something wicked this way comes

marysuefanfic does ffxv here / hi!

[coucou-art]

Option 1: Gladio

Option 2: Car

Option 3: Armiger

thanks to the discord fam for some inspiration

[doomherald]

“you’d best hurry.”

i thought, what if it had really been him? and drew this

[crossed-quills]

Six, don’t toy with my emotions like this!

[iizuumi]

Sleeping problems have become less annoying since prom has someone to snuggle up to whenever he can’t fall asleep at night uwu

[hheistt]

26/28 (more from this)

bonus: ur hammerhead mechanic bf starts wearin ur clothes and maybe accidentally pops a button wyd

[bilosan]

Noctis and Prompto

[lgions2]

what is this i don’t know. fenris with freckles and piercings 

[wakaba-chan-deactivated20240909]

[movie-gifs]

My mission is to protect you. — Yeah? Who sent you? — You did. Thirty-five years from now, you reprogrammed me to be your protector here, in this time. — Oh, this is deep.

TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY 1991 | DIR. JAMES CAMERON

[warpstasis]

[nightyswolf]

Ignis spending some time reading a book (before you wonder - let’s pretend that book is in Braille), while Umbra enjoy some belly rubs. Posing and rendering in Blender Cycles, edits in Photoshop. All Models and logos © by their respective owner’s! Fanart only! No copyright infringement intended!   I am not making any profit with this picture! Don’t upload anywhere else or claim as your own!

[ipromptography]

so you’re gonna wear this to our wedding right?

royal wedding attire by mouse_marple

[mintmoth]

I drew shitposts today

[olderthannetfic]

Maybe I’ve missed out but this is the first time I’ve seen anyone seriously try to make the case that fan fic should be monetized? That fan fic authors should be rewarded in anything other than kudos, comments and satisfaction? Anyway, a real dem-soc would hold ao3 up as proof against the argument that people won’t do anything without profit motive — rather than try to tear down a collective endeavor with wrong headed fic writers of the world unite nonsense. Goofiest anti AO3 case ever.

I don’t see it in my social circles, but it is incredibly common. It’s no accident that one of the more earnest and genuine-sounding people with this view was going on about all of the Youtubers they follow and Patreons they back.

If you want to see more of this attitude and more on its social costs, look into meta about the gig economy and “gigification”.

They’re reacting to AO3 out of an understanding of hobbies and websites that is heavily tied to how trying to get Youtube famous and make money there works. This attitude is rife in certain circles on Tumblr. I’d say a typical proponent is just post-college, broke, without a lot of ideas what they’re doing next. They’re looking for some way to make money that is also meaningful to them, that they have the skills for, and that is geographically/physically/whatever within their reach.

It overlaps with how women’s social networks are being leveraged for pyramid schemes, but those pyramid schemes don’t generally make the women doing this any money. Meanwhile, they’ve destroyed their support system. There have been a number of articles on this in recent years.

I get where it’s coming from, but even if these people who want to put a tip jar on their fic were making original content for Youtube, that whole influencer culture has major issues too. People like Lindsay Ellis have talked about how unrealistic a lot of people’s aspirations are.

A lot of us in our more oldschool community hate this bullshit because we think The Man will come for us when we sell fic. I actually don’t care about that part. I think it’s the least of the issues.

My problem is with influencer culture, gigification, how pyramid schemes destroy social circles, etc.

I have to run errands, but if anyone wants to reblog this with links to articles on these social phenomena, feel free.

[penrosesun]

Here are a couple of articles on the phenomenon, and thank you @olderthannetfic, for talking about this.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/01/21/how-mlms-are-hurting-female-friendships/

https://www.business.com/articles/mlms-target-women-and-immigrants/

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mlm-pyramid-scheme-target-women-financial-freedom_l_5d0bfd60e4b07ae90d9a6a9e

Tbh, this is something that has been bothering me about fandom and AO3 discourse a lot recently. I actually do think that legally and morally, fanfic writers should be able to monetize fic without fear of copyright reprisal, but I also very much do not believe that we should encourage a cultural shift towards expecting people to monetize their fanworks, for exactly the reasons mentioned above.

