It is not surprising news that fanfiction writers are highly underappreciated.
There’s something wrong with the numbers: let’s take a popular fic with almost 4k hits. For let’s say 700 readers, it will get about 50 comments and 300 Kudos (those numbers are just an example, sometimes it’s worse than that). Maybe I’m being too kind, maybe not, but things stay the same; there’s something wrong here. Can you see it?
It takes us days, weeks, sometimes months to write a story for you. We write for ourselves yes, but we also write to share. We write to offer you content about your favourite characters. We write to bring our and your ships to life. It takes you a fraction of second to leave a Kudos, ten seconds to one, two or a few minutes to leave a comment.
And here lies our problem: there’s no proper sharing if there’s no proper feedback. An author not getting comments is generally a sad author. If I didn’t get feedback I’d wonder what’s the point in keeping on writing. A comment makes a writer’s day, most of the time even motivates them to write more.
Another important thing thrandythefabulous and I noticed: why on Earth do so many readers don’t comment (even kudos) if the fic has been up for a little more than a week or two? Why? Your feedback is still welcomed and much appreciated.
We write for ourselves, but also we write for you. And sadly, many readers are being quite… ungrateful, when giving feedback is the least they can do to thank the people offering them stories for free.
So, before we get started on our little day, let’s talk about comments:
It doesn’t matter if other readers already said what you wanted to say, we’ll still love reading it again in your words.
It doesn’t matter the fic has been up for weeks or months or years; comments on those ones are unexpected and so, it makes them ever better.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t have much to say, we’ll be glad anyway.
Most authors leave the comment section open to people who don’t have an Archive of Our Own (AO3) account, which means you can still… comment! How amazing is that.
That brings us to our little Fanfiction Writers Appreciation Day.
The point of this day is simple; on August 21st, writers and readers alike would go on AO3 (or any fanfiction website really), on Tumblr, and leave a comment on their favourite fics (even the fics they enjoyed!) and/or send their authors a message about their works.
It doesn’t matter if you’ve already or never commented. It doesn’t matter if the author doesn’t know about this post. It doesn’t matter if the author already knows how much you love their work.
Just let writers know you love the fics they write for you, simple as that!
And well, don’t forget to keep leaving a Kudos and a comment in the future, and make writers happy!
Lets do this! I have a few people in mind~
i know i’ll be doing this. will you? 🙂
I’m down? Y’all with us on this?
I’m ready, let’s go
Annual day of revisiting old faves and realising I forgot to kudo and/or comment on something I’ve re-read umpteen times or am reading for the first time evar wooooooooot
august 21st is my birthday, I would be so happy to get comments on my fics on my birthday!!
you disliking something someone is doing doesn’t excuse you telling them to kill themselves
Incest and pedophilic ships harm people dumbass it’s not my personal preference.
who *in real life* do they harm
and even if they DO harm someone telling people to kill themselves is never okay
Did you just fucking ask how PEDOPHILLA harms people?? Are you shitting me?
oh my god, how does shipping a fictional thing harm real life people you fucking moron
Pedophilla triggers people who have trauma?? Oh my god?? Incest is the same?? Don’t act like fiction doesn’t effect reality??
So don’t read it if it triggers you.
Should war histories be banned for triggering veterans? Should movies portraying coca cola be banned because some girl was once beaten with a bottle of coke and get flashbacks when she sees people holding them?
I will never cease to be confused by “I have PTSD, therefore people must make it the case that i must never encounter things that trigger me, ever. OH BY THE WAY, I am going to devote large chunks of my online time to yelling at people who make the things that trigger me.”
??????
imaginary stories of the dynamics of underage fictional characters in an also fictional relationship isn’t pedophilia and the insistence of tumblr to call it such actually makes it hard for me to do my job as a social worker because i deal with real breathing living children who are being abused like i was
hey everyone. i’m back and i will start here. i took a break because well, teens on tumblr were telling me to kill myself because i disagree with them about things, mostly about… my own rapes! luckily i have a good support system. people who actually care about helping survivors.
story time yall massive trigger warning for everything below
i don’t want to say i was in a cult but. my family was part of a cult in the 80’s and 90’s. all my childhood and adolescence. this cult had a trade system. this cult had pedophiles. i mean real pedophiles. real ones. real ones doing real things to real kids. when i say pedophiles i mean adults who routinely and “for business” sexually assaulted prepubescent children, real prepubescent children, knowingly and for their own entertainment.
a young adult reading and producing harry x draco or, i don’t know what the kids like these days, naruto x sasuke, voltron whoever the heck fan content is not a pedophile. in fact, to call them a pedophile and to call such content pedophilia feels like a spit in my face
let me be really clear and direct at the risk of sharing some really personal things:
there were tapes of me and my siblings and the other children in our church. and photo albums. this was mostly in the 80’s and 90’s, remember so we did not have tumblr. we were real children being exploited and traumatized. this was pedophilia.
