My Fanfic

my writing diary, writing resources, tumblr fic and links to my writing on AO3 Korrasami forever masterpost • AO3 • personal blog • who the hell is this?

[raisinchallah]

ok guys rambling post ahead but i think i may have solved femslash as in working to understand why people view femslash the way they do.. which is one we can look at the various popular femslash shows over time and as it moves from the xenas and voyagers of the world to stuff like once upon a time and supergirl i think represents a clear shift in television marketing conception of like what shows for women even are there was in many ways a greater inherent respect by the greater public for shows like xena and voyager which were both spin offs of shows about men that this was a safe way to couch these shows and buffy also a big femslash fandom but mostly a m/f fandom due to the prevalence and popularity of arguing about what boyfriend she should pick anyways the success of these shows and more created an environment of understanding genre shows (always the most fertile ground for fandom) aimed at women were actually quite marketable which lead to an explosion in shows that were femslashable but also that due to the perceptions of these shows both by tv networks and fans at large are seen as far less respectable or serious shows this is obviously not a new phenomenon like look at the vitriolic fan response to star trek voyager for being star trek show but nominally about a woman sometimes vs like fan response to supernatural a tv show that dares to ask what if buffy and the x files had no women and yet has a massive massive fanbase its viewed as a knock against a show to try and make things about women but making it about men is a neutral or positive thing anyways a lot of these second and third generation post buffy/xena/voyager shows all heavily influenced by them and their approaches to integrating women into a genre television landscape that presumes such heroes should implicitly be men have done so to like various degrees that i think also reflect a studio that devalues such shows as well theyre just made for women so they will have less marketing or have specific narrow plot points often based around who the latest boyfriend is due to buffys stratospheric success around getting fans to argue what boyfriend she should pick and the lingering specter of xena and the fact people will implicitly assume ur nominally "feminist" marketed show about a woman and her best friend are about lesbians

this places femslash shippers on the back foot as the show already knows about u and is trying to combat it in ways honestly i think more active and specific that people do not assume any show about two men is implicitly gay but women doing things by themselves not thinking about men 24/7 is as the bechdel test wisely understands implicitly is kind of gay so tv shows work to try and get ahead of that and the assumption that television for women should focus on the boyfriends again further disenfranchises such femslash spaces but anyways femslash always finds a way this is the truth of the world and this plethora of shows about women are now also viewed by the general public as something small and lame just for women and are viewed with far less respect than bad tv aimed at men or a general audience but these shows are also given like a lesser budget less prestige etc so fandom knows all about supernatural but has no clue what lost girl is but also i think as the idea of marketing genre shows as womens shows has grown there is also this narrowing of focus on topics they like to cover as well with prescribed stories and plots assumed to be "for women" men can be universalized women cannot in general 2000s genre television became extremely cruel intense and focused almost exclusively on men in ways that were simply not spaces for femslash to thrive which i think broke the chain of connection from like voyager buffy xena era fans to the next decade of major fandom and also with this growing divide of like tv shows where femslash could thrive "womens shows" are also often implicitly interested in like family motherhood lighter topics worse plotting because theyre used as stepping stones for writers careers as they move somewhere else because the shows are given less money prestige etc

this also creates a weird chicken and egg situation in regards to fandom and fandom perception like ok people complain femslash is too soft too uwu not dark and weighty like their favorite slash and well ok a show like once upon a time interested in being a "family" show using disney properties to tell stories about breaking curses and finding your one true love and bonds of family fixing everything but also has like ten billion variously shippable women with weird tension with each other is it no wonder it has both a large femslash fandom but also that a fandom made up of people who enjoy this show would be focused on like women getting married and having a gay nuclear family with their child or whatever thats just the text of the show (not to imply thats all thats going on in swan queen fandom but i need to limit scope here lol) but people perceive this as like prescriptive that all femslash fandom is just about the sweet soft uwus that are just not very interesting but also it goes into what people are willing to forgive like limited scope and bad plotting for men but not women you know like supernatural has no women to speak of and is about men grunting about daddy issues and copying the work of far better shows (that actually featured female leads lol lmao) but people wanna wax poetic about deans daddy issues but the outlandish fantasy setting and the fact its about women means reginas insane mommy issues are not breaching containment of the fandom

