Hello everyone!

This month features the following Spotlight Topic: Black History Month

Going forward, each month we will now be spotlighting various causes and awareness events. Spotlight topics are not mutually exclusive, but given just how many notable causes and awareness events, we can't list all of them in a single post. Please visit our Google Calendar to view other deserving causes and feel free to talk about them and your experiences!

It's Tuesday and you know what that means, the sub is in restricted mode (meaning you can comment on existing posts but cannot make a new post for the day). We started this as a protest against Reddit back in June/July but it was decided that we would continue restricting each Tuesday for a few reasons.

1: To encourage people to get off of Reddit for a day and do something else, anything else. Pet a cat, write a fic, go outside and touch grass, go see a movie, read a book, meditate, or whatever else. Do literally anything that you are able to that gets you off of Reddit for a day

2: To give the mods a day off/a day to work on secondary tasks for the sub and clean things up each week

And lastly and most importantly...

3: To spend the day highlighting and discussing disability, accessibility, and diversity. AO3 has always been very good on accessibility and a lot of the world and internet is not, and fandom spaces have been known to be not the best about disability or diversity, so while we are restricted we like to shine a light on these often overlooked parts of fandom and the people that make up this group. So we have these threads where you can post your fic recs and self-promo about anything to do with disability and/or diversity, and also so people have a safe space to share their stories and discuss these topics.

Given the nature of this thread as a safe space for discussion of disability and diversity, we will be much stricter regarding civility and harassment. This includes the following thread specific rules:

Do not derail: No hijacking the thread for unrelated topics/discussions.

Do not talk over others: Everyone has their own individual experiences and challenges that may differ, and we ask that you show each other respect and do not talk over those sharing their experiences.

If you are sharing a rec or self-promo with these themes, please use the following format:

Rating:

Fandom:

Archive Warnings:

Tags:

Other Notes:

Link:

~The Mod Team

Looking for the regular Bi-weekly Megathread?

Hi! As a guy, I notice that whenever I read explicit M/M fics and get to the freaky scenes, there's this.. weird, tingly sensation that pops up in my neck/throat area. It's not uncomfortable but it does happen a lot. Is this a cause for concern?

Flaired it as discussion because I'm looking for people's opinions, but I guess this applies as "question/help" too. I've seen multiple discussions on here stating how aggravating it is when a long fic is tagged as complete when it's been abandoned and left unfinished. I do not want to do that, but I feel it in my bones that I'm just done with a particular story of mine. Maybe SOMEDAY I'll go back and finish it, but I don't know that for sure because my passions are elsewhere right now. It barely has any readers anymore, but for the very few who are there reading silently every week, I didn't want to leave in the lurch. I was considering doing the last chapter as a major summary of what I had planned for the rest. I guess I just wanted to hear people's thoughts that if I did that, would it still be anger-inducing for the story to be marked complete or should it be left as open to having more chapters?

In a similar vain, would people prefer not to have a summary like that in the end with the hopes it may be finished in a few years time? Or would more people prefer a summary at the end so they can have closure now?

For the record, I know I can do whatever I want and there's rarely a consensus on anything, but I still want to hear what the majority may prefer or perhaps even other general thoughts around these topics.

basically, all i need help with is motivation!! i set a stupid soon deadline for myself to put out TWO chapters that only one has been started and i have barely anything down!! i would really appreciate it if anyone here would be willing to give me some words of encouragement/motivation to help? i know i shouldn’t have set the deadline but one chapter has some romantic elements to it and i wanted to have that one out on valentine’s day, but i can’t have that one without this one. anything helps ❤️🤷🏻

Have read comments about public nasty bookmarks here -- well, I found a mean one on a fic of mine. The pairing is teacher/student and the story is set in the student's high school years. The anti says on their bookmark the story "turns problematic" when the relationship starts, which, duhhhhh, note the pairing, lol! (Or maybe they did and that's why they're bookmarking. Antis have learned we can't delete bookmarks like we can comments.)

I'm a little surprised because I wrote the story in 2002, and figured it was long buried in the archive.

However! I discovered that muting the person who made the bookmark disappears the bookmark, at least for me. I went ahead and blocked them for good measure. Still, I would like something on AO3 to address this method of abusing authors, perhaps hiding the fic from those who leave nasty notes.

