because competence is sexy
If I interacted with you about a fandom other than Homestuck, you're probably looking for me over at other-isms.
If my blog is removed for horny crimes, you can find contact information on my AO3 profile.
my ihop waiter: so how is everything?
me: g-good….
him:
People, especially games, get eldritch madness wrong a lot and it’s really such a shame.
An ant doesn’t start babbling when they see a circuit board. They find it strange, to them it is a landscape of strange angles and humming monoliths. They may be scared, but that is not madness.
Madness comes when the ant, for a moment, can see as a human does.
It understands those markings are words, symbols with meaning, like a pheromone but infinitely more complex. It can travel unimaginable distances, to lands unlike anything it has seen before. It knows of mirth, embarrassment, love, concepts unimaginable before this moment, and then…
It’s an ant again.
Echoes of things it cannot comprehend swirl around its mind. It cannot make use of this knowledge, but it still remembers. How is it supposed to return to its life? The more the ant saw the harder it is for it to forget. It needs to see it again, understand again. It will do anything to show others, to show itself, nothing else in this tiny world matters.
This is madness.
Thank you for this good PSA because I’m still seeing sincere, published, professional writers doing “ahhhhh oh no this monster was SO UGLY i’m mentally ill now!”
me, 11 chapters deep in a 25 chapter slowburn fic at 2 am, eyes burning and the phone keeps slipping out of my fingers:
this call out was fucking unnecessary
Follow me on Twitter for more vampire nonsense
human: dude you've been in our d&d group for literally like three years, you don't need to keep asking if you're invited every time
vampire: i knowww, i just get anxious ok?
human: oh fair
I feel personally attacked. Lol
reblog and put in the tags if you are on not disturb, online, afk or offline status on discord
My anthro professor has three forbidden words for his essays: problematic, interesting, and large. Point being they’re all filler words, he wants you to just skip straight to why it’s interesting or why it’s problematic. But anyway, any time I disagree with him in class I say to him “mm, interesting, but largely problematic.”
In the West, plot is commonly thought to revolve around conflict: a confrontation between two or more elements, in which one ultimately dominates the other. The standard three- and five-act plot structures–which permeate Western media–have conflict written into their very foundations. A “problem” appears near the end of the first act; and, in the second act, the conflict generated by this problem takes center stage. Conflict is used to create reader involvement even by many post-modern writers, whose work otherwise defies traditional structure.
The necessity of conflict is preached as a kind of dogma by contemporary writers’ workshops and Internet “guides” to writing. A plot without conflict is considered dull; some even go so far as to call it impossible. This has influenced not only fiction, but writing in general–arguably even philosophy. Yet, is there any truth to this belief? Does plot necessarily hinge on conflict? No. Such claims are a product of the West’s insularity. For countless centuries, Chinese and Japanese writers have used a plot structure that does not have conflict “built in”, so to speak. Rather, it relies on exposition and contrast to generate interest. This structure is known as kishōtenketsu.
This was really interesting. I’ve not been previously exposed to anything like it. I highly recommend all writer give it a read. Especially western writers. It’s easier to break out of your box if you know it’s there.
so you think you can stone miette and spit in miette’s eye?? so you think you can love miette and leave miette to DIE?? oh mother!! can’t do this to me mother!!!
All memes left on tumblr for more than about a fortnight metamorphose into Queen
When you read “y/n,” do you
a. mentally substitute it for your actual name
b. read it as “why-enn”
c. mentally pronounce it like a word (“yinn”/“yenn” etc)
Things that are a fanfic writer’s responsibility:
Things that are not a fanfic writer’s responsibility:
I got 99 problems and being responsible for your competent use of the internet ain’t one.
Or, if you feel that’s more suited for the experience: user CHOSE NOT TO USE ARCHIVE WARNINGS.
In which case, even more strongly than normal, READER BEWARE.
i agree with most of this but “creator chose not to use content warnings” is a bullshit tag that shouldn’t exist. it isn’t an actual warning, it doesn’t mean anything except maybe “this author wants to be ~edgy~,” and there’s no good reason for its presence on ao3.
seriously, i cannot think of a single situation in which “creator chose not to use archive warnings” is appropriate to use except maybe, maybe if your piece has content that could be a common trigger but isn’t available as an archive warning (e.g. incest), but even then it still feels like a cop-out and you absolutely have to make sure that content is still tagged for in your main tags
CNTUAW is perfectly fine, since it says: “I’m opting out of the warning system and you’ll have to decide for yourself if you’re willing to read my fic and whatever might be in there”. That is a valid choice for an author, and it’s just as valid for a reader to say: “What? Nope, not gonna read this.”
Nobody forces anybody to read a fic that has a CNTUAW tag. The only reason I can think of why people think this warning is invalid is because they assume that they somehow are entitled to every story they see, that somehow the authors owe them their fics. Which is ridiculous nonsense.
