@inu-fiction / inu-fiction.tumblr.com
Hey guys tiny pic is shutting down in 4 days, backup stuff that's hosted there ASAP. I think ao3 is doing something to preserve fic illustrations but uh you might want to grab those and save them anyways.
I checked and this is actually happening - if you have any fics you love on lj or ao3 that have pictures in them, please, please grab those and back them up, the authors and artists might not even be aware of the deadline.
You can read the post here for more info, but I wanted to just add a bit about what this entails from my POV, on the Support team. Somewhere between ¼ to 1/3 of all our tickets last month were in Chinese (somewhere upwards of 300 out of 1200 or so), almost all from users just setting up their accounts or trying to find out how to get an invitation. A lot of the tickets are what I’d characterize as “intro” tickets - they say hi, list favourite fandoms or pairings, or provide samples of fic they’ve written. Although this isn’t necessary on AO3, this is not uncommon in Chinese fandom sites that you have to prove your credentials to get in (in fact it wasn’t uncommon in English-language fandom sites 15-20 years ago). We respond to all of these tickets, even the ones that just say hi. We check whether the user has managed to receive their invite or get their account sent up, and if they haven’t, we help them do so. This means taking every single ticket through our Chinese translation team twice, once so we make sure we understand the initial ticket, and then again to translate our reply.
This is a challenging process, although we’ve found ways to streamline it and can normally get a reply out pretty quickly (like within a few days). We do it because this is part of why AO3 exists in the first place - to provide a safe haven where users can post their works without worrying about censorship or sudden crackdowns on certain kinds of content. We do it because this is important, and helping these users get their accounts and be able to share their works safely is why we’re here. We hope that we’ll be able to help as many of them as possible.
There have been a few (thankfully few, that I’ve seen) complaints about these new AO3 users not always knowing how things work - what language to tag with, or what fandom tags to use, for instance. To this I would say:
1. Have patience and be considerate. They are coming to a new site that they aren’t familiar with, and using it in a language they may not be expert in, and it might take a while to learn the ropes. You can filter out works tagged in Chinese if you don’t want to see them. Or just scroll past.
2. You can report works tagged with the wrong language or the wrong fandom to our Policy and Abuse team using the link at the bottom of any page. This will not cause the authors to “get in trouble” (a concern I’ve heard before, as people are reluctant to report for these reasons). It means the Policy and Abuse team will contact them to ask them to change the language/fandom tag, and if the creator doesn’t, they can edit it directly.
If you remember Strikethrough or the FF.net porn ban or similar purges, please keep them in mind and consider that these users are going through something similar or potentially worse. This is why AO3 exists. We are doing our best to try and help make the transition smooth.
I am a Taiwanese and I’d like to put some context behind the recent influx of China based AO3 users.
China is tightening their freedom of speech in recent years after Xi has became the chairman (he even canceled the 10 years long term of service of chairman, meaning he can stay as the leader of China as long as he lives–he has became a dictator).
They censor words that are deemed “sensitive”, you can’t type anything to criticize the chinise government. Big social media platform won’t even post the posts containing sensitive words. You don’t have the freedom of publish books without the books being approved by the government either.
To disguise this whole Ninety Eighty-Four nightmare, they started to pick on the easy target: the women and the minorities (China is getting more and more misogynistic as a result of the government trying to control their male population through encouraging them to control the female population through “chinese tradition family value” but that’s another story).
Last year, the chinese government arrested a woman who is a famous yaoi/BL novel writer named 天一 and sentenced her 10 years in jail for “selling obscene publications” and “illegal publication” (she’s not the only BL writer who got arrested. Meanwhile, multiple cases where men raped women only get about 2 years of jail time in China). It’s a warning to anyone who want to publish anything that’s “not approved” by the government that they can literally ruin you.
Just recently the chinese government “contacted” website owners of one of their largest romance/yaoi/slash fiction sites 晉江 and announced that for now on, for the sake of a Clean Society, they can’t write anything that’s slightly “obscene”. No sex scene, no sexual interaction, they can’t even write any bodily interaction below neck (I’m not kidding here).
But that’s not their actual goal. They also listed other restriction such as: can’t write anything that’s about the government, the military, the police, “sensitive history”, “race problems”, which is… you basically can’t write anything that might be used as a tool to criticize the government (as many novels did).
This recent development really hurt the chinese fanfic writers. They can’t write anything without the fear of being put on the guillotine by the government to show their control. Most of them don’t even think that deep politically, they just want to write slash fictions. But there are no platform safe in China, that’s why the sudden influx of chinese users to AO3.
