my dream as a fanfic writer is to write a story which people want to talk to me about and send asks about afterwards and discuss things the characters did and the symbolism and meanings behind certain lines and I'll be all "hehe thanks" but irl I'll be in literal tears because I wrote something that means something to someone

Please give me feedback! :)

I got an AO3 comment once which summarised said, 'I've been reading this fic for years and I keep coming back to it over and over because it's so amazing and I feel guilty that all this time I never commented, so this is me letting you know how much it's meant to me for so long.' And that was incredible, because five minutes before I didn't know that person existed and then they tell me that I've made such an impact on them.

It is never too late to leave a comment - the author will always be thrilled.

Thinking about a comment I got where they said they read one of my fics whenever they felt alone and the SOB that tore out of my throat😭

“I hope this email finds you well”

First of all the only emails that ever find me well are from AO3

Hi,

It’s you friendly neighbor fanfic author here. In the light of this apparent new trend of people feeding unfinished fics to AI to get an “ending,” and some people even talking about “blanket permissions,” let me just say this:

I EXPLICITLY FORBID ANYONE TO FEED MY FICS TO AI. DUDE, THAT IS ABOUT THE LEAST RESPECTFUL THING YOU CAN DO. IF YOU DO IT, SHALL YOU BE EXCOMMUNICATED FROM YOUR FANDOM AND WALK ON LEGOS BAREFOOT TILL THE END OF DAYS.

That is my anti-permission.

Thank you for your attention.

if you have a blanket permission statement on your profile for fanart/spinoffs/remixes/etc., consider adding something like this:

(full example here)

I have seen more and more readers on Ao3 mentioning that they don’t read non finished fics.

And I am not here to tell you to read fics that aren’t completed yet, because it’s not my job.

But please, if you subscribe to this policy, be aware that this absolutely contributes to fics never being finished.

Because writing a fic, especially a multi-chaptered-one, takes a lot of time and effort and writers need positive feedback to make it worth it. So if they aren’t getting it, the chance of them dropping the project altogether is significantly higher.

All of @misc-fandoms-ballad ’s tags

While I don’t think this post was made to guilt trip anyone, I’d also like to point out that just because you follow a wip doesn’t mean the author is under any obligation to complete it either.

As both a writer and a reader, I understand this from both sides.

However, I think it’s important to keep in mind that fanfic is written, shared, read and reviewed for free. Labour on anyone’s part, outside of their own desires is not required, and no one should feel bad about engaging with it however they see fit and comfortable for them.

AND ANOTHER THING

I’ve seen some comments mention community, etc and that’s a valid argument, fanfic is just as much about engaging with the content as it is with the community. HOWEVER. This threat of “if you don’t appreciate us, we’ll disappear”? Babes, I don’t know how to tell you this, but super popular fanfic writers who’ve got engagement up the wazoo disappear all the time.

Speaking for myself, one of my series gets WAY more engagement than my other works. Does it get more updates? No, because the plotbunnies and I aren’t friends very often. Is that anyone’s fault? No, because I can’t control it any more than the readers can.

Looking back on this discussion, and every other about what people in fandom “should” do, I think everyone is attributing way more control than they actually have over the behaviour of others. You only have power over yourself, inform yourself of the consequences in either direction, and make your choices how you see fit. Shifting the responsibility of any fandom’s longevity seems entirely needless when it boils down to what each individual does, and not what each individual tells others to do.

I have been reading a bit on the OTW elections and the whole Tiffany G thing, but most of all, I've been reading comments from people supporting Tiffany saying that she just wants to clear AO3 from all the CSAM (child sexual abuse material) content and I don't know who needs to hear this but:

If someone comes to a predominantly QUEER space (like AO3) and tells you that censorship is necessary to eradicate CSAM... it's not actually CSAM they want to eradicate...

I've seen this type of discourse about Pride and about queer literature and queer movies and queer communities. It's a tried and true technique of the right and conservative movements.

First, they say there is a DANGER to the community through CSAM and they conflate the actual threat of CSAM in the community (we all know someone who thinks that writing a love story between two characters who are 16 is CSAM...), and make you believe that censorship is the only way to PROTECT THE CHILDREN. And since most people are (rightly) mind-bogled at having to explain that of course they don't support CSAM content, they bow down and accept the censorship for the greater good, without anyone actually trying to have a conversation about what qualifies as CSAM (which needs to, you know, actually involve real children and not fictional characters who are 17 and losing their virginity with their crush in a Mature-rated story about high school football and first love based on the author's own experience of losing their virginity at 17 to their crush in high school).

