A little Marinette for the anon that said they were fond of how I drew her <3

Super adorable Marinette!

Here is a commissioned piece from @sweetmeatdale. Thanks for the opportunity to work with you!

This was originally animated but I posted both formats, depending on your preference. This was my first time making an animation and I have learnt so much. Here is the finished product;

This is peak Tumblr isn’t it - Neil Banging Out the tunes + Booping?

So cute! The Mousinettes are adorable!

Another AO3 thing I’m curious about, how do yall decide if something is good enough to read? Usually I follow a rule of 1 kudos for every 10 hits. One because it’s easy math and two it’s yet to fail me. Thoughts? Do you just go for it and pray it’s good?

folks, don't do this one. do not look at kudos count. do not look at comment count. do not look at hits. you read the summary and see if it sounds like your cuppa. multi-chapter fics in particular suffer a lot from inflated hit counts because loyal fans will show up for every chapter, but only get one kudos apiece. literally just read the write-up and if it's bad, you'll know within a minute of clicking on it. give new works and chaptered works a shot

Here's how I choose what to read.

I don't care if a story has views, kudos, or comments. I've been a new writer with no reputation, no followers, and no automatic interest in my work. There are lots of amazing writers on AO3. I also don't care if a story is finished. It used to bother me when works remained unfinished, because I was approaching fanfic as a consumer, the way you would buy books or check them out of the library. Fanfic is just as much about community as it is about the story.

There is Currently No Ethical Use of Generative AI

Just saw a post arguing that text generative AI is just a tool, the way a paintbrush or a keyboard is a tool, and that writers can and should use it as needed.

I counter with a solid fuck no.

There are a lot of problems with the "it's just a tool" argument. With keyboards and voice recognition, you're still selecting your words, putting them in order, actually writing. If you aren't making your own words and sentences, you aren't writing. You're an editor, and you're claiming someone else's work as your own.

There is no ethical use of generative AI when your AI is trained on stolen content and requires a ridiculous amount of energy and water to run.

Please reblog this if fanfiction has been beneficial to your mental health.

Fanfiction is a critical part of my mental health maintenance.

There’s probably more but these are the ones I can think of at the moment! Please be considerate and don’t play pranks at other people’s expenses!

Have fun everyone!

i would have booped you my brother, my captain, my king

"What type of Nebraska voodoo is this?"

My youngest made this. It was VILE.

Something I think has to be considered here is that "hanging out with your friends" is, like most things kids do, a contingent activity. It requires parents to allow it.

And increasingly parents are absolutely unwilling to let their kids out of their sight. Everything must be managed or supervised.

I'm an older millennial. My niece and nephew are ten and seven respectively. They live in the same housing development my brother and I grew up in. Lots of kids their own age there, and woodland with town-maintained paths to wander in.

When I was seven I thought nothing of telling my mom "Mom, I'm going out" and getting on my bike and going wherever. Maybe my friend Steve was home. Maybe Priscilla was climbing up that one cool half-fallen tree in the forest. Maybe I'd just pile rocks in the creek.

Fast forward three and a half decades. My brother was complaining to me the other day that my niece wants to hang out with one of her friends all the time and he and said friends parents just don't have time to arrange it all. It turns out her friend lives in the same neighborhood, a quarter mile away.

And I'm like "Why are you arranging anything? Why aren't they capable of coming and going as they please? She can get on her bike and ride there."

He looked at me like I'd proposed throwing his precious angel into a shark tank. Let her wander alone? Unsupervised? Just... out there?

It also turns out, by the way, that my niece is a poor cyclist because she isn't allowed out on her bike without my brother or his wife with her.

My brother and his wife are not unique in this. I have never, ever had a conversation with parents in my age cohort who aren't raising their kids far more restrictively than we ourselves were raised. Everything is monitored. You call them out on it and the near-universal response is "It just isn't safe out there."

Now, my niece and nephew are a bit younger than teens... but with teens it gets even worse, because then their parents are still paranoid about what could happen to them, but also suspicious about what their kids will use their new teen bodies and brains to do to THEMSELVES or to others.

