I've just started to read a few fanfics so I'll update this list whenever I finish reading a new one
Headers made by @gatopidao
Deathslinger Fanfic
By Dust and Sunsets, written by NinaSeymour on Ao3 : Deathslinger x Oc, fluff, ennemies to friends to lovers, a bit of smut. 9 chapters. Completed work. Very nice describing of intern dialogue and realistic emotional journey. The Oc, Reagan, is very relatable. Good characterization of the Deathslinger.
Bathing, written by @secondhook on Tumblr : Deathslinger x GN!reader, nudity but mostly fluff, relationship already formed. 1 shot. Completed work. Love the dynamic and the intimacy, really lovely to read for a bit of comfort.
Michael Myers Fanfic
H-O-M-E, written by @visceravalentines on Tumblr : Michael Myers x GN!Reader, fluff and domestic moment, relationship already formed, mention of violence. 1 shot. Completed work. Mute Micheal Myers, and interesting communication that conveys the intimacy with the reader.
The Shape of You, written by @spinningwebsandtales on Tumblr : Michael Myers x Fem!Reader, relationship forming, fluff and sort of domestic, mention of blood and violence. 3 chapters for the moment. Work in progress. Growing mutual understanding between the protagonists, which gives the sense that the relationship is progressing in a natural way. Kind of domestic.
@wingedcatgirl This made me curious. I decided to take a look at the synning choices wranglers have made for previous queerplatonic relationship tags. I started with a basic tag search for the term queerplatonic.
In case my readers aren’t aware, tag wrangling on AO3 is handled by human volunteers. Individual tag wranglers have a few specific fandoms assigned to them, and when they open the wrangling page* they see all new-to-AO3 uncategorized tags used on works in their fandom, which they then sort. Bigger fandoms have wrangler chatrooms for discussing these decisions. Smaller fandoms may be wrangler-less or have only 1-2 wranglers. In that case, you sometimes get wrangling choices that only one person has ever signed off on.
*I’ve never been a tag wrangler and am going off current and former wranglers’ descriptions of the process.
My tag search shows me all tags with the word “queerplatonic” used on AO3, regardless of wrangling status or canonocity. I clicked into several tags’ pages to see what synning choices, if any, had been made. Tag wranglers work off of AO3’s formatting guidelines, which are publicly viewable here.
My survey suggests that, with few exceptions, most user-entered queerplatonic relationship tags are left as unsynned, noncanonical relationship tags or synned to the relevant canonical platonic relationship tag. (“canonical” here means a tag that is canonized and directly filterable on AO3, and “synned” means “marked as synonymous with”). Since there is no overarching wrangling guideline for queerplatonic relationship tags, wrangling choices vary somewhat by fandom.
Of the sixteen queerplatonic tags under Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, fifteen are noncanonical and unsynned. The other, “Queerplatonic Ninth Doctor & The Master (Doctor Who: Scream of the Shalka”), is synned to the platonic tag for that relationship.
The Wednesday (TV 2022) wranglers seem to have made their decisions based on the original tagger’s choice of / or &, with the result that “queerplatonic Wednesday & enid” is synned to a platonic tag while “(Queerplatonic) Wednesday Addams/Tyler Galpin” is synned to a romantic tag.
Most of the fourteen queerplatonic Harry Potter tags are synned to a romantic relationship tag with the exception of “Queerplatonic Scorpius Malfoy/Albus Severus Potter,” which is synned to the platonic tag. I’ll also note, because it’s interesting, that no queerplatonic Harry Potter tags in my sample use & and most use /.
The Dr. STONE fandom was where I cracked up and decided I was done sampling. “Asagiri Gen/Ishigami Senkuu - Queerplatonic” is synned to the romantic tag while “Asagiri Gen & Ishigami Senkuu (Queerplatonic)” is synned to the platonic tag. It’s easy to see how that choice was made, even as it’s frustrating on a “how will readers find things” level. Again, remember that small fandoms (Dr. STONE has about 5,000 works) often have just one or two people wrangling.
What seems to be the Archive’s sole canonical top-level queerplatonic relationship tag is in a similarly sized fandom. The Outsiders - S.E. Hinton has 4,970 works. Its wranglers have made “Queerplatonic Johnny Cade & Ponyboy Curtis” a canonical tag, with two variant tags using / instead synned in.
So if you’re writing a queerplatonic relationship, what should you do? How should you tag?
