Writer | November 17 | Female | Home of the Raziel Dragneel AU | Links | Cronos' icon by chychymazzu, Acnologia's header colored by my sister joachan22, Acnologia's sidebar made by keiid.
I got another spam comment today on AO3, and I want to share it as a PSA. But before I do, I want you to understand that you SHOULD NOT DO what this comment is asking. Ok? Ok.
See that bit at the bottom? Don't do that. Insert ParamedicGuy.gif going "Don't."
Other malicious spam comments I've gotten seemed designed to make an author question their writing, or outright encourage them to delete their stories from AO3. This one is different, in that it tries to get you to destroy the work on your own computer.
If you ran that command, it basically locates your Documents folder, then deletes everything in it, including all subfolders. It also does it without any prompt, so you have no chance to second guess your actions.
This is just fucking trolling.
Coincidentally, we just did training on a cyberattack similar to this, called a ClickFix attack. You can read about how that works here.
As a general rule, if ANYONE or ANY WEBSITE tells you unsolicited* to do anything in Powershell, CMD RUN, command prompt, shell command, or something similar, DON'T.
*There are legit reasons for running commands in PowerShell or the command prompt, but in those cases you are likely seeking out a solution to a problem you are already experiencing. Don't just run random commands on your computer as recommended by some unlogged-in guest on a fan fiction site.
Always think and consider before taking action, and get a second opinion from a trusted source. When I got this comment I was pretty sure what the command would do, and it took me about three seconds of googling to confirm it.
This isn't just trolling. Nor is it a simple malicious attack to fuck with authors.
All of these things, starting with making people delete their stories from AO3 to now this, are all specifically designed to kill any digital paper trail so people can steal and make money off your fanfictions by just scrubbing the serial numbers off (and probably training AI on them).
These scammers have realized that even if people delete the stories off of AO3, authors can still prove that they are the original owner of the story by having locally stored documents that prove when the story was originally written.
That said: I want to impress on people once again to never EVER run any commands on your PC unless you know EXACTLY what you're doing! ESPECIALLY not if it's just a rando on the internet telling you to.
"If you ran that command, it basically locates your Documents folder, then deletes everything in it, including all subfolders. It also does it without any prompt, so you have no chance to second guess your actions."
Sorry, but that isn´t just trolling. This is a command that could VERY EASILY ruin a person´s life if they don´t second guess it. It is malicious and irreversible unless you have every single thing backed up elsewhere (some people have backups for important stuff but not everything and most people might not even have backups for all of the important things)
so no, this is not just trolling, this is a targeted, malicious attack on ao3 writers, especially younger and less tech savvy ones who might actually run the command.
I just got an ad for an AI app specifically designed to write you fanfiction. Add the fandom, add the characters, get a story to read.
Like apart from how it likely stole a bunch of works to train on, it gave me such an ick. It's one thing knowing that some people will use gen AI for that purpose, but they've literally built the entire concept on it.
Please don't fall for it. The point of fanworks is the love that goes into it by the humans that create it. The ability to see through another person's eyes what they have felt and experienced and how they think a character would think. It's never ever about just having content.
Loki who growing up in the shadow of others, creates a magical being bound to his own soul. Through this bond, he learns about identity, self-perception, and the nature of connection in a world that never fully sees him.
---
-> Told from Loki’s perspective.
-> Please be patient with me — English isn’t my native language, and I’m not that good at writing stories ;-;
I was still a child when I learned that loneliness has weight.
It pressed against my chest as I stood at the window of my chamber, watching Thor and his loyal companions rampage across the golden training fields of Asgard. Their swords flashed in the light, their laughter rang out like thunder. They were a unit, sweaty and drunk on victory, a brotherhood that seemed to consist of nothing but pure belonging.
Sif, Fandral, Hogun, Volstagg—they circled my brother like moons around a blazing planet. They belonged together. They fit.
And me? I was the wrong shade in their flawless painting. The note that did not harmonize. The prince no one called for. What could I possibly have given them that they did not already possess?
“Loki doesn’t need that,” I once heard Sif say. Her voice was not cruel, merely matter-of-fact. “He’s too… different.”