like there is also obviously lingering issues of well femslash fandom due to its forever perceived closeness to actual gay community vs the understanding people have many varied relationships with slash and comfort in the pure objectification space has also necessarily lead femslash fandom to have a paranoid reflexive streak in regards to broader like feminist positions on sex and violence and lingering impact of the lesbian sex wars etc and the fact that people may view femslash as more personal or more revealing as it should be like viewed as in concert with your identity rather than opposed to your identity leads to a paranoid writing streak for sure that writing more messy or "problematic" femslash says more about you and your preferences than with slash where people can view it as shared barbie dolls to smash together and eroticize if femslash is viewed as closer to a persons own personal interests and desires so people may feel more self conscious or more judgmental of others as well as the lingering effects of the lesbian sex wars and the specter of like is this good for women something that does not get contemplated much in slash spaces in the same way

there has also interestingly been well a confluence of all of these things been a sense of erasure of femslash existing in part because slash in some ways desires to lay claim to that space of "authenticity" as people self consciously wish to discard the old associations of the fujoshi as this distant fetishizing eroticizing figure and make slash equally about well earnest engagement with gay reality which was normally seen as the realm of femslash this is multifaceted i think due to the nature of femslash being seen as say a more authentic expression of ones own sexuality this causes some lesbians and bisexual women to feel defensive and uncomfortable about not liking femslash because its seen as the most clear expression of gay desire in fandom and this specter of needing to "respect women" has lead to femslash being treated as a bit of a dead horse pulled out to beat when necessary because people must use femslash as an object upon which to work out their own discomfort with the distance between who they want to be and who they are in a fandom space this is also coupled with an erasure of femslash history and pretending that this history does not exist and that due to the aforementioned narrowing of scope of "womens shows" has lead to them being pushed out of the public eye and a sense that femslash fandom must reinvent itself and that these shows do not retain precedence in cultural memory compared to say star trek or the x files xena languishes but anyways this is furthered because of this discomfort and embarrassment around what people perceive they should be doing and valuing vs what they do and people see femslash as a like concept rather than anything real because well a lot of these shows are not popular in the public imagination due to their narrowing audience marketing tactics and that people again simply dont care about stories about women and so people will just drag out pretending that femslash is too soft too uwu doesnt exist all women are cardboard or any other thing they wish to state about it to work out their own issues that the existence of femslash brings up to them which fuels the ongoing stupid circular logic arguments and people just bringing up femslash as a rhetorical tool to prove whatever the hell they want because of the various aforementioned factors that really impact how people view the entire enterprise of making fake women kiss in your head and the baggage they attach to it which further insulates them from ever actually trying to engage earnestly with this community as just a space of enjoyment because they think it has to have all this baggage and theres a defensive sense of well if i dont like this then all the people who like femslash must be a bunch of lame boring losers who only care about women kissing in a virtuous manner or whatever new association they wish to pin to it and construct artificially high marks to clear for when any combination of women kissing will clear that for them due to said weird baggage and the various distances between slash and femslash fandoms and insularity therein.... also people just hate women <3

[prettyarb]

That post about writing motorcycle scenes I've been meaning to write

Riding a bike is one of those things that’s a very physical experience, so if you haven’t ridden, then there’s a lot you will naturally not be aware of.  I love motorcycle scenes in stories, but over the years I’ve noticed that scenes written by non-riders almost always make the same mistakes.  They’re ubiquitous in fact, to the point that if you haven’t been there to learn the contrary yourself, it’s natural to assume that’s how it actually works.

The first thing to know about motorcycles is that when driving, the motorcycle performs as an extension of you.  It’s almost cybernetic, the way your mass and balance fuse with the machine’s, the way it transmutes your sense of your surroundings and the surface you’re driving on, and the sense of the bike itself and how it’s performing.

Most notably, the driver’s center of gravity becomes the central steering mechanism.  At speeds faster than around 10 mph, the driver steers primarily through shifting their center of balance.  If you want to turn left, you lean your body left.  You’re actually tilting yourself and the motorcycle to take curves and corners.

When carrying a passenger, then, the passenger needs to shift their center of gravity along with the driver’s.  It’s like taking the ‘follower’ position in partner dancing.  You lean WITH them; not less, because then your weight counters theirs and they end up not turning (which can be highly bad if, say, the road does not go that way), and not more, because then the bike could tip right over.

