#FFN

[puraiuddo]

FanFiction.net is not gone.

Right now it's a victim of DNS (Domain Name Service) spoofing. This means that a malicious party is trying to steal traffic from FFn by purchasing a very similar domain.

Correction:

The new "fake" site that people are seeing still belongs to FanFiction.net—they just misconfigured their servers and are not redirecting traffic from the bare fanfiction.net to the main site at www.fanfiction.net. There is likely no malicious agent. Didn't mean to scare anyone! Just wanted to let people know the site wasn't deleted!

So if you want to read fanfiction and not see leaves, you have have to type out "www.fanfiction.net".

Please share so people stop panicking.

[vioyume]

I am a bored and curious human being who wants to know what the majority grew up with for their pleasure reading time.

[kazoosandfannypacks]

[incognitopolls]

We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

[friendly-neighborhood-imbecille]

Man, it always sucks when I’m listening to a fic and the screen reader goes “doubleyou ach ay tee eye ess why oh you are eff ay vee oh are eye tee ee see oh ell oh are doubleyou ach ee are ee dee-”

And I pause it like what the fuck, then find my phone to look at the screen and I see “whatisyourfavoritecolorwhered-”

Like, bro, please, why would you do this?

Or when it starts going “EXEXEXEXEXEXEEEXEXEXEXEXEXEXEEXEXEXEXEXEXEXEXEXEXEXEXEXEXEXEXEX!!” Because somebody didn’t use the code for a line break. At least just make it one dash, please.

Like, it’s your fic and you’re writing it for free and that’s cool, so if you see this and you’re like, “mmmm, nah, still gonna do it my way” then that’s chill.

Just know that it’s really difficult for people with screen readers to read some of these fics. Me personally, when I find a fic that does this, I don’t give it a chance no matter how good it is.

[snaileer]

A writers haunted past.

I’m literally having this issue with a fic right now🥲

[bakanokiwami]

TOP 10 CARTOONS ON FANFICTION.NET BASED ON NUMBER OF FANFICTION (1999-2022)

To make this bar chart race, all series titles in the Cartoons Section on November 29 (or the closest date to it) of every year were copy-pasted from Wayback Machine to Google Sheets, rearranged according to number of fanworks, and then inputted to Flourish to turn into a bar chart race.

In 2000-2006, FFN used Miscellaneous Cartoons as a catch-all tag for all cartoons that didn’t have their own category yet. It was then renamed to Misc. Cartoons in 2007 before it was moved to the Misc. section in 2008.

Code Lyoko and Avatar: The Last Airbender were actually miscategorized at first and were found in the Anime section from 2004-2007 (2005-2007 for ATLA). I used their data from that section for those years.

In 1999, fanfiction weren’t divided into sections like Anime/Manga, TV, Books, etc. yet. It was just a small list of mixed fandoms.

Originally, the fanfiction list was sorted alphabetically too, but was changed to number of fics at around early 2013.

By November 2013, FFN started abbreviating numbers above 1,000 to K, so exact numbers aren't available for series with more than 1,000 fanfiction.

This bar chart was made with the assumption that the numbers listed in the Cartoons section are correct. I can't seem to get the same numbers for some of these categories when I go to the specific categories' page and toggle ratings, other filters, and language to All though... I'm not sure where the discrepancy is coming from. (And it’s not the crossover fic numbers that need to be added to serie’s total fics from what I’ve observed.)

Please refer to this post for more bar chart races.

Thanks for understanding and hopefully I didn’t mess up anywhere! 🙏

[physalian]

In Defense of Fanfiction (Or the perfect starting point for your original novel)

Fanfic gets a bad rap pretty much everywhere except Tumblr. It’s misunderstood and misrepresented by its average works, seen as juvenile and cringey, or a banal point of contention between a famous person or piece of media and its fans.

Outside of fanfic that writes about real people, especially smut fics of real people, I support the art wholeheartedly. Fictional characters are one thing, but personally, caricaturing a celebrity’s life for public consumption and writing or drawing them in compromising content without their consent is a little weird. You do you. Don’t like, don’t read, as they say.

Fanfic is the perfect starting point for a few reasons:

It places you in a creative box and forces you to work within those constraints

It does all the worldbuilding and character concepts for you

It lets you write way outside your comfort zone

When published and receiving feedback, it boosts your self-confidence

It's incredibly flexible

It’s practice. All practice is good practice

—

Behold your creative box

When I was little I had no idea the majority of fanfic was shipping fics. I always pictured and looked for canon-divergent alternate universes. Like, what if X happened in this episode instead of Y? What if this character never died?

Fanfic demands you work within someone else’s canon, whether it’s an OC in the canonical world, or the canonical characters in an AU. These are like little bowling bumpers saving you from the gutter, but also keeping you on a straight-ish path toward the pins.

