#you know how many star trek fics i've read for a girl who hates the new movies and has never seen an episode of any of the shows?

[nancywheeeler]

ao3 history is between you and your gods and i respect that but also i am so noisy and thirsty and would love to know what you think your most reread fic(s) of the year would be

[lady-guts]

Question Tag Game Thingy

@dummerjan thank you for tagging me!! 🥰🥰

Current book I’m reading: I'm.... this is embarrassing, but I'm not actually reading any books right now 😬. I am reading some comics though, I need to go out and buy the last volume of MADK (it's a great, dark story about a boy who becomes a demon) and I'm always reading One Piece, that's kind of a lifelong commitment. Another manga I read last week and really recommend is The Guy She Was Interested in Wasn't a Guy at All. It's about two girls who bond (and fall in love) over their tastes in music

Last song I listened to: Flight 22 by Kali Uchis

Currently watching: The Boys and Jujutsu Kaisen. I'm loving The Boys! I don't know how I hadn't watched it before. I'm developing a bit of a weird obsession with The Deep, because he's so fucking pathetic, but not even in a good way, and I hate that they made him religious instead of introducing the idea that he would totally have monsterfucking fans. JJK is.... devastating? I haven't watched this week's ep yet, and at this point I'm watching it mostly for the incredible animation, and out of a morbid curiosity to see how many more characters can die

Current fic I’m reading: I'm not reading anything here wither, other than the works I'm subscribed for. This happens to me a lot if I start binge watching something, and at the pace I'm going I'll be deep in Ao3 in a couple of days

Next on my watchlist: Cherry Magic this weekend! And Dungeon Meshi next month, whenever it gets released

(I actually have a wip for an omegaverse Cherry Magic fic. Maybe I should re-read it and edit it a bit to get the first chapter out in honor of the release of the new series)

Current obsession: I'm making a new dressup game! (This is another reason I'm not reading much, I've been drawing a lot) It's a space (mostly Star Trek TOS) inspired thing, and it has options to choose between more feminine or masculine bodies. I'm very excited about this! Right now I'm in the process of finishing the clothes, and then I'll jump into the faces and hairstyles and other genetics to make different alien races

[lonelypond]

20 Fanfic Questions

@ryqoshay tagged me in this (yeah! answering questions is fun); if you are reading this and write fanfic, consider yourself tagged. I also like reading other people's answers.

How many fics do you have on Ao3?

105. Just broke the 100 barrier recently.

2. What's your total AO3 words count?

933,098

3. What fandoms do you write for?

Mostly Love Live. I'm excited about Wednesday and Wenclair, but I've only written one short fic and one unfinished LL crossover so far there. Have also written (crossovers with Love Live): Star Trek, Monthly Girls Nozaki Kun, Little Witch Academia and (pre JKK terfdom) Harry Potter.

4. What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

Casual Lunacy (complete) NicoMaki College Theatre Coffeeshop Werewolf AU, with Pablo Neruda poetry and Fangs, a musical adaptation of Dracula on the side. Maki's a werewolf, Nico's Nico, Rin's also a werewolf, Maki gets grounded, at least one universe cracks open, and all this happens before opening night.

Idol Protection Program (one shots) Present and future μ's. Nico (Idol) and Maki (Doctor) sneak off and get married, have two small children, DIa and Ruby, and end up hiding out from fame in Numazu. Lots of non linear short fics, some mainly with Aqours characters. Lots of shenanigans.

Parent Trap (ongoing) The official summary: Dr. Nishikino Maki is a single mother, not in search of anything besides a few quiet moments. Yazawa Nico is a singer on the rise who did a favor for an old friend. Are they more connected than they realize?

tl;dr Famous Nico and single mom Maki try to get together, but parents and paparazzi keep intruding,

What Are You Doing New Year's Eve (complete) My first Hallmark/Lifetime movie style Christmas fic. Doctor Maki Nishikino has new neighbors, celebrity singer Nico Yazawa and her siblings. HOA president Eli Ayase is not happy about someone famous in the neighborhood. Maki's business partner, Hanayo Koizumi is a HUGE Nico Ni fan. With her limited dating experience, how will Maki navigate all this extra holiday bustle?