I wonder what percentage of the parents in that survey would be willing to, if their kids asked for the car keys to go hang out with their friends, would hand them over without a down-to-the-second itinerary, a precise list of who will be present, and a stern admonishment that they can track the car on GPS so watch out, mister. I wonder that very much.

Teens have limited agency. They have no money and their lives are controlled. You want to know why they're not doing something? Probably because their parents don't want it done.

And all this is without even getting into "maybe they're hanging out online. Why is being on a group video call in Discord talking about nothing in particular for three hours considered more problematic than hanging out at the mall talking about nothing in particular for three hours?"

(Both my local malls ban unescorted teens, by the way.)

I blame Stranger Danger. All of those warnings and PSA's aimed at the parents of 80's and 90's kids didn't land with them... They landed with the kids themselves. Kids raised in the post cold war era were bombarded constantly with the idea that Strangers were out there kidnapping and drug peddling and gang recruiting and whatever else.

https://youtu.be/6hMQjSINja4?si=HRmLq8Ba7JT-2LQ0

We fully planned to have free range kids (like we were growing up). But our friend group didn't have a lot of kids (a few had older kids and some stopped coming to our events when we had kids). Then we found that both the bulk of the families in our neighborhood and our kids' school were of the borderline helicopter and schedule EVERYTHING variety. We couldn't spontaneously have the kids meet up, it needed to be a scheduled play date. We've worked to push our now older teens to be independent in a society that has not wanted to allow this. And there is no where for them to hang out. If they take a walk with their friends, they're seen as wandering riff-raff. The malls have limits on teens under 18 without an adult because the management sees them all as gang members and trouble makers. We've lost the lower cost entertainment options to closure (roller rinks) and price hikes (movies). Our kids have SIGNIFICANTLY less disposable income than the milennials grew up with. Heck, our family is struggling to get by. The only place my kids can hang out with friends with any reliability is online. And it's not the phones' fault.

My Neighbor Batman

The challenge was to draw characters in a different style

I drew these for Guess That Artist event in dpxdc server im in >w< I animated it too! But didn't show the animation in the event because I knew it would rat me out XDDD Actually gives me an idea of like ;w; baby dick and jason being taken in. T o T I also made the cape wrap around Jason protectively. And then that's a moped I hand/digitally painted in the bg.. not a car. its too small XD

OMG SO FREAKING CUTE!

Because I’m curious-

Reblog so this breaks containment and reaches people near the equator

It literally snowed last night.

For the record, I would never knowingly use or share AI generated art in anything I post, so if you ever catch me doing so, it was an accident, and I'd like you to let me know so I can delete it.

Postman goes to wrong house...

Thanks to our Patreons for helping making this video happen! More Tim and Bash 👇 https://linktr.ee/timandbash

Credits: Music: Markus Zierhofer Sound Design: Gabriel Gallardo-Alarcon

È l'anno del Dragooo...

OMG. SO CUTE! And perfect.

FIC: I Guess I Live Here Now (MLB; Lukanette)

Characters/Pairings: Luka Couffaine, Marinette Dupain-Cheng; Luka Couffaine/Marinette Dupain-Cheng

Rating: Teen and Up

Summary: Luka wasn’t sure exactly when he started living with Marinette, but it was definitely some point between her favorite knitting mug showing up in his cabinet and the time he returned from the studio at three AM to find her asleep in his bed.

Author’s Notes/Warnings: Y’all.  This one has been sitting in the Hoard for ages.  It started with the shower tiles (and I’m still not sure where that inspo came from; I would have sworn Quick, but none of us can find it), grew from that, then sat in the Hoard for probably over a year just biding its time.  I opened it up last week to find the first two scenes and notes, and after a really rough couple of weeks the next thing I knew I was just floating in the moat around Fort Fluff with these idiots.

TL;DR: Never give up on your WIPs.  They all get finished.  Eventually.  😂

“I Guess I Live Here Now”

“You don’t have to do this, you know,” Luka chuckled, nudging Marinette’s shoulder with his arm.  She looked up at him with a grin and bumped him back, except she didn’t pull away and ended up leaning into his shoulder.  If his heart picked up a few extra beats at the familiarity of her closeness, they both pretended not to notice.  Her head rested on his shoulder, and she looked up at him with impossibly blue eyes.

