[isindismay]

Everything I write is massively self indulgent. I’m not ashamed, I only wish it could be like this for everybody all the time.

[friendlyfrankenstein]

You heard the poster. Chapter 3 of The Last Citizen is UP on AO3!! In this chapter, Henry gets some much needed medical care, and some information that's really important to him. Unfortunately this also means he now has the bandwidth to process just Anything Emotionally. I'd joke he's having a great time, but it probably still beats the decade in jail.

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

this is true and all. but also never stop talking about your ship because if it’s what makes you happy then you can and should talk about it for yourself and your own enjoyment too.

there’s nothing wrong with the tweet in the screenshot, but I feel like we’ve forgotten that shipping and fandom are first and foremost for ourselves and our own enjoyment, not if the ship is popular or if there’re enough people shipping it.

just have fun. fandom and shipping is about yourself and your own enjoyment.

[friendlyfrankenstein]

Love Divided: The Redemption of the Last Citizen

The first chapter of my Paradise Killer 'I loved this fucking game So Much except for this One Thing' fic is up!

Ch. 1 is called: Divided, Dies. It's about Henry Division being able to think semi-coherently about his past again for the first time in years, even if it feels a little too late, and a visit from Lady Love Dies.

It contains spoilers for just about every possible aspect of the ending of the game. I have all five-ish chapters already written, and will be updating as they're nailed down.

To all the other Henry Division fans, this one's for you. They told me to redeem paradise and fuck me if I'm not getting the job done before I go.

[niceoneventure]

Paradise Killer

[willgrahamscock]

don’t focus on your responsibilities you need to make gay shit for a dying fandom

[c7uos]

merry pridemonth 💗

[willgrahamscock]

the most essential part of a fandom are those people who immediately tell you to write it, draw it, make it when you share your ideas, you have no idea how many fanworks are born just because someone encouraged it

[ao3commentoftheday]

I'm loving the discussions about the role and purpose of fandom, as well and what activities are needed to keep fandoms alive and flourishing!

However... as a fandom creator (writer and artist), I sometimes feel like too much pressure is concentrated on creators. I don't know if this is a frustration others share? Not only should we keep making things, but somehow we also end up becoming these central fandom figures who can feel pressured into responding to comments (or else we're called arrogant or ungrateful), making friends (or else we're rude for ignoring well-meaning people who reach out), and being the drivers and pillars of that community (running events, responding to memes, etc. – and everything falls silent if we stop). It's a lot of work!! I don't always have the time and energy to make things for fun and then also engage in all the ways people might sometimes feel entitled to because they enjoy my works.

I really wish that more "non-creating" fans in the community would discover their fandom power!! and not just rely on the visible "producing" creators to be the only people worth engaging with. It takes nothing more than passion to write a meta-post about a character or a plot point, or to create an ask game, or to DM someone else who you see posting funny tags – not just the creator! Maybe your followers have other tips for evening out the balance a little more?

Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this, anon. This is an observation I've seen in many parts of life, not just fandom.

A lot of people feel as though they need permission or an invitation of some sort in order to contribute. That's why I always end my answers by asking people to share their thoughts. I want to make it explicitly clear that I want people to add things into the reblogs (which I can then share out for more people to see) and the replies (which people can at least read even if I can't reblog).

I have heard fans who are readers but don't write fic say that they think they can't get an AO3 account unless they plan to post something. This is incorrect, of course, but a lot of people make that assumption.

I think at least some people (I don't know what kind of percentage) assume that someone who is writing fic or posting art or making podfics and video edits etc. has some sort of expertise that "allows" them to post.

People with less confidence or with less practice etc. sometimes need an extra nudge before they realize that they're welcome to contribute too. If that's the case for you, please allow me to say:

You are welcome to post in your fandom, even if no one invites you to. Even if you think you're not good enough. Even if your idea isn't "popular."

Start a conversation. Share a thought. Talk to folks who reblog cool shit. Be a folk who reblogs cool shit. You don't have to do everything in order to do something.

As mentioned above, please do share your thoughts in the reblogs and replies to keep the conversation going.

[leomonae]

Other things people can do:

make a rec list

make a "here's all the fics I've found in this fandom with this one trope/general vibe/very particular setup I just think is Neat" list

make a "welcome to the fandom, here's the fics that people will just assume you've read/know about to get you started" list

make a "if you liked [popular fic A] you might enjoy [less well known fics B through N]" list

[iguanodonwildman]

More things you can do!

