i made this version of that popular cake meme as a love letter to my favourite artists, writers, editors etc who keep making content about my favourite characters/ship
ermm
I LOVE YALL!!!!!!!!
Monterey Bay Aquarium
cherry valley forever

#extradirty
NASA
Show & Tell

Origami Around

shark vs the universe

Janaina Medeiros
we're not kids anymore.
KIROKAZE

⁂

titsay
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸

oozey mess

if i look back, i am lost
Game of Thrones Daily

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Cosmic Funnies
ojovivo

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@whywritefanfiction
i made this version of that popular cake meme as a love letter to my favourite artists, writers, editors etc who keep making content about my favourite characters/ship
ermm
I LOVE YALL!!!!!!!!
fanfic writing culture isn’t “oh dang! I wanted to write about this prompt with this character but someone else already wrote it, so now I can’t”.
fanfic writing culture is always “two cakes is better than one. the more the merrier. there can ever be enough fics of this character with this prompt!”
There was an Aragorn+Legolas writer I used to read who wrote multiple 20k+ fics in which they went on a little mini-adventure and one of them got injured. They had like. At least ten that followed this exact format, and I fucking loved all of them. I’d finish one and be like, “AGAIN!!!” so like. Two cakes is great but it’s even better when it’s ten cakes by the same writer.
I saw a post that said no one reads a fic they love and goes to the author's page saying "that was amazing, I hope they don't have anything else like this one." And same thing is probably true with tags and prompts.
they dont even seem happy its like theyre just fucking with her out of obligation
Contrary to popular belief, abandoned WIPs are crucial to the writer ecosystem, as they become the fertile soil from which completed works grow. Without them, the landscape would be sterile and barren
wanna state not for the first time that several of my all time favorite fanfics are unfinished and will probably never be finished and I am so grateful that their authors decided to post what they'd written instead of waiting until they were finished (a time that ultimately didn't come!) I'm so so glad I got to read what they did write! It doesn't have to be finished to have value to a reader!
My therapist just told me my problem is that I need to write more fanfiction.
This sounds fake but the logic behind it is actually really interesting? She said obsession with a new fandom triggers quick dopamine release when we consume all this related content--it's easy and addictive.
What we're NOT getting is that 'slow dopamine' that's more sustainable and engaging. That's the kind we get from DOING things that take effort but are ultimately rewarding.
So like, she suggested that writing fic and making fanart are ways to balance the quick dopamine of watching a show/reading fic with the slow dopamine of working at something that takes effort.
Moral of the story is you should engage in the process of creation around your favorite things. You'll feel better for it.
Oh.
OH.
I have dozens of AO3 tabs open on my phone. Many of them are my comfort fics that I’ll read at any given time on any given day if I just want to. And I realised today that if something I write becomes a permanent tab on someone’s phone or computer, then the hours and hours of work and time and tears I spent creating it will be well worth it.
So, write the thing. It’ll mean something to you, and you never know what it could wind up meaning to someone else.
GUYS. DID YOU KNOW YOU CAN WRITE CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE FICS ON AO3
Other things you can do:
Linked footnotes
Customized page dividers
Sticky notes
Lined paper
Paper that looks stacked on top of each other
Old looking paper
Newspaper articles
Tumblr posts
iOS text messages
Emails
Fake ao3 authors notes and kudos button
Freaking discord chats
Its fucking amazing. Ao3 is fucking amazing. Can I legally marry a website?
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
WHAT
It never ceases to amaze me how brilliant fan fiction writers are, like, you take bits of something and can turn it into such brilliance and create crazy good plot lines with so much depth and layers and come up with all these ideas, like, literally blows my mind every time. The level of creativity is stunning
Never stop
People worrying is their fic is too self indulgent like....... that is the point of fanfiction. You are supposed to indulge . Every fic is self indulgent
Indulge in the thing you want. Do it more. Have all the cake. That's the entire point.
But actually? Fan creators might be the “real” artists here. Because fan creators know that all art is built on building blocks. It’s not hidden; it’s explicit. Fan creators know that creativity isn’t a finite resource that needs to be kept behind lock and key. With those same basic building blocks, from trope to trope and fandom to fandom, an infinite amount of vitally important creativity can be built. We know; we’ve done it. The law just needs to catch up.
— @earlgreytea68 in her article "How U.S. Copyright Law Fails Fan Creators." Read it, then listen (or read a transcript) of our conversation with her in our most recent episode, "The Copyright Conundrum."
“I think fanfiction is literature and literature, for the most part, is fanfiction, and that anyone that dismisses it simply on the grounds that it’s derivative knows fuck-all about literature and needs to get the hell off my lawn. Most of the history of Western literature (and probably much of non-Western literature, but I can’t speak to that) is adapted or appropriated from something else. Homer wrote historyfic and Virgil wrote Homerfic and Dante wrote Virgilfic (where he makes himself a character and writes himself hanging out with Homer and Virgil and they’re like “OMG Dante you’re so cool.” He was the original Gary Stu). Milton wrote Bible fanfic, and everyone and their mom spent the Middle Ages writing King Arthur fanfic. In the sixteenth century you and another dude could translate the same Petrarchan sonnet and somehow have it count as two separate poems, and no one gave a fuck. Shakespeare doesn’t have a single original plot—although much of it would be more rightly termed RPF—and then John Fletcher and Mary Cowden Clarke and Gloria Naylor and Jane Smiley and Stephen Sondheim wrote Shakespeare fanfic. Guys like Pope and Dryden took old narratives and rewrote them to make fun of people they didn’t like, because the eighteenth century was basically high school. And Spenser! Don’t even get me started on Spenser. Here’s what fanfic authors/fans need to remember when anyone gives them shit: the idea that originality is somehow a good thing, an innately preferable thing, is a completely modern notion. Until about three hundred years ago, a good writer, by and large, was someone who could take a tried-and-true story and make it even more awesome. (If you want to sound fancy, the technical term is imitatio.) People were like, why would I wanna read something about some dude I’ve never heard of? There’s a new Sir Gawain story out, man! (As to when and how that changed, I tend to blame Daniel Defoe, or the Modernists, or reality television, depending on my mood.) I also find fanfic fascinating because it takes all the barriers that keep people from professional authorship—barriers that have weakened over the centuries but are nevertheless still very real—and blows right past them. Producing literature, much less circulating it, was something that was well nigh impossible for the vast majority of people for most of human history. First you had to live in a culture where people thought it was acceptable for you to even want to be literate in the first place. And then you had to find someone who could teach you how to read and write (the two didn’t necessarily go together). And you needed sufficient leisure time to learn. And be able to afford books, or at least be friends with someone rich enough to own books who would lend them to you. Good writers are usually well-read and professional writing is a full-time job, so you needed a lot of books, and a lot of leisure time both for reading and writing. And then you had to be in a high enough social position that someone would take you seriously and want to read your work—to have access to circulation/publication in addition to education and leisure time. A very tiny percentage of the population fit those parameters (in England, which is the only place I can speak of with some authority, that meant from 500-1000 A.D.: monks; 1000-1500: aristocratic men and the very occasional aristocratic woman; 1500-1800: aristocratic men, some middle-class men, a few aristocratic women; 1800-on, some middle-class women as well). What’s amazing is how many people who didn’t fit those parameters kept writing in spite of the constant message they got from society that no one cared about what they had to say, writing letters and diaries and stories and poems that often weren’t discovered until hundreds of years later. Humans have an urge to express themselves, to tell stories, and fanfic lets them. If you’ve got access to a computer and an hour or two to while away of an evening, you can create something that people will see and respond to instantly, with a built-in community of people who care about what you have to say. I do write the occasional fic; I wish I had the time and mental energy to write more. I’ll admit I don’t read a lot of fic these days because most of it is not—and I know how snobbish this sounds—particularly well-written. That doesn’t mean it’s “not good”—there are a lot of reasons people read fic and not all of them have to do with wanting to read finely crafted prose. That’s why fic is awesome—it creates a place for all kinds of storytelling. But for me personally, now that my job entails reading about 1500 pages of undergraduate writing per year, when I have time to read for enjoyment I want it to be by someone who really knows what they’re doing. There’s tons of high-quality fic, of course, but I no longer have the time and patience to go searching for it that I had ten years ago. But whether I’m reading it or not, I love that fanfiction exists. Because without people doing what fanfiction writers do, literature wouldn’t exist. (And then I’d be out of a job and, frankly, I don’t know how to do anything else.)”
— “As a professor, may I ask you what you think about fanfiction?” (via meiringens)
some people out there really be typing fanfics longer than war and peace in their free time and then going on about their life like it's no big deal. how fucking incredible. like no offense to tolstoy but that was like. his whole job
sometimes i say things on twitter and then make a little graph about it
LOL. Okay, it’s also this time of year again.
AO3 started with astolat’s post An Archive of One’s Own on Livejournal. Details at Fanlore here.
(And no, it wasn’t originally supposed to be the actual archive’s name. It’s just that no one liked any of the other proposed names. There was a poll and everything.)
Cesperanza and various other friends (or more like acquaintances in my case) of astolat are all over the comments and were involved in the initial building. It was a who’s-who of LJ era big Western slash fandoms, so if you’re into stuff like SGA, you’ll see many familiar names.
The comments are still up if you want to go see what fandom was thinking in 2007 about this pie-in-the-sky proposal that was definitely never going to work.
I—-I followed them back in the day on LJ. Wow.
Everybody did. I guarantee if you were active on LJ and into m/m for live action Western fandoms, you followed at least somebody in those comments too.
It was a smaller world than now (or than all of fandom everywhere), and AO3 really was a community project.
I remember when I had to wait patiently for an AO3 invite from a friend of a friend…and that friend of a friend was a fic author who followed those named above.
I’m so proud to be an AO3 member since 2010.
The account number thing on everyone’s profile page is presumably for the future block feature, but it also gives you obnoxious bragging rights:
I waited a year - mostly watching to see how it was going first. ^^
{rummages through stats}
Oh good lord. I didn’t need to see that.
😅
Ahaha. I forgot about that feature.
oh wow
#ao3#haha three–rings is right#you can tell EXACTLY when ao3 opened to non beta testers#the floodgates opened in november 2009
Hah. Truth.
astolat is 8. elz is 10. I assume 1-7 are deleted test accounts. The really low numbers are the primary coders, unsurprisingly. The rest of the 2-digit numbers are committee members of the first round of committees (writing the ToS and so on). Then come whatever testers joined during closed beta.
Closed beta started on October 3, 2008. That’s when a bunch of staff’s imported old fic was visible to the public and people could start commenting and hammering on the archive.
Open beta, when anyone could request an invite, started on November 14, 2009.
#16 reporting in. :D Also, btw, the Archive of Our Own phrase comes right out of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” I take blame/responsibility/credit for this, though overall I still think it was the best name on the table and I like the history baked into it (arguably A Room of One’s Own kicked off the discipline of Women’s and Gender Studies and led to a search for women writers to include in the canon.) What I remember more though was people being like, “The Organization for Transformative Works is a terrible name for an archive!!” which–(one of my jobs was to explain this over and over and over)–yes, yes, it is, it’s NOT the name of the archive, it’s the name of the nonprofit company we have to set up to run the archive if we’re serious about this” (spoiler: we were serious about this) “and also it’s the name of the legal defense - transformativity - that the whole project is based on!” And the truth is, seriously, every time I see someone–someone I don’t know, in a fannish community I’m not in, or randomly on YouTube or wherever–announce “this is a transformative work” I sit back with a happy little warm feeling (and I also bow a couple of times in the direction of the OTW Legal’s team without whom etc.)
2759 here. One particular flood of new members in Dec. 2009 was Yuletide participants - that year we did signups and matching through the old Yuletide site, but we had to post our gifts on the new site (AO3). I became a tag wrangler about two weeks later and I’m still working.
It’s so interesting to track the various little explosions of users.
I was a late joiner, 3 months after I got an account I was a member of the systems committe.
I joined on: 2010-09-13
My user ID is: 9262
\o/
Are there posts showing how the number of accounts and/or users has grown over time? I recall a couple of news posts, but I don’t remember if they show the whole history. It would be interesting to see how 2012 affected things.
This is crazy to see I joined in 2012 and oh my gods it was like winning the lottery I stg felt so amazing.
I joined on: 2012-06-30
My user ID is: 55564
50K in three years and it’s insane to me to think that there’s another 10+ years of this. I always smile when I see the user / fandom counts pass a milestone but it’s crazy to see how fast this place has grown.
Anywho - donate if you can, it’s definitely something that helps keep the growth going!
Daaaamn. Yeah, the FFN purge really shook people up. 6/30 would have been right in the middle of the wait-forever-for-an-invite period.
My very sad story is that I requested to join via invite of some sort in 2012 or something but I didn’t know to check my junk mail and my email program kept sending it to spam, so I literally just thought—I don’t know—that I just wasn’t cool enough to get an invite, and then I FINALLY joined again in 2020 and only then because someone told me to check my spam folder after I requested 🤣 😅
Noooooo! So sad!
By the way, randos lurking, two important things to know:
1. AO3 does not screen for coolness, fannishness, etc. If you put your email in the queue, you’ll get an invite.
2. And it will be in your gmail “social” tab, which you will not have turned off for some god damn reason, and then I will see you on reddit or tumblr or somewhere bitching about yours never arrived
GMAIL SOCIAL TAB
Please, for the love of god, turn this thing off. I cannot begin to count how many people I see who’ve had this issue. It’s even more common than the spam folder eating it.
On Fanfiction
I was cruising through the net, following the cold trail of one of the periodic “Is or is not Fanfic the Ultimate Literary Evil?” arguments that crop up regularly, and I’m now bursting to make a point that I never see made by fic defenders.
We’re all familiar with the normal defenses of fic: it’s done out of love, it’s training, it’s for fun. Those are all good and valid defenses!
But they miss something. They damn with faint praise. Because the thing is, when you commit this particular Ultimate Literary Evil you’ve now told a story. And stories are powerful. The fact that it wasn’t in an original world or with original characters doesn’t necessarily make it less powerful to any given reader.
I would never have made this argument a few years ago. A few years ago I hadn’t received messages from people who were deeply touched by something I wrote in fanfic. So what if it’s only two or three or four people, and I used someone else’s world and characters? For those two or three or four people, I wrote something fucking important. You cannot tell me that isn’t a valid use of my time and expect me to feel chastened. I don’t buy it. I won’t feel ashamed. I will laugh when you call something that touches other people ‘literary masturbation.’ Apparently you’re not too up on your sex terminology.
Someone could argue that if I’d managed the same thing with original characters in an original world, it could’ve touched more people. They might be right! On the other hand, it might never have been accepted for publication, or found a market if self published, and more importantly I would never have written it because I didn’t realize I could write. The story wouldn’t have happened. Instead, thanks to fanfic being a thing, it did. And for two or three or four people it mattered. When we talk about defending fanfic, can we occasionally talk about that?
I once had an active serviceman who told me that my FF7 and FF8 fic helped get him through the war. That’ll humble you. People have told me my fanfic helped get them through long nights, through grief, through hard times. It was a solace to people who needed solace. And because it was fanfic, it was easier to reach the people who needed it. They knew those people already. That world was dear to them already. They were being comforted by friends, not strangers.
Stories are like swords. Even if you’ve borrowed the sword, even if you didn’t forge it yourself from ore and fire, it’s still your body and your skill that makes use of it. It can still draw blood, it can strike down things that attack you, it can still defend something you hold dear. Don’t get me wrong, a sword you’ve made yourself is powerful. You know it down to its very molecules, are intimate with its heft and its reach. It is part of your own arm. But that can make you hesitate to use it sometimes, if you’re afraid that swinging it too recklessly will notch the blade. Is it strong enough, you think. Will it stand this? I worked so hard to make it. A blade you snatched up because you needed a weapon in your hand is not prey to such fears. You will use it to beat against your foes until it either saves you or it shatters.
But whether you made that sword yourself or picked it up from someone who fell on the field, the fight you fight with it is always yours.
Literary critics who sneer at fanfic are so infuriatingly shortsighted, because they all totally ignore how their precious literature, as in individual stories that are created, disseminated, and protected as commercial products, are a totally modern industrial capitalist thing and honestly not how humans have ever done it before like a couple centuries ago. Plus like, who benefits most from literature? Same dudes who benefit most from capitalism: the people in power, the people with privilege. There’s a reason literary canon is composed of fucking white straight dudes who write about white straight dudes fucking.
Fanfiction is a modern expression of the oral tradition—for the rest of us, by the rest of us, about the rest of us—and I think that’s fucking wonderful and speaks to a need that absolutely isn’t being met by the publishing industry. The need to come together as a close community, I think, and take the characters of our mythology and tell them getting drunk and married and tricked and left behind and sent to war and comforted and found again and learning the lessons that every generation learns over and over. It’s wonderful. I love it. I’m always going to love it.
Stories are fractal by nature. Even when there’s just one version in print, you have it multiplied by every reader’s experience of it in light of who they are, what they like, what they want. And then many people will put themselves in the place of the protagonist, or another character, and spend a lot of time thinking about what they’d do in that character’s place. Or adjusting happenings so they like the results better.
That’s not fic yet, but it is a story.
But the best stories grow. This can happen in the language of capitalism—a remake of a classic movie, a series of books focusing on what happened afterwards or before—or it can happen in the language of humanity. Children playing with sticks as lightsabers, Jedi Princess Leia saving Alderaan by dueling Vader; a father reading his kids The Hobbit as a bedtime story as an interactive, “what would you like to happen next?” way so that the dwarves win the wargs over with doggie biscuits that they had in their pockets and ride to Erebor on giant wolves, people writing and sharing their ideas for deleted outtake scenes from Star Trek and slow-build fierce and tender romance with startling bursts of hot sex between Hawkeye and Agent Coulson.
A story at its most successful is a fully developed fractal, retold a million times and a million ways, with stories based on stories based on stories. Fanfic of fanfic of fanfic. Stories based on headcanons, stories based on prompts, stories that put the Guardians of the Galaxy in a coffee-shop AU and stories where the Transformers are planet-wandering nomads and stories where characters from one story are placed into a world from another. Stories that could be canon, stories that are the farthest thing from canon, stories that are plausible, stories that would never happen, stories that give depth to a character or explore the consequences of one different plot event or rewrite the whole thing from scratch.
This is what stories are supposed to be.
This is what stories are.
Fandom and fan creations are a communal act. They do not disguise how they are influenced by each other. They revel in it.
Literature was once a communal act, too. Film as well. It’s only once we decided to extend and expand the idea of copyright and turn stories into primarily vehicles for profit that we rejected this communal structure. The literary canon shouldn’t be all dead white men. They didn’t build the novel. They didn’t build theater. They took what was already there and said “This is mine now,” and we believed them.
Creativity is communal. There is no such thing as the lone genius on a mountaintop. Ideas are passed around, handed back and forth, growing all the time. Fandom is what human creativity looks like in its normal form. Fandom is like this because humans are like this.
We didn’t just borrow the sword. We remade it because we saw in it the potential for something better. And we did that together, all of us.
things that always make me happy: serial commenters. there are three types
1) reading a longfic chapter by chapter, leaving an increasingly emotional comment on every chapter, descends into keysmashes near the end: outstanding
2) read one fic by accident, clicked the author name, now working steadily through the backlog and commenting on everything, I wake up to an AO3 inbox full of enthusiasm: precious beyond words
3) the longterm serial commenter whose comment begins with I don’t even know this fandom but because they have followed me from somewhere else: stunning. humbling. magical.
these are all *chef’s kiss* and I want to add one more: 4) left a comment a while ago, comes back and leaves another comment on the same fic, telling you that they’re coming back to reread the fic: angels. blessings. lifesavers.
OK but real quick here: how many times can I comment on the same fic before it gets creepy???
IT NEVER GETS CREEPY
NEVER CREEPY ALWAYS DELIGHTFUL
Dear Fanfiction Readers,
If you’re afraid to leave a review/comment because you think it’ll sound stupid, don’t be. Just leave an incoherent reply in all caps. We love that shit.
Sincerely,
A Fic Writer that needs constant validation.
This
Wait really? Because for the past three years or so I was too afraid to leave comments and I still am, but I’ve gotten better at it so when I really like something I just comment < 3 Are fanfic writers really okay with, “OMFG I LOVED EVERYTHING EVERY MOMENT EVERY WORD I LOVE YOU FEEL MY LOVE AND AFFECTION FOR YOUR CREATION YOU BEAUTIFUL DYING MORTAL.”? I need answers.
Listen to me. Fanfic writers love that shit. The idea that someone liked what u created to the point of incoherence is extremely validating. Also, I have literally left (what I thought was) incoherent walls of text & had writers tell me “I was putting off updating this but then I saw your comment and remembered how excited I was to write this”
tldr u don’t have to be coherent to express excitement & all writers want is to know someone out there is excited about their work