#moral of the story is Stats Will Drive You Nuts

[optiwashere]

I just found you on ao3 and i wish i had earlier all the recommendations were fine but your writing is the perfect mix for me. All the high kudos fics in f/f don't hit the same.

No question just appreciation for my new favorite author!

Hey anon, this is all incredibly sweet of you to say! Thank you 💜 Hope you continue to enjoy the fics.

I would just say that I'm very happy with having anyone that reads my stuff. I love hearing from anyone and everyone that comments on my fics or leaves an ask here. And holy shit, some of y'all have been coming out in force lately. The reaction to Nightsongs alone is super inspiring, and very sweet! I try to ignore my stats altogether, but that's incredibly kind of all y'all.

That said, I'm also not a doofus and I've been around fandoms for a while. So I know "the game."

I rambled a lot about pointless shit, so it's all under a break. It wound up being more directed at other fic writers than about your original sentiment, anon. Just another day on this strange planet for me.

Please don't think about this stuff too hard or too much. It will never make you happy. If you're a "big name fan" it will just be awful for you for different reasons. I wasn't a BNF, but I was very recognizable in a previous fandom. It wasn't pretty for me then either lol.

But if you're curious, it's all down to how people sort, read, and how momentum in fandoms works.

You need either a big social circle or to write for the biggest ship/trope to fit into those sorts of rec lists, or have an external social media find you. Not that those rec lists are totally irrelevant to quality! Far from it sometimes. But they are a specific type of popularity that you as the reader have to be aware of. Even you mentioned that you used rec lists, but from my understanding most people sort by word count, hits, kudos, or bookmarks.

It's the reason I tend to just sort by new and go with the flow.

That does mean that sometimes you have to wade into unknowns as the reader. Sorting by those sorts of metrics tends to perpetuate momentum rather than indicate... really, anything.

Not to say anything negative about the quality of the high kudosed femslash for BG3! I just don't read a ton of fic these days, and I have very specific things I look for (usually it's characters that aren't cis). Plus, there's one ship that's the very clear fan favorite, and there's a few tropes that are the obvious favorites. So you have to orient your perspective around those realities as a writer if you plan on keeping stats visible.

So the way I see it? I don't write a popular pairing, I write trans fics which in the smut might feature things that some readers do not want, and I don't write the biggest OC trope for Shadowheart/Tav works. Therefore, I tend not to be found by a certain subset of readers. Additionally, I write one-shots linked together by a series rather than singular longfics, so I don't "gather" additional metrics to make discoverability easier on the usual fronts listed above.

All that to say: I'm really happy that a lot of people read and comment on my fics :) Love my li'l gaggle of readers so much!

And additionally, most importantly maybe, I don't want to see in my inbox the sorts of talk I've been seeing in the fandom places I've been poking my toes in lately. That is, I don't want to see others being put down to prop anyone else up. Fandom is meant to be fun, it's meant to be a hobby.

Am I annoyed by some things in the fandom? Absolutely. Without question. But I try to avoid that stuff at all costs to save my sanity and focus on the things I do enjoy instead.

My motto is love what you love. Read what you enjoy. Fuck the rest, ignore it.