@raccoon-sex-dungeon / raccoon-sex-dungeon.tumblr.com
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begging the poll anon to tell us about the argument that led to this question
hahaha im not crying you are
oh hello there
Well thats somethin
NOOO I got poor little meow meowed ☹️☹️
Oh? :o
Yeah thats about right
File under reviews that shock the Hell out of me.
This is so precious D;
We stan this lady
In the spirit of encouraging people to comment on fanfics while also making it easier to do so, I feel obliged to share a browser extension for ao3 that has quite literally revolutionized the comment game for me.
I present to you: the floating ao3 comment box!
From what I've seen, a big problem for many people is that once you reach the comments at the bottom of a fic, your memory of it miraculously disappears. Anything you wanted to say is stuck ten paragraphs ago, and you barely remember what you thought while reading. This fixes that!
I'll give a little explanation on the features and how it works, but if you want to skip all that, here's the link.
The extension is visible as a small blue box in the upper left corner.
(Side note: The green colouring is not from the extension, that's me.)
If you click on it, you open a comment box window at the bottom of your screen but not at the bottom of the fic. I opened my own fic for demonstrative purposes.
The website also gives explanations on how exactly it functions, but I'll summarize regardless.
The best part? You can simply close the window the same way you opened it and your progress will automatically be saved. So you can open it, comment on a paragraph, and then close it and keep reading without having the box in your face.
Comments are what keep writers going, and as both a writer and a reader, I think it's such an easy way of showing support and enthusiasm.
Hey guys? Stop doing this please and thanks. There’s no need to put your rating system in a public bookmark where the author can see it. I don’t care if it’s a good or a bad rating just stop it and keep that shit to yourself.
If you’re making your bookmarks public, you’re recommending the fic. Even if, for some reason, you want to save fics you didn’t like (which makes zero sense to me but okay), “I didn’t like this” is not a recommendation. It is the opposite of a recommendation.
“But you’re not notified when people make a bookmark, so it’s not feedback!” Let me put it this way: coming up to a person at a party and insulting them to their face is shitty. Like, I think we can all agree that’s not a nice thing to do.
If you’re at a party and start loudly insulting someone within earshot of them, that is still shitty. They can still hear you, and you are making no effort to keep them from hearing you. It doesn’t stop being shitty just because you’re ostensibly having the conversation with someone else. “But why would you read the bookmarks?” is about as ridiculous an argument as asking why someone would “eavesdrop” on a discussion you’re having out loud, in public, three feet away from them. Like, if you really didn’t want them to hear it, there are tons of ways at your disposal, starting with “not doing it three feet away from them.”
“But how do I tell my friends about bad fics?” You use Tumblr DMs or Discord or a group text or literally any other method that is actually private. I will freely admit I talk about fics and authors I don’t like with friends privately, so as to not be a dick to the author I’m talking about.
Shout-out to Ao3 for not only being transparent in the work they're doing to try to get the site running, but for IMMEDIATELY calling out any islamophobia. They're doing fucking WORK rn, all on a volunteer basis, and while most of the comments I've seen are far and away supportive I just know whoever is in charge of their socials is watching the comments section unfold with a migraine.
Anyway this is all to say I love Ao3 and the people working on it rn are dealing with absolute chaos, so the next time someone throws out a line about "why do they need a fundraiser every year" please remember today.
i see a lot of posts about how to leave quick and easy comments if you are shy abt leaving comments which is great!! but if you want to leave a more substantial comment than a couple emojis (which are great don’t get me wrong!!) here is my formula for leaving a substantial comment that generally helps me hit all the parts of the fic i want to comment on:
that’s my formula! of course there are always variations in each comment, but i try to hit all four of these points when i want to leave a substantial comment. this is again, strictly what i developed for myself and is by no means me telling you that this is how to leave a good comment!! all comments are great and as a writer, i’m glad for all of them, every single one. but i see a lot of posts on this site about how to leave “easy” comments, but not a lot about how to leave more substantial comments. so i thought i would share. hope this helps :D
Go read an old fic.
There’s such recency bias in fandom. As an author you post something, get a few reactions, and then it goes off into the bin. As a reader you check the tags, see what’s new, and move on. But a lot of old stuff is really good. It’s just sitting there, gathering dust, waiting for someone to take a peek.