Then, they tell you that there are other forms of DISTURBING CONTENT, and what they really mean is porn that THEY find disturbing, for ex, (and I kid you not, I have seen comments like that) porn featuring disabled characters, which they consider to encourage the exploitation of vulnerable individuals, or BDSM porn (which supposedly encourages violence and lack of consent), or rough porn, or any kind of porn that isn't two (preferably white and skinny) able-bodied people doing it missionary style while lovingly gazing in each other's eyes. SO TO PROTECT VIEWERS, that needs to be banned as well.

And then, they tell you that even that sanitized version of porn is still porn and that people under 18 or under 21 or under whatever age they consider too young to view anything sexual regardless of the fact that not all countries have the same law about the age of maturity, should be free to surf the site without having to *gasp* filter out properly tagged works. So TO PROTECT THE CHILDREN, every explicit content is censored.

And then finally, when all that is left is a sanitized, white-washed, ableist, puritan type of content featuring General-Audience approved gay works of two nice men or two nice women holding hands and chastely kissing each other on the lips... Well guess what? :) CHILDREN SHOULD NOT BE EXPOSED TO QUEER CONTENT SO WE NEED TO BAN THAT AS WELL, and since we've basically done purge after purge before and there are still a handful of people on the website, well surely they won't mind/care anymore, will they?

It's not just a slippery slope, it's something that has been done time and again, and that is why censorship on AO3 will never, never have a positive outcome.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

There is a candidate named Tiffany G. in the current Ao3 board elections with a pro-censorship position for getting Ao3 unbanned in China. This is ship and kink agnostic: the only way to get Ao3 unbanned in China would be the removal of all explicit queer content to bring it in line with the online censorship policies of the CCP Pre-ban, Chinese writers used Ao3 to host LGBTQ+ and explicit content due to being censored on Chinese websites, and writers of danmei (m/m) stories have been sent to prison in China for publishing queer content.

There are 3 seats, and 5 candidates (including her) so she has an actual chance to get elected. If you’ve contributed $10 in the past year and have eligibility to vote in this election, it is essential that you do so. Please check your e-mail for the ballot and vote for everyone except Tiffany in whichever order you prefer based on their stances.

Important context including how essential it is to vote this time if you want to support Ao3s current policies

Chinese fandoms on Weibo are up in arms against this candidate warning about her intention to bring Ao3 in line with the Chinese censored fanfic sites

Chat transcript of her election interview, including discussion of making Ao3 more publicly appealing, complaints about how it was banned in China, and the suggestion of removing ‘illegal’ content besides underage - which, in China, includes queer and explicit content - and avoidance of clear answers about which content would be censored

Hello, my fellow fanwork creators. Sorry to interrupt, but there's an important information you all should pay attention to.

In short, everyone who is eligible to vote for the election of OTW (they run AO3 and Fanlore), should vote against the candidate Tiffany G. If you have donated over 10$ to AO3 in the past year, you are eligible to vote for yourself, and for us, for every Archive of Our Own user, especially the creators in China. This is a very serious question.

In Tiffany's statement, they want to build a more strict censorship policy in AO3. They also talked about limiting the adult content so this website would "have a better image to public". And they said China banned AO3 because of "pedophilic content" but as a Chinese myself, we all know it's just because my country prohibits any sex-related website. So basically, if this Tiffany succeed to get a seat of OTW, AO3 will face more strict censorship, limited adult content, and for we, for Chinese users, the result would be more catastrophic.

Tiffany G also mentioned that they work in a governmental organisation in China. Just consider why a pro-censorship, fandom newbie(Tiffany said it themself), and government staff wants to run for the election of an organisation that is holistically against their agenda. In my personal worst imagination, once they got the seat, they will immediately pack all the information of Chinese users in AO3 and report them to the Government. The consequence will be horrible.

Please, vote for yourself, for us, and for the future of our favourite fanwork site. If you are not an eligible voter and you wanna do something, please let more people receive this information. Thank you.

HEY!

AO3 is in danger of becoming CENSORED. if you have donated $10 or more BEFORE june 30th, PLEASE exercise your right to vote (as you should have received an email to) and VOTE AGAINST TIFFANY GU, who is PRO-CENSORSHIP and PRO making AO3 “palatable” for outsiders and antis.

this is one of the few places dead dove writers/illustrators have to post our content, which is NOT illegal, immoral, or a threat to society. however, CENSORSHIP IS.

if you have the opportunity to vote, PLEASE TAKE IT.

KEEP AO3 WONDERFUL! THANKS!

