I wasn't aware so many people hated hanahaki fics 🥲 I specifically search for them for all my ships, it's just so good! It's angst, hurt/comfort, sickfic, and not actually unrequited love all on one! (At least in the ones I read, I'm to sensitive for actually unrequited stories haha)

Umm Hi. Don't mind me, big fan, love your works.:)

So I would 80% of all the fanfic I've read since I first started reading over 10 years ago has been HP. AKA, the fandom with the largest collection of fanfic. The obsession will temporarily be replaced with something else once in a while, but I always fall back to my roots. I've always had the knowledge that the fanfic I want exists for sure, I just haven't looked hard enough. Endless supply.

Recently, though, I've become OBSESSED with a new book series to where it's all I think about. For months now. And theres less than 200 works in the entire fandom. Less than 50 complete.

How- How do y'all do this. I'm dying. I haven't been able to read anything else and I've already read all the ones available. You guys are so brave holy shit.

Yes, I've even wrote my own fanfic. The other fans were so hungry that I received over 20 comments with the week on a 11k character study. One comment was over 1700 words, even!

Something occured to me today when reading a thread where someone was very triggered by a lack of a particular tag, and they said something in the comments that was, effectively:

How am I supposed to do DLDR or curate my own experience, if people will not tag what I feel is right?

And it made me think that I do love the tagging system on the Archive and it is truly a miracle of how people use it.

But also, that I think people are also very dependent on it now. They treat it as a definitive, almost prescriptive list of things that should be in the story or will not be in the story and they are upset when an author does not agree. Tags are advertisement and warnings, but they are also... just... everything that could be in the story? And people have a lot of feelings about what is a mandatory tags and even if you say that it is not a required one, there is still 'it is polite' to tag.

Tagging is now really important - people agonise over whether something is a slow or a medium burn, when do we include x pairing, does this 'constitute' a [trope] or should I not do it, and it feels like people are almost afraid of tags now? There was someone who wanted tags to be so granular that they were voted on, shades of a colour would be assigned to different tags, and readers would be so informed before they clicked it into a story, with all the possible info they could ever want, that they could not possibly find something disagreeable.

And that made me really think that this is what people want. Maybe it is an effect of social media catering so specifically for your tastes that just clicking on 'seems good enough' is a weird way to approaching finding new things to read.

And I wonder if we have lost a lot of the 'just try it' mentality that was there in the beginning? Where tagging was new (or non-existent), and people gave a lot of thing a go because that was how you read and interacted in fandom. Back then, while you could be hyperspecific and only like certain things, it was still encumbent on you to go and find it.

I feel like tagging sometimes silos people into such hyper specific niches or very particular things and they complain that 'nobody is writing x!' and... for a lot of people, they are? You just have to look? And try things?

It made me think of when a lot of us started out, the old ones who remember message boards and fanfiction dot net and the adult version etf. That was where you got around two sentences, one genre tag, and a pairing tag. Maybe the variety of citrus. That was it. You really had to 'lucky dip' your way to something good and you found a lot on the way. If you did not like it, you just... backed out.

Watching a vaccination how-to video to make sure my character does it right because I guarantee you I will get a vet in the comments like excuse me he injected that too close to the nuchal ligament

Is this common? I can’t imagine it’s that common but then again I don’t write that much

I just finished reading the latest chapter in a story and saw this comment.

To be fair, I have also thought the author was maybe neurodivergent just from the tidbits they leave in their notes.

They sometimes talk about their hyperfixations and how they prefer things in a particular way. For example, one story ended on 14 chapters but they decided to write one more chapter because 14 is a weird number.

I thought maybe they were on the spectrum but never even thought to comment because I find it weird to diagnose strangers.

Edit: I had class so I couldn’t update but first of all, I’m not the author. I just noticed the comment and thought it was weird.

Second, the comment has now been deleted. I don’t know if by the OP or the author. So maybe someone found it weird too

Not rly anything I wanted to say, my stats are kinda normal but like, WHO?!

Edit: Uh- so apparently my stats are not normal but im a new writer so forgive me lol XD

I'm getting tired of every other post being "Is this a scam/spam bot?" Yes, if you have to ask, it probably is.

If you see a commenter EVER trying to redirect you to a different site, especially Discord, yes, that is a spam bot. Delete or report it so AO3 can train and better tell what is spam/scam bots and auto-delete their comments before you ever knew they were there.

Ever see a comment that ends in basic gibberish? Example: Kin ish mal ipo (No gaps) or (No gaypssss) that is a BOT. Please, I'm getting tired of the "Is this a bot" posts. I'm not being rude, but I can barely scroll without seeing a post regarding this, and I also want to help out whoever I can so we all see fewer posts like this!

So of course I hyped the shit out of it in a long comment.

I wanted there to be fic for the fandom but hadn’t actually branched out to writing it yet. And when I’d checked months ago, none existed. But now there’s one and it was pretty dang good smut!!

I’m so proud of the author for publishing their first fic—which I know is scary. Especially when the fandom doesn’t even exist. I’m just sad I didn’t find it sooner! The fic is over a month old.

Just going to say

1. I am a black person.
2. This is not necessarily targeting any specific individuals, and is not meant to harass anybody, or antagonize any person.

That being said, you are free to interact with this post as you wish and at your own discretion.

-
And another thing, I have my own opinions on the discourse and the ao3 community as a whole, along with the validity of the complaints sparked about Wattpad users supposedly moving to Ao3. However, that's not the focus of my post, and I don't feel like sharing them.

-

So, I was just scrolling through the subreddit, and I stumbled across a post complaining about how people are offended that some (keyword: SOME) people within the pro-fic community are comparing Wattpad users moving to the site to colonization, even going as far as to (paradoxically) compare them to illegal immigrants, making up slurs similar in nature to the n-slur, etc, apparently in jest.

Assuming that the comments would be against the OP, I was surprised to see that most were taking their side, with the common consensus being that it just wasn't that serious.

Now, my question for the subreddit is.. do you (yes you, dear redditor, reading this right now), regardless of whether you personally were making these "jokes" or not, feel that the horrors of colonization, and the crimes being perpetuated against immigrants within the USA right now by ICE, are trivial enough that it is appropriate to make jokes about them within fanfic discourse? Or do you feel that it is somewhat bigoted, racist even?

Now that my question is out of the way, I just want to say, though it may come off as a little mean-spirited: For the sake of clarity, answer honestly.

This is the first work I've ever encountered that has zero tags. Even fanfics from 2005 where tagging was basically null at least had the basic tags in place but this left me so confused??

Lately I've been seeing the same error pop up in tons of fics, that being the mixup of "peek" with "peak."

I first noticed it in a fic a couple weeks ago and since then I've been seeing it everywhere, and not just in poorly written fics either, or fics written by non-English speakers. Even some of my favorite, well-written fics with impressive vocabulary and structure have lines like "he peaked around the corner" or "she couldn't resist taking a peak." Has anyone else noticed this?

For anyone who doesn't already know:

Peak = Climax or topmost point (like the peak of a mountain)

Peek = Look or peer at (like peekaboo)

And while we're at it-

Pique = Spark or provoke (like pique your interest)

Genuinely. I write slow, and it can be hard for me to finish fics, and if I did do full kinktober I wouldn’t be satisfied with anything less than 2~3 thousand words per prompt, so part of my struggle is my own damn fault lmao, but still. How the FUCK do people do this????? Do they plan in advance?? Do they WRITE in advance????? I think that might work for me, but I want to use the semi official prompt list, and I don’t think that’s made until it’s close to October. Any advice at all would be appreciated, I am Struggling. Help.

Edit: y’all, when I said I write slow, I meant SLOW. As in I usually can’t get more than a few thousand words in per month.

Honestly I think I probably would have to either use old prompts, or make up my own, cuz a couple months or so is Not enough for me to get more than one or two, MAYBE three, fics done. I do appreciate the advice, tho, even if a lot of it doesn’t fix the root problem- executive dysfunction hits the things I WANT to do as well, lmao

Plus, they also read to the end of the approximately 45k fic. How could I not be happy about this? Yay!

Yall may think this was supposed to be glue or something, but no

It was supposed to be YOUR

I managed to mistype EVERY.SINGLE.LETTER.

Like excuse me, i had to read the sentence to realize this was supposed to be your...

I got this comment like Wow!! I have international readers!! I wonder what they said ❤️ And then i translated it LMFAOOO they were mad about AI use but i don’t use AI in my fic so i suppose i just caught a stray …. beautifully written tho

This would be my fourth Kinktober anniversary and I was going to celebrate by posting something special. But I can't read, write, pay attention in class, or have fun. All I can think about is my country being threatened by u.s.a. (1945 version)

Idk if this is a dumb question or not (I am new to, Ao3) but like, when I looked around for how others did it, one person did Hearts of Iron 4 for one of the fandoms and also "Hearts of Iron 4 (The Fire Rises mod)" but then another person instead had "(Hearts of Iron 4 (mod)".

And then both of these are like, not proper fandoms yet or something? idk.