This blog contains both content for general audiences and mature content. Minors must block the tag “not/sfw” and are not to interact with any posts labeled as such.
This blog has been an archive for two years. I am in the process of downloading everything I'd like to from this account and when I'm done, I'm going to delete the account. The ao3 page will remain. Remember, if you're worried about losing your favorite stories, ao3 always has a download option.
03.19.22
This blog is now an archive. All bkdk content will now redirect.
hello! thank you for all your fics <3 may i please ask why you no longer write x reader fics? You don't have to answer, I've just been seeing so much negativity and entitlement from anons making writers stop doing what they love, I hope that's not the reason for you.
Ahh, sorry I don't know when this was sent in; I hope you haven't been waiting long. Don't worry, it's nothing negative. I'm really lucky never to have received any hate or been a part of any drama. I've made lovely reader insert friends and it's been a great community to be a part of. I so appreciate your concern, tho. And I'm glad you've enjoyed my stories. <3
Longer answer beneath the cut.
It's kind of a long story, so I'll start off with the tl;dr. Reader insert was always going to be transient for me. I'm a shipper and always have been, and I kind of knew that from the beginning. If you dig reeeeally deep into this blog, you'll see MONTHS of tags where I say "once I find a ship, it's all over here" and "this ship is calling me over, I swear" etc. Tbh, the breadcrumbs have been laid since near the beginning.
I've been reading fic since I was 12, and it was always shipfic. I never liked OC-centered stories, and was only ever drawn to reading and writing canonverse and stuff that felt similar. I don't enjoy deviating from canon. I talk to reader insert friends who have been into fic as long as I have and they talk about making OCs or pairing their faves with characters they could project onto and that was just...never my game. Idk if it's my demisexuality or my lack of imagination, but it's always given me butterflies to read about two characters who I see as really, truly in love. Whereas with reading and writing reader insert, I never cared about reader-chan. Even when I was modeling her exactly after me. I tried to give her depth and make her a good match for her bnha boy, but it was just that. A match to the boy. She was a stand-in, but not for me. For a character that whoever I was writing for would actually love.
I fell into reader insert by accident. I liked Todoroki upon my first watch of the series, and I wanted to read fics with him, but I wasn't jazzed by his ships. I'm usually pretty easy and get into whichever ships are pushed in canon. Like, if they tried harder with IzuOcha, I'd probably be an IzuOcha shipper, lol. But bnha isn't really committed to its, like, 4 or 5 het ships, so I wasn't either. So I clicked around random stories with Shou, stumbled upon reader insert, and I was like eh, that'll do. If there had been a ship I liked, I never would have read a single reader insert fic ever.
And then I got pulled in. Not by reader insert, exactly, but by the community. The blogs, and the friends I started making quickly, which was crazy to me, because I've never been in a fandom as active as this. In other fandoms, I would make a friend or two, but stuff like discord and tumblr friends and groupchats were new. And exciting, especially in the loneliness of covid.
Then I entered a feedback loop. I started reading bkdk as early as November 2020, and I only started reading reader insert in August, writing it in September. But November was also when I joined my first reader insert discord. All my friends were talking about reader insert, and we were all promoting our stories, reading each other's and so my brain kept on being flooded with fic ideas, headcanons, requests. Especially since I was writing all oneshots, mostly nsfw ones which, for me, didn't take a whole lot of effort or time. I started writing for a more (read: the most) popular character, Bakugou, and my fics were becoming popular, in January 2021 I hit 1k followers, I had decent interax, everything was going well.
By this point, I said at least to friends, if not hidden in tags somewhere on this blog, that I was ready to leave reader insert as soon as I had an idea for a bkdk fic. Cold turkey. I was one foot out the door for months before I actually started writing bkdk. But because of that feedback loop, I kept on having reader insert ideas and I wasn't in the same way talking about bkdk, thinking about it, taking the time to try and conjure up a fic idea. I still had wips for reader insert and I wanted to fulfill those promises as well.
Just some discord screenshots with dates, so you can see that the descent is much earlier than you'd think. Plus, past!me says some of this better than I'm managing to here.
