#for a chapter you own

[ayrennaranaaldmeri]

alright I am highkey annoyed that the savior of necrom title is tied to an antiquarian achievement which requires you to do 4 dlc dungeons in order to complete. 

[bardofavon]

not to be controversial bc I know this is like…not in line with shifting opinions on fanfic comment culture but if there’s a glaring typo in my work I will NOT be offended by pointing it out. if ao3 fucks up the formatting…I will also not be offended by having this pointed out…

‘looking forward to the next update’ and ‘I hope you update soon!’ are different vibes than a demand, and should be read in good faith because a reader is finding their way to tell you how much they love it. I will not be mad at this.

‘I don’t usually like this ship but this fic made me feel something’ is also incredibly high praise. I’m not going to get mad at this.

even ‘I love this fic but I’m curious about why you made [x] choice’ is just another way a reader is engaging in and putting thought into your work.

I just feel like a lot of authors take any comment that’s not perfectly articulated glowing praise in the exact manner they’re hoping to receive it in bad faith.

fic engagement has been dropping across the board over the last several years, and yes it’s frustrating but it isn’t as though I can’t see how it happens. comment anxiety can be a real thing. the last thing anyone wants to do is offend an author they love, and that means sometimes people default to silence.

idk where I’m going with this I guess aside from saying unless a comment is outright attacking me I’m never going to get mad at it, and I think a lot of authors should feel the same way. ESPECIALLY TYPOS PLZ GOD POINT OUT MY TYPOS.

[tadfools]

You guys are commenting on the fics you read right? You’re at least leaving kudos on the Astarion smut and the pairs that have less than 20 fics for them too? You’re bookmarking stories you really like that are still being updated and ones that haven’t been touched in over a year right?

You know that even the smallest interactions are like cocaine to fic writers right? You understand how important a string of emoji hearts left behind on a chapter at three am is right?? Right????

You’re treating AO3 like a community and not a content factory….right?

[egophiliac]

we were fucking ROBBED

[canisalbus]

What if I told you that RoobrickMarine went and wrote an entire novella starring my 16th century dog couple? It's very canon-adjacent, well researched and thoughtfully put together, has inspired me a ton during these past months and it's now publicly available at AO3. I highly recommend it.

✦ Separation ✦

[collegeboysam]

Fake Armand enjoyers trying to excuse what he did when real gremlin Armand lovers know one of the best parts about Armand is that he's a fucked up scheming devil beneath his "woe is me" doe eyes, who enjoys fine art in all forms as much as he finds deep delight in stalking someone nearly to madess while threatening to murder them if they bore him, falling in love in the midst of psychological torture once he discovers the most fascinating side of his prey, a nuclear warhead who has always wanted to be loved with his more dark and ugly sides included and not only for his beautiful Botticelli's angel exterior. The real Armand is finally coming out after decades of hiding behind the mask he thought he had to construct around himself.

[zuzu-draws]

Trolling aside, i think there is some great importance as to why Gege chose this specific manner of panelling for the Yuji-Sukuna confrontation in JJK 264. We can't help but think that Gege's trying to show us some sort of a parallel between Gojo and Sukuna in this situation.

In JJK, there's this interesting notion of one's decision to go "North" or "South" as explained by Nanami during Gojo's death Flashback:

And we all know, that chapter of Gojo's death is titled as "Go South", which highly implies that Gojo chose to stay as who he was, as opposed to starting as something completely anew.

Now the interesting point in the Yuuji-Sukuna confrontation is that apparently...

....the destination for the supposed train within Yuuji's domain...is "North".

Which means that Yuuji's taking Sukuna towards the North.......

They're heading towards the North.....do you guys understand what that means?? For BOTH of them??? Q C Q

[fumifooms]

I don’t like minimizing the importance and gravity of Laios and Toshiro’s fight into just being a childish squabble, even if to a degree it is framed that way, because to both of them it has a lot of personal significance and emotional weight and runs very deep to their characters… The fight isn’t nothing it’s a LOT, they made up but it’s not something easy to express and to get over for either of them which makes it all the more meaningful! I’m on both sides but there very much are sides, there’s no "they’re both having a ball, Toshiro and Laios hand in hand yay" side to the fight, that comes after

The fight with Toshiro WAS very scary to Laios, almost existentially so, but it’s moreso the "I thought I’d made a friend!!" bit and my god. My god actually