Different.
The word clung to me like sticky tar, seeping through skin and bone, straight into the marrow.
I rested my forehead against the cold glass and closed my eyes. There was a pressure in my chest, as if something trapped inside me were struggling for air. As if I were drowning, though there was no water—only this suffocating, endless emptiness.
Why am I not like him?
Am I ever enough?
For Father? For Asgard? For anyone?
The questions burned. They ate through me, glowing hot, until I no longer knew whether I wanted to scream or to cry. But I did neither. I simply stood there, motionless and silent, as Asgard’s sun sank, the shadows stretched, and the silence grew so heavy that I felt I might lose my own heartbeat beneath it.
At some point—I do not know how long I remained frozen there—I could no longer endure it.
I sank to the floor. My hands trembled. Beneath my skin, magic prickled and churned, wild and desperate, as if it wanted to tear me open from the inside. Perhaps I wanted that too. Perhaps I simply wanted to create something that would stay. Something that would not abandon me.
So I closed my eyes and let it flow.
At first, there was only a shimmer. Green—the green of my magic, the very green Mother once called “beautiful.” Then something began to take shape. A form, supple and delicate, with scales that caught the fading light like liquid emeralds.
A snake.
She was small. So small she fit into my trembling palm. Her eyes—two drops of molten gold—looked up at me.
And suddenly, something inside me broke. A sob, deep and raw, tore itself from my throat as if its edges were lined with barbs. I cried. I cried because she was there. I cried because I had been unbearably alone. I cried for all the pain I had inflicted upon myself without ever daring to name it.
“Please,” I choked out, my voice shredded by tears. “Please don’t go away.”
She slid around my wrist. Her touch was cool and firm. Steady. An anchor in the raging black sea of my isolation.
“Jorma,” I whispered. The name was a prayer, an incantation, a desperate promise.
She did not answer with words. But she answered. A sensation spread from her, through the contact, through the magical thread that now bound us. It was not simple joy. It was a deep, resonant sorrow. An understanding that reached down to the roots of the soul.
In that moment, between one strangled sob and the next, I understood.
I had not created a companion.
I had shaped a mirror.
Jorma had been there every time I felt invisible. She was the silent witness to every night I wondered whether I even had the right to my place here. She was the essence of my loneliness, poured into living, scaled form.
The years that followed did not bring simple happiness. They were a slow, often painful path toward understanding.
Jorma became more real. Her scales grew firmer beneath my fingers, her breathing a familiar hiss in the silence of my chambers. Our bond deepened until it became something unbreakable—stronger than blood, more enduring than stone.
I told her things my tongue could never have spoken to any other being.
“I hate him sometimes,” I confessed one night, my gaze fixed on the dark canopy of my bed. “Thor. I hate him because everything comes to him so effortlessly. Because he never has to know what it is like to be invisible.”
Jorma hissed softly. Her forked tongue brushed gently against my cheek.
“But I love him too,” I whispered, and the truth of those words cut deeper than any dagger. “And that makes it so much worse. Because I love him and he… he doesn’t see me. Not really. No one does.”
At first, she was only an illusion—a trick I played on myself to fill the emptiness. But with every day I called her, with every secret I entrusted to her, she became… more.
“You’re mad,” Thor laughed once, when he caught me in the library with Jorma draped over my shoulder. “A snake as a pet? So typical.”
“She is not a pet!” I snapped back. And it was the truth.
She was a part of me. A severed fragment of my own soul, turned outward because the pressure of carrying it alone threatened to suffocate me.
Once, lost in my own pain, my concentration faltered. Jorma—who lingered in my chamber as a half-illusory presence—was not forgotten, but neglected, and the magical bond that sustained her grew thin and fragile.
Suddenly, her panic pierced me like a knife. I felt her existence fray. Seized by raw terror, I ran back and found only her flickering, translucent image. With a desperate motion, I tore the remnants of the illusion apart and caught her as she fell into my arms, barely tangible.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, pressing her nearly insubstantial form against me. “I am so unspeakably sorry… I forgot you.”