Moonlight Becomes You: Apocalypse Midnight Dance Party (ongoing) Los Angeles: Maki's a DJ, Nico's an actress, Eli's a werewolf, we have BOTH μ's and Aqours, plus time travel, pizza, dancing, selkies, fallen angels, prophets, whatever the heck Hanamaru is, and a Mari party.

5. Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

Yes. First off, I think it's polite to respond, although I understand when authors don't. Mostly, I reply because I'm grateful when people take the time to interact. For Casual Lunacy, as sprawling as it is, it was a big help to me having a several regular commenters who helped me realize if things were unclear or if there were characters they wanted to know more about.

I don't get many comments now so there's an extra bounce in my step when someone posts one on a story.

6. What's the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

The Star Trek ones end on deliberate cliff hangers with characters actively endangered due to the format.

Perilous Pastel is one of the rare times I just let the characters be upset. Nico is not in the Christmas spirit, Covid has cancelled her tour, and she's feeling useless. There are also a couple of other Idol House stories that deal with bullying and rumors: Rooftop Run-In and Protect All Idols

7. What's the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

What Are You Doing New Year's Eve, my first Christmas movie based fic, I think, because it has an actual ending. You get the whole rom com experience in a neatly wrapped package.

8. Do you get hate on fics?

I have gotten some really awful comments on fanfiction.net. And sometimes, but only sometimes, I get a sense that certain people do not enjoy my NicoMaki perspectives.

9. Do you write smut. If so what kind?

Nope. I much prefer setting a mood to graphic descriptions. Plus, I think I'd be pretty bad at writing smut.

10. Do you write crossovers? What's the craziest one you've written?

I love crossovers. Reading and writing them. My theory is the more crossovers I write, the more people who might fall in love with Love Live ; ) For craziest, I think it was Teenage Mutant Ninja Idols, my Love Live X Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle one, where thanks to a Tumblr vote, *spoiler*, all the Love Live characters involved were werewolves. I want to revisit it.

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Don't know.

12. Have you ever had a fic translated?

Not aware of one.

13. Have you ever cowritten a fic before?

Yep. Adventures Of The U.S.S. Helicon

I'd been wanting to collaborate and vnvDarkangel and I were chatting about Maki as a Chief Medical Officer and general Star Trek lore one night on Twitter and decided to dive in. So far, we have five full episodes and one in progress.

14. What's your all-time favourite ship?

NicoMaki. I love their dynamic. It resonates and makes so much sense to me. I started reading NicoMaki and Love Live doujins, then fanfic, then watched the anime. As a demisexual, I get excited about media when it has a relationship I understand: NicoMaki, Korrasami, Wenclair. But NicoMaki actually got me writing. First major project was filling in the gaps I thought the anime had left: Choreography: Steps To A First Date and The Dance: Lead Me To I Love You.

15. What's a WIP you want to finish, but doubt you ever will?

*sighs* technically, I've started the sequel to Casual Lunacy, but I'm wary of picking up that story again. I am reluctant to mess with the original.

More practically, Parent Trap keeps getting more involved. The original pace in my head had more dramatic flareups, but they seemed fake-y so I followed what was building between the characters and it's turning into more of a slice of life story, which could continue indefinitely. But I also want to give the readers closure so I've been mulling plot arcs and character dynamics. A lot.

16. What are your writing strengths?

Conversations. I do love reading snappy patter so I put a lot of effort and thought into the dialogue I write for my stories.

17. What are your writing weaknesses?

Describing settings. I'm used to theatre scripts. We build sets rather than describe a room. I always go through a draft specifically to add more of a picture. I also research fashion to know what the characters are wearing.

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language for a fic?

