scene into the workshop - even if it's a discarded one. I find discussing him in abstract hard because he's unconventional and there is so much background material to grapple with.

 

Yeah, I think it’s difficult to say whether the character works or not without seeing him in the story.

The way he’s described here, I could definitely see him working as a main character— or not working. I think it’s going to come down to execution, with this one.

 

What if Rat Teeth was thrown into a situation where he's forced to become a "heroic protagonist"? Personally, I think that it might be an interesting direction to take with the character. Here is a "dirty dozen"/"suicide squad" type scenario that I'm actually considering adding as the main story:

Rat Teeth has been arrested by local authorities and is about to be executed. However, there is an ancient evil reemerging in the nearby kingdom, and has been abducting local children for some unspecified but nefarious purposes. The kingdom has sent many of their bravest men to save them, but all their attempts have ended in disaster. Desperate, officials have struck a deal with Rat Teeth. In exchange for his freedom, Rat Teeth has to infiltrate the evil force's Mordor style lair and free the kidnapped children. If he returns without them or if any of the children are harmed or worse, he'll get the noose. Thus Rat Teeth is hellbent on rescuing those children, as his life literally depends on their safety.

In the eyes of those officials, the deal is very win-win. That way, if worst comes to shove, there's one less criminal for them to deal with, and on the off chance he succeeds they'll be reunited with their children.

 

oh, well, I personally love shit like that. I still think it comes down to execution, though.

 

In the eyes of the reader though, will there be a character arc where Rat Teeth obtains some of the insights he's been missing into other dimensions of human life?
Structurally, these plotlines are equivalent:-

The prison official needs some groceries. His regular dogsbody has the flu, so on a whim he unlocks Rat Teeth and says he can have a pardon if he can find 12 rolls of toilet paper.
The headmistress needs some ballet tickets. Her regular dogsbody quit, so she lets Rat Teeth out of detention and says she'll cancel his explusion if he can get 2 front row tickets.
Rat Teeth's dad is watching the big game, so he lets Rat Teeth out after curfew to post his mortgage paperwork.

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https://archive.org/details/dirtydozen0000nath_n3r2/page/28/mode/2up
I think the Dirty Dozen is a complicated project. It's given a false basis in both WW2 and psychiatry*, but the characters can perhaps be read as placeholders for American literary stock characters (the first two mentioned are Queequeg and The Noble Savage... and next is "Maggot" who is a caricature of the German regime being sent into a literal mission against it). So I would approach it as a postmodernist story - the literary stock characters chosen for the project are the problematic ones who many people might think should be kept censored in most circumstances, and Nathanson using them in The Dirty Dozen is like the army using criminals in a suicide mission.

And I guess this might be something that could be done with Rat Teeth too, but I wonder if then the negative feedback on him would have been welcome, if it shows he fits an edgelord archetype that he's being created to deconstruct.

* The basis in WW2 was ridiculous - a story Nathanson heard once from Russ Meyer - it's not just a lack of research but a parody of it
The psychiatry is summed up with "Kinder wanted to run a series of Rorschachs and Thematic Apperception Tests on the group as soon as it was organized."
The latter test works by showing the patient a series of pictures that have a vague resemblance to real-world objects - which on a postmodern reading might be what Nathanson is doing to the reader.