#which is why like LJ and tumblr are better

[letteredlettered]

Related to your last post: For me tumblr would work better as a community site if there was a function that would hide reblogs of the same posts. I get overwhelmed if I follow more than ten people in the same fandom because of the repeating posts. With work and everything else, I don't have the hours to find the original things people are saying. Reddit works better sometimes except the subreddits often have very surface level discussions with high amount of newcomers asking the same questions and the topics are quite limited. Maybe I should just try if there is life on Dreamwidth :P

This ask is a response to this post I made about feedback to fic and fandom community.

Anon, I agree 100% regarding the difficulties of tumblr for discussion that builds community. If you're following this discussion, than you may have already seen these follow-ups:

@eleadore added their thoughts about preserving reader spaces in a reblog here

@yiiiiiiiikes25 added thoughts similar to yours re tumblr's poor functionality as a community space here

@thehoneybeet added to the post that sparked my post here, about how to foster the kind of community we're all saying we want.

I'm linking these posts because I want to call attention to them; I think they're great. But I'm linking them in response to you specifically because yes there are multiple vectors to this problem--the web enshittification I described in my post, the splintering of fandom after the death of livejournal, and the difficulty of tumblr as a venue.

But it's that last, the difficulty of tumblr as a venue, that means that even like-minded people who want the community we're discussing can't really have it. Some went to, and are still on, dreamwidth. Frankly, I still find myself deeply irritated that fandom didn't move there, that it accepted AO3 and not DW. But I think a large factor in that particular exodus actually has to do with the fact that AO3 is closer to the direction the enshittified web went than DW ever could be. AO3 has a "like" button and is not built for deep, meaningful interaction. Again, this is because it was meant to be a limb of the fandom community, not replace community entirely. I'm not claiming that AO3 is enshittified but rather that it bears more similarity to current social media sites because it's only one part of a community that was at the time, thriving (yes, in spite of strikethrough and everything that was happening on LJ at the time).

In my opinion, tumblr straddles the divide between that old style of community website and the new one. Like livejournal and DW, you can view tumblr chronologically, without an algorithm feeding you content. You can remain anonymous, and everyone can see anything you post. But like other more modern social media sites, you can reblog and like, which you couldn't do on LJ and DW. The fact that tumblr is sort of both--and that it wasn't sold to the Russians and torn apart, like LJ--is why fandom fled here and why scattered pieces of it remain here, despite so many others moving on.

One thing I wanted to talk about in my original post, but couldn't find a place for, was how so much of the "community" aspects of fandom are now private. I think that's happened partly because tumblr isn't a great place to hold a conversation, so the conversation quickly gets moved elsewhere--but instead of somewhere where everyone is still welcome (ahem, like Dreamwidth), it gets moved to private spaces. Or the conversation never starts and exists only in the kinds of spaces meant for such things.

@thehoneybeet makes great points about this in the post I linked above. They mention "the invite-only server, the private ao3 challenge, groups and experiences that you need to be in-the-know about to even begin to participate in. that, essentially, require an invitation."

@eleadore mentions it at the beginning of their reblog (also linked above), saying, "i feel discussions of this nature have been severely crippled over the yrs, and people prefer to take to private group chats and such instead of engaging [...]" But they go on to mention "private discord book club servers."

To be clear, I'm 100% with @eleadore about the necessity for spaces for readers, and also 100% with them at the idea that there can be spaces authors don't have to touch. Writers don't "deserve" to hear every single thing anyone's ever said about their fic, positive or negative. Earlier this year I in fact made an impassioned post about the fact that I believe that bookmarks are for readers, not writers, and that making them a space purely for an author's comfort limits the functionality of bookmarks for readers, both in terms of finding fic but also in terms of finding friends.

So, yes, I agree that it's okay to have private discord book club servers. But the mention of discord did make me do a double-take, because in my opinion, discord is a huge part of what I perceive as the problem. You can't find a discord for your chosen fandom by searching discord. You have to have the link. Even if the discord isn't invite-only--which many of them are, you can usually only get the link by knowing someone.

There are all kinds of reasons for why discord is so private. Discords are run by mods, who feel responsible for what happens to people in spaces for which they are responsible. And mods who take a laissez-faire "everyone just do what they want" approach often have servers dominated by people who make the environment difficult, sometimes through racism, sometimes through bullying, sometimes by constantly bringing up traumatic or triggering content, sometimes just by making everything about them all the time. It's not like lj or even tumblr, where you can just unfollow. You're kind of stuck, unless you've got a mod who is policing vigorously, which is a huge job and impossible to do in ways that will make everyone happy. It's just easier if you don't have anyone and everyone wandering through.

I hate that. It makes me want to throw things. To me, fandom is about a space that's for anyone and everyone. You shouldn't have to know someone to get to have discussions about the thing you love. That's not why I'm here. In fact, in some ways I'm in fandom to get away from that kind of bullshit, so I don't have to construct some kind of social persona that is palatable enough to be accepted. I'm hear to talk about blorbos and read porn, maybe write a thing or two. A private discord book club made intentionally as a safe space for readers is a great use for discord. But discord as a place for fandom actually makes me feel a little ill.

I don't have a good suggestion of where fandom community should be built. To me, the best place is dreamwidth, and I think that after fifteen years, I really need to give up on the idea that enough people will move there (in this economy????) to really get the numbers you need to be able to find the people with whom you really click and connect. When tumblr tried to ban nudes, a lot of people talked up other possibilities--and some people went, to Mastadon, to pillowfort, even to twitter and IG. But those spaces all have their downsides, and none of them have the critical mass to be a real fandom home. As before, I have no conclusions about this. I just wanted to highlight some other aspects of this problem and describe some other food for thought.

[vintagelacerosette]

Wednesday tag game

Hiii darling angelpies! I am here on timeish 😆

I was tagged by these dazzling sweethearts Nosho @creepkinginc Mel @gardenerian Evie @energievie Deanna @deedala Kat @ mybrainismelted Julia @blue-disco-lights Al @spookygingerr Jessica @guinguin1984

How did you get into the fandom?

Like a lot of us 😆 I saw a fan edit of Mickey & Ian on YouTube (I can't find it again even when I've searched my history 😭) I was kinda in between fandoms at the time with Malex from Roswell New Mexico but they were broken up at the time & buddie lol.

But then I was shot through the heart when I went through the gallavich tag & it felt like home 🥰

How long have you been here?

I was lurking at the end of 2021 & the first official time I contributed to this darling fandom in Feb 2022 with gallacrafts 💝

What's the first fandom channel you found? (youtube, reddit, tumblr, insta, twitter, FB, other?)

Here on tumblr babeeeyy

What's your favourite now?

Still tumblr but I wish I was better on discord 😅 I get overwhelmed & don't wanna talk over ppl 😔

Which mutual have you known the longest in the fandom?

Oh my goodness I had no idea but my longest mutual is the always spectacular Calli @callivich 🥰🩵💙 woooww!!

Which tumblerinos did you have your first fandom crush(es) on and wanted to get to know?

Y'all have to understand you are all unbelievably swoon worthy & there's only so many ppl I can tag in one post (damn you tagging limit 😣)

Ok, so definitely have a big crush on Deena @suzy-queued & to see smitten feeling is mutual got me

GIF by theresaphoenixinmyboot

Alice @darthvaders-wife Jane @captainjowl Mitch @psychicskulldamage when we became mutuals I squealed bc how much talent??

Jenna @ianrightsonly & Kay @goodkwuestion their fics changed me

Also, Benja @svltburn | Nosho | Vey @look-i-love-u Macy @heymacy Julissa @heymrspatel Jo @jomilky Harvey @mikhailoisbaby Georgia @iansw0rld Molly @deathclassic Stas @messedwithmandy Howl @howlinchickhowl Michelle @michellemisfit | Deanna | LJ @ofalltheginjoints Sam @sam-loves-seb Face @ burninface | Calli | AJ @ clingymickey Mills @gallavichsbitch Leah @whatwouldmickeydo

Also Jay!! You've left but gave me butterflies 🦋

Pls I kind hate this question! I've come to the conclusion I have a crush on you all OK?? 😭

This is why I make y'all Valentine's

First gallavich fan fic you read (or that blew you away that you remember)?

By the magnificent Kay The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Ian Gallagher!!! OH MY GOSH JUST THINKING ABOUT THIS FIC MAKES ME FEEL ELATED & FERAL!!! It's my favourite piece of written work & I need my non gallavich ppl to read it so I can scream into their faces how much I love it 🥰🩷🩷🩷

First fan art that blew your mind?

Seriously, Deena's gallacrafts & art always take my breath away!!! Like the artistry & creativity?? I wanna get to your level 🥰

It's three dimensional & has twinkling lights ✨️ I was astounded & my jaw literally dropped 😍

All of Alice's art especially my commissioned art 🩷

Also, Mitch's comic I stared at it forever like Ian's eyes reflecting Mick's booty 🍑👀

Fanfic trope that you were sure wasn't for you but now you low key (or high key) love?

I have read some pretty freaky & nasty fic bc of curiosity, so I nothing really gave me icks in tropes, but in writing style, I got turned around with Jen @wehangout with second person POV. You're so talented that I really enjoyed them when I would nope out before 😆

What surprised you most about this fandom?

Everything surprised me about this fandom bc it was my first one!! 😆 I didn't really know how to do tumblr & didn't really get how to interact. So I used tumblr like a sticker book, then came learning tags & so ppl reached out to me which helped me gain confidence haha

This is kinda a golden standard fandom. So welcoming, loving & encouraging!! If I ever dabble in another fandom, imma have a high standard bc I've been spoiled by y'all! ILY

Moment in the show (or YT vids if you're one of those) that you fell in hyperfixation with gallavich?

It was the "I'm fucking gay" scene to the "Guess what we've been doing daddy" The way he humps the car with all that conviction & screaming "he fucking loves it".

Everything clicked & I was like "Damn I love this fictional man." He is my favourite character of all time & this ship is my OTP & GOAT.

Also I love this edit too. It gives me chills

Ian or Mickey?

Mickey, but holy shit I love them both

Which gallagher or milkovich are you?

I took a page from @/guinguin1984 & did some quizzes & I got Fiona Ian Fiona Debbie not of them feel right ahaha

I guess Fiona bc I had her twice 😅

Consider yourself tagged if I have a crush on you or mentioned you. Also tagging these sunshines & if you wanna do it too, have at it 💛🥰

@lingy910y @mickittotheman @doshiart @crossmydna @y0itsbri @7x10mickey @whatthebodygraspsnot @ms-moonlight-inn @mmmichyyy @sickness-health-all-that-shit @kiinard @transmickey @gallawitchxx @sleepyheadgallavich @rereadanon @whaticameherefor @darlingian @andthatisnotfake @ian-galagher @francesrose3

[arokel]

10 questions for 10 writers

thank you so much for the tag @strangethings-everywhere ! secretly I've always wanted to do one of these

1. Is writing a hobby or a way of life?

Way of life for sure; I'm basically never not thinking about it. I start to feel awful and purposeless if I go too long without writing at least something.

2. A journal full of notes or a clean completed manuscript?

Clean completed manuscript, unfortunately. I wish I could be less persnickety about my first drafts but so far that hasn't happened. I do sometimes make extensive outlines though and those are always by hand, but they're usually pretty clean too :/ no scribbly scribbly for me

3. Who or what inspired your writing?

I've been writing since I was five years old and telling stories since I could talk, so I guess I'll say that when I was first reading chapter books I asked my parents why books always have a few blank pages at the end and they said it was so you had space to continue the story yourself if you wanted. They made it up on the spot and they don't remember saying it at all, but it's always stuck with me.

4. Which is worse: Someone you ‘idolize’ reading your first draft or listening to you sing?

Listening to me sing, 100%. I post my barely-edited first drafts on ao3 all the time lmao. But I also feel like with a first draft it's easy to say hey this is a first draft, if there's stuff you don't like I'm happy to hear criticism! Whereas with singing, that's just your voice. You can practice the song but at some point whether they like it or not just comes down to something about you that you can't change. (Although I am a hashtag classically trained singer so my feelings of needing to live up to that might not be universal.) (Don't ask me to sing opera for you because I don't actually like opera.)

5. Has writing from someone else’s POV changed your perspective?

I think most of the perspective changes that have come out of stories have been from reading for me? Like the first time I was really exposed to the idea of transness was a Harry Potter fic (suck on that, JKR) and that obviously really stuck with me. But I think the desire to write from queer povs really helped me come to terms with my own sexuality, maybe more than actually doing it. I guess writing narrative essays, which I do less frequently than straight up fiction, is usually a way for me to explore things I feel about myself and about the world.

6. Tumblr, AO3, LiveJournal, or FFN?

AO3 foreverrrrrrr. I was on ffn in my misspent youth and Very briefly on lj, but ao3 has been my home since 2014 and it would take a lot to get me to move.

7. AO3 word count? And are you satisfied with it?

646,046, and soon enough it'll jump another 100,000. Honestly not sure how I feel about that.

8. What movie/book gripped you irrevocably?

I will never not love Tamora Pierce's Tortall series. I know they're kind of dated and don't hold up in some places, but they've been in my bloodstream so long that they're basically a part of my understanding of the world. They shaped so much of my ideas on literature - how to create compelling characters and relationships, what makes a world believable, what fantasy even is - and honestly I think they're responsible for about 50% of my sense of humor and at least a quarter of my relationship to gender. They were my first fandom and in the end I'll always come back to them.

