youarestellarverse

[youarestellarverse]

The Fanfic Author��s Guide to Metatext (As Used on Ao3) by Eiiri

Here it is as a PDF available on google drive

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"should we tell authors on ao3 when we have discord conversations about their fics" i don't speak for everyone here but if y'all ever find a group chat discussing my fics you can should must and WILL send me screenshots of the whole damn thing. inflate my ego. gimme

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Reading my own fanfiction is basically just a rollercoaster of emotional whiplash.

20% of the time: “Hold on. I wrote this? This is fire. This is emotionally devastating in the best way. This scene is dripping with tension. I’m a literary perfectionist. Someone give me a book deal.”

80% of the time: “Straight to jail. Immediate prison. Why is everyone’s breath hitching?. I used the word ‘gaze’ three times in one paragraph like I was possessed. Did I think 'his eyes darkened' was profound? Why is everyone clenching their jaws? Why is someone whispering 'their name like a prayer' again?? No one talks like this. What is this dialogue. Why are there so many weird metaphors and em-dashes…”

[youarestellarverse]

i love when characters lie to themselves in the complete privacy of their own minds

[youarestellarverse]

Fanfic is a free hobby.

It's one of the last few things we can have as a society that's free. You can engage, for free. People give you things (art, stories, etc), for free.

Don't buy into the consummerism just because it's everywhere else.

You don't have to consume everything you interact with. You don't have to use things, just because they exist.

You're allowed (still, for now), to have things that are enjoyable for free.

Do you realise how insane the world is? We don't have many places where we can just be, for free anymore, but ao3 is. Did you notice we don't have ads in ao3? We don't have pop ups? Where ELSE do we not have that?

Where else can you just go and not have to wait for a commercial to be over or for ads to be on the sidelines?

I don't think the younger people understand, but the whole of internet used to be like this. YouTubers would do Youtube for free, just because. You couldn't monetise your internet presence before.

Ao3 is like a little preserved corner of the internet where the old internet used to be, and it's being attacked by people who do not understand that free things are allowed to exist without judgment.

Please don't ruin this for us.

Some of us need it.

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You ever just draw a character with a headcanon so much you forget other people don't have that headcanon? Like not in a bad or mean way, just in a "oh yeah this isn't a popular headcanon!" way.

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Being kink positive makes it really hard to be a hater of media rip. I used to love watching “the WORST book I’ve read this year” booktube videos but now its like I hear them ask, “Who is this werewolf smut even for?” Omegaverse fans, next question. “Why would you write this?” Because they find it sexy, can we stop focusing on the ewie yucky kink part and focus on the fact that the author used the word knot five times in a single scene? It’s bad werewolf erotica, but it’s not bad because it’s werewolf erotica like come on

[youarestellarverse]

this post inspired me to write a scene where Ruby figures out how to fulfill Annabeth's "figging with a hot chili pepper" fantasy without giving her chemical burns

I always find it funny when people write bdsm erotica where the dom is really aggressive and demanding and the sub is all sweet and innocent when I feel like more often than not the dynamic is a sub who asks for the most insane, out of pocket, dangerous, borderline illegal, unhinged shit and a dom who's like "hmmm ok yeah maybe we can scale that back a bit"

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[youarestellarverse]

It’s a short career, sports superstardom, which means that the world accumulates ex-great athletes at a fairly remarkable pace, one a year at least, as if time itself were an aging athlete out fielding fly balls — Elway, Sampras, Shaq, Ronaldo, thunk, thunk, thunk. At any given moment there’s a significant population of ex-sports superstars milling around in the weird background of culture, the part that’s half after-party and half wax museum. You could throw a dinner for them, the living retired great athletes, and fill a pretty good-sized hall. I’m picturing Yogi Berra trading fake punches with Muhammad Ali, MJ smoking scornfully in the corner booth. Maradona face-down in a cake. It’s odd, isn’t it? I don’t mean melancholy or emblematic — it’s those things, too, but the tragedy-of-mortality, silent-season-of-a-hero vein of sports lyricism isn’t what I’m after here. It’s just, at a basic level, strange that the machinery of sports cranks out this class of enormously celebrated people cut off from the source of their celebrity, icons whose cultural value lies primarily in serving as mobile reminders of something other people once saw them do. What must it be like, to be a piece of living memorabilia? I sometimes think that the life of a retired sports legend would be like experiencing existence as the Andy Warhol painting of yourself. Or, at the very least, like discovering you’re being haunted by a ghost, and you’re the ghost.

Brian Phillips, Pelé and the Cult of Celebrity

[youarestellarverse]

My grandma’s on and off again boyfriend that she cheated on grandpa with died today.

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couldn’t have said it better myself.

[youarestellarverse]

Wow, now there's a bot going around on Ao3 telling people that the "moderators" will delete works from "deprecated" fandoms and impose bans.

Fearmongering bullshit, but it's fearmongering bullshit that seems to be taking advantage of the recent spotlight series in order to trick authors into deleting their fics.

Just. Why.

What the hell does anyone get out of making these bots.

[youarestellarverse]

jason grace is canonically good at drawing. take that how you will.

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"mmh did you know that creator you like also posts 🔞 content? did you know that? don't you think that's weird? don't you think we should keep this space-"

no. i don't.

i booked a front row seat to the devil's sacrament and you're blocking the view

just go back to the 1660 new england hole you just crawled out of and eat barley for a week to atone for your sins or whatever

[youarestellarverse]

really good tiktok

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a writing competition i was going to participate in again this year has announced that they now allow AI generated content to be submitted

their reasoning being that "we couldn't ban it even if we wanted to, every writer already uses it anyway"

"Every writer"?

come on