“Of course I do,” she said, reaching over to poke at his stomach.  An eyebrow lifted, and her smile grew.  “Juleka and Rose are busy.  Dingo’s working.  Bri’s still stuck in Berlin.  The Captain’s God knows where.  Someone has to make sure you don’t end up living in a crap hole.”

“…I don’t know if I’m insulted or not at the implication that I wouldn’t be able to tell a good place from a…crap hole,” he said sardonically, laughing a little.  Marinette nudged him with her shoulder, or maybe she just snuggled closer.  It had been getting harder to tell lately.

Incredibly fluffy and so perfectly Lukanette.

Good morning! I’m salty.

I think we, as a general community, need to start taking this little moment more seriously.

This, right here? This is asking for consent. It’s a legal necessity, yes, but it is also you, the reader, actively consenting to see adult content; and in doing so, saying that you are of an age to see it, and that you’re emotionally capable of handling it.

You find the content you find behind this warning disgusting, horrifying, upsetting, triggering? You consented. You said you could handle it, and you were able to back out at any time. You take responsibility for yourself when you click through this, and so long as the creator used warnings and tags correctly, you bear full responsibility for its impact on you.

“Children are going to lie about their age” is probably true, but that’s the problem of them and the people who are responsible for them, not the people that they lie to.

If you’re not prepared to see adult content, created by and for adults, don’t fucking click through this. And if you do, for all that’s holy, don’t blame anyone else for it.

This needs to be reblogged today.

Consenting to see adult content doesn’t mean you should have to see a bunch of shit romanticizing incest and pedophilia you walnut

Except this is the last line of consent before the actual work. So if you’re at this button you have already done the following:

1) chosen to go onto AO3 in the first place

2) chosen the fandom you wish to read about

3) had the chance to filter for the things you do want to see like a specific pairing or a specific AU

4) had the chance to specifically filter out any tags you don’t want to see like, oh I don’t know, incest and non-con and dub-con and paedophilia

5) had the chance to set the rating level if you wish to remove any explicit content at all

6) have read the summary of the story, which aren’t always great but are the only indicator of what the story will be like writing wise so something about it was good enough for you to click on it.

7) have read the tags of the story which will tell you what is actually in the story. If you have used filters to remove stories with things you don’t want then there shouldn’t be anything in here that’s a shock to you but maybe there is. That’s why the tags are there for you to check for yourself.

8) Then you have to actually click on the story. You cannot see anything other than the summary or the tags without personally deciding that you are going to open and read this story.

9) Only here, at step number nine, do you get to the adult content warning pictured above. You have been through eight different steps, the last six of which have also been opportunities for you to see that this has adult content. And AO3 has *STILL* stopped you to ask one last time “are you sure you want to read this because it has things that only adults should see in it”.

If after this point you are reading incest and paedophilia then it’s probably because you specifically went looking for it.

You walnut.

This is the most beautiful thing that I have seen about ao3

“If after this point you are reading incest and paedophilia it’s probably because you specifically went looking for it” this. This is the point of it. Not only is it fucking disgusting to equate CSEM to a fanfiction of anime teens, but also, if you think Ao3 has an “incest and pedophilia” problem it’s 99% because you went out looking for those yourself, which honestly makes you a disgusting freak in your own book, but that’s not even the point. Ao3 gives you step after step after STEP of warnings and ways to filter the content that might be harmful to you and, as explained here, you skip past all of them intentionally, knowing what you are getting into, and then come onto the internet to bitch about it. If you are a minor on the internet it’s a given you shouldn’t be getting into the tags that are not for you and that you aren’t mature enough to brush off and handle. But there is another thing:

the majority of these braindead internet users are calling for some kind of censorship of Ao3, with the justification that it would “get rid of incest and pedophilia on the site” and I have just a few things to say: 1. Ao3 operates within the legal boundaries and 2. who the fuck do you think will be the victims of censorship?

