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AlexĀ āOkayā Mercer
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anyway gifmakers i love you fanartists i love you fic writers i love you meta writers i love you fanvid makers i love you people who make fandom fun i love you
die die die
It's a pain in the ass, but it's my pain in the ass!
you ever accidentally create a recurring theme in your writing. you start putting together an outline for something youāve never written before and get partway through planning, rearrange the pieces, and go āGODDAMMIT THIS IS ABOUT GRIEF AGAINā? because let me tell you,
i feel. like on a fundamental level. i do not understand x reader fic. i am not exactly opposed to it because let a thousand blossoms bloom etc. but like. i genuinely donāt get it. it seems like the exact opposite of how i engage with fiction. like the whole point is that iām not in there. i donāt wanna be in there. if iām in there itās going to be very stressful.
I do not understand it, but I do worry it makes me a worse writer.
For this isnāt solely fanfiction, thereās always been (and I think it rises) pressure for characters to be relatable, to be insertable spaces for readers. People love this. They plainly do!
Will you write about relatable characters. Will you not have them do that because people wonāt like them. Can people relate to that. Is (character) relatable?
And as a reader I genuinely donāt care, as itās entertainment, so my main criteria is that characters are interesting. Do they make me curious and make me laugh, okay, we are in (show) business. I do not want to be in there. There be literally dragons in there. I do not want to be with Mr Darcy. I want Elizabeth Bennet to be with Mr Darcy.
But as a writer, it worries me that thereās this big readerly desire I donāt entirely understand. Tumblr tags full of ācharacter x readerā fics. Rising requirement for the relatable in popular media. Other peopleās pleasure is my business. (I may sound like a words hooker here. No matter.) Nobodyās wrong to like the flavours of entertainment they like. I just want to understand better.
So that was another reason I wrote Rae and Eric in Long Live Evil - characters who would jump at going into a story, and have āme x favourite characterā daydreams. Letās engage with what makes this appealing and what makes it complicated.
Mind you, I donāt know if I did it right. I donāt know if Rae and Eric themselves are relatable. They are both very idiosyncratic. I do also often think itās insulting to readers to act as if they relate to fairly blank slates. But what do they relate to? Itās worth asking the question. Is it love for a character? Is it a wish for comfort or romance or adventure? If I can understand the motive maybe I can understand the desire.
I was recently on a writing retreat with lovely writer friends (huge for me, havenāt gone on a big trip with a big group in years because, well⦠a (totally different) writer friend group fractured after I got cancer) and had such a great and interesting time. But we did have many discussions about relating to protagonists, which ones we related to and why, and how I canāt āgo in.ā One male writer friend talked about how he is one of his protagonists, and nobody guesses this because sheās a girl. It was fascinating. I reached few conclusions. But talking about writing, like writing, is more about asking interesting questions.
I was at a festival last year and two extremely lovely readers came to me and said they loved Long Live Evil (yay hurray!) and they went to the panel going āI wonder what the Long Live Evil writer looks like, will we know which one she is right awayā and then said they knew it was me as soon as they saw me. Which was a lovely thing to say and I was very flattered. But I did wonder if it was about me seeming like Rae, or like the kind of person who would write Long Live Evil. Either way, itās lovely - if itās the second, I am that person, and if itās the first, maybe I did move closer to the readers and writers I wanted to understand by writing it.
(A picture taken of me that day. Maybe it was just about the evil glint ever present in my eyes.)
I love it when fan fiction writers are like: āah shit, this was meant to be one part but I started writing it and now it has to be threeā. Like the fanfic is happening to them and not being created by them.
langdon now spends time with the king sisters.
(langdon is losing. becca is an expert at mario kart)
My hottest fanfiction take is I think people should stop posting multi-fandom oneshots as a single fic with like 50+ chapters and instead post them as individual fics
itās not weird to find fanfiction from 2021, or 2017, or 2014 that youāve never read and actually taking your time to read it.
itās not weird to love it and comment and leave kudos because the author will probably still see it someday and it will make them happy.
itās not weird to like said authorās work so much that you want to go look for other fics from them.
itās not weird to go through the authors profile and look for other fics from the ships you like (or maybe some that youāll give a chance because you liked the author) and maybe bookmark them for later.
itās not weird to read these other fics and like them too and comment on them because you actually like them and you want to let the author know.
itās not weird to read fanfiction from 5, or 8, or 10 years ago and actually enjoy and engage with it because itās perfectly normal to relate to something thatās less than a decade old!
letās stop treating fanfiction like theyāre instagram posts that stop being interesting in 24 hours! fanfiction is NOT social media, fanfiction is art!!! and art doesnāt get old in one day, one year, or even a decade!
read fanfiction! write fanfiction! comment on fanfiction! letās not let fanculture die people!!!!!