ETA: Bad word choice. If it were "abuse" I'd just file an Abuse report and be done with it, no need for discussion. Let's use the phrase "slap in the face" for authors. Bookmarks are being used to circumvent the control authors have over their comment pages, and it's a problem.

The point "just don't read the bookmarks!" -- don't be absurd. Of course authors are going to read public bookmarks. The link to them is right next to the kudos.

Sometimes I’m in a fandom and like half of the fics are chatfics and I wonder if people actually like reading them? I try sometimes but they’re never good. The format just annoys me and half the time they give each character a username/nickname and I’m always so lost.

I bought a library bookshelf puzzle and when I was putting the stickers on for the books I noticed plenty of different real books, but then I got to this section of stickers and was trying to figure out where I heard the name “All The Young Dudes” before. Once I looked closer at some of the pictures I was like “WAIT A MINUTE!! THATS JAMES SIRIUS REMUS AND PETER!” If anyone doesn’t know this is a Harry Potter fanfic about his parents as well as a gay relationship on AO3 and is a pretty popular fic. I’m guessing they are fan made covers for the fic and I can’t decide what would be better, the person who made the puzzle knowing this is a wolfstar Harry Potter slow burn fan-fiction or someone googled Harry Potter books or something and accidentally put these in lol. Especially since there are SO MANY.

I’ve been working on this fic for a while now, and I’m very happy that someone bookmarked it :)

I hope they enjoy the next chapter, too :D

I've currently got a multi-chapter work (17 chapters, specifically), and I've decided that I want to split it into two separate works. Chapters 1-9 will stay where they are, but 10 on will become a new work, both of them tagged as part of a series.

Is it possible to split a work like that? Short of just re-uploading all the chapters, I mean. I definitely feel like I've seen it done, but I'm not entirely sure.

Every time I click on my bookmarks, I have to swipe off the tab and go back on for it to load. Sometimes the Error 503 message appears.

I’m on an ios, so I use the website. I have 1121 bookmarks if that matters. I’ve had an account since like 2019, why is it does this to me

There was a story about how you can find soulmates by listening to their music or something of that nature. Jiang Cheng (from Mo Dao Zu Shi) hears it and sees Lan XiChen with Nie MingJue and finds out Lan XiChen is a mute or deaf and such. I can’t find it! Someone please send the link!

I currently have a huge crossover fic planned with a whole lot of fandoms, and was wondering how many I’m actually allowed to add onto there.

I’ve been writing fanfiction for years now, but i stopped after some real dark time in my life. But then this idea of a kpop group + game of thrones + a/b/o came along and then i decided to put this on paper after some thought and.. i posted it.

I posted and now i have 29 kudos (aka 29 PEOPLE) reading a multi-chapter omegaverse game of thrones post-canon fic with members of a kpop group as characters

and im happy???? there’s TWENTY NINE people out there who look into this and though with themselves: cool, i’ll leave a kudo. Ive posted three chapters already and im still writing it and im happy. thats it.

(apologies if flair is wrong) I have made a post about this before, but something actually mind boggling happened today. To give context to everything shortly, I got banned from my fandom's discord server because of my noncon fanfics of my favorite character. They traced it back to me because of how small the fandom is. I heard of misinformation being spread about me (that I was a rpist, that I advertised my noncon fics to minors in the server, which i didn't) etc. Yet NEVER saw said misinfo being spread. At this point, I accepted that I wouldn't be back into the server and let it go. I thought it ended there, but NOOOOO. It didn't.

One of the mods in the server joined my game and recognized that I was the one who created those fics. I was trying to deny it (ever since the situation, i have been sort of scared by further, unnecessary confrontation) but obviously, he found out it was me. I told him that we should actually take this to private DM's and not in a whole roblox game where children were present... but NOOO we HAD to talk in the CHILDRENS game as also was, streaming our convo to the server i was banned in to other children and adults, unbeknownst to me. It's worse when I got all vulnerable with this guy because he was asking those kinds of questions.

He said that my content was borderline CSEM (...when i made fics ONLY of adult characters, so... WHAT?? the media is mainly for children, but still) and that it was also bordering illegal, I would lose job opportunities, all that. He even claimed that he watched public executions on twitter, yet my necrophilia noncon fic made his hands SHAKE. Me, a minor, had to confort what I believe is nearly an adult and tell him not to read my fics, as he doesn't even need to. He said that if I did not stop publishing these fics, CPS and the FBI would be called on me and/or my parents. They don't know my address or anything, and I'm not sure if they are just trying to threaten me?