1. When I say Ao3 operates within the legal boundaries it means that Ao3 doesn’t host anything on the site that’s a danger to internet security or prohibited by law. Which means that said “written incest and pedophilia” that you say Ao3 is full of is looked at as purely fictional, not considered illegal nor exploitation material under the law. So if you want to change that shit up, the proper way to go about it is not being stupid on the internet, nor is it calling out Ao3 users specifically. The proper way to go about it is go to your government and demand a change of law, see how that goes. The proper way to go about it is not to look out for such content and then play smart on social media. See how none of the users disagreeing with you have a problem with Ao3 content? That’s because they don’t look up such content on purpose.

2. Even if there is most disgusting fiction imaginable on Ao3, the site gives you a number of steps you can do to censor it out YOURSELF based on what things make you uncomfortable. Calling for censorship of Ao3 means giving the power to a third party to censor the content. If you give someone the power to decide what’s acceptable, they have the power to exclude you from it. That happened already, actually! There’s a reason fanfiction.net is a dead site. Who do you think was the ultimate, end-road target of any attempt on censorship? It’s queer people. It’s queer people and queer content, and Ao3 is a safe place for a whole HISTORY of queer content in fandoms. Calling for censorship of Ao3 will inevitably result in all things queer being censored on there just like on every attempt of censorship ever.

So do a favor and either be old enough to understand how to operate a site or fuck off, genuinely.

The site is built on the use of tags, which are there to help you determine if a story is right for you.

If all this isn't enough for you, you can fuck right off. Your preferences do not dictate what is allowed to exist in the world. Make your own fanfic site that provides the kind of content you want.

Reminders for new ao3 users (in no particular order):

- filter your searches like you would on a library website or in an online catalogue

- don’t post placeholders, fic searches, or recommendations as fics. DON’T! It’s against ao3 TOS

- there is no algorithm. ao3 sorts by date posted/updated unless you filter with specific search criteria

- ao3 is a non profit. that means it doesn’t sell ads to make money — it only survives on donations. this is why it can show you so many fics without ever flashing an ad or pop up at you!

- report fics that break TOS when you see them (I.e., placeholder fics, searches) to help other users navigate better

- the tag “dead dove, do not eat” doesn’t equate to gore/awfulness automatically. it is a complementary tag that enhances current tags. E.g., if the fic is tagged “gore” and “dead dove, do not eat” the author really wants you to mind the gore tag

- most fandoms have a variation of “no beta, we die like (x character)” and they all link back to the “No beta” tag

- publishing a new fic sometimes means it won’t show up in the fandom/pairing tag for a few minutes

- subscribers receive update emails at different times, depending on when you update/publish your fic. there’s no good way to predict when an e-mail will be sent — it can be in 30 seconds, or two hours later

- some fics are restricted by authors to those with ao3 accounts only. if you see a blue lock in the upper right corner, that fic is only visible to logged in ao3 users

- you can block commenters now! this didn’t use to be a thing

- updating a fic just to stay at the top of the pairing tag/fandom tag is a dick move. unless you’re legitimately editing or adding chapters, this just annoys readers and fellow authors, and people will skip over your fic

- make sure that you tag your ships correctly, both romantic and platonic. Putting an “&” between a pair of names means that the ship is platonic. Putting a “/” between the characters means its romantic. For example: “Greg & Steve” = platonic. “Greg/Steve” = romantic. They are NOT interchangable.

- if your fic includes original character/s or reader insert or y/n or etc, then TAG THOSE IN THE CHARACTER TAGS. Not just in the relationship tags!! They are characters in the story, so include them in the character tags. Failing to do so means people who want to find fics with those tags won’t be able to, and people who want to exclude fics with those tags won’t be able to.

- NEVER EVER EVER ADD A LINK TO A PATREON OR KO-FEE ACCOUNT OR ETC. Ao3’s entire legal protection hinges on the fact that no one is making money from fics. If you start commissioning fics or linking to a monetary platform, you are in breach of the Ao3 terms, risking legal action, and risking ao3 as a whole. There are loads of authors/companies who WILL sue if they think you’re making money off their intellectual property.

- seconding what OP said about Dead Dove Do Not Eat. It doesn’t automatically mean “gore”; it just means “heed the tags.” It means “Hey yeah when I tagged this as [thing] I was NOT fucking around, ok? Only read this fic if you’re OK with reading [thing].”

additions from someone who has posted way too much on this site please listen to me: