#bg3ficreviews faq

[bg3ficreviews]

If you have any questions, please feel free to send us an ask!

Good morning everyone, We are absolutely delighted to see the number of fics submitted to us to read and review, and absolutely thrilled that so many share our excitement about promoting and sharing BG3 fanfic works. Ultimately our goal, as fellow fanfic authors ourselves, is to share our love for fanfiction (particularly those set in the BG3 universe) and help foster a mutual sense of community and care. We have received a few asks that have asked us for more specifics about what we hope to do and how, and we would like to encourage fanfic authors to send through more questions like that (which you can do here). We are open to engaging with our community, and would like to be able to respond to any queries and concerns that others may share. We want to give as detailed and helpful a response as we possibly can. As fellow fanfic writers, we've seen for ourselves how difficult it can be as a fanfic author (and fanwork creator generally) to have safe, supportive spaces for our work. That is our ultimate goal. We want to uplift fanfic writers and boost our mutual love of creation through positive engagement and support. As we grow, we hope to one day build more hands-on communities of support to assist writers in learning more about the art of writing and how to improve their work, but this would be on a strictly opt-in basis if authors feel they would like to work together to improve their work. The intention is not and will never be to judge others' work per se, only to strengthen the community in a positive way and uplift fellow writers. As such, please, feel free to send us asks if you have any questions about what we hope to do and how. We are thinking of putting together a mega asks response post or FAQ post of sorts to answer those asks, and your input is incredibly valuable to us. It will take us some time to compile that, as we want to be an inclusive as we possibly can. Thank you for sharing your passion and enthusiasm for this project with us, and we will do our best to answer your questions to the best of our ability. Be well and keep writing, The BG3 Fic Reviews team

[bg3ficreviews]

FAQs about BG3 Fic Reviews

Hello and welcome to BG3 Fic Reviews! We believe in ongoing and continuing engagement with the BG3 writing community, and as such as would like to encourage fellow authors to submit asks through our asks channel/portal should they have any questions pertaining to what we do and how we do it. This post serves as a master list (of sorts) of our responses to some of the questions we have received, and will be updated as and when we can.

If you have any questions that have not been answered by us previously, please feel free to send through an ask and we will respond (or include the answer here with an update) as soon as possible.

Last updated: 18 March 2024

Question: What kind of BG3 fics do you review?

We review any and all BG3 fan fiction. This includes NSFW, controversial/heavy topics, AUs, post-canon, etc. We do not have any limitations/restrictions on the kinds of fan fiction that is submitted to us, as long as it can fairly be classified as falling within the "Baldur's Gate" fandom and franchise.

Question: Does the fic have to be hosted/posted on AO3?

AO3 is easiest for us to use at present, but we don't want to exclude any writer simply because they haven't been granted an account with AO3 yet. This would adversely affect new writers especially due to the sometimes long waiting list for an AO3 invite, and we don't want to discourage anyone by limiting reviews to AO3 alone. So, regardless of where your work is hosted, please feel free to send it to us. We are currently working on improving our work pipeline to ensure we can include work from other platforms, for instance by including 'external work' in our review queue collection on AO3.

Question: Do fics have to be completed to be submitted to the team and/or be reviewed?

No. We happily accept in-progress works as part of our review queue. As BG3 fic authors ourselves, we understand that writing longer form works can sometimes take a considerable amount of time, especially as real-life responsibilities and realities come into play, and as inspiration ebbs and flows. We value all work equally, whether they be one-shots or in-progress long form works.

Question: What is your stance on controversial topics and tagging?

We are resolutely pro-fiction and believe in the freedom that can be found in fiction. That said, we are also firmly pro-consent and favour community safety, and therefore support tagging as a mechanism to assist readers in navigating the content with which they choose to engage. We share the views expressed by BG3 fanfic author Tavyliasin in this post she has written on the matter here. In this post, Tavyliasin has also included a great deal of incredibly useful information regarding what authors should consider tagging and how to tag effectively on different platforms. Tags also help us to mind our own personal boundaries as individuals when we review fic submitted to us, and the individual members of the team are then able to choose fics that align with our area of interest or avoid those fics that we know won't resonate with a particular member of the team. For example, person A may enjoy reading angst, while person B prefers fluff and smut. We choose fic in our queue accordingly so that no author is negatively affected because they happen to cross the metaphorical desk of someone who does not enjoy that particular trope/kink/what have you. No fic is ever assigned to a reviewer for this reason - as individuals, we choose them ourselves from the team's queue.

