#there could be a fandom for it if i just got up my ass and actually posted about it somewhere

[lovelytayforce]

I agree with this comment here so hard, I remember getting blasted for calling readers who don't comment "leeches" on R/Fanfiction and I'm glad people are seeing that for what it is even if it's four years late

So, I'm gonna share my own little story here because discord has actively ruined communities for fanfic (and art too I'm not gonna leave y'all out cause my bestie @zoetiger-1106 is an artist who deserves way more praise than she gets!!) The reason why authors and myself see the "I'm shy" shit as an excuse is because the same people will type long ass tirades on Discord without a single thought. YOU CAN EDIT AO3 COMMENTS PEOPLE! If you make a mistake, read it back over and edit it. I've watched it happen in real-time with one of my favorite commenters on my one-shot where they left a short gushing comment and then came back and wrote more, you have no excuse much less reason to go "Man fandom keeps telling me to not critique and I might make a mistake so I will say nothing and consume like the average TV and Streaming consumer who thinks there doing something!" YOU have a lot of power with comments and even those bookmark tags hell just copy-paste what you put into those bookmark tags as a comment I DON'T CARE AT THIS POINT USE THAT LIL BOX TO VOICE SOMETHING!!!! God this is all over the place idc but I read back at those bookmarks, and saw people call my works the best and super cool and I APPRECIATE THAT but tell me! Stop taking the easy route, I been blasted for misunderstandings over comments multiple times cause people take my "tone" terribly cause it sucks being black and emotive online yay and for some reason people think !!!! Is bad? yes, I've been hit with that but I keep on trucking cause fuck whatever some weirdo thinks about exclamation points! Anyways back to discord and why I hate it now, I was in a small fandom, KFP got invited to a discord cause ONE person commented on my works and saw they talked about my fic, and at first, I was happy and people TALKED about my chapters at length in the fanfic channel. I basically was the ONLY ONE posting consistently in that channel and it was great but also I wanted that on my fic to show I improved so guess what I did? I went all in trying to one-up myself to be noticed, to have the acclaim my peers did so it would evolve outside of discord channels but it never happened. And Imma tell y'all now; it never will. Readers prefer convenience over your hard work, they are not gonna take time for you no matter how much you improve. People told me over and over while I looked for solutions for this; "We can't make commenting look like an obligation." "Add more prose, space these paragraphs better" all this just for no one to take the initiative and say something SINCERE towards a work they love on it. I've had to tell my own ex-friends now to go leave comments on works they called Masterpieces while ignoring me. Despite the fact they wanted Gen content in which I WROTE. Or met people who have very weird "I don't review" rules for themselves despite getting motivated by reviews themselves!! We're in a shitty time for creatives much less community cause we don't see each other as humans much less want to treat each others as we desire to be treated. Fanfic readers want to treat authors like showrunners and I hate it. But then your peers will tell you 'not to worry about engagement" and no I am because why is my hit count going up every day but ain't no one saying shit? Make it make sense!! I sat in that community commenting as much as I could, especially on long fics; it wasn't all perfect but I TRIED. I didn't expect shit back but hey it would have been nice but it never happened and again I learned; it never would. That's the real issue, no one wants to give no more; just take and take and take til you're sucked dry of passion worse than any corpo out right now. It's why I thankfully switched fandoms. I got ONE consistent commenter and they are better than that ENTIRE SMALL CLOSED COMMUNITY!! So, to any discord reactor for fanfic you better skip on to that message you made and copy and paste it in this box right here and never utter "I'm shy" ever again cause we see you, our friends tell us about you. You are not as anonymous as you think! 🫵🏽

A writer friend told me something that broke my heart a little bit today; they're going to quit publishing their fanfic.

My instant thought was that they had been trolled or attacked or that something terrible had happened in their life because this person is so passionate about their writing. It wasn't any of that. Engagement with their works has been going down, as it has for many of us. Comments are like gold dust a lot of the time, and just looking through the historical comment counts on old fics on ao3 demonstrates this trend very clearly. It was not simply the comments dropping off which caused them to decide to stop posting, however.

