It is inherently fun and sexy to say statements that swap the traditional genders of pronouns and terms mid-statement, such as: “I’m going to make him my wife” “She’s my boyfriend” “Who says a guy can’t be a pretty princess?” “That girl’s the coolest dude I’ve ever met” “She’s a madman who has to be stopped” “It’s not his fault he’s a material girl” Gender is a set of watercolors and the prettiest shades come from mixing the paints together.
my cats are in a toxic gay relationship. the one in the foreground is Joseph and the one who is sneezing is Lenny. sometimes they frolick together. Joseph encourages Lenny to sniff his ass. Joseph beats the shit out of Lenny, which makes him have a sneezing fit.
I wonder what kind of symbolism they’re trying to get at
“There are a lot of giant robot shows in Japan, and we did want our story to have a religious theme to help distinguish us. Because Christianity is an uncommon religion in Japan we thought it would be mysterious. None of the staff who worked on Eva are Christians. There is no actual Christian meaning to the show, we just thought the visual symbols of Christianity look cool. If we had known the show would get distributed in the US and Europe we might have rethought that choice.” -Kazuya Tsurumaki, assistant director/art director on Neon Genesis Evangelion
something about foreshadowing being more prominent the second time around reading a story but in a way that the meaning is changed forever and you can never view a story the same as you once did before. do you know what i mean.
literally so insane how you can never go back to the innocence of it all. you see all the signs coming and you know how it ends. but there’s nothing you can do to turn a blind eye to it anymore. it hits you and you just have to keep going.
my favorite song is “Intro” and my favorite album is “Greatest Hits” and my favorite tv episode is “Pilot” and every midnight a deliicate raven flies in through the window and puts me to bed so I can have my scarydream
everything about the gestures o the hands convey the concept of a robot that is absolutely fucking pumped to pet a cat and then panics when it doesnt go right
Supernatural creatures existing, but the magical abilities they have are actually super rare, functioning essentially like their species-specific superpowers.
“Holy shit, a dragon. Can you actually spit fire?”
“Oh wow. A human. Do you have telekinesis? Can you move items with the power of your mind? Yeah thought so. Fuck off.”
Santa is on strike due to global warming. All presents this year will be delivered by Sasha the Christmas Tiger. Milk and cookies may not be sufficient.
saw that one “are cishet aro men queer” poll that’s going around and like. I’m not gonna reblog it bc the results are frankly disappointing and the discourse going on in the tags is really dumb but, unfriendly reminder, if you’re aro/acephobic you’re a loser lmao…. bye. anyway hi aro men you are very valid and I think you’re super awesome and cool ‼️
i also have a whole post i could write about how kudos on ao3 correspond to marketability rather than quality, exactly how the actual publishing industry works, but. the question is… do i have the energy
okay i’m writing it.
there’s a very good encouraging post (cannot currently find it) about how ao3 kudos don’t correspond to writing quality, which is true.
but if you don’t know WHY that is, it sounds like meaningless pat-on-the-back “keep your chin up, champ!” stuff.
it’s not.
kudos on ao3 are a marketing game. i’m gonna use my own ao3 works to make my case bc that’s a lot easier (and Significantly Less Asshole-ish) than analyzing the marketability of other people’s ao3 fic
my two main fandoms over the past 8 years are homestuck and the raven cycle/dreamer trilogy verse.
my most popular homestuck fanfiction is vacation. it’s a johndave fic i wrote when i was 16, and as of writing this post, it has 2,974 kudos.
by comparison, there’s breathe on the ashes. this is an ancestor fic similar in length and chapter count to vacation. it has 268 kudos - an encouraging readership for sure, but less than 1/10th of the engagement of vacation. it has less than 1/20th the amount of hits.
quality-wise, breathe on the ashes is SIGNIFICANTLY better than vacation (though there’s a LOT about it i’d do differently if i wrote it today). i wrote it when i was 19. it has better characterization, more thoughtful character arcs, more compelling plotting, better twists, and a significantly more fulfilling resolution.