9. What’s the highest compliment you could ever be given, and have you been given it?

One of my plays deals with a very difficult emotional subject and is quite frankly pretty depressing the whole way through, and after the premiere a friend of mine came up to me and said "it was so so funny; I was laughing the entire time." That's what I always want my writing to do, not so much in fic but out in the world - I want to give people catharsis, and I hope they leave the reading or viewing experience feeling a little better than they did going in. And also I want people to laugh at my jokes.

10. What defines your writing style?

Can I say inconsistency? No but really it's definitely dialogue. I struggle with descriptive prose sometimes, but I never have to work at dialogue. I think it's my strongest area and people always tell me it's snappy (thank you Tamora Pierce). Other than that uhh... too many commas probably.

tagging @violasmirabiles @fregata-magnificens @kjxlll @borealopelta @uwu-dowoon @teaforarteza @icegreyrose @shadowquill17 @ris-d-deridex and using my 10th tag for anyone else who wants to participate!

[cookinguptales]

I almost wrote a small essay in the tags of that "fanwork as content" post but realized that it would probably be better off as its own post. So now it's... a large, rambling essay. lmao

Like... to preface, AO3 is great, it's a great resource for fandom, it feels good to have a centralized location that works well. That said, there has been a steady decline in how I've felt treated as an author since we switched to an archive-only model of fic.

For people who are newer to fandom, pre-AO3 (and even in the early days of AO3), people often crossposted fic. Sometimes to websites, sometimes to journals (particularly LJ/DW), sometimes to communities, sometimes to kink memes...

AO3, while certainly one of the primary places you could upload stuff, wasn't necessarily where you would get most of your primary interaction about your fic. It was always designed to be an archive, not a social media site.

But since we moved to an archive model (and away from LJ/DW) I've noticed that fic gets almost no traction on sites that actually are intended for social interaction. I'm not saying it's easy for any creator in fandom, but god. The numbers on fic posts are just downright demoralizing.

I don't mean to sound arrogant here, but I think I'm a pretty good writer. People seem to really connect with my fic. In multiple fandoms, I've written fic that most people have read and enjoyed, to the point where people have just taken it for granted that if someone reads fic in the fandom, they've probably read something I've written.

All this is to say, I know I've written fics that people like. I know I've written fics that people connect with. And I know those posts still only get like 5 notes sometimes on Tumblr.

I'm proud of my work and I'm happy that it's gotten such a warm welcome on AO3!!! But there are times when I feel like all this means that I could write literally the best fic on earth and still no one would talk to me. People still wouldn't want to interact with me on social media sites.

I wrestled for... honestly, a long time with all this. I had a hard time putting into words why this felt so uh. Bad. Was I just self-conscious about my own writing? Yes, but that's a separate issue. Was I just jealous of others' popularity? Sort of, but it went deeper than that.

I had an issue with a fandom that I don't write in anymore. I got a lot of fanart based on my fic, which was great, which was amazing, there were even fan comics made. Visual media travels better on social media than fic. That's just a fact. And I had to watch as repeatedly, art based on the fic I wrote got thousands of notes while my fic got maybe 12. And I realized the power of social media vs. AO3 because it did get to audiences that weren't familiar with my fic and people started to give those artists credit for my ideas.

I remember watching the tags of those posts because it was occasionally the only way I'd hear feedback on what I'd written (imagine getting one comment and 5 notes on a fic, then seeing dozens of people in the tags of fanart saying that it was their favorite fic in the fandom! it was weird!) and seeing the tags gradually devolve into "oh, this is such a neat idea for an AU, artist OP" or "wow this dialogue is perfect [artist] I love it" and like

It's weird to feel so happy because so many people are enjoying your work in a transformative way but also so unhappy because you have been completely removed from the equation. No one... even knows you wrote those things anymore. You have been removed in favor of a more "marketable" version of your work.

It's uh. It's a bad feeling. I stopped writing in that fandom eventually.

So again, I felt like... idk, like there was no point in me even trying. Because I could write the best fic on earth and still somehow get erased as a person. People would want my "content," but they wouldn't want me.

I think that's what hurt my feelings so much.

What I've realized is this: what I miss is the sense of community. On LJ, you could post a fic, cross-post it to a community, and there would be comments that would become conversations that would become lasting friendships. Not always! But often. I still talk to some people daily who I met through fic on LJ over a decade ago.

In the archive model, there has almost become a death of the author. The me on social media and the me on AO3 are very different; more importantly, it's almost like it's viewed as the "me" is on social media, but the work is on AO3. I am absent. There is only the fic, not the person who created it.

And that's okay, but when you try to combine those two things on social media and it goes over like a lead balloon... idk. There's an odd sense of dehumanization. I don't mean it in like... I don't know, a dramatic human rights violation kind of way. More that I literally feel like less of a human person the way I interact with fandom these days. Like I'm no longer a person who writes fic as a way to connect with my fellow fans and more a "content creator" whose human side is separate from my creation and never the twain shall meet.

(And I'll admit it feels especially galling to be forced into the capitalistic "content creator" box when it's not even a thing I can make money off of, lmao. It's like the worst of both worlds. I feel like if I can't make money off fanfic, I should at least be exempt from capitalistic social trends during its creation.)

I'm not so much complaining about my current fandom; WWDITS has actually been one of the best fandoms for interaction I've been in since the birth of AO3. That's one of the reasons I keep writing stories for fellow fans to read -- many of those fans feel like my friends, and I want to make them happy.

I think that poster was right when they talked about how the pivot from fan to "content creator" has fucked up fandom. There is this sense that we should be treating fandom like a job, often a fast-paced one with no pay. There is this idea that we should be separated from our "content" like you might a worker from their product, and blah blah blah alienation of labor, Marx, I get it, but damn if that isn't a shitty thing to do to your fellow fans who are making art for the love of art.

There are so many things I do love about AO3. I like having a central, organized place to put my fic. I like not having to worry about my work being lost to the ages. I like having an organized comments section I can return to on bad days to cheer myself up.

But I don't like the way that fic has kind of been relegated to a portion of fandom where people aren't particularly social. I don't like the way that authors are separated from their writing. I hear people complain sometimes about A/Ns because god forbid an author leave any trace of their actual personality to distract you from their content.

I can't have DMs with someone on AO3. I can't add someone to my friends list. There are no "beloved mutuals." There is just my work and the people who are kind enough to comment on it, even if they never actually engage with me elsewhere.

It's... a weird feeling, to feel so loved and unloved at the same time. Like you keep writing trying to make something good enough that people will talk to you but like. That's really not how it works. lmao. The best fic in the world won't make you friends anymore. It won't make people see you as a fellow fan rather than a pen name under a title.

My fic is some of the most personal stuff in the entire world, but my personhood is stripped away from it. It's so fucking weird. People like my fic, but they don't like me. They remember my stories but not the person who told them. It's bizarre. It feels like having your life and experiences strip-mined for content, and then the rest of it is just... left behind.

Frankly... I work in the publishing industry IRL and I have had opportunities to write professionally. Real, tangible opportunities. But I turned them down because I've seen it, the way that trying to fit such an intensely personal art form into a capitalistic framework can be exhausting, dehumanizing, and stressful. I don't want that for my work. Fandom has always been an escape from that.

But now fandom is starting to conform to those exact same capitalistic frameworks (and ofc without any kind of capitalistic compensation) and I hate to see it. It's so stressful. I feel like we're losing a lot of what makes fandom fun for writers and we're getting pretty much nothing in return. I'm not surprised that so many writer friends I know in fandom have quit.

like damn, I just wanna have fun with a bunch of dumbshits who love to overanalyze vampires and cry over their dumbshit shenanigans, not take on a second job. one that, I reiterate, I am not being paid for.

(Note: I am not asking for payment, just that I not be treated like a worker. The tradeoff for treating someone like a worker is that they get compensated for it. If I'm not being compensated, no one gets to treat me like this is my fucking job.)

It's a weird thing, because for a lot of people, fandom has become their job. Fanartists at cons selling fanart, youtube essayists making money off videos, professional cosplayers with sponsorships, etc. And so fandom is becoming more corporate, more capitalistic, more marketable. It's frustrating for those who don't want to capitalize on our fannish output, and doubly frustrating for people who are legally unable to do so.

I'm realizing as I write this that I'm most upset about the nonconsensual capitalization of fandom, particularly when imposed on people who are unable to access the very meager benefits of capitalism. I didn't ask for any of this!

Feels like when I'd be forced to go to assemblies for the US military when I was in high school. Like I'm morally opposed to all this but I'm also not physically fit for "service" anyway, so it's doubly insulting. I feel like I've been opted into the, ah, corporatization of fandom when I'm not even eligible for employee benefits. None of this should even apply to me! ;;

Okay!! I'm all het up now so I'm gonna go eat lunch and go for a walk! No monetization of hobbies, only trees.

[copperbadge]

As a person who prefers anon for small/one off messages like this, thanks for keeping anon on! I totally get why people turn it off, I've seen anon used for evil. It does make me mildly sad when I encounter it though. I'm usually trying to send someone an ask for their ask blog or just a random "thanks for that neat post"

Yeah, usually having anon off is a sign that the person's already had to deal with Some Nonsense, it's rough to see. I don't send anon asks by policy, but that's mainly just because a) I'm logged in all the time and b) I don't really send asks very often.

I wish that we had a slightly more codified set of rules around anonymous asks, or that we allowed anon comments (that you would need to opt into allowing, obvs) because there are some issues surrounding anon asks, even benign ones. I perhaps deal with some unusual ones since I have a large readership, but I feel the overall impact is similar. The reason I have the "I don't repost asks sent in response to other asks" policy is that if I don't outright state that, every single time, I get like...an ask about something, I answer it, I open it to the readership, and I get three more asks. And like...one, the original asker might not be a follower and might not see those responses, and two, I don't want to post a bunch of responses when those responses could be going in the original post, so that my readers don't get tired of seeing individual asks on a topic.

There's a thing that happens with social media, and this is not endemic only to Tumblr, it was a problem as far back as LJ -- I'll make a post, someone will respond, I'll respond to them, and then a new person will come in and basically, without meaning to, repost all the information I'd put in the original post, or ask a question that was answered in the original post. It gets super recursive super quickly, and keeping the discussion all in one place doesn't prevent it but it does cut it way down.

Also like...I will get three asks all basically saying the same thing, and there's no real point in posting all three, but which do I post? Do the other people feel bad when I ignore theirs and post someone else's?

So I keep anon asks open, but there is a lot of management that goes into it, and I wish we had better protocols around sending asks to people.

[uozlulu]

🍒, 🥝,🍈 for the fic ask game

Thanks for sending an ask :D

🍒 What’s your favorite character dynamic to write? (Can be romantic or platonic, specific or general!)

I think that I gravitate towards dynamics that have a lot of emotion and connection to them. Like you've got the relationships that have a lot of history to them. Asta & Yuno are effectively basically twins and their bond runs deep. EraserMic have known each other for 15 years and they share so much baggage and it's fun to explore how that might have drawn them closer together. Devil's Minion (Armand/Daniel) have like an at least 13 year history if not longer depending on which canon you're talking and there's just so much going on there you can explore.

But deep connections can sometimes be something that's swift and drowning almost like Destiel or they grow on each other like weeds after some time and energy like InuKag and that's also fascinating. This is also why I like the League of Villains as found family because I think their ability to trauma bond to each other quickly is a fascinating thing to explore.

I think in general I'm fascinated by how people can come together, can choose each other be it platonic, romantic, etc.... and it's so fun to write characters that have that kind of charge to them

🥝 What’s your favorite trope/AO3 tag to write?

I love writing crossovers, though I don't do it as much as I could. I think it's fun to either swap scenarios or settings to see what happens or combine casts of things to see how they all interact with one another.

I also like to take inspiration from places like Tumblr, LJ, etc...because I always like to write things I think people are looking to read and I like being able to jump from some post to whatever scenario pops into my head. It's why I have a whole series dedicated to all the inspirations I've gotten from Tumblr over the years.

🍈 Who’s your blorbo and what are some of your favorite headcanons/ideas about them that repeatedly show up in your fics? Free pass to rant about blorbo opinions.

Oh I have so many blorbos. I have so much affection for a lot of characters in a lot of things I read and watch. I think my blorbo of all time though was Dean Winchester. He's just so relatable on many levels and you can just explore what's going through that head of his, how trauma might have shaped whatever's going on with him. He also felt very effortless to write even though my SPN fics could have been better if I'd been more into the editing process at the time I wrote them.

The thing I could never get into with him the way a good chunk of fandom seemed to was the incest stuff. I have a brother who's about five years younger than me so to me, Dean and Sam are pretty normal siblings when you take away the trauma bonding. Like that episode where Gabriel shows up the first time "Tall Tales" I think it's called had me on the floor because that was like peak sibling content. The wallet scene reminded me of when I was 10 and my brother was 5 and I would babysit him when he was grounded from the TV and I'd have to get the remote control away from him and put it on top of the fridge.

I also think the ending Dean got in SPN was a bit BS because like I always kind of wanted him to eventually become a kind of Bobby to a new generation. To kind of become hunting adjacent, because I think he never could have fully gotten away from hunting, but I think he'd have liked the grow his found family aspect of that and make little gadgets for other hunters to use. Get him to a healthier relationship with Sam while he's at it, like they seemed to be moving towards at the end of season five where Sam can come and go and live a life outside of hunting, though Sam too would probably never be completely free from it.