I could maybe manage French. I do strive to use Japanese honorifics properly when the fic is actually set in Tokyo or at high school. I sometimes throw in poetry but drop a translation in the notes.

19. First fandom you wrote for?

Buffy. I needed to ease my way into No Buffy when it was cancelled so I wrote a Willow Kennedy Tara Oz fic. It's not posted anywhere. It was before I discovered there was fanfic out there online.

20. Favourite fic you've ever written?

I'd like to say Casual Lunacy but it's too long to reread in one sitting. Which I sometimes do with my Christmas fics when I need cheering up or reminder that I have written some fun and cool things. My favorite of those is probably Santa Cutie And The Christmas Cookie Queen because it has all of μ's and is darn fun. I took a chance on magic and whimsy and it went really well. The μ's personalities fit into their individual roles, everybody gets some romance, and Eli is as much of an obstacle as she ever is in canon. Christmas and Maki really is a magic combination; Nico adding that essential heart eyes Idol sparkle.

If you've read this far, do you have a favorite of my fics? Or one you're now wanting to try? I'd really like to know.

[olderthannetfic]

I recently saw a twitter post where it was alleged that "Mary Sue" was just a tool used by adults to bully children on the Internet about their OCs. That.....hasn't been my personal experience (9 times out of 10 when I've seen stuff like that it's either been kids hassling kids or adults hassling movie studios ala Star Wars and Rey) but said experience is pretty limited. I know the term started in a Star Trek fanzine in the 70s to satirize stories they were getting so obviously it's a phenomenon that predates the internet but apart from that I don't know much. I'd be really interested to hear your take on it, and if you have any related stories or knowledge to share! :D Thank you so much, I hope you're having a good day/night.

--

LOL. How cute that they think children were even on the internet at the height of mary sue hate.

I vaguely recall the coiner commenting years ago (in some interview I read) that her original parody was loving and she wasn't wild about how much hate was being flung at women's wish fulfillment later on, using her term.

Sue hate was big in the 90s and early 00s. The term was constantly used to hassle people, but it was probably mostly 20-somethings bugging other 20-somethings. There were ~helpful~ guides to how to avoid writing the dread mary sue and people MST3Ked sue fics cruelly, sometimes with violent commentary about wanting to murder the sues.

This kind of thing is more typical of FFN culture and related places, not so much the LJ and later AO3 flavor of fic fandom. TV Tropes falls more into the former sphere, for example:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MarySueHunter

People in AO3-y space have backed off the Sue hate in recent years, though I still see a lot of discomfort with too-obvious teen girl-sounding wish fulfillment. TBH, I attribute this to AO3's high percentage of m/m shippers who associate trashy het fic with their own adolescence that they then grew out of. Wattpad is like 95% obvious mary sues, and nobody cares. Het wish fulfillment for a female audience is what they're there for.

In terms of the phenomenon itself... it dates back basically forever. I once read an article on 19thC women's magazines and reader-submitted fiction that was all a Too Pure For This World girl who was Cruelly Mistreated by [writer's target of choice] and expired melodramatically and nobly as A Lesson To You All. When Mary Sue isn't marrying the canon character of your choice, she's generally sacrificing herself and making everyone else look bad in exactly this maudlin way.

Heavy-handed wish fulfillment cheese looks remarkably similar in different times and places.

--

Overall, any current twitter message about "adults" bullying "children" raises red flags that someone is a whiny-ass fanpol trying to say that women over a certain age should leave fandom... However, "stop being mean to the teen girls about a normal phase of writing everyone goes through" is a meta essay/rant that fandom has been writing for a very long time. Here's an example from back in 2008:

7 Reasons the Mary Sue Witch Hunt has to Stop

I'd say if one was on Fiction Alley Park circa 2005, one would have run into experienced writers sneering at the dumb newbies and their too-obvious American exchange student OFCs.

As with so many other anti-sounding things, it does remind me of something... just something hella old.

[markcampbells]

20 Questions: Writer Edition

@jenjiy tagged me; thank you lovely!

