#fic discourse

[transformersconfessions]

I cannot believe MOMU has fewer AO3 kudos than that racist caricature OOC JazzProwl mob AU. Ugh, sometimes this fandom has no taste.

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[sharkfreak-official]

Hi Tumblr. It’s me. Sharkfreak.

I actually made this account ages ago and then forgot about it like a true AO3 feral. Anyway hi. I’m the author of Ashes and Embers, the long-ass Naruto/Sasuke fic where they’re both mentally ill, emotionally constipated, and also probably in love (tragically).

This blog is now officially my place to:

Scream about my fic

Post dumbass meta

Spiral about how Sasuke is both the problem and the solution

Cry over other fandoms too (ATEEZ, other animes, K-pop chaos, etc.)

Possibly ruin lives with crack posts like “Naruto bottoming is reparations”

If you're here because you read my fic and went “what the hell is wrong with this person,” welcome. You were right. Pull up a chair.

AO3: sharkfreak Current Fic: Ashes and Embers Status: Actively spiraling

[roseyfillorian]

love the magicians but the tag on ao3 has an "over-saturation" of queliot fics and it hurts my soul

well over-saturation isn’t the right word. but i wasn’t expecting it to take up 73%

was expecting 50% at most but 73?!?

i can’t write so i shouldn’t be complaining yet here i am…

[perseidlion]

Whenever a fanfic writer laments about dropping engagement and says they wish people left comments like they used to, inevitably someone chimes in to say "just write for yourself!"

That advice has gotten twisted around. It is excellent advice when you're learning how to write because it helps you find your voice and expand your skills. Plus when you write from your heart, you'll tell stories worth telling.

That advice is NOT meant to tell writers they should write with no expectations of getting anything from readers, ever. It just means don't write trying to please someone else, because the story won't be as strong. It's also much harder to get the motivation and gain the discipline to write when you're not writing a story you love. If you don't care about the story, why should your readers?

That is craft advice, not fandom behaviour advice. They're very separate things. There would frankly, be no fanfic community if people didn't write for engagement. The stories would sit forever in documents and not shared if its only purpose was for the writer's own edification.

It isn't an either-or thing. When I choose what to write, I try to find the venn diagram overlap of what I want to write and what I think the fandom will enjoy. If I write something outside of that, then I don't expect the same kind of engagement. I never fully write for myself (then I wouldn't post it) and I never fully write for fandom (because it would probably be a bad story.) There's ground between those two things, and that's where the best stories can often be found.

Writing with an awareness of the audience is a skill worth developing if you are doing more than just chucking out stories for fun (which is also TOTALLY valid and fine.) It's also fair if you don't care about engagement. But it's also not wrong to care about it, either.

Social media and influencer culture has ruined the gift culture of fandom. On Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, etc...the big creators are part of a monetization program and/or they get brand deals. So you just consuming their content does in fact benefit them. Published writers get sales stats and royalties from people reading their work. That is NOT true for fanfic and for Ao3. The only "payment" we can hope to get is that if someone likes our story, they tell us.

When people say they wish readers dropped a comment, we're not necessarily saying we wished more people read our work (that is sort of a given, really. What writer doesn't want to be read more?) What we're saying is that we wish the people who we know are reading our work would take a moment to say thank you. I would never want someone to read my story out of a sense of charity. I want people to read it because they like the concept and my writing.

We're saying that IF you read and enjoyed the story, please tell us. That's all. It doesn't have to be long or involved (and for god's sake, don't leave unsolicited criticism.) Even a 'loved this!' or a string of emojis is welcome.

To put it bluntly, telling writers they should write for themselves when they ask for a thank you if someone read their work is very entitled. It's also a cop-out because it absolves the reader of a small amount of effort and allows them to just consume silently with no guilt. We're not asking for a novel of a comment (though those are very much appreciated!) just a sign that a real human liked it.

This is especially important on long multichapters where you can only leave kudos once. It can get very lonely as a writer when you're 2/3 of the way through and there are few new kudos and few comments. It leaves you wondering if anyone still cares, and it comes at the most challenging part of the fic. I would venture to guess this is when most longfics get abandoned. An easy way to prevent that is just to drop an occasional comment so we know we're not shouting into the void.

A fic is a present a writer gives the community. If you loved the present, it's polite to say thank you. It's 10 seconds of effort on your part for hours of effort on the writer's. That really isn't a lot to ask.

[mrstsung]

Great idea:

X reader fic where blorbo in question is just bored. Just bored,stimming and doing funny stuff to try to be unbored.

No romance. No sex. Just a normal damn fic.

Or if there is smut,it's treated like an activity. Because honestly,sometimes it be like that. Of course,fully CONSENTING,and fully with someone who you trust obviously.