===

Put a fruit from this post in my ask box and I'll answer fic related questions (You can also ask non-fruit related questions if you have any. That's also cool)

[aliform]

ending 2024, rhythms and threads

On the online presence, on preserving the self

I've been scrolling back through my likes (I felt a stupid sort of trepidation once I hit almost 1k) and have been queuing them up and unliking them as I go; one of the reasons why I love tumblr and won't leave it in the digital scrapbook/commonplace book sense is that no matter how old I get, how I drift through the months and from job to job, no matter how much I am bored of my life or invigorated by some small new thing, there's still undercurrents that have been me, been Samantha, since I was a teen and are visible here. I still love cake the most, I still love pink roses, I'm an teaboo Anglophile forever, reading/book collecting/libraries are woven into my very essence, and I still latch onto a few subgroups/cultures every year and read about them and then move on (this year: I discovered there's a lot of British men who blog about the different pubs they visit, love that for them, and me).

This tumblr was created 16 years ago (2008 -- I was 21, and my LJ account is now 19 years old as of last month) and is the visible record of my online presence through my 20s: fandom, connections, events etc. My face is on here, snide confessions, inappropriate battles between other users, that one viral post I made about self-care -- anyway. I'm not leaving anytime soon but what does the internet feel like for almost 40-year-old me?

I feel in-between. There's middle-aged blog owners who've been typing away since Usenet was a thing; there's Gen Z who uhh...I don't know how they blog or if they want longform content of any kind. I feel like I don't fit anywhere digitally anymore.

There's Substack, which for weird reasons I refuse to go near (those reasons are that I am suspicious of anyone on there; it's like a NLOG version of influencing and I could be totally wrong but there's a vibe to it that is too commercialist, me-me-me my personal thoughts are better than the other persons...come on, there are only so many ways to teehee over pop culture or dissect girlhood or whatever).

But I did follow through and do what I've wanted to do for years (decades) and make an actual real grownup blog this year. In March! 10 months ago! There's like three whole entries because I can't figure out how to widen the width of the posts and I want to do that before I start writing "for real." Of course I should ignore that and keep on prattling to no one.

On waning, on growing, onto 2025

What has 2024 been? I feel myself age: my face is longer, my hands are older, cuts take ages to heal. We lost Gordon, my husband's soulmate in cat form, to cancer. I've started doing quarterly staycations -- first the Midwest and then New England. Next, the southwest. It's my way to not hate being where I live.

My goal for this year was to only read books I owned. Since I mostly read by listening to audiobooks (all borrowed through the library) that was a fail. My book goal for next year may be to read through everything in my childhood bookcase, from Mary Poppins to His Dark Materials to Ouran High School Host Club.

One major surprise this year was that I started bullet journaling again. Because I'm an idiot I never put years in the old ones (are years not aesthetic enough??) and I think they were from like...2017? to 2019? Maybe? I fell down a rabbit hole of a studytuber and then all the snark about her and was like, why am I not doing this when I have all the supplies; there are 20-year-olds taking time out of their lives to do this and I can too. It's part of my daily routine now and I crave it and even though I am literally writing down the most banal bits of my day.

What do I want out of the next year? More reading, a new fandom or some sort of pull towards something, to not be tired all the time. A house. A bigger apartment. To finally learn how to knit. To keep going and not become some stretched, grey and surface-level version of myself. I can't create more time.

[sapphirecrook]

[STORY] Call Me Fang - C. 3-1 Getting the band back together

TUMBLR TEXT:

Download (it looks nicer)

ORIGINAL:

I dunno why, but my writing style is 'ahead, and little bits at a time' its very strange.

-----

I’ve been standing outside the music room for a few minutes. Finding it took some time, so naturally, I’m late. How did that even happen? I was literally in History/Civics class with Reed two minutes ago? I could’ve followed him? I guess the fear of small talk and exposure was just too much.

Hanging out near the door, and pushing my head against it, I can hear their conversation. Once more, I am reminded I have wings. These stupid things are nothing but a bother. 

They are talking about “L&L” and bugs. Nerds. At least they’re not gossiping about me getting my wings caught on the door in history class.

Come to think of it, I have no idea how much Fang has communicated this change in style. If there is a change. I should stick to my tactic so far. Charge through, apologize later. Better too much than too little, had too many times undercommunication killed it.

I can’t delay forever, and playing the sneaky little spy only makes me look like shit.

To quote the wise Brooklynite: let’s a go.

I swing the door open with bravado and step in. Door shut with a bump of the butt, arms in my side, time to pull every ounce of confidence into a single 30 minute conversation. Home stretch. There’s hair in my face, as this silver waterfall is remarkably unruly. Still.

Giving it a look, the music room is a music room. Chairs for a whole band or choir, instruments in a massive closet, residual music stands, and of course… the posters. Treble clef anyone? 

Trish and Reed sit on the very large windowsill. Reed’s tail is idly brushing the floor with its feathery tip, while Trish is excitedly explaining how bug slime nets work. Which Mr. Pink muses has use in his “L&L” game. They were both ready to play, as the drumset was the only instrument given space, and a bass guitar was right below Ms. Purple’s seating area. 

“Everyone here?” I demand to know. Standing tall over all of them.

Actually, I am the tallest in the group. Good. Trish’s eyes roll like marbles at my meaningless demands. “Dude, we’re a band of three people.” 

“Alright. Let’s do this!” I take a lungful of air and then… “So, what did you do to bribe LJ?” Reed takes some wind out of my sail by setting the conversation instead. It was a topic I intended but…

“Okay, yea. The trailer I sent. Okay, let me just play it for you.” I look around and find the hookup to the sound mixer and speakers, as well as a nice guitar to go along with it. No reason to play that file directly off my phone speaker like a pleb.

I am not ready for this. But maybe, if I just go real hard and fast, they won’t be able to notice and I can twist and turn things to suit the narrative. Confidence first. Deep breath, straight face, piledriver. 

Master of the mind.

Playing a song I played only a few times in fragments will be hard. My fingers hover over the strings. Akin to gravity, they twist into the proper posture to play the instrument, anticipating. 

There’s that feeling again. That underlying bubbling feeling of spectral hands grasping mine and guiding them along. I close my eyes and feel myself getting sucked into a cold, wet, dark abyss, where ever lyrical line becomes glowing bubbles.

It’s at once a struggle for survival, yet easier than breathing. 

I found myself teetering on the edge of a cliff when it ended. The last few notes and words echo off the walls briefly, leaving me standing there. I can’t think of what to say.

My face was burning and glowing. I didn’t notice before, but it makes me smile. “And… uhm…  that’s what she likes?”

I look them over, and they seem… engrossed? Trish even got the bass and had put a few notes to my score. My face feels like lava, as I realize I managed to entertain them so directly. Muscle memory is Fang’s, but the stage fright is alllll me. I’m contributing.

“That is a few towns over from our old stuff, ain’t it?” Reed gestures as he breaks the enchantment. “It’s good, but… yea.” He seems to like it? Trish’s expression is less optimistic. She’s frowning, rubbing her chin, looking at the ground left to right. “Yea, I’d sooner believe she’s setting us up. You know, a nice loser band to make Swamp Babies pop. Why else would she turn us away so many times only to just… turn at… I dunno. It doesn’t make sense to me.” 

“The returning champion wins again.” Reed appends with a sigh, shaking his head. “So, we’re supposed to change our style in… a week. Six days or something? Like, how are we gonna do that?” “Reed’s got a point. I like it, doesn’t mean I can do it without time. Crushing this on a short schedule is a feat. Between babysitting and projects and stuff, time’s a crunch.” 

The two are both looking down and away. They’re digging holes, time to fill em up. With confidence. Luckily, I bothered to think ahead. It’s the only way to keep my head from going to bad places. Felt weird that Fang would send LJ trailers without… the rest of the band playing. 

It takes a second to build up my resolve, and when I do, I give my answer with boisterous noise. “And that’s where you’re wrong. Nothing’s impossible with a pinch of magic.” I can’t resist gesturing with hands and body, to emphasize the point.

“Cool, cast your spell, o mighty wizard.” Reed grins, as if he had the fullest confidence before even hearing it. His posture loosened, to receive the spell.

“Nah, man, Fang’s a witch. No books on them!” Trish finger guns me. I can’t help but smile again. 

My plan isn’t the best. It basically puts all the work on me. Given this band thing is Fang’s idea, that’s fair enough. Sins of the body-father. Body-parent. I seem to have this new music down fine, and I have more time to practice. In fact, I’m new to it, whether we play the old or the new stuff. Thus… “I’m talking about backing instruments. We can use the MIDI box, right?” I hold up the weird slab next to the sound board. The cute post-it is the only reason I can identify it as such. Fang had one, and it took little to sort out the what and how. “Probably. There’s usually some solo artists or like, half bands. So I doubt we’d get slammed for it.” The purple punk concedes. “So. What if, say. We take what we know, and turn it into something else? Like, there’s only so many guitar chords and notes on a scale. Just dress it up in vibes and moods, some spiffy lyrics, and badaboom badabing.” My growing confidence leaves a mark. Even the worm-hugger seems to get sucked into it. 

They exchange glances. 

Admittedly, this entire plan was me screwing around with the MIDI controller back at Fang’s place and figuring out some workable ideas.

To cover MY ass. 

Making the best of it.

Twisting it to suit the rest of the band’s asses is two birds, one stone. 

Letting the idea simmer, Reed gives his feedback. “That’s… actually pretty clever.”

Man, this is going pretty damn great. 

What is that feeling? That odd breeze on my rear?

Oh.

The tail.

What are social terms on tail related movement? “Man, here I was, thinking we’d actually have to try. Turns out Worm Drama was nothing but style and talent from day one.” Leaning back further, the purple horned one crossed and plants her ankles on the back of the chair near her. Oozing suave. Pinkie slides into thought, before raising a finger to ask a poignant question. “Uh, not to undercut your high, Fang, but do you think you can retool a song like that in a week?”

“No worries, Reed. You guys just gotta send me a line you can work with.” I really should figure out what instruments they play. “Or, whatever you feel you’re best with. Then, I merge them together. It’s easier to build with a foundation, after all. I’ll send you the finished version Sunday, so you can digest it.” “Is that enough time?” His skepticism is telling. Fair enough. I can, apparently, make a trailer work in a day. A whole new song? I’m not sure if that’s necessary, but I guess we can’t play the old, nor have them learn the new thing I made… “If you can send me the lines today or tomorrow, I have at least a few days to write alpha versions, let them sink in, digest, regurgitate. It’ll be tight, but look, I don’t have extracurriculars, it’s fine.” 

“Def was nervous earlier. Yet all I see now is why you’re the boss.” Violet finger guns and a wink and smile. 

Honestly, I was expecting someone to comment on my voice. Somehow, I’ve been close enough that nobody noticed or cares? As they say, nothing but net. “Are they? I thought Fang was more of a de facto leader.” 

“Reed, dude, head vocalists are always the leader.” “Or the guitar.” Pink shrugs. “Double leader, triple president. Fang, your family is made of layered leadership.”

“Ah, I see Naser told you about it too?” I snicker. “Just walk past his ‘office’ and you’ll hear him say it to everyone that comes in. Curious how his big opening speeches are gonna go, given that campaign of his.” “Say what you want, but Naser has charisma. I’d definitely make out with him if Fang wouldn’t kill me for it.” Reed sinks into the window, arms behind his back. Showing off his armpits since his shirt covers none of that. 

“You’ll have to fight Stella for the honor though.” I didn’t even hear Trish. Excuse me? “Uh, Reed, what the hell?”

“I’m kidding. Come on.”

I’m not really pissed. I’m living up to my assigned role as Reed Assassin. “If I catch you mackin’ with Naser you’re getting a one-way trip to the moon.” I can’t muster the sincerity to make it sound like a real threat. Though, if anything, they love it.

“Macking?” 

“Hey, heard the moon’s nice this time of year.” Reed winks. “Perfect for a triple president honeymoon.” 

The foundations of laughter, the bubbling of snickers, push up my throat. My face contorts, and strange, nasal guttural sounds pop from my nostrils. The crack of Reed’s wit whip works because it catches me off guard. 

“God fucking damnit Reed!” How have I met this guy, like, a few hours ago?

I hardly noticed our bassist getting up and deciding it was enough, even if all she’d really done was idly play along with me. “Oh, well, nice to catch up. I gotta hit up Rosa for some things, important top secret projects.”

“Thanks for the moral support.” Wait. “Wait, your basslines?”

“I’ll send them tonight, don’t worry.” Her head pokes through the doorway as she shoots me an extended tongue. Fair. 

Things wind down quickly. 

I sit on the windowsill. 

Reed took it to himself to play me the drum beat he wanted to use. That he felt confident had ‘enough flexibility to fit anything, but enough style to impress’ or something. Reed has mastered the art of being capable, serious, and seeming like he doesn’t give a shit at once. I half expect him to go ‘one more thing’ and blow my case wide open. Just pull off Fang’s face like a rubber mask like a meddling kid. 

While he plays, I look myself over. I peer at my reflection in the window, and wonder. It’s strange to see another person’s face like that. I make faces, and they mirror. I’m getting too sucked into this. Tomorrow's another roll of the dice for this to just go away. 

Then, I am taking a few weeks sabbatical to recover from straining every single social muscle. And maybe pick up that offer with Rex. Finally get him to shut up about that. Go to the pool and just float about. Get some hot tub hours. Yes. 

Gonna treat myself for once. 