The thing is, the entire concept of “fair use” has been pretty irreparably tarnished and tied up with bad legal precedent. The widely-accepted fair use carve-outs (eg. teaching, news reporting, parody, critical commentary) were never meant to be exclusive, and the idea that these are special exceptions to some sort of genuine ownership over ideas is damaging. Copyright isn’t really “property” from a legal perspective, even though it’s misleadingly called “intellectual property”; it’s a licensing scheme, designed to prevent people from underselling authors by publishing knock-off versions their works for cheap. That’s all it is. And so anything that doesn’t tend to take a bite out of a content creator’s publishing profits ought to be fair use, pretty much by definition.

Now, fanfic has always legally gotten by by pointing to the fact that no one is making money off of it. But this really doesn’t go far enough, in my opinion. Even if fanfic was making money, it still wouldn’t be stealing from legitimate publishing profits, because the things people go to fanfic looking for are fundamentally different from the things people want out of canon. If I wanted to read about Harry Potter traveling back in time to save Dumbledore, or Kirk and Spock having a passionate Pon-Farr, or the Avengers ordering pizza and watching Game of Thrones together in the Avenger’s Tower, I cannot get those things from the original. No matter how much money fanfic authors charge for fic like that, it is taking $0 away from the original authors, because readers would not have been able to buy those things from the original authors, and so they would not have shelled out more money for the original work in their absence.

I think that people should be able to write and publish unauthorized sequels, as long as they make it abundantly clear that they are not the author and that their work is derivate. I think that people should be allowed to publish unauthorized series bibles, and works with features added for accessibility, and dub-over parodies with the same constraints. I think that the Harry Potter Lexicon case was wrongly decided, and that the terms of the Prelude to Axanar settlement were draconian and morally wrong.

But I also strongly agree that we, as a culture steeped in capitalism, have a serious problem with devaluing unpaid labor, and I think that the mass commodification of traditionally free art forms such as fanfic could destroy fandom community as we know it.

It’s not all about “fanfic authors should be able to be paid!” Should they? I mean, frankly, yes (…although since OTW is currently the only organization that I know of which is seriously funding legal defense for fanfic writers, if you ever want them to be paid, you’d do more to accomplish that goal by supporting AO3 than you would by supporting sites that allows monetization right now but provide zero legal support). But saying that fanfic authors shouldn’t be sued for trying to make money off of clearly transformative works is not the same thing as saying “creating spaces for non-commodified art is somehow morally wrong.” 

I don’t want to live in a world where fanfic is a job! I write fanfic as a passion – I don’t want to have to worry about views and kudos and comments not only because of my ego, but also because of my paycheck and food security. And I don’t want to see genuine fan communities dissolve into just another realm of personal shilling, with everyone fighting for a piece of the monetary pie, and with no one creating anything purely for love anymore. That sounds frankly dystopian.

It’s not a bad thing to create communities which are not based around money, and “we’ll be sued if we do otherwise” is not the only reason.

[olderthannetfic]

Ooooh! Yes! Tasty links and meta I did not have time to produce.

[mistressofmuses]

This is some good meta and discussion, right here. Ties together two things I’ve been thinking about lately:

1 - The struggle with creating things without expectation that it becomes a revenue stream. Our culture, as mentioned above, has turned the “gig economy” into an expectation that *everything* you do should be a “side hustle.” And this feels especially true of creative pursuits. If you sew/knit/crochet/make jewelry/etc, then why aren’t you putting it on Etsy? If you do art, why don’t you do commissions/have a patreon? If you’re writing, why aren’t you aiming toward publishing? There’s nothing wrong with making money for creative passions! For a lot of people, it’s the dream! But it feels like no one is even allowed to have hobbies they do just for fun or personal fulfillment anymore. If you can do something, it’s like you’re *obligated* to monetize it. (With an implication that unwillingness to do so marks you as lazy.)

