✨💎To the tenebrous prince Andhera, Scion of the Unseelie court 💎✨

 I’m very sad this season is over but I had to draw my favourite character! 

I love Omar for creating this awkward apple juice drinking ace legend I can relate so much to 💜

hi pack of pixies!!! ✨ 

sorry having insane gerard thoughts. im obsessed with this guy. gerard who died doing the first brave thing in his life. gerard whos wife doesnt love him anymore so hes turning back into a frog. gerard who only cares about becoming human again but thats not quite true because he cares about red and pinnochio. he cares about the kids. he questions the two of them going into the fight he puts himself in danger after seeing pinnochio go down he risks his life after watching red fall. and he regrets his choice. hes a coward who for once in his life decided to be brave and he paid with his life for it and he regrets it and im insaaaaane

Maybe they just go to brunch, Brennan.

“A bunch of cowards and the bravest little girl in the world.” - Neverafter, Ep. 3, about Ylfa Snorgelsson

“The world should have protected you, but you have been asked to protect it. What an honor. What an injustice." - NADDPOD, Ep, 97, about Beverley Toegold V

Bibbidi bobbidi boo

a TPK for youuuu

not to beat a dead horse or anything but it's a time loop. it's a time loop.

drosselmeyer is not a clockmaker in the nutcracker. he is a toymaker and he makes automatons that dance beautifully. that's his whole thing.

drosselmeyer being a clockmaker is a choice. also one of his clocks was just literally pibs clock. he would not be a time wizard for no reason.

it's a time loop.

Is this a problem?

So I was talking with a friend about the issue discussed in this ask I got months ago. They mentioned how a mutual friend who is in a server neither of us are in DMed them to say that the people in that server were all raving about an image my friend posted to Tumblr. None of this feedback would have made it to my friend without the second friend letting them know. I've had the same thing happen numerous times and when my friend told me this, I replied:

Which then, of course, got me riled up about people sharing uncredited work, not linking to the original work, etc. But it also made me wonder if the sharp decline in interaction/reblogs that most creators have seen over the past few years on Tumblr has to do with this kind of thing happening so much on discord.

Obviously, the biggest part of the issue is so many people refusing to give even the most minimal feedback to fandom creators by reblogging or commenting on things. But with how much chatter goes on in discord servers, I'm beginning to think that might also be a huge factor.

And yes, I make art and fic for myself, as do many people, but is it such a horrible thing to want some feedback or nice comments on something you've spent hours and hours on? The desire to share your work with others and get excited about it together is a pretty normal and healthy human thing, so acting like fan creators are whiny or entitled for wanting even the smallest scraps of interaction is honestly just idiotic.

What's entitled is enjoying all this free art and fic and never lifting a finger to thank the people who make and share it.

P.S. I had this sitting in my drafts for a few days and then a different friend told me about yet more people sharing my art in servers without saying a peep to me about it, which was the impetus for posting this today.

TL;DR if you like something, tell the person who made it.

I've been thinking about this, too, lately.

I did pull all my works from AO3 and FFN. Everything since 2012. My accounts are empty now. While guilt was my primary motivator (I had a lot of wips and very few complete works outside of oneshots), I've been reflecting on how lack of community contributed. Not to say that I dipped out because of a lack of kudos or comments-- honestly, I probably got more than what was warranted-- but when I finally found a small circle of friends who would actively talk with me? Get as deep into the story as I was? Enable my unhinged narratives? Share songs or art that reminded them of the stories or characters? It was a whole new world.

The day I pulled everything, it was such a small, harmless comment that set it off. "Loved it! When's the next update?" The reader's first comment, 30k into the fic. It was almost out-of-body. What's the point? Why am I doing this? Why do I come into this space when I have friends somewhere else that actually talk to me? I get more out of reading bits of my fic out loud during Story Time on Discord with three others in chat than I do from any amount of three-word comments.

It ain't the numbers. I could have the fic with most views/kudos/comments ever and I'd still feel this way. It's interaction I want, and most existing fandom spaces really aren't designed for it. Views and kudos aren't interactions, but for some reason those are some of the most visible metrics. You interact with a specific fic, not the author. You reblog a piece of art and hope the artist doesn't read the tags too closely. Because many fandom spaces are oriented to the product, they're not oriented to the process or the people behind it.

Discord's not like that. Discord is oriented to the people in a given server, a vehicle for communication, not a destination in itself. Discord destroys the division between creator and audience because you are both and everyone else is both, even if the only thing anyone is creating is conversation. Discord's biggest limiting factor is fragmentation. Servers are generally purpose-specific, which inherently limits who you can talk with, but when given the choice of a large silent audience and a small interpersonal one, I think more people are choosing the second.

And it makes sense that people gravitate towards it, because AO3 and even tumblr don't really let the audience gush together about something they love. It's not common to see readers talking to each other in a comment section (I think I saw it maybe three times? in ten years?) and tumblr doesn't lend itself well to conversations (it happens but the interface is awkward af compared to just... live chatting in discord).

