Eclectic Eccentric

Hey guys, an AO3 tag wrangler here with a small suggestion for making the lives of wranglers and the Abuse volunteers and all your fellow users a little easier. You know that impulse to post a “PROMPT ME, I WILL TAKE ANY OF THESE 50 SHIPS IN 30 FANDOMS” work?

Please don’t. These make everyone cry.

Look at all those fandoms and ship tags… that this work doesn’t apply to! Look at the fact that this isn’t even a work yet! Look at all those tags you’re asking wranglers to wrangle, usually not the existing canonicals, that appear in the bins of 30 different wrangling teams, flooding the smaller teams and annoying the big ones! Look at the Abuse volunteers getting 3 reports for your work in the first day and having to talk to you and reply to each of those people!

I have a better suggestion: personal prompt meme.

Aw yeah, AO3 has prompt memes and allows personal collections! Imagine your personal prompt collection:

Control when it’s open and closed!

Post a link in the notes of all your works!

Post a link on your blog and your AO3 profile!

Post the things you’ll accept in the Rules/FAQ section of the collection!

Use claims or gifts to notify the prompter when you’ve posted a work for their prompt!

Easily delete prompts that don’t follow your rules!

Post each work separately and gift each one to the prompter to build relationships and encourage interest from new fans who just noticed your work!

So much control, so much useful organization, so many fewer frustrated users finding a work with two chapters, neither of which applies to most of the relationships or fandoms tags. Why burn your bridges with some users when you’re trying for positive attention for your works?

Just imagine it: “[YourName]′s Personal Prompt Meme*”. Your name on a collection on AO3. All for you.

This user is anti-censorship

This user believes in “don’t like, don’t read”

This user believes in “ship and let ship”

This user is fully aware that reblogs are important in order for a post to reach a wider audience, but they still appreciate getting a ❤ because it means someone saw and acknowledged their post and making that connection with another person is important, even if the post doesn’t go any further than that. 

This user knows that sometimes a like is all of the interaction you can manage with a post, and this user wants you to know that that’s totally okay. You keep scrolling, you funky little tumblrite. 

Found this in the original post tags and I just... SIGH

Here’s the thing, anon. Squick isn’t just ‘I don’t like this’, it’s ‘I think this is gross and it makes me deeply uncomfortable but I pass no judgement on those who enjoy it, because I acknowledge that everyone is different and those same people may have the same visceral reaction some of the things I enjoy’ and was originally made popular in the kink community.

So yeah, if you want to say that every time you come across a trope or whatever you find icky then go ahead, say that every time.

Squicks are things I find personally gross but may not be gross to someone else. They don’t upset me or provoke my PTSD, they simply do not pop my corn. Example: Omegaverse. I don’t like it, it makes me uncomfortable and I’m not going to read it, but if you like it, you do you.

Triggers are things which directly provoke my PTSD. This means that my triggers may seem completely normal and innocuous to someone else, because my triggers are so personal and intrinsically linked to a specific event in my life. My reactions to these triggers can include panic attacks and flashbacks to this traumatic event. Sometimes being triggered can affect me for several hours or even days.

If we encourage everyone to lump things that just make them slightly uncomfortable or simply aren’t to their taste in under the word “trigger”, it actually dilutes the meaning of the word. It makes it harder for us all to, for the most part, collectively agree on and understand what exactly is being described when the word gets used.

And that destruction of shared precise definitions is a problem! It is really useful to have the communal language to be able to clearly and quickly delineate between “this grosses me out, no thanks” and “this is going to set off a trauma episode, rattle my brain, and probably throw off the rest of my day/week as a result” while also maintaining your privacy, and to know that you will be understood in what you are saying. Not having it is actually detrimental to the effort of making our communities safe and navigable for people living with trauma. Which is a goal that is much more important to me, personally, than the idea of not being “cutesy” (a word which in this case which sounds a lot like it’s being used as a euphemism for “cringe”).

if it scratches an angry little itch, fact check it!

if it gives you petty satisfaction, fact check it!

if it feels like revenge, fact check it!

And yeah this post is about my big dumb animal brain accepting the science behind narrow roads and the evils of certain types of zoning laws, but it's also about stuff in general. If you don't know why someone isn't changing their mind on something, it's probably because the information they're getting hasn't reached a critical mass in their monkey brain yet. Whenever you hear stories about people changing their minds on things or leaving a certain ideology the story never goes "A person on the internet did a slam dunk on me and then I changed my mind."

