#tumblr tags don't let me use quotation marks as I want to

[isnt-it-pretty]

any advice for someone who never wrote a fanfic before?

Writing is a skill like any other. You wouldn't expect to pick up a flute and know how to play, would you? So no matter what, just keep writing.

Beyond that, here's a few pieces of general writing advice:

- Make sure your dialogue formatting is correct. A new paragraph every time a new person speaks, proper quotation marks, etc.

- Remember your tense. If you're writing in past tense, make sure everything is in past tense. The same applies if you're writing in present tense. It's an easy mistake to make, but people will notice.

- Don't use physical descriptors in place of nouns. Like this:

"Dialogue dialogue," the raven haired man said.

It's one of the quickest ways to turn people off your work. Use pronouns or the character's name unless the reader doesn't know the character's name. Sometimes you can get away with character relationships, ("blah blah," his father said), but use them sparingly.

- In a similar vein, just use 'said.' Words like whispered, shouted, etc., should be used for emphasis, not for regular dialogue.

- Don't learn to write from reading fics. You can tell when somebody does because they use all the tropes common to fanfiction, but honestly, those aren't very good (we've had passionate debates in my discord server about whether "golden orbs" or "the bluette said" is a greater sin. There is still no agreement.)

- Run your work through Grammarly. Copy and paste it into Grammarly's word processor since that works better than their google docs extension. Even the free Grammarly will help you a lot with little grammar things you don't notice. I know it picks up typos and such for me all the time.

- Personally, I suggest checking out some nonfiction writing books too. I'm fond of Stein on Writing by Sol Stein, and The Story Graph by Shawn Coney, but most people never do that, and they write fic just fine.

- Depending on the topic you plan on writing, research. I'm serious; the number of stories I've read that just toss in a deaf character because the author likes the headcanon is insane. If you want to deal with topics like disability or social issues, you need to research.

- If you post on ao3, learn the tagging system and use it properly. For example, "/" is romantic, and "&" is platonic. In general, don't use both for the same two characters.

- This is an excellent master list of writing advice by tumblr user she-who-fights-and-writes. Not all of it will apply to fic writing, but the basics are the same.

None writing but still important things:

- You'll never be happy if you compare your work to others. You can look at your pieces all day and wonder why they don't sound right or feel right or why it isn't like your favourite fic author, and it won't to make a difference.

- Coming off that, jealousy is a natural part of being involved in a skill-based community, but don't let it sour your friendships or make you bitter. I've seen it happen, and it makes everybody involved feel shitty. Meet people with kindness and move on, even if you think they don't deserve their popularity.

- Make friends! Fandom is a community. Authors should make friends with each other and with their readers. They should participate in the community by leaving comments on fics, reblogging art on social media, etc. This is supposed to be fun, so let it be.

- It is illegal to earn money off fan works. Don't mention anything to do with money on ao3. Don't link a kofi, paypal, say a work was a commission, etc. It breaks the terms of service.

- Just be kind and have fun.

[sinchun]

Generator/randomizer tutorial

A few year ago, I made some light-hearted generators/randomizers – for example:

A friend asked me for a short tutorial on creating something like this, so I'll give it my best shot!

This tutorial is geared towards creating a simple randomizer/generator for a custom Tumblr page, so it's for HTML with a little bit of Javascript and CSS styling. Nothing fancy. (It's not even a great example of best Javascript coding practices. I will still a programming student when I coded these pages.)

A side note: I think you now have to ask Tumblr support to allow Javascript on your blog, but once that's been granted, you're good to go with this tutorial.

There are three sections to your custom HTML page:

CSS (i.e. the styling, or what the things on your page look like)

HTML (i.e. the building blocks of what you see and can interact with on the page)

Javascript (i.e. what happens when you interact with something on the page)

This tutorial will focus on the Javascript and assumes a basic understanding of how to set up an HTML page. For those of you who aren't familiar with HTML, I think this quick intro is pretty good.

Throughout this tutorial, I will use small text to refer to HTML elements and bold text to highlight Javascript terms.