So go on. Treat yourself.
Read an old fic.
I’d argue there’s a bias against like… middle-aged fics in particular. A lot of people sort by kudos or bookmarks, but that’s going to be strongly biased toward older fics, which have had more time to accumulate them. Then there’s people that sort by date and read the newest. But there’s so much good material in that middle area.
A friend taught me her trick for smaller fandoms, which is to sort by kudos and use the published date filters to go through the fandom in 6-month increments. Within a 6-month time span, you’re not really going to get the kudos-over-time bias. Basically, you end up reading the best fics of each 6-month period until you start hitting fics below your quality threshold, wherever that is. You’ll find so much good material that way that would never have crossed your line of sight otherwise.
File under reviews that shock the Hell out of me.
This is so precious D;
We stan this lady
I keep seeing truly fascinating takes popping up on my dash about how people can’t wait for Ao3 to explode so they can watch the fallout, and it’s like. Mind-blowing to me, honestly. And it’s always followed by shit like “sucks to suck if fandom is your whole personality” and “maybe you shouldn’t support pedophilia hope this helps!”
Y’all, I’m 32. I’ve been reading fanfiction since I was a teenager. I’ve also been reading a metric fuck ton of original content, creating my own, working, going to school, having a whole life—most people who engage in fandom also do all that shit. We would be devastated if anything happened to Ao3 for a multitude of reasons, and for the vast majority of us, none of those reasons would be “because we don’t know who we are without it.” Do…do they realize that what they see of someone on tumblr is not actually their whole life and self?
As for the whole Ao3 being a cesspool for kiddie porn, that is…not only untrue but also, 99% of the people arguing on behalf of Ao3 on this issue aren’t fucking saying that child porn is good or morally acceptable. All that’s being said is, “The purpose of this site is to be an ARCHIVE of all kinds of works. There are tags to assist with weeding out what you don’t want to see.” Because when purges happen, it is frequently marginalized people and/or content representing marginalized people that is in the line of fire. It ALWAYS is! Do they genuinely not realize that fandom as we know it exists because it was the only place so many people could see the stories they wanted to see, to feel a sense of representation?
No one saying Ao3 is perfect and that there are elements that really should have been fixed a long time ago—the racism and racist content is a v real fucking issue. But it’s also super weird to me that some people feel so entitled to dictate exactly what does or doesn’t belong there in terms of like, romantic and sexual content, while completely ignoring its original purpose. Especially as a librarian, because…oof. If they think Ao3 is bad for allowing offensive works to exist, I’d hate for them to learn about libraries! Which, in the US, their tax dollars actually DO pay for—unlike Ao3!
Also, the whole “quit telling us to learn fandom history it’s not important and we don’t care, y’all are just old and too attached to media lol” is gonna bite these folks in the ass so fucking hard when they realize that fandom does not exist in a vacuum and that art and stories and the fans who consume them have informed one another since the beginning of fucking time?? And that saying “fuck fandom history actually because I think this is a silly topic” is like…wildly shortsighted at best?
I’m assuming I don’t have a big enough following to catch shit over this, but whatever, man. This kind of thing does genuinely alarm me, because i have to wonder if these points of view extend outside of fandom spaces, and that never ends well.
As someone working on their PhD in history, it somewhat baffles me how the discourse objecting to ao3 often fundamentally misunderstands what an archive is. Archives are repositories, places to store material and ephemera that are culturally significant or relevant. I can’t tell you how many problematic things I have encountered when I go to archives to examine their collections--murders, oppression, sexual assaults, violence. But one of the big areas of discussion in the field of history (not to mention in Library and Information Science) is the silences in the archive--who’s voices aren’t kept for posterity, who’s stories aren’t told, and how we can overcome these silences. For a multitude of reasons, from intentionally or unintentionally prioritizing certain voices to the occasional actions of archivists or others to censor past atrocities, we always battle incomplete archives.
