I just want to tell you that I adore your stories. In fact, you are one of my favorite authors because your stories have depth and thought in them. I personally imagined a philosopher Loki before I read your writing, and I was overjoyed when I finally discovered you. Don't get discouraged by the lack of kudos or review, because they don't necessarily mean anything about the quality of writing - some very popular stories are awful, yet some obscure ones are brilliant.
Oh my goodness, that’s such a lovely thing to say!! (I felt a bit weird about answering publicly, because it sort of seems like bragging, but it would be churlish not to acknowledge a comment like this, and it’s anonymous so I can’t answer privately, so… good excuse to share the nice thing someone said about me, I guess :-P )
I do have a tendency to get discouraged by the low response rate. We all say to ourselves that popularity doesn’t necessarily correspond with quality, but people will still filter by number of kudos, and whenever I see fic rec lists on here, it’s generally the same already popular authors. And most of them are good, and deservedly popular! I went looking through the Loki/Thor tag on AO3 to see if I could find any undeservedly obscure authors and fics, and what I saw seemed to fall into two categories: the popular stuff I was already keeping up with, and a few fics with <100 kudos that I skimmed and found to be badly written and derivative. It does make me wonder sometimes whether my perception of my own work is skewed or even self-deceived. If I’m seeing work by popular authors rack up over 100 kudos in a couple of days, but it takes a year or more for one of my fics to inch its way up there… maybe it just isn’t good. And then you see posts going around that say things like “If you’re not getting the response you want, you should consider the fact that 90% of the fic out there is crap, so yours probably is too. And maybe you have a few devoted fans, but either they’re your mom or they have bad taste.”
Anyway... it’s still reassuring to see that there are some people who really like my work, and apparently for substantive reasons. It makes me hope that my writing is an unusual or acquired taste, like really dark chocolate (try Trader Joe’s 85% cacao; it almost tastes spicy, even though there’s no pepper in it) or sour beer (look for Flemish red or gueuze, which is lambic without fruit flavors), rather than just being bad. (Not like retsina, though. That shit is just nasty.)