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thisbluespirit · 2 years ago

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Meme: Top 10 AO3 works vs Personal Top 10

I was tagged by @captain-aralias Thank you @captain-aralias! <3

Rules: List your "top 10" (or up to 10 if you haven't written that many) fics ranked by kudos on AO3. Are you surprised by what's most popular to your readers? Then, under a cut, provide your ranking of your personal top 10 fics (with explanations if you want!), and then tag a few fellow writers!

AO3 top 10 by kudos:

The Spirit of St Mary Mead (Miss Marple)

So We Meet at Last (Miss Marple/Dracula 1968)

it's the rain that will strengthen your soul (Star Wars Prequels)

Five Times the Doctor Got in the Way of Captain Janeway (and One Time They Got Along Just Fine) (DW/Star Trek: Voyager)

By the Book (Original)

Observation (Miss Marple)

We'll Burn That Barn When We Come To It (Hist RPF)

Not Bad For a First Attempt (Georgette Heyer)

Some With Arrows, Some With Traps (SW Prequels)

Dodging a Bullet (Doctor Who)

My own top 10.

A lot of these are fine as top stories, I think! Even if I think something is good, I don't trust that it is, if other people haven't said so. I mean, proof of the pudding is in the eating and all that. That said, there are definitely some random things that have got into this list.

(Dodging a Bullet has been pretty well unloved for YEARS, but looking at it it seems like maybe someone recced it last year somewhere or something? It suddenly had a bunch of bookmarks and has pushed out other things. Plus all the Star Wars ones have moved positions again.)

If I sort by comments, I think those are much better, so in no particular order:

The Spirit of St Mary Mead (Miss Marple yuletide fic, where Miss Marple is a Genius Loci, but it's still just canon. It was a great prompt, I think I wrote it fine, and it's top of my works by every measure, and there's no ship effect, so... who am I to argue?)

We'll Burn That Barn When We Come To It (William of Normandy/Harold AU in which the Battle of Hastings involves a lot more sheep and bees and a lot less people being killed. It's 'found texts' type fic, another Yuletide one, it was huge fun to write and it got a great response, so again, I'm not going to disagree!)

By the Book - I am SO happy and amazed this is on both lists. It was original fic written for Het Exchange (the tiniest exchange, lol!! XD) a few years back, for the prompt of Librarian/Demon she accidentally summoned. I got to use all my rl library knowledge and it, er, sort of stormed the exchange (it was VERY tiny, did I say?), and I would place it in my top ten, yes. I don't know how people still keep finding it, but I'm so delighted that they do, and they still like it.

it's the rain that will strengthen your soul - again, yes. This is a five times Padme Lives Obidala AU where they go on the run with the twins post RotS. It was another for an exchange (Space Swap, I think). I wrote it in mid lockdown, I buried myself in the Wookieepedia, and I was pleased with this one, and it's gradually got more love as the time has gone on, and I think it is a good fic; a very gentle story of healing that was probably a lot due to the times.

Okay, but there we diverge, because I think all of these are that bit better than the others in that list (which include at least 2 pieces of flash fic, one of which was written to cover a wrangling error I made long ago). Mind you, I think in some cases, it's because I Did The Research Dammit Appreciate This People, or because I plotted harder than usual, but most of these are or have been in top ten positions on AO3 as well:

(5) movements of the mind (Twelfth Night) - I wrote Shakespeare fic for Yuletide (about Feste & Olivia), and pulled it off. I had to watch TN a lot and then got 16th C jokes off the internet.

(6) Truth and Compromise (Discworld) - so old I hesitated a while over it, but I think I genuinely got the tone right (which is never easy for something like this) and I occasionally still read it myself if I want something to follow up The Truth with Wiliam/Sacharissa.

(7) Cul-de-Sac (No hawkers, traders, cold callers, canvassers or purveyors of religious knowledge) (Sapphire & Steel) - I've written a lot of S&S I'm really pleased with. It was hard to choose one (I do think I've done some good and unusual things for it), but this stands up and was very well liked.