Gonna take this moment to be extremely grateful for the ao3 team behind the scenes, as much as I complain, please take your time, we are forever grateful to you š«µš«”š«”š«”š«”
Errors Accessing AO3
We are investigating reports of errors when trying to load AO3, including errors saying that AO3 is down, which seem to be related to the previous incident. We will update when we have more information!
Posted: 22:36 UTC 02 March, 2026
AO3 is now fully down. After performing a software upgrade a few days ago, we've been unable to keep our server cluster healthy due to what we believe is a bug or issue with the new release of our database server software.
We're working with our vendor's support team to understand the cause and whether reverting or upgrading further will best resolve the issue without continuing the cycle of up and downtimes.
We do not currently have an estimated time for when we will be back up, but we expect it to be multiple hours at minimum. We apologize for the inconvenience and will update you when we know more.
For updates refer to our status page.
Posted: 03:16 UTC 03 March, 2026
Following guidance from our vendor, we've brought AO3 back online to help troubleshoot. We expect the site will go back down, although we don't know when that will happen.
If you choose to post or update your works while AO3 is up, we strongly recommend making sure you have a backup of any text you are attempting to post.
For updates, please check our status page.
Posted: 04:37 UTC 03 March, 2026
i donāt know how to explain to you people that no matter what a countryās government is like i do not and will not support the US indiscriminately bombing that countryās civilians and i donāt know why thatās a controversial take tbh
āoh iran is a dictatorship!ā āoh palestine is homophobic!ā i donāt care like literally i donāt care thatās not a problem to be solved by other countries blowing innocent people up
everyone say thank you ao3 volunteers you're the best ao3 volunteers ily ao3 volunteers
No, no, and NO.
AO3 does not live in āthe cloudā because that is other peopleās computers, and other peopleās computers are vulnerable to censorship.
AO3 is on its own computers. It does still have to be housed somewhere, and I suppose a determined enough hater could try to find that place and go after it, but itās a lot harder than sending spurious complaints to Amazon or whomever going āBadWrong things are hosted on your cloud service!ā
Owning the servers is a core tenet of OTW/AO3.
Warming up a new database serverā¦.
When people involved with AO3 talk about āthe cost of serversā they donāt mean āthe cost to pay Amazon for space on their servers.ā They mean, like, the cost to physically own them, and eventually replace them with new ones. And the operating costs to run them.
AO3 is not āin the cloud.ā AO3 is stored on physical machines that the OTW owns.
While this is not a solution that can work for everyone who wants to deal with controversial content, it is why AO3ple sneer at alt-righters who complain about getting thrown off hosting platforms.
I Want Us to Own the Goddamned Servers
BecauseĀ I want us to own the goddamned servers, ok? Because I want a place where we canāt beĀ TOSedĀ and where no one can turn the lights off or try to dictate to us what kind of stories we can tell each other.
AO3 is what a website looks like when you seize the means of production.
Errors Accessing AO3
We are continuing to investigate reports of slowness and errors when trying to load AO3, including errors saying that AO3 is down.
Refer to our status page for more information.
Posted: 19:38 UTC 01 March, 2026
AO3 is currently down. We do not have an estimated return time currently. We're looking into it with one of our third-party support providers and will update when we have more information. Thank you for your patience!
Refer to our status page for more information.
Posted: 20:35 UTC 01 March, 2026
We've identified the problem and are working on a fix. We expect to remain down for several more hours. We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience!
Refer to our status page for more information.
Posted: 22:56 UTC 01 March, 2026
AO3 is back up! We appreciate your patience. We've got our protections against bot traffic turned up a bit higher than usual, so some users may experience problems if they're using a VPN or similar tools.
Refer to our status page for more information.
Posted: 00:44 UTC 02 March, 2026
fandom etiquette as a whole died when people who didnāt grow up on fandoms became stans during lockdown, yes, but why am i seeing people openly mocking fics on twitter. why am i seeing screenshots of fics with captions like ābro what is this š.ā why am i seeing people mock fic writers for not knowing how sports or theater or college or any other organization operates in the real world.
ācollege is absolutely nothing like thisā āwhy are we writing four people on the team scoring a hat trick in one gameā āso tech work is nothing like this, hope that helps!ā
if you donāt like a fic, and if you canāt suspend your belief enough to enjoy a fic that exaggerates or ignores real-world orgs, you donāt have to read it. you donāt have to screenshot it and put it on blast for twitter. you donāt have to post a link to it in the replies. the back button is literally there on your phone. itās not giving babyās first fandom anymore, itās giving entitled asshole and it isnāt as cute as you think it is.