Create whumps lists

Create lists of shippy moments

Make screenshot collections

Record and post clips of your show to get more people into your fandom

Make incorrect quote memes

Make silly little TikTok-style edits of your favs

Make character playlists

Figure out the layout of buildings/cities

Recreate those building in the Sims or with an online floor planner or even just draw it out because holy hell writers will be so thankful for that

Make your blorbo in various video game character creations

Build a pokemon team for your blorbo

Make up silly headcanons! What does everyone do at the fair or the beach or during a fire drill?

Outline a fic idea you have — maybe you don’t have the time or energy or you just don’t feel confident enough to create it, but share it anyway!

Create outfits based on your blorbo’s design or outfits they would wear

There are so many ways you can engage with fandom that aren’t making fanart or writing fanfics. Fandom is community - Please don’t be afraid to join in!

[pancake-surprise]

(I've been on tumblr for 15 years, far longer than I was ever on twitter, but I've never engaged much beyond reblogging so please pardon how many times I reference fandom activities I witnessed on twitter)

Collect interviews with the author, producer, director, mangaka etc

Similarly, translate interviews

I remember someone in the haikyuu!! fandom kept a twt thread of every time two characters were in the same panel. Not sure what the tumblr equivalent would be. I guess just a regular old post with lots of additions? (Send help; i'm not sure why my brain is struggling so badly to translate twitter threads to tumblr posts)

Run a quote bot account: I'm not sure of the status of quote bots in a post twitter era, but those were quite fun. Again an example from the hq!! fandom, there was the hq!! bastille bot which would spit out a bastille lyric + a ship. The siken bot would spit out a line of poetry + a ship name. On tumblr maybe the equivalent would be a gimmick blog?

Run a ship/character week. I think these are probably the easiest kind of fandom event to run. it doesn't take more than one person, a blog, and rudimentary graphics skills.

Are socmed AUs still a thing?

Make gifs

Try to figure out the layers to a character's outfit and share your studies with the world. (I'm looking directly at you, Hoyoverse and all you're what-even-is-that how-do-they-even-put-that-on character design. beautiful, but confusing)

Update fandom wikis

Log fandom history on fanlore.org (another project run by the Organization for Transformative Works, aka the parent of ao3)

Volunteer for the Organization for Transformative Works/ao3

[marypsue]

Fandom wikis!! One thousand blessings upon everyone who maintains fandom wikis, oh my god.

Some suggestions:

Transcribe episodes for film/audio canons

Podfic! We can always use more podfic, and most people's phones have a voice recorder.

Create bingo sheets (e.g. make a fanwork with five or more of these tropes for a bingo; read/reblog fanworks in five or more of these categories for a bingo)

Be a Your Blorbo expert consultant! If I'm writing about a character I don't have strong feelings about, but I know one of my friends is constantly reblogging and posting about them, even if it's all silly memes and "character <3"-type posting, I'll sometimes reach out to them for advice on if I'm getting Their Blorbo right. It's absolutely invaluable and I appreciate these people so much.

We are all just enthusiastic nerds on the internet. You have as much right to share your enthusiasm as anyone. One of the things I love about tumblr as a platform is that you can just start saying whatever about something you like, and you will find other people who like it too.

[ravensilversea]

Be the person with The List™ Be the person who has a collection of links who can jump in and answer someone's question with a "Hey! You may want to check this out!" This list can include everything from tutorials to userscripts to transcript sites to generators to communities and so much more

[might-be-a-lynx]

Other things you can do:

Describe art or (make fandom accessible!)

Offer to beta read or be a fic continuity adviser

Create memes

And I'm gonna reiterate the creating lists of fan fics

[isindismay]

A snake necklace and a handful of photographs (1982 words) by isindismay Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Cobra Kai (TV) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Terry Silver & Sensei Wolf Characters: Sensei Wolf (Cobra Kai), Terry Silver Additional Tags: Cobra Kai Season 6 Part 3, Introspection, Friendship, Sad Ending Summary: After Terry's disappearance, Wolf reflects on their time together.

[isindismay]

How exactly do you see the silver/wolf ship/dynamic? I’m on the fence about the ship but I’d really like to know more from you ‘cause I see like the ships creator and ceo lol

Well, I hope you wanted an essay, anon, because that's what you're going to get!

Sadly, there's not very many scenes between Terry and Wolf in the show, but these are my favorite moments:

"I'm your savior"

The way Terry watches Wolf fight with such admiration

Terry standing up and looming over Wolf

Wolf getting in between Terry and John and getting protective after John punches him

Before his fight with Johnny, Wolf looks around and asks "where's Silver?"

(and not a moment, but at some point Terry must have given Wolf his snake necklace from season 5, and he wears a dragon necklace himself)

I think whether you ship them or not, their dynamic is an interesting one. I love the intensity and the drama of their first meeting. They're both in dire circumstances and there's a lot of parallels between their situations. They've both lost their dojos, Wolf is cage fighting (presumably forced to do so because of his debts) while Terry has lost most of his money (and they don't go into it but I imagine Wolf has his own scores to settle and burning resentments like Terry does). And yet, their first conversation is quite playful. There's an immediate rapport between them.

Terry says "I'm your savior" to Wolf, and I think that's interesting for multiple reasons. Terry likes to be the one to fix things for people, we see it several times with John where he buys the dojo for him, and the whole plot of KK3 which hinges on Terry getting revenge for him, also funding Cheyenne's business and wanting to save Kenny from being pushed around. The savior comment could be taken as Terry being his usual dramatic self and trying to manipulate Wolf, but I think he does get satisfaction from helping people. To Wolf, this guy just shows up out of nowhere and offers to pay his debts. It's almost too good to be true, right? But Wolf clearly wants to believe in him. He wants to believe that Terry is not just his new friend, but his savior too.

And in a way, Wolf is also Terry's savior. Terry had just got Cobra Kai accepted into the Sekai Taikai and then (thanks to his own actions) he loses it. I imagine him searching around for an ally and finding Wolf, who was not only the sensei of the last SK's winning team but also in dire need of financial assistance, and thinking he couldn't be more perfect.

Terry needs Wolf even more than Wolf needs Terry. Without Terry, Wolf could've found another way to get his dojo back and enter the next SK. But for Terry, this is his only chance. He has to get even with Miyagi-Do, and also he won't be around for the next one.

Whether Wolf feels like Terry is his only hope or not, he immediately sees him as someone he can join forces with and is on board with his plan from the very start.

They're both pretty ruthless as senseis. There's probably a certain amount of "they make each other worse" going on here, but from what we see it seems like Cobra Kai and The Iron Dragons had similar philosophies from the start. I imagine them feeling like they had found someone who really understands them. And after everyone else turned against them it would feel so good to find someone they can believe in. Terry has burned all his bridges and there's no-one else he can trust. Maybe it's the same for Wolf, he certainly doesn't seem to have any friends at the SK.

Their dynamic is based on them needing each other, and I can totally see it as being a business only sort of relationship or a co-dependent friendship, but what if they also wanted each other? Their ideals and goals are similar, and they each have an obligation to each other, but what if it wasn't just an obligation? What if their devotion and shared determination turned in passion and/or love? There's so much scope for exploring angsty one-sided relationships and misunderstandings, or just two people tangled up in a complex power play relationship, playing on the savior aspect and their obligation and gratefulness towards each other.

Oh, and I would love to take the glory for coming up with the ship, but I'm pretty sure it was cobra-wives who first posted about them!

[toskarin]

do you think insight can be gained about an author from the stories they write?

no. authors are like squids and can only be understood through spirited but ultimately futile combat

[c7uos]

first tumblr post… kinda nervous…….

[jamiesfootball]

Huge shout out to all the people who read fics. Who actually take the time out of their busy days to open a fic and read it

Before I started writing in earnest, I did not understand how much writing was going to eat into my fic reading time. We joke about having too many tabs open, but I have a different problem: the amount of tabs I have open on new fics is way smaller than it used to be. My ao3 wrapped would be a sad affair. Unless I’ve subscribed to an author or come across something on my dash, I basically don’t see it

Which has really driven home for me how much fandom cannot just be creators. You have to have people who want to read fic and meta discussions and joke posts. You have to have people who want to look at art and gifs. It has to be mutual.

Community thrives on flow. You have to have that movement of people sharing things with each other for a community to exist

Thank you fic readers. You keep things flowing

[emma-reblogs-stuff]

This is super important for people to remember. Using an ecological example but:

Yellowstone got rid of their wolves iirc 10 years ago. Because there was no natural predator, the deer began to overpopulate and the flora was overharvested. When Yellowstone introduced the wolves again, plants began to regrow and it was healthier again.

My point is, everything has an important part in life; whether that be in an ecosystem or a community online. Fandoms die without readers. I think it’s super important for creators to remember that!