I'm going to use my a/b/o scent generator (seen in the gif up top) as the example for this tutorial. I will start by saying that although I've called it a generator, it is actually a randomizer. All of the options are preset; when you use it, you are given a random option from the list—or, in this case, a random option from the specified list.

First things first: All of the Javascript for your HTML document will live inside <script></script> tags inside the body of your HTML. Conventionally, this will go below the actual HTML content of the body but transparently, I can't remember if this order actually matters or not.

1. Create an interface for the user

In the body of your HTML (before the script), create a select dropdown to display each list the user is able to choose from, a submit button, and a blank text element of a type that you don't use anywhere else on the page (I like to use h3 for this).

For simplicity's sake, this tutorial will assume that you also only have one select and one button on the page.

This is what this looks like for my scent generator:

The divs are optional but useful for styling purposes (not covered by this tutorial). Personally, I just like them for the organizational piece of mind :—)

2. Establishing your randomizer's options

Within the script you'll want to create your list (or lists) of options inside a constant. If you're using more than one list (where the user can pick which list they want an option from), your options constant should be an object, with each key corresponding to the value of an option in your HTML dropdown select (i.e. which list the user chooses). Each key's value will then be an array with all of the options you want to include in that list.

An object is denoted by { curly braces } and an array is denoted by [ square brackets ].

Every element in the array (i.e. option that the randomizer might select) should be inside quotation marks and separated by a comma.

This is what this looks like for my scent generator:

(Please excuse the shoddy indentation and the fact that I misspelled the word lavender.)

You can access an element by asking for the name of the object, followed by the key of the array you want, and finally by the index of element within the array (i.e. how far into the list the element is).

Don't forgot: Javascript starts counting index at 0, so the first element in the array has an index of 0 and the second has an index of 1.

In my example, I could access "Bong Water" by saying options[gamer][2]

You'll also want a variable to keep track of which list the user selects. Variables are denoted with "let" rather than "const" to indicate that the value will update in the future, but to start with, this should be the first item in your select as it will function as the default selection for your user – for example:

3. Letting the user update their selection

Now you have to connect your pool of options to the user interface. This is achieved by using query selectors (to pinpoint an element in your HTML doc) in combination with event listeners (so you can do something when the user interacts with said element).

You'll need one query selector for your select, and one for the button. Assuming you only have one of each in your document, you can use the very simple format of document.querySelector("") with the type of HTML element you're querying for inside the quotation marks – like so:

Then you'll want to put an event listener on each of these so you can keep track of when the user changes their selection and hits submit. This will follow the format of addEventListener("", () => {}) with the first argument (i.e. the quotation marks) being the type of event you're listening for and the second argument (i.e. () => {}) being the callback function that you want to execute when the event in the first argument happens.

In this case, we want to listen for change events on the select and for click events on the submit:

select.addEventListener("change", () => {})

submit.addEventListener("click", () => {})

A quick aside on functions: Functions can be fed variables (called arguments) and execute code upon them. These arguments are given to the function inside the parentheses before the =>, while the code to be executed upon them goes inside of the curly places on the other side of the =>.

In the case of these callback functions for the event listeners, the only argument you are allowed to use is event, which refers to the action the user takes that you are actively listening for.

For the select's callback function, we want to update that family variable we established in part 2 to the new value selected by the user. This is done by using the event argument and then accessing the changed value withe event.target.value.

For the submit's callback function, we only care about whether or not they clicked the button, so we don't need to use the event argument (so the parentheses will be empty). We can just execute code. Specifically, we want to execute code that will grab a random option from the selected list and then show that to the user.

This will be elaborated on in the next section, but here's a sneak peek with what this looks like for my scent generator:

4. Randomizing an answer and displaying it

For the sake of my sanity, we're going to create a separate function for the randomizing logic. This function will be invoked inside the callback function for the event listener on the submit. It will take one argument representing the selected list (e.g. the scent family the user selected in the dropdown) and return one option from that list.

Let's call this argument scentFamily.