It's usually a long process that happens over the course of months or years. Seeds planted here and there that coalesce eventually into a new thought or ideology over the course of years or snap together or send someone down a new path after a certain event. Same with me about pedestrian-centric cities. For me the tipping point was finding this video, which isn't necessarily super special or the best and the guy who runs the channel, in my opinion, isn't the most qualified or the most sympathetic towards every city in every situation, but it was the feather that tipped the scales in my brain to "Oh, wait. Maybe everything I thought I knew about how cities work is wrong actually." But that video alone didn't change my mind. With the amount of stuff and people that have gradually and gently been giving me information over the past couple years, something else was bound to eventually change my mind.

People on Tumblr yelling about abolishing the car, if anything, slowed down me changing my mind. Every time I saw a person saying that driving cars is stupid and that cars are bad I took a step back into my old way of thinking in defense. Because I grew up only ever using a car to get around. Rhetoric like that felt like a direct attack on my family, who I know to be loving people who care about other human beings and who drive cars literally everywhere.

And you might say, posts and videos like that aren't actually an attack on people that drive or have to drive. Okay then. Why are they phrased like that? Because that makes you feel good? Because you're angry? Alright, your anger at how it's currently impossible to get around if you don't own a car and how people who don't actually want to drive are being forced to drive is reasonable. And now I understand why it exists. I'm kind of angry too now that I get how this stuff works. However, is calling the people you're trying to convince stupid to their face and immediately bombarding them with your most radical ideas that might be completely detached from their reality and how they understand the world really the most productive way to channel your anger?

What about a guy with a knee problem that lives in rural Appalachia? Do you think he is gonna be convinced by your angry rants about bike lanes? No. He lives on a mountain that he can't climb or bike up because he's disabled and has only ever known getting around in a car. What about a person who overheats easily living in a suburb in the middle of the desert? Do you think she is inspired by your green lush pictures of trolleys running through parks in The Netherlands? No. If she leaves her house for too long without ice water she could literally die and you're going on about getting rid of, in her mind, the only thing that lets her go to the grocery store and not faint.

Go eat something. Get something to drink. Do a big stretch, maybe walk around the house, move your laundry from the washer to the dryer. That last part is for me, but you can do it too if you’ve got wet clothes you’ve been forgetting about

Blacklist, block and mute at will. You don’t owe anybody anything.

Turn off those notifications.

Decide when you log on. Don’t use social media at breakfast if it will stress you out all day. Don’t use it before you go to bed if it will keep you up. Find a fun ritual to replace it, like a video game or craft thing.

Consider which platform allows you to avoid topics that upset you. For example: tumblr is kinda shit for fan fiction because everything ends up in the same tag. The older forum-style platforms are much better for finding content you enjoy and avoiding content you don’t.

Leave online communities that don’t spark joy. You don’t need to stay in a place where everyone is always fighting. You don’t need to stay in communities where you are afraid to speak your mind or to make mistakes.

Ask yourself: could this ‘debate’ also be a conversation instead? Don’t debate people who seek debate to upset you. Don’t debate people who seek debate to get an audience for bigotry. Don’t debate people who seek debate to win instead of to learn. Don’t debate people who do not acknowledge your humanity.

Repeat to yourself: doomscrolling is not activism. Nothing in the world gets better just because you read, liked and reblogged posts about how terrible things are. 

Write what the fuck you want.

Write what makes you happy. Write what makes your soul sing. Write what fucks you up and makes you cry. Write what comforts you. Write what distracts you. Write what you want to read. Write what you want to watch.

Write what you want to dream about tonight.

Write what you can't get enough of. Write what you're completely obsessed with. Write what wakes you up at 4am and drags you out of bed because you can't stop thinking about what your characters are going to do next.

Write what turns you on, if that's your vibe. Write characters you're in love with and characters who inspire you and characters you want to be friends with and characters you fucking hate but oh my god they're so much fun.

Write about things you would sell your soul to do in real life and things you would never do in real life. Write about things that are happening right now and things that happened a thousand years ago and things that might happen in the future and things you wish could happen.

Write to get a publishing deal or to sell your books yourself or not to sell your books at all. Write for your friends or for strangers or for the people who reblog your posts on Tumblr and send you songs that remind them of your characters.

Write for yourself.

Fuck any system that tells you there's only one right way to create or one valid way to share your writing. Your story, the way you tell it, has so much value. Make people smile or piss people off or do both of those things because art is divisive and fascinating and beautiful.

Do not be discouraged if you see someone with the same idea for a fic as you! Because that's what we want--the same exact stories, over and over, through the unique lens of each writer! That's the beauty of fanfiction: you can read the same story, slightly to the left, as many times as possible!