PSA to Real Person Fiction (RPF) Writers

Had trouble pasting the video here, but @ao3commentoftheday posted this video about this announcement from Channel 4.

You can view Channel 4’s Twitter post regarding their new show at the link below, but I recommend you to read the full article announcing Channel 4’s fan fiction puppet series.

Here is a quote from the article:

According to @ao3commentoftheday, Channel 4 representatives are also already commenting on AO3 works asking writers to write RPFs for their show. AO3 is currently deleting the comments as spam.

What’s happening now is an issue in more ways than one. Beyond writers being exploited for their free content, their EROTIC fiction will be read out by their intended celebrity through puppets with the effect of making fun of the written content (nevermind the fact that it’s making fun of women and queer sexual expression) and potentially making these celebrities feel very uncomfortable.

It’s already mentioned in @ao3commentoftheday’s video, but TO ALL RPF WRITERS AND ESPECIALLY TO BRITISH RPF WRITERS—HIDE YOUR RPF WORKS, both current and future works.

On AO3, you have the option to private individual works so that they are only viewable to registered AO3 users (for those who are not AO3 users, your AO3 mutuals can send you an invitation). Tumblr also has settings to hide your blog from external search engines such as Google and only make it viewable to Tumblr registered users. I’m not sure what features are available on Wattpad or FFN in terms of hiding fan fic works, but if anyone uses those sites, please be sure to hide your RPF works from public view if possible.

As a fan fiction community, it’s especially vital now that we continue to prevent our works from being exploited and ridiculed.

Please jump in if there is anything I am missing—or something that I am saying that may unintentionally be misinformation.

Wow, what the fuck

Been hearing this is a problem again. Don't be a dick in bookmarks, folks. And yes while I made this image, I'm giving free reign. Take it. Spread it far and wide. Because I'm hearing that some readers don't know that their bookmarks are visible. Editing for clarity, since it's hit 14k notes and I'm tired of repeating myself:

Hey everyone. There's another app on the Google playstore. Pretty sure it's not official and it's making money from in-app ads.

I think the AO3's latest post about apps is here:

I don’t access Ao3 on my phone, but for those of you who do. wise words of warning.

Last time I looked, my best bet to use AO3 safely and free was to go straight to AO3.

I don’t understand the appeal of this. Has anyone ever thought “you know what would make AO3 better? Ads!”

Semi-regular reminder to my readers that AO3 does not have an app and every time you login through one of them, you are potentially comprising your account/password. AO3 has an effective design for mobile use and you can always add to home screen, if you really need an "app" icon.

Somewhere in my notes in the last few days I saw someone add some tags that I’ve been thinking about ever since. I wish I could find them again (or that I’d just saved their post at the time) because I think they made a lot of sense.

They were talking about how fanfic is becoming more and more mainstream while still remaining largely transgressive. It’s such an interesting dichotomy to think about!

On the one hand, you have sites like AO3 and realities like widespread high speed internet access being more and more accessible to larger and larger groups of people. This makes it incredibly easy for anyone at all to find and read fanfic.

On the other hand, you have the roots of fanfic. It was born out of marginalized groups such as women, people of colour, and members of the queer community deciding to take the stories that had been aimed at a largely male, white, heterosexual audience and inverting them into something they could enjoy and relate to. To this day, fanfic is a place where people write the kinds of stories that don’t get made into movies and TV shows. The kinds of stories that don’t get published or end up on the New York Times bestseller list.

Fanfic used to be written and shared in secret. People used to hide it. People still do hide the fact that they read or write it. But it’s becoming something that more and more people are becoming more and more aware of.

So now there’s a spotlight starting to shine on fanfic. People who aren’t looking for transgressive works are finding them where they always were. People who think the status quo is fine are getting upset when they enter a place where the status quo is constantly being upended.

The tags on that post that I can’t find made the point that popular media is curated and sanitized and stripped of most of its controversy in order to appeal to the widest possible audience. But that also makes that audience expect all media to be curated and sanitized in the same way. When they encounter the messy, controversial, ugly, radical, difficult things that people write in fanfic, they’re unprepared.

Fanfic isn’t big media. Fanfic authors aren’t being edited and filtered and polished - and nor are their works. The clash between the expectations of people new to fanfic and accustomed to popular media and the realities of what fanfic is and what it’s being written for - that’s part of this struggle that fandom is going through right now. It’s been going on since the beginning of course, but it’s getting louder every year.

I’m still thinking my way through this, but it really does make a lot of sense to me. If those were your tags, please let me know so I can credit you with the ideas at the core of this post.