I think the best answer to this question is one that focuses on making sure a reader looking for queerplatonic relationships can find your work, hence my suggestion above. I also recommend using the additional tag “Queerplatonic Relationships” to make sure your work shows up in broader filters.
Current or former wranglers, I’d love to hear your perspective on this one. What kind of chatter have you seen about these sorts of tagging decisions?
Not something I would usually post here on this blog but here we go!
It has been revealed that one of the ships got it onto the top 100 ships on AO3 by someone utilizing ai generated fics to spam the tag.
It's honestly disheartening that people (usually my age) view AO3 as a fucking social media app rather than an archive where hundreds if not thousands of user dedicate their writing to something they genuinely love.
Polluting the website with ai generated fanfics that no one will read nor was written by anyone is truly a new low and for what??? A ship??? Are we DEADASS??? You only care about the fuckass numbers that shouldn't mean THAT much to you, it's honestly pathetic and sad.
Seriously I get you for loving a ship so much but are we really going to dickride the living shit out of a phony ass bot to make u a gazillion amount of fanfics just for some ranking. It's actually frying me omfg what the fuck.
Thanks for reading my rant I suppose, normally I would be a lot vulgar when it comes to my rants but I'm just honestly heartbroken that someone did this
Here, have the top ten video game fandoms on The Archive of Our Own every year since the archive started
These tables show the current number of extant works (including archive locked works) on the AO3 created before Jan 1st of each year.
This is just the top fandom lists from a much larger project. For graphs, full details on methodology, a separate section on the Dragon Age tags, these lists in text rather than screenshot format, and more, see the full work here here
I am on my knees begging you to reblog this post and to stop reblogging the original ones I sent out yesterday. This is the complete account with all the most recent info; the other one is just sending people down senselessly panicked avenues that no longer lead anywhere.
IN SHORT
Cliff Weitzman, CEO of Speechify and (aspiring?) voice actor, used AI to scrape thousands of popular, finished works off AO3 to list them on his own for-profit website and in his attached app. He did this without getting any kind of permission from the authors of said work or informing AO3. Obviously.
When fandom at large was made aware of his theft and started pushing back, Weitzman issued a non-apology on the original social media posts—using
his dyslexia;
his intent to implement a tip-system for the plagiarized authors; and
a sudden willingness to take down the work of every author who saw my original social media posts and emailed him individually with a ‘valid’ claim,
as reasons we should allow him to continue monetizing fanwork for his own financial gain.
When we less-than-kindly refused, he took down his ‘apologies’ as well as his website (allegedly—it’s possible that our complaints to his web host, the deluge of emails he received or the unanticipated traffic brought it down, since there wasn’t any sort of official statement made about it), and when it came back up several hours later, all of the work formerly listed in the fan fiction category was no longer there.
THE TAKEAWAYS
1. Cliff Weitzman (aka Ofek Weitzman) is a scumbag with no qualms about taking fanwork without permission, feeding it to AI and monetizing it for his own financial gain;
2. Fandom can really get things done when it wants to, and
3. Our fanworks appear to be hidden, but they’re NOT DELETED from Weitzman’s servers, and independently published, original works are still listed without the authors' permission. We need to hold this man responsible for his theft, keep an eye on both his current and future endeavors, and take action immediately when he crosses the line again.
THE TIMELINE, THE DETAILS, THE SCREENSHOTS (behind the cut)
Sunday night, December 22nd 2024, I noticed an influx in visitors to my fic You & Me & Holiday Wine. When I searched the title online, hoping to find out where they came from, a new listing popped up (third one down, no less):
This listing is still up today, by the way, though now when you follow the link to word-stream, it just brings you to the main site. (Also, to be clear, this was not the cause for the influx of traffic to my fic; word-stream did not link back to the original work anywhere.)
I followed the link to word-stream, where to my horror Y&M&HW was listed in its entirety—though, beyond the first half of the first chapter, behind a paywall—along with a link promising to take me—through an app downloadable on the Apple Store—to an AI-narrated audiobook version. When I searched word-stream itself for my ao3 handle I found both of my multi-chapter fics were listed this way:
Because the tags on my fics (which included genres* and characters, but never the original IPs**) weren’t working, I put ‘Kara Danvers’ into the search bar and discovered that many more supercorp fics (Supergirl TV fandom, Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor pairing) were listed.
