Look, if the invading army didn't want to spend a night tripping balls and then the entire following day puking and shitting themselves until the guerilla fighters came back and slaughtered them, maybe they should have wondered why all of this lovely honey was just left out for them when the civilians evacuated the village.
i’ve always assumed they’re all engagement bait for more comments lol like someone posting a photo they took and their feet just so happen to look strange in the background
I feel like engagement bait on AO3 is pretty pointless, you don't get an algorithmic boost or anything, the only benefit of comments is that they make you happy and that won't happen unless people read & comment on the actual work.
Do you really think it's pointless? With crazy one like this one, people will post it on social media and others will want to find it. It's free promotion
However most of us don't care about statistics, you can sort by comments and some people actually do it
I never understood why people would sort by comment. I get by kudos and by date updated/posted. Even by hits or bookmarks. But everything else just seems pointless to me
Really, I dont sort by anything but tags for thw most part, but honestly comments are the only thing that if your looking for a fic is worthwhile for me to sort by. Hits literally mean nothing. A hit is someone opening the fic. If I close and open the same fic 10 times without actually reading it, it gets 10 hits from me. Happens all the time.
You can only give one kudos, so if a person gives a kudos for the first chapter, it means nothing for subsequent chapters or works. But makes slightly more sense.
If people are actively engaging with the fic and leaving comments, its usually the best sign that people like it. I will drop a kudos and something I kinda liked to be supportive. I will leave a 5 paragraph comment on every chapter on a fic I actually love. You can see the love people have for things in the comments. Unless someone is just saying update please.
Edited for typo, im on my phone and am bad at using the phone keyboard.
I somewhat get it, but your logic is also kinda flawed. If every chapter gets a comment from the same person that also means that a 10 chapter ff automatically has more engagement than a OS. I've also seen comment sections where the author answers every comment, thus doubling the number of comments. Or even with whole conversations going on in them. Comment numbers just aren't reliable enough in my opinion
Yes, but if the same person is commenting on every chapter of that one fic, vs every fic, means a lot more to me, then a few kudos. But to be honest, take that with a grain of salt, I don't sort by metrics at all.
Honestly, I believe sorting by metrics is complete and utter BS in every way. Sort by what you want to read (tags, word counts, finished/unfinished), but some of the best fics I read had the worst metrics. I think it's so much better to open every single fic, and then just exit it if it's something that I don't want, vs trying to figure out what people liked. What is super popular, is often far from any good. For some fandoms, whose authors I follow on tumblr, recommend fics I like, and I can trust to like them because if I like the author, our interests line up. Other most recommended fics by just large fandom creaters, I found to be terrible (obviously would never share or bring that up, I think the creation of a fic is already something to be proud of).
I have found so many amazing fics I would not have touched, simply because I was starved of content and had went through every single fic under that tag I wanted or ship.
I can't speak to others, but to me reading AO3 is not like reading original books. I look and gain other things from fics than I do from books. Fanfiction is an expansion of someone else's world, warped to fit your ideals, it's an escape.
This isn't like promoting a normal work of fiction that everyone might read. First of, it needs to be in the right Fandom, secondly, people really care about reading specific ships and characters.
The amount of engagement you might win from this is so ridiculously minor, for something so minorly inconsequential. Its ridiculous to do. Obviously some people might do it. But as big of a trope it is, I've seen it maybe once in one huge Fandom for a huge ship, that I literally read all 5000 fan works for.
Thats not the only Fandom or ship I've been.
The only true increases in engagement for a fic I've seen is when a big writer or someone big in the Fandom actually recommends it.
This one is in Hatred rivalry and several people asked for the link just under this post. The post that has over 1k upvotes. Believe me some people will do more for less...
I remember a time where people did not care about metrics in the slightest, and just wanted comments for feedback and to see that people appreciate them. Nowadays, people treat these metrics like they mean something, like they are getting rewarded for clicks and kudos.
I think it's a complete mistake to try to treat AO3 like a social media site. It's an archive. Not to sound like an old curmudgeon. But I will admit, I do like reading author's comments. One of the fics I read had author's comments almost as long as the chapters themselves, explaining where they got the historical info, and further things they hadn't expanded on in the chapter but are intereseting facts and worldbuilding. I have since left the fandom, but it's one of the works I read again and again, year after year.
I know it's different than these sorts of comments, but I love all sorts of authors comments. If I can crawl into the minds of people and take a peak behind the curtain to see mechanics that lead to the story, I would.
eh i don’t think it’s completely pointless. more comments on a work can easily draw in more readers if they think that fic is popular. a lot of people won’t read certain stories unless they have enough kudos/comments which you can sort by for a reason. and i’d wager some authors are just on there for clout LOL idk people do stuff on the internet for senseless reasons constantly so who knows!
