To the people in the OTW Tumblr Inbox asking about how the OTW is responding to the American Election.

This is a separate post (and not a response to a specific message) because we all need to see it.

Folks have been asking Support (through the form) as well as the other social media mods, and we have now been given the following to tell you.

<3 Mod Remi

what they don't tell you is that a well-written fic can get you to ship anything, and i mean ANYTHING. notp? not anymore. you will stay up late thinking about and crying over them for the rest of your life. characters you don't even know from a piece of media you've never engaged with? fuck it, they belong to you now. problematic ship that you loved to hate and now just love to love, that you must never tell your friends about? don't worry, ao3 knows how to keep a secret. like. a well-written fic will have you acting UP and that's a fact baby !!

Fanon is not canon, headcanon is not canon. That doesn’t mean they’re lesser, and we can have fun with them if we want.

Our fandom forbearers did NOT suffer through Anne Rice, strikethrough, and other bullshit for fucking ACOTAR and Harry Potter fans to fucking ruin it for all of us by selling fanfiction. I am not losing novel length yaoi epics because some of you don't know how to act in fannish spaces and yes I do blame the booktokification of fanfic but I also blame those of you that treat fandom like content to consume and not a community to engage with.

Seriously people, learn fandom etiquette. It exists, it exists for extremely good reasons, and it's been decades in the making.

You know the saying, 'OSHA regulations are written in blood'? Yeah, that applies to fandom etiquette. We didn't make this shit up to lord it over newcomers, these rules evolved as a form of fucking self-defense and by god we'll die on this hill.

So stop putting other people's fanfictions on KINDLE UNLIMITED!!!

In case you're unaware: that can (and will) get the writer and publisher a Cease & Desist and very possibly a lawsuit. Which they will lose.

Fanfic must be free or else it is breaking copyright — even advertising on a fanfic website is risky.

You do not own the copyright. You do not own the characters. You do not make money off copyrights that are not your own.

Who TF is putting fanfic on Kindle Unlimited??

Don't list it on fucking Goodreads either ffs.

me, staring down ao3: ok i’m desperate for fic about this pairing but like… how desperate

You’re not desperate until you’re staring at fanfiction.net

Fools. you’re not desperate until you’re staring down an empty word document.

And there it is.

ok, because i just saw a terrible take, i feel compelled to say that there is no "fic market" to "oversaturate" in fandom. good gravy.

i need everyone reading this post to remember that writing is not "content." writing is art. you don't look at a painting of an ocean and say "eh, it's overdone." you look at it and think its beautiful, because it is, and y'all better start treating writing the same fucking way before you lose your favorite authors for good.

Art is not something to be capitalized on. Stop treating it like it is.

people always talk about leaving comments on ao3 like it's a nice thing to do, or the best way to encourage writers to keep writing, or overall like it's how you Do Your Part in fandom

and yeah, all those things are true, but having spent the past few months leaving enthusiastic comments on as many things as i can, i have a different perspective

you should leave comments on fics because it's fun

taking the time to stop and focus on what i like about a story has made me way more aware of what's going on in stories and what i like about them. there's bit more actual comprehension and appreciation and not just beaming content into my eyes to fill time

i like noticing cool little things in fics, or riffing on funny events. i've never been very good at speculating or picking apart characters, but sometimes something clicks and it rocks.

and of course it's pretty nice when you get a response and it's clear you've made another person happy

so yeah, you should leave comments for your own sake, too. it makes reading better!

Louder for the people in the back: "taking the time to stop and focus on what i like about a story has made me way more aware of what's going on in stories and what i like about them. there's bit more actual comprehension and appreciation and not just beaming content into my eyes to fill time"

and

"so yeah, you should leave comments for your own sake, too. it makes reading better!"

current fan creation landscape is kinda like if you went to a party with a homemade cake and everyone takes a slice and silently thumbs up at you with no attempt to start a conversation except for occasionally some guy sits in the corner with a tape recorder critiquing the cake as though he was a restaurant critic and another guy is handing the cake to an uber driver like "yeah i need you to find a restaurant that makes cake like this so i can have more of it" and the only person that's talked to you in 30 minutes is a very sweet little guy who was like "hey i liked your cake" and then ran away apologizing for bothering you the moment you said thank you.

someone brought a cake analysis robot to feed the cake into to determine the exact ingredients and supposedly it can spit out the exact same cake. and if you're like dude. what. then they're like well if it bothers you you should have made more cake. i'm hungry and i deserve cake. and you're like dude we're at a party.

Three months later you find out that fifty people locked themselves in a room to discuss how much they loved your cake and how they wished you made more. None of them ever told you.

something that I feel like is missing from fandom nowadays is the idea that you dont have to have a unified, chronologically/tonally consistent interpretation of your favorite work. your fics dont have to fit within the same version of canon, even if theyre all canon-compliant on their own. your headcanons can contradict each other. be a multishipper. write metas that take two totally different interpretations of the same plot point. write a character as a villain and then write them as the hero next time. write a character as a lesbian and then write them as straight next time! engage in hypotheticals and drop them when you get bored! make up the rules as you go!! have fun with it!!!