The indecisiveness of too many choices can be too intimidating when you’re first starting out. You want to be a writer but you have no idea where to begin, what genre to pick, what characters you want to chronicle, what themes you want to explore.

Even if it sits on your computer never to see the light of day, you still got those creative juices flowing.

Pre-packaged worldbuilding

Sometimes all we want is to get to the good stuff. Maybe I want to write a story about elemental magicians but Last Airbender already exists and I just want to play in a pre-existing sandbox. So I write some OCs into that world and have a free-for-all.

I don’t have to come up with my own lore, world history, magic system rules and mechanics, politics, geography—any of it. I get to just focus on the characters.

Even if you’re writing an AU, like say a coffee shop AU, you don’t have to think about brand new characters, you can just think “What would M do?” and go from there. The trade-off is your readers will expect canonical characters to behave in-character, but I think it’s worth it.

Stretch beyond your comfort zone!

Do you hate writing action scenes? Go practice with a shonen anime fic. Need work on dialogue? Write some high-fantasy fic, or a courtroom drama. Practice a fistfight by watching fistfights and writing what you see, and do it over and over again until what you read makes you feel like you're watching what’s on screen.

But beyond that—practice genres that you aren’t super familiar with. If you’re new to fantasy, write fantasy fic. Or a mystery novel/show, thriller, comedy, satire, adventure, what have you. The nature of fanfic still gives you those “guardrails” and you can get some brutally honest feedback on how you’re doing.

And, of course, the realm of M-rated romance and smut fics. I haven’t because I think I would die of embarrassment if I tried and I never intend to include sex scenes in my works anyway, but if you do want to, use the internet as your test audience. Post it on a throwaway account if you’re nervous.

Build that self-confidence!

The fandoms I used to write for are super dead, so it’s insane how I still get email notifications that so-and-so liked my fic to this day. Comments are as elusive as ever, but random strangers on the internet telling me they liked my work is a magical reassurance that my writing isn’t actually awful.

Random strangers on the internet are, as we all know, beholden to no moral obligation to be kind to your little avatar face, or be kind to be polite. So a rando taking the time to like my work or even leave a positive comment can feel more honest than one of my friends telling me what they think I want to hear.

I tend to avoid the more present aspects of fandom like online communities, forums, social media, what have you, so I get a delayed and diluted aspect of any given fandom through completed works. Which means, in general, I get to avoid the worst and most toxic aspects of fandom and get to sift through positive feedback and critique.

Even if your fanfic isn’t written with stellar prose, it’s fanfic. We don’t expect Pulitzer-prize winning content. And if your work isn’t up to snuff, people are more likely to just ignore it than put you on blast (at least in my experience, I never got a bad comment or a “flame” in the old FFN days).

Fanfic doesn’t care about the rules of published literature

On the one hand, try not to practice bad habits, but with this point I mean that your layout, punctuation, formatting, paragraph styles, chapter length–all of it is beholden to no rules. I get as annoyed as the next reader with giant blocks of paragraphs, or the double-spacing between pages of single-sentence paragraphs, but if the story’s good enough I might ignore it.

There’s more than just straight narrative fics, though. People write “chat” fics, or long streams of text and group chat conversations. The scene breaks can come super rapidly–I’ve seen fics with a single sentence in between line breaks to show the passage of time. And without the polish of a traditionally published novel, I’ve never seen a purer distillation of author voice in any medium more than fanfic.

All practice is good practice

Even if it’s crack fiction, or a one-off one-shot, or something meant to be lighthearted and straightforward and free from complex worldbuilding and intricate plots. It really helps break writer’s block when you can shift gears and headspaces entirely and you can get relatively instant feedback to keep you motivated.

Beyond that, the “guardrails” help you stay consistent as far as character growth and personality if you struggle with designing rich characters.

The most recent fanfic I wrote was just a couple years ago, for a dead fandom I didn’t think would get any traffic whatsoever. It wasn’t my original works, but the feedback on that fic gave me the kick in the butt I needed to get back into writing more seriously.

—

In short, I support fanfic. I may not be proud of my earliest fics' prose now, but I am proud that they walked so I can now run.

[thedevilsfamiliar]

I can’t believe that we have to say “hey, don’t publish and sell other people’s work” in the year 2024

From my understanding, fanfics are currently being sold in Amazon and Etsy.

[fandom-data-scientist]

poll on chatfics

for the sake of clarity, allow me to first define chatfics as "fanfics which are told primarily in the format of chatlogs or text messages between characters (either in a group setting or between individuals)."

they may be of any genre (although they are commonly classified as "comedy" or "crack") and branch out into prose at points in the story, but most of the story or plot should be in chatfic format.

chatfics do not include fanfics that have brief passages of chatlogs or text messages between characters as, like, flavor enhancers to the story, which would otherwise be told using more conventional prose.

without further ado:

if you would like, you may also elaborate on when you started reading fic, what site(s) you use(d), and which fandom(s) you read for, but mostly i am just curious.

