[z399]

[murplemuddle]

[wardingshout]

revstar tegakis

[userbailu]

DREDGE (2023) — developed by black salt games

[artemisdesari-blog]

A writer friend told me something that broke my heart a little bit today; they're going to quit publishing their fanfic.

My instant thought was that they had been trolled or attacked or that something terrible had happened in their life because this person is so passionate about their writing. It wasn't any of that. Engagement with their works has been going down, as it has for many of us. Comments are like gold dust a lot of the time, and just looking through the historical comment counts on old fics on ao3 demonstrates this trend very clearly. It was not simply the comments dropping off which caused them to decide to stop posting, however.

My friend came across a discord server for their fandom (I should point out here that their fandom interest and mine diverged a couple of years ago, we stay in touch but don't currently read each other's posts because I'm not into their fandom and they would rather gouge their eyes out with a wooden spoon than read anything Star Wars) and specifically to share fic in that fandom. They joined, because we all love a good fic rec, only to discover that their latest multichapter fic, which has almost no comments and very few kudos, is being hotly discussed in this server as one of the best stories ever. Not one of these people has bothered to say this to them on the fic. When they asked, none of participants could see the point in telling the author of the fic they apparently loved so much that they love it.

This discovery has absolutely destroyed my friend's love of sharing fic. They share because they love seeing other people's enjoyment, and fic writers do that through comments and kudos/reblogs/likes because we don't get paid. There is no literary critic writing a blog post/article about how amazing the story is for us to copy and keep/frame. There is no money from royalties. All we have are the words of the people reading our works.

Those people on that server could have taken five minutes of the time they spent gushing about how amazing my friend's story was to other people and used it to tell the one person guaranteed to want to hear that praise how much they loved it. They could have taken a moment to express their opinion to the person who spent hours upon hours plotting, writing, editing, and posting those chapters. Instead, they deprived my friend of thing that keeps them sharing their writing, and in the process have killed their love of it. My friend now feels used and unmotivated.

I won't be sharing a link to their fic, they said I could share their experience but not their identity. I know they plan to post one final chapter. I know they intend to express their hurt at being excluded from the praise for the thing they created, and I know they intend to announce that as a consequence they will not be posting for a long while, if at all.

So please, I beg you, don't hide your love of a story from the writer. It's just about the only thing we have.

[over-informed]

move forward now

[tboybobreynolds]

heartbreaking. you have to write the fic youre writing in order for it to be written

[eghostsofdeadchildren]

Spaghetti night with my wife

[damnwyverngems]

Monster Hunter 20th Anniversary - Great Hunting Exhibition. Seikret life-size figure.

Photos by masamune_MHF

[faultlinesurfer]

My second favorite ship dynamic is "requited but they're both fucking idiots" my favorite, though, is "Requited, but one of them (let's call them a made up name, like 'Claudine Saijo' for example) is a fucking contrarían idiot that refuses to take the desperate flirting of the other at face value"

[thunderpetal]

hey guys so i am pretty normal about mayakuro. kuromaya. whatever. my favourite ship from 5 years ago and my favourite ship now if you even care. They are in LOVE

[soracities]

Marina Tsvetaeva, excerpt from Poem of the End, Selected Poems (trans. Elaine Feinstein, with Angela Livingstone)

[tracedinairlwa]

I come bearing a very important contribution

Revue Starlight characters, ordered by most to least sane

A tier (the only vaguely sane bitch in this whole show) Claudine

B tier (mostly sane but their taste in women is unhinged) Junna Futaba

C tier (more than a few screws loose, bizarre decades long obsession with throwaway childhood jokes) Karen Kaoruko

D tier (decisions all vaguely make sense with explanation but are impenetrably weird at first glance, and still kinda fuckin buckwild either way) Hikari

E tier (inverse of B tier, reasonable taste in a ditzy but mostly sane woman, but acts on it in the most UNHINGED manner possible) Mahiru

F tier (girl what the fuck) Maya

Daiba Nana Tier (do I even need to explain this one) Nana

Thank you I do not take constructive criticism now or ever

[otiksimr]

Poorly drawn Nidoran line

[railroadlion]

Arbok

[sneksnack]

What the dog doin'? 🥩🐕

[tokyozilla]

dinasour shaped loaf of bread, dusty sandy spikey Diablos angry unglazed cinnamon roll looking ass tricera-chimera...