(8) One Step Forward (Two Steps Back) (Jonathan Creek) It's very timey-wimey and I had to write accurate Maddy and Jonathan and be funny, and I do think I achieved all of the above, even if it took quite a while.

(9) Salt of the Earth (DW) I always include this one in my self-recs, but there's a reason. I still think it's good. It's about a very minor character, but it was one I'd wanted to write ever since I first watched Image of the Fendahl.

(10) i love the rose both red and white (Shadow of the Tower) Maybe this is another 'i did the research' one, but it's very obscure and still has done pretty well in my stats, so I don't think it's just me. But I did do the research, and I tried to push myself as to style for it as well, I think.

I do like Some With Arrows, Some With Traps, but it's another SW Obidala exchange fic, and it is very surprising that it's as high in kudos because it has never got many comments, and I just thought it wasn't much liked. But it has an OC droid and was as much 'SW fun adventure but Obidala canon divergence' as I could make it. (Still, I it's a short story that clearly in my head should have been 80k and never ever will be, so I think it's fair to swap it out for variety.)

I do not know what is with the Miss Marple thing. It just happened. (Those are pretty much my only Miss Marple stories! It's a rare fandom! It is a mystery.) It's pretty funny, though, and I will be sad if one day the ships beat Miss Marple from the lists!

Tagging (if wanted/not already tagged): @maryellencarter @pers-books @lurking-latinist @herawell @scarletmanuka @human-nxture @bunn1cula @foreignobjecticus @jurijurijurious

#meme #replies #ao3 #fanfic #top 10 vs personal top ten #captain-aralias #tbh at this point i would be sorry to see the random miss marple overtaken by inevitable shippage #but the way that ficlets/double drabbles you scribbled off hastily take off over all the fic you slaved over #is very funny really #that's life as they say #and clearly if i wanted to be popular #i should just write nothing but quirky miss marple fic

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firelxdykatara · 4 years ago

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not gonna lie I would love to hear more about the drama and infighting that went on in The Vampire Diaries fandom if you have the time (and also want to use that time to give your experience with the fandom, which from the snippets you've told sounds Not Fun so I get it if you don't want to lol)

oh god, there was like, SO MUCH, i just

i really feel like tvd is one of those fandoms that is so hard to describe without a lot of ‘you’d have to have been there’, but it really felt like this huge and all-consuming beast for about five years until the show finally imploded and the fandom basically turned on it en masse. (you ever see that post going around that’s like ‘if you ever want to know what true regret feels like, ask someone who once called tvd their favorite show’? still a mood, all these years later. basically the entire fandom thought the show should have just bowed out with whatever shreds of dignity it had left at the end of season 6, and became more of a hatedom than a fandom for the last two seasons. when you have an entire fandom cheering news of your show’s cancellation, i think that’s a sign you done fucked up, julie.)

first and most infamous, of course, are the ship wars. which are pretty much inevitable in any teen-centered drama, and i really think the CW fucking thrives on them, but it was particularly egregious in TVD’s case because not only was the base premise of the show a love triangle, but the two main romantic leads were brothers that the show constantly pit against one another--in pursuit of elena’s affections, but also because it kept up this insistence on the ‘good brother/bad brother’ dichotomy which stopped making sense after about season 2 (by which time we have found out that the good brother was never as good as he appeared, and the bad brother has been growing and isn’t nearly as bad as he pretends to be)--and the question of which brother ‘deserved’ elena (and no, what elena wanted very rarely factored into these discussions, especially in the team stefan camp because they turned on her when what she wanted was no longer The Good Brother, but i’ll get to that in a bit) was hotly contested.

i’m not kidding when i say the shipping wars were vicious. i started watching tvd shortly after it began to air, which was late 2009, and kept up with it fairly sporadically over the years. i didn’t come onto tumblr until 2011/2012, and by then, the fandom was already pretty much a garbagefire. there were anti ship and anti character blogs, any time something bad happened for one ship the rival ship would invade the tags to gloat about it (seasons 3 and 4 were especially rough, and i’m not gonna pretend delena fans weren’t just as bad about tag invasion and shit, but as that was my side of the road i saw a lot more of the stelena shippers being assholes, which soured my opinion on the ship a long time before i started rewatching and realized the red flags were there from the start), confessions blogs were popular also toxic as fuck (so much fighting happened in the notes of those posts, good gods), and this was right around when twitter’s popularity was on the rise and the line between Celebrity and Fan was thinning, so the fandom was absolutely atrocious to much of the tvd cast and crew.