This is pretty ao3-focused but my fandom past also stretches back into FFN and Livejournal; goddammit 😂

How many works do you have on AO3?

30!

What’s your total AO3 word count?

97,939. Very exciting to be close to 100k!

How many fandoms have you written for and what are they?

I have nine fandoms on ao3: Star Trek AOS and TOS, White Collar, The OC, One Tree Hill, Sherlock, Home Fires, Doctor Who, and Being Erica. My fandoms stretching back to FFN were Rent, Grey's Anatomy, Little Women, and a few others where I wrote one piece and found I didn't have ideas for more, LOL.

What are your top five fics by kudos?

your hands can heal, your hands can bruise (Star Trek AOS, McKirk): 197 kudos (SO CLOSE)

absolution (Star Trek AOS, McKirk): 103

but we just haven't mastered the fall (Star Trek AOS, McKirk): 102

it's the heart in you, i know it in my bones (Star Trek AOS, McKirk): 101

And... and what's this? It's my Sherlock fandom past with a steel chair! Crap Telly, my earliest and most successful Sherlock/John fic, sits at 99 kudos.

Do you respond to comments, why or why not?

I do! God help me but I've always loved responding ever since it was long bolded author's notes at the end of chapters on FFN. 😂 I really, really enjoy hearing what connects with people about my work, and I always at least want to say thank you to folks who have taken the time to read and comment. I have had people want to talk about the books I've referenced in a story; I have had people share personal stories with loss on my stories about heavier subjects. It's really meaningful to me and I always appreciate what readers have to say.

What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

Doctor Who is a tossup between There Is a Light That Never Goes Out, an Eleven/Rose fic, and The Time is Out of Joint, a fic I wrote to explore my vision of Amy, Rory, and River's life as a family, that was later rendered moot by canon, LOL. Light was born partly out of a line from one of Eleven's Christmas specials that a lot of shippers caught on to ("One last day with your beloved. Which day would you choose?"). Time is a story I've always been extremely proud of, as I tried to deal with the emotions of a very difficult situation that canon completely glossed over. The sadness comes from the readers knowing what River's eventual ending will be in a way that the characters do not.

Star Trek is two different kinds of angst. pack up the life that's left has hope towards the end, in Jim starting to reclaim his religious faith and some family mementos about his late father, but is still melancholy. (at least out loud) i won't say i'm in love, uh... ended in a much angstier place than I anticipated when I started. Good ol' I can't be with the person I want to be with angst.

What’s the fic you’ve written with the happiest ending?

our silver lining is a proposal fic so that probably wins! But there is also my absolutely wild AU fic for the premise "everything is the same but it rains ducks" that I am very proud of, LOL.

Do you write crossovers? If yes, what’s the craziest thing you’ve written?

Back in the days of yore, I wrote a Fright Night / Secret Diary of a Call Girl crossover for an ostensibly-Doctor/Rose ficathon that was a prompt about Peter Vincent and Belle called One Night Only. It's probably a little embarrassing to look back on now! But it was a very fun prompt and a cool way to take the other work of those performers and pull it together into something plausible.

Have you ever received hate on a fic?

I've been in fandom a long time and I might have and don't remember it, but my most vivid memory by far is the person who graded my Little Women fic on a RUBRIC that scored me on "use of character, addition to story, faithfulness to Alcott's writing style, and substance/relevance." The person literally gave me ratings in those categories on a scale of 1 to 5 and then a five-paragraph breakdown of their reasoning. They closed by saying that they felt my story was "the cream of the crop" of other Alcott fanfiction, so it wasn't even a bad review! But the sheer audacity of GRADING FANFIC ON A RUBRIC as though it were some kind of homework assignment is what's made that review stay in my brain since 2008!

Do you write smut? If so what kind?

I did in the past, but these days I don't write any I publish. In general I've shifted away from including much on-page sex in my work partly because I personally find I'm not super interested in writing that kind of thing anymore and partly because I find that as I've gotten older, my understanding of my sexuality has changed and a combination of working through compulsory heterosexuality and allosexuality has made me realize sex isn't as important to me as it could be, so I focus my work on other things. There is definitely a place for smut in this world; it just happens to not be written by me!