2 - I recently commented something to this effect, but fanfiction is one of the places that offers the most freedom to do anything you want with a story. The OP of that post was talking about the magic of fic being how it allows any idea, no matter how “out there”, to be treated seriously. And my comment was about how in part that’s because there’s no financial/marketability barrier.

The rise of self-publishing has removed a lot of barriers, and created more diversity in writers and in stories, but marketability is STILL a large concern.

Fanfiction offers so much freedom to write any wild mashup of tropes and plotlines without apology, because it doesn’t matter if it would be commercially viable! You want it, you write it! I feel like it would be a detriment if fanfic were expected to be a revenue stream for authors, because it would absolutely incentivize writing fics with the broadest appeal, rather than what most appeals to you as a passion project. It would diminish the variety that exists.

(Incentives to write for popularity are already a thing, if you want kudos and comments and such, but I don’t think it’s truly comparable to a financial inventive.)

All that said, I’m not completely UN-conflicted. I’ve wistfully looked at artist alleys and friends making (deserved!) bank on fanart, and been sad my breed of fandom contribution HAS to be unpaid. I’d be happy if fanfic authors could get kofi tips and patreon subscriptions for their fic if they wanted. Writers are often very sadly undervalued.

BUT. I genuinely enjoy there being one damn thing that doesn’t require or expect capitalistic attention every time I engage. I can read fic and write and share fic without feeling like money *should* be changing hands. Like penrosesun said, this is one of the few broad communities I know of that’s not about money, and having it turn into just another side hustle would be a serious loss.

[diskblorp]

Adding to the lack of capitalistic demands: it still kinda blows my mind to have no ads at all on AO3. Like… Where on the internet are you *not* being advertised to? (No, that isn’t unique to AO3, but it is *rare*.)

Routinely using adblock makes it less obvious, but holy crap is it a rarity to not have banner ads and popups and background scroll-past ads and ads hidden as “suggested articles” and ads appearing mid-article and ads that block half a small phone screen every time you scroll a bit and ads that are the wrong size for their placement and block the content or break a layout…

(I’m often stuck on mobile apps and browsers with minimal adblock, or shared computers that I can’t put adblock extensions on, so I’ve become painfully aware of how omnipresent ads are, and how negatively they impact use of a lot of sites.)

[olderthannetfic]

Yup.

And the thing is, while I see very few ads because of adblock, I see the design that is intended for ads. You know exactly what I’m talking about:

Clickbait.

AO3 makes it very easy to save things for later. It makes it easy to download and read offline. It’s addictive in the sense that we like fandom and we like fic, but addiction isn’t baked into the design of the site. If you only want to open the site long enough to download a fic, that’s fine!

AO3 does not care and will not try to keep you around longer.

Even with all the addons in the world, it can be hard to get rid of all of the algorithm bullshit driving us to scroll just one more screen and read just one more divisive political rant or let our eyes glaze over to one more “clever” listicle.

I like pringles too, but I’m really tired of my online life being like an unending can of them.

[hheistt]

please, remember me

fondly

[midwestmaryjade]

‘Twirl at My Haters’ by James R. Eads (16″ x 20″)

[jellybeanforest-a-go-go]

One of the things that perplexes me about the anti-AO3 crowd is that they have the gall to come to AO3 and demand moderation when AO3 was clearly and explicitly established in response to censorship and fandom purges of more popular (at the time) fandom spaces. AO3 was created not because the original crew were huge fans of problematic (but legal) content but because they recognized that content’s right to exist regardless of any one person’s particular taste. AO3 is popular precisely because they don’t moderate. I left fandom in like 2012-ish around the time of one of the big FFN purges. At the time, FFN was the big site and AO3 was a little nothing site with a fraction of what FFN had. I returned in 2017 when AO3 suddenly seemed the place to be for writers and readers of newer fandoms. There’s a reason for that.

