Being on AO3 but for a tiny fandom is such a particular experience.
When I started writing for The Show That Rotates In My Mind My Every Waken Hour, there were 27 fics for it. The show had been over since 3 years, with a book in the interim. No explicit fic. The gay ship that would go on to haunt me forever had exactly 7 fics, including one in a language i did not speak. 4 by the same author, and they where excellent, but barely a kiss.
I wrote a pwp. It was born out of frustration and out of creative juice bubbling, and also the fact that most of what I read on ao3 is porn. It was the 28th fic for my fandom on ao3.
On other parts of the internet, we were told that gay ship was weird. Why would someone ship it, it's not canon, these character are surely straight (despite stated bi in the canon). On tumblr we were 10 people and when a post had more than 30 notes it was a hit post that everyone had seen.
Now, nearly 10 years later, there are 339 fics for that fandom, in large part thanks to a sequel movie. 97 about my gay ship, which has become somewhat of the main ship of the fandom. When a post breaks 30 it is still a hit post.
There are 14 explicit fics about my ship on ao3. I wrote 7 of them. I wrote 43 fics about that show in total, which if you're quick at maths, is more than 10% of my fandom total supply of fics.
I m not the only one in my fandom, far from it ! It's a cozy fandom and it's fun and i met friends thanks to it . And I'm not even the worst off in this fandom : my ship is, by an incredibly big margin, the most popular/written about in the fadom. One of my friends has imprinted on a canon ship that has 6 fics total, and he wrote 4 of them !
It's just... how do you convey, to a 20 000 + fics fandom, that you're frustrated because there are no more fics for your taste, and it's not because you're picky ? How do you explain, in both the english language and the fandom lexicon, that you KNOW that if you want more fics you just have to write them yourself, and that you DO write them, but it gets tiring ? How do you explain, that someone could have 2012 bbc sherlock level of insanity about a show, with as many long rants and meta written, but you can still just be 5 people active ? How, how to accuratly convey the.... the frustration of the lack, turning into a creative obsession, turning into a sort of... of burn out, where you're tired and apathetic but still oh so frustrated, and still , unwillingly, creative, and still craving those fics with every fibers of your body that KNOW will not arrive without you writing them yourself.