And if you have any ideas for how we as fans can better introduce the newbies to the culture and expectations in fandom, I’d love to hear it. The better we can guide people into our space, the better they’ll fit in when they join it.

While I’m not entirely sure how, here are a few what ideas. If you’re coming into fanfic new, here is what you need to know. Perhaps other folks can think of more diplomatic ways to frame these thoughts.

This feels related to a post I saw a while back about how so much of fandom is rooted in neuro divergence. The hyper fixation, the “squeeing”, the encyclopedic knowledge. And how, as fandom gets more and more mainstream, those hallmarks of being a Fan get tagged as *cringey*

Idk. Makes you think.

I love almost every point here, but if there’s one thing I would tell new fans, it’s this:

Most fanfic is straight.

These are the best hard numbers I have (with multi/other including all fics labeled as more than one of m/m, f/m, and f/f along with ones labeled as multi/other):

AO3 is the gay porn bookstore, so AO3 is the site that cares about:

If you hate Bad Kinks, that’s fine. Just know that you will never get the kind of labeling AO3 has from the people who pander to the mainstream. If you want to get rid of The Bad Stuff, the kind of websites you’ll end up with are a sea of nigh unsearchable het, like Wattpad. And the same kinks will be there. They just won’t be labeled clearly.

People imagine that fandom is mostly queer because their own bubble is, because queer stuff sticks in their mind more as anomalous, making it seem more frequent than it really is, and because the only places that label clearly are the queer ones.

If you want to tear down the places with queer+freaky content, you will end up tearing down the only places that protect queer content at all.

No, literally no one missed that. For you, the big thing is underage. For someone else, it’s RPF existing at all. For someone else, it’s rape-as-kink.

I reiterate: If you hate Bad Kinks, that’s fine. But AO3 looks how it does because it’s opposed to censorship. A site less opposed to censorship would also be less into this type of metadata and would have less clear labeling.

Perhaps Wattpad’s terms of service would be more to your taste.

The politest way to tell somebody to go to hell has been found

Shit like the Great Purges and the Strikethrough of Livejournal eventually led to fans banding together to create A03, which I would have absolutely KILLED for when I was 15.

Back up ao3 was created by fans?

It’s…right on the main page. 

I love this because I will bet you that persefv has read that bit we are all so inundated with hyperbole and advertising that says that the consumer is somehow in charge of whatever product they are shilling that we all just assumed this was another sales tactic.

But we’re not even… selling anything…  *quiet sobs*

No ads. No subscriptions. No data selling.

We are the definition of “what it says on the tin.”

Is there any way to spread this info? 

THE OTW WAS CREATED BY FANS SO WE’D HAVE AN ARCHIVE THAT WASN’T SUBJECT TO CORPORATE REVIEW. 

Nonprofit, so that nobody could ever say, “this isn’t making enough money; it’s getting shut down.” (See: Geocities, Quizilla, Figment, G+.) With lawyers involved and a firm awareness of the legalities of fanfic, so nobody would decide “we’ve gotten a nasty letter from a megacorporation with lawyers, so we’re hiding because we can’t afford to face a lawsuit. (Jedi Hurtaholics, Trevizo’s Millennium site.) With teams, so that an argument between co-mods didn’t result in the destruction of a whole archive. (Gryffindor Tower, Detention.)

AO3 IS OUR SITE.

It is by fans, for fans. Fans do all the coding. All the legal paperwork. All the abuse/tos violation complaints. Fans make all the choices about policies. Fans decide how to run the fundraisers. Fans write the blog posts. All the volunteer staff are fans; all the people who train them are fans. Fans wrangle all the tags. 

(And the other OTW projects, too. Fans manage the entries at Fanlore. Fans run the Open Doors project. Fans publish Transformative Works and Cultures.)

EVERYONE WORKING FOR THE OTW LOVES FANDOM. Wants it to survive. Wants it to be awesome for everyone.

(Knows that it can’t be awesome for everyone; some approaches to fandom just clash hard. But they strive to minimize those clashes as much as possible, because they love fandom.) 

AO3 is not some company that decided, “we’ll make a site for fanfic and then…” I don’t know what people are thinking is the reason. Money? Data harvesting? Tax shelter? Amusement and pity?

Nope; AO3 was fans saying, “Livejournal sucks; we’re tired of this fucked-up ‘rebuild every three years’ garbage; WE NEED TO OWN THE DAMN SERVERS.”

That’s the “of our own” part of the name. OTW isn’t a “them” running the site “for us.” It’s “us” making places for “us” to share what we love with others of “us.” 