A smooth landing for the returning traveler. Or perhaps I’ll just wake up in bed. Not a day missed. Ah. It can be that fortuitous! 

As we wrap up, crack a few gags, he gets a bit more serious.

“Might have to skip on getting us the usual band ride. My van is totally trashed.”

“What happened?”

“Hm. Lemme think. I might’ve been stoned off my ass taking a hairpin turn. And like an idiot, overcorrect and uh… well, I’m alive. The van just needs a lot of dents pulled. So you either carry your own guitar, or you know, use whatever LJ’s got lying around.”

“Don’t freaking puff and drive!”

“It was that, or be home after midnight on a Sunday. And neither of my moms would give me amnesty in that case.” 

“That’s just bad planning.”

I get up, and stretch. I push every feeling of being a personal space invader to the back of my mind, and try to focus. Look forward. It’s gonna be fine. 

Reed seems to be busy thinking, so I’ll leave him to it. Unfortunately, that posture breaks before I can open the door. It’s for me. 

“Yo, got a minute?”

“What’s wrong, Reed?”

“Just wanted to ask… you alright? Not too nervous about this audition thing, right? This might be that big break.” He looks dead at me, with a slight squint. Well, not really a squint, more an analytical frown. So he’s probably not projecting. That’s how it works, right? “I’m fine.” Shrug. “Hey, if you need some R&R time, I host L&L games” There’s the hook. I got a guess what he’s talking about. “Trish is in there. Sage too. Perfect time to take a load off and laugh. Naomi’s in, and Rosa. So everyone.” Everyone but me, huh? Although I have deftly avoided Stella and Sage so far. Wait, is he recruiting me under the guise of wellness? Sneaky. “L&L?” “Legends and Lore. It’s a tabletop roleplaying game? It’s like…”

Man, parallels are something around here. Can’t wait to find the complete works of Henry Shakescale and the musical talents of Mozartodon. “Oh, I know what those are.” Holy shit, he perks up instantly. His adorable, fluffy tail tip starts wagging side to side like a broom. “Sure, maybe later. After the audition. This weekend’s short notice.” Stalling for time, baby. I’d prefer to do some personal research first too.

“Cool, cool.”

I take a minute. Just standing here with Reed on his drumming stool. It’s nice. He’s pretty cute. Laid back. Like a big ol pillow. Trish has more of that big friend-energy. 

“Weird summer, huh?”

I look up, and shrug. “I’ll be honest, weirdest one yet.” Sure has been.

Can’t wait to get some more downtime to process any of it. 

“Never took Trish for the camp type.”

“Mhm.” Sure, that’s the weird one, buddy. ��I gotta go. I wanna be there on time. Naser needs his moral support.”

“I’ll be on the roof, keep lookout for potential party crashers.” 

[three--rings]

So I read your post “On Callouts, Triggers, and Problematic Content”, and I wanted to say that it resonated with me. I’ve been there, being whole-cloth canceled for being “problematic”, and being accused of personally, morally agreeing with (or straight up doing) the problematic things in my fic, and honestly the harassment that came after (even after I’d apologized) still causes me anxiety even now. I think I’m in the same place now where seeing people get canceled for having morally impure thoughts / creating impure art really bothers me. Anyway, I just wanted to say that I appreciated the post, it really clearly conveyed some of the things I’ve been feeling regarding it.

Yeah, I’m glad that post is one of my most popular.  The incident I describe in it was really small, just a small niche blog making fun of a single post I made, but, I felt like it was illustrative of a wider phenomenon.

I have, however, experienced VERY painful condemnation, cancelling, and banning for expressing my opinion.  Prior to returning to tumblr for YOI fandom, I spent a lot of time on a fannish website/forum where I was very active, made what I thought were a lot of friends, and generally had a very strong sense of community.

Except one day I replied to a comment thread posted by another active user, in which they expressed that they thought some of the reaction of a particular fandom was overblown in regards to an event on a show.  The criticism of the show was on social justice grounds: this plot development is sexist and racist.  The people in that thread expressed the feeling that the current brouhaha was an overreaction.  The people in the thread were mostly women and included POC, so we were basically saying we didn’t think it was particularly offensive personally.

For saying such, we were all banned from the community with no warning and no opportunity to give explanation or make amends.  I literally made one single comment saying I thought some of the arguments about sexism were flawed (I didn’t mention race) and I was banned from a community I’d been an active participant in for years for being sexist and racist.  

It’s hard to really convey how much this upset me.  I’m disabled, and my internet life is a major-to-only way I have to socialize, so being suddenly cut off from my main daily social outlet was a huge blow.  It sent me into a significant depression for at least a month or so. 

In retrospect, what I find so infuriating, other than just waking up and finding myself blocked from posting suddenly, is that it was one instance of disagreeing with the perceived “approved” progressive opinion which was immediately punished by ostracization.  We were told that by expressing our opinions we were creating a hostile discussion environment.  However no one actually tried to discuss it from an alternate viewpoint.  In a discussion forum, no one would discuss it, instead private complaints were supposedly made to the admins who banned us without even knowing the fandom we were discussing.  Simply disagreeing with a social justice oriented criticism was a sin great enough to be lifetime banned, in the name of safe space.  (Nevermind the people being banned were members of the affected groups.)

I have not talked about this incident much here for a lot of reasons.  Partly because the memory is still painful, though less so now.  Partly because I at least used to have people on here who knew me then.  But I don’t want to talk about the specifics of either community or fandom, because then it becomes all about that. 

But yes, there’s a reason I remain very skeptical of purity culture and callouts.  I hope to always work against racism and sexism and homophobia and exclusionism both online and in RL, but I try not to join bandwagons and pile-ons.   Discussion, pointing out offensive mistakes, etc, are to be encouraged.  But the answer is not groupthink and creating a more and more rigidly patrolled, constantly shrinking “in-group” of sufficiently pure woke-ness.

And, the long-term effects of my experience, for me, have been a greater reluctance to throw myself into communities or to get too attached to people and places online.  I still engage, but with a certain distance.  I do my thing in my space, where I am in control. 

[olderthannetfic]

Hi! I love your blog! Thanks for doing what you do! I had a question about a03.

tl;dr Nowadays, I see essayists suggesting a03 turn into a social media-ish website. In the making of the a03, was it ever discussed to have the archive include social media mechanics (like group chats, PMs)? Where does this idea come from? Is there a history to it?

Long version: I wandered the Interwebs and spotted an essay critiquing a03. The essayist posited that fans would be better served if a03 had a "closed community" option, where only a select group of users could see a fic. This community would be able to socialize in a group chat or message board--it sounded like they wanted LJ back, or to reinvent Discord. This wish puzzled me, because a03 is an archive, not social media.

I understand wanting to keep a fic private, but ao3 already has functions for that: orphan the fic or Unrevealed/Anonymous Collections. Or, yanno, a fan could post their fic on a private Discord, or a password blocked Tumblr. Or email their friends. There are lots of options. When it was brought up that the essayist could use a03's code to make their own semi-private archive, the essayist responded that making an archive was too much work, and nobody would find their fic, ever (which is what I thought they wanted...?).

I'm puzzled why this essayist wanted a03 to be everything all at once. Isn't it enough that it protects our fic and stores our history? We can log in to other websites to talk to each other.

Thanks for reading this ask! It got way long, haha.

--

In the making of the a03, was it ever discussed to have the archive include social media mechanics

Constantly and persistently.

People were desperate for The Next Livejournal just as people a couple of years ago were desperate for The Next Tumblr.

Since LJ was the platform people were thinking in terms of, group chats weren't mentioned so much. I don't recall if PMs were, but LJ (and now DW) have fine gradations of privacy filters and also PMs, so that kind of thing was inherent to the premise.

From the beginning, astolat and other founders were very clear that AO3 was not going to be social media. Period.

--

The functionality that essay describes sounds like exactly what Dreamwidth is good for. In 2022, one could easily make a private com there for one's friends' fic. The sorting isn't as good as AO3, but if a com mod tags well and it's a smaller group of people and fic, it's still pretty convenient. The privacy controls are excellent.

In 2007, as OTW/AO3 was being proposed and discussed, not everyone was down with moving to DW or using it that way. Some people had beef with Denise, founder of DW, and some didn't think enough of fandom was moving there to make it suit their needs. Denise is great and they should get over it, but the latter problem is always an issue on any platform.

--

The biggest conceptual issue is between two camps:

LJ fandom and pre-LJ fandom.

Livejournal reigned supreme for most of a decade, just like Tumblr did. Also like Tumblr, tons of fans got into fanfic and related stuff during that time and took the platform and its specifics as How Fandom Works: the natural and eternal default. When platform change happened, people said "We can't go to X! It doesn't have basic feature Y!"...

And then everyone left for platform X and they were all alone.

The highly distinctive feature of LJ is that the fic posting and the social stuff happened in exactly the same space. I hated this. I loathed reading fic on LJ. To me, this was a newfangled and worse way of doing fandom. But if you got started on LJ, that's The Way Things Work.

Immediately prior to LJ and overlapping with that period was the era of fandom archives. I was very used to doing the socializing and serializing of fic on a mailing list, then posting finished works to an archive. The first posting was a little more polished, but it's not dissimilar to twitter threadfic now. You know it's hard to find later, so you clean that shit up and store it in the long-term storage, which is an archive.

The split model of twitter+AO3 or tumblr+AO3 or discord+AO3 is culturally very similar to mailing list+older archive or usenet+older archive.

Even the older archives that had a lot of social space often still had mailing lists and other offsite more ephemeral social spaces feeding into them. The LJ model was a departure from the norm. It was just a very influential and popular departure.

[truckfreaks]

reblogging to reply cos comments were too short... but anyway!

Honestly, as someone who's been around for both tumblr and LJ, I do feel like tumblr lends itself to make certain things easier to find. But at the same time, a lot of LJ was word of mouth, and I feel like that is something that tumblr builds upon in a good way. It isn't just a comment section on a community post where you're asking for recommendations and getting them - people are actually using their own platform to share other works, which is a little different.

As a result, could it be potentially awkward to see your fic included on a rating system? Yeah, maybe. But I don't think it's that much different from word of mouth recommendation. And even back on LJ, it wasn't uncommon to rank your favorite fanfics - both on your personal blog and in community posts. It opened up a lot of discourse, but IMO people seem much less sensitive about criticism of fanworks nowadays than they used to be. That isn't to say that it isn't still something people get twisted about ... they definitely do. But for the most part, I feel like the overall reaction to having your fanwork critiqued is received a lot better for two reasons: one, people are a lot more constructive about their critiques on this platform. And two, creators are a lot more open to receiving critique. I mean, back on LJ you could do beta reads of your writing prior to publishing, sure, but the beta readers were people who were probably already familiar with and/or liked your work. The response was more likely to be a positive one. Whereas here, it's a lot easier to reach a wider audience that might not be predisposed to responding in an echo chambery kind of way.

All in all, I think it's a lot better than it used to be, and I don't think there's anything wrong with rating fics, especially if people value and appreciate your personal opinion on fanworks. You *could* put the effort in to break down why you're rating it in such a way, but frankly, unless you're actively interested in beta reading and critiquing people's work, I don't think you inherently owe people that effort unless it's something you find important enough to discuss.

tho re: previous reblog. i kinda feel weird about the "rating fics from 1 to 10" thing, ngl. like I do think bringing back a bit of criticism in fandom (when it's not targeting the creator i mean) is a good thing, because... idk it might be just me, but i get the feeling we've gotten so obsessed with controlling what other people think about us and letting it control our image/identity/etc, especially in online communities. but also it might be a feature from the lj days that isn't translating fully to tumblr fandom as a social medium (ay). because reblogging wasn't really a thing on lj, right? so if someone found their fic on a rec list, they had to go out of their way on someone else's journal/community to find it. meanwhile, on tumblr, it might just be thrown on their dash without a warning.

idk man maybe it's just because i have a lot of followers on this blog lol. so it makes it 1000 times more likely that the og creator sees it. would love to hear what older/lj era fans think about this

[destielficarchive]

The Wayback Machine and the Quest for Deleted Fics

What is the Wayback Machine?

The Wayback Machine is the time machine used by Peabody and Sherman in "Rocky and Bullwinkle." It's also the nickname of The Internet Archive (https://web.archive.org/) which, since the late '90s, has crawled the internet and just. Archived everything it finds. (You can read their history here). People now can enter pages they want to save (I used it to preserve some censored Chinese gay books, for example, entering all the URLs myself to be sure that Wayback captured them), and I don't even know how else it finds stuff, but it's pretty amazing. How amazing?

This is their capture of my Tripod anime webpage from when I was in college. Some of the graphics are missing, yeah, but like. I made this website in fricken 1999, and stopped maintaining it in 2001 or 2002. Back then my e-mail address was still "unforth@penpen.com" and webrings were a thing and I was well known for creating Winamp skins in Jasc. That it's there at all is pretty fucking incredible.

Who cares about your old anime page?

Other than me? No one. BUT. Wayback's "catch all, save all, store all" approach to archiving means it's an invaluable tool for finding deleted fic. For example, here's their capture of "Rock Salt and Feathers," which was (as far as I know) the first Destiel-specific fic archive made on the internet, and many of the earliest Destiel fics were posted there or x-posted there from LJ.

The owner deleted it in 2010, taking all the fics with it, but many can still be accessed - and saved by my project, and read by anyone who wants to - because they're in Wayback.

Okay, that's way more interesting. How do I use Wayback to find stuff like that?

