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@stabat-mater
[If I don't follow back, it's because this is but a humble side blog. But I see you and 💕💕💕]
ao3 tagging isn’t always intuitive and some tags are highly subjective but some are really really not. If I see “mutual baby trapping” I’m expecting two people in a situationship who’d rather engage in absurd manipulations and shenanigans to obtain a baby rather than communicate clearly “hey I want to be serious with you”; if they’re *already talking about marriage and kids* then it’s not babytrapping. If I see Underage I am expecting at least one Mrated scene with a minor, not “two teens kiss but don’t even get to second base”. If I see the big Rape/Noncon tag and then the authors note says “the Rape tag is cause they have sex while A is slightly drunk” then I am backing out of the fic and never trusting your tagging again!
Like! Tagging is for two populations—the people who explicitly want to see X and the people who explicitly don’t want to see X—and neither population is served by overtagging! If there was a fic tagged, idk, “Swedish Politics” because in one throwaway line someone mentions Sweden has political parties, I’d be upset if I was looking for Swedish Politics and this was all that came up. And I’d be just as upset if I was filtering out fics with Swedish Politics and missed the perfect fic that was overtagged!
super simple low-effort ao3 summary methods that are 1000% better and 1000% less annoying than just saying you suck at summaries:
copypaste the first few lines of the fic. u already wrote ‘em. let ‘em be their own damn hook
if ur feeling fancy & don’t mind showing ur hand a bit, copypaste the first few lines of the fic that u feel are esp. Important or Interesting - the ones where u first start getting into the real meat of things
state the main tropes! theyre probably already in ur tags - just say them again - maybe as a full sentence if ur feelin fancy. or with a joke if ur feelin Extra fancy
ask a question. pose a hypothetical. eg what happens if u take [character] and put them in [situation]?
make an equation. [character] + [thing] = [outcome]
just write like a one-sentence summary of what the fuck is going down. just one (1) sentence. doesnt matter if it doesn’t cover every important aspect. or if it sounds bland. any summary sentence is gonna be miles better than “idk i suck at summaries”
just…explain the fic like u would to a friend? it doesnt have to be a polished back of the book blurb. it can just be “[pairing] coffee shop au, but like, still with murder, and also i made everyone trans. enjoy”
just stick a meme in there
honestly who cares
just put literally anything but a self deprecating comment in there & ur golden
#it’s okay if you even have to spoil a little bit of the early plot twists#set the lure; cast the net [x]
here’s the thing. if you put a self-deprecating comment in the summary you have at least halved the chances of me deciding to read your story. because if you think you suck or you think your story sucks why should i spend my time with it? you told me it sucks. i’m taking you at your word. i only have so much time in my day and i’m trying to only read stuff i like.
so don’t do that.
almost any summary you can possibly come up with is better than readers seeing you calling your own work bad and deciding you must know best, after all, and not giving it a chance.
Yes yes. Yes. Do not tell me ahead of time that your work is poop actually. I will believe you.
Because, for one thing, I’m too old and tired and lacking in executive function to bolster anyone else’s ego. I am fully occupied with my own thanks.
no and i can take it further
lads please.
before you hit "post" on ao3
give your fic an appropriate rating (if you're not sure, add the tag "rating may change"!)
if it's a multichapter make sure to check "this work has multiple chapters" (i know why you might be tempted to let it show up as "complete" but seriously, don't you be the asshole in this scenario)
check if it clashes with the TOS. meta discussions, lists, stats, prompts etc are not fanworks and posting them as such violates the content policy
i'm sure there are other things you should keep in mind but that's what i could think of off the top of my head
check if you've spelled names correctly especially if they're not English. I know they did not teach you this in school because the US education system is uniquely awful and nobody ever told you you can just Google things so I'm doing it now.
changing minor things about your fic so you can change the date to a more recent one and show up at the top of the tag/search list is vile. get yo zero interaction and be humbled like the rest of us. This is not social media, it's a fucking archive.
post an actual chapter, not just a quick announcement that this fic is in the works and you'll be posting soon, promise!! Again: this is not social media. This is not how it works. And yes, we all want attention for our works, and wish for people to interact with them, but let's play by the rules* here, shall we? (Also, if there's no chapter there's nothing for me to interact, so the only thing you'll achieve is me getting pissed and probably blocking your account.)