Please follow us for more updates and as always, should you have any questions please don't hesitate to send an ask and we will respond as soon as is possible.

[bg3ficreviews]

Hi! Can you explain how you are going to review fics? I have a few I would like to recommend, but what criteria are you basing your review/critiques on? Like what are you looking for in order to share fics recommended to you?

How true to character it is? If it's canon to events in game? Writing style or techniques?

I think something like your page can be good, it's just vague what you mean by review and I would love some clarity before I recommend anything.

Hello Cerudinae! Apologies for the delay in getting back to you - we have had many asks in our inbox over the last few days, and we are trying our best to keep up with them all and catch up.

As we have mentioned in some other posts, we are currently compiling a general FAQ document to answer questions readers and fanfic authors may have around what our plans are. It is a work in progress, as we are adding questions (and answers) over time as we consult with the writing community. You can read them here, and they should answer some of your questions already. In terms of your questions regarding how "true to character" or in line with canon a given fic is - we absolutely do not look at these as defining criteria in reviews. We respect and value the freedom that writing fan fiction gives authors, and we respect everyone's headcanons. If anything, our primary interest centres around just how creative and interestingly diverse fan fiction can be - we do not want to put anyone in a box of conformity. That has never been and will never be our goal. Our primary goal is to support fanfic authors and celebrate their work and creativity - not to break anyone down or to dissuade them from writing and creating what they love. Doing so would be the very antithesis of our motivations and what we hope to achieve. We hope this response eases your mind somewhat, but if you do have further questions please don't hesitate to ask. Please do keep in mind that we are fanfic authors and hobbyists ourselves, and only started this endeavour a few days ago. We are learning as we go, but we are doing and will do our utmost to support our fellow authors as best we can.

All the best, The BG3 Fic Reviews team

[bg3ficreviews]

Hello! Here are several questions to help build your FAQ post.

1. I am thinking of submitting a fic or two for review, but I don’t have an AO3 yet. Do you accept fics posted on tumblr or should I wait until I have them uploaded on AO3?

2. Do you require any specific tags be added to the fics you review? Either so you can find them to read them or so that they are labeled with some kind of tag post-review?

3. Is there anything your team is NOT willing to read/review (content, topic, theme, pairings, etc)? (This last one is mostly to look out for you guys. Boundaries are important!)

Hello and good morning! Thank you so much for these questions! We really, really appreciate them. We will be responding here as well as add them to our FAQs master post. 1. We accept any BG3 fanfic regardless of platform. AO3 is easier to manage because of how it's structured due to the collection feature, as well as with the tags, but since not all writers (and especially writers just starting out) will have access to AO3, we don't want to exclude anyone at all. We are investigating the possibility of adding external work to the AO3 collection (the platform seems to allow for that), so differing platforms shouldn't present a problem to the review queue system we have in place at present. 2. We're not entirely sure if you mean a specific 'review' tag on AO3 or the general principle of tagging, so we will try to answer on both fronts (more in the answer to question 3). We don't require any particular tags be added on AO3 in additional tags, since authors submit their work through our asks. That said, it's not actually a bad idea that authors simply submit their work to the BG3 Fic Reviews Queue collection themselves. That would remove the step of submitting an ask, and since the collection is moderated by us we will be able to see when authors submit their work to us. (We are still working on the best way to optimise our work pipeline, so to speak, so this is an interesting idea. We don't want to spend too much time searching for work on AO3, as we would like to focus on reading and reviewing and get those out as soon as is feasible.)

3. We are open to any and all fic, regardless of topic, trope or tag. Different members of our team do have different areas we prefer (or that we avoid), but we are firmly pro-fic and not shy to engage with heavy or controversial content as a team/project. As such, we do ask that, regardless of platform, authors have as inclusive/extensive a tag list as possible (as is the standard practice on AO3) so that we can navigate our triggers and areas of interest effectively. We really appreciate the consideration and care you have extended by asking this particular question, and have discussed this at length amongst ourselves prior to launching the BG3 Fic Reviews blog and it is an ongoing discussion that we take very seriously, both for the sake of our team members but the writing and reading community more generally. @tavyliasin has written an extensive and informative post on the importance of tagging over on her blog, and we share her views on the matter and honestly couldn't say it much better than she herself has. We highly encourage writers (and readers) to give her essay on the matter a read, and in so doing you will also have an idea of our own positioning on this matter.