I went looking online for any mention of word-stream and AI plagiarism (the covers—as well as the ridiculously inflated number of reviews and ratings—made it immediately obvious that AI fuckery was involved), but found almost nothing: only one single Reddit post had been made, and it received (at that time) only a handful of upvotes and no advice.
I decided to make a tumblr post to bring the supercorp fandom up to speed about the theft. I draw as well as write for fandom and I’ve only ever had to deal with art theft—which has a clear set of steps to take depending on where said art was reposted—and I was at a loss regarding where to start in this situation.
After my post went up I remembered Project Copy Knight, which is worth commending for the work they’ve done to get fic stolen from AO3 taken down from monetized AI 'audiobook’ YouTube accounts. I reached out to @echoekhi, asking if they’d heard of this site and whether they could advise me on how to get our works taken down.
While waiting for a reply I looked into Copy Knight’s methods and decided to contact OTW’s legal department:
And then I went to bed.
By morning, tumblr friends @makicarn and @fazedlight as well as a very helpful tumblr anon had seen my post and done some very productive sleuthing:
@echoekhi had also gotten back to me, advising me, as expected, to contact the OTW. So I decided to sit tight until I got a response from them.
That response came only an hour or so later:
Which was 100% understandable, but still disappointing—I doubted a handful of individual takedown requests would accomplish much, and I wasn’t eager to share my given name and personal information with Cliff Weitzman himself, which is unavoidable if you want to file a DMCA.
I decided to take it to Reddit, hoping it would gain traction in the wider fanfic community, considering so many fandoms were affected. My Reddit posts (with the updates at the bottom as they were emerging) can be found here and here.
A helpful Reddit user posted a guide on how users could go about filing a DMCA against word-stream here (to wobbly-at-best results)
A different helpful Reddit user signed up to access insight into word-streams pricing. Comment is here.
Smells unbelievably scammy, right? In addition to those audacious prices—though in all fairness any amount of money would be audacious considering every work listed is accessible elsewhere for free—my dyscalculia is screaming silently at the sight of that completely unnecessary amount of intentionally obscured numbers.
Speaking of which! As soon as the post on r/AO3—and, as a result, my original tumblr post—began taking off properly, sometime around 1 pm, jumpscare! A notification that a tumblr account named @cliffweitzman had commented on my post, and I got a bit mad about the gist of his message :
Fortunately he caught plenty of flack in the comments from other users (truly you should check out the comment section, it is extremely gratifying and people are making tremendously good points), in response to which, of course, he first tried to both reiterate and renegotiate his point in a second, longer comment (which I didn’t screenshot in time so I’m sorry for the crappy notification email formatting):
which he then proceeded to also post to Reddit (this is another Reddit user’s screenshot, I didn’t see it at all, the notifications were moving too fast for me to follow by then)
... where he got a roughly equal amount of righteously furious replies. (Check downthread, they're still there, all the way at the bottom.)
After which Cliff went ahead & deleted his messages altogether.
It’s not entirely clear whether his account was suspended by Reddit soon after or whether he deleted it himself, but considering his tumblr account is still intact, I assume it’s the former. He made a handful of sock puppet accounts to play around with for a while, both on Reddit and Tumblr, only one of which I have a screenshot of, but since they all say roughly the same thing, you’re not missing much:
And then word-stream started throwing a DNS error.
That lasted for a good number of hours, which was unfortunately right around the time that a lot of authors first heard about the situation and started asking me individually how to find out whether their work was stolen too. I do not have that information and I am unclear on the perimeters Weitzman set for his AI scraper, so this is all conjecture: it LOOKS like the fics that were lifted had three things in common:
They were completed works;
They had over several thousand kudos on AO3; and
They were written by authors who had actively posted or updated work over the past year.
If anyone knows more about these perimeters or has info that counters my observation, please let me know!
I finally thought to check/alert evil Twitter during this time, and found out that the news was doing the rounds there already. I made a quick thread summarizing everything that had happened just in case. You can find it here.
I went to Bluesky too, where fandom was doing all the heavy lifting for me already, so I just reskeeted, as you do, and carried on.
Sometime in the very early evening, word-stream went back up—but the fan fiction category was nowhere to be seen. Tentative joy and celebration!***
That’s when several users—the ones who had signed up for accounts to gain intel and had accessed their own fics that way—reported that their work could still be accessed through their history. Relevant Reddit post here.
Sooo—
We’re obviously not done. The fanwork that was stolen by Weitzman may be inaccessible through his website right now, but they aren’t actually gone. And the fact that Weitzman wasn’t willing to get rid of them altogether means he still has plans for them.