Being a good passenger on a bike is not a huge learning curve for most people, but there is a learning curve.  And some people have more of a knack for it than others.  Some people are natural back-seat drivers, for whatever reason overly pushy, eager, demanding, or determined that they know better than you, and have a habit of making it hard on the driver.  I’ve had people tell me they hate riding pillion even if they’re good at it, because they don’t like how out-of-control it feels.  I detest it myself, in fact; I’d far rather be driving, and it’s a constant struggle for me to just follow along and behave myself.

This means, though, that carrying a passenger who weighs significantly more than you can be a tricky business.  I weigh about 110, and when carrying a rider weighing significantly more than that, it’s awfully easy to crash if the passenger tries to back-seat steer.  (A way to mitigate this, especially for new passengers, is to simply take 15 minutes or so to bump around quiet local roads at low speeds so that the driver and passenger can familiarize themselves a bit with minimal risk to themselves.)

Now, undoubtedly the #1 most-committed mistake I see from almost everybody who writes about motorcycles (and for that matter, a lot of unsuspecting new passengers try it in real life) is the ‘wrapping arms around the driver’s waist’ business.  It’s so common that this line is practically required by law when somebody’s writing a motorcycle scene, but seriously:  DON’T DO THAT.  <–The all caps there is not for shaming; it’s for emphasizing the safety issues.  It’s not only uncomfortable for the driver, it’s potentially dangerous.  It makes it hard to steer, hard to breathe comfortably, and easy to get jerked off balance and into a crash.

In a similar vein, holding onto the driver via grabbing their clothing is ill-advised.  This can lead to getting jerked off balance, having seams dig in painfully, and being choked by fabric.

What to do instead:  The rider sitting pillion should brace their hands on either side of the driver’s waist.  

I know, if you’re in it for the sexual tension, this sounds less sexy, but I’m here to tell you that’s a filthy lie.  A passenger who’s sitting properly is basically molded onto the driver’s back.  Riding with/being a passenger on a bike is a startlingly intimate experience.  There’s a lot of trust and teamwork involved, which takes place at a kinesthetic level.  It feels a lot like dancing, as I said before, or maybe partnered sports, where the collaboration is happening at a physical, bone-deep level that often skips right past the conscious intellect.

Now, sometimes (you may’ve seen this on the road) you’ll have passengers who prefer to hang onto a part of the bike–bits of the frame, maybe, or a ‘sissy bar’/seat back sticking up from the back.  It’s not uncommon, but it’s a bad habit because the passenger is never quite as in-tune with the driver this way, and if something happens–a tire slips in a puddle, for example–their weight moving in the wrong direction can end up jerking the bike out of the driver’s control.

Another thing I see a lot of writers do in stories that doesn’t work in real life:  unfortunately, helmets are NOT easily swappable.  They’re designed to clasp the head; a well-fitted helmet should not move on your head at all, even if you shake your head hard (though it also shouldn’t be tight enough to exert uncomfortable pressure).  A helmet that fits loosely is useless at best and dangerous at worst.  One that’s too tight is either painful or doesn’t go on at all.  It doesn’t take much difference in the size of two people’s heads for one person’s helmet to not fit the other person properly.  (And even if they’re the same size, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll be comfortable for more than short-term wear, but hey.)

Also, the stupid things are ridiculously expensive–especially the full-face models–so most bikers aren’t lucky enough to have a bunch of extras just laying around.

Another tip, both for writing and riding: riding pillion on a sports bike (those sleek ones where the driver’s crouched and leaning forward like a race jockey) is a miserable freaking experience.  On a lot of models, you’re perched up there on something that barely counts as a seat and leaves you constantly feeling like you’re about to slide off the back; your legs are pushed up into a crouch; you’re hunched like a monkey over the driver; and possibly you’ve got a scalding-hot muffler pressed up against your calf.  

(Pro tip: if anybody ever invites you for a ride on their bike and you’re wearing shorts, pay attention to where the muffler’s located in relation to the foot pegs.)

Now, what is it about motorcycles that makes some of us bikers go into a lathered-up frenzy at the idea of riding?  It’s because it FEELS SO DAMN ALIVE.

