#update your fics people

[sporadicsweetswitch]

Your fandom may be small, and your fandom may feel empty, but it will never be lonely. I will stand on the edge with support watching you pray at the alter of your fandom, and you will never be found wanting. I will watch in awe, as you cling to the abyss of character arcs, growth, redemption, and death. I will be inspired by your passion, even when I do not know the plot that causes your pure joy.

But damn gurl, would it kill you to update your fanfics?

[madspeed]

riku your pasta riku the sauce is burning riku the stove ri (sketches based on @candyriku's fic, you can read it here!!)

[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.

[eat-your-milk]

I GOT FANART GUYS DIFNDKWLYKCLWLDKC!!!!!!

Wonderful art by @fishie-from-a-petrie ! Its Viggo and Cinder from my fic Youve Got Mail!!

I am cryign

Cinder being a gremlin is just perfect and Viggo's face just has me rolling lmao. I am just so blown away its absolutely incredible!!! Thank you so much!!! :D

[wundrousarts]

With Mogtober around the corner, I wanted to share:

If you want to do more prompts, such as tackle a 31-prompt list for the whole month, or just don’t like the prompts and want to do other ones, I have this spreadsheet that I usually pull the prompt lists from if you want ideas. Or, if you’ve had any Nevermoor ideas for things floating around in your head that you’ve been meaning to get to, you can also just take Mogtober as an opportunity to do that. The main goal is always just to have fun!!

[averagefandomist]

Showing my appreciation for Still Growin' Up Now.

@fangirl-docintraining YOU. I LOVE YOUR WORK. I leave a comment on every week's chapter, scrambling for words to express how much I love it all-

Betty herself, her relationship with the gang and her own family. Her character development from this random nurse that gave them some shots this one time to OMG HELLO SHES AMAZING AND INDEPENDENT AND LOVING, SHE KNOWS WHEN TO STAND HER GROUND BUT SHE CAN ALSO LISTEN??? Every Betty chapter makes me giggled and sob inside simultaneously. And Darry! How he grows and how he affects the people around him. His struggle as not only a guardian, but as a brother, a fiancé, and a friend. He's not just Big Curtis that lets you sleep on his couch sometimes, he's Darry Curtis, a kid just tryna keep himself and everyone else around him together. Just Darry, who grew up too fast and really isn't ever going to get it back. You do him so much justice in terms of writing and fleshing out his character compared to how he was described in The Outsiders (cough cough Pony bias unreliable narrator cough cough). Betty and Darry live rent-free in my brain, being sickeningly sweet in all these fake scenarios I make up with them.

I also love your balance with the others, giving everyone their spotlight at least once. (Ponyboy especially always gives me a good hearty chuckle.) With Soda and Dally I love how you write them, keeping them true to how they're written in the book, while also rounding them our and making their characters deeper than we get to see in the source material because of Ponyboy's bias throughout all of the Outsiders (I could go on a TANGENT all on its own about Pony being an unreliable narrator) and you still make it feel CANON. It feels just like The Outsiders, down to the dialect of the characters. They're not just the movie star middleman or the angry hood rat, they're kids who have self-esteem issues, bacause of how they were treated. They're tough and mean and cold because they're scared of getting hurt by those they trust, as well as those they don't. AGH. I love how you gave Two-Bit his shenanigans every now and again (the chickens made me giggle), I love his and Darry's relationship. THEY'RE AMAZING. Now, I can never say much about Steve, he's just kinda there. BUT. When he does get a little bit of spotlight, he makes me laugh almost as much as Ponyboy. I'm mentally fortifying for the day you throw some gut-wrenching Johnny angst at me and I still know its gonna make me sob, that's how good you are.

This is a really long-winded way to ask for pointers, because I want to draw Betty like how she is in my mind's and then how you describe her.

[vhstown]

reminder that ppl who make stuff on the internet for free don't actually owe you anything at all like ... as sad as it is that ur fav comic / fanfic hasn't updated in god knows how long that person has a life 😭 can we not harass people and be compassionate and patient and understanding thanx

[amywritesthings]

silver underground update:

happy to report that i wrote over 1,000 words of chapter 23. ✨

[saetiate]

btw i have 2 sae crackfics planned ahaha i really want to try my hand at a more lighthearted writing style. i think what i’ve written so far has been really like. emotion driven and prosey which is ofc fine and i do LOVE reading stuff like that and has been lots of fun!! i wanna just try smth new in my own writing <3

[irritablepoe]

If I ever update how do I say goodbye again they'll for sure bash me with sticks

[muffinlance]

Hey just in case you haven’t heard fanfiction.net has been taken down (it’s still accessible as m.fan fiction.net and www.fanfiction.net) but this indicates that it’s days are numbered. So please can you ask all your followers to download/slash archive all of their favourite fics or just as many fics as they can in general. Thanks in advance.

FF is a trash fire which I am sticking my hands into rescue fics

Edit: Posting this less for this specific issue than the general "FF is a trash fire that's being barely maintained, if you have favorite fics there then backing them up is a good idea" vibe

[blorbologist]

dorian, morrighan, and dariax - freedom, longing, devotion

[I'm sorry there's no Morrighan and uh very little longing in this. Three characters is a Lot and I had very specific Thoughts I wanted to explore after yesterday's episode. Because I'm a biologist and spiders are really cool. Will edit once I get access to transcripts to clean things up! Also available on AO3.]

[TW for a lot, a lot of mention of spiders.]

Do you remember the first time you saw, oh, a butterfly? Or a mouse, or a grasshopper, anything as benign as that? Probably not. They’re parts of the periphery of life that stop really standing out once you’ve seen them once or twice. Maybe once they were subject of stories - omens of change, or a brave needle-wielding warrior, sage little advisors - but now just swift movement in a busy world. 

Dorian remembers the first time he saw a spider, because it was so - it was just - well, it went a little like this:

He was outside and quite small, made all the smaller by the big wide sky around him. The endless (at the time) tends were constricting, and all he remembers about the why is that he had to be out there. For some reason that left him red-eyed and stormy-haired.

And while staring at the white clouds and white-blue beyond and white glare of the sun, and really getting a bit cross-eyed, something very little drifted by. Even smaller than him, if you can believe it. 

It was a grain of rice, or two, with delicate hairs - or, nope, those were legs - holding onto a cloud just its size. Drifting in the sky without a worry. Dorian would have been very worried, if he was this thing, because it was really being thrown into loops and dives and almost hanging, still, when the wind got tired of playing with it.

So little Dorian held out his hand and caught it. 

It, you might have guessed, was a tiny spider. Slowly moving over his hand, like it was dizzy. Or maybe just tired. 

Being a child - no, more than that, being Brontë - had immediately forgotten whatever had him in a state to find Cyrus. That’s when he learned this was a spider, a baby spider tossed around on the breeze to find a new home.

He’d decided this would be its home. Put it in a little jar with what twigs and leaves could be tossed to this altitude. 

Dorian never did find out if it escaped. Or if it died, perfect little legs curled into a fist. 

--

It’s weird, how many stories have spiders as the villains. Terrible glutted things guarding secret passages, or lying to brave adventurers, or pulling silk-strings of their puppets to make them dance. Dorian thought it unfair - it’s not like spiders were that bad. They were fragile, and quite pretty, and with talent matching the finest weavers he’d seen. Maybe it was artistic envy, to paint them as the worst in every story?

Sorry - it was weird, back then. Dorian knows better now. There’s a little grain of truth in every tale, after all. It turns out this one is not a grain of rice, but the girth of a god.

Dariax was staring at him. Or, well - he couldn’t be sure of that. Because his eyes were still inky black, the shiny abdomen of a bloated specimen. But Dorian definitely felt stared at. Angling his handheld mirror revealed not even the littlest blemish. 

He still tasted black ooze at the back of his teeth. It reminded him of when a fly launches itself at the back of your throat at mock-fuckyou and gives you both a bad time. Except he wanted to enjoy the flavor. 

That tang was in his mouth as he matched the lullaby. On his tongue during the nightmare, too.

Dorian glances away. The Circlet is still in the center of their camp. With all the spindly thorns, he can’t decide if it looks like its legs are folded neatly beneath it, or if they’re thrown up in the air. 

--

Dorian notices spiders more, now. He’s not sure if it’s true for anyone else. He definitely doesn’t ask Opal about it.

But the dainty little creatures are a lot less innocent to him. Noticing them more means seeing their habits too: how they’ll sit motionless in their webs. Or methodically repair their tapestries. He’s seen them hunt now, too. They never seem to fail: the fly or butterfly or mayfly or dragonfly tangles in the web and then it’s over. And then everything goes still again.

Others watch him, scrambling away when he moves. Those have the biggest eyes, he finds, and almost fly from perch to perch. Light little windwalkers, just like him.

All of this should scare him, it really fucking should. Something deep in the back of his head shivers and recoils. This is dangerous, the stories say. We taught you to fear this. Please do, please do.

Dorian’s tongue pokes, just behind the rightmost molar, and he tastes the bile again. And he can’t do anything but admire them, and what they have, and what they do.

Opal sits a little more still, now. But not quite still enough, he thinks. And she moves erratically, like four limbs are four too few, and - gods, it’s awful. He has to dust out his mind to keep it free of cobwebs. 

He catches himself each time. Or most of the time. And he always turns to Cyrus, and nudges him into a conversation, and studiously ignores the eight eyes watching them both.

--

Spiders don’t eat like this, he knows it, he knows it, he knows it, he’s seen it. 

They restrain and wrap and pierce and and and they leave something whole behind. A little husk you can pretend is a beetle or a moth if you don’t look closely enough. He’s seen it a dozen times. 

He can’t stop seeing his brother in two pieces. He can’t really pretend otherwise. The little bugs, they don't scream. They didn't. He did. He did, his brother did.

And the spiders, the spiders - spider in the purest sense of the word, unhindered by what the world demands of them to survive, uniform. With no place but as villains. 

What does that make Opal? Royalty, probably, outfitted in a bombastic black carapace like a ballgown, skittering legs like a train. The spiders around her like attendants; Fy’ra at her side, making her and the gems gleam with sick light from her hair. A Champion. If there’s one thing villains have going for them, it’s being the star of every fable they show up in.

It could have been him. 

No, not really. Male spiders are disposable - they’re tentative little things looking for love, and then dying quite happily if they get it right or in really, really awful ways if they get it wrong. And maybe that’s not necessarily all that different to him (go to Orym). 

He got the sense Lolth wanted something a little more effective. She’d have eaten him alive. Or Dariax. Or - 

(He can’t say Or Cyrus. Can’t when he’s half-sure that’s what’s happening now.)

Everything hurts. Dorian isn’t sure if it’s from the running or the fighting or the pain in his heart that stretches outward with every breath. Pooling in his temples, the back of his throat, his stomach, his lungs. He wants to cry, but he’s half-sure that if he does webs will pour out. 

So he chokes on the feeling, swallows it whole, and keeps moving. Dorian imagines it burning, lit on fire and shriveling. 

And yet Dariax has no idea what to do. No idea? Like vengeance isn’t the answer, like Cyrus’ body and Opal’s everything weren’t played with by this thing. Like if he doesn’t keep twisting and billowing he’ll be still, and that feeling will come back. 

The strings of his lute feel like web, pulled taut. Wonderful. The tapestry a quiet beauty no longer, given a voice by his hand. What had he thought, about spiders and artists? "Let's put the question in a song," Dorian says, and places it in Dariax's lap. 

Last Dorian tried - tried getting the answer in the form of a tune - it had been the eerie Undercommon lullaby that draped the inside of his head. 

The Spider Queen did have designs on Dariax too, once upon a time. Made his cheerful eyes blank and black, made him wake and sleep back to back with Dorian. But apparently he was still blind, still deaf to the worst of it. Deaf to more than that, actually - Dorian winces at the first painful strum of his poor, poor instrument. But Dariax does not echo that lullaby. 

"I don't know if I'm in a place right now to be fighting gods and monsters," Dariax says, and Dorian smiles and laughs and looks away and anything to not reply we're not in a place to do otherwise. We're already caught in their web. Don't you see?

He feels venomous. Maybe that's what the bile was all along: a deadly little bite of his own. If they're in a web, they'll need a sharp blade to cut it.

Go to Orym, she said (who is she anymore?). Find the Tempest. And he will, he will, this little windwalker will bring the wrath of the storms on these gods and monsters and monsters who are gods. A fitting bookend, given how all this started. 

His hand curls into a fist, a delicate and useless little fist, and he turns invisible. 

[skyward-floored]

Hmmm I could post the first chapter of yet another fic I haven’t shared much of

...no, no I should not do that actually I have three million other things I need to finish

[wetcatspellcaster]

New chapter uploaded! High level wizard shenanigans and [REDACTED] ensue!

[rking200]

Is it Sunday?? It's Sunday!! New chapter update for The Red Room, alongside some more amazing renders by @connor-sent-by-cyberlife, who knocked it out of the park as usual. Usual information and chapter summary under the cut! This chapter marks the completion of RBB's requirements, 10k words! While the fic is still being written, there is a current length of 50k words, and more are being added every day. Buckle in, because this fic is shaping up to be loooong. @dbh-bb

Within this chapter, we're back to following Hank around as he struggles with his evolving feelings towards the singer at The Red Room. This time, we get to see two of Connor's sets through Hank's eyes, and experience the hurt that one of them brings Hank. The Red Room (13371 words) by rking200 Chapters: 4/? Fandom: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game) Rating: Explicit Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Hank Anderson/Connor Characters: Hank Anderson, Connor (Detroit: Become Human), Original Chloe | RT600, Markus (Detroit: Become Human), Elijah Kamski Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Human, Stalking, Vomiting, Suicidal Thoughts, Top Hank Anderson, Bottom Connor (Detroit: Become Human), Connor is a Mess (Detroit: Become Human), Hank Anderson is Bad at Feelings, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Missing Persons, Abduction, Manipulation, Death Threats, Mental Health Issues, Zlatko didn't do it, POV Alternating Summary: Connor Stern is a law school dropout who dreams of making it big in the music industry. He manages to get into a special apprenticeship program with the musical genius Elijah Kamski and, despite working two jobs and struggling to stay afloat, feels like his dream is finally within his grasp. When Hank Anderson stumbles into the lounge Connor performs at, The Red Room, he becomes entranced with him. As Hank falls in love with Connor's voice, he ends up entangled with conflicting emotions and delicate situations. Slowly, his nights are filled with Connor's songs and his closeness, even if he feels he doesn't deserve it. They reach several roadblocks along the way of getting closer, some more dangerous than others. A collaboration written alongside Connor-sent-by-Cyberlife for the Reverse Big Bang 2024, told with a POV alternating between Hank and Connor. Chapters added weekly.

[sentimentalslut]

Sometimes I want to yell at you to update your fics but I remember you’re a whole ass lawyer and have a life.

also writers block dont forget the writers block