No, It's Not Too Short...

People intending to compliment short fics often comment with something like, "I need more!" It's a nice thing to say, but it often feels backhanded.

"I need more" implies that the piece isn't complete as-is, that the piece is a prompt for something more, or that there's something missing from how the author wrote it. This probably isn't what these enthusiastic commenters think at all!

So, here are some alternative compliments that have a similar meaning:

shoutout to the microfic server for starting this convo 💛

What are some other compliments you'd like to hear on a short piece?

People have written a lot of touchy-feely pieces on this subject but I thought I’d get right to the heart of the matter

[The artist, putting a simple cake next to a much fancier one: “Aw man, that guy’s cake is way better than mine.” The Audience, gleefully holding up a knife and fork “HOLY SHIT! TWO CAKES!”]

additions from the og artist (credit)

“Holy shit two cakes,” I mutter to myself as I do fucking anything these days, this post was a godsend

hey do you guys remember when like. brother/brother and sister/sister and brother/sister ships werent just normal, they were really common? parent/child ships werent as widespread as sibling ships but you still saw both of them a lot. like you used to see incest ships all the fucking time.

like you couldnt go five minutes on this hellsite without scrolling past wincest or thorki or any number of the dozens of popular hp incest ships. do people not remember the onecest takeover? the onecest dynasty? what about elsanna? what about all the fontcest that came out of the undertale fandom? mha fans loved shipping the entire todoroki family together. what about game of thrones just in general? the hitachiin twincest? literally everyone from osomatsu-san? usuk and all the other incest ships from hetalia? fucking HOMESTUCK?

it used to be that you couldnt throw a rock in ANY fandom without hitting a whole bunch of super popular incest ships. it was everywhere. it was NORMAL. because people didnt care about what anyone else liked in fiction, because everyone knew the difference between fantasy and reality. and its not like incest hasnt been one of the most popular porn categories all over the world for years.

now though, with the huge resurgence of evangelical puritanism in western fandom and the massive influx of alt-right christofascist antishippers, nothing is allowed to just be fiction any more. braindead little conservative assholes and bigots will scream and shit themselves over people shipping the elric brothers because fandom isnt allowed to be fun any more. antis will see someone talking about sebaciel and start spewing their disgusting rhetoric at everyone and being TERFS and wannabe cops until nobody wants to participate in fandom any more.

fandoms are dying and its antis fault

someone I follow on the bird app just announced they're starting a very exclusive private fic server because they and a bunch of other people want to talk about how much they love the fics they're reading, and as an author can I just say that a really great place to talk about a fic you love is in the comments for that fic

I understand that people are trying to create safe spaces, but as the number of comments that I get on my fics dwindles with each passing year, knowing these spaces exist where my fics are being discussed, places that I am excluded from, makes me want to write fic LESS

I mean I guess who cares, right, because if I stop writing, there's 10,000 other people that will continue...but if you participate in a fic "book club" server and you say nice things there about a fic you loved, maybe copy and paste that into a comment on AO3?

the only thing fanfic writers are asking for in return for hours of hard work is attention. please don't rob us of the one thing that we hope for when we hit "post"

this is directly related to this post I made about how fanfic authors now are treated like content mills, and not like valued members of a creative community who thrive on interaction. for the past decade, we've watched the fandom ecosystem disrupted over and over, as NSFW fan artists seek safety by putting their work behind paywalls, and self-conscious fic readers squirrel away their feelings in invite-only communities

an easy way to do your part to fight against the evils perpetrated by social media is to leave a comment on a fanfic you love

but don't take my word for it -- here are some responses that my fellow authors have left on this post:

The fact I had a fic that was fairly beloved and NO ONE commented on it because it was all being done in a fucking book club server made me want to scream.

I haven't updated that fic in two years now.

I cannot express enough how imperative it is to show the writer how much you love their work. The comments don't have to be novels themselves - even just an "I loved this so much!" Or keyboard smashing works wonders to keep the writer going. Please, we need to bring back supporting writers and artists now more than ever!!!

i think gen z ppl need to stop trying to moderate social media– which is impossible to moderate– and just go on forums already. “this is for mlm, wlw dni” bruh i’m telling you, if you discover mlm forums you’ll go bananas. everyone there will be mlm, i promise. this is genuinely friendly advice. stop wasting your time trying to control your twitter and tik tok, it won’t work because it’s designed to not be controlled.

I’ve said it before but the loss of forums in place of homogenized mass social media is a huge blow to the development of communities, and trying to implement forum rules, logic & expectations on social media is doomed to failure and just results in unnecessary hostility and argument.