My friend came across a discord server for their fandom (I should point out here that their fandom interest and mine diverged a couple of years ago, we stay in touch but don't currently read each other's posts because I'm not into their fandom and they would rather gouge their eyes out with a wooden spoon than read anything Star Wars) and specifically to share fic in that fandom. They joined, because we all love a good fic rec, only to discover that their latest multichapter fic, which has almost no comments and very few kudos, is being hotly discussed in this server as one of the best stories ever. Not one of these people has bothered to say this to them on the fic. When they asked, none of participants could see the point in telling the author of the fic they apparently loved so much that they love it.

This discovery has absolutely destroyed my friend's love of sharing fic. They share because they love seeing other people's enjoyment, and fic writers do that through comments and kudos/reblogs/likes because we don't get paid. There is no literary critic writing a blog post/article about how amazing the story is for us to copy and keep/frame. There is no money from royalties. All we have are the words of the people reading our works.

Those people on that server could have taken five minutes of the time they spent gushing about how amazing my friend's story was to other people and used it to tell the one person guaranteed to want to hear that praise how much they loved it. They could have taken a moment to express their opinion to the person who spent hours upon hours plotting, writing, editing, and posting those chapters. Instead, they deprived my friend of thing that keeps them sharing their writing, and in the process have killed their love of it. My friend now feels used and unmotivated.

I won't be sharing a link to their fic, they said I could share their experience but not their identity. I know they plan to post one final chapter. I know they intend to express their hurt at being excluded from the praise for the thing they created, and I know they intend to announce that as a consequence they will not be posting for a long while, if at all.

So please, I beg you, don't hide your love of a story from the writer. It's just about the only thing we have.

[weirdkidshere]

Oh my fucking god i just watched the episode „Wilson“ for the first time and holy fuck this is my new favourite episode ever. I could watch an entire show about Wilson being his silly little self im not even kidding.

Just,,, imagine a show about our over-caring oncologist just doing his job, (and doing it incredibly might i add,) with this random crazy-ass best friend somwhere in the background. I could watch a hundred and ten seasons of it I‘m not even kidding. That fucked up crazy little oncologist right there? That’s my babygirl. That’s my pookie. That is my kin. Give him the world pls and thank you

Like I feel like we as a fandom gloss over the fact how great Wilson really is at his job. My man realised a patient got a brain tumor because he didn’t want to talk about his grandkids. Like??? All the while being extremely focused on a different case of his, and handling all his other ones as well.

House always makes fun of him for it, but he really is an amazing doctor, all the while being such a calm and comforting presence… no wonder all his patients love him!!

He’s like a big walking-talking teddy bear handing out cancer diagnoses!

[misc-obeyme]

Re: the earlygame beef between Mammon and MC. I always find it so funny whenever I see the (abundantly common, entirely typical) "Mammon has been there for us since day one! Our first man! Mammon is the only brother who never threatened to kill us or try to hurt us!" posts. Because it's just...so incredibly obvious how wrong they are? I have to assume that the people making those posts either literally never played the actual game at all, or they played with their eyes closed. Or perhaps they don't know how to read.

Because the game was literally shoving the fact that Mammon hates your guts and wishes you were dead in your face for like 2 or 3 Lessons straight. On day one when he first meets you? He can't stand your ass. He wants you gone. All the way up until you make a pact with him, and even for a little while AFTER making a pact, Mammon actively despises you and tells you so himself. And then multiple other characters (including Diavolo, Barbatos, and Lucifer) ALSO come along and give you extremely obvious exposition like "wow, it's Mammon's job to watch over you and protect you in this hostile new environment? And he abandoned you the first chance he got, leaving you to the wolves? Haha, classic Mammon. Of course he abandoned you to get eaten by other demons, what a goofy guy"

And YOU LITERALLY ARE ALMOST EATEN BY DEMONS. BECAUSE MAMMON DIDN'T GAF ABOUT DOING HIS JOB AND DITCHED YOUR ASS. The manga goes into more detail about it too, showing that you literally came to harm because Mammon abandoned you when he was supposed to keep you safe. And later on when you call Mammon out, he threatens to kill you and eat you. To your face. He literally does that.