I agree with everything you say, 100%. It's lonely to be a creator. But it's lonely to be the audience, too. The best AO3 and Tumblr can offer right now is one-on-one interactions (which can be intimidating for both parties, let's be real), but once you do that... what's next? Is there a secret corner of tumblr I don't know about where people are having full-on conversations about fic or art? (completely plausible, I'm still fairly new to tumblr)

I don't have any solutions. I've found what works for me, for the most part. I'm working to be better about reblogs and comments, though I'm still kinda ass at both. I'm still getting coached on how to properly use tumblr (shout out to @bluedaddysgirl for having the patience to explain with small words). Like you say, we create for ourselves but we post for others. When others don't say anything, well... maybe someday I'll post on AO3 again. For now, I'm happy to share the gDoc links with those who ask.

As someone whose formative fandom experiences were on LJ groups, forums, and geocities fan sites, the movement from public spaces to private discords makes me sad.

I don't doubt that it's a wonderful setting for that immediate sharing of enthusiasm and community, especially in smaller servers where everyone knows everyone else. But it's hard to know those communities exist if you're not already in them, and I don't know that it's possible to archive them.

The Matrix messageboard I was on in the early 2000s still has pages on the internet archive. Most of the fics are there, and at least a few pages of discussion. The LJ groups are still there, even if individual blogs have been abandoned. When M4 was released a few months I found my way into a discord server mostly full of new fans who wondered aloud about what early fandom was like - and that record is still there for them to find.

What will the fandom revivals of the future have left to find? AO3 is an archive of fan works, yes, but as noted above it's not as good at (or built for) community engagement.

I dunno, I suppose I feel like discord is as ephemeral as the living rooms of those early Star Trek fans. There are hard copies of their fic and zines that have survived, but the conversations are only memory. And that's closed to anyone who wasn't there.

Last year for Yuletide I wrote a Murderbot fic.

I am on a very active Murderbot server. During the anon period, someone posted a link to that fic in the server and created a discussion thread for it.

Because I am a member of that server, I saw that thread and the lovely comments people were making about that fic.

But those people who were squeeing about my fic on that Discord server were not commenting on the fic itself. Some of them did! but not all. And, crucially, even the ones who commented on the fic commented more in the thread than they did on the fic itself. It wasn’t a problem, because I was a member of that Discord board and could see it.

But they didn’t know that. This was during the anon period. If I hadn’t happened to already be a member of that discord, I would never have known how much they liked my fic.

I made a comment about this, and how discouraging that was to me. How I enjoyed reading the thread, but also would be so happy if they could just copy and paste what they said in that thread into comments on the fic itself. That would mean that long after the thread is archived, when I need a bit of comfort on a sad day, I could go to the fic and see the lovely comments. I mentioned it was only luck that I got to see their squee about my fic, and how there are a lot of Murderbot writers who aren’t on that Discord, and can’t see when such threads are made about their work. How much it would mean to those fic writers if people would just copy and paste their comments from threads like that into a comment box on AO3. It would be very easy, they already have it written! Just copy and paste it!

Oh, no, I was being quite unreasonable. Commenting on AO3 was far too formal and intimidating, they couldn’t possibly be expected to share their joy over the fic with the author. Some of them would try to be better about commenting on AO3, but there was so much pushback.

It really made me sad.

You love a fic, and you’re happy to share your joy about it with other people in your private community ... but if the author of the fic doesn’t happen to be a member of that community, they don’t get to know you like their fic. The person who created it doesn’t get to share the joy.

microdosing on catharsis by watching a fictional character or persona i relate to have an emotional breakdown until my chest starts to ache from the amount i've repressed

ASDFGHJKL

Twitter Support has removed that tweet.

Fanfiction Authors: HEADS UP

(Non-authors, please RB to signal boost to your author friends!)

An astute reader informed me this morning that one of my fics (Children of the Future Age) had been pirated and was being sold as a novel on Amazon:

(And they weren't even creative with their cover design. If you're going to pirate something that I spent a full year of my life writing, at least give me a pretty screenshot to brag about later. Seriously.)

I promptly filed a DMCA complaint to have it removed, but I checked out the company that put it up -- Plush Books -- and it looks like A LOT of their books are pirated fic. They are by no means the only ones doing this, either -- the fact that """publishers""" can download stories from AO3 in ebook format and then reupload them to Amazon in just a few clicks makes fic piracy a common problem. There are a whole host of reasons why letting this continue is bad -- including actual legal risk to fanfiction archives -- but basically:

IF YOU ARE A FANFIC AUTHOR WITH LONG AND/OR POPULAR WORKS, PLEASE CHECK AMAZON TO SEE IF YOUR STORIES HAVE BEEN PIRATED.

You can search for your fics by title, or by text from the description (which is often just copied wholesale from AO3 as well). If you find that someone has stolen your work and is selling it as their own, you can lodge a DMCA complaint (Amazon.com/USA site; other countries have different systems). If you haven't done this before, it's easy! Here's a tutorial:

HOW TO FILE A COPYRIGHT COMPLAINT FOR STOLEN WORK ON AMAZON.COM:

First, go to this form. You'll need to be signed into your Amazon account.

Please share this information with your writer friends, keep an eye out for/report pirated works, and help us keep fanfiction free and legally protected!

NOTE: All of the above also applies to Amazon products featuring stolen artwork, etc., so fan artists should check too!

lou becoming a “where is your dice god now, you only need one set” truther makes sense when he had to sit through a tpk across from one of the most dice superstitious people in the ttrpg space

"If I was so dead, where was my funeral?! Where’s my headstone?"

I'm haunted by both these quotes and the idea of what would have happened had Timothy Goose found Ylfa after she'd well ...

Quote is by Kristin Chang