#we have had people come into our inbox asking us to essentially pitch the fic to them and convince them to read it

[campbyler]

okay, so, i will admit that even though i keep seeing your fic EVERYWHERE, i avoided it despite being a byler, for the sole reason that it's so popular. idk why but when i tried reading it before, i barely got past the first paragraph before going nope, nope, NOPE.

but now i'm reading it again and I AM OBSESSED. what the hell did you all put in this fic?! i literally missed my train AND bus stop on the way home because i got too hooked reading the fic SIJXNDKSKSK

anyways, you guys are such amazing writers and this fic of yours is going to live in my soul rent free for a LONG TIME.

hello! warning for a long post incoming, but like 90% of this is just some thoughts i have on the matter, not directed at your specific ask anon. so glad you ended up liking it though!! i can deeply sympathize with the public transit horrors though omg a couple weeks ago i accidentally rode my first bus almost to the end of its line when i should’ve gotten off about eight stops earlier. genuinely don’t know what i was doing to not notice for that long lol. i also am not putting this under a read more because mobile decided it hates me so i am so sorry if it doesn’t automatically add one 😭

neither of us are believers in having to like things solely on the basis of them being big — there are plenty of popular things in fandom and outside of it that we don’t personally care for — and while we are so so grateful for all the support and interaction and appreciation we’ve gotten, i feel like this is also part of the inevitable consequences of a fandom piece breaching containment? our fic isn’t going to be for everyone, and there will always be people who dislike it but that’s ok! it’s a niche au with a Lot of lore and longgggg chapters in a fandom with a seemingly significant preference towards in-universe best friends to lovers fics, usually some form of canon divergence or compliance. we have said this so many times before but we literally expected our first chapter to get a FRACTION of the interaction it did, because a lot of people also don’t love to read long incomplete chaptered fics while they’re still updating. if we were writing a fic hoping it would get popular, we would have chosen literally any other premise, and so i would like to make this one thing clear: whether someone doesn’t like the fic itself or doesn’t care enough for the premise to try, it’s okay! it happens and it happens often and we literally do not care.

with that being said, the thing that does get a little 🤨 — both as authors of a larger fic and also just seeing it happen for other Popular Things — is this weird like. groupthink mentality that often seems to come with the Popular Thing in question? while we do actually get this sentiment directed at us pretty often, people usually aren’t saying it To Our Faces — it’s more often posts under the tag or mentions or whatever being like “everyone’s read acswy but me, should i read it?” or “am i the only one here who isn’t obsessed with acswy” or “why is it so popular what’s the hype” etc. and while, like i said, we don’t care if someone likes or doesn’t like our fic, what does annoy us a bit is when people seemingly have to like. conduct a survey or something just to see if they should even TRY reading a fic. like, you have ao3 access, you know the title of the fic and the fandom and probably even have a link — literally just open it up and read a little bit! why are you waiting for 20 replies to your post to hype you up to try something that will have absolutely zero consequences if you end up disliking it!! it just honestly feels like people are trying to gauge whether their investment of time will be worth it and i get it to an extent — fics are long (guilty), they take time to read, sometimes the plot takes a bit to pick up if there’s a lot of exposition and it’s hard to get past that hurdle, and we are all busy people — but to a farther extent it does make it feel like fanworks turn into a product to consume after they reach a certain level of popularity, and “is [insert fic] good, should i start it even if it’s long?” starts sounding an awful lot like asking if something is worth your money to buy. i just can’t wrap my head around why something as innocuous as a fanfiction, created by other fans for you to read for freeeeeeee, would require so much deliberation and crowdsourced input to even just be checked out. and i cannot stress enough that there is no consequence to disliking this fic or any fic, popular or not. like, the worst thing that can happen is you lose 20 minutes of your life, but tbh people who hit post on this stuff at 2am don’t strike me as particularly concerned about this lol

anyways, genuinely all we ask is that our readers give acswy a good faith effort because they actually want to, not because they feel like they have to or are trying to slog through it just to feel included or whatever. even from the interaction we actually get via asks, comments, etc (not even counting stuff like twt mentions or the general tag) it immediately becomes sooo apparent who’s reading our fic because they like it and are having fun engaging with it and us as part of a fandom community vs the people that are…. Not doing that lol. and all that to say: thank you for giving us that good faith effort! we get it, we would both be lying if we said that we have never fallen victim to the anti-popularity mindset — that’s not at all what we are implying here. there have been so many times i have not cared for a popular fandom fic and so many other times i’ve loved them. i guess i just wish it was a more common mindset to accept that you won’t necessarily like something if it’s popular, but also that the fact of it being popular doesn’t automatically detract from its quality. the only way you’ll know is to try for yourselffff (maybe without having to conduct that survey first. lol)