The key to using the Wayback Machine to find old and/or deleted fics is that you need the original url. Thus, teaching someone how to use Wayback to find deleted fics ends up mostly being about teaching someone tricks for finding ancient urls for fics that have been deleted (and occasionally when you find the url you actually discover the fic isn't deleted at all, which is always nice!). Once you have the URL, the "how to use" part is easy, you just go to web.archive.org and enter the url in the search box.

The bar graph of years shows every time Wayback Machine "captured" (archived) the specific page at that url. Often, each of these captures will be different, especially for websites that update regularly (like an archive or an author's works page). When you click on a year, you'll get a calendar, and then you just pick the date and time you want (I highlighted April 18th, 2009, as an example, and because it was my dad's 68th birthday so why not? It's also about a month before I personally started watching SPN, ah, memories...). Once you've picked the capture you want, it'll load the next page and show you a capture of it - so here's a (different than above) capture of Rock Salt and Feathers, dating to within a week of when the website was first founded! The same bar graph is now up top, and you can click on the bar you want to jump to that date and see how the website changed over time - so this capture on April 18th, 2009, is pretty bare bones; by the time of the May capture I screen capped above, things have moved along!

Further, once you're in an archive of a deleted webpage you can (or at least, you can try) to navigate it as normal, just...all within Wayback's interface. So like, on this page, I can access their list of new works (and find different ones by trying the different captures)...

...and I can even read them!

Uh oh, better watch out for those 4.20 spoilers. Anyway, the point is - if you've got the original URL, you can use it to load a deleted page into Wayback, and then navigate that website as normal...at least up until you try a link that Wayback didn't archive, and then you'll hit a "sorry, we don't have that one" page (I'm not gonna screen cap cause at this rate I'll hit Tumblr's image limit in about 2 more minutes). Not everything will be there, ever. Rock Salt and Feathers is unusually well-preserved; when I did a deep-dive and spent three days trying to find things there, I was able to preserve nearly 90% of all the fic I know of that was posted there, and some of the rest I was able to find by tracking down alts for the people who posted there - many (though not all!) had x-posted their works to LJ, and later some ALSO x-posted to AO3, once AO3 existed (Rock Salt and Feathers predates the existence of AO3 by about 6 months).

So, as you can see - using Wayback is the easy part (at least until it isn't - more on that later...it's easy on a simple page like Rock Salt and Feathers, hence my using it for examples, but it can get hella complicated for more modern, dynamic websites like AO3). The hard part?

(cutting to a read more...I hate using them cause then people don't read but this post is just. so long.)

Where am I supposed to get the original URL for a fic that's been deleted for 5 years or a decade or more?

Google search is your friend (or your preferred search engine I guess, but I always use Google). If you know the username and the exact title, it's easy - especially using quotes, which is also your friend. So, for example, I couldn't remember the URL for Rock Salt and Feathers and I didn't actually have it saved, so I just googled "rocksalt and feathers" (in quotes). It prompt got mad at me and told me rock salt should be two words, and so I changed it, and sure enough the first result was an ancient LJ post that included the links I needed. Which is to say, what you're really looking for isn't the "thing itself," but rather other websites that reference the thing in question. For works that were originally posted on LJ, FF.net, personal websites like Rock Salt and Feathers, or elsewhere, ancient rec lists tend to be winners for finding the links. Learning some search tricks can also help - like, if you don't know the exact title, try variations, or try just the part you're sure of. If you remember a quote, try searching for that. If the title is something super common, try adding the author name or, if you don't know it, search for it using "(name of fic)" destiel. Anything you can think of, remember, etc., will help. Sometimes, you just get as close as you can, and then look through the results, and often there'll be something close that even if it's not right, will lead you to a resource that'll help.

Alternatively, again for older works, searching for a different work that you know was released around the same time. So, like, looking for a fic by...idk...Fossarian? Or cautionzombies? Try search for aesc, or bauble, or obstinatrix, or annundriel - someone else who was active when Fossarian and cautionzombies were. (Obviously knowing some Destiel fandom history helps in this case, but there are enough fandom olds around that even if you don't know this info, learning it is an ask away). Especially, try searching for a contemporary whose works are still up, because you can get titles for those more easily (for example, in this case, aesc, annundriel and obstinatrix all have some works cross posted on AO3, so finding the titles is easier, and then you just...keep going til you find what you want). You can also try looking for works where they were betas or editors or gift-recipients, and/or you can kinda...map out...their old friends groups, by seeing who commented where. For example, looking for links to cautionzombies stuff? cautionzomes and annundriel were friends, which I learned by poking around a fuck-ton, and annundriel's accounts are still up, and some old cautionzombie links can be found in annundriel's journals. The links don't work but that's not the point, you just need something to plug into Wayback!

And, as a side note - just because an old LJ link is dead, don't assume that the work is lost! Many of those authors x-posted onto AO3 once they had AO3 accounts (heck, Gedry was continuing to back up works to AO3 as recently as last year), and even among those who didn't (such as annundriel or CloudyJenn, who each only backed up a few) they often simply ported their accounts to Dreamwidth, so you can find their works just by reformatting their LJ url (username.livejournal.com) to a dreamwidth url (username.dreamwidth.org - works for me too, if you want to see the awful shit I wrote in 2005). Also, sometimes you'll find they x-posted to FF.net but not AO3 (which, granted, presents FF.net own array of challenges for backing up, but that's for a different post - drop me an ask if you want me to write that up sooner rather than later, otherwise I'll just do it whenever I remember). All of which is to say - before you assume a dead link means a deleted work you can save yourself some trouble (and some heartbreak, Wayback isn't great for LJ in general because of how LJ posts and blogs were structured) it's worth your while to take a little extra time and check - okay, was it x-posted? Did the person have alternate usernames they used on different platforms? Did they have a writing community on LJ where they posted (for example, a lot of authors posted their works directly to deancasbigbang.livejournal.com or deancas-xmas.livejournal.com, and also a lot of authors made communities even just for themselves, and those communities remained even when they deleted their personal accounts). Even if you find they deleted across all platforms, it's easier to find full works from AO3 or FF.net on Wayback than it is to find works from LJ, so it's worth a try. And, honestly, with really old stuff? Finding the old work x-posted somewhere, or just asking someone like me, or the folks at @destielfanfic, is more likely to find it for you than putting an LJ url into Wayback, though in a pinch that of course is an option too.

Unforth, stop babbling about LJ, I care about deathbanjo, or apokteino, or TamrynEradni, or...

...or anyone who posted on AO3 exclusively, and deleted more recently, yeah, I get it. Of course, the tricks for finding the urls remain similar - rec lists are your friends! But, for AO3, there's another super handy trick. It doesn't always work, but it's by far the best place to start.

Go to @ao3feed-destiel.

Search for the author's name, and/or the fic title, and/or anything you can remember about the fic.

Since mid-2013, the Destiel AO3 feed Tumblr has logged probably around 75% of all the Destiel that's been posted. There ARE gaps - works that weren't initially tagged Destiel, or times when the feed was down and just caught nothing, or "oops the author changed their name four times and I don't know which one they were using when they posted That Fic," or "there are three people with very similar usernames" or "the fic is called 'carry on' and there are a bajillion fics with the same title." It's not perfect, but as a first step it's essential. Because, whatever you find, it'll have:

The link to the original AO3 post

The link to the author's name page at the time

The exact date and time it was originally posted

The original title, tags, etc.

If the work was in a series, the series link

And all of the links can be put into Wayback to help you find The Thing You Want. So, to use a recent example from someone I know doesn't mind having their stuff distributed (or, in this case, discovered on Wayback)...

When you click on the tinyurl, you get an AO3 error page, but, more importantly, in the enter-the-url bar, you get the original url for the fic! Which, in this case is:

http://archiveofourown.org/works/8447584

And then you can go over to Wayback, and...

Well, lookie there, it's the fic that HazelDomain locked! (Note that you'll get a "do you agree to the terms of use" and potentially other pop-ups. Just say yes and click through, there's no way to avoid them because there's no way to access these pages in Wayback as if you are "logged in as you," so the notifications and, in the case of Mature and Explicit works, the "you must be 18+ to proceed..." warnings will pop up every single time (and the 18+ one will cause you depressing issues, which in general just make Mature and Explicit deleted works MUCH harder to find, more on that later, yes this post is really gonna be that long, sorry...)

Now, suppose you weren't looking for this fic by HazelDomain, but instead were looking for one that ao3feed-Destiel didn't have on their list. Well, now is when that link to HazelDomain username comes in handy!

http://archiveofourown.org/users/HazelDomain/pseuds/HazelDomain

You can put this directly into Wayback, and it'll show HazelDomain's home page or, alternatively, if you loaded the fic above (for example) you can just click where it says HazelDomain below the title, and you'll get to go to their main page, which'll list their most recent works (on the date that the capture was taken) and some other links. Tada! You've found HazelDomain fics on Wayback.

(Side note on all of this: AO3 links are stable and permanent, which means that they do not change even if the nature of a fic changes. If the fic's posting date is edited? If the author changes their username? If the title changes? If it's added or removed from a series or a collection? If it's orphaned or added to an anonymous collection? The link will never change. That's how I know that the so-called "orphaned" version of With Understanding is actually a fake - it doesn't have the same URL as the actual version of With Understanding that apokteino posted. So, if you find a link to a work and it turns out that work has only been orphaned, not deleted, that link will still work! For example...

https://archiveofourown.org/works/13063581

One of sir_kingsley's link, with the exact same link it had before it was orphaned!)

Okay, but the one I want isn't on the author's page even after I checked!

As I mentioned, a basic old site like Rock Salt and Feathers? Very easy to use on Wayback. A complex website like AO3? Much more messy, which means there are a bunch of tricks you can use to try to "get at" the data. There's always the chance it's not there at all; a random ficlet by a little known author? Unlikely to have made it into Wayback, unfortunately, especially if the ficlet was Mature or Explicit rated. But, there are bunch of things you can try, and there's never any guessing which will work until you try. When I'm looking for something that's been deleted? I try them all.

Trick 1: The "/pseud" trick.

See how in HazelDomain's author link, it's listed as "users/HazelDomain/pseuds/HazelDomain"? There's a few tricks you can use related to this. First, on AO3, both "users/(username)" and "users/(username)/pseud/(username)" function as links (even if the second instance of username isn't actually a pseud and is just a repeat of the same username, as in the HazelDomain example). As such, they are different urls for Wayback machine searching purposes. Sometimes, when you search "user/(username)" you'll get results but get none when you search for "users/(username)/pseuds/(username), and vice verse. To Wayback, these are two completely different urls, so you have to check them individually - AO3 knows internally that these links route to the same place but Wayback is just basically taking screen caps (well, HTML text caps) so it doesn't know they're equal - so check both!

Trick 2: The "they changed usernames" trick.

If you know that an author changed usernames, try plugging every single one into those "user/(username)" and "user/(username)/pseud/(username)" links. Is it a lot of work? Yes. How bad did you want that fic, again?

(side note: having trouble figuring out if they had alternate usernames? Yeah, it's a nightmare. Checking old rec lists is one way to find out. If the work is in a series, there's also a trick - even if the person changes username, the "Series created by: (username)" thing at the top will still show the username they had when they created the series. Or, if they had a fic with a really unusual title, try doing a google search for that title specifically, even if it's not the one you're looking for, because the odds that two people used that crazy-specific title are low, and you'll be able to see results that might give the different name. Or-or, as yet another option...my master spreadsheet lists every alternate name for a given user that I know of...for example, deathbanjo has also been loneprairies, beenghosting, and tumbleweeds. Also note - unlike WORK links, which are stable even if the person changes their username, orphans, etc., "user/(username)" links are NOT stable. If you search for, idk, bellacatbee...

https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellacatbee

...you'll get an error, even though fairychangeling is bellacatbee and still active...

https://archiveofourown.org/users/fairychangeling)

Trick 3: The "/works" trick.

Hope you're not done giving those "users/(username)" and "users/(username)/pseuds/(username)" links a work out, because you're not done yet! Those links will just give you their home page, which will only list their 6 (...I think it's 6???) most recent works. And then you click on "works" at the side and...oh no there's nothing there! Whelp, whichever link Wayback tried to use ("users/(username)/works" or "users/(username)/pseuds/(username)/works") ...try the other! And then try it for all their username changes, if they had any! Getting frustrated yet? If you're lucky you'll have Found The Thing and you can stop, but if you haven't, we're not done yet, cause yes, there's more...

Trick 4: The "?fandom_id=27" trick.

So, I'm writing this guide specifically for Destiel, so this trick is being shared in the SPN-specific format. Every single fandom on AO3 has a fandom ID number. Supernatural's is 27. If you're looking for a different fandom, you'll just have to find it's number - you can do this by going to any author you know wrote for that fandom, going to their home/main page (users/(username) or users/(username)/pseuds/(username)) and clicking on the fandom - the results will show the fandom_id in the link. So, like, I've still got fairychangeling's page open, Thor is fandom_id 245368, MCU is 414093, Good Omens is 114591, etc. Again, these IDs are stable - fandom_id=27 will ALWAYS be Supernatural, no matter who the writer is. AND, since Wayback treats every single one of these urls as unique, even if "users/(username)/works"/"users/(username)/pseuds/(username)/works" don't work, "users/(username)/works?fandom_id=27" or "users/(username)/pseuds/(username)/works?fandom_id=27" might. And you know what comes next - yes, it's try every variation again!