*aka Ao3's Content Policy
Use warnings. If there is Major Character Death, there's a warning for it. If there's sexual assault, there's a warning for it (one you should probably not use if your fic contains cnc as a form of kink, just saying). If there's graphic violence...you get the gist.
"Writing" a fic with genAI and then bragging in the notes how the reader probably didn't even notice and how this proves that AI "witchhunting" is futile and we're all stupid and you will continue to let a fucking robot do the work others struggle so hard to do because they love it and would never let the joy of creating be taken from them by a soulless, data- and art-stealing machine will make me block your name and think you're a lazy, arrogant victim of your own consumerist attitude towards fandom.
The tags do not work like they do on instagram or wherever; you don't need to add a '#' at the beginning and you can leave space between the words. Bit like on Tumblr, really.
Remember when joining fandom as a younger person meant lurking for a bit and figuring out the vibe and etiquette instead of coming in on day one and calling people weirdos for liking weirdo shit in the weirdo factory.
why are you censoring words in the fic summary on ao3?
You know, if you can't spell out "sex" or "fuck" or "cock" or whatever in the summary of your fic on ao3, which famously does not censor anything, then maybe you are too immature to be reading and writing smutfic and to be talking about all things sex. Sorry.
No Bridgerton for you, no Outlander, no Heated Rivalry, no Spicy Booktok Romance Novels, no Witcher (because whenever Geralt doesn't fuck, he says "fuck" quite a lot), no Euphoria, no Interview with the Vampire...you can't even read the Bible, really, where, for example, Onan "let his seed fall to the ground".
If you found Ao3 via any social media site except tumblr, via a site where you are required to censor words like "dick" and "pussy" and "rape" and "masturbate" lest your account be cancelled: This is not the case on Ao3. You are free there. Look around, see everyone using these words plainy and directly, calling things by their name. Be brave. Be bold. And grow the fuck up.
also -ette is a gramatically female ending (see names like Annette, Bernadette, Claudette, Miette); if you must call a man by his hair colour, the ending is just -et.
But really, you can just use his name.
Not to derail from nonbinary folks' additions about gender neutral adjectives, but just CALL THEM BY THEIR NAME (and/or pronouns)
"Heart thumping in their chest, the taller looked adoringly at the ravenet*te giving the taller a blowjob" what is this, 2000s fanfiction.net third person perspective? Why is nobody called by their name? Does the "narrating" person not know the name of the person sucking them off? "Oh god, yeah, raven-haired person, use your tongue just like that", something they would say? "Oh yeah, I sucked the taller off yesterday, they came so hard for my ravenet*te ass"?
They have names! You don't talk about your relatives, colleagues, friends etc. by using (only) adjectives, you call them by their names in your head and when talking to other people. And as long as the character's name is known to a) the narrator/POV character and b) the audience, that goes for fictional characters as well.
also -ette is a gramatically female ending (see names like Annette, Bernadette, Claudette, Miette); if you must call a man by his hair colour, the ending is just -et.
But really, you can just use his name.
What they don't tell you about writing is that as you write, you discover scenes and entire plots that you hadn't accounted for that need to be written. So you can spend two hours writing and editing only to realise you're further away from the finish line than you thought you were when you started
just read "minors dni!!1" in a fic summary. Girl. That's what the ao3 second warning is for if your fic is rated M, E, or not at all.
Also this isn't tumblr.