People like the above are why I by now refuse to use Archive Warnings and exclusively tagg ALL my fics “Author chose not to use Archive Warnings”. It’s so that people who feel entitled to my fic will not want to read it :)
(I still get enough engagement on my fics. Boo fucking hoo ;)
Idk how to answer someone’s question when they block me but… well.
They don’t seem to understand that “I’m opting out of the warning system” is a PART OF THE WARNING SYSTEM on Ao3 and even the DEFAULT Archive Warning according to their TOS FAQ.
To suggest I don’t post to Ao3 because I like using their default warning is…more than a little bizarre xD
Again, it all boils down to “ONLY THE WAY I DO FANDOM IS RIGHT!” - while Ao3 instead explicitly offers authors several different ways of doing fandom/posting their fics, which aren’t inferior to each other. JUST DIFFERENT.
But then, far too many people don’t understand that “different” doesn’t mean “bad”, and even when the site specifically tells its users “We offer you different ways of doing this”, apparently some people think that those who actually take advantage of that offer should…leave? *lol*
Also, I threw a fit after people told me how authors were “exclusionary” and “dicks” etc. etc. for using CNTUAW as if they were owed to be able to read every fucking fic. Which they are not. (Yet another fact this person doesn’t get.)
In short:
Every time I see wank about the “Choose Not to Warn” option on AO3 I remember how controversial the idea of MANDATORY WARNINGS was when the archive was created. This was 2008-9! No one in the wider world had heard of trigger warnings! They WEREN’T A THING!!! No where! Fandom was the place where the concept of trigger warnings caught on and a big part of that was because of AO3′s inclusion of tags and warnings.
So there was so much debate over WHAT kind of content requires MANDATORY warnings? And why? This wasn’t how fic worked before AO3. Yeah, many authors would warn for things like non-con or graphic violence but it was still very voluntary and up to each individual.
Many authors at the time HATED the idea of including warnings or being forced to warn because they felt that putting a warning for things or a tag at all would ruin the suspense and surprise reveal of their plot. And this wasn’t a fringe concern!
That’s why there’s an opt-out option! Because a community is about compromise and balancing the needs of authors and readers and people with very different feelings about how fiction should work. So having mandatory requirements to warn for certain things AND an option that lets people opt-out of this requirement while still warning readers that these are DANGEROUS AND UNCHARTED WATERS is a fucking compromise.
I know a lot of younger people seem to have never heard of compromise because they’ve been raised by the extremes of online discourse and Fox News but when you’re literally building community infrastructure it’s the name of the game.
It kills me that kids somehow think AO3 was made without considering these issues, that previous fandom generations haven’t already hashed out these fights. That the extreme growth and popularity of AO3 isn’t inherent proof that the system that was put in place after MUCH discussion and consideration WORKS.
This doesn’t feel like compromise to me though because the people who say “Fics don’t need to be tagged” get 100% of what they want for their stories, and people who say “All fic needs to be tagged” don’t get what they want at all. It’s the illusion of compromise.
Basically, if the people who don’t want to do something come out of the argument able to behave exactly as they wanted before the argument began, you have not actually created a compromise, you have given them the win
I’m 41 by the way, started reading fanfic back when it was primarily personal archives
The disconnect I think you’re having is that you are thinking of AO3 as a service for the readers instead of for the authors. It is an archive created by and FOR fanwriters and it takes a multitude of differing fanwriter perspectives into account by giving the CREATORS control over their own stories. And it provides warnings to readers who only want to read tagged works. But it doesn’t allow readers to dictate how writers present their work, because it’s not a reader-customer-focused business, but a nonprofit to preserve fanwork. The compromise is that instead of imposing one way of doing things on every user (i.e. every writer) each writer gets to choose for themselves.
The customers of AO3 are the writers, not the readers. That millions of readers do enjoy it, is basically a bonus. (That costs the organization money instead of makes it because it’s ad-free.)
@iamwestiec‘s tags are EXACTLY right:
reblogging for that last one SPECIFICALLY archive of *our* own writers are readers and readers are often writers but the ao3 is not a goddamn content provider
Readers “don’t get what they want at all” is a baffling statement to me because it ignores roughly 5 million works that chose to use tags, which sure seems like a lot of getting what you want. I think three–rings is right that this disconnect in perception only makes sense if someone is viewing AO3 exclusively through the lens of a content organizational system for readers. “I can’t organize this content, therefore it is zero function.”
But another disconnect I notice is not noticing how it successfully performs as a compromise because readers who want to organize fics by tags and know the content of a fic before choosing to read it *can do this* with the CNTAUW tag. This tag allows readers to *choose not to read fics with the CNTAUW designation.*
They can even filter for it, when selecting reading material.
Heck, they can even *draw conclusions about themes and values important to the author and therefore likely to be textual or subtextual in their writing.* (Example: the author who used the tag to express their value of self-determination, and their value of people not acting entitled towards them.)
It is not a zero data tag, it is an informational tag.