This was my final edit on my Reddit post before turning off notifications, and it's pretty much where my head will be at for at least the foreseeable future:
Please feel free to add info in the comments, make your own posts, take whatever action you want to take to protect your work. I only beg you—seriously, I’m on my knees here—to not give up like I saw a handful of people express the urge to do. Keep sharing your creative work and remain vigilant and stay active to make sure we can continue to do so freely. Visit your favorite fics, and the ones you’ve kept in your ‘marked for later’ lists but never made time to read, and leave kudos, leave comments, support your fandom creatives, celebrate podficcers and support AO3. We created this place and it’s our responsibility to keep it alive and thriving for as long as we possibly can.
Also FUCK generative AI. It has NO place in fandom spaces.
THE 'SMALL' PRINT (some of it in all caps):
*Weitzman knew what he was doing and can NOT claim ignorance. One, it’s pretty basic kindergarten stuff that you don’t steal some other kid’s art project and present it as your own only to act surprised when they protest and then tell the victim that they should have told you sooner that they didn’t want their project stolen. And two, he was very careful never to list the IPs these fanworks were based on, so it’s clear he was at least familiar enough with the legalities to not get himself in hot water with corporate lawyers. Fucking over fans, though, he figured he could get away with that.
**A note about the AI that Weitzman used to steal our work: it’s even greasier than it looks at first glance. It’s not just the method he used to lift works off AO3 and then regurgitate onto his own website and app. Looking beyond the untold horrors of his AI-generated cover ‘art’, in many cases these covers attempt to depict something from the fics in question that can’t be gleaned from their summaries alone. In addition, my fics (and I assume the others, as well) were listed with generated genres; tags that did not appear anywhere in or on my fic on AO3 and were sometimes scarily accurate and sometimes way off the mark. I remember You & Me & Holiday Wine had ‘found family’ (100% correct, but not tagged by me as such) and I believe The Shape of Soup was listed as, among others, ‘enemies to friends to lovers’ and ‘love triangle’ (both wildly inaccurate). Even worse, not all the fic listed (as authors on Reddit pointed out) came with their original summaries at all. Often the entire summary was AI-generated. All of these things make it very clear that it was an all-encompassing scrape—not only were our fics stolen, they were also fed word-for-word into the AI Weitzman used and then analyzed to suit Weitzman’s needs. This means our work was literally fed to this AI to basically do with whatever its other users want, including (one assumes) text generation.
***Fan fiction appears to have been made (largely) inaccessible on word-stream at this time, but I’m hearing from several authors that their original, independently published work, which is listed at places like Kindle Unlimited, DOES still appear in word-stream’s search engine. This obviously hurts writers, especially independent ones, who depend on these works for income and, as a rule, don’t have a huge budget or a legal team with oceans of time to fight these battles for them. If you consider yourself an author in the broader sense, beyond merely existing online as a fandom author, beyond concerns that your own work is immediately at risk, DO NOT STOP MAKING NOISE ABOUT THIS.
PLEASE check my later versions of this post via my main page to make sure you have the latest version of this post before you reblog. All the information I’ve been able to gather is in my reblogs below, and it's frustrating to see the old version getting passed around, sending people on wild goose chases.
So there's gossip about some version of kinktober over on twitter adding a bunch of nonsensical rules this year, and I am fascinated. Studying this like a bug.
Well, it was a good old week for fans of tomfoolery, as April Fool's came and went with some accurate and some less accurate guessing at the number of toys in a pit. Friday brought the penultimate episode of Yellowjackets' third season, with many mixed feelings. The newest episode of 9-1-1 aired with some heartwarming moments in Texas and some...less heartwarming moments in LA. Sunrise on the Reaping is breathing new life into the Hunger Games fandom on Tumblr. Your love for video games is ever-present, with Tomodachi Life, Sonic & Shadow, Pokémon, Cookie Run: Kingdom, and Love and Deepspace all in this week's list. Meanwhile, the artists keep on arting, Jujutsu Kaisen makes an appearance, and Jayvik is still hanging onto the last place. This is Tumblr's Week in Review.
Can someone smarter than me write an essay on the neorevivalism of the Mary Sue.
I only entered fandom at the tail end of “Mary Sue bad” like two decades ago, and never really understood the problem. Internalised misogyny. Ship and let ship and all that.
