#(slightly better and higher quality fics of an adult writer now)

[rweoutofthewoods]

Glad I'm summoning the voltron crowd again. I've been writing vld fics since 2018. I created an ao3 just to read and write voltron. Come home to me, I haven't forgotten my roots!!

[absynthe--minded]

something I think a lot of the kids (and older teens, to some extent? but mostly sixteen and under) need to understand is that it's brand fucking new to be able to consume all queer content all the time and actively choose to prioritize movies and shows with LGBT characters period, let alone LGBT ships

prior to this current "Golden Age of Television", if you wanted a network show with gay (not bi, not pan, not trans - gay and gay only) characters, you had... well, basically Will and Grace, and later seasons of Buffy, and Ellen before it was canceled, and occasional one-off episodes of shows like Friends or Star Trek. that was it. Xena got away with it because the queer content was plausibly deniable. you could claim Gabrielle was just her super dedicated platonic friend. also Xena was generally seen as a geeky thing and you could push the envelope more with B-grade properties like that, whose fanbases tended to stick with a show regardless of Quality. premium cable channels like HBO or Starz or Showtime would make more explicitly gay content like The L Word or Queer as Folk or Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (the original), but those were generally walled off away from wide access and only happened because the subscriber-not-advertiser model enabled more risky content (and yeah, this kind of thing was incredibly risky, and was automatically classed as Adult Content and more sexually explicit just because it involved non-het couples and characters). the one-off episodes often featured lesbian characters because lesbians showing physical affection for one another was more acceptable than gay men doing the same (look up the Sweeps Week Lesbian Kiss; it's a thing.)

movies were a little better but not much, in that gay men had been making films for other gay men for a few decades at that point, and there were a few lesbians directing too (the 90s brought us The Watermelon Woman and But I'm A Cheerleader, for example). but you had to go looking for those films specifically, and in the pre Internet days were limited by things like "if the movie you were searching for had a release outside of film festivals", "if the national chain of video rental places that was your only option even had a dedicated gay and lesbian section", and "how homophobic your area was". if you didn't have a dedicated LGBT bookstore, you were often left with whatever could be dredged up at the local Blockbuster, which wasn't much.

books were slightly better. especially speculative fiction. you could find some queer characters in sci-fi, or heavy queer subtext in a way that suggested the author wanted to do more but was pressured by higher ups to tone it down. and because LGBT bookstores were a thing, you could get smaller publishing houses to work with you and put your work out there sometimes. but if you were dealing with even a little homophobia, this didn't help. libraries kept most of those books in a dedicated section, making clandestine access kind of hard. and if you didn't have any other way of finding that kind of material (like a bookstore, or LGBT friends who'd loan you stuff), you often went without. even very well meaning librarians were limited by the homophobia of their surroundings sometimes.

this is the very recent reality.

fandom wasn't much better. slash existed, both m/m and f/f, but it wasn't accepted or seen as appropriate in a lot of circles. the early HP fandom had massive divides over if slash about the adult characters (or adult versions of the kids, etc) was even okay at all on a moral level because These Are Children's Books. a lot of fic archives would ban slash, as would forums and fansites with archives. some het advocates got really ugly. (and I'm not saying that every slash shipper was, by today's standards, a Good Queer or a Good Ally. lots of straight women would jump through all kinds of hoops to justify their ship, and "I'm not gay I'm just in carnal lust with you specifically" was a trope you'd see turn up now and again. but that was due mostly to lack of exposure to the queer community as a whole for everyone not just straight women, and even slash as written by straight women was more complex and complicated than I'm Jerking Off To This. lots of those fic writers defended LGBT rights outside of their work and did their part to be allies. don't assume everyone was the same.)

like with original works, you had to go looking for slashfic, and you'd face criticism if you were found reading or writing it in the wrong fandoms. sometimes there was legal action taken against slashers by the owners of the copyright - this happened to Han/Luke fans in the eighties with the Star Wars fandom, despite Lucas being okay with fanworks as a whole. there were a couple of Big Slash Fan Spaces (Star Trek TOS, Starsky and Hutch, etc) but outside of that you were essentially on your own. fanfiction.net, when it did finally launch, did a lot to change this, but FFN wasn't without anti-slashers doing their part to try and censor content they didn't like. and other posts have detailed Strikethrough and Boldthrough and FFN's bans on adult content better than I could, but suffice it to say that queer content has always been seen as more taboo than het content even if it's SFW.

things changed, gradually, but even as recently as the mid-2000s it was still a joke to be LGBT in public. stereotypically gay characters were poked fun at and made fun of. Brokeback Mountain was a huge joke and everyone mocked it. it's really only been in the last five years that "mainstream content aimed at queer audiences" is a thing at all, let alone in kids' shows. and even now there's network pushback, and fear of backlash from conservatives.

so kids, don't assume that All Queer All The Time is the easy option. we've fought for what we have and it happened because of years of baby steps. you're incredibly fortunate to have as much representation as you have. stop tearing down your fandoms for Not Being Good Enough. they're giving you a lot more than I ever got growing up.