Also also, when have minors ever not interacted. It's not your responsibility to parent them. I'm so fucking done with people acting as if everyone over 18 must baby everyone under 18 on the internet all the fucking time.
i hate it when i can tell my perception of a character is diminishing in real time because of fandom wank. like nooooo i want to maintain an objective relationship with the text but everyone is so annoying about you nooooo
i know i know i knooowww i KNOWWW that women in media are very often shallow caricatures of women crafted by men who’ve never had a honest, respectful conversation with a woman in their lives but honestly… i don’t get why people can’t take the same energy they put into stanning male side characters with 2 personality traits and crafting entire ships out of scratch into fleshing out unsatisfactory female characters. like, i don’t believe it when people say they can’t like female characters because they’re shallow but they’ve made 10000 headcanons and created backstories for half a dozen dull men to latch onto and ship. it’s just dumbfounding to me because so many male characters have been raised up on fanon interpretation alone when you could… easily…. do the same for any woman
The thing is–and I’m speaking here as someone who does do the later a fair amount–that it really is a different kind of work.
Building up the shallow side man into someone relatable is like applying layers of paint, and usually you’re working with a good set of stencils when you do so. It’s walking over to a receptive-looking smooth blank surface and doing something you’ve been trained to do and have all kinds of models for. You can just start. People do it automatically.
It doesn’t usually even feel like work; it’s like…rolling downhill.
Rethinking the female characters designed as objects, or intended as actual characters but with all kinds of misogyny baked in, is a vastly more complicated process.
First of all, and this is a huge barrier, you generally have to get past your own feelings of repulsion. They might be strong ones about how dehumanized her whole canon design makes you feel by association, or subtle ones about how viciously passive-aggressive all her dialogue is, or a sense of personal anxiety or shame about being judged for wanting to spotlight her and preparing to defend this choice, or anything, but it tends to be there. That turns the project into walking uphill right from the get-go.
The surface you’re decorating here is much less smooth and firm. The mortar is flaking, or it’s already painted with a hydrophobic texture that makes liquid paints tend to run and drip rather than adhering, and of course it’s covered in inconvenient holes and protrusions that draw the eye and will intrude themselves into whatever art you put on top.
And then you have to think about it, the art you’re composing, because you aren’t being handed the scripts you need for this, most of the time. You do not have a robust stencil set to address this need, and when you try to apply ones from the other set it often turns out awkward and blurred, because the wall you’re painting has all those bumps and dips so you can’t press the stencil flat.
There are stencil sets shaped for this, though they may only be usable if you do some masonry work first in some cases, but anyway they usually don’t match the project goals, and if you do give in and use them even though they’re not really what you were going for you’re liable to wind up feeling almost as alienated from your own art as you did from what you were seeking to amend, so it was all for nothing.
So to get the same level of comfortable ownership and sense of depth and desired themes out of a majority of the shallow caricature women that people do out of the bland background men, it generally requires two to ten times the mental effort, much of it spent in a negative emotional state as one confronts the factors causing this woman to be difficult to empathize with, digs under what’s there, and brings out what could be.
And after all of that, you know perfectly well the whole time, a minority of the fandom will even be willing to care, and the odds of drawing hostility specifically for presenting this person in a good light are generally much higher. (This also means you’re more likely to have spent the whole work process in isolation, incidentally, rather than in the cheerful glow of group-brainstorming.)
And because this is a hobby people do in their free time, often specifically for self-soothing purposes, of course the easy version with more community and positive feedback waiting at the end is what most of us go for.
It’s like, when you get home from work and you can either have a microwave burrito or start chopping the whole vegetables in your crisper, some of which are kind of old, to make a salad. Most people don’t have it in them to go for the salad most days, and I can’t really blame them.
this is SUCH a good point! the bland male characters i hc about are just that- bland. there’s not a lot going on there, but it’s an additive process; there’s very little you have to remove before you can start expanding
the female characters from the same stories, the ones i dont bother with? they’re not just bland, they’re bad. there’s layers upon layers of garbage that you have to chisel through before you can even START building them up, and sometimes you do all that just to find out there wasn’t even anything under it at all :\
This is an incredibly articulate explanation. I agree.
Petition to include more OFCs in everything we do. If we start from scratch, they’ll be awesome from the beginning.