Look.  It’s like…life these days is, well, canned.  We spend a lot of our time in pods–houses, cars, subway trains–breathing tinned air, walking around on pavement or carpet…  But when I’m on a bike, it’s me and a 360 degree panorama of the world, and there’s nothing between me and it.  Some people get off on the risk of that, but for me it’s a matter of immersion.  When I ride, I can feel the cool humid air rolling down from under a forested hillside.  I can smell the road dust, the oil, the exhaust, the herby scent of weeds and wildflowers on the roadside, the river I’m driving near, the shady scent of a forest, the roadside fruit stand…and I’m not talking in that wafty, broken-up way you get if you roll the car doors down.  It’s like driving into a wall of scent, crashing through one bubble after another of temperature changes and smells and sounds and sights, and I have this bike underneath me that’s rumbling and vibrating and moving like it’s part of me, and it’s just the most powerful sense I’ve ever had of being in charge of my own life and not hiding from the world.  I can see it, and it can see me, and yeah, that’s a bit dangerous, but it’s also real.

[destinationtoast]

Thank you! This is incredibly useful.

[badwolfkaily]

This.

[strongwomenunited]

I don’t know about others but the only reason I put both is so that whichever someone clicks on, they will find my fic. So if there is supposed to be rules, I guarantee you that no writer knows these ones. We can barely get people to comment, you think we’re going to specifically choose & or / ? Hell no.

[beatrice-otter]

I’ve been in fandom for twenty years, and “/” means romance and “&” means no romance was literally one of the first things I learned. It dates back to Star Trek fanfiction of the 70s. I’m boggled by the fact that anyone who’s been reading fic on AO3 for more than like five minutes wouldn’t know that, and I’m curious as to what fanfic community you come out of.

I don’t think that tagging with both is actually going to get your fic in front of more readers. People looking for romance often exclude the “&” tag if there are too many gen fics tagged with both. People looking for gen often exclude the “/” tag if there are too many fics with both. So rather than putting your fic in front of twice the people, you are in fact more likely to get your target audience ignoring your fic because it has a tag they don’t want.

Also, by overtagging you are more likely to annoy potential readers away from your fic than entice them. A fic tagged both & and / better have both romance and a ton of platonic interaction between the two characters, like a slow burn romance friends-to-lovers arc. If it isn’t, I’m going to be very unhappy because the author lied to me with the tags to try and trick me into reading a fic with deceptive advertising.

When I’m in a fandom and see tagging where some of the tags don’t really apply and are just there to get it in front of more eyes, I’m going to assume one of two things. Either the author is a newb who doesn’t know anything, or the author is purposefully spamming the tags because they don’t care about lying to their potential audience and think that “spray and pray” is an effective tactic. In the first case, their writing probably will not be very good, so why bother reading their fic. In the second case, the fact that I can’t trust the tags to be accurate means I’m not going to read it to see if it’s interesting even if it has a tag I like. Chances are, that tag isn’t actually in the fic anyway, and even if it is, by spam-tagging the author is making the archive harder to use for everybody. Why would I reward bad behavior with attention? No. Far better to mute the author and move on.

[mylordshesacactus]

More to the point--and no, I will never stop harping on this, because we have GOT to stop leaving our strongest points in the drawer--it doesn't matter if you heard of this convention before joining AO3 or not, because it's in AO3's tagging FAQ.

[id: the "How do I tag a romantic or platonic relationship?" section of the tagging FAQ here.]

"But Jo," you may argue, because you're wrong. "There's no way to find that without digging through site FAQ menus, and that's really inaccessible!"

sure

except

that when you go to post a new fic, and you go to put in those relationship tags, you see this

[id: the Relationships field]

and that tooltip, the one THERE TO EXPLAIN HOW THE FIELD WORKS, links to the Relationships segment of the tag FAQ, which explicitly lays this shit out.

I don't care if you don't know fandom history. I don't care if you've never heard a goddamn word about the spirk shippers. I don't care if you've never been exposed to fandom culture in your life. It is, frankly, not fair to expect those things of everyone.

What is entirely fair to expect is that you will READ THE INSTRUCTIONS PRINTED NEXT TO THE FUCKING BOX, actually. Forget fandom conventions. It genuinely doesn't matter whether you agree with or respect fandom conventions. This is a site policy. This is explicitly how tagging on AO3, specifically, works.

[leiflemmon]

Just saw a tweet like "REAL libraries check for quality!" as some kinda gotcha at AO3?? But I'm a librarian, so... heads up that "quality checks," AKA "weeding" or "pulling," means looking for damaged books or ones that haven't circulated in a few years to clear up shelf space. We don't Quality Check for if the library books have nontoxic romance or good grammar. :U I assure you every library in your area has absolute ABOMINATIONS of bad storytelling as well as your favorite pop lit.

[ao3org]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

In our ongoing efforts to give you more tools for curating your Archive experience, we’re rolling out a new interface to let you hide content by specific users.

