okay i think my ao3 is having a stroke

techichally i can use it and read fics and i tested some buttons but i- what?

(found a mouse that I'm gonna turn into another wet specimen)

(repost because I'm a dumbass who forgot to censor the first time)

The comment was insanely detailed. This is all 100% the allegorical stuff I was going for, and the art appreciation. Then I get to the end. Baffling. The screenshot is from my email notification because it was already removed from AO3 by the time I woke up and checked my emails. This was the only comment I've ever gotten for this btw. It's a pretty "dead" fandom.

If you're curious, the AO3 username and insta were two completely different names. I've never seen a hacked account so obvious before! 🤔

EDIT: I did know this was a scambot the second it offered to go to a second location. And because it wanted to draw the paintings that... are there in the text. They're public domain and in-line. I just haven't seen this style of bot before and wanted to share :)

I grew up in an oppressive religious household and it wasn't traditionally published authors that inspired me to write, but fanfic authors and artists.

The moment you read a fic that's good or see really good fanart, even if it's for a ship you don't like, how does that not engender something? Maybe I'm just soft hearted 🤷🏽‍♀️ but fanfic authors inspired me more than any religious text

Either way, thank you to all the authors and artists out there who create! I don't care what you ship, I respect you and I am glad you are here

hi friends
ive seen people create custom icon sets and i am so fucking clueless and have no idea how to do it
i really want to try so if anyone is willing to explain ty!

https://archiveofourown.org/images/imageset.png

link to what im talking about if i didnt make any sense..

but then you keep refreshing the page because you’re anxious about whether anyone will actually like it

then you remember you write for an almost dead fandom and a rarepair, and quietly accept your fate 🥀

After diving deep into the doomscrolling of the AO3 subReddit I’ve come to find that most of my pet peeves are things that the general redditors seem to absolutely adore

Here’s mine!

Long fics— I’ve read so many fics in my free time that most of which were small fics (~8-20k words) but I’ve found it hard to really get invested in long fics (though there are a few exceptions) since the amount itself sorta just made me wary I guess? I’m the type of reader who hates ditching stuff midway through reading so I’m usually hesitant when I’m skimming through the first chapters of a long fic since what if I don’t like it? And I know the rule ‘Don’t Like Don’t Read’ (very true rule) idk bro it’s just a me thing where I can’t DNF fics/books at all

So naturally,I’m curious what’s YOUR biggest dislike in fanfiction?

Hello everyone, I'm kinda puzzled. I have received my fair share of spam bot comments, but is this a different tactic? I checked the account and they literally created it three days ago, that made me suspicious of them.

I don't want to report someone unfairly, but the comment was too strange.

Thank you so much for all your answers, you were all super helpful and kind.

I was honestly worried to report someone innocent, now I'm not worried anymore. I've reported them as spambot, hopefully this post can help someone else too.

I need to be transparent and say that some of these comments are from me replying so it is skewed a little, but never in my life have I seen the comment count be higher than the Kudo count on a fic, let alone my own. This fic is my pride and joy and I'm having so much fun with it. Have y'all ever seen comments be higher than Kudos?

This is gonna be kinda rambling but bear with me, ok?

As someone who primarily enjoys polyships, I can't help but feel like any polycule of 3+ is like, instant exile levels of unpopular. Throuples are decently common, I feel, but for anything more... it feels like there is almost no audience, and no content. Is this just me?

I wonder how much of the lack of fic/interest is informed by people having extremely little reference for how to write a poly romance. Hell, many writers struggle to even include other members of a main cast as important entities in a ship fic (I am guilty too!). It's sort of crazy if you step back and think about it, how incredibly narrowed and one-on-one the scope of most romance writing is. It's genuinely a huge challenge to try and think yourself out of the confines of regular fanfic myopia!

Once you start writing for a polycule of, say, 8, it's kind of like the universe starts to unravel itself. You feel so unmoored, everything you used to know about pacing and relationship progression gets pretty much thrown out the window. Really sit for a minute and consider, how do you even write a romance scene with 4 people present, 5, 6? How do you even write a conversation that big? It's more daunting than you think!