She lifted her head. Her golden eyes were dull with exhaustion, yet there was no accusation in them. Only a deep weariness I recognized all too well—the weariness of always having to be strong.
You forget yourself, her gaze seemed to say. Always.
And she was right. I did.
There were nights when I lay awake, her cool skin beneath my hand, and wondered: Is this madness?
Then I remembered. The gaping void. The shattering nothingness.
Jorma was not madness.
Jorma was survival.
She was the part of me that said, You are enough, when everyone and everything else fell silent. She was the voice that hissed in my ear when I most wanted to dissolve into nothing: Stand up. You exist. This is your foundation.
She taught me to see myself. Not through Odin’s eyes, always searching for the warrior. Not through Thor’s eyes, expecting the loyal companion. But through my own. Through hers.
And what I saw was not flawless. It was fractured. Shot through with fear, with rage, and with a sorrow so devastating it could have swallowed entire worlds. With a longing greater than all Nine Realms.
But it was also… precious.
Because it was me.
_____________________________
She has grown. She can be as small as an amulet or as vast as a lindworm coiling around the pillars of the world. She has a will of her own. Sometimes she defies me. Sometimes she protects me—even from myself.
She is a part of my soul. And I am a part of hers.
Our pain is the same. Our loneliness we share. We are two ends of the same ancient thread, woven into a knot no one can ever untie—and I would not wish to untie it.
You may never fit into a world that was not made for you. The kind of love you ache for may never reach you. The emptiness will come. The silence too. And the question Am I enough? will echo through the halls of your mind until you believe it is the only truth you possess.
But it is not.
The only truth is this: you must learn to love yourself. Not despite your fractures, but because of them. Not as the radiant hero of a saga, but as its dark, complex author. You must cast the bravest, hardest spell of all:
To stand before the world in all your confused, frightened, brilliant, and broken splendor, and to say: This is me. And this is enough.
Create your own mirror. Find that hidden, wounded part of yourself that has never known love, and embrace it. Give it a name. Let it stay with you until its touch no longer feels strange, but like a final homecoming.
It will hurt. By all the Norns, it will hurt. It is like stitching your own wound while you are still bleeding, with a needle made of your own sorrow.
But it is the only way.
For at the end of all days, when every door is closed and every voice has fallen silent, only you remain. And that being—this fragile, strong, lonely, wonderful weave of light and shadow—deserves to be loved. Above all, by yourself.
Jorma taught me this. Or perhaps I taught it to myself through her.
It is the same.
And it begins with a single, desperate spark of magic in impenetrable darkness. With the decision to endure the nothingness no longer. With reaching out a hand… and taking your own.
EVERYONE BE CAREFUL. ARCHIVE OF OUR OWN PHISHING SITE (first link)
(the link is purple bc i clicked on it to get the link w/o special characters to report to various phising page report places).
the page leads to what appears to be the normal archive page, w/ the popup about the privacy policy & everything, with the url https://xn--iao3-lw4b.ws/media DO NOT LOG IN. THEY ARE HERE TO STEAL YOUR LOGIN CREDENTIALS. LOOK AT URLS BEFORE ENTERING ANY PERSONAL INFO.
Alright! Sorry for being so absent today! I was building a tool so you can all check your own names on demand.
I am asking that you not talk about it on Hugging Face. I'm sure word will get there eventually, but I'd like to avoid them accessing this as much as possible. Feel absolutely free to spread around Tumblr.
AO3 search tool is here! Use page 1 to search scraped fics by username. Use page 2 to search by work ID (which you'll need to do if you're looking for an anonymous work).
Or you can use this version, which is strongly recommended if you've published more than about 20 fics on the username you're searching.
If you're unsure which to use:
The first link is better if your entire username is a common word. For example, if you're username is just "bread" then you probably can't search yourself in the second link. The first version is way slower, so I recommend trying the second link first and using the first link as a backup option if the second fails.
The first link contains a page to search by work ID. This is good if you have an anonymous or orphaned fic, since that's not going to appear by searching your username.
The second link is better if you have a LOT of fics. It will give you a count of fics so you don't have to add them up. It will show the top 2,000 work results found.