This this this.

I was there for all of that shit, and AO3 is a godsend. If you enjoy or create fanworks, support AO3, donate if you can, and remember why it’s there in the first place!!

Fandom history really does get lost quickly. For current 20-something fans, AO3 has always been there.

the biggest scam of all with the ao3 shit is people genuinely believing we NEED ao3 and ao3 alone.

the entire foundation ao3 is built on is one from past fic archives made to tailor to a certain demographic - harry potter fic authors were infamous for causing drama between fic archives, and this was only in the 90s/2000s. look at livejournal, ff.net, etc etc. ao3 has been lying to y'all for years into thinking there’s no better options for storing and sharing fic. we can do better than ao3, and we have before.

AO3 has never tried to convince anyone that it’s the only archive. There’s a lot of people who think it’s the best, including most of the active volunteers, but they don’t object to other archives.

AO3 hasn’t been “lying” to people to convince them there’s no better archives. More people post at FF.net and Wattpad than AO3; obviously, a lot of people think those are better. It’s likely more people post at Amino apps, although it’s hard to track those numbers.

OTW’s code is open source. Anyone who likes AO3’s structure but not policies, can make their own site. Or they can grab the pieces they like - the tag system, or the warnings structure, or the fandom label setup - and attach those to an entirely different fanwork hosting site.

For the people who do like AO3 - there aren’t any better sites. They’re the only ad-free fanwork hosting site. The only one that lets you search by tags across the whole archive. The only one that lets you download fic as ebooks to throw onto your ereader so you can read them offline. The only one that provides clear warnings for some kinds of content, and allows authors to tag for not-required content that they want to warn about. And of course, the only one that allows the full range of legal fannish content, rather than “the mods will decide if something is against the rules and throw it out, but not tell people exactly what those rules are, and not enforce it consistently.”

I am curious what was “better than AO3” before, and why it’s not being used now instead.

what the original post neglects to take into consideration is that yes, of course, there were archives before AO3. of course there were fanfic sites before AO3 that people loved and uploaded millions of words to and generated huge amounts of traffic.

and they’re gone!

they’re gone!

because whoever owned them lost interest, or sold off the company/domain/page, or was DDOSed, or targeted for mass reporting by people who think gay content is icky. that’s the point. that was the whole point of AO3, that it was something that would stick around and wasn’t subject to the whims of 3rd party content policies or revenue-based downsizing.

there’s a lot of subjectivity in what makes an archive good, why some people like x better than y or y better than z, but there’s one respect in which AO3 is undeniably superior to all its predecessors:

it’s still here.

If you have ideas for creating an archive better suited to your own needs, then you absolutely should! There used to be lots of smaller archives for specific pairings and fandoms, and there’s nothing stopping you from doing it again.

AO3 supremacy isn’t real, and they’re not some huge corporation that’s like… building a monopoly by putting smaller archives out of “business.” People like to talk about AO3 like it’s Amazon and not a small non-profit. They’re not oppressing you. They’re not stopping you from making your own archives. People moved over to AO3 because it was the option that worked best for them, but if it doesn’t work best for you, that’s okay too.

Make your own archive! Use AO3′s open source code, or come up with your own! There’s nothing stopping you!

louder, for the people in the back!!!

Don’t like AO3′s content policies or the AO3 team’s decisions?

Go support eFiction. It’s an open-source community that has been working since 2003 to let fans create and run their own fanfiction archives, where they can set their own policies and create their own experiences.

AO3 is open source, but its architecture is so elaborate and intense that running even a small version of it would be pretty difficult and expensive for a hobbyist. It’s not realistic to say, “Just take the AO3 code and make your own!”

But you can say that about eFiction. When I was a teenager with a $5/mo webhosting plan, I could install and run my own eFiction archive to use with my friends. If a really dedicated fan, or a handful of fans, wanted to create their own website that they could moderate how they wanted, they could read up on coding, pool money for webhosting, and get their own eFiction site underway.

As a project, eFiction needs volunteers to help update the code (it started in 2003, remember; the internet has moved on) and to provide support to people who want to create and run their own archives. If you’re willing to show up and learn some new skills, you could make a difference.

love how every time ao3 does a donation drive we have to explain the concept of operating costs to thousands of people who have apparently never had to manage money

like truly it is so funny that this site full of self-proclaimed communists has a nonzero number of people who bitch about funding what is essentially a public service. it's like people who piss and moan about paying taxes, vote to cut them, and then act surprised when the public library no longer has convenient hours and the fire department takes twice as long to arrive