But I'm starting to understand it now that the concept of fandom etiquette is unravelling at the seams, and what was once a faux pas no longer seems to be.
I've written a few thoughts elsewhere on Mary Sues in the 40K fandom. I'll share them here for further discussion:
The original "Mary Sue" was the protagonist of a 1973 Star Trek fanfic parody. She was the youngest lieutenant in Starfleet (only 15 and a half years old) and adored by Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Scotty. She effortlessly outperformed the canon characters, received the Nobel Peace Prize, the Vulcan Order of Gallantry and the Tralfamadorian Order of Good Guyhood, and then died a tragic but noble death while the other characters wept unashamedly.
The fic was written as a gentle critique poking fun at certain trope patterns emerging in early Star Trek fanfiction, mostly by young female fans imagining themselves as important, beloved crew members of the Enterprise. The Mary Sue caricature wasn't originally trying to tear down these fic writers maliciously, but was a commentary on fandom trends that older (also mostly female) fans felt had become a bit overused.
However, over time, "Mary Sue" lost its original, somewhat affectionate meaning, and became weaponised to police and silence the creative expressions of female (as well as queer and POC) fans. The term shifted from referencing the playful parody of idealised self-insert or wish-fulfillment characters to being a misogynistic insult directed at any female/queer/POC character perceived as too skilled, too popular, or too central to the story. Fans from marginalised demographics who created original characters, especially self-inserts, were accused of poor writing — of course, the real offense was daring to imagine themselves as heroes in a canon that wasn't written for them.
In the 2010s, the democratisation of online spaces and growing awareness of the intersections of power, identity, and bias gave rise to a broader cultural movement toward unapologetic self-expression and empowerment, especially among marginalised groups. This is when we started seeing neorevivalism of the Mary Sue archetype — not as critique, not as policing, but as a celebration of creative freedom.
That's broadly where we are today.
So why do Mary Sues, usually in the form of self-inserts and x reader fics, still create tension in some fandoms, even within otherwise transformative subsections of a fandom?
A very specific dissonance arises from inserting a Mary Sue archetype into something like Warhammer 40,000, where the canon is deliberately constructed as a brutal satirical critique of contemporary politics, especially fascism, authoritarianism, religious extremism, and the dehumanising machinery of war.
For some fans, a Mary Sue character is a genuine power fantasy: someone who, in a universe of endless suffering, can actually win; can make a Space Marine fall in love with them, make family men out of primarchs, redeem a villain or make even the most brutal warlord respect them. In this framing, the Mary Sue offers escapism, the hope for a better future — for the author in real life as well.
In doing so, however, the Mary Sue also unintentionally negates the societal critique at the heart of 40K: the character's success suggests that broken systems can be overcome through individual exceptionalism.
This fundamentally clashes with the fatalism of the canon. In 40K, no one person can "fix" the universe. That's the tragedy; that's the point. It's why even the Emperor, the most powerful psyker in history, could not prevent humanity's fall into stagnation, oppression, and endless war. It's why Horus, beloved son, falls; why even the greatest heroes are eventually crushed under the weight of bad ideology and moral decay.
The Mary Sue bypasses that tragedy. Mary Sues reintroduce optimism into a world built on narrative pessimism, stating that problems rooted in systems, cultures, and histories can be solved by individuals — a comforting power fantasy deeply at odds with the thematic core of the canon. The Mary Sue basically ends up becoming a narrative counter-point, transforming grimdark horror into heroic or romantic fantasy.
This isn't to say that Mary Sue characters (or self-inserts or x reader fics) are "bad" or indicative of poor fandom etiquette. Power fantasies are valid, even vital, especially for marginalised fans who have historically been excluded from narratives of heroism and romance.
The real conflict arises because fandom spaces, particularly platforms like tumblr and, to a lesser extent, AO3, smash these divergent narratives together in broad tags.
Some fans want a place for hope and power and self-rescue. Some want to examine societal issues through the setting's inherent grim pessimism and systemic critiques.
Both are valid. But they can't fully coexist without friction, because they are asking completely different things from the canon.
At the end of the day, I think the best we can do is tag rigorously, curate carefully, and offer each other grace when we stumble into a neighbour's house and find their decor isn't to our taste. ❤
What I personally find most interesting is the shift in the "Mary Sue" from a hypercompetent genius paragon of a woman into a meek, motherly, often distinctly POWERLESS creature. I haven't seen that many fics in which she leads Guilliman on a leash or plays with Horus's helpless heart. Instead, she is defenseless; impregnated by him, owned by him, controlled by him, defined by him. Her role in the story is more often defined by her "submission", not by how "unbelievably" competent she is. She's the Mother. She's not the Prodigy. She's the Wife. She's never free.