Trick 5: check every capture!

Captures on Wayback are a moment in time, which means there's always a chance that each one will be different. Trying to find a work that a user wrote in 2011, but Wayback /works is only showing works from 2021 on the first page, and going to page 2 produces a dead link? Try going to the oldest capture. Try going through every single capture, until you find the title you want, if you find the title you want. The /works page wasn't captured at all? Go through every old version of their main page, and see if there's any version of it where the story you want was in the 6 most recent works they posted. Etc. Try every capture on every variation of the /users/(username) links. Test and test and test until you either find it or you've exhausted your options.

Finding lost fics is about patience and about exhausting every option before you give up. All these small variations that look like nothing? Are another chance that Wayback may have captured the work. Skipping one isn't gonna do you any favors. There's never a guarantee. Lots is simply not there. But - more is there then you'll think if you just try one link then give up.

But I'm not looking for a list of their works, I'm looking for a specific work!

The above tricks are what I use when, for example, I've just heard a person deleted their account, and I'm trying to build as complete a list as possible of the works that have been deleted. Further, even if Wayback hasn't captured the actual work, the /(username) page and the /works page will have the links. Sometimes, those links will help you discover the work was orphaned or moved to anon instead of actually deleted. Other times, you'll click it, and bam, the fic will be right there in Wayback! Still other times, it won't be...or at least not apparently. But, sure enough, there are tricks around that too. Before you give up and assume a fic isn't in Wayback at all, you can try...

Trick 1: Remove the chapter part of the link

So, you've got the link to your fic - lets use, idk, "Carry On" by TamrynEradani (I haven't actually tested this as an example yet, hopefully it works lmao for everything I need to do here... lmao).

The original link to Carry On (found on ao3feed-destiel):

http://archiveofourown.org/works/775352/chapters/1458361

AO3 assigns every work a unique number AND every chapter a unique number. If you put in a work without the "/chapters/####" part in AO3, it auto-routes you to chapter 1 and fills in the chapter number. But, not to beat this dead horse again - Wayback doesn't know how to do that! It's entirely literally. It captures only the link, exactly as the link was fed to it. Thus, if you put that link into Wayback? It gets no results. BUT, if you remove the "/chapters/1458361" part (it actually DID loop me to the chapter ID, but when I put it in WITH the Chapter ID, it found nothing - welcome to the joys and vagaries of searching for deleted fics in Wayback...)?

There's Carry On...at least sort of! Because yes, there's still a problem - that pesky "Proceed" button. Because you can't log into Wayback as if it were AO3, and Wayback is (again) literal, you can often end up in annoying cycle where (with Mature and Explicit works) you just get looped back to the "Proceed" page over and over again. There are a couple ways you can try to bypass this.

Trick 2: Check past captures!

Are we learning yet? Yep, this is a repeat. Often, going through every capture will find one or more where, for whatever reason, the Proceed page just...isn't in the way. I have no idea why that's the case, but it works - it's how I opened that HazelDomain fic above, for example. And, it works for Carry On, too - when I tried a different capture of the exact same URL?

There it is!

However, even if that doesn't work, you still have recourse.

Trick 3: the "?view_adult_work=true" trick.

When you hit that "Proceed" button, AO3 auto-adds on "?view_adult_work=true" but (hits the horse with a stick again) Wayback doesn't know that necessarily, unless you tell it. So, you can sometimes bypass the endless-loop-of-proceed problem by giving it the direct link instead. In this case...

http://archiveofourown.org/works/775352?view_adult_work=true"

or

http://archiveofourown.org/works/775352/chapters/1458361?view_adult_work=true

(this trick actually DOESN'T work with Carry On, but it DOES work sometimes, especially with one shot mature/explicit works. That said, the "check every capture" trick works more often, so definitely try that first).

Okay, so...getting somewhere, but! Carry On is 34 chapters, and this one I've found in Wayback (it's here by the way - Wayback links? Also stable. https://web.archive.org/web/20131126180609/http://archiveofourown.org/works/775352/chapters/1458361) is showing just the first chapter. And when I try to go to Chapter 2? It gets caught up in that goddamn "Proceed for 18+" thing again, and there are only two captures now, and WHAT DO?"

Trick 4: The "?view_full_work=true" trick

There are two ways to implement this trick. One is easy - when you're on the page in Wayback, you see that "Entire Work" button over the tags box? YA JUST CLICK IT! It's like magic! At least, it's magic when it works. (It does, in this case - if you want to read all of Carry On and don't want to track it down? https://web.archive.org/web/20130911072416/http://archiveofourown.org/works/775352?view_full_work=true tada!)

And see the difference there? it's the same link, just with ?view_full_work=true added to the end! So, if you've found yourself in a position where you can't get by the "Proceed" loop, OR where you try to go to Chapter 1, try every link variation, and get nothing? You can always still try:

http://archiveofourown.org/works/######?view_full_work=true

Because there's always a chance that Wayback captured that even if it didn't capture the other variations.

Unforth...I've read all this...I've tried everything...I still couldn't find the thing! What can I dooooooo....

At this point? You've mostly exhausted what you can try in Wayback. But! Wayback actually isn't the only way to find a lost fic, it's just the most obvious and most easily used by the public. There are a few others!

1. I already tagged @/destielfanfic, so I won't again, but they're a great resource for finding deleted fics that authors have said "yes you may distribute," and they've also got a list of authors who've indicated "no." I used their lists as the base for mine (and their head mod and I trade notes, and fics, semi-regularly and have for years). So, I mentioned Fossarian above? Well, you can find Fossarian fics for download by going to destielfanfic, searching for author Fossarian, and going through the links - for example, "All the Hours Wound" is available in ePub format right here!

2. If you're willing to delve into Livejournal, spnstoryfinders (https://spnstoryfinders.livejournal.com/) is a still-active community that helps find all sorts of missing SPN stories (not just Destiel) and often posts will have links for x-posts, help with finding alts/different names people have used, or have people volunteering to distribute if contacted. Honestly, personally, I'm too shy to actually contact those people, and even if you're braver than I if they haven't posted since 2015 it's anyone's guess if you'll still be able to reach them, but it's always worth a try!

3. Me. Ask me. Even if it's not on my list. Drop me a note. I know tricks, as you can see, and I'm just really experienced at this point. I've been doing this for years. And, even if I did list most of the tricks I know above, I probably forgot something, and I also have the time (...well, sometimes I do, like when I'm not spending 2.5 hrs writing blog posts about how to use Wayback lmao), and I might know pseuds for a person you don't, and I have contacts who have collections, and, and, and...

4. Speaking of collections, the Profound Bond Discord mods graciously gave my archive a chat room (it's #fic-archive-project in the collections section of the server). AND, people who are on that server who have large private fic collections can opt to give themselves the @/archivist role, and when things get deleted or when we look for things, even if I can't find it, I can tag the other archivists and see if anyone else has it. When I exhaust MY options? That's where I go. So. You can too, you don't need me to mediate that, just join the Discord.

5. There's a smaller, Wayback-esque archive webpage called http://archive.is/. It has way less in it, but I've occasionally had luck on there finding LJ stuff that Wayback didn't have.

6. As a last ditch, you can always try Google. For example, if I google: tamryneradani "carry on" destiel download - the only damn result (I made this search up off the top of my head without testing it so I'm glad it worked lmao) is shiphitsthefans's master post of TamrynEradani fic which includes download links, because Tamryn made it clear from the moment they deleted that they didn't mind distribution (I was here then, which is how I know that...). So, like, literally, you want to read Carry On, yes I linked it above on Wayback but you can also just download the e-book from this post. There are all kinds of things in all kinds of pokey places on the internet. There's a small old archive that got permission from LJ authors to PDF their works and posted about it, with links, on Tumblr, and now a lot of those originals are deleted (I don't have the link sorry, I didn't bother to save it after I downloaded everything they had) but the Tumblr posts are still up and the DL links that still work. There's master posts for fics that have been deleted but the master post still has a functional link to a full PDF. Stuff is everywhere and you don't know unless you check.

There's so, so, so much Destiel, and so much as been deleted over the years. When you look, sometimes you'll strike gold right away by just plugging the link into Wayback and YAY THERE'S THE THING, and sometimes you'll spend an hour looking and think you finally finally have it and get so close and that last PDF link on the last place you had to check after everything else didn't pan out will be broken and you'll kind of want to burn down the internet, but...you'll know you tried.

This is how I built this archive - that, and downloading as much as possible before it was deleted, so that once it was gone, I didn't have to find it, cause I already had it. Basically every fic marked as "deleted and looking for copy" on my list? I tried all of this and still couldn't find it. Not always - sometimes I just don't have time - but. When I have the time, I check, and I even occasionally check again, just in case I missed something the first time. This is how it goes. You try, and you hope, and sometimes you'll succeed, and sometimes you won't. It's hard, but if you want the fic bad enough...you do the thing.

So. This is my general tutorial on how to use Wayback. What you do with that information is up to you. Don't ask me for help finding links for things I've said I won't distribute, but if you're willing to do the leg work and try the above strategies...well, authors can't do much about Wayback, they lost that level of control the instant they posted their works, and it's there to be accessed by anyone who knows how (if it's there at all, anyway, which, well, sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't).

Now you know.

Go forth and get the fic.

(And if you know of, or learn, some tricks I don't know? PLEASE DO TELL! I am always ready to learn more!)

[thestalwartheart]

(This is another post but they're both versatile about topping and bottoming in my brain, okay? Okay. But you do you.)

oh lol no i completely agree with you, that's why i put "bottom" in quotes. i just mean, a lot of people in fandom have very old fashioned views about same sex relationships, and one of the most common is that gay couples are just remakes of straight ones - with a "man" (top) and a "woman (bottom) - and therefore q, being the skinny one, is the woman which means he's the bottom, which means he must be short too. it's like an ourosborus of homophobic stereotypes. and so we end up with 4876847684 fics where q is now tiny just because people want to write him getting railed by a great big hulking manly bond.

We're definitely on the same page. Sorry, my little "you do you" line was aimed at the more general "you" 😊

So, obviously Bottom!Q and Top!Bond isn't a homophobic take just because it exists (I know that's not at all what you're saying anon, but I wanted to clarify in case there are any anons ready to jump into my inbox and accuse me of having that opinion). The specific type of writing and characterisation that gets padded around Bottom!Q and Top!Bond, though? It can absolutely be indicative of persistent stereotypes. Sometimes I don't think it's getting all that much better as time goes on, either. Even years after people stopped expliclty warning for M/M in their fics like it was something gross (RIP LJ and slash warnings and *lemon starts here* line breaks), I feel like reading through fandom slang often feels like a game of Wait is This a Joke, A Reclaimed Slur, or is it Actually Homophobia? Obviously it's also a problem IRL. People see a skinny gay man and immediately think "bottom" which is tragic.

I see evidence of it all the time in fic comments and tumblr tags where Q is described as either cute or adorable, and Bond is described as the hottest, most irresistible, most jacked man in the world. And it's not just Q's characterisation that suffers! If fic writers only see Bond and Q as those things it removes a lot of their agency as characters to act in really interesting and unexpected ways.

All this isn't to say people can't have their preferences, but as is the case in the wider world of dating and romance, preferences don't exist in a vacuum. When you see these assumptions over and over again, you start to see a pattern and it's clear what's driving the thinking behind it (which is, to be clear, centuries of cultural and social conditioning around gendered constructs and homophobia).

Anyway, I happen to think Q's really hot, and would occasionally be quite domineering if he was in the right frame of mind. He can be that way from the top or the bottom, IMO. And there's space for him getting railed too. But even that doesn't have to be written just one way. I often wish it was written with a lot more bantering/bickering.

There's a wider point to be made here about sex in fic often not feeling anything like sex in real life, which is messy and intimate and and (if it's good sex), starts with wanting to feel good, and not with implicit assumptions about who's doing what. Because we're all WAY more complex as individuals than media ever reflects us to be, and put two or more complex people in a room together to have sex? If you're doing it right, it's not going to feel like rote stereotyping. I sometimes wish both fic writers and romance writers had a better understanding of that.

Okay I feel the need to clarify if you've got this far and your opinions are different from mine and anon's, that's okay, we can all disagree. You can still want to see Q get railed, I promise.

Thanks for the ask, Anon! ❤️

[kirathehyrulian]

Non-Challenge Art 🧱Another Brick in the Wall🧱  Art Master Post

(right click, open image in new tab images for better quality view) (Please do not edit/alter. Feel free to reblog, but please do not repost. At the very least please give me credit.)

Artist: @kirathehyrulian | Ao3 | LJ Author: @road-rhythm​ | Ao3 | Storylink: Ao3 Pairing: Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester Fic Rating: Explicit Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Word Count: 19,898 Summary: When Sam vanishes on a case, it feels like every nightmare Dean's had since he got his brother's soul back is coming true. Waking up buried alive doesn't exactly make it Sam's favorite day, either. The Winchesters will do anything to save each other: that’s almost a natural law. But in nature, everything has a cost, and Sam and Dean have a bad history of not examining the price tag.

For more art from me please check out my “myart” tag here on Tumblr.   👇(Artist Notes, Bonus art and Spoilers below the cut) 👇

Artist notes:

“A room in darkness. In the middle of the floor, a thing on fire. Sam came near. It was a heart. The heart burned, but did not char. The flames licked along the surface of the organ in blue and orange, but the flesh within was fresh, perfect, wet, and red. Underneath the fire, the heart pulsed. He took it in his hands, in awe of its beauty. He trembled to touch it. It seemed he had never seen heat or light before now, and in the logic of dreams, he knew what he had to do with it. He was always going to do it. He raised it to his mouth. When he ate, he felt it burn all the way down.Then he woke.” - Another Brick in the Wall Chapter 18

Months, this art project has been in the works for months. If I look back at the text logs, it was all the way back in May, this year, when I started trying to crack down on it. Part of why it took so long was because I felt so drained in a lot of different ways. But, hey better late than never, right?

Normally, I have more things to say in this section, but because this set was stretch out over months I don’t remember everything off the top of my head. So, I’ll just go with a few bullet points that come to mind: •I know I started out wanting to do something more abstract but that went out the window when I started drawing. What can I say, I prefer defined art. I did try there at the beginning, though, I promise. •Sam’s green because first of all he’s dreaming of the sewer he’s trapped in (and sewers to me mean green atmosphere) and it’s supposed to be otherworldly/strange because it’s a dream. I promise it had nothing to do with the Grinch or Kermit. Though that was a funny happenstance. •The heart was originally going to be red surrounded in flames, which was closer to what the text described, but then I saw a reference of a heart on fire that looked like it was lit up like the sun. Which I think still fits the dream’s description still. So, I switched tracks on that part because that was like bright sun heart. •Originally what the blue and orange flames description meant just a single flame with the blue color as a core and the orange flame at the tips. Think of the type of flame you’d see on the stove top. But I thought it meant separate orange and blue flames, and once I had that idea it was hard to accept in my head. Plus, a lot of references of things on fire didn’t incorporate that combination. So, that’s how I end up doing what I did. •The hardest part was probably trying to figure out the heart/fire, runner up or alternatively how to draw an open mouth Sam. Thank god for the many Jared/Sam pics easily accessible out there. •I’ve been listening to a lot of Doja Cat lately, the main song was the one I linked below but really it was the hour long vid version, several times. •I made the title card last because I completely forgot about it till the end. So, I quickly made it mostly within a day. My favorite part about the process for the title card was deciding the font with author. We tried out four, one was a joke font, but I said I was going to try them all out and I did.

Idk, if anyone has any other questions they want to ask send me an ask or reply or reblog I’ll try to get back to you.

Bonus:

These pieces just show a little bts of the art. I removed most of the fire and the blood and took away the black filter so you can see the foundation of the work that was built upon. The fire covers up some of Sam’s face and I was proud of some of those profiles which I had to sacrifice for the fire in the final pieces, lol.

🎶Musical inspiration or just music I was listening to during (watch/listen at your own risk):

[rollercoasterwords]

algorithms are destroying the world make your own gd decisions about shit

if you hate freedom so much go read a google ads round robin fanfic on ff.n (I think Michelin and Bridgeport are doing the enemies to lovers back and forth rn) or go 😳 at whatever happened to lj

or change all the names and sell your erotica to bellsaplus; just know that the writing is better, and the porn is more diverse on ao3

🥂

(I say porn but JEEZ guys even if you’re reading nothing but gen-fic the writing is still usually trying to say something unlike the useless pap that capitalist “content creators” churn out — to generate clicks in order to generate data on what people do everyday sitting and watching or better—-shopping. that data is then sold to other bidders. please protect the plentiful, the beautiful, the ao3. god knows what anyone would say if they say my ao3 history)

wow ok coming in hot! i'm assuming this message is meant to be like...ranting at me the way u would to a friend on facetime and that the "you" you're yelling at isn't actually me? and i am also going to take a wild guess and say that this is a response to the tiktokification essay i wrote that has escaped its enclosure and is now running wild across tumblr. so.

yes i agree we need to protect ao3 and yes i agree anything made for the sole purpose of getting as many people to click on it as possible is probably going to be pretty soulless but i feel like this rant is maybe getting slightly away from what the original intent of my post so i'm just gonna use this as an opportunity to address a few things i've seen across people's responses that have made me like :/ (warning this gets long lmao)

the tiktokification essay was not intended to be an all-encompassing analysis of the way things are across every fandom space connected to ao3. like. i am pretty secluded over in my little corner of marauders-fandom tumblr and i generally post my little essays expecting maybe like...10-20 people to interact with the post? like, when i post stuff on this blog, it's just because when i start thinking about something i can't really relax until i sit down and write my thoughts out and organize them. so when i'm posting those thoughts on tumblr it usually feels to me like the equivalent of facetiming a friend and rambling at them, except the friend is my little handful of beloved tumblr mutuals <3 anyway, i know the post is called "the tiktokification of ao3" which is a very broad statement, but that's just because i like pithy titles. if i had known it was going to run amok across tumblr i probably would have been a little more intentional with my phrasing, but oh well! what i did do is specify in the post that i was only talking about the marauders fandom, because that's literally the only fandom space that i am a part of. it's interesting to see how widespread the stuff i was talking about seems to be across different fandoms, but for anyone who has interacted with the post to essentially just be like - "ok but this isn't true everywhere/in every case"....cool! that's because i was talking about a phenomenon i have observed specifically within the marauders fandom.

it was also not intended to be me shaking my fist and cursing the youth, nor was i trying to invite like...an "us vs. them" mindset between older and younger members of fandom spaces. this is where i've seen some stuff that's made me a little like...hm. because, ok. i am one of those people who's sort of in-between the like...older versus younger sects of fandom spaces. and so i see the ageism that gets aimed towards older people by a lot of younger teens, and i understand why a lot of older adults are fed up with young fans and feel defensive, and i get that teens can be annoying on the internet. on the other hand, i still very clearly remember when i was an Annoying Teen on the Internet, and it was because i was still just...learning, y'know? like. i was just coming into contact with complex ideas about emotion and morality and relationships and everything, and that is just part of being on the internet together. there will always be shitty people, yes, but there will also always be people learning, and especially when those people are young teens, i personally tend to try and start out by giving them the benefit of the doubt. like, i tried to be clear in the post and also included in the tags (though those do get lost when the post gets spread around) that i wasn't trying to condemn anyone for engaging in the behavior i was talking about, because i do genuinely think that a lot of it is simply coming from a place of not knowing any better. so, while y'all can vent however you want on your own blogs and i do understand the frustration, i just want to make it clear that my own intention was to say - hey! younger marauders fans! here are some things to think about moving forward in how you interact with fic, since you have maybe grown up with only one model of social media, unlike those of us who grew up with the internet (i was literally born the same year google was invented) and have seen various examples of social media and observed how it's changed over the years. and it was also intended to say - hey! older marauders fans! if you're scratching your head and wondering wtf is going on with younger fans, consider that they maybe genuinely do not know better and this might help explain some of the roadblocks when it comes to trying to communicate with each other about our fandom spaces.

i did not intend to imply that there is anything wrong with wanting people to read your fanfiction. this is another thing that like. i might have spent some more time clarifying had i known how many people were going to be reading the post. but i did state very clearly that "those sharing their work online might be seeking community, but that is fundamentally different from seeking an audience." it is completely natural and understandable to want people to read your writing!! i actually made a separate post about this after the tiktokification essay but obviously they're not going around as a pair lol. however, i stand by the statement that writing fanfiction with a goal of going "viral" or just getting as much interaction as possible is not sustainable and will not bring you deep or lasting joy. idk i'm not gonna go on about this here if u want to know my thoughts on social media culture rot u can scroll through my blog i've talked abt it in a few different posts.

i was not trying to say that negativity is a new phenomenon in fandom spaces. a few people have interacted with the essay and said something along the lines of "i disagree with this"/"this isn't accurate" because there always have been and always will be people in fandom spaces who are entitled and rude and criticize fic. which like...cool! i'm sure that's true. i do think you missed the point of the post a little bit. it was specifically about a phenomenon in the marauders fandom involving the way that changes in social media over recent years have fundamentally altered the way we view online interaction, and the way i have observed that bleeding over into the marauders fandom. it wasn't just about general negativity in terms of things like comments and messages so much as it was about how expectations relating to influencer culture and virality have led to things like...people making tiktoks about "jegulus fics i hate" or fics going viral on tiktok and people then interacting with the writers as though they are the ones who made those tiktoks. and granted, i have only really been involved in this fandom for a single year, so maybe i'm just wrong about how new this is! but the tiktok stuff at least can't be older than like...2020. so. i do actually do think it's valid to talk about how changes in social media culture might be affecting the ways people interact with ao3 and fic, and i do think there's more to it than just "people will always be negative and entitled sometimes!"

i was not trying to say that we have a right to treat influencers/people posting shit on other social media sites as though they are products. this is another thing that a few people have felt the need to add on, which...okay. nothing wrong with wanting to clarify that. again, if i'd known the post was going to get so much attention, i might have spent some more time talking about it. but i'll just clarify here - my observations about the way capitalism gives rise to an influencer culture that essentially leads to viewing people as products are just that. they are observations. they are not normative statements. just because i understand why we interact with influencers like that does not mean that i think we should interact with influencers like that. however, there is a difference in an influencer whose job is content creation on social media versus an ao3 writer, and the purpose of my essay was to talk about that. saying "we shouldn't treat ao3 writers this way" does not mean "but we SHOULD treat all influencers this way."

anyway, as i warned at the beginning, this got very long -- and honestly, each of these points could probably be its own separate essay, but....i'm tired rn lol. i know that most of the people reblogging the tiktokification essay probably will not come all the way to my blog and run across this post, but i'm just leaving it here because i get grumpy easily and it's annoying to see people misinterpreting or missing the point, so i want to have all the little things i've thought about addressing in one place.

and anon - the main reason i say you may have been getting slightly away from the original point is just

1 - it had nothing to do specifically with porn, and that seems to be mostly what you're talking about? which like. real. but also just wasn't really part of the original post lmao

2 - you seem pretty angry, which again is valid, but i'm just...not. like i feel like u came into my inbox wanting to rant back and forth, and the thing is that i wasn't really intending to rant in that essay! like i said, i'm not necessarily angry at the people i've seen asking for algorithms, because i think a lot of them genuinely don't know better because they have only ever used social media that is algorithm-based, and to me that's mostly just sad and something i wanted to pick apart and piece back together like a puzzle, so. apologies for hijacking your rant to as an excuse to write a whole 'nother essay lmao i appreciate ur energy tho <3

[shadowfae]

We’re all pretty aware that the tumblr otherkin community is at a huge decline; I was wondering if you have any theories as to why that is?

American Protestantism, the decline of queer oppression in North America and the AIDS crisis, helicopter parenting, web 3.0, morality politics, and  Tumblr’s porn ban; roughly in that order and rolled up into one bombshell that was a few years in the coming but nobody really saw it and understood it until it was far too late.

That was a mouthful and probably only made sense if you follow current cyberpolitical theory. For some of you reading this, as with every other hot take I have this has a chance of being passed around, that alone is enough. But for others who had no idea what I just said and need the ELI5 version, let me explain that. Buckle up, this’ll be a long one, and will go into fandom history a bit as well because it is actually relevant.

As we know, tumblr is a very American-centric platform. Twitter is also this way, but less so, but tumblr has it bad. Now, I’m ‘lucky’ in the fact that I’m Canadian and a twenty minute drive from the American border, so that puts me in the ‘privileged’ majority. (I say privileged because I’m not really sure what else to call it. Most of the information going around about politics either directly affects me or indirectly affects me approximately one or two links of contact away. Someone who’s only influenced by American politics because it makes their sister’s online friends sad is not going to be privileged in that way.)

This means that American politics and their social climate overwhelmingly affects tumblr’s social climate. This also bleeds through into other fandom spaces, on twitter, instagram, and Pixiv to name a few places; but here’s where I spend the majority of my time so here’s what I’ve witnessed.

America’s main religion, as far as I understand (from the raised agnostic and currently neopagan view I have), is some weirdass capitalistic-Protestantism that is so many miles from what the actual Bible says that if I were a betting man and knew more about cults than I did, I’d say it’s some weird fucking cult and never set foot in the country again for any reason that isn’t gaming free shipping through a PO box. If you have no idea what I just said but are at least vaguely familiar with Christianity, this graphic explains it pretty well. So we can see there’s some glaring issues with that ideal.

The decline of queer oppression and the rise of queer rights in North America, which is to tenderly include my own country but we all know when people say ‘in NA’ they mean ‘America, and Canada where it applies because the right-wing Republicans are really good in the propaganda department to convince everyone that Mexico is a drug-lords-and-anarchy wasteland to the point where even I don’t actually know what’s down there other than bad drivers and heat’; means two things. One, it’s a good thing by a long shot and do not mistake this as me thinking queer oppression being lessened is a bad thing. But two, it means that thanks to the AIDS crisis, queer folks lost a lot of first-person sources as history.

The queer elders in NA who survived are typically either a) bitter anarchists who are often POC, probably still dirt poor and do recreational drugs or b) university-tenured TERFs (trans exclusionary radical feminists). Category A are the people who Republicans have deemed worthless in every way, because racism, queerphobia, ableism, and all the other ways to be wrong and different and Evil that they can’t handle, because Jeezus would never want them to actually learn to love someone who wasn’t just like them, and they don’t have the compassion to do better. Category B are the people who want to be different in just a teensie little bit, typically with TERFs they want to be lesbians, but they don’t want to challenge the status quo. They’re fine with the way things work, they just want to be on top oppressing others over ripping the whole damn thing down and building a more forgiving system.