The actual randomizing itself relies heavily on some of Javascript's built-in functions. Remember how in part 2, I talked about accessing an element via its index in the array it belongs to? All we're doing here is randomizing a number within the constraints of how long the given array is and then grabbing the element with that index.

Let's break it down—

Given the argument scentFamily, we can access the array within the options object with options[scentFamily]. Right now, we only care about how long this list is, which we can get with options[scentFamily].length

Math.random() is a function that will generate a random decimal between 0 and 1. Multiplying this by the length of our array will give us a random number between 0 and the index of the final element in the array, inclusive.

But to actually access an element by its index, we need a whole number, so we have to use the Math.floor() function to round the number down the nearest integer. Let's assign this value to const randomNum.

Last, we can access and return the randomly selected element with options[scentFamily][randomNum]

Put it all together:

Now, we want this function to execute when the user clicks the submit button, so we invoke it inside the submit's event listener's callback function and assign the returned value (i.e. its output, or in this case, the randomly selected element) to a new constant.

In my example, this would read as const scent = randomScent(family) where family is the value the user has selected and randomScent is the function we just wrote.

Finally, we want to show this new value to user by updating the text of the h3 I talked about all the way back in part 1. This is done by first using another another query selector to find the h3 in question—document.querySelector("h3")—and then assigning its innerText to the newly generated value.

Once again, this is what that event listener will look like:

And that's the last piece of the puzzle needed to complete your multi-list randomizer.

Conclusion

In retrospect, maybe I wrote this tutorial backwards and should've started with the randomizer function and then shown how to leverage that in a user interface.

That being said...

I hope this was helpful! If you found this confusing, feel free to drop me an ask or if we're mutuals on Twitter, you can always DM me there with questions, and I'll try to get back to you. (I might also update this tutorial if I get enough feedback about certain parts of it being Bad.)

thank u 4 coming to my ted talk :—)

[rollercoasterwords]

i am once again asking people not to share my writing if u aren't going to credit me!

this is gonna be a bit of a rant i think. sorry but also i'm just fed up at this point lol

i've already. mentioned this or talked about it a few times on my blog but like. here's the ~official post~ i guess because over the past year i have lost count of the amount of times i have come across a post--usually on twitter or tiktok--that is quite literally just a direct quote from one of my stories copied and pasted without a single reference to where it came from or who wrote it.

so like, quick reminder:

this is not a quote.

"adding quotation marks to it does not make a quote."

"a quote is only a quote if you QUOTE THE PERSON WHO IT CAME FROM." - rae, @rollercoasterwords tumblr blog

does that make sense???? PLEASE tell me that makes sense. to make it even clearer:

if you are going to quote my writing in a tweet, please include AT LEAST my ao3 username (rollercoasterwords) and also, ideally, the fic title that you are quoting from. if you want to throw a link to whatever ur quoting from, great! but like. at the very least, all i am asking is that you add "quote" - @rollercoasterwords on ao3

if you are going to quote my writing in a tiktok, please include AT LEAST my ao3 username either clearly in the video itself or clearly at the very beginning of the caption, where anyone looking at the video will be able to see it immediately. please don't just put credit in a tag at the very end of a long caption where it isn't clear which tag is the fic title the quote is coming from; please don't just put it in a comment that not everyone will open and find; please don't just put it in a response to someone else's comment asking you what fic the quote is from. and please don't put no credit at all--i've seen tiktoks of my own writing without even quotation marks to let people know that it's a quote! like...at that point you're just plagiarizing my writing for...what? tiktok views? like. ok.

other writers might feel differently about how you credit them when quoting them, but for me--this is what i'm asking. just. at the very least, clearly include my ao3 username, so that people know who wrote the thing that you're sharing.

