Author of the fanfic's response:
I understand that that was the intention behind Uncommon Time. However, I personally felt hurt by the ways that the traumas of characters who were not Alto were consistently treated throughout its narrative, and I can assure you that I was not the only one. This fic was my way of working through those feelings, just as the original story was its creator's way of working through her feelings about typical abuse survivor narratives.(then the 2nd part of the message)
Hi again. I originally didn't want to try to justify myself to you. I felt like I didn't have the right, or like the story I'd already written should be able to speak for itself and if it didn't then no further clarification would help. I also don't want to make you feel like you have to Engage In The Discourse at me to defend a story that was clearly really important and meaningful to you. But if you do want to know a little bit more about where I was coming from, there are now some comments on chapters 5 and 7 explaining it further.
There's one more thing that I wanted to say in response to your comment specifically. I understand that Teagan was written as neurotypical, but at times it felt a bit dissonant for me to try to read her that way. In my experience, people who exhibit the behavior of justifying their assholishness as "honesty" tend to be coming from one of two places: a history of privilege and entitlement that's let them get away with it for most of their lives, or an inherent difficulty with performing to social standards leading them to stop trying altogether and instead attempt to reframe their "failure" at behaving "normal" as a virtue. Since Teagan is a commoner woman of color, it felt weird to assume the former of her, and much more natural to assume that it was the latter being mistaken for the former, which… uh… is a thing that's happened to me as an autistic person a lot.
I also want to thank you for commenting, as weird as that sounds in this context. I know there's kind of an anti-criticism culture in fandom that can make speaking up against works you see as harmful and toxic frightening, and I respect you a lot for doing it anyway. I want input from people who feel like I've done something wrong to help me evaluate myself and my writing, and I also want to feel like I have the right to post criticism in situations where I might find myself in your position. There's… also some parts of fandom with an opposite culture where everyone gets together and dogpiles the Harmful and Toxic person until conformity has been successfully enforced, and for a while I was afraid that was where this was going — but then it wasn't, and the anxiety passed, and I feel a little bit stronger for having faced it. So, thank you.
As for where that self-evaluation led me… I do feel like that "unaware of its contents" part is a problem I would like to try to fix. I tend to default to the "creator chose not to warn" tag in situations where I have difficulty figuring out how to warn "correctly," in hopes that people will take it as a warning that the fic could contain anything at all and they shouldn't read it if they're not in a particularly robust mental state. Given the canon content of Uncommon Time, I was hoping that seeing that tag on a fic in this category would set off even more alarm bells than usual. I'm trying to think of a way to indicate that this does not strictly adhere to the moral and thematic thrust of the canon in a way that sounds value-neutral toward both the content of the canon and the content of my fic. So far, I'm drawing a blank. If you have any suggestions, I would love to hear them. If you have alternate suggestions about tagging or warning, I am open to those too. I am not open to removing this story from the archive.
ETA: Also, to be clear, it's obviously fine if you still think I'm 100% in the wrong here or are otherwise still angry at me and don't want to engage with me at all. I think I was getting a little ahead of myself in that regard by the end of this comment, and I apologize for that. I wanted to offer to take certain kinds of suggestions from you, but I don't expect you to make them, or even to respond to me at all. I hope that makes sense.