That I think speaks to a much scarier shift in women's collective imagination. And it is not isolated to 40k at all. Look in any fandom and you will see more fics looking at aspects of being domestically abused, sexually dominated, and impregnated/made into a wife. Than you will find fics in which the woman excels on unbelievable merit. Mary Sue is a tradwife now.
however, I would argue that tradwife mary sue still IS a power fantasy, because tradwife is a power fantasy and the tradwife power fantasy is one who gets her power THROUGH and only BY her affiliation with powerful men.
To draw the eye and win the heart of Guilliman or Sanguinius or Hot Sexy Spess Maroon #74 is still a power fantasy, to win out against a) all the other women vying for his affections and b) to break the societal conditionng IN CANON that says 'space marines don't have girlfriends'.
Y'all are way too young to remember and I am too but my mom's generation went MENTAL for a book, the Thorn Birds, and it was...aiiight (I read it years later when I found a copy in a used bookstore trying to figure out why my mom's entire generation lost their collective MINDS over this book) and it was this: the man is a priest and he breaks his vows to be with her. (I can't say more without spoiling the plot...of a novel older than all of us).
THAT IS A POWER FANTASY.
What it is, is a power fantasy more similar to the power fantasies of the 1970s (when the Thorn Birds came out) and not the boss babes of later fandoms.
The cyclical nature of sexism is perhaps worth looking at here, but I repeat again
TRAD WIFE IN WARHAMMER IS ABSOLUTELY A POWER FANTASY. Just one that involves hyperfemininity rather than impersonating masculine tropes of heroism.
I don’t know if it’s just me, but it often feels as if these people haven’t really engaged with canon. It’s not limited to the tradwife x reader people, or this fandom, not am I saying they are all like this, but sometimes I do feel like people are just out there spouting “headcanons” about characters and events that are just blatantly wrong and contradict canon.
I don’t know if these people purposely choose to ignore some aspects of canon because it’s a power fantasy, or it’s a case of “wow he’s hot I’m going to imagine myself as his wife now” and then never reading a book after, but I find it very interesting
Thank you, everyone, for your thoughts on this topic! ❤
While I have also noticed the rise of tradwife characters in fandom spaces, I would argue that tradwife characters are not, in fact, Mary Sues.
A Mary Sue is by definition a power fantasy that grants agency to a marginalised character, someone who would under normal circumstances be powerless. The central fantasy is about overcoming marginalisation, often in terms of youth, gender, race, queerness, or disability — "Wow, [favourite character] wants to be my friend/love interest despite me being [marginalised identity]!"
Tradwife characters do not fit this mold. As @reclusiarch-orm points out above, tradwife narratives do not increase a character's agency, they reduce the character's agency.
Take Guilliman/Yvraine as an example. Yvraine is canonically already powerful, beautiful, able-bodied, and (despite her "xenos" label) coded with Eurocentric cultural indicators of high status. In tradwife narratives, she is then made to leave her position as a political and military leader to take on the much less influential role of Guilliman's girlfriend/wife.
@theclockwitch is correct that tradwife stories are also often power fantasies, just oriented around hyperfeminine ideals of submission and motherhood.
But a tradwife character is not a Mary Sue.
I want to underscore this because we see both classic Mary Sues and tradwife characters in the 40K fandom (and in the fandom discourse, such as this thread), and I think it is incredibly important to keep these two fundamentally different character archetypes separate.
Classic Mary Sues are often primarchs' daughters, young female commissars, or similar wish-fulfillment characters who singlehandedly change the genre of the setting from grimdark to noblebright, as I described above. They are in motion, transitioning from powerlessness to power, earning the admiration of popular love interests (the original Mary Sue was romantically pursued by Kirk) and/or the respect of (often male) peers (the original Mary Sue was called 'flawlessly logical' by Spock) through their actions in the story. They originate from positions of systemic disempowerment (young, female, marginalised) and claim masculine-coded ideals of heroism as their own. They are very rarely written as pregnant or mothers.