and like. i think there's this idea that you're doing me a favor by sharing my writing, in any capacity, on the internet. and at the risk of sounding harsh, i want to be very clear: that isn't true. if you are sharing my writing without any indication that it is even mine, then you are not doing me a favor. you are taking something that i worked very hard on and using it to get a few likes for yourself. i know that it's fanfiction, and i know that once i post something on the internet it is, to a certain extent, outside of my control. but like...this isn't something i'm profiting off of. it's not something i'm trying to get the most views possible on. the only reason i'm sharing it on ao3 is so that people who appreciate it can find it, and so that i can connect with those people who take the time out of their day to leave a comment or send a message saying "hey, i loved this, thanks for sharing it!" i would rather have only 5 people see my writing and like it and genuinely connect with me over it than have 5000 people see my writing and like it and never have a single one of them know who actually wrote it.

anyway. i'm not trying to sound ungrateful, y'know? i do truly, sincerely appreciate that there are people out there who have been moved enough by my writing to want to share it with others. but this isn't a numbers thing for me, ok? the amount of people looking at a thing i wrote is not what makes writing worth it to me, and i would truly, genuinely, just rather not have a single person share my writing on twitter or tiktok than have like. fifty people share it without crediting me.

[ao3skin]

Hi! I've been having way too much fun with your tag blocking skin. Question though, I noticed when I just change the font color (setting the background to either white or transparent) the red color that usually appears when I hover my mouse on the tag don't appear anymore. Do you have any idea how to make it so that when I hover over a highlighted tag the color can change?

yes! Two options!

Option 1: this will make that the red will return to ALL the ‘hidden’ tags:

a.tag:hover { background-color: #900900 !important; }

you can use any other color code, but #900900 is the Ao3 red.

Option 2: But if you want to only have some that can still be visible (but not all because maybe you have some words that are a complete nono) you can add it back to singular tags one by one

if you add the selector :hover you can change the color when you hover the mouse.

Let me explain how it works.

so, for example you have the tag set like this with the blocking skin:

a.tag[href*=“fluff”] { background-color: black; color: black; }

Now just paste a second code with the hover and the changes:

a.tag[href*=“fluff”]:hover { background-color: #900900; color: white; }

Always reminder that tumblr fucks quotation marks! make always sure that the ones that are in the code you paste and save are the straight quotation marks and not the curly ones!

[luimagines]

You know, since the Zelda games are in a kind of medieval era, courting must be a thing in all of the Link's time, more in Hyrule and Legend's era as they are the "first" ones (I know it is Sky, but the people from the sky don't strike me as being very stern in following the protocol of courting, contrary to their earthen people) and are more of ye olde time.

(Small warning as this was view with a female reader in mind, but I won't be making use of any type of pronoun besides neutral)

Hyrule is just a humble traveller, he doesn't have lands or riches to his name, not even a house for the both of you to settle. On top of that, his Hyrule is very dangerous and the menace of Ganon or any other evil being is always a possibility, to the point of making him lose sleep.

He lives on the go, always going to new lands and learning new cultures, which in result has let him admire all type of customs, clothing and jewels he would have never imagined if he didn't see it for himself. He had in several occasions pictured you with such objects, maybe as a gift for your wedding, the glint of the accessories would seem dull compared to the shine of your smile, the flowing fabrics swaying as the both of you dance together and the celebration of your marriage goes well into the night.

If only he had the money to pay for your price, but there's also the problem of talking with your parents, which might be impossible if you ask him due to the current situation. In the end, everything must remain a dream, he doesn't want to give you a poor life nor an early departure if he ever gets ambushed by enemies that for once proved to be more than what he can handle, or in the case of only him perishing, you won't have nothing and will be alone in a dangerous, unknown land as a dowry is something he will never be able to settle, he doesn't have goods to give to you, only what he had in his bag and person.

Legend have almost the same worries as Hyrule, but they are founded by the fear of losing you. He can make enough money for the two of you, maybe you couldn't live a posh life, but sufficient to live comfortable to the rest of both of your days. But no amount of money could stop losing his only family, he doesn't need a repetition of that event but this time with the family born by your union, something made by the two of you with love.

He also feels a type of social pressure; even if he managed to save Zelda and clear his name, there have been times in which Legend caught the stare of people looking at him over their shoulders, judging him. They still believe him a kidnapper, a traitor, and his attitude does nothing to appease their opinions. He doesn't want you to be a subject of that hatred if he ever steps fowards with his desire of courting you.