Look I'm hella romantic. I love soul crushing romance. And smuttest smut to ever smut. Like I'm not aspec by any means. But holy shit dude,i feel bad because where's the food for them?

But like sometimes....i just want a good ol fashioned. "Fuck cuz im bored and wanna do something engaging with my s/o" type of fics. Whether it's sexy times or playing uno or something. Like where's the character fics with that?!

Like gimmie believable grounded fics with the deep transcending stories.

We need both.

But yeah i wanna play uno with shang tsung.

[captainkirkk]

If a fic author deletes their work, what’s your take on people who’ve previously downloaded the fics sharing their copies? I’m personally torn on it - I can understand both sides, but was wondering what others think.

This might be a controversial opinion, but I think it's fine to share downloaded copies of fics in certain situations. For example, if a friend mentions they have the fic and another friend asks them to email it to them. Or someone is desperately looking for their all time favourite fic that was deleted and asks for it on tumblr, I think it's okay for someone else to answer and offer to email it to them. I think, as authors, we need to accept that we give up a certain level of control when we publish a fic. Anyone can download it, even if we later delete the fic.

ALTHOUGH, I think posting it in a more public setting for other people to access (e.g., sending a link to a massive discord server) is probably a no-go?? Also, if the author has come out and explicitly asked people not to share downloads, then I'd say respect their wishes!!

[foolondahill17]

I don't know guys...I agree that it's nice to get comments on fics, but the vast majority of art produced in the world is never seen by people other than the creator. I think social media and its impulse to commodify and content-ify all art gives not only the consumer but also the artist a false sense of entitlement. If the masses aren't gonna appreciate what they're given for free, then maybe they don't deserve your art. But that doesn't mean you necessarily deserve the attention and appreciation of the masses, either. Personally, I don't think art should ever be about being paid, even in kudos. If you aren't creating truly out of the joy of creation, then you're just setting yourself up for disappointment.

[inkwingsinc]

how much is too much for a fanfic chapter? Is 10k the limit for what readers will seriously tackle?

[can0n-fodder]

I'm reading an SGA fic, and McKay is this sexually liberated cosmopolitan who experiences no embarrassment or awkwardness EVER, and talks like a committee approved pamphlet on sexuality.

Did we not watch the same show?

I mean, I get it's a fic, but if you're going to completely change their personalities, then you didn't really write a fanfiction. You wrote an original work and just used the names from a tv show.

[Also, he expresses in this fic that he's "fine" with sleeping with people under 18, which...wtf.🤢]

[aerodaltonimperial]

okay, are y'all ready? cause we got results from that smut poll, and it absolutely confirms everything i'd already discovered through keeping a stats spreadsheet of my own fics.

let's fucking talk about this!! first, almost 5% of people either don't read explicit fics on ao3 or don't read fics at all, so we can just sort of slide those results out of the poll entirely, since they don't matter for purposes of information gathering here. the big thing that i sort of KNEW would be a thing but was desperately hoping i had made up in my head is not that 5% of people, but the staggering 15.4% of people who say they won't even leave a kudos on explicit works that they liked (options 1, 2, 3, and 7).

now, interaction, at least in my fandom, is pretty shitty anyway. i've had people i considered friends in this fandom point-blank tell me they read my fic and i hadn't seen a kudos from them in 6 months. i will yell until the fucking world explodes that it's a GOD DAMN BUTTON that you CLICK and takes zero effort, and yet. here we are. that 15% of people? i am so fucking uncharitable towards. you don't deserve to read fic at all. you don't deserve to read a single explicit fic. it's an ANONYMOUS WEBSITE. literally nothing is stopping you from creating A SECOND USERNAME if you are THAT WORRIED about someone seeing that you left a kudos on an explicit fic, which, might i remind you, no one can fucking see unless they are on the fic themselves (or the author).

see, the thing about smut, is that for a lot of us, it's nerve-wracking to post. it's nerve-wracking to WRITE. and we are out here, putting our whole ass username on it BECAUSE WE ARE THE ONES POSTING IT (unless you post to anonymous), and y'all can't even click a button at the bottom of the fic??? a ton of the tags mentioned that this is a devil's sacrament situation, and they're right. anyone who sees you in the kudos list either also read the fic or wrote the fic. all you are doing is hurting your chances of getting more fic. honestly, the not leaving kudos pisses me off way more than the not leaving comments does lol. it's the lowest of energy. it's a fucking button. you can click it with your finger, or your nose, or you dick, idgaf, but you click that god damn button. absolutely horrible lol.