I bet it won’t be long before AO3 got banned in China, but until then, be a little bit patient to them. As much as I hate the chinese government, I pity their people.
I’m crying so loud…As a Chinese, you don’t know how your kindness meant to us. When I’m young, I read 1984, and I thought this story is so unrealistic, but now, it’s getting tougher and tougher for fanfic and the writer in China. Thank you ao3. Thank you for the people who care about Chinese people. (hope I didn’t spell anything wrong)
Hi everyone! As much as I poke fun at ao3 culture on this blog, I love the platform and the community and I’m glad that it can function as a refuge for Chinese fans, both writers and readers.
So followers! I encourage you all to be welcoming and helpful to Chinese fans joining us on ao3 and to be patient as the platform figures out how to integrate them. If any of you are Chinese speakers and are inclined to volunteer with ao3, I’m sure that would be appreciated. As for the rest of us, let’s remember that ao3 exists as a sanctuary for our community, especially exactly those parts of it that are most at risk under Chinese censorship (lgbt+ content, explicit fics, etc.) and let’s take this opportunity to be grateful that our community has worked together so well for so long in order to create this sanctuary. I’m delighted that that effort can now be helpful to Chinese fans facing censorship, and I’m excited to see how Chinese fans and fan culture will interact and co-create with English speaking fandom.
And with that, I’m off to slip ao3 an extra 10 dollars.
So, Fansplaining just released the results of their survey of fanfic readers and the types of tropes/genres/tones they prefer in fic. The results are interesting (if occasionally relatively expected), and I even learned some terms (such as “imagine” which it turns out is just something we do all the time on tumblr lol), so I’m going to link to the article discussing this first in case ya’ll want to read it:
But one of the terms covered took me aback, and leads me to pose a question to ya’ll, because a.) it doesn’t use the term quite like I thought it was used and b.) it’s actually relevant to a fic I’m working on and am starting to consider the future tags for (I might do clearer tags just to be on the safe side - but I’m still curious!). The term in question is a genre descriptor often used as a tag on places like AO3 or tumblr: “darkfic”. So my question - twofold, I guess - is this: 1.) if ya’ll use the term “darkfic” in tagging/labeling/describing your own work and/or the work of others, especially in Inuyasha fandom, how exactly do you use it? and 2.) How do you assume others use it? Like, if something is TAGGED or described by its author as “darkfic”, especially if it doesn’t have many other tags to clarify beyond that, what would you assume about the fic?
that involves Inuyasha just casually tossing his robe into campfire and Kagome initially losing her shit before he reminds her it’s made of fire rat fur and is in fact fireproof and that’s just how one cleans such a thing and it even repairs any rips when you incinerate it. I just never liked the idea that his clothes magically repair and clean but Inuyasha purposefully throwing this priceless garment into a fire is such a comical image to me that I have no choice but to believe it’s real.
Fuck yes. This will be canon in my fanfic
I can’t believe you didn’t think of Inuyasha walking around in his loincloth while his robes are in the fire. Didn’t imagine Kagome getting a nice preview of those abs and that ass.
I mean technically, it’s only his haori that’s fire-rat so I assumed that only his shirt can be burned/repaired. So him walking around butt naked didnt feel on the menu
I always assumed the hakama were made out of the same material, but maybe not. But if they were, the white (hadagi? kosode?) shirt he wears underneath is surely just linen, so he could be wearing just that and showing off his hanyou leggys lol
I mean, if we assumed the pants were the same material as the top half, maybe Kagome would too? Into the fire they go! Bwahaha!
“Kagome WAIT those aren’t–!”
*inuyashas pants ignite*
ahahHHAHAH I’M WHEEZING OMGGGGG THAT IS THE BEST THING.
I’M D YINGGG
“Oh you mean they weren’t made of the fire rat too? Well why didn’t you say something?”
“I did say something.”
*shamelessly staring at his legs and butt* “Sorry did you say something?”
This is too great a headcanon and too priceless of a mental image to not reblog. :D Though I will note, that’s not a “haori” that he wears - it’s actually a garment called a suikan. (Which is kind of like an old-timey Japanese sportcoat? The link there goes to our article on his costume design if you’d like more information, including our source for that)
@coquinespike is absolutely correct that you can refer to the white undershirt he wears as a hadagi, though! That is one very appropriate word for it. It’s sometimes also called a hadajuban. For the record, “kosode”, IS a real word for a Japanese clothing piece; however, it is an outer garment, a common form of kimono with shorter sleeves (hence “ko” for “small” in front of “sode” which means “sleeve”) compared to what say, the furisode (which is named after its “swinging” sleeves), has. Sango sometimes wears a type of kosode, for reference, as does Rin...and many other random commoners in the series, actually, since a kosode’s shorter sleeves are far more practical compared to furisode for people doing say, farm work.