English • Afrikaans • العربية • Bahasa Indonesia • Bahasa Malaysia • বাংলা • Български • Català • Čeština • Cymraeg • Dansk • Deutsch • Ελληνικά • Filipino • Français • हिन्दी • Hrvatski • Italiano • עברית • Кыргызча • Lietuvių kalba • Magyar • Nederlands • 日本語 • Norsk • Polski • Português brasileiro • Português europeu • Română • Русский • Српски • Српски • Suomi • Svenska • Tiếng Việt • Türkçe • 中文-普通话 國語

[ao3commentoftheday]

Muting hides content from your view of the Archive. Blocking stops another user from interacting with you. This muting functionality is a really exciting update following on from the announcement of comment blocking back in June of last year.

Many thanks to the volunteers on AD&T who coded these changes and to the volunteers who tested and reviewed the code as well. I’m so thankful for all of your hard work ❤️

[gffa]

“Thoughts on one of the hardest things: banishing the imagined bad faith reader from your writing process” by Melissa Febos on Twitter is hitting really hard today.

[dduane]

This.

[septembercfawkes]

PSA: Just a friendly reminder that whenever you start a creative project, you will invariably hit a phase where the Thing™️ appears horrendous and you start asking existential questions. But if you keep working, it invariably passes and starts to resemble something less like the devil’s vomit. Doesn’t matter if it’s art, writing, or what–this happens repeatedly. Carry on.

[noodledog]

This is a bit of advice I always pass on to people asking me about art. EVERY. SINGLE. PEICE. Every single one that I love I have at one point or another wanted to throw in the trash. Wanted to burn in a fire. Wanted to give up and leave it. The trick is to go “okay what is the worst part and how do I fix it” and just focus on that ONE thing. Then you do that again for the second worst. Then you do it again. And again. Until finally nothing needs fixing. And then it’s done and it’s beautiful.

If you dont love it, it’s not done yet. That’s all there is to it.

[rollercoasterwords]

the tiktokification of ao3

or: some of you fundamentally misunderstand ao3 and it really, really shows

i was talking about this with a friend a few days ago and since then i've seen multiple posts of various sorts that have just made me think about it more, so. here is me breaking down a disconnect i see particularly with younger members of the marauders fandom (i say marauders specifically just bc that's the only one i'm plugged into):

okay, so i've seen many (usually younger) marauders fans either talking online about how they wish ao3 was more like social media (specifically regarding algorithms) OR talking about ao3/fanfiction/fanfic writers as if they are operating under the same etiquette/guidelines/assumptions they would bring into social media platforms. this ranges from being mildly irritating to genuinely harmful, and i want to talk abt why.

first - you have to understand that social media, in this day and age, exists in a profit economy. and when i say social media here, i'm referring to platforms like tiktok, twitter, instagram, etc. all of these platforms exist in a profit economy where content is a product that can be monetized. this leads to a few important distinctions:

people posting on these social media platforms are generally posting with the intent to get their content seen by as many people as possible, as quickly as possible

they post with this intent because once their content is consumed by enough people, it becomes a product that they can monetize

therefore, if that content gets popular enough, these people can become influencers, where content creation is an actual job and their audience are, in a sort of vague and obscured way, similar to consumers purchasing a product

because of the profit economy surrounding social media, there are certain assumptions + forms of interaction that bleed across almost all social media platforms. the ones relevant to this little essay include:

operating under the assumption that anyone posting anything on the internet wants to go viral, ie. be seen by as many people as possible as quickly as possible in order to grow an "audience"

these influencers are creating content for us, their audience, so they should want to please us. they should also be trying to appeal to the broadest possible audience. therefore, if we dislike their content, we have a right to make that very, very clear.

in that same vein, we have a general right to critique content creators, as they are making a profit and we are the consumers purchasing their product--much like you might feel entitled to a certain standard of service in a restaurant where you are paying for the food.

when you carry these assumptions over to a platform like ao3, it creates problems. why? in a nutshell: because ao3 exists outside the profit economy

ao3 is a non-profit. it does not have an algorithm because it is not trying to sell you anything. this means that the writers posting their work on ao3 are not making a profit. we are not influencers. we are not creating monetized content to sell to a consumer-audience. where consuming content on other social media platforms might be comparable to eating at a restaurant, reading fanfiction on ao3 is more like coming over to someone's house and eating cookies that they made for free. you are in their house. the cookies are free, given as a gift. so what happens when those assumptions outlined above start to bleed over from other social media?