So when I see the discourse arising, and people suggesting (or rebutting suggestions for) censoring Archive of our Own, I can’t help but marvel at the short-sightedness. Because archives shouldn’t dump stuff that’s unpalatable (and unpalatable to whom is another issue to consider)--that’s a clear way to whitewash the past. If we paper over or removed evidence of the atrocities or unlawful behavior captured in archives, we’d have a (even more skewed) understanding of the past--and that’s just from a historian’s perspective. I suspect that scholars from other fields, who also use the archives to understand the human condition, would also assert that even the most morally objectionable and hard to stomach materials are often the most revealing and sadly helpful in understanding humanity--today and in the past.
[There are steps that can be taken to make archives (especially ao3 which invites public engagement to a level not normally present in other, more traditional archives) safer. Consistent use of warnings for specific content and creating methods to combat racism in comments and harassment of fans/creators of color would go a long way towards achieving this goal. Perhaps investing in technology or paying experts to consult on developing policies and tools for moderation might be an avenue forward. Whatever the method, fans and creators of color need to be involved and consulted.]
ao3 is a repository for fandom works. It holds fandom history, and can be used by many in many different ways--for pleasure and enjoyment, for windows into cultural studies, for an understanding of societal values, to understand shifts in conceptions of gender, race, class, and other factors. There are problematic things in the Archive (of our own). But ask any archivist or scholar, and they’ll tell you that there are problematic things in all archives. Removing them doesn’t make the world better, it just makes it harder to understand the human condition (past and/or present).
If I can add my piece as a temporarily lapsed history postgrad—the other enormously important thing that AO3 does vis a vis archiving work that is underrated by all these conversations about morality is the heavy lifting of presenting a legal defence against the overreaching use of copyright law by entertainment corporations like Disney, Comcast, etc.
Archives are as useful as they are because they largely exist outwith the bounds of copyright law. There is, of course, copyright law that does apply to archives, if you’ve ever tried to reference archived material in, eg. a published paper, you’ll know what that looks like, but you cannot DMCA strike an archive. You cannot remove history from archives simply because Mickey Mouse has been doodled on the sides of a page. But you can do that on the internet—particularly an internet without the OTW legal team’s immensely important work.
I’d like to draw a comparison between the work the OTW does and, perhaps a little strangely, an ongoing struggle in the world of computer and web development.
The internet, for those who don’t know, was largely built in two ways. One, by academics and US federal government employees working hand-in-glove, and two by a veritable army of programmers and coders who developed the architecture of the internet and made it available for all to use and reuse when and how they pleased. We call this ‘open source’ software or code. Every single thing you touch and interact with on the internet relies on open source code. Not almost everything—everything.
And bad, bad things happen when, for example, major companies try to use copyright law to bully developers into giving up their hard work. The internet literally falls apart.
How does this relate to fanworks? If you have ever reblogged a gifset from a movie under copyright, or drawn and posted fanart or sketches, or read fanfic or fan videos online, then YOU have violated copyright, such as it exists (and if it isn’t a violation of copyright law in your specific country, I can assure you that Disney’s legal team is hoping to make it a violation), and could be liable for the legal fallout from it. Companies like Disney are interested in monetising every element of our social and cultural life, and the easiest way for them to do this is through the use and abuse of copyright law. If you mocked TumblrPlus, just you wait for what the Mouse has in store.
Now, back to the archives. Strip away the enjoyment factor of the internet, ignore, if you will, how the internet connects people and how it gives you the opportunity to enjoy art and culture in a way you otherwise can’t. Imagine you’re a historian trying to research how culture responded to the pandemic. You’re going to need an archive to do that. Now imagine you need to pay £5, £10 for each archived resources you want to read or observe. For reference, my MPhil dissertation referenced 600 separate archived items, and that was only a 20,000 word paper. PhDs run close to 100,000 words. Think about how untenably expensive that research would now be.
That’s why it’s important to support the OTW. Not because of the moral component, because of the pure and simple defensive value it provides as a front against capitalist alienation. Nobody is telling you to not donate to individuals’ GoFundMes, they’re telling you to think strategically and systematically. (And I am also telling you that—as with boycotts—if you choose not to participate, then that’s fine, don’t participate, but you also don’t need to go running about shouting it to the high heavens, that in itself is both deeply boring and maliciously individualistic).