[catgirl-catboy]

MUTUALS AND DISTINGUISHED GUESTS!

I have found the coolest fucking thing ever.

tumblr user longlivefeedback has created an INTERACTIVE SOCIAL SCRIPT for commenting on ao3. You can find it at:

doc!google!com/spreadsheets/d/1lOqWGDNquHxr23l84ASKn-vdSLFrHop4giVOYDkKnWI/edit#gid=986224789

(replaced .s with !s because tumblr doesn't like links.)

Look at all the different categories it has!!! and if you click any of the boxes...

It tells you loads of things you can say!!!!

As an autistic person, I struggle with communication. This puppy can take my ao3 commenting up to the NEXT LEVEL! I'll be too powerful. Authors will love me!

[insanitysilver]

Official merch including the original books/dvds/albums/video games, but also keychains, t-shirts, and other licensed goods.

[reader edition]

[simpleellegance]

What do you mean I have to connect my plot points

[wolfjackle]

So, for anyone who still uses FFN. Uh, you have to manually turn on email notifications for fic updates now! Which...is a choice the website made. And you have to manually turn them back on every 3-6 months. (The above screenshot shows 6 months, but I've seen others from today [Nov 11, 2022] that say 90 days.)

So, if you still follow fics on FFN, make sure to check your account settings.

@ao3commentoftheday I know this isn't AO3 related, but I haven't seen much notice on tumblr about this yet and the news should probably spread.

[lyrebright]

so! you want to rip a fic from fanfiction dot net?

I’m sure at this point we’ve all seen the posts about FFN’s inevitable demise. Not to downplay how much that would suck, for all we riff on FFN--but people have been saying that for literal years at this point, and while I do not doubt that FFN is dying, it’s probably not going to up and vanish on us in the next week. It’s got some good time of chugging and wheezing along left yet.

But among the panic there are people asking sincere questions about what can be done to save fics from FFN in the case of the site going down and taking literal decades of fandom history with it, and I’m seeing a surprising amount of people saying that the only way to do it is to either screenshot the fics or type them out yourself because copy/paste does not work on FFN. And that is just blatantly not true. There are many ways in which you can save fics from FFN. Here are just a few:

You can copy/paste directly from the mobile site. This is probably one of the easiest methods for anyone to do. Just click on the URL of the chapter you’re reading, and change the www. to m. Hit enter and the page will reload in mobile mode. You can now copy/paste the chapter right into a word document. You will have to go chapter by chapter.

CTRL+S. Go to the fic you want to save, and hit ctrl+s. Save the damn webpage. This will keep it in the exact format of the webpage, which you could see as a pro or a con, but it will also keep the ads, which does suck. You’ll also have to go chapter by chapter with this method but it does go a lot faster than manually copy/pasting the text.

HTML to PDF. This method I’m admittedly a little less sure about, since when I used it it was like, 2013 and I was in highschool so I’m not sure how viable it still is, but--just a quick google search should find you a website that will let you save a webpage as a PDF file. I have folders and folders of fics I saved back in highschool using this method. It will again have to go chapter by chapter and just like saving the webpage will keep the format of the site intact--down to keeping the ads.

Use a fanfiction downloader. Two I’ve been using for years are FF2eBook and FicHub. You put in the link of the fic you want to download and it converts the entire thing into a file for you. Yes, the entire thing--you don’t need to manually go through chapter by chapter. By default, both sites download in epub format, though FicHub does have a few other options. I’ve never really experimented with them though because I’m personally fine with epub, and there are a million epub to pdf (or other file type) converters out there.

And there you go: a handful of ways for you to save your favourite fics before FFN goes under. Again, I don’t think it’s something to be too worried about, but the best time to do your part for fandom preservation was yesterday. The second best time is to get started right now. There is no reason to wait for FFN to be on its death bed to start saving fics. I’ve been doing this for years just so I have fics to read offline. 

I’m a little too young to have been around for livejournal, but I was one of those weirdos that posted their first fics on quizilla. I remember when quizilla just...changed. And so much was lost. Looking back, almost none of what was posted on quizilla was actually good, but it was still something that someone put time and effort and passion into creating, and it was important.

There is almost no way that when FFN inevitably goes down that its entire archive will be saved. But we can do our best to save as much as we can. Stop panicking and start saving.

[cubedtissue]

Any fics where it's either drarry or perciver where Ron is just completely unaware and everyone else knows about it except him for some reason