Twilight's concern is about what you think of his life style. He is a simple guy; he grew up in a quite, self sufficient little town and wishes to live like that until the day of his death. Having a family with you in a little farm is his biggest desire, but he would settle with only being the two, growing old together and living a ton of happy moments.

In case of a modern reader, he's afraid you will find his life poor and boring, he have seen how the city people gets sick and annoyed really quick of the country life and he fears you will do the same. The country life isn't an easy one; you have to wake at the crack of sunrise and having nice things aren't necessary, but you come from an era far advanced than his so even if he can easily get the extra rupees for a gift for you, it won't be anything that you haven't seen or own before.

If he can't give you or make you experience good things, then why would you be with him? He would be devastated if he couldn't make you happy if you ever took a leap towards his open arms and he failed in delivering what you deserve.

--------

Idk! I just thought "well, since they are from a different world and raised in ancient times, then they would have certain views that the reader isn't aware and it will actually worry the guys a lot if they ever develop a crush on the reader.

I skipped Time and Four bc I never played/watched OoT and Four swords. Wild and Warrior strike me as the one who cares the least, wild doesn't even remember them and while warrior is aware and would have gladly partaked, fighting a war made him lower the importance of following such strict protocol. You can't do it if you are dead!

This is.... perfect?

Amazing?

So well thought out and well articulated that I'm speechless.

Four would also have his own courting system from his Hyrule but he's less concerned with a dowry or gifts. He can make gifts and he has a place, a stable job and he knows that he can take care of Reader and a family should the future present itself. He knows he has all those bases covered.

But would Reader like him?

Height is a deal breaker for some people and while he's never had someone to put his heart out on the line before, he's seen it happen to his neighbors and friends, and while he's not necessarily insecure about his height.... He wonders if Reader would ever even consider him an option.

Time though?

Also no land, no house and while he has a job, it's low paying because he doesn't need much as a bachelor.

He's not so concerned with dowry or protocol though. Mostly because he didn't grow up with that on his radar, even after he couldn't return to Kokiri Forest, no one explained it to him and he's never asked. He's noticed some of the typical things when he's in town and the younger boys begin courting with the one their hearts desire, so he knows gift giving, and special treatment.

So Time will be more concerned with catching Reader's attention and making sure that he can at least provide when he gets back home because he's never needed anything for him. But it won't just be him anymore would it?

But a dowry? What's that? I don't know her.

I know you probably didn't include Wind because he's currently the youngest but I do think Outset Island as a vague protocol that he's aware of.

It's not Dowry or Courting Specific.

But I do think that there's a specific order to do things. Like ATLA and betrothal necklaces because there's not much else to say Hey! I'm engaged!

So Outset might have a similar custom of gift given but I don't know what that would be.

Maybe a shell necklace or a certain fish you need to catch to show them you're interested.

All things he wouldn't be able to do outside of Outset of course

[esselley]

hi! so i just made an archive of our own account and i don't know what to post first. do you have any tips or advice for posting on ao3? do you have any tips for ao3 in general? thank you!

Hi there anon! Thank you for your question!

First things first: I think to a certain extent, what to post first is going to be entirely up to you. Whatever you feel like writing, whatever format it’s in, you should write it up and post it! Or, depending on how long you’ve been using the site as a guest, you can look through other people’s content to pay attention to tagging, author’s notes, formatting – that kind of thing. AO3 is user-friendly in most ways, and you’ll grasp it pretty quickly.

But, I do have a couple tips to help you out on your first run-through (and actually some helpful tricks I think some more familiar users may not know, as well)! 

BTW since we’re on the topic, if you use the subscribe function on AO3!!! Did you know about the different ways to subscribe to an author, a series, or an individual work?

You can only subscribe to an author from their dashboard or their profile page! If you are in the middle of reading a particular fic, and you hit the subscribe button at the top of the page, you will only subscribe to updates for that fic. Same deal if you want to subscribe to a series, you must be on the series page. Subscribing to a fic within that series will only subscribe you to that specific fic – you will get updates if that story is updated/chapters are added, but not if a new work is added to the series.

I suspect some people are unaware of this, due to the frequent amount of subscriptions I get on one-shots! (But, idk… maybe there’s just some really hopeful people out there laijefliajelsjf)

Anyway, now, onto the rest of this textbook (it got long)!

NEW WORK vs DRAFTINGWhen you go to post your very first work on AO3, you’ll go to Post > New Work at the very top to open up AO3′s drafting tool. From here, you can go through and copy over a work from Word or Google docs or whatever writing program you use, or just write up your fic in the post box itself! 

Either way you choose, you can then decide to post your work right then and there (Post Without Preview), or if you are still editing it, you can choose the Preview option. This will take you to the work as it will appear once posted; from there you can go back to the editing page, which will now have a Save Without Posting option. Use this if you would just like to save your work and come back to it later. Note: drafts are saved for one month only.

HTML vs RICH TEXTWhen you open your drafts/start a new work, the main field for your text has two options: HTML or Rich Text. HTML just shows you all HTML codes in your work. Rich Text is probably what you want to work in while editing, because you’ll only see this bar in that format:

However, sometimes you will want to use the HTML section in order to copy over text from another source that allows HTML format; for instance, Tumblr! I always copy the HTML from my tumblr fics over to AO3 when posting, because it is the easiest/fastest way to ensure the formatting stays intact. Here’s where to find that:

AVOID BACKDATED DRAFTSThis is a pitfall I encountered with my first fic I ever posted. When you create a draft, the date of posting defaults to the date you first saved the draft. So if you are like me and you draft fics way in advance of posting, you need to make sure to update the post date before you actually hit post, or it will backdate your fic – this happened with This Place in the Sky, and it was several hours before I realized it had backdated by a week, and no one was seeing it T.T Learn from my mistakes, younglings

(And if you want to backdate a draft, then you would go in here to alter the date.)

ITALICS ISSUESome people have noticed an issue with AO3 that causes fics to have odd spaces after punctuation (periods, quotation marks, dashes). This is a glitch related to italicizing when you transfer over fics from another source. To avoid having to search your entire fic for those spaces, always italicize the punctuation that precedes/follows your italicized words. For instance: 

“No!” – quotations/exclamation not italicized, glitch makes it show up as: 

“No!” – all punctuation italicized, now shows up as:

:D It’s just less of a headache to have to comb through and find all the random spaces, I find, when you just italicize beforehand! A preemptive strike. 

PARAGRAPH SPACINGLet’s look at the variations of line spacing in a posted fic: 

And here’s what this looks like in AO3′s Rich Text editor:

Sorry that is so tiny, but notice the clear difference in spaces between paragraphs while editing! There’s no actual correct way to do this, but! The “regular” option of spacing is the most common on AO3, and also the easiest to read. Avoid the no spacing option at all costs! It can be a huge headache to read, unless you are indenting paragraphs (less common on AO3, but acceptable). I tend to dislike the double spacing option as well because I feel like it breaks up the flow of wording, but that’s just personal preference.

HOW TO AVOID DOUBLE SPACING BETWEEN PARAGRAPHS

Frequent posters may also have noticed a thing AO3 does where it will insert double spaces at random intervals, often for large sections of the fic at a time, for no discernible reason. This happens often when you copy your work over from another source. But there’s an easy fix!

On MS Word and Google docs, find the “Add space after paragraph” option, and enable it for every fic you write. When you hit Enter (ONCE) to go to a new paragraph, it will autospace for you (meaning, you should not need to double tap the Enter key).

Now when you copy this over to AO3, it will read ONE SPACE reliably, giving you that regular spacing option up above. Cool news: if you copy your HTML from Tumblr to HTML on AO3, you don’t even need to worry about this. HTML be chill like that

QUICK HTML CODESAnother thing I see people asking is how to add hyperlinks! But also, did you know you can add links, bolded, and italicized text to your summary/notes as well? You just have to put them in HTML, and this:

ItalicsBoldHyperlink

will show up as:

You can easily bold/italicize/add links in the Rich Text editor, but summary/notes are HTML only and you will have to use the above. These are the most useful/common options you’ll need, I think. Try to preview before posting to make sure you got it right (and haven’t bolded your entire summary and the world with it on accident). 

LINK BACK TO TUMBLRThere’s an easy way to link your stories to Tumblr (or Twitter) that automatically includes your title, tags, summary, and all other relevant information right in the post! Just hit this button at the top of your fic, once it’s posted – it’ll take you to the Tumblr log-in screen, so log-in and from there you can edit the post. This is what I use to make all my AO3 fic posts on Tumblr \o/

TAGS/SYNOPSISFinally, more of a stylistic note! Be thoughtful when tagging your fic/writing a synopsis. In general, try to be clear and concise, so people can see what they’re getting into at a glance. Tag what’s important to the theme and tone of your fic. This really varies from person to person… maybe you want to tag every single thing your fic encompasses! I find really long tags to be overwhelming when browsing AO3, and prefer simple ones. I tend to overtag more for smut-heavy/PWP than I do for longer, plot driven fics.  

Your summary should also be clear and to the point, and describe the content of the fic. You can put any other thoughts in your beginning and end notes; if you are leaning towards saying anything like “sorry this sucks this is my first fic/I am bad at summaries/etc” just leave that out! If you don’t like summaries, use a quote from the fic. You don’t have to apologize for posting, even if you don’t think it’s a Shakespearean masterpiece. You still wrote a fic, and that’s awesome!

This is everything I could think of for the time being…I hope it’s helpful!!

[37h4n0l]

Oh great, so now a lowly anon can't even come to vent to the one person they think would understand their sentiments, because someone's going to feel offended and write you an essay on how it's 'not all YOI fans' instead of maybe, idk, acknowleding that there has to be something off about the fandom as a whole if so many people are already sick and tired of it (some even to the point of making anti-blogs, which I don't necessarily agree with, but at least can see where they're coming from).

And oh, about 91d being ‘hardly a brainpower draining masterpiece’ - sure, that is, if someone knows how to make a use of their brain in the first place, which apparently is too difficult of a skill for your average viewer, judging from how many people did not understand the ending or where it came from, completely misunderstood the characters, thought of Avilio and Corteo’s relationship as the central one to the plot etc. I guess your average brainpower may not be enough sometimes.

And here I am now, issuing an essay as well, because I want to express my position on this very clearly. (Massive longpost).

I’m sorry if my latest reply came off as hostile towards either side of this issue, I didn’t intend it to sound like that. For anyone to whom this is not understandable; this is about the fandom, which can many times be a big influence on how someone perceives the show as well. To put it in the simplest terms, seeing something over and over again everywhere makes you tired of it quickly, whether it’s about an entire franchise, a ship or a common fan theory or opinion. I will speak for myself; although I’m not as salty as you are, anon, I’m annoyed at how yoi and vikt/uuri are all over the place. Mostly when they keep appearing in other fandoms’ tags (the one where it went the furthest would be the ks tag, that hellish corner of tumblr). The ‘not all’ part is included in all this. If I decided to go after every yoi fan, I’d be going after people I like, followers and friends of mine. 

I don’t think I have enough involvement in the yoi fandom to start denouncing its failures internally. I’m part of this weird group of people who liked certain things in yoi, maybe watched it as it aired, thought it was an okay-ish show but got over it quickly and didn’t keep obsessing. I think a line needs to be drawn between behaviour that simply pisses us off personally and more ‘objective’ problems (I put it in quotation marks to refer to things that are a nuisance to a wider group of people). 