but then you gotta look at the other options, where people leave kudos but not comments. a few people were like "oh haha my explicit fics get lots of interaction" well good for you, you must have a real dedicated group of friends who reads and comments on your shit lol, but most of us don't have that! we are out here worrying over, was this hot? did i do a decent job? did i get the characters right? because i find smut difficult not just because i freeze up trying to write the narration, but because i am so focused on making sure the characters still read like themselves! and we just wanna know if we got it right, if it was sexy, if it sounded good. 56.2% of readers will not leave comments on explicit fics that they like.

that leaves us with just under 20% of people who will leave a kudos AND leave a comment on the fic if it's explicit.

look. i knew this would happen lol. i keep a spreadsheet of my fic stats (one-shots only, as chapters skew hit counts). anything explicit will end up sitting at about half what the others are in terms of kudos and comments. a lot of reblogs mentioned that people re-read explicit fics more, but in a small fandom like mine (tiny! niche! very low fic count!) i find that ALL my fics get re-reads simply because there is so little of it available, and that all the fics get the re-read numbers by the end.

if you ever wonder, why don't i have more fic to read? this is why. fic writers are putting this out for free. we are creating this out of love. yes, we all know, and have been told about 5 million times by everyone under the sun, that we should write for ourselves, but that's not the point of FANDOM. fandom is for interaction. fandom is for finding community. and fandom ain't gonna get fic if people treat writers like content creators on tiktok.

my last huge fandom was livejournal based, and sometimes i'm struck by how much i miss that. there were no hit counts on LJ. no kudos buttons. the ONLY way people could interact with your fic was to reply to the entry. and people DID. that's how we all made friends. that's how we all connected. that's how we created our community. people commented on your fic, and the ecosystem thrived. and people just don't do that anymore.

anyway. for the people who, like me, said they would kudos and comment on explicit fics, thank you. you are keeping this whole place afloat. and here are some of my favorite tags, the ones that made me feel slightly better about how the results from this came down.

thank you all for being here and saying the things you did lol. you are why people keep writing explicit fanfics.

[werewolf-cuddles]

Just found about about the FiMFetch debacle.

Basically, the operator of an MLP fanfiction archive not only deleted all "foalcon" related stories from the archive, but also went on a moral crusade to call out as many people who create and/or consume this content as they could find.

Their definition of what counts as "foalcon" turned out to be incredibly broad, and includes aged up depictions, non-sexual stories that just happen to be marked as mature, and even artwork of adults that just happens to have the "younger" tag. (i.e. the elderly Granny Smith as a young mare)

At least one artist was put on the list, not because of anything they actually drew as most of their work is SFW, but because of NSFW edits of their artwork that they did not create.

And the cherry on top of this whole shitshow? A discord screenshot was leaked where this righteous moral crusader admitted to having, in their own words, "a weakness for Scootaloo" when sent an explicit image of the character.

Just want to make it clear that I don't like foalcon myself, and to be fair, some of the people on the list were also alleged groomers, and at least one person had actually been arrested by police for possession of CSEM (presumably REAL CSEM), but why am I not surprised that the person who went on a moral crusade against fictional smut turned out to be a projecting hypocrite with a taste for chicken?

EDIT: It has come to my attention that the artist in question has drawn some explicit works, none of which involve underage characters. They are still on the list because of an edit featuring their artwork, not because of anything they drew themselves.

[transformersconfessions]

I hate the fic MOMU (you might not know of it unless you are a JP shipper). Though I guess it’s less that I hate it and more that I hate how fans won’t stop recommending it like it’s awesome and has such good takes on the characters, and fans keep replicating its takes in their own stuff, when I think they’re pretty much baseless and don’t like them at all

.

[literatehistorylover]

At great personal risk, I feel I must speak my truth. If you are writing a fic and the main character:

Has a pre-written back story

Has identifying physical traits

Has a distinct personality

Has specified knowledge and skill sets

Reacts in not universal ways

Then they are not really a reader insert. What you have written is a self indulgent fic with an OC you related to. Please just name your OC. Y/N is such an unnatural thing to read for a character who is often rather well development, just not named for some reason?

I feel like it's some weird thing were young authors don't want to admit to their fanfic having a self indulgent OC. Like, bro... The whole damn hobby is self indulgent. Write your self insert and be proud you fucking finished a story at all.

And name your fucking characters. Because I would never act like that, so Y/F/N just distracts.

[oops-prow-did-it-again]

I am blocking on sight anyone that puts any fucking discourse over "moral" fiction or whatever the fuck on my dash. I have blocked 5 people in the last month. I don't care if I've been a mutual with you for years, if you engage in this kinda shit, especially on the side of believing that certain fiction shouldn't be allowed, then you are someone I have no respect for.