assuming that anyone posting fanfiction online wants their work to go viral -- i've seen this with popular fic writers getting questions like, "are you worried x isn't going to be as popular as y?" those questions are usually not ill-intended, but they demonstrate a fundamental lack of understanding about why writers post work on ao3. it's not to go viral. it's not to build any sort of online following. most of us who post on ao3 have jobs or schoolwork or other commitments, and writing fanfiction is something done for fun, out of a love for writing. those sharing their work online might be seeking community, but that is fundamentally different from seeking an audience, and in no way involves internet virality. if someone is posting fanfic on ao3 with the hope that it'll "go viral," then they likely either won't continue writing fanfic for long or will reach a point where they have to re-evalute their motivations, because seeking joy and validation by turning your art into a product for consumption just isn't very sustainable.

influencers are creating content for us, so we have a right to let them know if we don't like it -- nope!! fic writers are not influencers. yes, even the popular ones. no matter how much other people might blow their work up on social media, fic writers are still outside the profit economy. they are not creating content for an audience. they are not creating content for you. they are writing because they love it, and they are generously sharing it. if you don't like it, don't interact with it. you are never entitled to loudly and publicly proclaim how much you dislike a fic. i talk about this more here

we have a general right to critique fic writers, the same way we do with content creators/influencers -- again, no. you should not be treating fic writers the way you would treat an influencer on another social media platform, no matter how popular they may be. this is not to say fic writers are beyond all reproach; rather, it is a call-in to check your entitlement. fic writers are not little jesters entertaining in your court. they are not subject to your whims. they do not have to do things for you. they do not have to write things you like. in that post i linked on point 2, i talk about what etiquette might look like if you're really concerned that a fic writer is doing something harmful, but that is not what i'm talking about here. i am talking about the proliferation of negativity i have seen, especially on twitter and tiktok, where people essentially just talk shit about fics or fic writers as though they are entitled to have those fic writers working to please them. this is gross, and it needs to stop. you wouldn't go over to someone's house, eat the cookies they baked to share, and then spit those cookies back in their face and start shouting about what a shitty baker they are. or maybe you would--in which case, congratulations! you are Not A Good Person.

anyway, at the end of the day, a lot of this can be boiled down to: Because ao3 exists outside the profit economy, fic writers are not influencers, and you should never be treating them as though they are. i think i see this disconnect largely with younger people just because they've maybe only ever really understood social media within this sort of influencer-consumer-culture economy, and genuinely don't understand how to interact differently with the internet. so, consider this post a call-in to reevaluate the way you interact with fic writers and the etiquette you use when it comes to engaging with fanfic on ao3! i promise that ao3 being different from social media is a very, very good thing, and also a very, very rare thing, so let's treasure it and focus on fostering community rather than trying to morph it to fit the mould of influencer-audience dynamics that we see almost everywhere else <3

[fiddleabout]

#honestly the tiktokification of people's internet brains though#like do i want people to read my fic yes#but in the same way that when i bake cookies and share them with my friends#i want lots of my friends to be like wow i really like these cookies#i don't want them tweeted at the actor who plays mrs chocolate chip so that you can ask her what she thinks#of the gay porn cookies i baked#because that's a different thing altogether#please tell me you understand this distinction holy butts (via @swashbucklery​)

[wordfather]

writing tip:

if you push buttons on a keyboard, letters will appear on the screen. and with that power you can do anything

[funnytwittertweets]

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

*adds a sprinkle of cornstarch to the plot and stirs*

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#NOOOOO URE SUPPOSED TO MIX THE CORNSTARCH INTO A SLURRY BEFORE ADDING IT TO UR SOUP ITLL CLUMP IN HOT WATER 

NOOO THE PLOT CLUMPENS

[knicks-knacks]

It's hilarious to me when people complain about AO3 and its policies, and what they allow on the site - but it's ESPECIALLY funny when people complain like "Why can't the freaks make their own site and just go there?"

Sweetie... AO3 is the site for that. Y'all invaded our space.

Wattpad and FFN still exist. Go there. They're as shitty and G-rated as you want. You can't have the luxuries that AO3 offers if you're gonna be a little bitch about its policies. Imagine walking into a strip club and complaining about the alcohol and naked ladies when there's a god damn Dennys next door you could have gone to. Christ.

