Yeah, if you're going to do a workshop with your friends, you have to be willing to put your stuff out there too and let them criticize it. Even if you secretly think it is better, it might objectively suck just as much.

But yeah a workshop with an actual teacher would get this across to them and you won't have to do so. I don't even take criticism well myself but over time have found it's a good thing. For instance, in college I wrote a play where a character said that another character had stolen their hoe. Being college, some idiot thought that I meant they had stolen the other characters whore. Now, this was idiotic in my opinion to think that was what I meant in the context I had written it, BUT. I realize now it was still a good idea to change the object stolen because I accepted the truth that idiots will be reading what I write, and since it didn't affect the story one iota to alter it, I did so. But the same is also true of characters or so on--I've had characters pointed out to me as being superfluous or whatever. I loved the characters but in the end I had to accept that yes, indeed, they were superfluous. Or poorly written or described or whatever you have. So a workshop class is a good idea, and if you all go to it then you can improve your writing, too.

I mean, as it is you are putting yourself into the position of just supposedly objectively knowing that they suck (and I am sure I would agree), when no matter how good you are at judging these things it will ultimately be seen as subjective, when a better way is to get the cross-spectrum opinion of 20 people to agree that they suck, as it is probably closer to objective truth.

This is a bit closer, But I tend to see it more as an old person "I don't know what that is/means but that's nice" which, of course is often interpreted as you've put it because it pretty much screams "If you can't say something nice, bullshit your way through the conversation" and most people are aware of it to the point that it's almost a dead-horse trope.

There's also the "with all due respect" clause which allows you to say anything you want as long as you preface it with "With all due respect", unless you are talking to someone with an ounce of sense who points out the absurdity of this idea (pretty much anyone you would bother prefacing the statement at all with in the first place).

I mean Will Ferrell had this to it's logical extreme in whatever movie it was ("With all due respect, sir, you are a cumguzzling shitbucket." "WHAT?!" "I said it with all due respect." "THAT DOESN'T ALLOW YOU TO SAY ANYTHING YOU WANT!"), but it does happen in real life where people will say "With all due respect" and then not actually deliver on the "due respect" part of that statement in the least.

Guys, it's already happened.

Well there goes the subtlety.

Hahaha, totally didn't realize this thread was about Kyanbu.

WELP

I feel like this has been done several times before

This.

I was shopping around the first draft of a play I wrote to some friends that I knew liked to read and write a lot. I got a couple of people saying "I like it" but my girlfriend at the time absolutely beat my dick into the dirt over it. She pointed out everything that didn't work and made some suggestions on how to improve it. In the end, I had a much better product that I'm proud of and is receiving much better reviews from the people I've sent it to.

Same thing goes with my current attempts at screenwriting. I'm still in high school but one of my friends is currently majoring in film in college. He's been teaching me everything he knows about screenwriting but he's not afraid to tell me when I'm fucking up at it. He's flat-out told me "this sucks" at points and I ended up writing something better so I could say "Fuck yeah, how ya like me now?!".

EDIT:

I actually have this problem with a friend but I guess this works too.

...You mean the chatroom hivemind has led me astray?!

He's lying! I know for a fact that Sevenshot doesn't have friends!