Reblog if you too write fanfictions in your head but can't put them on paper because your brain is way too far in advance for your hands to ever catch up.

This is why I read the reddit comments

I love how the notes for this are just chock full of examples of the most batshit specific things people research for their fanfics. Truly a treasure trove.

Some of my favorites

And my absolute fav

one day I’ll finally write that ridiculously elaborate fanfiction that I’ve been carefully constructing in my daydreams for months and then you’ll be sorry. you’ll all be sorry.

may I offer my contribution

this gets funnier every year 

The year is 2042. Your daughter is awkwardly silent as she eats her dinner. “Something wrong sweetie?” She sighs and puts down her fork. “I was digging really deep in AO3 last night…Why didn’t you finish that coffee shop au?” It happened. Your past has come back to haunt you. Nay, it never truly left.

U CANNOT OUTRUN UR CRIME

OKAY BUT WAIT. This has happened to me. Recently. Because I am old and I have things out there from previous fandoms with previous pseuds and one day my teenager begins a rant at me about people never finishing any WIPs on the pit of voles (which he does not call the pit of voles because he has No Knowledge of such a thing but yet he still reads on which I didn’t think anyone did any longer) and he points out an example to me of something I WROTE AND LEFT WIPing for ages and he has NO IDEA #1 that his mom wrote this and #2 How much it still haunts me to this day that it will. sit. there. for. eternity. because I am too lazy to pull it down.

oh my god

#why didn’t you finish cleaning your room?#IDK MOM WHY DIDN’T YOU FINISH THE RON/DRACO MERMAID AU? 

( @mrv3000 )

after seeing yet another huge post where young people rail against AO3 and older people have to explain that censorship is bad actually, I gotta say that as someone who reads a fuck ton of books a year, these younger people could really benefit from doing the same for a little perspective. fucked up content is not just a fanfic thing, and with books, you don't get any warnings! you just turn the page and gaze upon the most fucked up scene of your life! these people do not know how good they've got it tbh just filter tags my lieges

Fandoms lately.

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.

It’s not a corporation, it’s a co-op.

Arts inspired by @socvrates​ ‘s beautiful fanfic: “To the Waters and the Wild“; a Selkie AU

*sweeps all of my AU ideas under the rug* why must I be called out this way?

This post ran me over with a truck and laughed

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.

Canon: and so they never met

Fanfic: here’s a funny story

Canon: There was tension and pining, but they never even kissed.

Fanfic: Actually,

Canon: Torture the cinnamon roll.

Fanfic: Torture the cinnamon roll.

Canon: When they traveled they stayed in separate rooms

Fanfic: AND. THERE. WAS. ONLY. ONE. BED!!!!!

Canon: … and they were roommates.

Fanfic: oh my god, they were roommates…

Canon: They were international assassins who assassinated assassins.

Fanfic: But hot DAMN wait till you hear about this cafe they opened

Canon: They had a coffeeshop

Fanfic: but they were ASSASSINS

Canon: they were mortal enemies and attempted to murder each other on multiple occasions

Fanfic: bUT THEY GOT MARRIED AND ADOPTED CHILDREN

Everytime I reblog this has a new addition and it’s the best

Canon: They were straight

Fanfic: Lol

THE LAST ONE IS THE BEST ONE

I love fanfic so so so much.

Canon: Am I joke to you?

Fanon: No, just a disappointment.

rjjrrjrjfjrkekekdjtjjwjejrirjfksjwk the last one sENT ME

Attacking people who write fic that isn’t the fic you want to read won’t make them suddenly stop writing the fic they want and start writing the fic you want. 

They may stop writing in your fandom completely, and there won’t be more of the fic you want; just less fic overall.

Or, they may double down out of spite and write even more of the fic you don’t want, because fuck you, you entitled little goblin. 

@blackkatmagic

People criticize Ao3 for having certain content they do not like but willfully ignore that, in the dark days before Ao3, people would simply write it and then not tag shit because they were afraid the mods would delete their story or because that specific tag didn’t even exist. I ended up reading way too many stories about grooming and abusive relationships and “light” sexual assault against my consent because of this. Learn how to use the tag system, for the love of god, because it’s the very first time fanfic readers, as well as fiction readers, because Ao3 hosts that too, are given the possibility to truly select what they want to read or not.

My friends and I had one of those powerpoint nights and here’s mine