/Japanese clothing tangent. Also while I headcanon the pants are made of the same material, I can’t stop snickering over the fact that this makes for a great opportunity to make a “pants on fire” joke...
mswhy92 replied to your post “What We Know about the Inu no Taishō”
Did you not see the third Inuyasha movie OP? His human form is there
You bring up a good point in that their father did appear (for a few minutes) in a humanoid form in that particular movie, looking (if anybody is wondering) like this:
(Pictured above: the design they used for the Inu no Taishou in movie three. Handsome! Nailed it, IMO, I can totally believe he charmed two different women looking like this) ...but - and this is key - this was not used in the original manga by Rumiko Takahashi, which is our primary source for these kinds of articles. The reason being, the adaptations of her story have a history of making pretty big changes and even inserting entirely new material - precisely what happened here! this is actually a great example of it! - and so they’re not interchangeable with the original or even each other a lot of the time.
For this reason, when we’re asking “what does canon say on this?”, we prefer to stick with The Original Work By The Original Author, which...means we turn exclusively to the manga unless it’s about something adaptation-specific. We enjoy the anime adaptations too! But they are a separate canon.
Interestingly, the Inu no Taishou was also not shown that way in the anime TV series either, nor in any of the other theatrical films, making Swords of An Honorable Ruler an outlier across pretty much all canons.
At least it’s a pretty outlier :P
Holy crap, I just learned that there are ways to filter fics on AO3 down to those that have only *one* pairing and those that have *no* pairings. (Give or take a few non-canonical tags that AO3 doesn’t yet recognize as ships.)
Searching for rarepairs and genfic is suddenly no longer practically impossible!
Before: 1 - 20 of 51715 Works in Loki
After: 1 - 20 of 7081 Works found in Loki
Before: 1 - 20 of 8852 Works in Mycroft Holmes/Greg Lestrade
After: 1 - 20 of 3980 Works found in Mycroft Holmes/Greg Lestrade
(Also really good for finding friendship fics that aren’t also tagged as relationships.)
Other fun search operators, for those interested: Here
Handy!
“I adore the way fan fiction writers engage with and critique source texts, by manipulating them and breaking their rules. Some of it is straight-up homage, but a lot of [fan fiction] is really aggressive towards the source text. One tends to think of it as written by total fanboys and fangirls as a kind of worshipful act, but a lot of times you’ll read these stories and it’ll be like ‘What if Star Trek had an openly gay character on the bridge?’ And of course the point is that they don’t, and they wouldn’t, because they don’t have the balls, or they are beholden to their advertisers, or whatever. There’s a powerful critique, almost punk-like anger, being expressed there—which I find fascinating and interesting and cool.”
—
Lev Grossman (via theadventuresofcargline)
This is very true - I’ve seen innumerable fanfics of people saying, “I could do this better than they did.”
And quite frequently, they do.
(via lil-miss-choc)
Dangerous question, but what hair colour do all our lovely Inu-yōkai have? for Inuyasha: I remember early in the anime Yura (episode 4, corresponding manga chapters 8-11) stated that Inuyasha had beautiful silver (gin) hair. but there is alot of fanart that states/draws it as white. I am curious about what Rumiko actually viewed his hair colour as? Tōga's hair looked silver (but perhaps that was due to night/moonlight). Sesshōmaru, I have no idea. but his mothers hair looked more pure white.
Whatever white-approximate adjective any particular writer decides to use. Takahashi is notoriously blase and inconsistent about specific details like this, and it generally amounts to “whatever tone of paint I had on hand that day that was close enough”. White, silver, alabaster, snowy, ivory, eggshell… there’s no specific paint swatch value given for his hair so there’s really no constraint other than “white-ish”.
Not even disputing anything here from anybody but I mean, in fairness...if you look at even human hairs that have lost ALL their pigment, such that they look “white” from even a distance (e.g. on many of the elderly), up close you can usually see they’re actually a bit silvery, too? If it’s a clean, glossy, pigmentless hair it’s going to look whiteish or some degree of greyish from a distance and more silvery up close, in my experience.