I desperately want to continue making my fanfics. Nothing will stop me, I am SO proud of my fanfics. But if I'm in danger then I'm not sure what to do, and might even have to stop writing what I want to write for my favorite fandom. I never gave anyone information, they don't EVEN know my name. Does anyone know if I can get in trouble for this? I am also planning to confront a mod about this because this is genuinely stupid.

edit: hi! thanks for all of the advice, it helped a lot, but a small clarification since i think i have worded some part of this wrong.

i only wrote these fics of ADULT characters, not children, as the mod had seemingly thought, even as he had read my fics. his words, not mine.

one character is 34 and the other is 8 billion or something… idk. he just claimed my fics were bordering cp which was stupid because well… they’re adults. so… yeah…

That's all.

There's always a particular scene that kind of engraves the story into my mind and touched my heart and that is my kudos moment.

Does anyone else have a kudos moment while reading fics? Is it similar for y'all?

Ok so long story short I read a lot of spiderman/batfamily crossover and they can get repetitive but there's a few with unique pieces I like or are just well written, but this means I confused some of them and now I'm looking for two of them and I can't find them.

One of them has peter waking up from the Lazarus pit on top of him being trans

And the other gave him unique bonus powers along with having venom be there.

I've tried to individually search but either the fic doesn't come up or the pool is too big, my history is a mess too.

Is there a way I can individually search my history instead of the entire AO3 archive????

Edit: I checked the dates in my history where I would've read these (my big craze where all my memories lump together) and it appears one or both of these have been deleted!!!! :/ Thanks for tips guys<3

Which characters, in your fandom and in your opinion, are the hardest to write?

In MCU, I would say it's easily Tony Stark. It's hard to capture his witty, smartest-person-in-the-room banter without it degenerating into babbling. In regular Marvel Comics, I wrote a couple of fics with Doctor Doom and he is TOUGH to write. It's very easy to become meme-y, he's got to be over the top but remain intimidating. A difficult balancing act when you want to write him kissing someone! EDIT: Considering like half of Doom's canonical appearances have been retconned over the years to be Doombots, obviously even professional comic book writers find it hard to write him!!

I'e been using AO3 for probably close to a decade now. I'm working on my own fic, I've read thousands more - it's great.

Somehow, I only just noticed today that there's a tiiiiiiiiny little 'beta' as part of the site header. Why? The archive is not a new thing, it's been around for ages, and it doesn't feel like it's in a beta testing stage.

Like the title says.... I jumped right into a show this weekend... binged it all.. and wrote a series of one shots for it, as I progressed through the show. Long story short...I feel empty. I feel like I've done drugs and am just waiting for my entire life to fall apart. It's a very unnerving feeling...

Does anyone else experience this?

Archive Of Our Own I've just been seeing ao3 not AO₃ 🤦‍♀️😂😭

Is anyone else having issues with the bookmarks page being really slow? It's slow when I look at my page, but also when I look at other people's. Only the bookmarks page, the rest of the site is fine! I keep getting the 503 error code with page loading slowly too.

So I haven’t written fanfic in a while but I’m feeling out a story that has a flashback sequence at the beginning of some chapters.

Are we still using italics for flashbacks? Is there a different technique folks prefer?

So, i began writing a few days ago and before that, I was used to commonly having vivid daydreams of scenarios of the fandom that I'm currently writing a fic of, and this made me willing to write a fic because i wanted to convey those imaginations in paper and share it with others.

The problem is, once i started writing the first chapter, i felt that i could only convey a hollow shell of what i previously envisioned, I currently finished the second chapter and I think it only got worse getting quite "too straight to the point", Cliché and overdramatic (tbh i have high expectations about that, i want to be the second coming of Terrence Malick and Christopher Nolan). I still think it might be possible to fit some scenarios that i wanted it in, but overall it's kinda messy and rushed. (And yes, i made a sheet with almost all the details i want to include in the story.)

My question is, Is this common for beginners and I will be able to convey what i wish to better on later chapters, or i am committing a grave mistake that'll ruin my entire fic? How could I make my imagination flow better while I'm actually writing?

(also screw you reddit web for erasing my entire comment once i almost had finished it just because i looked up a director's name in another tab)