woodsgotweird said: man i just jumped on the bandwagon because i am a sheep. i have no idea where it came from and i ask myself this question all the time
Maybe someone made a typo and it just got out of hand?
I kinda feel like panic!at the disco started the whole exclamation point thing and then it caught on around the internet, but maybe they got it from somewhere else, IDK.
It’s a way of referring to particular variations of (usually) a character — dark!Will, junkie!Sherlock, et cetera. I have suspected for a while that it originated from some archive system that didn’t accommodate spaces in its tags, so to make common interpretations/versions of the characters searchable, people started jamming the words together with an infix.
(Lately I’ve seen people use the ! notation when the suffix isn’t the full name, but is actually the second part of a common fandom portmanteau. This bothers me a lot but it happens, so it’s worth being aware of.)
“Bang paths” (! is called a “bang"when not used for emphasis) were the first addressing scheme for email, before modern automatic routing was set up. If you wanted to write a mail to the Steve here in Engineering, you just wrote “Steve” in the to: field and the computer sent it to the local account named Steve. But if it was Steve over in the physics department you wrote it to phys!Steve; the computer sent it to the “phys” computer, which sent it in turn to the Steve account. To get Steve in the Art department over at NYU, you wrote NYU!art!Steve- your computer sends it to the NYU gateway computer sends it to the “art” computer sends it to the Steve account. Etc. (“Bang"s were just chosen because they were on the keyboard, not too visually noisy, and not used for a huge lot already).
It became pretty standard jargon, as I understand, to disambiguate when writing to other humans. First phys!Steve vs the Steve right next to you, just like you were taking to the machine, then getting looser (as jargon does) to reference, say, bearded!Steve vs bald!Steve.
So I’m guessing alternate character version tags probably came from that.
"Why can't the freaks on AO3 just go and make a site for all the gross stuff and leave AO3 alone."
Because AO3 is that site. Because AO3 was that site long before you decided AO3 was better than the sites you bullied us off of before, and I can promise you if someone somehow comes up with a fanfic site you like better specifically for the 'gross stuff' you'll try to bully us off that too so you can benefit from it.
AO3's specific core purpose is to preserve fanfiction, yes, but it was also instigated as a host site for the fanfiction that kept getting yeeted off other platforms like Wattpad. Its designed to preserve all fanfiction, not just the fanfiction you, personally, think is 'allowed' to be written.
AO3 is the site for all the gross stuff the freaks make. We've been there just as long as you. We've been funding it just as long as you have. AO3 has specifically said you have a place here. The timeline was literally:
Wattpad/FF.net/LiveJournal purge fanfics > AO3 is born > The people who's fics got purged moved over to AO3 > AO3 gains popularity as the best functioning site > The people who pushed for the fics to be purged off Wattpad move to AO3 > The same people try to push for AO3 to purge fics.
AO3's source coding is open-access. You go make a polished, strict, rigid site where nothing 'icky' is allowed. You go make a site where you can control what is hosted. We already have our space.
Although it is sad Chain of Thorns was initially supposed to come out this week but didn't, there are plenty new books to read that I think many of you would enjoy to pass the time. Two of which actually came out November 1st, the same day ChoT was originally supposed to release.
Here they are!
I'll start with a Taste of Gold and Iron, which came out this August. It's an adult m/m fantasy romance featuring prince Kadou and his body guard Evemer. After an incident with a powerful ambassador, Kadou has to prove his loyalty to his sister, the queen, and investigate a conspiracy involving counterfeit coins in a world where certain people have the ability to touch-taste precious metals with their finger. It's a slow burn type of romance between a prince and his body guard. I really liked how Kadou's chronic anxiety was depicted. Evemer, on the other hand, is very stoic and duty driven. He tends to be quiet. He can go entire days only saying "yes, my prince" and "no, my prince". The book has both their POVs and includes discussions about ethics and a very intimate (not necessarily sexual) bathhouse scene which may have inspired a similar scene in my Trojan war AU from Alastember.
Next up is a Marvellous Light and a Restless Truth. These are the first two books in a historic fantasy romance trilogy set in the Edwardian era. Book 2 came out this tuesday and I just finished it. The first focuses on Robin Blyth, a young non magical man who is accidently given a government post to do with magic, which leads to him finding out magic is real. The magic society would just erase his memory and replace him with someone who knows magic, except that he gets cursed by the same people who killed his predecessor, and now he and his grumpy magical coworker Edwin Courcey have to get to the bottom of the conspiracy and also undo the curse. The second book continues the investigation in the same conspiracy, but instead stars Robin's sister Maud, who accompanies an old lady on a journey from New York to England on a ship. Except the old lady dies on the first day and now Maud has to investigate who killed her with the help of a scandalous magician called Violet. These books are a lot of fun, especially book 2 had me laughing a lot. Be warned there's a lot of sexual content in this series, more so than the other books. Book 2 has a lot of emphasis on sexual self discovery and involves Maud buying a suitcase of what is essentially the Edwardian era version of very explicit fic.
I cannot tell you a lot about Ocean's Echo by Everina Maxwell because it just arrived and I haven't read it yet. Like a Restless Truth, it came out November 1st. But it's very pretty and I wanted to show it anyway. I don't know if it's good yet. I did read Everina Maxwell's first book, which is Winter's Orbit, the book the Stars Collide draws a lot of inspiration from. As far as I know Ocean's Echo is not connected to Winter's Orbit, but is set in a completely different part of the same universe, where some people have developed mind control abilities. I'll tell you more about this book once I've read it, but as of right now I'd definitely recommend Winter's Orbit and have high hopes for this one.
Finally, I have Prince of the Sorrows and Lord of Silver Ashes by Kellen Graves. I put them on top of each other on the picture because the cover of the first book won't fall flat and otherwise it'd look stupid. The first book came out in March, while the second just came out last week. It's an indie published m/m fantasy romance series. Right now there are two books out, the second one came out just last week and arrived today. There's going to be more of them, but it's currently not set how many, though I did read the author might make it an eight book series. I guess that depends on if people buy it? I haven't read book 2 yet, since it just arrived, but I did read book 1 and really liked it. Saffron is a human changeling living in a fae world, and he will be sent back to the human world once he gets too old, unless he can get an academic endorsement to keep studying there. He accidently learns the true name of prince Cylvan, a brooding fae prince, and makes a deal with him to help him remove the power from his true name in exchange for an edorsement. At the same time, other human servants are getting killed and Saffron has to find out what's going on before he's next. I'll probably have to reread book 1 before starting book 2 because I don't remember enough, but I'm excited where this is going.
I hope this helps and let me know if you want more book recommendations in the future or if there is anything specific you're looking for!
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