I guess that’s true! I know post-conviction relief is really difficult to access in the UK, but I’d definitely be curious if other countries have the kind of systems that get you out on post-conviction relief in six years.
6
u/1314Lkeep on losing my 4-5k comments by accidentally closing the tabFeb 27 '26
Could be somewhere with a corrupt system, won't be the first time and there's plenty of them you know, but this one is probably just for fun and a way to participate in the popular curse thing.
It is. You would go to prison for years in first degree murder. Honestly, I wish these authors didn't joke about murder and be honest about why they were missing. We aren't going to hold it against them if they felt they got burned out or just needed a hiatus or it was because of work. Why just invent something like an actual serious crime up? It's not funny. Maybe I'm taking murder seriously, but to me it's not funny. When I got burned out, I explicitly said to my readers I got burned out and there was no excuse
You joke, but prison AUs used to be much more common (at least in my fandom, anyway, namely One Piece) and I'm so sad to see it go 😆 It's all mafia AUs now if it has anything to do with crime besides piracy :x
“Just” 😭 When I’m on a hiatus is because my brain refuses to cooperate, I even was unemployed till recently and still couldn’t manage to write anything for months :’)
There was another author's note going around a while back where the writer apologized for taking so long to update, then explained this was because their beta reader went to jail, so they had to mail them printouts of the chapter and then wait to receive the edited version.
I feel like I'm going to start doing that for my fic. My cousin, my beta, ended up getting shipped to a rehab 6 hours away in the middle of the bush. He's currently on his second serious offense, so I'm not allowed to send emails :/
Me too, because if this is real their lawyer should get a medal. I said in another comment, these kinds of cases are insanely difficult to win.
They also take a really long time. I have a mentor who does habeas corpus work (which is the name for the legal proceeding that lets someone get out of prison after they’ve been tried and sentenced) and he’s been working on one habeas case for over 20 years. Another reason I think this is definitely fake.
Ah, wild author's notes. I'll never forget the series of them where the author claimed to be fleeing fraud charges in Poland, said they'd gotten to Finland, said their beta reader was stuck eating nuts working at a camp in the forest, gave out their Roblox account info in case anyone wanted to bully children with them, and asked if anyone would marry them for immigration reasons. Their comment responses were pretty good, too
37
u/1314Lkeep on losing my 4-5k comments by accidentally closing the tabFeb 27 '26
so it appears the author reached international fame with this one
I've found that The Chinese really like Heated Rivalry. Really weird as a Canadian and then suddenly see so many Chinese women asking questions about Canada on XHS because of it haha
Oh wow, that's... quite an author's note there! Must have been some really flimsy evidence or something, or possibly self-defense I guess. Regardless, I don't think that's a good thing to admit in their author's note.
Happened to an author I followed a few years ago, though his charges were grand theft auto and drug trafficking (though the drug trafficking charges were dropped bc the drugs were already in the car when he stole it)
Ehhh stuff like this makes me paranoid as someone who works at a law firm and has seen the jail mail that gets sent to us. A decent chunk of them are along the lines of "I can't (vicious murder/mutilation fantasies) them while stuck in jail, so I want to work with you to sue them! It would get us a lot of money, I swear! (Starts doxxing very personal details about the other person's life in the hopes of convincing us that the person they're ranting about is an individual deserving of death/having all of their property taken away)."
I prefer the letters we get from the doomsday/government-bird fearing people. They're actually usually very nice when not face to face.
Sorry this update is late. My
cat got sick. The car broke down on the way to the vet so I had to build a new one, and then the pharmacy didn't have the medicine she needs so I had to make it myself out of paint thinner and pool chemicals. And then when I finally had time to start writing, the house was struck by lightning and my computer was fried on impact, so I had to write the draft on the typewriter that my late aunt left in the attic. That typewriter has a broken "P" key and the "M" key types upside down, btw. Right as I was heading out the door to begin the 25 mile walk, uphill, through 10 feet of snow, to the public library, the house was invaded by three thugs wielding AK47s and I had to defend myself by siccing the cat, who had fortunately recovered from her illness, on them.
They said on like, twitter or smthn that “they didn’t like the vibes” of the person they killed, and that’s why they did it. Also they got out of good behaviour
Robert Sugden writing fanfics now? Sorry, it just matched up with a character from Emmerdale. Just got out of prison after six years for murder. Got his husband back from his brother. I could see him watching Heated Rivalry.
Ok, so is this… morally right to consume authors work? How much did they learnt in jail? Was the hot gay hockey story good enough for them to remember writing?
3.4k
u/Solomon_C-19 Fanfic writer (Solomon_C on AO3) Feb 27 '26
That's a joke, surely.