and now i hear all these young teens on tumblr insisting that fanart = pedophilia and the fanartists = pedos. you are wasting resources for your own personal gain and popularity and wokepoints on fictional people while i, having now become an adult, am a therapist, social worker and activist. i use my experience as essentially a child sex slave to help others recover and process and to help law enforcement when i feel that intervention is necessary to prevent someone from being harmed more
do you know how hard they would laugh if you tried to shove gay teen anime boys at them and call it pedophilia? do you know how hard some of them would cry and tell you to stop wasting their time? an officer i talk with regularly had to take months off because he was so shaken by one of the cases. shit like this affects all of us deeply.
a fan liking the way two characters mesh is no more pedophilia than a writer writing a murder scene is an actual murder.
and don’t use “grooming” as an excuse/weapon. you know what i was groomed with? uwu purity christ worship and sock puppets. stickers. care bears. know what i wish i had access to growing up? fanfics. or just sex scenes in movies. hell even teen nick shows about normal stuff like crushes. even just sex talks on sitcoms. SOMETHING to let me think about what was happening to me in a context outside of “this is what the lord made me for” and “we must be pure pure pure even if it means harming our own” something to help me think about real life through the lens of characters who might be very different or very similar to me
not once has an anti ever spoken to me as a human. they treat me like i’m “the wrong kind of survivor” because i’m not part of their crusade to suicide bait and call for the murder of perfect strangers because of imaginary things.
the worst part is that as a therapist who specializes in csa related ptsd….i have so many young kids thinking they are evil for wanting to fantasize about their assaults in contexts where they are in control. let me repeat, a lot of the survivors like to fantasize about what happened to them as an “au” where they were in control, or aged up, or even enjoying themselves. sounds pretty fucked up right? well that’s the brain for you. for a lot of us, it’s the only way to process some of it.
you do harm when you equate a drawing or a fiction to the actual violence we endured.
please. i am begging you. please stop. you aren’t helping. i can’t get people to take me seriously about csa as an issue when i talk about it online in professional settings. because they think i’m a crazy purity wank asshole when literally my job is to help others like me. please. please. please. we cant take it anymore. you have turned pedophilia into a scary buzzword to drag people with instead of a word to describe something real that we are trying to fight.
i already lost a friend to tumblr. you lot convinced her she was evil and perpetuating her own abuse because of a fucking voltron ship. you told her it was her own fault for being raped and that she was the same as her attacker. you know who you are and you’ll have to live with it forever. may whoever meets you in the afterlife have pity on your misguided souls. you’ll have a lot to answer for. all the people you told to die, to “piss yourself” (ableist as fuck).
please please please go outside and get a grip on reality. if you can’t, then stop pretending you care.
if you cared and if you really believed it was bad enough to wish death upon people you would be saying that people are murderers for drawing or writing about death because how would you be able to excuse death? murder is a huge problem all around a world. so why isn’t fiction featuring murder held to the same standard, as “normalizing” murder and “romanticizing” death and “triggering” people who have lost someone to murder or who have almost been murdered.
don’t you dare say death is better than being a survivor. don’t you fucking dare.
if ur lgbt+ im curious: if u can remember, what was your first major Gay Ship?
all these answers are important to me what a nice post
The first thing that comes to mind is a pair of OCs that were really side characters in a Legolas/self-inserts (yes plural, now that I’m grown up I realize it was just a big poly ship) fic my best friend and I worked on, but after that I would have to guess, either Legolas/Aragorn or Remus/Sirius.
1: What inspired you to write the fic this way?
2: What scene did you first put down?
3: What’s your favorite line of narration?
4: What’s your favorite line of dialogue?
5: What part was hardest to write?
6: What makes this fic special or different from all your other fics?
7: Where did the title come from?
8: Did any real people or events inspire any part of it?
9: Were there any alternate versions of this fic?
10: Why did you choose this pairing for this particular story?
11: What do you like best about this fic?
12: What do you like least about this fic?
13: What music did you listen to, if any, to get in the mood for writing this story? Or if you didn’t listen to anything, what do you think readers should listen to to accompany us while reading?
14: Is there anything you wanted readers to learn from reading this fic?
15: What did you learn from writing this fic?
Guys I was drawing this on a plane and a super friendly rather good-looking West Indies cricket player moved to the empty seat next to me and started asking me questions like, “How did you get the idea for the picture?” and I legit panicked. OH IT’S JUST AN ILLUSTRATION OF MY FANFICTION IN WHICH THIS CHRIS PRATT CHARACTER GETS IT ON WITH THIS SENTIENT RACCOON. I think what I actually ended up saying was something like, “….Comic book characters?” God I should have just told him it was inspired by YouTube.
Verilidaine's Scrapbook 