Which is probably why a lot of Senior-related things use “Silver” in their name (e.g. I’ve seen “Silver Sneakers” for a Seniors-aimed exercise program before and I think the equivalent of an AMBER Alert in the USA but for Seniors, is “Silver Alert” or something like that?), despite people talking about their hair going “grey” or “white”. So my argument is it’s totally possible that just like some people’s hair looks brown or even bluish under some light sources, and black under others, that Inuyasha’s or Sesshomaru’s hair looks snowy white from a distance but has a shine or sheen to it that lets it look silvery up close, and that would still make total sense.
if it way Kikyo who was the normal girl(15) while Kagome was the guardian of the sacred jewel what would their personalities be like? Would they still be the same but a little different?
I can’t believe I got this in like February and totally forgot about it, OOPS. Now, one thing to keep in mind is that according to canon, Kagome doesn’t seem to be “just” the reincarnation of Kikyo; rather, Kikyo’s soul was a PART of her, but clearly not the only part because she was able to survive and even have a lot of her spiritual powers when the “Kikyo” part was removed.So, it’s not the case that their souls are identical; there are elements to Kagome’s soul that are not in Kikyo’s, and it’s possible (not definite, but possible) that the reverse is true as well. So at that point, I think you have to examine what they behaved like in canon and take that into account alongside the different upbringings and lives.I think one VERY important question is: what time period are they in? Is this something where it’s a total switch and Kikyo is the girl in modern times? Is this “the Jewel didn’t get passed to Kikyo back then, but wound up at the Higurashi Shrine centuries later” AU? Or are they both in modern or both in feudal times?I feel like Kikyo would be a still fairly reserved but not as uptight, personally, especially if raised in the modern world (though I bet she gets good grades lol), while Kagome...hm. I think the duties would give her a bit of anxiety, to be honest! It’s a lot of pressure! And if she were in the feudal era like canon!Kikyo was...that version of Japan was RIDDLED with youkai and mononoke compared to the series’ version of modern Japan (as evidenced by Kagome being REALLY shocked when supernatural things turn out to be real!), which means a lot less surprise when it happens and perhaps a lot more wariness.I do think we’d get a more “serious” version of Kagome (especially if she grew up in the feudal era) and a slightly less high-strung version of Kikyo (especially if she grew up in the modern era), regardless, though, simply because while the souls in balance have differences, the influences on them would be similar:- Jewel guardian has a lot of pressure to worry about in terms of keeping the Jewel purified and trying to destroy it while guarding against youkai and performing all those other miko duties. Kikyo kept a lot of things close to her chest for this reason, that’s part of why she seems so Serious.- normal girls don’t have to worry about nearly as much of that, which is ONE contributing reason why Kagome was...okay, a little thrown for a loop by having to deal with monsters and magical jewels, but she’s also a lot more chipper and basically had a more emotionally balanced, peaceful childhood- modern world is safer compared to feudal era; this means a Kagome raised in that era would at least learn to be a little more wary, while a Kikyo raised in the modern era MIGHT not be as much so compared to her canon version (or else would be wary in different ways - such as being extremely polite, or being Very Prepared for normal modern worries like exams or lost socks lol)But hmm. There’s a lot of factors to this. It makes for an interesting prompt!I don’t know if I will do anything with it, but I do consider it intriguing enough to post! :)
I hope this isn't an inconvenience, but I'm looking for a fic. I think it was called "Full Circle." Kagome dies in the final battle against Naraku and is reborn in her own time without any memories of InuYasha. Meanwhile, Rin grows up in Sesshomaru's care. When she's grown, she and Sesshomaru sleep together and she runs away, but later gives birth to twins. Does this ring any bells? If it's no longer online, has anyone saved a copy to share? The pairings are InuKag and SessRin. Thank you!
Huh! Yeah I don’t know, it doesn’t sound familiar to me, but I’m nowhere near as widely read as many other fans and that doesn’t mean nobody else has seen it before.Tossing this to our followers! Can someone help us #Find That Fic?
I posted meta to AO3 today and got a beautiful, insightful essay expanding on the topic I addressed.
I posted the same meta to tumblr and I got people calling me satan.
Now don’t get me wrong, I LOVE being called satan for a meta post. Pissing people off because I slapped them in the face with EMOTIONS is deeply satisfying.
But I still very much miss having deep extended meta conversations with fans who really care about spending extended amounts of time questioning character’s motivations.
And I finally got to have that kind of in-depth interaction today on AO3 for the first time in a very long time.
And I can’t WAIT to post more meta on AO3 so I can have EVEN MORE interactions of that nature.
And now I’m angry all over again that people tried to drive my meta post off AO3.
How dare anyone tell me that AO3 is not a place for meta when clearly there are people on AO3 – a community on AO3 – who like me are fed up with corporate, fan-hostile sites like tumblr and twitter, unable to find an audience on dreamwidth, and relieved to find a haven for their ideas on AO3.