It’s like… okay, let’s say there’s a dog park. The dog park is sprawling and super popular among owners of all dog breeds and sizes. There are separate spaces for terriers and large dogs with signs posted so you know what types of dogs are allowed where. All of the sudden, some small dog owners, the ones with teacup poodles and yorkies or whatnot, decide that the pit bulls all the way on the other side of the park are a PROBLEM because pits are dangerous. Doesn’t matter if they only play in the one area that is specifically designated for them, and there are warning signs indicating their presence. They’re a breed that shouldn’t exist because what if a child tried to pet one? 

Think of the children! 

No matter that children aren’t allowed in the pitbull section; they might break in unaccompanied by an adult to pet some pitbulls. All pitbull owners are dangerous, irresponsible assholes who want nothing more than to train their pits to eat small dogs and attack kids. In fact, if you have ever owned a pit, not only are you a bad person, you are a literal murderer who trains your dog to attack children on sight. 

Think of the children!

The anti-pitbull crowd is persistent, and pits are not very popular in general, and a lot of people don’t like them, so the dog park decides to ban pitbulls. But the purge also sweeps away German Shepherds (a popular but potentially dangerous breed also known as explicit slash) and Boxers and other large dogs. Maybe some of these dogs were dogs the anti-pitbull crowd even liked, but hey, all is done in the name of safety, right? Because:

Think of the children!

It’s not that you can’t find pitbulls in the dog park anymore. They’re still there, except now they aren’t tagged and easily identified as pitbulls and aren’t confined to one area. They’re much easier to stumble across by accident. But hey, maybe 1 or 2 of them will be reported and kicked out for a spell until the owner sneaks them in again. It’s not like anyone is really checking every single dog at the door for pit ancestry. It’s too unwieldy; there are millions of dogs and not enough staff to do so, and they can’t quite agree on what a pitbull is anyway.

Anyways, a few of the dog owners think this is bullshit. Maybe some own pits but mostly they own like Golden Retrievers and Black Labs (that are technically still allowed in the park, for now, but hey, you never know what will happen). They decide they’re going to build their own dog park where all dogs are welcome as long as they stay in their designated sections. It’s a small operation at first, but it’s free and staffed with enthusiastic volunteers, and as more dogs are booted out of the first dog park, some entire segments of dog owners (including many that don’t own pits) gravitate to the new dog park. It’s friendlier there. They accept everyone, and won’t randomly kick out the odd bulldog for looking pit-like. All their friends are starting to go to the new dog park. 

New dog park grows, gains a lot of traction over the old dog park, and becomes the place to be.

Only now, the anti-pitbull crowd is also there. They use it frequently and like its amenities, but there’s only one problem. They allow pitbulls here. Nevermind that they’re tagged and in their designated area. What if a child tried to pet one?

Think of the children!

So they start reporting pitbulls. The pitbulls are a danger to society; they should be taken out back and shot. Why TF would anyone allow pitbulls into their dog parks??? The staff looks at them, shrugs, and points out their policy, which has been there since the beginning, which is the reason for their popularity and what everyone agreed to when they entered the dog park, that says All Dogs Allowed. 

‘But that’s not right,’ the anti-pitbull crowd screeches. 

Think of the children!

Other dog owners point out that old dog park still exists; they don’t have to frequent this one.

‘But this dog park is more popular! More people will play and interact with my dog here!’ they say, stomping their feet. ‘You should accommodate me and my preferences.’

‘No.’

They throw themselves to the floor, thrashing their arms about, in full tantrum mode. ‘Then I rather this dog park not exist. It is a danger to children everywhere!.’

Think of the children!

Think of the Goddamn children!

And that’s basically the story of AO3. AO3′s lack of content moderation is not a flaw but a feature. And if you don’t like it, FFN still exists. Have fun trying to avoid untagged pitbulls there.

[thwippersnapple]

OctoPrompto is just as obsessed with Humans as Regular Prompto is with Chocobos.

See’s Nocts bare legs:

Prompto: OH MY GOOOOD HOW DO YOU KEEP GETTING CUTER?!?!

…..I want to ride my Human Boy alll daayyyy~~ <<      :>