so why is vacation so much more popular?
a great deal of it is luck - it was the first (i believe?) mainstream mermaid AU in the homestuck fandom, and it inspired a LOT of fanart that brought readers in. it was written in 2012-2013, at the height of the homestuck fandom’s engagement w/ fanworks
it also combines a popular AU concept with the most popular fandom ship at the time. i have multiple very short, badly written johndave oneshots from 2012 that ALSO have significantly more kudos than breathe on the ashes.
breathe on the ashes, by comparison, is about the homestuck ancestors, who get almost no screen time in canon and have no canon personalities. it’s plot-heavy rather than ship-heavy. it’s dense, and at some times very dark.
much of its readership is tumblr mutuals and people who started following my writing for johndave. but also, a significant part of its readership is people reading for the tagged relationships and the promised adventure story. that’s why it has over 200 kudos instead of, like, 10.
unbecoming jordan hennessy is my newest series, so it hasn’t had years to gain a readership. but none of the fics have more than 70 hits, which is unusual for my profile. in fact, only the first fic has more than 10 kudos. by comparison, the vampire AU has 73 series bookmarks, 3,500 hits on the first installment, and nearly 450 kudos on the first installment.
that’s because i knew the jordan hennessy series had little potential readership going in and made no effort to mitigate that. it’s an extremely dark dead dove series that has basically every available content warning and then some. it focuses on a dreamer trilogy character (so, already a smaller fandom than the raven cycle) who gets very little fandom attention, and character spinoffs who get even LESS attention. most didn’t even have ao3 tags of their own until i wrote them. it’s all genfic, and it’s all gruesome and gutwrenching and awful.
meanwhile i DID take steps to encourage vampire AU readership, even as i continued writing what i want. the main characters are in a polycule, but poly fic is rarely interacted with in this fandom. so several installments focus chiefly on the main fandom pairing (pynch) with the polyamory as a background. that way there was already a readership when i started exploring adansey, bronan, etc.
i wrote the vampire AU with fan-favorite tropes (i mean…. it’s a vampire AU). i wrote it to be self-indulgent and fun. i wrote it ENTIRELY as a series where I Do What I Want, but i also marketed it in ways that drive reader engagement. i used tags that people often search on ao3. i used popular & humorous title formats. i used short, snappy summaries that told people what to expect from the fic.
both of these series are undeniably good. i’m a good writer. but only one was written With The Consumption Of Others In Mind, and it’s reflected 100% in the stats. in fact, if i didn’t have tumblr mutuals who’d shared jordan hennessy, NO ONE would have read it.
i’m not sore about people not reading jordan hennessy. i wrote it for myself, like most of my writing is for myself, and i published it for maybe 3 or 4 mutuals who care about the content as much as i do. i knew it wasn’t going to be mass devoured by the fandom.
(i have well over a million words of fiction that i’ve written for myself that no one else has ever seen. unbecoming jordan hennessy is the closest public window into what most of that content looks like.)
so.
here’s how to market a fic to get kudos:
pick a large fandom. raven cycle is a pretty big YA fandom, homestuck is a giant internet fandom. if i cared to write for fandoms like the MCU, i could almost definitely surpass vacation’s success
pick the most popular pairing. or a very popular pairing, if there are several in your fandom.
DO NOT write relationship-less genfic. even if the fic itself is pretty genficcy, tag it with a popular relationship. (use & relationship tags if there absolutely is no romance or it’s focused on familial bonding.)