At its heart, that is what AO3 was designed to be – a haven for fannish interpretations of media (wherein the word interpretation is meant to be used as broadly and inclusively as possible).
What really infuriates me is that this person had the gall to tell me “I’d love to read your post if you put it on tumblr, where it’s appropriate”
First off I DID post my meta to tumblr, but nobody in the fandom was able to see it because tumblr’s broken censorship algorithm fucking banned my blog from search engine results. Tumblr isn’t the “appropriate” platform for anything. Tumblr is a cesspool. Tumblr is the last resort platform you use because you lack better options, and it’s BARELY useable as it is, and becoming less useable by the day.
I’m un-banned for now, but I don’t expect to stay that way, and I don’t expect this site to even still exist in 2 years given what happened to every other formerly fandom occupied platform that failed to turn a profit for its corporate owners.
Secondly, and more importantly, how dare this stranger ask that I tailor my fanworks to their preferences like some kind of entitled shopper yelling at a checkout clerk in Target, demanding a refund on a product they bought from Walmart.
How dare this person, who has offered nothing meaningful or interesting or worthwhile to add to my meta posts, presume to tell me how I should be allowed to present my works, to best suit THEIR consumption. As if I would even want to waste my ideas on such a person.
I find that some of my meta does reach an audience on Dreamwidth even now, but Dreamwidth is a blogging platform–albeit a more consistent one than Tumblr. Old posts are more findable on DW than Tumblr, but it’s still not intended as an archive where standalone works are accessible years later. Because it’s stable and paginated, one often can find the really old stuff, but that’s not really what it’s for. It’s also primarily divided by personal account, while AO3 is primarily divided by fandom.
Single-fandom meta plays especially well with AO3′s native search functions because you have something specific and valid to put in the ‘fandom’ field. (As opposed to certain kinds of multi- or pan-fandom meta, which are allowed, but which don’t fit as cleanly into a fanfic-oriented metadata structure.) I think AO3 is not only an acceptable place to post single-fandom meta but an ideal place.
It’s right in the Terms of Service FAQ - fannish nonfiction is allowed as long as it’s non-ephemeral and doesn’t otherwise violate the terms of service (such as by containing harassment for instance). It’s 100% fine, and nobody should get upset at AO3 hosting the exact kind of material it was designed to preserve.
We even have a fandom tag for general cross-fandom meta - “Fandom - Fandom” (sorry, we made it a long time ago and nobody can really think of anything better). The freeform tag is “Meta Essay”. Fannish meta is welcome on AO3!
Reminder that AO3 is a GREAT place for meta and that we have a guide on how to figure out what’s appropriate for AO3 and how to tag it here: http://inu-fiction.tumblr.com/post/180707900571/psa-stuff-you-maybe-didnt-realize-you-can-back A particular thing I’d like to note here though, is something I discovered while writing that article: another useful tag widely used for much of what can be labeled “meta” on AO3, which is “Fanwork Research & Reference Guides”! tldr: "Fanwork Research & Reference Guides” applies to nonfiction works on AO3 that, for example, go into anything “research” or “reference” related to either a given canon or a specific fic e.g. our pieces discussing the traditional Japanese clothing seen in the Inuyasha series, or on how real-world biology knowledge could be applied to that particular fantasy setting, would apply there (as they provide a reference to fellow fans for details in an existing canon) as would, say, an AU fanfic’s extraneous worldbuilding notes (what do I mean by that? two words: Tolkien’s. Appendices. That’s like, the ur-example of Extra Worldbuilding Material You Couldn’t Fit In The Actual Story, it’s EXACTLY the kind of thing that would be perfectly fine as a separate “work” on AO3, and the use of the “Series” feature even makes it relatively easy to do).
Hey guess what there’s also now a 100 paragraph text limit ᕕ(ᐛ)ᕗ
Of course! Because, y’know, what really takes up space on a website is text.
hey casual reminder that t*mblr has also been falsely flagging non-photographic illustrations/photos of sculpture (whether they included any skin or other sawsy anatomy or not), non-adult photos of puppies, bread recipes, and text ranging from non work safe fiction that SUPPOSEDLY isn’t banned under their own TOS, to utterly work-safe stories about people’s gay uncles and just LGBT+ content in general, while mostly managing to ignore white supremacist and nazi glorification blogs despite those being against their official TOS and mostly failing to prevent bots from joining up, following, or spamming people despite THAT also nominally being against their TOS also, casual reminder that while all that could SOUND like mere incompetence, they also have DELETED and in some cases vacated a number of different tags associated with criticism of either their actions or their algorithms’ crappy functions in what can only be acts of mass attempted gaslighting to try and erase negative PR about t*mblr AS WELL AS now making it impossible to tag for any number of things ranging from various LGBT+ topics to tags that happen to include a ~curse word~ (no more f bombs in the tags 4u!!)