Like it’s not "just" about oh his friend liking him less than he thought, THAT IS SO MUCH. It’s a bond he thought he had being a lie it’s all the time and moments spent together either being a lie from his perspective or marred now looking back. It’s not only being upset at Toshiro for lying but upset at himself that he’s so easy to fool, it’s being upset that there’s something so wrong with you that you can’t even tell if your "close buddy" even actually likes you or not, it’s like. Holding my head. He can’t trust his own vision of events that happened do you see. There’s always this film of distrust that it could be a lie that should be there when he interacts with people there’s always this sense of cloak and dagger to expect backstabs out of nowhere because you CAN’T see it coming you CAN’T you CAN’T there’s something about you which makes it impossible so you CAN’T-

He’s so scared of not being able to read people. He knows it’s a weak spot he has, he’s always known. All of these bits are centered around social expectations and betrayals, the assumption that he doesn’t belong either in society or with other humans.

And Laios’ level of awareness is actually sort of complex to analyze, but it’s there, there’s how out of him and Falin he was the one sensitive to the ~aura of hatred~ he felt from the townspeople, there’s of course his nightmares whispering to him about the mocking looks, and how yeah actually he realizes that his gold stripper coworker was taking advantage of him. There’s of course the Winged Lion speech about his trauma and how he fundamentally mistrusts/dislikes humans to some deep seated degree, this distrust that he still keeps under control always. There’s how pre-canon he often wanted to suggest eating monsters but never worked up the courage to bring it up with the others. There’s how he gets across as stoic when he isn’t being enthusiastic…… We don’t know how aware and wary he is exactly in the moment but we do know he has some anxiety around social stuff, and looking back he does notice and aughh augh, the sense you have to hide yourself to not get hurt and be on your guard and shit and.

When you don’t know what to look out for and when to look out for it, the general ‘common sense’ of not always trusting people or noticing when someone’s messing with you becomes hypervigilance in social settings

"Man they really know what you hate huh". Being socially unaware literally plagues him, he knows, he knows it so well.

It’s so quick that it’s almost hard to digest how literal and blatant Laios summoning his monster to crush all the people who’ve hurt him is. His literal go-to coping mechanism for comfort in his literal monster-induced emotionally intense nightmares, saving him by taking away the upsetting element (the humans)

"Monsters are his coping fantasy, where they can whisk him away from humanity, all the hurt it’s caused him and its arbitrary rules" with the subtlety of a brick. Monsters are his comfort safe zone "because they kill humans" yes but no it’s because he pits them as the guardians against humans who to him are in the role of the agressors. To him they represent freedom from the shackles of what it means to be part of humanity, a fundamentally social species

[blindmagdalena]

Guilty Pleasures (Directory)

Homelander x plus size f!Reader 18+ completed series. 20k. AO3 Link gif credit tags: workplace harassment, stalking, obsession, voyeurism, somnophilia, breaking and entering, assault (not by HL), violence, murder, emotional manipulation, gaslighting, hurt/comfort, office sex, cunnilingus, cream pie, breast play, flight sex, lite overstimulation, riding. nebulously takes place post-s1.

Homelander is on top of the world. He can say or do whatever the fuck he wants, and the sycophants around him will bend over backwards to make his word law, with few notable exceptions. He never expected someone like you to be one of them. When you put him in his place after a workplace incident, he becomes fixated on the promise of a firm hand alongside a soft body.

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

[qiinamii]

darkner Xiao, lightner lumine 👹✨

[arthursfuckinghat]

I'm at that part of chapter three my friends, so let me be a reminder that Colm O'Driscoll's plan to lure in Dutch after taking Arthur failed because nobody came looking for him.

He would have died being held captive any longer, he barely escaped.

The gang did not come for Arthur.

[muffinlance]

Wait, what’s going on with Embers???? That fic has been on my read later list since 2021, what’s happened with it???

Brief overview, then I'm likely never touching this topic again, because this is not a Drama Blog:

Context: Embers is a super old AtLA fic that was written during the early fandom days, read widely at the time, and was the origin of the widely-used fanon name of "Wani" for Zuko's ship (kind of by default that it was one of the first popular fics to give his ship a name, I think?), even though most fic writers don't seem to realize it's from there anymore.

"What's Going On": I used to include a link in all my stories to it, because I believe in crediting other writers for borrowed elements, and I was using "Wani" in all my fics. But BOY did I not want to be sending readers that way anymore, so I've adopted a new name for Zuko's ship, and removed all Embers links.

None of the criticisms about Embers itself are new; I'm assuming they date back to when the fic was being written, because this isn't an "it aged badly" thing, this is an "actually yeah this gets worse the longer you think about it and I shouldn't have ignored my bad feelings just because some of the worldbuilding was interesting" thing.

An Incomplete List of Why I Made the Change:

I don't actually like the story that much anymore, and don't want to rec it

I tried to re-read it recently to see if some things were as bad as I remembered and it turns out they were So Much Worse Oh Yikes. More specifically, the treatment of Katara and Aang and their respective cultures has... rather a lot going on. One example: The Fire Nation and Air Nomads are both given multiple backstory elements in an attempt to make the average Fire Nation soldier's participation in the genocide/war in large part the fault of the Avatar and the Air Nomads themselves, and also fully justified from the Fire Nation perspective. And I do mean fully. One of its core tenants is "People from the Fire Nation (and only people from the Fire Nation) who don't follow orders Literally Die, therefore murdering pacifists and babies and continuing the war (and their regularly scheduled war crimes) is the only thing it is physically possible for them to do". I cannot emphasize enough how literal that is.

Also the name "Wani" means "Alligator" and is... objectively a pretty lame name for Zuko's ship? Where's the personality, where's the deeper meaning, where's the resonance with Zuko's themes? @tuktukpodfics initially thought I was calling the ship "Wanyi", and that's what I've switched to, because it is Objectively So Much Better. In their words: “Wànyī (萬一): Literally ‘one in ten thousand,’ ‘perchance.’ Used grammatically in Chinese to mean ‘what if’ or ‘just in case.’ I think a ship called ‘The Perchance’ is perfect for a boy clinging to false hope.”

TL:DR; I don't rec Embers anymore, because I don't actually like the story anymore, and there are things about it that get worse the more I think on them. I've removed links to it and renamed Zuko's ship to "Wanyi" ("The Perchance") because our boy deserves a ship name that reflects his character arc.

[i-dreamed-i-had-a-son]

jon val jon or something

[lbhslefttiddie]

Luo Binghe leaned over the desk, examining the mess of ink and papers, scrolls from the library rolled out haphazardly across the edges of the desk, stacks of prose and poetry copied in Shen Yuan’s shaky handwriting. The topmost stacks were already a bit neater, with Shen Yuan staring with single-minded focus as he moved the brush, trying to imitate the graceful strokes of the original texts. His own work was a mess of ink, not even bothering to let the ink dry properly before he would throw new pages on top. He gripped the bowl of ink in his right hand, held close to his work, both hands stained with the stuff, and Luo Binghe could see smudged black hand prints on the sleeves of his dark robes, a smear of ink across one cheek.

He took a moment to marvel at the fact that, despite the mess on himself and his work, Shen Yuan somehow managed to keep the scrolls he was copying from getting dirty. The amazement was short-lived, though, quickly overtaken by notice of just how tired he looked.

[powdermelonkeg]

Minecraft's worlds are cyclical.

The End, called such, is the last place you go to. It's got floating islands over nothingness. It's still forming.

The Nether is full of lava, ruin, decay. The monsters don't hide at night, because they don't even have a concept of night. Killing the Wither, made fully of parts you can only find in the Nether, grants you an achievement called "The Beginning."

The Overworld is full of life that's constantly changing. The terrain is forming bigger and bigger, new entities and old come into/back into existence.

Neither the End nor the Nether are habitable for human life. You can make do, somewhat—chorus fruit and hoglin porkchops can technically sustain you. But there's no sun, no flowers, no trees.

The Nether came first. It's dying.

The Overworld is the current, alive world.

The End is still just coming into being.

When the Overworld is no longer habitable, the End will have evolved new landscapes, new horizons. And while the End's life flourishes and the Overworld's life dies off, the Nether will have a chance to heal, start over. Like a phoenix, or a forest after a wildfire.

Idk guys I just really like the idea of worlds that live, die, then live again.

[grzybjek]

A collage I made for one of the characters from my newest story. His name is Kundel by the way hes an absolute manfail and a menace