People keep requesting to add my fic to collections and I don’t know if they know this, and I don’t know if people who allow their own stories know this, but once you add your story to a collection, the owner of the collection can perform fuckery with your story.
Like, I’m REALLY glad that collections exist, and I’ve put my work into some collections when I made those things specifically for those collectuons. Collections are a useful tool for things like bangs, where the stories need to be hidden until the reveal….. but that also means that the person in charge has the ability to hide your works from the public. Like, without you agreeing, because you already “agreed” to that by submitting to the collection. Which means works you previously had available suddenly disappear from where people can find them.
What I’m saying is please stop random requests to random people to be in your random collections. I know you probably don’t have ill intentions, but there’s no way to tell. And if you’re getting requests to be part of random collections, please be aware that if you approve them, you won’t be the only one in control of some elements of your posted stories, including whether or not they “exist” to the average reader. If they mark the collection as “unrevealed,” you story stops being accessible to the public. And they have the option to mark the collection “anonymous” which I’m pretty sure turns the author from being You to being Anonymous.
And I say all of this because I have seen this happen to people. I have had friends whose stories “disappeared” because they approved a random collection invite and the collection owner turned everything “unrevealed” (likely without even knowing or understanding that it would hide it for EVERYONE not just hide the collection so no one would see they had it, it’s not like a private bookmark). And while I haven’t seen anyone do this maliciously (at least none I can prove) I can see where it could be USED maliciously. So please, just be careful out there.
I wish AO3 had a way to auto decline collection invites- they gave us a way to auto-accept, so I don’t understand why the opposite isn’t true. If I wanted my story to be part of a collection, I’d submit it myself.
Uhh okay, so someone replied to this that they didn’t know how to remove a work from a collection.
Copy and past the following link, and where it says “yourusernamehere” type in your AO3 pseud.
This should take you to a page where your works that have been approved for collections resides. You can remove your works from collections by selecting “rejected” instead from the drop down menus.
If the direct link doesn’t work: go to your AO3 dashboard, click “collections” on the side bar, click “manage collected items” button at the top right, click “approved” button at the top right, and you’ll be at the right page to remove your works from collections.
hey! so from someone who tried her hand at making a collection to collect fics centered around a specific theme, I found out a super cool thing! you can create collections of bookmarks.
want to add a fic you love to that super-specific collection you made for Fics With Werewolves Set In London? bookmark it and add the bookmark to your collection!
no fuss, no muss, no permission required from the author (since it’s YOUR bookmark), no chance of fucking up their fic (since it’s YOUR bookmark), presto chango, you have a collection that rocks but doesn’t rock a poor fic writer’s boat!
Thank you for this info, this is very valuable (and relieving) knowledge.
So please, as readers, this is a MUCH BETTER option!!
I…did not know any of this, and my work is in some collections. Thank you.
This post is going around right now, but with outdated info. Since I made this post, AO3 updated collections so that now if a collection changes status (goes anon or hidden) the authors of all the works in it will receive an email notification with instructions on how to remove themselves from the collection if this was done against their will.
The above is STILL good info to have about how collections work, especially for people that make them to be aware of what they’re doing (and you should still make bookmark collections if you’re just using it for yourself), but authors no longer have to worry that these things will occur with no notification.
Behold, the Archive of Our Own!
After moving our little collection of servers to their own rack close to six years ago, and then expanding to a second rack in August 2018, your donations have now paid for three racks total! (The pictures were taken in December, while work on the third rack was happening, which explains the extra cables and things.) We now maintain over 30 servers just to power the Archive, and we’re sure we’ll be adding more soon. 🥳
I can see my fanfic from here! *points*
if you can't get on ao3 tonight it's because a minecraft streamer rpf fic just updated and all 41k of the authors twitter followers tried to read it at once and yes if reading this confused you it means you're officially old
you all honest to god have no idea but minecraft rpf IS the biggest fandom right now. most of these people and certainly the people this story is about had no or very little engagement before last year but suddenly millions of american children who 1) love minecraft, 2) are growing up on streaming, 3) have never heard of fandom before, had nothing to do for a full year but sit at home and watch these guys stream. dream, who is a 21 year old streamer who has never shown his face, gained 15 million subs this year. fans of this genre are avid, skew very young, and, as mentioned, have probably never read another fic. the author's twitter replies are full of young teens explaining to each other what ao3 is and how to make an account there just to read this fic. we have wild times ahead. anyway, if this post really confused you, that's what's going on.