The truth is, that I feel nothing towards reader insert now. I kind of want to delete my fics for it all the time because, like, I don't even know who that person was who wrote them. Who was Ana? Not me, and that's why I go by my real name now. I'm not a person who goes through phases, usually. I'm a pretty consistent person, and when I latch onto something, I tend to stick with it for life. Bkdk will be with me for life, I am 100% sure. This was a very strange, out of character blip for me.
And I know that sounds kind of disparaging towards the genre, and I don't mean that at ALL. Reader insert holds so much value as a genre, and it did for me too. You can see from my chat above that it was holding the entirety of my mental health for months. And I'll always value the friends I made. I love that these fics are still enjoyed, so I never will delete them. But I wish that I could fully detach them from myself too. I don't want to give up being able to read the lovely comments and reply back, though. Still, I wish with all my heart that I'd been with bkdk during all that time instead. Bkdk gives me butterflies. It makes me feel warm, makes me feel something like love. Reader insert just doesn't.
There's also a similar story in here about how I got caught in a feedback loop of writing smut too, and I never wanted to be a smut writer. I've written 50 fics or so for bnha, and none of them are my favorites (even the bkdks). My favorite fics, now, are all sfw, shipfic ones I wrote years ago. I don't like that. I want to like my current stuff more. This is why, in addition to retiring from reader insert, I've retired from smut. Smut is also a genre that I love and have mad respect for, but it needs to be as a reader, not a writer. I want to be proud of my fics again, for me, not because they've gotten popular because they're kinky.
So yeah. I left because I never liked reader insert in the first place, but it was a ton of fun to be able to write so prolifically in such a lively community. I'm terribly sorry if this taints my fics in any way to you, like I was flippant while writing them. I wasn't. I always cared about writing them, there was just something big missing for me, and I stayed longer than I should have. That's all. I do appreciate you asking the question; it wasn't an intrusion at all. I give all my love to this community, because it was truly meaningful to me during, as we all know, a terrible, terrible time. But I'm much happier now, and hopefully my next fic will be one I'm truly proud of again.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
The Hero of Light shall come forth bearing the radiance of the sun and stars
Art for @stardust-rust's latest fic! I wanted to get it to her before Christmas but ran out of time so the lighting and lines aren't completely done ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It's a bit hard to see at this magnification, but the jewels on the sword are colours of past OFA wielders, including AFO.
It’s… it’s okay if you’re not very good at writing? I don’t know if this is much of a controversial opinion, but you are improving, and you are consistently moving forward even if you don’t see it. Progress is largely practice-based, especially in writing, and even if editors and beta readers weren’t a thing that are actively helping you every time they give a critique (and, well, why do you think those exist in the first place? Nobody’s perfect), you would still be improving just by writing more and reading others’ writing. It’s okay if you’re not good at writing. That doesn’t mean anything about you, and it definitely doesn’t mean anything permanent.
Looking back on this post, I feel it could use some context. So many times I would meet writers, especially young ones, who would tell me without preamble, “I’m not good at writing.” Sometimes, for all my inherent disagreement, I want to skip the reassurances and the specifics and the debate and just say, “So what?”
So what if you’re not good at writing? So what if you suck at it? If you like it, do it. If you want to improve, do it. Post your writing and ask for critique. Post your writing and don’t ask for critique. Every writer on this planet started with their worst writing. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t look like you’re getting better. It doesn’t matter if you suck until the end of time. It doesn’t matter if it takes you seven hours to formulate a coherent sentence. There is nothing wrong with writing ‘badly’, even if your writing is objectively ‘bad’. Just go out there and do it and have fun. Here’s your permission slip.
There's a tumblr post floating around somewhere that says "We think that if we get better at writing, it will someday stop sounding like we wrote it" or something along those lines.
Does anyone happen to have a link handy? I want to reference it in an advice post.
[ID: a tweet by elicia donze that reads "People hate their own art because it looks like they made it. They think if they get better, it will stop looking like they made it. A better person made it. But there's no level of skill beyond which you stop being you. You hate the most valuable thing about your art. /end ID]