[aye-write]

[everwizard]

Guys what happened to Passerine??

It’s just??? Gone???

[boygirlctommy]

this pops up when you search for it??

[sanctuarysusie]

oh my god it got approved to add to someones collection and that person made the collection private, therefore removing passerine

[maxile0-deactivated20220923]

WHAT.

[ethotv-archived]

is this not a known thing anymore? please god if youre a fic writer DO NOT LET RANDOM PEOPLE ADD YOUR FIC TO A COLLECTION!!!!!

if you are a READER who enjoys bookmarking fics, you can put your BOOKMARKS in a collection, which can be privated without hiding any of the original works

[hallsoffandom]

ITS BACK BUT LISTEN TO THE PERSON ABOVE ME

[ineffectualdemon]

I will say you can also revoke permission and remove your fics from collections

[kateawolf13]

A good thing to remember. Check your collections, my friends.

[kateawolf13]

TO CHECK :

Go to your profile, click works, then click “works in collections”

.

.

If a work has be hidden, it will display like this :

.

.

.

Then, if you wanna remove a collecting, go to edit, scroll here, and click the x on the relevant one

[xantissa]

The same, hard same

[racethewind10]

Also I’m sorry to nudge this post off topic just a little but taking the opportunity to once again beg fic authors PLEASE, please please on behalf of your readers, orphan your works instead of deleting them. Fandoms change! your life changes maybe you don’t want to be associated with that fic anymore it’s okay! But please do not delete it! That is someone’s comfort fic, I promise you.

[shoomlah]

redid my 1890’s naval officer Sailor Uranus design from a couple years back!

I’ve always felt like I really missed the mark when it came to capturing Haruka’s effortless rakishness on the first pass, and I wasn’t about to let that happen AGAIN

[qlala]

tolstoy saying in an 1873 letter that he’d be done with anna karenina “in fifteen days, if god grants me life” and then taking another four years to finish writing it is both hilarious and deeply relatable

[femmenietzsche]

Were the ‘legendary’ names of ancient Greece common among the population of the time? Ie: were there people named Hercules, Icarus, Midas, Narcissus, Odysseus, etc getting around?

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The short answer to your question is that, yes, there would have been real people with the names of heroes and gods, but no, they were not common.

The long answer is that Ancient Greek naming conventions are a complex and fascinating topic. On the one hand, there are no surviving sources that explain to us how or why the Greeks came up with names for their children. Ancient authors do not seem to have found this topic interesting enough to write about. On the other hand, Greek names form a tremendously large body of evidence - the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names claims to have published as many as 215,000 so far - and the fact that most names are composed of words with a direct meaning in Greek means that they present a unique window into the social world of Ancient Greece. Because of their components and their meaning, names can often tell us about people’s place of origin, family ties, social status, cult practices, looks, and so on.

With the exception of some restrictions on the naming of slaves, there do not seem to have been any particular rules about what people could and could not be named. We might expect, for instance, that it was frowned upon to give your child the literal name of a god or goddess, but there’s no evidence that the Greeks actually found it taboo. Admittedly the names of divinities, while becoming more popular after the 1st century AD, are rare enough in the Classical period (5th-4th centuries BC) that individual known cases have been extensively discussed by scholars. However, they are not altogether absent. There certainly were people named Artemis and Leto. This shows that there were no hard limitations to what a child could be named, but only conventions by which most names were chosen. The only names that genuinely don’t seem to have been used at all were those of underworld gods (Persephone, Hades).

So what were the conventions they stuck to? One of the most powerful factors, especially among elite families, was the names of ancestors; some sons were named directly after their fathers (such as Perikles, son of the famous Perikles), while others were named after their grandfathers (like Kleisthenes, father of democracy, grandson of Kleisthenes the tyrant of Sikyon). Modern scholars are on pretty firm ground when they assume that people with similar names are related; often a name would “run” in just one family, sometimes for centuries. A related strong influence was the desire to express social status (again especially among the rich), which meant that many wealthy people would have names that contained words like aristo- (the best), -archos (leader), and especially mutations of the word hippos (horse). The latter is often regarded as a firm indicator of high status, since only the richest men in Greece would be able to afford to own horses, and horse-riding was the favourite pursuit of the leisure class. Famous examples include Perikles’ father Xanthippos (“yellow horse”), the physician Hippokrates (“horse power”), and Philippos II of Macedon (“horse lover”).

