To save you, I could do anything

It's not weird that we are here! There are SO MANY OF US! We're not outliers, we're not oddballs. We are occupying a space we CREATED and we are still fucking here, having fun with all our younger online friends, which is COOL AND GOOD and NOT EMBARRASSING ACTUALLY. It's fucking rad.

Look. We *built* online fandom, comrades! We built it with Angelfire and Geocities and the fucking telephone cables we unhooked from our phones to plug into our enormous, boxy desktop computers to suffer through glacial download speeds that today's children can't even fathom. I think we should all agree to stop apologizing for being here when this is our fucking house. An excellent sentiment (not mine):

To all of my beloved young friends - remember this when you get older. You don't need to grow out of fandom. Who the fuck cares if it's cringe? Childlike joy is something to CELEBRATE, NOT SOMETHING TO BURY AND HIDE!

sees some incest mpreg

No transphobes allowed, only transborbs.

Check out my stuff!

"in the age of no body shaming, there is still one thing you're allowed to body shame apparently, and that is men with small dicks. Greta Thunberg was arguing on Twitter with a guy called Andrew Tate, who is on house arrest in Romania, for sex trafficking. Do you know what she said? 'you have small dick energy'. She could have said 'Andrew, you're on house arrest, in Romania, for sex trafficking' but apparently on the list of crimes that rates below having a small dick."

May I present the best apple:

For years after 9/11 we were constantly told “NEVER FORGET” and the idea was basically “keep feeling sad and afraid and especially ANGRY forever; don’t let time dull your emotional response like it’s naturally supposed to; continue to justify the injustices by feeling this way all the time.” And the 3000 deaths were constantly pointed to as this huge deal that justified any lengths to go to.

And then Covid hit. And there were several points during the height of the pandemic (because fun fact, according to the actual definitions of a pandemic, *it’s not technically over yet!* ) where we were having a 9/11’s worth of deaths every week or so. And suddenly 3000 deaths were not a big deal at all. Instead of being enough reason to go to war far away and strip us at home of many rights too, they weren’t even enough justification to make people wear a damn piece of fabric over their face.

3000 people died once and now the government can legally wiretap anyone without a warrant, and hold people at Gitmo under suspicion of terrorism (no need for due process)… 3000 people dying every week but we should all still be going out to brunch and concerts and who cares about the disabled and immunocompromised?

"*****smut marked with asterisks so you can skip!*****""

Don't. Don't do this.

You let readers know what your fic contains through proper tagging and rating. Content warning notes at the top of the chatter are also great. You can even summarize key "this is the plot relevant stuff you missed of you're skipping this chapter" notes at the bottom too! This is a much smoother reading experience.

This is HELL on screen readers which is a disability access issue. Screen readers will read out every single asterisk you put, which I have seen done as entire page breaks. It's an awful reading experience. Please just don't.

Readers do not need their hands held through the reading experience. If they're enjoying the fic but don't care for smut, they can just skim until it gets interesting again. If they REALLY don't like smut, you warned them. There's a back button. You don't have to do a special song and dance isolating out the specific parts you think might be "icky". (If you think those bits are icky and don't like writing them, consider just don't! Fanfic is a hobby we do for fun and you don't have to write anything you don't find enjoyable. There's plenty of readers for gen fic and smut free ship fic).

Please, please don't try to span the entire page with whatever symbol you're using for your scene breaks. It takes an eternity for screen years to get through, and typically has me noping out of even the most interesting stores.

Instead, use just three (or fewer) make. Three is standard, and does the job without making your story unreadable.

It is hell

It is absolute hell

From navigation to listening to the voices

It's just awful

Since then I've tried to write with screen readers in mind because the number of websites that think about accessibility is SO SO SMALL

If you don't believe me, use NVDA which is a free accessibility tool. Otherwise you have to spend thousands of dollars for a slightly better one. Then try to navigate a website.