Fanfiction Writing Advice And OC Review

and no, this isn’t me saying “write that messed up, disgusting thing” because while, yes, write it if it’s what you want (I myself enjoy writing dark fics, something I believe would be considered “vile” to a lot of people), this is me saying in a world of censorship and capitalism, ao3 really is a treasure.

See that bit at the bottom? Don't do that. Insert ParamedicGuy.gif going "Don't."

Other malicious spam comments I've gotten seemed designed to make an author question their writing, or outright encourage them to delete their stories from AO3. This one is different, in that it tries to get you to destroy the work on your own computer.

If you ran that command, it basically locates your Documents folder, then deletes everything in it, including all subfolders. It also does it without any prompt, so you have no chance to second guess your actions.

This is just fucking trolling.

Coincidentally, we just did training on a cyberattack similar to this, called a ClickFix attack. You can read about how that works here.

As a general rule, if ANYONE or ANY WEBSITE tells you unsolicited* to do anything in Powershell, CMD RUN, command prompt, shell command, or something similar, DON'T.

*There are legit reasons for running commands in PowerShell or the command prompt, but in those cases you are likely seeking out a solution to a problem you are already experiencing. Don't just run random commands on your computer as recommended by some unlogged-in guest on a fan fiction site.

Always think and consider before taking action, and get a second opinion from a trusted source. When I got this comment I was pretty sure what the command would do, and it took me about three seconds of googling to confirm it.

All of these things, starting with making people delete their stories from AO3 to now this, are all specifically designed to kill any digital paper trail so people can steal and make money off your fanfictions by just scrubbing the serial numbers off (and probably training AI on them).

These scammers have realized that even if people delete the stories off of AO3, authors can still prove that they are the original owner of the story by having locally stored documents that prove when the story was originally written.

Sorry, but that isn´t just trolling. This is a command that could VERY EASILY ruin a person´s life if they don´t second guess it. It is malicious and irreversible unless you have every single thing backed up elsewhere (some people have backups for important stuff but not everything and most people might not even have backups for all of the important things)

Logic: Characters, just like real people, are mallable. There is typically very little that's so truly, heinously out of character that you absolutely cannot make it work under any circumstance. In addition, most fans are also willing to accept characterization stretches if it makes the fic work. Yeah, we all know the villain and the hero wouldn't cuddle for warmth in canon. But if they did do that, how would they do it?

What counts is often not so much 'would the character do this?' and more 'if the character did do this, how would they do it?' If you get 'how' part right, your readers will probably be willing to buy the rest, because it will still feel like their favourite character. But if it doesn't feel like the character anymore, why are they even reading the fic?

But it was along the lines of "instead of asking whether something is out of character, ask 'what would it take for this character to do this'"

I like to leave very long rambling comments on people's fics and that has actually netted me some very real, genuine friendships and we've become cheerleaders for each other. My friend has a D&D Podcast that she doesn't get ANY sort of engagement out of, so I started listening to it at work and livereacting the things I enjoy about it and showing her my investment and it makes her very happy and it makes me happy that she's happy.

“college is absolutely nothing like this” “why are we writing four people on the team scoring a hat trick in one game” “so tech work is nothing like this, hope that helps!”

Most scams want you to panic.

I want you to take a second and breathe. Did you give AO3 your address when you made your profile? Is your address associated, openly, on the internet, with your personal business (i.e name, phone number, address, etc)? How would a person have found out that your email address is associated with an AO3 account?

The answer to the first question is, no. I have an AO3. They never asked for my address. They don't need that information for me to have an account.

The answer to the second question, for the vast majority of the internet, I'm going to reasonably assume, is also no. If you're using, like, your whatever-professional certificate/license associated email address for your AO3......uhh, stop that? We use personal emails for recreation, you goose.

See? Logic defeats a scam almost every time.

You wanna write create some fantasy creatures but don’t know where to start? Go check out some videos The Weird Creatures Earth has Had.

Want some inspiration for your Super Evil Villain’s Villanous Deeds?

Or maybe you want some weird locations to kick start your Fantasy World Terraforming?

Or maybe you need knowledge of bunches of historical places and cities and cultures?

But maybe you’re basing fantasy on the modern world?

Okay but lets say you want to start from the same inspiration as GRRM? (and part two!)

That’s just the stuff I could quickly grab. Things I’m subscribed to, that I know offhand. There is So. Much. Stuff. Online.

not mine. found on reddit, but my god scam bots on ao3 are both embarrassing and hilarious 😭 I was told their usual goal was to either get users’ personal informations/money through fake commissions or get them to delete their fics so that these bots could ‘safely steal their works to train their ai without writers being able to claim ownerships of their own works since the original sources were deleted’ but I don’t even know what the point of this is. just to scare people for fun? because some people might unfortunately believe them. just to troll?

I was also told that if they were commenting as a guest comment, they sometimes used the urls of random innocent and legit users (since anyone can use any name they want if they’re commenting as a guest user), which is just bad for the innocent users who were impersonated by these losers.

anyway, if you got a comment like this, report them for scam.

it’s also important now more than ever for us all to leave nice comments on the fics we like. with the rise of scam bots plaguing ao3’s comments section, getting a genuine, nice comment from a real person means so much to writers who gave us these wonderful fics to enjoy for free.

AO3 are archiving all the fanfic from the 1990s paper-and-ink fanzine DTA (Dreaming the Answers), published by cj2017 and me. But it's been 1000000 years and we no longer have current contact details for any of the authors!

If your fic was published in DTA and you want updated username/contact info adding or your username removing, or you don't want your fic to be archived at all, please contact the Open Doors project and let them know, or contact me. More info is here on the announcement post on AO3.

it means “i know the contents of this bag (a dead dove) may be upsetting, so i have labeled the outside very clearly with what is inside (a dead dove), and if you look inside, you should not be surprised to find a dead dove, because that’s what the label very explicitly says is inside the bag”

i realize this is a losing battle because enough people have made it mean the other thing as to make the tag totally useless, but seeing people argue over what it should mean gives me a headache because it literally could not be clearer

Before fic tagging was common, fics weren’t tagged. You had a pairing, if applicable, an author’s note about genre or general content, and if they were feeling charitable, a vague content warning. There are even a few genres of fic where even vaguely tagging literally spoils the plot and impact (such as horror, psyche thriller, in which the likely content is implicit to the genre). As a result, there is a basic category tag that permits this, as a courtesy to “old-fashioned” writers.

“No Archive Warnings Apply” means the fic is PG13 at worst, probably fluff, totally safe.

“Choose Not to Use Archive Warnings” is the polar opposite. It’s a glaring Enter at Your Own Risk billboard. It means: a shitload of warnings apply but I ain’t telling because this story requires shock value. It’s very important to read the author’s notes for those fics because they might be using that older format from above.

graphic depictions of violence

major character death

underage

rape/non-con