[actual-changeling]

In the spirit of encouraging people to comment on fanfics while also making it easier to do so, I feel obliged to share a browser extension for ao3 that has quite literally revolutionized the comment game for me.

I present to you: the floating ao3 comment box!

From what I've seen, a big problem for many people is that once you reach the comments at the bottom of a fic, your memory of it miraculously disappears. Anything you wanted to say is stuck ten paragraphs ago, and you barely remember what you thought while reading. This fixes that!

I'll give a little explanation on the features and how it works, but if you want to skip all that, here's the link.

Edit: Yes, this also works on mobile!

The extension is visible as a small blue box in the upper left corner.

(Side note: The green colouring is not from the extension, that's me.)

If you click on it, you open a comment box window at the bottom of your screen but not at the bottom of the fic. I opened my own fic for demonstrative purposes.

The website also gives explanations on how exactly it functions, but I'll summarize regardless.

insert selection -> if you highlight a sentence in the fic it will be added in italics to the comment box

add to comment box -> once you're done writing your comment, you click this button and the entire thing will automatically copied to the ao3 comment box

delete -> self explanatory

on mulitchapter fics, you will be given the option to either add the comment to just the current chapter or the entire fic

The best part? You can simply close the window the same way you opened it and your progress will automatically be saved. So you can open it, comment on a paragraph, and then close it and keep reading without having the box in your face.

Comments are what keep writers going, and as both a writer and a reader, I think it's such an easy way of showing support and enthusiasm.

[ao3commentoftheday]

I don't know if it's just me being in small fandoms, but fandom as a whole feels...really lonely as of late. People have split themselves up so much that they don't discuss things the way they did before, they just kind of post their stuff and leave and half their audience "consumes" it like "content". There's no comments, barely kudos, the only places fans talk with each other anymore are on private discord servers that no one ever finds out about...I don't know, I'm a bit of an old and I feel like I'm screaming out into the void for no reason at this point. Sure, "somebody" will like my stuff, but will I ever get to know about it?

I think about this kind of thing a lot, anon, and I think my generation (Gen X/xillennial) kind of did folks dirty a bit.

In our defense, we didn't know we were.

I'm an educator by profession, as well as on this hobby blog, and so I spend a lot of time thinking about how people learn things. A lot of learning is social, and a lot of it happens when parents teach their children.

When I was growing up, pre-internet, my parents taught me how to talk to other adults in our community, how to play with other children, how to order food in a restaurant, how to call a business and ask a question. They literally walked me through how to do all of that stuff and more because those were daily skills in the world at that time.

We've spent the last 20+ years talking about how kids today are "digital natives" - but have we spent enough time teaching kids how to keep a conversation going when you're not in the same room as the other person? How to leave a comment on a post by a person you don't know? How to show your appreciation to a content creator? What a content creator even is and how that differs from a fan creator?

I know there are a lot of jokes out there about different things that would kill a Victorian child, but I think what would actually be difficult for them would be the lack of rules and instructions that kids today receive from the adults in their lives.

I don't have kids myself, so maybe this is all just bullshit and I'm talking directly out of my ass. But a LOT of the time when I notice someone doing something 'wrong' it's because no one ever told them how to do it right.

I kind of suspect that might be part of what's happening in fandom these days. Combine the above with the fact that fandom got inundated with new members in 2020 during quarantine and lock downs, and it's not surprising to me that a large percentage of the people in fandom today don't approach things the way that we used to before.

i don't fault them for it. When fandom was smaller and the internet was new, we used to take the time to bring people in. But now, it feels like 'everyone knows XYZ' so why does it need to be taught? And with how fast things move, it's more rare for newcomers to lurk for a while before they dive into everything.

This is a very long answer to a problem that probably just needed a listening ear, but I hope what you take away from this is an understanding that you're not the only one who feels the difference. I see this same experience shared in the notes on my posts all the time.

There is no easy fix for the situation and it certainly won't be fast to change, but maybe if we mentor a bit more when we have the spoons to, we can shift the culture a bit? One fan at a time?

If you managed to get all the way to the end of this, do yourself a favour and leave a comment on a fic or reblog a post with some chatty tags. DM somemeone or tag them or send them an ask just to let them know you see them and you think they're cool.

Even if nothing happens as a result, you tried. And maybe you just made someone's day. 💗

[xiaq]

One of the best things about being a writer is thinking of something small you can add to your work that’s just. Devastating. Like you’re sitting there going. Oh. That would be diabolical. People would get really riled up about that. Exquisite. Let’s do it.