Since I have spent my entire lifetime in the Sherlock fandom working with Moffat and Gatiss’s underutilized female characters, I have many thoughts and feelings about this. Since my internet connection is uncertain, I will try to compress them into bullet points.
* First thing is not to believe anything the canon text tells you about the character’s motivations. For any female character, a plausible case can be made that anything she does in the presence of a male character (and the typical male creator of bad female characters will not spend much time showing you what she’s like alone) is a performance in which she is engaging for reasons that might range from cold cynical calculation to a desperate need to protect herself or some other vulnerable person.
* Basically, when you stop to reflect that this character had a life before she entered the protagonist’s story, about which the canon text is probably largely indifferent–and not only that, that there are vast amounts of time that this character still spends off-screen with people who are not part of the story–you will see many ways in which incoherence motivations, unforgivable actions, and batshit crazy romantic/sexual choices can be recontextualized in such a way as to provide that character with coherence and depth. Sometimes the best way to liberate a female character from canon limitations is to change the story around her.
* Also recall that you have probably internalized some of the same patriarchal bullshit that your show’s writers believe about what female characters are for and what they can and can’t do. Recognize this, and try to think outside the box. Have them do things that would normally be assigned to male characters. Sometimes forget, when you write them, about how attractive they are or what they’re wearing or who wants to have sex with them and how much. Involve them in plot developments that have nothing to do with romance or sex. Invent physical descriptions of them that are vivid and memorable but don’t include their secondary sex characteristics.
* Making someone a fully realized character is not the same as making them sympathetic. You can understand a character’s motivations and take an interest in their activities without liking or identifying with them. Like, I could not and did not make the Sherlock Mary Morstan sympathetic. But I feel like I’m on solid ground in saying that I made her make some fricking SENSE.
* You name a female character on Sherlock, and I will tell you how I turned her into a fully-realized character. Seriously, go to my askbox and do it. I’ll have fun answering and maybe it will inspire you to do something different with her.
* As has been suggested above, it helps to give yourself permission to create some OFCs–not for the Heroes to fall in love with, but for the canon female characters to interact with (and fall in love with too if the occasion arises, why not). Writing relationships between women gives you a lot more possibilities for development than writing women in relation to men.
So you can work with canon female characters–you can make them central to the story–no matter how paltry or how bad the canon characterization is. And when you have…be prepared to cherish each kudo you receive individually, because they will not come in waves. The number of people who bemoan the absence of fully realized female characters in both canon texts and fanfiction is much, much larger than the number of people who actually want to read stories in which female canon characters are central.
I didn’t design my Sherlock fanfic this way out of a sense of duty. I did it this way because I am genuinely more interested in writing female characters and I had already created literally dozens of female characters in my original fiction. In general, you won’t have too much success trying to write something you don’t really want to write. So if you’re not interested in dealing with canon female characters, then don’t. It’s OK. If you are intrigued by the possibilities, then Godspeed and good luck. The audience for that kind of fanfic, though smallish, is often very enthusiastic, and it’s rewarding to be giving readers something that they really want and don’t often get.
best trope: "ugh I guess I'll tolerate you for the time being, but this is a conditional, tactical alliance, and the second I get what I want, we're parting ways" to "you are the only good in the world and I will protect you to my dying breath"
Fanfiction is insane. You can write porn so good you make friends.
I hate that the "x reader" or "x Y/N" style of fanfic has become sooooo popular, partially because it's just not for me and partially because they clog general non-fic related tags and those authors seem allergic to the "read more" function on this website, but ALSO because I believe that you should have to go through the trouble of creating an absolutely batshit self-insert character, with a backstory that makes no sense and a name that doesn't really gel with the aesthetics of the universe. Legolas and Aragorn should be in a love triangle with Kylie, the angsty sixteen year old half-human half-elf and inexplicable tenth member of the Fellowship. Do the WORK. If everyone was doing "Y/N" nonsense back in the day, there would be no Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way, or probably Bella Swan. These are important women. They deserve to be named, confusingly and with no regard for the fictional world they inhabit.