Now, due to all those ‘isms and the cheerfully malicious aid of the Republicans, pun not intended but drives home the cruelty of it all, we also see the rise of helicopter parenting. The invention of the internet did not really help this. Basically what you’ve got is a whole bunch of parents who saw the civil rights movement, just got access to the internet and things going viral, know the world is changing, and like all parents, they’re scared for their children. Now instead of parents knowing one or two people in their classes who just went missing one day and everyone assumed they ran away, they hear about eight homicides in the city of kids going to parks at night and dying. The Satanic Panic was another event around this time that contributed to that, but I’ll let you research that one.

This means that all of these parents, instead of doing what their parents typically did and let their kids wander off for the day so long as they’re back by sundown, they can’t let their children out of their sight. There might be a freak accident where their child is decapitated on the playground swing! Their baby might get murdered by an evil Satanist walking home from school! Their dearest darling might go online and tell their address to someone who’s got a 100% chance of being a pedophile who will show up and kidnap them in the night!

…You get the idea. 

Combine those three things I just established, what we’ve got is a lot of queer kids who have a lot of internalized shame for being different and wrong, because they’re queer, and they can’t find spaces offline to be themselves, because all of the elders who would do that are dead and/or inaccessible and their parents won’t let them go to any clubs that aren’t school-related, which they’ll never find a GSA or queer club because Republicans, ‘isms, propaganda, and the war on Category A queer adults have all done their best to ensure that those spaces don’t exist.

So you have a generation of kids who I am the youngest of. The first generation on the internet. The late Web 1.0 (usenets and Geocities) and early Web 2.0 (livejournal was the big one, ff.net too, also 4chan but fuck those guys) generation. What we were taught was: trust nobody on the internet with your real info no matter how much you like them, this is a wilderness and any crimes that happen won’t be punished or seen so don’t put yourself in a position where you’re going to be the victim of one, and everything you put online is never getting taken down so don’t put anything up that you’re not willing to have on the front page of your local newspaper.

This worked out pretty well, actually! You had kids who knew that if they got in trouble, there was no backup coming to save them. Because the form that backup might take - parents and police - wasn’t going to help. Best case, they’d be banned from their friends and online support groups for being queer. Worst case, they’d be jailed and put in juvie and conversion therapy and turn to drugs and become evil Satanists just like everyone says they secretly are already. So they learned very quickly to take care of themselves. Nobody was going to save them, so they learned to not need saving.

And then, well, Web 2.0 shifted to Web 3.0. Livejournal died because parents - the Warriors for Innocence was the big name - went “gasp how horrible my children are being exposed to the evil pedos and homosexuals they’re going to do drugs and die of AIDS!”. Which is uh. It’s filled with a lot of bigotry, and I’m not excusing them - absolutely I am not - but you can kind of see where they’re coming from, if you tilt your head and squint.

Either way, LJ died, tumblr took its place, Facebook was fast taking off, and the fandom folks who had seen mailing lists go inactive, web admins take their fanfic sites down due to copyright, entire fandoms burnt to the ground in flame wars, said ‘fuck that we’re making our own place’ and that’s how AO3 got made.

That’s important. A lot of folks move to AO3, because well, the rules let them. The rules say ‘you can throw literally anything up here so long as it’s fan content and is not literally illegal, so we don’t get taken down’. It’s a swing for the first generation internet users, those kids who know this place is a wilderness and are carving out our own sanctuary.

But. The children under us. The children for whom AIDS is a nightmarish fairy tale, for whom the ghost stories are conversion therapy, for whom know they can’t really talk to their parents about being queer but can trust they probably won’t get kicked out over it. The children who haven’t spent ten seconds without supervision except online, and their reaction isn’t ‘oh thank god I’m finally free to express myself’ but ‘if I get in trouble, who will protect me?’.

And there’s nobody there. Because we went in knowing there was no backup. And that was fine. But now, the actual adults have figured out that hey uh, maybe we should make cyber laws? Maybe we should make revenge porn and grooming children over the internet crimes? And they grew up with that. They grew up learning that no, even if your parents are suffocating and controlling, they’re always be there for you! Some adult will always be there to protect you!

That isn’t the case. It’s not. But they expect it, because it’s always been done for them. They don’t really want to change the status quo, because that means doing it themselves. They can’t do that, because they don’t know how, they’ve been controlled for every single part of their lives thanks to helicopter parenting and without that control, they don’t know how to keep their lives together, and they demand someone come and control it for them, without restraining them.

Effectively, they want someone to ensure they never face the consequences of their actions. Helicopter parents will rescue you from whatever you did, because you’re their precious baby and it doesn’t matter if you punched a kid, you can do no wrong and the other kid clearly started it.

But being queer is doing wrong. Being queer is something Jeezus doesn’t approve of. So they want to make it something he could approve of! But if it’s too off what they consider to be okay, if it’s too different and weird and wrong and evil, that can’t do, that’s still bad, and they’re precious angels, and children, and minors, why are we the adults not protecting them and letting them see it? Why aren’t we being just like their parents  but queer-friendly, why aren’t we protecting the children?

The adults who taught us were the children of those who died as a result of AIDS. The eldest of my generation knew some of them personally. My therapist’s younger brother died at 20 of AIDS, and she told me what it was like. But they don’t have that. These kids of web 3.0, they don’t have that. What they have is over-controlling parents, and the expectation that someone will always be there to protect them but hopefully in ways that don’t hurt them this time, no real understanding of why Category A queer elders are the way they are, and so much internalized shame that they have to do some pretty fancy logic-leaping to keep them from collapsing entirely.

They can’t turn into Category A queer youngsters, because they don’t know how to unravel the system around them, because they’ve never had to actually make choices in their lives and live with the consequences, because they don’t have the example of how to do it. They can’t unravel their internalized shame because again, that’s hard and they don’t have their parents to take away the consequences and pain. It doesn’t come easy to them, so it may as well not come at all.

But, you ask, if Category A queer elders aren’t around to teach the kids, then how are they learning anything positive at all? Well, Category B, our university-tenured TERFs, who don’t want to change the status quo but want to just be at the top of it instead.

For a lot of kids who don’t know how to make hard choices but want to be queer, this is an extremely attractive option. But when they go online to queer spaces, a lot of them say fuck terfs, we don’t support your hate, and they go ‘yeah okay that makes sense’. They can say fuck terfs without ever actually questioning why terfs are bad. They’re Bad and Evil, just like drug addicts, just like fairytale nazis, just like the evil homophobes.

And we saw them say ‘yeah fuck terfs’ and we were like, ‘aight you got it’ and we never questioned if they actually understood us. They didn’t. They didn’t, and we didn’t do enough to fix it, because not enough of us realized the problem. So terfs got a little sneaky. They hid behind dogwhistles and easy little comments, hiding their rhetoric in queer theory that you’ll absolutely miss if you just memorize it and never actually question it and understand why that point is being made.

This goes back to America sucking, because their school system is far more focused on rote memorization over actual logic and understanding of the text. They’re engaging with queer theory the way they’ve been taught, which is memorize and don’t think, don’t question. Besides, questioning and understanding is hard. Being shown different points of view and asked what they think is not only hard but requires them to go against all of the conditioning that says to just listen and agree and never question it, which goes back to tearing the system and internalized shame down, and we’ve established they can’t do that so naturally they don’t do that.

This begets, then, the rise of exclusionary politics. They’re turning into Category B queer youngsters, because we told them ‘hey that’s a terf talking point what are you doing’ and they never questioned why. They learned you can do all sorts of things, just don’t say X, Y, or Z, because they never thought deeply about it.

The children who have grown on Web 3.0 do not want to do any heavy lifting to make things easier for themselves long-run. They want to do as little as possible and have things get better for them. There isn’t enough of us left in Category A, because Category B terfs are very good at recruiting young folks and Cat. A is overwhelming poor, dead, and easily dismissed in the system as evil and bad, so we can’t exactly convince the young folks to listen. If all of the young kids could agree to tear down the system, a lot more older folks might listen. Change always starts with the young, and there’s a reason for that.

But Republicans have figured out, if you get people fighting, they never put together a force that can actually stop you. TERFs, who want the exact same thing as Republicans but with themselves on top, are doing this to queer youth, and Cat. A elders can’t fight back because there isn’t enough of them and the odds are against them, and the young folk like me who follow their lead.

People can kinda handle gay people. It’s not so far from the acceptable normal that it’s impassable. But you want them to handle kinky people? Gay people of colour? Kinky gay people of colour? Trans people? Those are bridges too far to step across. The original idea was to get the foot in the door with marriage equality and inch our way through with racial equality, sex positivity, dismantling ableism and perisexism (forgive me if that isn’t the word for anti-intersex ‘ism), and see if we can’t patch up the system instead of inciting a civil war over this and have to tear down the system entirely.

Well, we might’ve managed that if not for AIDS being the perfect ‘Jeezus is killing all the evil gay people for being sinners’ propaganda machine. As it stands now, not a chance in hell. So long as Republicans and terfs keep everyone fighting, nobody has the power to dismantle their empire, and they stay in power.

So then, you ask me, “Lu what the fuck does that have to do with the decline of otherkinity on tumblr???” and now that you’ve got all that background knowledge, here is your answer.

Those children who want their experiences curated for them and the evil icky content they don’t like to be gone because it disgusts them and anything that disgusts them is clearly sinful problematic and should be destroyed, are what we call ‘antishippers’, or anti for short.

They like being progressive. Sort of. They learned what Republicans and terfs have honed to a fine talent: keep people fighting, hold them to a bar they have to constantly make or risk being ostracized, and harass the people who don’t play along into getting out of your sight forever. Sound familiar?

They learned of otherkinity, and particularly fictionkind, because web 3.0 means if something goes viral on one site, it doesn’t just go viral on that site, it makes it to worldwide newspapers and twitter and nobody ever, ever fucking forgets it. They realized the following: “Hey wait, if I’m this character for realsies, not only does it help me deal with the internalized shame I’ve done nothing to actually fix because that takes work, I can also tell these people who draw gross content I don’t like they’re hurting me personally, and that actually sounds credible, and I can shame them into stopping”.

If this is your first time here and that sounds sickening, it damn well should, and I am so, so sorry that any of us had to witness this, and I am more sorry I and everyone else who personally witnessed this didn’t realize what was going on and put a stop to it. I answer asks and browse the tags and clear up misinformation and it isn’t just a genuine desire to help. It’s damage control, and my own way of trying to deal with the guilt of not stopping this. I’m well aware I couldn’t have seen it coming, I was a teenager myself still learning and no one person has that much power. I still feel like I should have done more, and I’ll do what I can to fix what’s within my power to fix.

So back to the story. This all culminates around 2016 or so. Trump wins the election, and every queer person ever knows they’re fucked, and the younger generation’s only ever heard horror stories, never seen actual oppression that this could bring. We’re all scared. We all don’t know what to do. Nobody has any answers or any control over the situation.

So they lash out. They attack others for drawing things they don’t like, for challenging them in literally any way, for asking them to reconsider the vile shit they just said, for so much as defending themselves from the harassment they just got. And when challenged, they yell “But I’m a minor! A literal child! How dare you attack me, clearly you get off on this, you evil pedophile!” and they sling around every insult in the book until one sticks. Pedophile is a pretty good one, so is abuser, and sometimes zoophile works out too. Freak is great, everyone gets right pissed off about it.

The fact that Category A queer elders were called pedophiles and freaks is not a fact they know or care about. The fact that they are quickly making every fandom community super toxic is also not a fact they care about. The fact that the ‘kin community has words and terminology and they actually mean shit, and the fact that they’re spreading misinformation faster than we can keep up with, are not facts they care about.

So they come in, take our terms, make it impossible for us to find new folks. They realize our anger is easily a power trip, because we’re already made fun of, so they get off on the little power they can find and make fun of us too, and then when we get rightfully annoyed and pissed off, they can hide behind being minors.

Then tumblr implements their porn ban, because nobody’s stopping them, because it isn’t profitable to have porn on here. Considering most of the otherkin community, and most fandom communities, are full of adults who do occasionally talk about NSFW things, and the fact that they’re just banning everyone who so much as breathes wrong, this begins the start of a mass exodus, scattering already fragile communities to twitter, pillowfort, dreamwidth, and a few other places. Largely, twitter, where you can’t make a post longer than a snappy comeback and where the algorithm is literally designed to piss you off as much as possible.

So community elders have largely left, because they can’t stand the drama and the pain of what’s happened, and that’s if they didn’t get banned for being kinky furries who do talk about how their kintypes merge with their sexuality. Most community members have also left or stopped talking about being ‘kin, because they get associated with antishippers and toxicity and it’s just not worth it. Those of us who are left get drowned out by misinformation and trolls and wishkin and antishippers who appropriate our terminology because it supports them getting a power trip, and whenever we argue, we get called pedophiles and freaks and worse.

And now there isn’t much left. I hope we get to find a better place. Othercon was a good place to talk about it, I did a whole panel (it’s on Youtube!) about what we want to do about it. But I don’t really have any answers. 

But to sum it all up... America’s political climate ultimately culminated in destroying queer spaces, and we survived, and then people who wanted to destroy smaller communities to get on top showed up and we were all but defenseless against something we had never, ever dealt with before on this scale.

One of my twitter mutuals mentioned how kinning and otherkin are now completely separate communities. It’s really the best I can do to keep hoping that continues, until nobody realizes the words are at all connected to each other. It’s the best anyone can hope for, now. I hate it. I hate every part of this. But maybe we can salvage what’s left.