Tradwife characters, on the other hand, are the established domestic partners of primarchs, Space Marines, and other powerful canon characters. They were often once powerful themselves (like Yvraine), but their agency is now sublimated into serving their romantic partner and building a private, domestic life, often involving pregnancy and motherhood. Their goal isn't winning romantic attention — typically, they are already married or in a romantic relationship. Their goal is to be a good wife. They are static, defined by being rather than becoming. As others have noted in reblogs and tags, tradwife characters embody hyperfeminine traits in ways that closely echo conservative, right-wing ideals — most disingenuously, a complete lack of motivation to change their current situation.
So why are Mary Sues and tradwife characters being conflated in fandom discourse, if they are in fact diametrically opposite?
Because they do share one similarity: In both Mary Sue and tradwife character fanfiction, the canon is treated primarily as backdrop for the character-driven fantasy, and the broader literary themes of 40K — grimdark fatalism, fascism, and systemic oppression — are ignored or downplayed. The Mary Sue overcomes systemic oppression through individual exceptionalism, while the tradwife character finds personal sanctuary through submission and domesticity.
As a result, fics with either of these character archetypes typically feel less grimdark, less anchored in canon timeline events, and more centered around the author's personal fulfillment.
This disconnect understandably frustrates fans who love 40K's worldbuilding and want to engage seriously with its political and literary themes — why are you even in this fandom if you're just going to ignore the canon?
But Mary Sues deserve grace. Like Paula Smith, who wrote the original Mary Sue with a mix of fondness and exasperation, we older fans might feel that these fics are banal and repetitive. However, Mary Sues serve an important purpose as power fantasies that offer marginalised fans the possibility to see themselves as successful and worthy of love, admiration, and influence. Mary Sues are assertions of imaginative agency, and we should offer them patience and kindness.
Tradwife characters are a different matter. They propagate and valorise cultural ideals rooted in patriarchy and conservative Christian visions of womanhood. These narratives aren't just escapist but reinforce harmful real-world ideologies that actively endanger disempowered people.
That said, it's crucial that critiques of tradwife narratives don't become direct attacks on individual fans, many of whom may not even realise they have internalised harmful narratives.
Instead, as we do here, we must recognise and critically examine these problematic tropes as broader fandom trends, creating opportunities for self-reflection and growth.
And most importantly, we must not let our frustration with harmless Mary Sues conflate them with harmful tradwife characters.
Mary Sues belong in transformative fandom. Tradwife characters do not.
♡ character running out into the storm, swiftly followed by their enemy.
♡ "i can't want you, and yet i do. gods, i want you."
♡ both characters are drenched to the bone but neither breaks eye contact as they match scream for scream.
♡ “would you stop being so stubborn and come back inside?” “you don’t have to be here.” “i am wherever you are.”
♡ “please just go back, you will catch a cold.” “i am not going anywhere without you.” “why?” “why do you think?”
♡ character A shivers in the rain and then mid argument character B shrugs off their coat and puts it on character A.
♡ “would you honestly rather walk through a thunderstorm than speak with me?” “i would rather walk through a thunderstorm than be reminded you don’t care for me.” “care for you? we are far past just caring.”
♡ “your lips are blue.” “careful, it almost sounds like you care.”
♡ character runs out of their wedding, unable to marry someone they do not truly love. their supposed enemy who was waiting just outside follows them into the storm.
♡ “why did you follow me?” “why do you think? for someone who is so incredibly brilliant, how do you not know?”
♡ character A’s yelling is halted by character B pulling them in and whispering, “you are gorgeous when you’re mad.” “i’m covered in water.” “just gorgeous.”
♡ “why did you come back?” “you hate storms.”
♡ “i hate how much i can’t hate you, i want to hate you. why can’t you just let me hate you?”
The Hills Have Eyes (1977)
Halloween (1978)
The Amityville Horror (1979)
Cujo (1983)
The Lost Boys (1987)
A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)
Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)
Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Dawn of the Dead (2004)
Crawl (2019)
DBD killers in 2016: This one smacks shit. This one throws shit. This one smacks shit and throws shit. This one is nurse. She'll be a problem forever.
DBD killers in 2024: The Throngtungler's agony rod can put survivors immediately into the dying state but every time the survivor tungles one of the throng shrines located around the map they gain fifteen seconds of tungle protection and increase their agony meter. Once the agony meter is full, the Throngtungler's active ability button changes from the agony rod to "squack", increasing their movement speed by fifteen percent and taking away their ability to see Detective Tapp. While using "squack" all generators within the heartbeat radius will-