Thank you so much for these thoughtful questions and for engaging with us, and we look forward to hearing more from you should you have any more questions or suggestions! All the best, The BG3 Fic Review team

[bg3ficreviews]

Do you only want sfw fics? Just wanting to make sure.

Hello! No, we are open to any and all fics - the only requirement is that they are connected to the Baldur's Gate 3* universe in some way. If you as a writer can apply the "Baldur's Gate" fandom tag on AO3 to your work, then we're interested. For clarity, that includes post-canon, any and all AUs, and anything in between and beyond. Thank you for your ask, and we look forward to hearing more from you! All the best, The BG3 Fic Reviews Team

*For now we are most familiar with the characters and world explored in the third installment of the game, but we are open to learning more about BG1 and BG2 as well, we just don't have a great deal of personal experience with them just yet. So, if there are authors out there who explore those particular narratives/storylines/characters, you are welcome to send us your work too, but we may need some time to improve our knowledge of them so we are able to best review your work. Please just let us know in your ask should you send through work in this vein. :)

[bg3ficreviews]

Send us your BG3 fanfics to review!

(FIC SUBMISSIONS CLOSED)*

BUT APPLICATIONS FOR REVIEWERS OPEN!**

Hi everyone, and welcome to BG3FicReviews! We're a group of writers and fanfic authors who have decided to come together to write reviews of Baldur's Gate 3 fan fiction. We aim to support fanfic authors in our community by sharing the works we love (and what we love most about them) with the BG3 community. **We have recently published draft fic review guidelines and we're ready to start taking on more reviewers! Please send us an ask & tell us more about yourself! Please also send us your email address and/or Discord details so that we can reach out to you! We're very excited for the future! 🙌 If you would like us to review your fanfic, please send us an ask with a link to your work and a short description, and we will add your work to our review queue. Works that are in our current queue to review will be placed in the BG3FicReviews queue collection on AO3. Works we have already reviewed can be found in this AO3 collection here.

*We've temporarily closed submissions to catch up with all our current fics in the queue to review! Thank you to everyone who submitted their work to us. We're honoured that you would allow us to read and review your work! (Current queue: +-68 works 👀)

Thank you for your support and please keep creating and sharing your incredible work!

If you want to meet the team of BG3FicReviews, check out our post here!

Below the fold are our fic submission guidelines, our FAQs, and a master list of all our reviews we have posted!

Last updated: 14 July 2024.

FIC SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

When you submit your fic, please be sure to include the following:

A link to your work & the pseud/handle you publish under (regardless of platform)

The title of your work

Any tags we should be aware of

A brief summary

Any social media you would like to be tagged in the review when we publish it (please include a link to your profile)

If you have commissioned artwork for your fic, please feel free to let us know! We would be happy to post it with the review of your work

You can submit your fic to us through our asks here. Please note that we won't respond to your ask (unless we need further information) and we will just add it to our queue and will get to reviewing it as soon as we can. Please don't worry when you don't get a response to your ask from us! You'll know all is well as soon as you spot your work in the review collection, which you can check here.

FAQs

We are currently compiling an FAQs master post based on questions from the community! This will be updated as we go, so if you have any questions that don't appear in the FAQs post, please send us an ask! We've gone into some detail about our goals for BG3FicReviews in this post.

REVIEW MASTER LIST

Please find our AO3 collection of works we have already reviewed here. The Wilted Dreams of Baldur's Gate series (Review published 3 April 2024)

A seven-part collection examining Astarion and Tav’s relationship across the game and post-canon. There’s something for everyone in this series with some fluffy slice of life here, a little angst there, and a generous portion of smut.

Thunder Reforged: Rolan x Dammon works (Review published 27 March 2024)

What's hotter than a tiefling wizard with a knack for a well-timed thunderwave? Said tiefling wizard having a rendezvous with his tiefling blacksmith paramour, of course.

The Loving Master series (Review published 18 March 2024)

A series based on the worst possible version of Ascended Astarion as he masters the art of creating his own vampire spawn cohort and inflicts pain and anguish on them in what he has deluded himself into believing is 'kindness'. Tags include: NSFW; dead dove; sexual trauma.

Too Many Burdens to Bear (Review re-published 15 March 2024)

A story based on the once Archdruid of the Emerald Grove Halsin Silverbough and his lover and partner Kiaran, the author's durge OC. Tags include: NSFW; sexual trauma.