another casual reminder that some large businesses, ESPECIALLY in tech, ESPECIALLY ones owned by ya*hoo or v*rizon, seem to actively “sabotage” themselves possibly deliberately when they don’t make enough money for the CEOs’ or shareholders’ tastes, and that as we see from even brick and mortar stores like B*rnes & N*ble and T*ys R U*s, sometimes the head honchos will pretty clearly and blatantly do stupid crap that nobody “in their right mind” would seemingly do when running such a business, to deliberately drive a bus*ness into the ground so they can use loopholes to make out like bandits and that I think we pretty much all know that’s what’s going on here by now? AND SUPER CASUAL JUST SAYING REMINDER THAT
AO3 doesn’t have ridiculous limits like that and doesn’t censor your tags or criticism of them and they literally allow for meta essays and canon guides and such so long as they’re “fannish” in nature and effort is made to correctly categorize and tag it, they allow for image embedding (though the images need to be hosted elsewhere, please keep that in mind), and both internal and external links too, that you can literally copy paste text/images from tumblr into the Rich Text Editor on AO3 IIRC and it works, or even directly edit it in HTML view, and they have a robust user-generated tag system and ZERO bans on “adult content” or mention of female-presenting anything so long as it’s content that is ~legal to post in the United States~ and on that front too the Organization for Transformative Works literally has volunteer lawyers on staff to help make sure fans are protected from governmental overreach at least in the USA just, you know
saying HAHA ON AN UTTERLY, YOU KNOW, UNRELATED NOTE I still have like, eight extra Invites for AO3 if people need them as do other longish-term AO3 users maybe still since that was a thing they did to celebrate Hannukah a few weeks back, so pls reblog so I and others who have invites can see the requests if you need an invite to snag yourself an account
you know just in case you ~happen~ to feel you’d like one very soon
SO. MANY. IMAGE. DESCRIPTIONS. AJSDHFDJSHSJDH. (You bet I teased Tekka about this. We had a good laugh about how......THOROUGH...she was, lol) But it’s up!!! Image descriptions and all!! Huzzah!! :D For those confused: This is not an entirely new work. It is an updated/copiously annotated archival copy of a previous meta article by TekkaWekka, discussing the (scant, but key - and often overlooked!) canonical details that we know about Inuyasha and Sesshōmaru’s father, according to the original manga. The archiving and annotating work, including swapping the URLs of images to more stable sources, image description work, etc, was done by me ( @vorpalgirl ), as were the new footnotes (which include some new cultural and translation notes regarding terminology and dialects!), but the original, 9-points-and-20-frickin-images long article was composed by @tekka-wekka who, I think we can all see, put a TON of effort into this thing, so let’s hear it for her dedication, hard work, and apparently massive collection of Inuyasha manga images! :D Speaking of which - one request, ya’ll: if anybody can positively and 100% identify the translation sources for some of these images (which seem to MOSTLY be fanslations but may include some official translations??), please let me know so I can update the captions with proper credits! In particular, tagging @fast-moon because I’m pretty sure at least one of those pages’ translations was done by them, but I didn’t want to say for sure until I had actually checked with them and heard back on it. >_>
For those of you going through this for the first time: everything will be okay. Fandom always survives stuff like this. We’re good at it.
I know there’s lots of advice posts out there. This isn’t an advice post. I’m just going to tell you why it’ll be okay.
So far, on every commercial platform fandom has called home, there has come a tipping point when we leave. There have been a few scares on Tumblr before, but I didn’t think that we’d reached the tipping point back then. I do think so now. Given the way I’ve seen fandom leave platforms before, yes, this is the real thing. It won’t happen all at once, but in waves. You can afford to wait, but start thinking about it so you’re not taken by surprise when you reach your limit.
Take note of those advice posts that are going around, and especially of the things the BNFs in your fandom are planning – people will tend to follow them in clusters, so that’s a good place to start. But even if you leave it all to the last minute in the hope it won’t happen, and then realise you need to leave after all, it will still be okay.
We are fans, and the internet has always been our playpen. We all have multiple social media accounts, many with the same handle. We can find each other again. It won’t be the same. Of course it won’t. Tumblr fandom is different from Livejournal, is different from GeoCities. But it will still be fandom, it will still be good, and you will still find people you like, including some of those currently in your fannish circle.