[dinamnealey]

FFN and AO3

So, the eternal debate for all fanfic writers and -readers.... Fanfiction.net, or Archive Of Our Own?

Personally, I see nothing wrong with using both. They both have their strengths and weaknesses... FFN has a wider audience and a marginally better search engine (it's easier to deparate crossovers and non-crossovers, for one thing), plus a forum... that I don't really use anyway, but it's free for people to use. However, I like the look and feel of AO3 better, it has a much better comment system, the "kudos" idea was a good one, and it's easier to download stories... plus I appreciate how I can get all the chapters of a story on one single page and just scrooolll through an entire story.

Also, it seems like the average quality of fics is slightly higher on AO3... or at least there are more outright HORRIBLE fics on FFN, but that might just be a side-effect of there being more stories on FFN. But it's nice that AO3 allows adult content... I like the occasional adult fic.

So as a reader, I'm good with both. As a writer... well, as a writer I use both too. However, here AO3 REALLY eclipsed FFN. It's just so much more user-friendly.

I started out on AO3. only have one fic there: Holly Potter and the Witching World. which is also here on Tumblr (with drawings!)

I started posting it a few of months ago, and got a number of "You have to post this to FFN too!" requests-slash-demands. After a few people had used the "but you'll get soooo many more readers on FFN!" argument, and at least two people in unrelated discussions declared their hatred for AO3 and refusal to ever read anything on that site, I decided to go ahead. There was nothing wrong in posting my fic on both sites. Not like this is an exclusive deal, after all. So I signed up for FFN and started posting my fanfic

The experience wasn't all positive.

Uploading fics to FFN is needlessly complicated and counter-intuitive, as is editing your content. All this Doc Manager nonsense and having to go through five hundred steps before the chapter is actually posted... who thought that was a good idea? And don't even get me started on editing the chapters. Say you read through one of your fic and spot a typo that you'd somehow missed during the spellcheck or read-through. On AO3, it's simple to fix the mistake. Go to "Edit Chapter," fix the typo -- boom, done. On FFN you have to go to the Doc Manager, and if the document in question has expired you have to re-upload it to FFN again, before editing it, then going to "update stories," find the story in question, go to "Add/Replace chapters," choose the correct chapter and the correct document from drop-down menus, and then... I JUST WANTED TO FIX A STUPID TYPO!!

This wasn't the worst of it though. Turned out I'd signed up in the middle of a glitchy period. I very quickly got two reviews for the first chapter, but I couldn't view them because a glitch on the site (which people were complaining about on the forums) made the reviews inaccessible to read. I'd made sure I'd set up "e-mail me for all reviews" but that didn't happen either.

Now, I can forgive some glitches, and I realize I was a victim of bad timing more than anything else, but still, this did not make for a very good first impression of FFN as a writer.

Took a few days before I got to see the reviews, and when I actually did... two reviews were from the same person, accusing me of being a plagiarist who had stolen the story from AO3. I mean, I have like the same username on both sites, so I would have thought it was obvious I was the same person, but apparently not.

This same person also sent me a PM asking me if I was plagiarizing... a PM I did not get on the site and that i only discovered because I downloaded the FFN app for my tablet in the hope that I might read the still-elusive reviews there. No such luck; the reviews weren't visible on the app either but that PM was. I had to respond to it from my app (and I'm not fond of typing on my tablet).

I still don't see that PM anywhere on the site, only on the app. Later on, I got a separate PM on the site that did not show up on the app, so I suppose that if I want to make sure I get all the PMs, I'll have to check both site and app regularly. Because it's not like I'm getting any e-mails about either, even though I triple-checked that I'd signed up for e-mails about PMs.

Oh, and that site PM I got? It had nothing to do with my fic; it was from a guy who wanted me to explain a loli-yuri-manga to him. What the...? I know I've made it clea that I'm bisexual and that my fic will eventually contain femmeslash... and yes, the protagonist is a young child in the early chapters, but surely there's a bit of a leap from that to "if you ever want me to explain the intricacies of some random adult-rated manga with underage girls, by all means give me a call!"? I SWEAR I never said that!

Now, fair is fair... There ARE things I like about FFN. I like how you can see how many views/reviews the individual chapters of your story has. And I'd be lying if I said I didn't appreciate the number of readers... Also, being placed on the favourites and alerts lists of several people was satisfying... But MAN is that a site a hassle to actually be a writer on.