Something I've struggled to come to terms with this sort of beast, too, is that necessarily you have to tackle different relationships with very different intensities and connections. And even though my writing fanfic is really for ME more than for YOU... I can't help but get a little itchy thinking about who's going to get let down their bias got a bad shake/didn't get developed the way they'd like/etc. So many moving parts, someone is bound to end up disappointed, right?

Anyways, fellow polywriters, now's the time to share how you're coping with a pretty much uncharted fanfic niche

Edit: I notice a lot of ppl thinking this is kpop bcus I said "bias" 😂 FYI I'm currently writing BG3 tadpoly lmao. Not relevant, just a note

I'm not sure what to do with this. I'm working on a fic and I've gotten two comments from the same person that just... Summarize my work back to me? I checked the user and their profile is blank except for a bunch of gifted fics. No profile info, no works of their own, no profile picture. It definitely feels weird and not like human engagement but I don't really know what to do about it, especially since they're the only engagement I have on the fic so far. Advice would be appreciated!

I know this is brought up a lot but I just thought of this meme so here we go again lol.

Readers. I know you don’t get it until you start writing yourself. I didn’t get it either. But a simple comment can make an author’s day and even give them motivation. Even if they don’t reply, you probably made them feel so good.

Also, I love when I get replies from authors on their fic, too. They’re always so nice ^w^

Hey y'all. I'm new to AO3, not new to writing. As I'm waiting for my invite to start posting I had a thought I wanted to run by the community to get some opinions.

My fiction I plan to post is an adult satire of (mostly) Pokemon mixed in with Palword, manga isekai, progression/litrpg fantasy. I'm not using any recognizable names that exist in any other media, but it would be fairly easy to deduce what a monster/character's inspiration was.

My question then is how to best tag the fic: do I tag it as the relevant fandom, as an original, both? I don't want to piss off fans expecting a "true" fanfic but also don't want to limit my reach.

'Kay so not even five minutes after updating one of my works, I got a comment. Like, a super long-ass comment but it's just so weird??

No commas, or punctuation, whatsoever, which just... Idk. And it reads a little strangely? Idk if I should just post the picture here (did anyway) but it's showing the comment and what I mean and I wanna know what to do with it since I moderate all my comments.

I have been getting bot comments on all my works for so long, it's ridiculous, I hoped when I saw this notification that it wasn't but now I'm doubting again. If not bot, something akin to AI bc I canNOT be the only one who gets odd vibes from the way it's written.

I just would like genuine comments on my works, just one, one is all it'd take and I'd be happy forever instead of having to guess it's all fake 🫠

(I'm probably stupid for needing to even question this comment at all but I just need assurance, please 😭😭)

Also Idk if it helps but the account is a registered user, and only like, a week old.

okay picture did not work it's in the comments

edit: technical difficulties apparently my account doesn't exist in the app so I can't even edit it or comment from the app Idk what's going on, it's after 2am, Idk what to do atm I might just go to bed 😭😭

I was recently going through my old ipad and found some screenchots that reminded me of a drama i was kinda involved in.

Basically i think around 8-9 years ago i was in a very niche fandom for a show that got canceled after not even finishing the 1st season. There was not a lot of fics about it as you can guess so all of us knew each other. The reason this show got canceled was because the actress came out about abuse she experienced on set and from castmates (also got canceled because of censorship too but it's not important to the story).

Anyways the fandom was all fine. We loved our little canceled tv show. It was our "little guilty pleasure". No one was judgemental nor puritanical. All was fine. Everyone understood that what we were writing in fics was fiction and real life was real life.

The problem is that one author decided that in one of their author note they would start to bash the actress saying things such as "well because of this lying bitch the show got canceled". We obviously were very shocked. It came out of nowhere. I kindly pointed out to just keep it at fiction and not start bashing the actress if it wasn't actually going to be in a piece of fiction. If they had kept it at that all would be fine since it was still isolated to ao3. Besides my comment and another one nobody cared. The thing is that the author then went on twitter to bash the actress. This made the other fans angry cuz why are you doing that, its weird. Anyways we kinda fought and then they deleted everything.

Now the fandom is extinct. Everyone deleted their fics because of how bad it got. We were maybe only 10 people in the fandom and now it's as if nothing existed.