Idk, it's just crazy to me how badly people can mischaracterize these things. I know that Mammon is the fandom baby or w/e but Mammon fans in particular love to rewrite history and infantilize him as this sweet innocent woobie who never did anything wrong. "Mammon is the only brother who never wanted to kill us!" you're literally lying, lol. He threatens to kill you and eat you to your face. "Mammon loved us from the very beginning!" No he didn't, he repeatedly told you that he hated you lmao.

This happens with other characters too, yeah. People include Beel as part of the "never tried to hurt us" group even though he absolutely DID try to hurt us when Mammon physically force-fed us his custard (another thing Mammon did to deliberately harm us) Also Satan gets thrown in the "one of the bad ones who tried to hurt us" camp, despite never actually doing anything to us. He gets angry and goes on an edgy little rant, but if you actually know how to read you'll notice that he doesn't ever actually DO anything to harm us or try to kill us. He never makes any kind of move to actually harm us, but everyone assumes he does? Wild. But Mammon gets this the worst for some reason.

I could go into a whole entire separate spiel about how the Mammon infantilization also applies to the "everyone bullies him for no reason even though he's literally an innocent pure baby who never did anything wrong ever" but I'm just gonna double the length of this already long rant. What's crazy is I don't even dislike Mammon, he's cool. But oh my god some Mammon fans can be absolutely fucking insufferable 😭

Woobie 😭 I'm sorry, I know there's like paragraphs happening here but that word sent me lol.

I'm gonna level with you here, anon. This kinda thing just does not bother me in the slightest. I mean it doesn't matter to me if people mischaracterize or rewrite the story to fit their preferences. If it makes them happy, then they can go ahead and live their truth.

I think I probably land somewhere in between on the Mammon characterization scale, mostly because I like when he's a lil pathetic~

Anyway, if you want me to get into the nitty gritty of how I characterize Mammon, I can certainly do that. But I kinda get the vibe that you just needed to rant a bit. And that's okay, my ask box is always open for ranting or rambling or anything else!

[triglycercule]

mtt therapy moment except dust keeps taking breaks to talk to phantom papyrus and horror just wants this to hurry up so it can get to his turn because he couldn't give two shits about dust and killer's trauma and killer physically cannot discuss his issues and just starts zoning out while crying for some reason during it

and i'm the therapist listening to all of this writing down notes fervently because ITS CANON MATERIAL CANON I NEED TO GET THE CANON MATERIAL

[firefl1ezz]

i just. hit s+ rank in splatoon and i never honestly thought this would happen?? am i cool now.. do i get to be a part of the s4? do i get to be watered down to my running joke all the time?

[the-acid-pear]

Yesterday I was replaying Deltarune and I was going really insane about it picking up on things I missed on my first playthrough and something that fucked me up hard was this line here

The little ellipsis at the end, almost like you can hear the regret on their voice. Voice of an ad who is realizing maybe they fucked up on this one. But it also made me think of... The possibility of this being a reaction to Spamton's actions.

Because I don't think this was an automatic thing, I feel like their drifting off was gradual. Sure, their jealousy had won them over (I'd have killed the guy or myself if I was them so I don't even blame them) but Spamton was too getting busier and busier the more famous he got, and as they say, that never stopped. He only kept getting bigger, until it all came crashing down. And when it did it was one of them who tried to go find him, after all that.

But I digress, let's focus on the original quote from my favorite sigma enby themselves, Pink Addison. There's obviously not only the regret to it, but feeling like they were abandoned too. Both parties lost a lot and the real tragedy is just how easily it could've have been avoided! Or rather, how beyond their control it was...

But I'll get off topic if I keep speaking so I'll leave it at that. The sheer tragedy that there is to everyone involved just makes me insane. Like I said in a post previous to this; you cannot trace down a good guy or a bad guy in this tale, it's just desperate people taking awful decisions and living to regret their actions.

[tigergendermoved2tigergender]

Remembering the toxic hellscape that was 2015-2019ish SU fandom and just how much hate the show got is really insane when you rewatch the show after it's been a while. Like the show is good what the hell were any of these people talking about

[realititrip]

a glitch in time changed my brain chemistry i will never be the same

[deviousdiesel]

.

[polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup]

I don't not mean this offensively at all but is blows my mind that you are a lawyer but also writing jjk fics bc I work at a law firm and cannot for the life of me imagine any of the lawyers that work there writing fanfiction LOL kudos to u seriously I know how busy schedues can get due to court dates haha

im working in like. big city criminal law stuff right now and have been told by people in my office that i come off as a very deadpan and straight-laced legal nerd so i don't think the people who know me from my attorney life are imagining me writing jjk fanfic in my free time either

[harrylights]

ok i just need to write down these whack 1d dreams i’ve had the last couple days

[memequeen92]

sometimes i look at my fics and think 'man thats some fucked up shit i hope the people subbed to me on ao3 arent like... traumatized by it'

but then i remember that literally the first fic i uploaded on there ended with death and torture and... y'know. That thing. that fic. the one with the springlocks.

...I don't think anyone who knows what they signed up for by subbing to my ao3 is any more traumatized than they were when they woke up this morning.

[arolesbianism]

Every now and then I get haunted by my past as a dr fan because someone mentions it or smth and lemme tell you the worst case scenario is if they bring up v3 in an even slightly positive light because nothing will make me start giving a shit abt dr again except for my burning hatred of that damn game, I just spent like 30 minutes ranting to myself about how much of a nothing character Kokichi is in the bathroom after showering just to vent it out because if I don't rant abt v3 every now and then I'll explode and kill someone

[slimeylee]

why have these last years fucking sucked ass

[saphkick]

do you ever love the sotry you're working on so much that you forget it's all in your head and there isn't an actual fandom for it? it's just you your friend who knows about it and the worms in your brain

[stjohnstarling]

Alright, so: I want to explain a little more about this connection between the Twilight fandom, Fifty Shades of Grey, and seemingly, the self-publishing industry as a whole. It's a lot, so I'm going to have to chip away at it a bit at a time, and I think the best place to start is by describing the scene in late 2000s Twilight fandom.

In 2009, Twilight was one of the biggest fandoms in the world, although it was nearly invisible to outsiders because it

Was about a straight couple, while most other fandoms were predominantly gay, and

Was conducted almost entirely on fanfiction.net among a group of people who had little other background in fandom. (x)

That meant for many Twilight fans, Twilight was fandom. It was all they knew, and many had no path out. That also made it a corked champagne bottle with the pressure building.

Because of these community dynamics and the declining quality of the Twilight books themselves, Twilight fanfiction evolved to be mostly AUs so alternate they were more-or-less original romance novels that used Bella and Edward as broad character templates. (x)

Seriously, Twilight fandom got really crazy big for a few years there. It was not totally uncommon to get multi-million clicks on a semi-popular story. It's weird looking back on it and calling it "Twilight fandom" because it was really more like "Romance Novel fandom". For real, for a period there, calling a Twilight fanfic author a 'Twilight fan' would be the ultimate insult. But they never stopped writing about Edward and Bella! It's so weird. (x)

If you were in 2000s era fandom, you're probably aware of the phenomenon of Big Name Fans and the various social-climbing dynamics that happened around them. The Twilight fandom took this social power game another level:

This wasn't even just an author thing. There were Big Name Authors (BNAs) but there were also Big Name Readers. These were basically like... full-time rabid fans of a BNA. They devoted so much of their time to helping out the BNAs, reviewing their chapters, making them fanart, promoting their fics, kissing their asses with cringe-worthy intensity, you name it. Which is why you saw what looked like BNAs having 'employees', such as Moi, tby789's Director of Marketing. (x)

It became apparent that these power games weren't just for fandom clout. The fandom was proving that that social power could be translated into real-world dollars. You see, the Twilight fandom used to organize charity auctions where big name authors would auction off custom fanfiction, and the money generated was substantial:

Mostly authors would auction off stories. So if you donated in my name, I'd write you 10,000 words of porn in my Tattward universe, or something new, etc. That's how it worked. The 2009 auction raised $80,000. The 2010 auction raised $140,000. The 2011 auction raised $20,00. [NOTE: this is likely a typo] (x)

A lot of these dynamics were not unique to the Twilight fandom, but it was the combination that created a perfect storm of opportunism. This would end up changing not just fandom dynamics but the publishing industry as a whole.