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not that I'm aware of, but for all I know, maybe. I've never been a widely-read author and have always moved in fandoms with much bigger fish, so I'd probably be an easy person to steal from.

Have you ever had a fic translated?

Also not that I'm aware of! I would LOVE if someone wanted to.

Have you ever co-written a fic?

I did, in a Doctor Who challenge community, and I didn't super love the experience as partners were assigned to us and the style of my partner and my style did not mesh well at all. I looked back on it this year and I feel like anything that made my style distinctive is overriden by the style of my partner. I have written, and continue to happily write, original fiction in a roleplay style with partners, and I haven't fully dismissed the idea of cowriting in the future! With firm rules on who does what and styles that mesh well together, I think it would be a fun thing to do properly.

What’s your all time favourite ship?

Two of my oldest, all-time favorite OTPs are Nathan and Haley (One Tree Hill) and Mulder and Scully (The X-Files). I never read much Nathan and Haley fic, but there's a Mulder and Scully high school AU on FFN that I read and loved years and years ago that actually had a significant influence on me! I've only started writing for McKirk recently, but they had been a comfort ship I would return to periodically ever since the first AOS film came out, and are definitely one of my favorite dynamics in fiction.

What’s a WIP you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

I will definitely not ever finish this, but I remain pretty proud of Surviving, which was an AU Ryan/Marissa story and my first fanfiction for The OC. It was premised on Marissa not dying like she did in canon, instead moving away to live with her father at some point, and her and Ryan reconnecting as adults in a grief group after significant personal losses and finding that they still have a romantic spark.

I was a college student when I wrote it and some of the realism is probably lacking, but I wrote it out of a deep desire to rectify the injustice of canon and let Marissa grow up and find her own way once she was out of the messy environment she'd been stuck in during her teen years. I've been through some significant deaths in my life myself, and that made me interested in writing a story about coping with the trauma of loss with the help of another person and moving forward into a new life. I'm no longer in the fandom and I am hopefully a more mature writer now, hence why it'll be left unfinished, but I really liked my concept for it and had received some nice responses from readers about it on FFN; I'm grateful for that.

What’s your writing strengths?

I have always had an ear for dialogue! I'm a dialogue heavy writer and I focus significantly on interpersonal dynamics, romantic or not. I work really hard to build out relationships and explore ways characters could connect with each other and bond.

What’s your writing weaknesses?

I am so fucking bad at descriptions. Poetic language is not my strong suit and I consider my style in general a little plain, but hopefully effective. And I tend not to write longfic.

What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in fic?

If I absolutely had to do it, it would only be if I knew someone who fluently speaks that language on tap to correct my surely grievous errors.

What was the first fandom you wrote for?

Not counting the fandoms I mentioned earlier, my first forays into fanfiction were horrible video game self-insert fics for Spyro and Kingdom Hearts. (I'm SO OLD.)

What’s your favourite fic you’ve written?

Of my McKirk fics, probably a tie between your hands can heal... and it's the heart in you... YHCH started as a prompt fill for a bingo square and just grew into a really personal story that partly reflected my acceptance of my sexuality after a long struggle with bi erasure and partly reflected how much I value my queer community and the friends who have shared their experiences with me. It's also the first fanfic of mine that ever generated fanart, since @lokilenchen and @excavatinglizard almost killed me by surprising me with fanart in the space of, like, a week. <3 it's the heart in you... has surprised me so much with the kind things people have said about it and the angle I took on Bones connecting with Winona. I loved writing it and got to use some of my favorite tropes, so a win win!

Tagging the folks I know who weren't tagged already and who I know use ao3--please don't feel obligated if you don't want to do it! (Also, anyone I missed who wants to do this, please steal!)

@tinybowties @nadja-antipaxos @afterthenovels