(some of them deserved a lot of the later backlash, but in the early years a lot of it was ‘how dare you write the story in a way i dont like, you terrible fucking person’, and gods don’t get me started on the dobsley vs nian Thing)

i think what really encapsulates my feelings on the tvd fandom as a whole, though, is the way they (to this DAY) treated elena gilbert, which can be summed up in one meme that gained a lot of traction around season 3 if i remember right: that gif of pam from true blood, with the text altered to read “i’m so OVER elena and her precious doppelganger vagina!”

i swear at one time i had over half the active tvd fan accounts on tumblr blocked, because i got to a point where i would no longer tolerate elena hate, and she was (and still is, in what remains of the fandom; you’ll see a lot of ‘elena was one of the worst things about the show’ takes from ex-fans, too) one of the most widely despised characters in the entire fandom. because she -checks smudged writing on hand- was a traumatized teenage girl who -reads off a crumpled notecard- couldn’t always perfectly sort out her own feelings and -squints at the ceiling- sometimes made mistakes or bad decisions. (except a lot of the fandom also insisted that she was a mary sue who had no character traits or flaws or faults and it was like....make up your fucking minds???? is she a calculating conniving bitch whose somehow manipulating these centuries old vampires to tie them around her little finger or is she a boring flat character with no depth and no flaws??? jfc)

there was this massive double standard, too--like, stefan and damon could fuck whoever they wanted and that was fine, but elena was constantly raked over the coals for the crime of developing romantic feelings for the two men who had become constants in her life and whom she cared for deeply, and oh my GOD the slut shaming that happened when elena slept with damon was fucking wild. (and also happened in canon lmfao. like the show had one of elena’s best friends basically call her diseased on screen for falling in love with someone other than stefan. it was gross and ridiculous and the friend in question was also being a giant hypocrite at the time since she was happily flirting with someone who was directly responsible for the deaths of like four of elena’s loved ones and her own boyfriend’s mother but that’s beside the point) but like elena was called a slut and a bitch and a whore for ‘cheating’ on stefan (she hadn’t, and she had in fact broken up with him on screen the episode earlier) and ‘immediately’ jumping into bed with damon, even though none of them said fucking boo when stefan had one night stands or damon had fuckbuddies or whatever.

shit, caroline didn’t get any of this treatment when she started falling for tyler while dating matt! which isn’t to say i think she should have, just that i think it’s fucking ridiculous that elena was absolutely demonized by the fandom for daring to have feelings for two guys at once and eventually acting on them--despite the fact that the entire premise of the show was a love triangle. it’s not a love triangle if both sides don’t eventually get explored, and the crew had been pretty explicit about the fact that delena was going to happen at some point--but when it did, a huge chunk of the fandom absolutely threw a fit.

and a lot of these elena haters were alleged stelena stans, and i say alleged because they hated her so much for not wanting stefan’s dick anymore that it was clear they were really stefan stans and only wanted stelena to be endgame because they wanted stefan to ‘win’ at the end of the day, because ‘he’s the good brother’ so he deserved elena more.

it was all very gross and very misogynistic and very sex shaming (apparently delena was a ‘shallow’ and ‘superficial’ relationship because they had sex after two years of unrequited feelings slowly becoming requited and then pining for ages on both sides, and because they had a lot of on screen chemistry that the show capitalized on for years so of course they did a lot of making out and shit but it’s not like stelena didn’t have its fair share of making out and sex scenes, stefan was just too much of a coward to let elena top i’d apologize for that joke but i’m really not sorry because it’s true), and when i say it was egged on by the crew, that’s because they refused to let the love triangle die back in season 4 when it should have.