If you have more than 2,000 published works, first off, I am jealous of your motivation. But second, that won't display right on the public version of the tools. You can send an ask or DM to have me do a custom search for you if you have more than 2,000 total works under 1 username.
You can also ask or DM if your entire username is a common word, because you're likely to get drowned out of the search results in that case. Try the tool first, but if it returns a lot of author results for your search, and YOUR name isn't in the results, ask me! There's a decent chance you're in there, but one of the tool's weak points is searching extremely common words.
In case this post breaches containment: this is a tool that only has access to the work IDs, titles, author names, chapter counts, and hit counts of the scraped fics for this most recent scrape discovered in April 2025. There is no other work data in this tool. This never had the content of your works loaded to it, only info to help you check if your works were scraped. If you need additional metadata, I can search my offline copy for you if you share a work ID number and tell me what data you're looking for. I will never search the full work text for anyone, but I can check things like word counts and tags.
Please come yell if the tool stops working, and I'll fix as fast as I can. Version 1 is slow as hell, but it does load eventually. Give it up to 10 minutes, and if it seems down after that, please alert me via ask! Anons are on if you're shy. Version 2 typically loads results within 1 minute and handles most users well.
On mobile, enable screen rotation and turn your phone sideways. It's a litttttle easier to use like that. It works better if you can use desktop.
Some FAQs below the cut:
"What do I need to do now?": At this time, the main place where this dataset was shared is disabled. As far as I'm aware, you don't need to do anything, but I'll update if I hear otherwise. If you're worried about getting scraped again, locking your fics to users only is NOT a guarantee, but it's a little extra protection. There are methods that can protect you more, but those will come at a cost of hiding your works from more potential readers as well.
"I don't want to know!": This tool is 100% optional. If you don't want to know, simply don't click the link. You are totally welcome to block me if it makes you feel more comfortable.
"Can I see the exact content they scraped?": Nope, not through me. I don't have the time to vet every single person to make sure they are who they say they are, and I don't want to risk giving a scraped copy of your fic to anyone else. If you really want to see this, you can find the info out there still and look it up yourself, but I can't be the one to do it for you.
"Are locked fics safe?": Not safe, but so far, it appears that locked fics were scraped less often than public fics. The only fics I haven't seen scraped as of right now are fics in unrevealed collections, which even logged-in users can't view without permission from the owner.
"My work wasn't a fic. It was an image/video/podfic.": You're safe! All the scrape got was stuff like the tags you used and your title and author name. The work content itself is a blank gap.
"It's slow.": Unfortunately, a 13 million row data dashboard is always going to be on the slow side. I think I've done everything I can to speed it up, but it may still take up to 10 minutes to load. It's faster if you can use desktop, but it should work on your phone too.
"My fic isn't there.": If it was published after March 15th, 2025, that was likely after all of the scraping took place. Otherwise, from what I can tell so far, the scraper's code just... wasn't very good, so most likely, your fic was missed by random chance. I am continuing to look for methods to reduce the chances of a work getting scraped anyway, and I will share on this blog if/when I find something that works.
Thanks to everyone who helped with the cost to host the tool! I appreciate you so so so much. As of this edit, I've received more donations than what I paid to make this tool so you do NOT need to keep sending money. (But I super appreciate everyone who did help fund this! I just wanna make sure we all know it's all paid for now.)
(Made some quick edits to the post on 04-May-2025 to update information a bit!)
There was a blackout yesterday in my country. Almost 12 hours without light and we still have a few connection problems with internet and all. Some trains don't even work.
StopNCII.org is operated by the Revenge Porn Helpline which is part of SWGfL, a charity that believes that everyone should benefit from technology, free from harm. Founded in 2000, SWGfL works with a number of partners and stakeholders around the world to protect everyone online
“A sister they had, Galadriel, most beautiful of all the house of Finwë; her hair was lit with gold as though it had caught in a mesh the radiance of Laurelin.”
umm i need reassurance that my presence is wanted but i can’t ask for reassurance because that’s really Embarrassing and it wouldn’t feel genuine if i asked for it