We have the advantage of the OTW now too – this kind of thing is exactly why we built it. It’s our safe harbour, no matter what, because we own it.
Once you decide to leave Tumblr, it won’t be as scary as you think. You’ll recognise people’s handles. You’ve probably already done this without realising it – remember the people you used to share a fandom with, but no longer do? Their handles are still seared into your brain, and you’ll always feel that pang of nostalgia when you see them again.
It’s just the same when fandom migrates.
Some people will disappear, and you never will find them again. But mostly, you will still see the same handles, having the same conversations, sharing love for the same favourites, just in new places. You will find them on Dreamwidth, Pillowfort, Instagram, Twitter, Google docs, discord, fanfic.net, Wattpad, Deviant Art, YouTube, Vimeo, and so on. Most importantly, you’ll find them on Fanlore and AO3, because they are run by the OTW and we own it.
Fans and fandom will still be here long after Tumblr is full of rolling tumblrweeds.
We’re good at this. No matter where we end up, you will find your people again. Fandom will go on. It will be okay.
This is who we are.
Out of all the posts I have seen about Tumblr reaching peak idiocy, this is the one I like the most. This has happened before. We’ll be okay. See you wherever our next home will be. 💛
The important thing I got from this, apart from the wonderful sage advice, is to keep same handle everywhere! Good to know. And AO3 is wonderful. We can put in our AO3 profiles wherever we eventually migrate to, though for now, we all seem to be staying here.
A lovely post <3 Also Mod Vorpalgirl would like to add: - she is “vorpalgirl” or “VorpalGirl” on all her current platforms (which include AO3, Pillowfort.io, and Dreamwidth.org so far in addition to tumblr) - as far as this blog goes, you will find some of Inu-Fiction’s existing AND FUTURE content on AO3 in a special Collection of our archived and drafted meta and fiction from tumblr (it’s slow going converting it, but it’s happening!), as well as a brand new Inu-Fiction Community over on Dreamwidth (and possibly Pillowfort too!), where similar meta will be cross-posted. :)
العربية • Bahasa Indonesia • català • Čeština • dansk • Deutsch • Ελληνικά • English • español • français • italiano • magyar • Nederlands • norsk • polski • português brasileiro • português europeu • Română • Русский • svenska • Wikang Filipino • 中文
AO3 has reached 25,000 fandoms! To celebrate, we’ve put together info about fandom tags and how all tags work: https://goo.gl/W4wPxH
Hey folks who use AO3 - please read and reblog widely. In addition to the celebration of our 25,000th canonical fandom, this post contains some great tips for making our tagging system work for you.
As a Support Staffer and Tag Wrangler for AO3, I beg you:
Among the tips:
Separate your / and & ships / is for romantic and/or sexual relationships. & is for platonic relationships only – ones that are neither sexual nor romantic. (Pre- and Post-Relationship are still /.) & was created for those Gen fans who don’t want anything non-platonic in the ships they’re searching for. You can help both Gen fans and shippers by carefully choosing the tag that matches your work!
Look, I know you’re writing a slow burn where the friendship aspect of the relationship is important. I applaud that; I love it in my romantic pairings. But it’s a /, not a &. Please save & for those of us who want to find the three truly and purely gen fics for a popular romantic ship.
Folks, I LOVE AO3, please read and share!
As someone relatively new to using AO3, I did not really realise this. *goes back to check tags* THANK YOU FOR SHARING THIS.
TAG WRANGLING: For Pairings
/ is for romantic or sexual relationships
& is for platonic, non-romantic, non-sexual relationships
So FIRST OFF I’m delighted to announce that I seem have a work around for getting MORE STABLE links for the embedded images we’ve been using in our articles that I’m cross-posting to AO3. HUZZAH! Namely, by LITERALLY archiving our articles on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine...that archives copies of the images, too! So then replacing the URLs of the images that originated on tumblr with the ARCHIVED images’ URLs from the Internet Archive, in place of the tumblr versions, in the HTML view, means I can get a slightly more trustworthy, yet still 100% free, hopefully more-stable, external link for my images that are otherwise not hostable on AO3, huzzah! (Of course, this doesn’t work for images you didn’t already have externally hosted elsewhere, such as in an embedded publically-viewable tumblr post, but hey, it’s still a great work around for those of us preserving image-heavy meta from tumblr!) If that sounds confusing, don’t worry, I’ll probably post later about how to do it. :P I have screencaps of me fiddling with it! In the meantime though, I’ve been archiving our articles on the Wayback Machine and in the process archived some wonderful connected discussions: the above link is an example of one of the most notable early discussions involving this blog, which included lots of speculative biology and also some very amused comments from @richardiancox . Worth checking out if you have copious amounts of time to kill! :)
Okay... How did Inuyasha actually survive for 50 years pinned to that damn tree?
