While browsing around the Fairly Oddparents tag, it has come to my attention that once more, a lot of people have no idea what "proship" means.

So like many before, I shall break it down for you:

Pro- A preffix that means "in favour of; supporting" (Oxford Learner's Dictionary)

Ship (Shipping) - Short for "Relationship. (Fanlore)

Therefore, to be Pro-Ship/Shipping, one is in favor of or supports shipping. In other words, one does not care what other people ship.

Many old school ways to refer to this can be summed up as:

"Ship and let Ship." and "Your ship is not my ship, and that's okay!"

"Pro" does not stand for "Problematic."

In fact, many people who support the rights of people to ship and write whatever fiction they want do not themselves enjoy darker materials and consume solely good-feeling fluff.

Being "Proship" does not say what a person likes in a ship or their fiction anymore than being "Anti" says what they enjoy.

For example, an Anti viciously against age gap ships may also watch South Park, a show famous for it's mature-rated material concerning minors.

That being said, some advice for fandom:

Make things for the things you like and don't waste away focusing on things you dislike.

Want more content for your favorite pairing or platonic relationship? Write or draw it.

Can't write or draw? Give it your best go and learn, or write blog posts gushing about all the things you love until someone else is inspired to make the thing themselves.

You will be happier focusing on the things you enjoy than constantly policing everything you say or type on the internet.

Have a good day!

Pro-writing tip: if your story doesn't need a number, don't put a fucking number in it.

Nothing, I mean nothing, activates reader pedantry like a number.

I have seen it a thousand times in writing workshops. People just can't resist nitpicking a number. For example, "This scifi story takes place 200 years in the future and they have faster than light travel because it's plot convenient," will immediately drag every armchair scientist out of the woodwork to say why there's no way that technology would exist in only 200 years.

Dates, ages, math, spans of time, I don't know what it is but the second a specific number shows up, your reader is thinking, and they're thinking critically but it's about whether that information is correct. They are now doing the math and have gone off drawing conclusions and getting distracted from your story or worse, putting it down entirely because umm, that sword could not have existed in that Medieval year, or this character couldn't be this old because it means they were an infant when this other story event happened that they're supposed to know about, or these two events now overlap in the timeline, or... etc etc etc.

Unless you are 1000% certain that a specific number is adding to your narrative, and you know rock-solid, backwards and forwards that the information attached to that number is correct and consistent throughout the entire story, do yourself a favor, and don't bring that evil down upon your head.

Editor here. Can confirm.

"Two centuries later" just triggers a mental note to check if timing is consistent throughout the book, because it may mean more time jumps are ahead. "200 years later", or heaven forbid, "201 years later" will have me draw up a time line. The more specific the number, the more critical people become.

Strange phenomenon. Well spotted, OP.

actually i think i might have an explanation for this from linguistics? i think folks get more nitpicky if you have specific numbers because of gricean maxims, specifically the maxims of quality and quantity

basically gricean maxims are a set of guidelines that we all carry in our heads that we expect other people to follow when having a conversation in good faith - i’m copying and pasting definitions from someone else because my attempts at summing up quality and quantity weren’t going so hot

so basically, when you put a rough number in a text, people think subconsciously ‘oh, the exact number isn’t important, because if it was they would tell me an exact number, so i don’t need to worry about this’, whereas if you put something precise in, people’s brains go ‘wait, they think i need to know this information so i’ll remember it, but now it’s later and they’ve said something that contradicts it, so at least one of those times they were lying and i must figure out which time it was’

Also: don't specify data storage sizes. Just, you know, don't.

it is the year 2005

Tumblr purity culture thinks this is how AO3 works

outta the way gayboy im boutta read Murder Magazine

DONT BE AFRAID TO COMMENT ON OLD FICS DONT BE AFRAID TO COMMENT ON FICS IN A FANDOM THE AUTHOR MAY NO LONGER BE ACTIVE IN. IF THE STORY IS STILL UP LET THEM KNOW YOUR THOUGHTS IT MIGHT JUST BE THE REMINDER THAT MAKES THEIR DAY.

SINCERELY SOMEONE WHO JUST GOT A REPLY THAT MADE ME WANNA MAKE THIS POST

Listen. Authors' brains are really dumb. We start thinking people don't like a story anymore after too long of radio silence

Reblog if you think fanfiction is a legitimate form of creative writing.

It is. We twist canon timelines into something of our own making while still staying true to the original or we completely deviate and create our own ending. Of course it’s creative writing!

source

[image id: The text "how it feels to write a serious fanfic when one of the characters has a stupid name" is above a photo of a man sitting in front of a laptop and cracking his knuckles. He's wearing a rainbow-colored clown wig and a red clown nose, both of which have been photoshopped into the image. end id]

All of Transformers

Quick PSA, if you get one of those "Work scanned, AI use detected" comments on AO3, just mark them as spam.

Some moron apparently built a bot to annoy or prank hundreds of authors.

There is no scanning process, your work doesn't actually resemble AI writing, it's all bullshit. Mark the comment as spam (on AO3, not the email notification you got about the comment!) and don't let it get to you.

The spam comments have evolved.

They are now also linking to a site they claim is able to scan works and tell you whether they were AI written or not, and that you should do that before reading a fic.

It should go without saying that you should not, under no circumstances, visit a site advertised in a spam comment.

In this case, I'd say there's even a chance that the "scanning" site is actually used to scrape fics and use them for future AI writing. What it definitely doesn't do is tell you whether something was AI written or not. That's a bullshit claim.

Don't use that site. Don't believe these spam comments, whether you get them on your own works or see them on someone else's.

It's all bullshit.

if you ever doubt your writing, be it your themes, or the reason behind it, remember that h.g wells wrote war of the worlds both as a commentary on colonialism and the horrors it brings, and because he fucking hated his neighbours and his 13 hour job, and wanted to write about the town in which he lived getting blasted to the fucking ground by lasers into an irreparable heap and all of the townspeople dying painfully 

you, too, can channel your hatred for that guy that lives down the hall and blasts music at 4am into the one of the most influential science fiction stories ever written! fuck it! i believe in you!!  

This is one of the most inspirational things I’ve ever seen

Been looking for this

The 12th and FINAL chapter of "Leading from Behind" is up!

OMG, I can't believe how long this ended up being (it was supposed to be a one-shot) and yet I also can't believe it's done!

I hope you enjoyed it because I had a great time writing it! This was the fic that broke me out of a long stretch of writer's block, which led to me picking up "With a Side of Rust" again, which at the time had been on hiatus for a few years.

But mostly I like this fic because it's so weird and, imho, pretty darn funny.

>>>LINK<<<

I wrote a Shattered Glass, TFP fic featuring Airachnid / Arcee. :)

Poison Bonbon (NSFW)

>>>LINK<<<