Things I personally don’t like: Vikt/uuri ship dynamics, simply because I’ve seen way too many ships like that already and I find them boring due to the lack of angst. Yk’s lack of character development and how the fandom still pretends there was one, as if it could be settled by simply making a stereotypically ‘nerdy’ character do a cool thing out of the blue. The way there’s a yoi or vikt/uuri AU for literally everything, every fandom and every ship. This fandom idea about vn and yk being yp’s ‘parents’, ignoring yp’s anger and disappointment towards vn and antagonism towards yk. I must emphasize how I’m not sitting in front of a computer screaming in utter rage at these things; it goes more like me sighing deeply and going like ‘not again’. 

Wider problems: CALLING PEOPLE WHO DISLIKE YOI HOMOPHOBIC. I want to underline this at least thirty times. Calling yoi progressive, innovative and a pioneer of gay representation while hating on fujoshis and the yaoi/shonen-ai genre. Yoi is (sorry for putting it bluntly) a fusion between a sports anime and a shonen-ai, except the latter would at least have explicit gay romance, while the vikt/uuri kiss was declared by the author to be ‘up for interpretation’. SHIPBASHING, especially the one against otay/uri for it supposedly being underage. Spamming another fandom’s tag with complaints about how yoi is much better than that particular thing (coughKScough) even if it’s an entirely different genre.

I’m reserving a separate paragraph for the Crunchyroll Awards shitstorm. I don’t have a very definite position on anime awards in general and how they should be held (if there’s even an objective way to do that), and while my personal annoyance towards the CR ones persists, I’m not surprised it went the way it went considering it was based on audience votes. Still, calling yoi ‘anime of the year’ is a bit of a stretch. I would’ve personally worded it differently, maybe ‘most popular anime of the year’ or ‘audience favourite’ or something like that. The ‘art is subjective’ versus ‘quality’ debate is a very complicated one. Someone could say that since a lot of people liked yoi, that must mean there was something about it in which it exceeded other anime; and while it’d be hard to pinpoint what that is, we should consider that good PR plays a great role in this as well - being able to target the right audience at the right time and advertise in a compelling way. I remember the times before yoi was released, when all we had was the trailer including the infamous ‘only I know your true eros’ scene; plenty of people were already sold back then. Of course, when you have high expectations of something, you won’t start watching it as some overly analytical movie critic to nitpick every detail. People like their expectations to be fulfilled. Besides the overall quality, there are other things to argue about, and what is often brought up is the animation. Consider: if someone was asked whether yoi had the best animation in 2016, you’d expect them to admit it didn’t, wouldn’t you? And yet yoi won the animation award - by popular vote. We can argue whether it’s more fair to have a committee in the judging process, but letting the audience vote has a downside; mainly that votes won’t always be used as intended. Crazy hypothesis; could it, perhaps, be that a lot of people were emotionally attached to yoi and voted for it in every category? Popular vote is what leads to initiatives being cancelled when 4chan decides to troll them, it leads to Boaty McBoatface and things like that. 

Now, after this huge rant, let’s move on to what happened in the 91d fandom. In my opinion, it’s not like people didn’t have the ability to understand - they didn’t want to. Simply because they perceived avil/ero (let’s censor this word as well for safety) as ‘problematic’ and preferred to ignore the role it played in the plot. It doesn’t elevate people who understood the ending above anyone, it just shows that somehow a lot of people have a very biased view on this - some for not wanting angst to exist, others for not wanting homosexuality to exist - and it results in a huge chunk of the fandom ignoring hints. If yoi was blown up by PR, 91d had the opposite problem; it’s hard to tell whom such a show should be targeted at, so they didn’t go with a precise demographic, they just released material and waited to see who was attracted to it. Is 91d for Fujoshis ™? The hints at gayness are too subtle for that. Is it for people interested in the plot and not the emotional side? How do you explain the last episode and the ending to them? Maybe this is also the reason why the fanbase is so unusually small. 91d is just hard to categorize, that’s the conclusion I came to - and people want it to belong to already existing tropes very desperately, which is where the reaches come from. 

As for this entire discussion; anyone is always welcome on my blog to give their two cents on it, anon or not. All I want to avoid is 1) anyone attributing malicious intent to me 2) people assuming I think things that I haven’t explicitly stated.