He was under the spell from Kikyo’s arrow that technically made him in a sleep state.
(Wow this has been in our drafts since forever...Oops? Ahem. Anyway.) IIRC it was specifically a “sealing” arrow, wasn’t it? Fired by a very powerful priestess (Kikyo), who was known to have great spiritual abilities. But ALSO....the tree. The tree may actually have played a part, IMO. You know, the one she pinned him to with the arrow? I headcanon at least that it does. And I mean, there’s at least a suggestion it’s no ordinary tree as it’s called the Goshinboku, spelled ご神木, and like...okay that first character there is only a hiragana phonetic for “go” and the last one (which is the ”boku”) just means tree but I looked it up and that middle kanji is pretty significant. When I searched Jisho.org for “ご神” I got three separate terms as matches and couldn’t help but notice the following: - All of them were spelled with kanji at the front and not a hiragana “go”, but they all three began with the same kanji as each other and all three pronounced it “go”, just like in “goshinboku” - All of them referred to SOMETHING “sacred” or “deified” -The 神 portion, which was also consistent on all three, and is the kanji smack in the middle of of the term “goshinboku” from the Inuyasha canon, literally is a kanji referring to “gods, mind, soul”...in fact, I discovered that “shin” is just its on-yomi (Chinese-based) reading; one of its kun-yomi (native Japanese-based readings) is literally “kami”...i.e. the word that includes, conceptually, all deities, as well as many other of what we might considered “powerful supernatural spirits”, up to and including being THE translation for the English/Spanish/Portuguese Christians’ big-G “God/Dios/Deus” concept. Meaning, it is used in several words that refer to deities and the sacred.
- In particular, what stood out to me was the first result the site suggested, “ 御神体 “, (which indeed carries an alternate spelling where the first kanji is replaced by the simple phonetic “go” I should add), the pronunciation of which according Jisho, is “ ごしんたい “ or “Goshintai”. This is the definition given for the term: “Noun 1. shintai; object of worship believed to contain the spirit of a deity, typically housed in a shrine. Shinto term, Honorific or respectful (sonkeigo), See also 神体 “ (bolding mine) - It’s really REALLY worth noting here that the kanji at the end of that, “ 体 “, is the part pronounced as “ たい “ (”tai”), and that part is used for “ body, substance, object, reality, counter for images “. The kanji at the front, which is frequently replaced with the phonetic spelling and can in some cases be dropped to form the word “shintai”? That just means “ honorable, manipulate, govern“. - So basically a “shintai” is an object believed to contain great spiritual power from a deity or deity-like being aka a Sacred Object which connects very directly to/contains a divine source of power; thus “goshintai” (if I had to guess) is just a very Respectful way to refer to one and/or refers to a particularly important/powerful one, and the “tai” part just means “object/thing”. Literally, it goes “Goshin” = something to do with great spiritual/deity power, and “tai” = “object [that houses it]”.
Soooo basically if you replace the “tai” part of this compound word with the “boku” (”tree”) kanji you have the “Goshinboku” term that canonical sources use to refer to that tree that Inuyasha was pinned to. I assume then that when people refer to it in translation as a “sacred tree” or even “God-Tree” they are in fact translating it about as directly as they can. That is no ordinary tree, is what I am saying. Again, I don’t believe the arrow was normal either, and priestesses of great power, like Kikyo, who practice the (often used in sacred practices) Japanese longbow like she does, could definitely (according to native Shinto belief/Japanese folklore) have the power to use an arrow/bow “seal” things or curse/bless them in ways we in the West might consider borderline “magic”/”spells”. So that was a large part of it, I’ve no doubt. But the fact you can literally translate “goshinboku” as more or less “god-tree”, tells me that it’s not impossible that the seal was partly due to, or at least strengthened by, the particular tree she “happened” to pin him to. I say “happened” in quotes because...this was a tree within walking distance of the village/shrine she worked as a priestess in. I am not sure if it was referred to as a “goshinboku” BEFORE he was pinned to it, but I would not be surprised if that was not only the case, but the entire reason she chose to pin him to that specific tree.
I don’t recall if this is ever directly addressed in canon, but that is at minimum my headcanon :)