Not to begrudge anyone their fun, but we work really hard on making sure our servers don't keel over even during stressful times, and it would be a pretty bad sign if a single fandom, let alone a single work, managed to bring the whole website to its knees. Luckily, it didn't!
(We even said so at the time, even though a screenshot of that tweet didn't make it into the post above.)
To give you a sense of how much traffic the AO3 servers can handle, we saw a total of 65.6 million page views on Sunday, January 3rd, which was a new record. That's an average of 2.73 million pages served every hour (more at peak times, less when a majority of users are asleep), or 45,555 pages per minute, or 759 pages per second. This level of fannish activity did not crash our volunteer-maintained servers, and we're actually kind of proud of that accomplishment!
The day of the downtime, we had a total of 62 million page views, which was still a bit more than we saw over the December holidays. And while a new chapter on a popular fic did not manage to kill the Archive for three hours, we are still working on optimizing things to prevent an unlucky repeat of that downtime in the future. Please help us out by not spreading admittedly funny rumors, if you'd be so kind!
Good morning! I’m salty.
I think we, as a general community, need to start taking this little moment more seriously.
This, right here? This is asking for consent. It’s a legal necessity, yes, but it is also you, the reader, actively consenting to see adult content; and in doing so, saying that you are of an age to see it, and that you’re emotionally capable of handling it.
You find the content you find behind this warning disgusting, horrifying, upsetting, triggering? You consented. You said you could handle it, and you were able to back out at any time. You take responsibility for yourself when you click through this, and so long as the creator used warnings and tags correctly, you bear full responsibility for its impact on you.
“Children are going to lie about their age” is probably true, but that’s the problem of them and the people who are responsible for them, not the people that they lie to.
If you’re not prepared to see adult content, created by and for adults, don’t fucking click through this. And if you do, for all that’s holy, don’t blame anyone else for it.
This needs to be reblogged today.
Consenting to see adult content doesn’t mean you should have to see a bunch of shit romanticizing incest and pedophilia you walnut
Except this is the last line of consent before the actual work. So if you’re at this button you have already done the following:
1) chosen to go onto AO3 in the first place
2) chosen the fandom you wish to read about
3) had the chance to filter for the things you do want to see like a specific pairing or a specific AU
4) had the chance to specifically filter out any tags you don’t want to see like, oh I don’t know, incest and non-con and dub-con and paedophilia
5) had the chance to set the rating level if you wish to remove any explicit content at all
6) have read the summary of the story, which aren’t always great but are the only indicator of what the story will be like writing wise so something about it was good enough for you to click on it.
7) have read the tags of the story which will tell you what is actually in the story. If you have used filters to remove stories with things you don’t want then there shouldn’t be anything in here that’s a shock to you but maybe there is. That’s why the tags are there for you to check for yourself.
8) Then you have to actually click on the story. You cannot see anything other than the summary or the tags without personally deciding that you are going to open and read this story.
9) Only here, at step number nine, do you get to the adult content warning pictured above. You have been through eight different steps, the last six of which have also been opportunities for you to see that this has adult content. And AO3 has *STILL* stopped you to ask one last time “are you sure you want to read this because it has things that only adults should see in it”.
If after this point you are reading incest and paedophilia then it’s probably because you specifically went looking for it.
You walnut.
This is the most beautiful thing that I have seen about ao3
Stop complaining with writers when you dislike a story FGS
This also works when stories are tagged, oh say, infidelity. If you don’t want to read about someone in your OTP being unfaithful (I.E., HAVING SEX WITH A DIFFERENT PERSON), don’t read that freaking story. The tags are there for YOU. So stop complaining when the story contains exactly what the author says it contains. Freaking hell.
If I go to the supermarket, walk down the fish aisle, pick up a salmon fillet, pay for it, take it home, put it in the oven, wait for it, take it out, then take a bite…
I cannot complain to Tesco that I don’t like fish.