If there were no particular traditions binding new parents, they would be able to choose a name they liked. Endless possibilities are known. Particularly striking to us, though not necessarily the most common, are male and female names that contain a direct reference to warfare - Kallimachos (“beautiful battle”), Archestrate (“army-leader”), Nikomachos (“victory in battle”), Andromache (“battle of men”), Deinomache (“terrible in battle”). Other names are more straightforward, like Leon (“lion”), Kephalon (“head”) or Melissa (“honey”). People were named after cities, mountains, and, very commonly, rivers; Aristotle complains about rare and ridiculous names like Hermokaikoxanthos, a pile-up of the names of 3 rivers. Generally, words like kalos (beauty), stratos (army), agora (marketplace), demos/damos (people), -anax (king) and old values like bia (strength) and kratos (power) occur often in what we might call “posh” Greek names. Names ending in -kles (Perikles, Themistokles, Damokles) refer to kleos (glory). The combinations of these words don’t always make sense; what sort of a name is Isagoras (“equal marketplace”) or Iphikrates (“strong strength”)?

Interestingly, while the actual outright names of gods are extremely rare, by far the most common type of name in Ancient Greece was actually the indirect reference to a god or goddess. There were 2 ways to do this. First, the name of a god could be easily adapted into an adjective form, so as to become a name derived from a god rather than the god’s name itself. Some of the most common were adaptations of Apollo (for example into Apollonios), Dionysos (Dionysios), Artemis (Artemisia) or Demeter (Demetrios); the latter is still in common use now, in its vowel-shifted form of Dimitri. One of the most famous examples of such a godlike name is Alexander the Great’s companion Hephaistion (from Hephaistos). The second way to adapt divine names was to add words to them - most commonly kleos (glory),-doros or -dotos (gift, given). So we have authors like Diodoros (“god-given” - the reference is to Zeus), Apollodoros, Asklepiodotos; in the Roman era, when Eastern gods made their way into Greek lands, new names like Isidoros (gift of Isis) crop up. While it has proved impossible to say with categorical certainty that names are an indication of which gods were being worshipped in a given place, regional patterns are very clear in the evidence, and names derived from gods are at least a clear indication of which divinities were considered important. Perhaps the most touching are the few cases when parents who consulted the oracle on matters related to childbirth would name their child after the god who had advised them or after the place of the oracle.

Given all these factors and trends, it’s perhaps easy to understand why the literal names of heroes were not commonly used as names, even if there were no strict rules or moral taboos against them. There wouldn’t have been any family tradition to do so; there was no social credit in making pretentious references; since mythological figures were not always the recipients of cults, they wouldn’t often have been credited for advice or protection in childbirth. It’s possible that their names would have been regarded as old-fashioned or an ill omen, given the fates of most of them. According to the searchable part of the Lexicon, Ikaros is attested just 20 times; Narkissos a more respectable 74 times. I can’t find a single person named Odysseus. Only the hero Iason has a famous “real-life” counterpart in the 4th-century Thessalian tyrant Iason of Pherai.

Source for most of this: R. Parker, ‘Theophoric names and the history of Greek religion’, in S. Hornblower/E. Matthews (eds.) Greek Personal Names: Their Value as Evidence (2000), 53-79

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/73epkn/were_the_legendary_names_of_ancient_greece_common/dnpyyh1/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

[avelera]

The Causal Chain And Why Your Story Needs It

The most obnoxious thing my writing teacher taught me every story needed, that I absolutely loathed studying in the moment and that only later, after months of resisting and fighting realized she was right, was something called the causal chain.

Simply put, the causal chain is the linked cause-and-effect that must logically connect every event, reaction, and beat that takes place in your story to the ones before and after.

The Causal Chain is exhausting to go through. It is infuriating when someone points out that an event or a character beat comes out of nowhere, unmoored from events around it.

It is profoundly necessary to learn and include because a cause-and-effect chain is what allows readers to follow your story logically which means they can start anticipating what happens next, which is what is required for a writer to be able to build suspense and cognitively engage the audience, to surprise them, and to not infuriate them with random coincidences that hurt or help the characters in order to clumsily advance the author's goals.

By all means, write your story as you want to write it in the first draft, and don't worry about this principle too much. This is an editing tool, not a first draft tool. But one of the first things you should do when retroactively begin preparing your story to be read by others is going step by step through each event and confirming that a previous event leads to it and that subsequent events are impacted by it on the page.