Unless someone is actually straight up committing a crime (I.E., posting *actual* photographs or videos of REAL LIFE PEOPLE, not fictional/drawn people, REAL PEOPLE, being harmed/sexually abused) I Do Not Care what other people read or write or watch or make. I Do Not Care. I do not trust anyone else's, especially on the piss on the poor website, to be able to determine if a text is "glorifying" something or if they are just uncomfortable with the subject as a whole. You people all suck at media comprehension and I am just flatly not interested. I keep seeing posts of people making good points and then people ripping them apart in the most bad faith possible. "Someone else's media consumption doesn't hurt you" "yes except for when abuse is portrayed as love, or-" no. shut the fuck up. You Missed The Point. You DO NOT KNOW, and you CAN NOT KNOW, why someone else wrote or created something nor can you know why anyone chose to engage with it. Also, sometimes the fucking point of a story is to portray something bad as good, to serve a narrative purpose. that doesn't mean the author thinks it IS.

I Do Not Care about icky feelings. If you can't tell fiction from reality, that's a you problem. Leave us writers/artists the fuck out of it. And if your knee-jerk reaction to this is "oh, you're just making excuses For The Freaks" you are part of the problem and I also have no respect for you.

FWIW, I am an abuse survivor and I find everyone's moral panic over shitty fanfiction stupid at best and upsetting at worst. You people freak out over fictional bad things happening to fictional people, to the point you waste the resources and time of people that actually hunt down predators by sending them loli fanart? You make me feel like you care about fictional people more than you care about the victims. Also, you'll be fucking fine if you hear about weird art or fic happening. Just don't fucking read it yourself. But knowing it exists won't fucking hurt you. You know what does hurt you? ACTUAL ABUSE. Like the kind so many of the creators you demonize go through, bc like I said before, you can't know why people make the art they make and you certainly can't know whether someone's a victim or not. And people shouldn't HAVE to disclose their victim status for you to make sure you're only attacking the "acceptable" people.

Maybe just don't fucking attack people over some fucking fanfiction or fanart. period. go the fuck outside.

You crave ruthless, vindictive justice more than you crave to help people. You are after the high of feeling good about putting people down, the "right" people.

And I Have No Respect For You.

[perseidlion]

Look, I get there are a lot of valid reasons to not read incomplete fic. Lack of time, getting plotlines confused reading multiple WIPs at once or forgetting the plot between updates, not being good with cliffhangers, etc. That's all valid.

The main reason people seem to cite for not reading WIPs though, is they got burned a few times by a fic forever being incomplete.

The hard truth about that is it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you don't read WIPs for whatever reason - and especially if you don't comment on them - fics are more likely to be abandoned or go a long time between updating.

It also seems like sometimes the people who got burned by incomplete fic do it themselves. There is a date on each fic that tells you when it was last updated. I feel like some people don't look at that before starting to read and then get upset that something hasn't been updated in years. Like using tags and filtering properly, that's on the user, not the writers.

Often, but not always, if you engage with a fic you'll actually start getting faster and more consistent updates, along with upping your chances that fic will be completed. If fic writers feel like we're not shouting into the void, we get more inspiration.

Finishing work is hard. Keeping up momentum to write is hard. And it's nearly impossible to do that when you feel like no one cares.

So yes, you can choose to only read complete fics for whatever valid reason. But just recognize that in doing so, it means you're contributing to the fact that there are incomplete fics in the first place.

How many great works never get finished because everyone is waiting for it to be done before they give it a chance?

If you are someone who doesn't read WIPs for reasons other than you got burned a few times, I encourage you to read the first chapter of something that looks interesting, bookmark it, and tell the writer you look forward to reading it when it's finished. If that's true, of course!

For those of you who are afraid of reading something that remains unfinished: I promise you the pain of putting hours and hours into a story or a chapter and having it being met with crickets is much worse than the disappointment you might feel to not getting a finished story.

Also, there are many fic writers who stick to a very consistent update schedule. It's easy to tell if a fic has been updated regularly. And if you're wondering what the schedule is like? Subscribe to the fic and see how frequently you get emails before committing to read.

The truth is though, there is never a guarantee that a fic is going to be finished. Life happens and this is a hobby. It's a leap of faith for us to post and hope someone reads it just like it's a leap of faith to read a WIP and hope it gets finished. We're not owed comments and readers but that also means you're not owed a finished story. This isn't a commercial transaction, it's gift culture. Speaking for me personally, I try to honour the faith WIP readers put in me with consistent (usually weekly if not twice a week) updates.

For those of you who do read WIPs and especially those who comment and share and hype writers as they write - thank you. You are the reason there are any complete longfics to begin with.

[sonofatoasterwaffle]

Eddies name is Edmundo.

lol yes you’re correct. I assume you’re saying this because of my Eduardo character. It’s meant to be a play on 2x01 when Eddie corrects Buck’s assumption that his full name is Eduardo as if it’s something that happens often. Hence the line “close, but no cigar.”