DO NOT go overboard with relationship tags or with general tags. do not write a summary that’s a million words long.
write a popular AU. high school, college, supernatural, coffee shop, office workers, soulmates, whatever.
write a popular relationship trope. fake relationship, enemies to lovers, there was only one bed, and they were roommates etc.
write a popular subgenre. sickfic, slow burn, married shenanigans, plotless fluff, angst with a happy ending, etc.
write a oneshot or keep chapter lengths somewhere from 2,000 to 4,000 words.
profit.
does any of that have to do with the writing quality? no.
it has to do with what people are searching for on ao3, what they’re likely to read, and how to reach the largest market possible in your fandom of choice.
so if you’re writing for external validation, use this formula and go forth and enjoy success, friends. and if you’re worried that maybe you’re a bad writer because your fic isn’t being engaged with: stop worrying. marketability and quality are not the same thing, and they never have been.
my homestuck fic actually comprises a significant fraction of the first ten pages of top-kudosed works. im on there a lot. i shaped a big chunk of early fanon. there’s an unsettling amount of evidence that im why troll dicks generally look like that. and it’s not because i was the best writer around, it’s because i got in early and because i write fanfiction to throw spaghetti at the wall, trying out whatever seems new and interesting to me, so i ended up blazing exactly one step of a new trail in a bunch of different directions, so then subsequent explorers kept on crediting me.
but like, actually examining my works through the lense of kudos also shows the other filter besides just novelty: i wrote a huge range of lengths and subjects and pairings and tones, and what actually Became A Hit was pretty much all the Normal Shit. the redrom. the strider manpain. the ornate aus with lovely outfits. the palatable stuff that almost anyone liked.
your best work probably won’t (and probably shouldn’t!) be your most popular, because quality is a function of passion and experience and experimentation and originality. popularity is about working with averages. stuff most people like well enough. there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. but you need to keep that in mind if you want to be an unrepentant freak who writes for the unhinged joy of it.
everyone likes a guitar. the inventor of the saxophone was almost assassinated like three times by inept but evidently passionate sax-hating time travelers. draw your own conclusions.
[Image ID: Disappointed Black Guy is a four-panel reaction image macro that expresses the expectation-reality meme. Black writing on a white background saying
- creating AUS - world building
- creating OCS - sending memes to your friends
juxtaposes a photograph of a happy, excited man. The third panel
- actually writing the fic
followed by a picture of the same person, but now with an expression of disappointment or shock. End ID]
As someone who falls into 3 of these categories, I feel very called out by my own meme 😅
Alt text:
A meme image of 4 arms / hands reaching out & grabbing another hand’s wrist, forming a kind of square.
Hand 1: Trans & non-binary folks
Hand 2: Bi & pan folks
Hand 3: Aro & ace folks
Hand 4: Neurodivergent folks
In the middle between them all: “Wait… doesn’t everyone feel this way?”
It’s always fun when you’re one or more of these things simultaenously and find out so, so much later that the world you live in is very much not shared by everyone else.
dear diary, today i learned a new word. trans gender. some people use different pronounce than the ones they were born with. the mean lesbian who took me in uses he and she. i think everyone should be who they are. i just wish he would be less of a bitch. #love is love #pride #ally
I love seeing list memes where someone makes a “le cool people vs le cringe” and they obviously skew it so they barely scrape by into the cool kids club
You just KNOW this dudes 5'11"
I’m 5'11, but in most casual conversations I’ll say I’m 5'9. I do this purely for the chaos that it creates. Because everyone assumes that men only exaggerate their height up, it makes me look like the only person honestly describing their height and thus knocks at least 2 inches off everyone else’s description. The panic that the 6'1 guys feel at the thought of being described as 5'11 is hard to understate. I have had people run back to their cars to grab tape measures.
If I could get away with describing myself as 4'6 I would.
you are the diametrical opposite of the aforementioned guy. you are a demigod walking among mortals
a post containment breach is usually when a specific fandom post is vague enough that folks outside of the fandom start reblogging it bc it’s relatable. the opposite of this is when a random post accidentally vibes too hard with a fandom and op has to respond with “who’s [this person you keep tagging]” and I for one, love that genre of post.
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