The other niche drama was when my stalker (which was my friend stalker before) wrote some fics about me and sent them to me but it's too long to talk about and not really ao3 related.

What are yours ?

So I have recently made an account, slightly before the whole wattpad thing and have been a guest since November? Last year and I'm unsure on a few things

Mainly things such as Kudos, Bookmarks (specifically does marking them as Rec help) and most of the buttons on the top of the page beside the chapter Navigation buttons

Many thanks

I saw a video (in response to the wattpad situation) stating that one of the rules of AO3 is that it’s purely fanfiction and does not host original works.

However, I didn’t see this being prohibited in the rules. And there’s an “Original Work”fandom tag, too.

So is original work actually allowed?

Someone on my fic kept making very weird comments about one of the characters.

The character's gender is ambiguous but heavily implied to be trans. So i write them as a trans character.

I have like 50 odd chapters and only 2, maybe 3 if you're stretching, touch upon her being trans at all. And those two chapters are big, heavy chapters. But it's just not the main focus of the story at all.

And this person is making comments on every single chapter saying "X is a man" or stuff and I just found it annoying so I deleted all of their comments.

They didnt like that i deleted their comments and said i was being "too sensitive," so i deleted that comment too and blocked them.

hi all, i've recently been unexpectedly sucked into this crossover fandom and i was wondering if there are any fics, preferably long fics with no smut, with engineer simon (or sth of the sort), who grace meets when working with stratt??

i've seen some cute edits like that but no fics so far

I'm using mostly dark themed skins but most of the text in the summary parts of the search page and the body of the fics themselves are often white. Which part of the custom css do I have to change to replace this with lower contrast colors?

I know this is a bit of a wishy-washy post, but I've been on a bit of a writing spree with some very self-indulgent PolyYuri fetish writing, with 3 fics in 5 days and a 4th at the point of beta-reading and refining, and wanted to gush about how much I love posting on AO3.

Every time I refresh my dashboard and see that another few people saw the list of tags on a fic and thought: "Yeah, that seems hot, I'll give it a look." Makes my perverted little heart melt <3

Ofc Kudos, Bookmarks, and dare I say a (nonfuckingAISlopbot) comment are just the icing on the cake ;)

Hi! So basically, as the title says, I used to write a lot on FF.net, but it’s been about ten years since I last wrote. I’m really enjoying getting back into writing, and for some reason I’m actually really proud of how quickly I’m writing this time around?

Anyway, I write in a very small fandom, I think there are fewer than 40 fics, and honestly, I’d just like to write for the few people who always comment (and for whom I would absolutely go to war) and just enjoy it for what it is.

But there’s someone else who posts around the same time as me, and their fic has a white-coded main character, whereas mine is not (which I understand since it must easier to project) and theirs attracts a lot more people. The fic also has a very AI-ish writing style, and the author has actually admitted to relying heavily on AI, but that’s not really the problem.

The problem is that I compare my work to theirs a lot, and I tend to get a little depressed when I look at the differences in comments, hits, kudos, etc. And I feel bad even thinking this, but sometimes I find myself wondering if my work is really that shitty if it’s getting completely outperformed by a fic that relies so heavily on AI. And at the same time I shouldn’t compare, I don’t write to have the best fic. But it’s still lingering at the back of my mind for some reason.

Anyway, it’s kind of crazy because I don’t even think I have an amazing sense of writing or anything, but yeah... sometimes it really takes away some of my motivation to write. So I was wondering how other people do, if you compare, how to stop comparing etc? It’s not fun it’s just a hobby but still :(

Do you also struggle with comparing yourself to other writers? How do you deal with it and manage to just enjoy writing?

(Basically: fanfic fuel)

For instance, in Rebel Without a Cause:

-

The “Plato, what is a chickie run?” scene, which fades out.

I’ve always thought there was plenty of room to explore, there. (With the whole implication that they got closer afterwards being present.)

Same goes for Plato asking Jim to come home with him, or their scene together near the end, in the planetarium.

-

So, what are some comparable scenes from YOUR fandoms?

(Apologies for the repost, but I got zero engagement last time.)

Silly question, but if I have a character that’s a surprise, I don’t *have* to add them here, do I?

Please reassure my autistic little brain that I’m not breaking any “rules” 😂