they insisted on stringing stelena fans along, dropping little bread crumbs to keep them invested, like dreams of a future where they were married and revealing that stefan was also a doppelganger and he and elena were descended from a pair of star-crossed lovers (a plot that ultimately went nowhere, to no one’s great surprise), and then fucking like. julie plec turned around and threw nina under the bus after she chose not to extend her contract and pretended that stelena might have happened again if she hadn’t left the show, which....i mean frankly i wouldn’t put it past her, but it would have been shitty writing. then again, she thought having a vampire pregnancy where a uterus was magically transplanted from a witch into a vampire that could somehow......carry the babies to term.... made sense and was a good way to accomodate candice’s RL pregnancy rather than like literally ANYTHING else, soooooo. but anyway julie saying that around like, end of s6 sparked off a new wave of nina hate and elena hate and ship wars bc they SEers took it as ‘confirmation’ that stelena was REALLY meant to be endgame and it was all just a hot fucking mess

another thing is that, while tvd was in its prime before the anti/purity culture shit started picking up any real steam, there was still this pervasive attitude throughout the fandom that if you liked Damon, you were A Bad Person. liking damon was apparently grounds for insults and harassment, and apparently he was The Worst Person on the Show even though literally nothing he does on screen is any worse than shit we know stefan has done (and frankly every other vampire too, but i mention stefan specifically because he was always held up--in the show but especially in the fandom--as the Good Brother while damon was the Bad One, and if you liked damon more then that had to mean your morals were dodgy and you clearly couldn’t appreciate what a heroic and saintly figure dear stefan was and....oops, i’m sorry, my salt keeps leaking -cough-).

meanwhile klaus quickly became a fandom darling despite not even really having much of a redemption arc (on tvd anyway, he just became more ‘affably evil’ as the show went on and more inclined to work with the main characters rather than try to kill them; i have no idea what went on over on his show, though), and like i can 100% appreciate liking villains and not caring that they do dodgy villainous shit, even just liking them bc they’re hot and wanting them to kiss a main character bc they have insanely good chemistry (yes i ship klaroline, no i won’t apologize for it, they could have been Really Great), it’s just really the double standard that gets me.

and all of this, incidentally, required ignoring some truly gross shit stefan was responsible for wrt his relationship with elena, that frankly it has always bothered me never really got addressed in the show. i get why elena herself would never be able to actually call him on it, but the fact is that he stalked her for months after he first saw her and thought she was katherine (meanwhile it only took damon .5 seconds to realize she was someone else entirely, but that’s another topic entirely), and then he deliberately inserted himself into her life because, in his words, ‘i have to know her’. he never gave a thought to how his presence in her life might affect her (or rather, he did, and tormented himself about it in his internal monologue, but never let this actually dissuade him from disrupting her life), and elena would wind up blaming herself for every tragedy that befell her friends and loved ones as a result of getting mixed up in vampire bullshit even though none of it was her fault--she literally blamed herself for existing but most of the fandom didn’t give a fuck about that lmfao--and stefan did shit like find out that she was adopted and then withhold this information from her until she got pissed about another secret he was keeping (her resemblence to katherine) and drop it on her to try and distract her from her very reasonable anger, and like... i should stop before this becomes a whole rant about how much i hate stefan fucking salvatore, but the point is, he did a lot of really sketchy shit he never answered for and elena never really took him to task for, and the fandom just kept eating up his insistence that he was the Good Brother and therefore he deserved to have elena, and if she didn’t want him anymore it was because she was a heinous bitch who didn’t deserve him.

uh.....i think i got off track there. and there’s probably a lot of shit i missed, like i think i was incandescent with rage for most of seasons 5 and 6 so i missed a lot of the interfandom shit cause i was too busy being increasingly pissed off at the show itself, but if nothing else this should give you an idea of how much of a goddamn cesspit the fandom was while the show as in its prime. there’s a reason both the show and the fandom have such a lousy reputation lmfao.

#the vampire diaries #tvd #tvd fandom salt #anti stefan #anti stelena #salt for ts #asked #Anonymous

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