Inu-Fiction: An Inuyasha Fanfic Blog

This is a challenging process, although we’ve found ways to streamline it and can normally get a reply out pretty quickly (like within a few days).  We do it because this is part of why AO3 exists in the first place - to provide a safe haven where users can post their works without worrying about censorship or sudden crackdowns on certain kinds of content.  We do it because this is important, and helping these users get their accounts and be able to share their works safely is why we’re here.  We hope that we’ll be able to help as many of them as possible.  

There have been a few (thankfully few, that I’ve seen) complaints about these new AO3 users not always knowing how things work - what language to tag with, or what fandom tags to use, for instance.  To this I would say:

1. Have patience and be considerate.  They are coming to a new site that they aren’t familiar with, and using it in a language they may not be expert in, and it might take a while to learn the ropes.  You can filter out works tagged in Chinese if you don’t want to see them.  Or just scroll past.  

2. You can report works tagged with the wrong language or the wrong fandom to our Policy and Abuse team using the link at the bottom of any page.  This will not cause the authors to “get in trouble” (a concern I’ve heard before, as people are reluctant to report for these reasons).  It means the Policy and Abuse team will contact them to ask them to change the language/fandom tag, and if the creator doesn’t, they can edit it directly. 

China is tightening their freedom of speech in recent years after Xi has became the chairman (he even canceled the 10 years long term of service of chairman, meaning he can stay as the leader of China as long as he lives–he has became a dictator).

They censor words that are deemed “sensitive”, you can’t type anything to criticize the chinise government. Big social media platform won’t even post the posts containing sensitive words. You don’t have the freedom of publish books without the books being approved by the government either.

To disguise this whole Ninety Eighty-Four nightmare, they started to pick on the easy target: the women and the minorities (China is getting more and more misogynistic as a result of the government trying to control their male population through encouraging them to control the female population through “chinese tradition family value” but that’s another story).

Last year, the chinese government arrested a woman who is a famous yaoi/BL novel writer named 天一 and sentenced her 10 years in jail for “selling obscene publications” and “illegal publication” (she’s not the only BL writer who got arrested. Meanwhile, multiple cases where men raped women only get about 2 years of jail time in China). It’s a warning to anyone who want to publish anything that’s “not approved” by the government that they can literally ruin you. 

Just recently the chinese government “contacted” website owners of one of their largest romance/yaoi/slash fiction sites 晉江 and announced that for now on, for the sake of a Clean Society, they can’t write anything that’s slightly “obscene”. No sex scene, no sexual interaction, they can’t even write any bodily interaction below neck (I’m not kidding here).

But that’s not their actual goal. They also listed other restriction such as: can’t write anything that’s about the government, the military, the police, “sensitive history”, “race problems”, which is… you basically can’t write anything that might be used as a tool to criticize the government (as many novels did).

This recent development really hurt the chinese fanfic writers. They can’t write anything without the fear of being put on the guillotine by the government to show their control. Most of them don’t even think that deep politically, they just want to write slash fictions. But there are no platform safe in China, that’s why the sudden influx of chinese users to AO3.

So followers! I encourage you all to be welcoming and helpful to Chinese fans joining us on ao3 and to be patient as the platform figures out how to integrate them. If any of you are Chinese speakers and are inclined to volunteer with ao3, I’m sure that would be appreciated. As for the rest of us, let’s remember that ao3 exists as a sanctuary for our community, especially exactly those parts of it that are most at risk under Chinese censorship (lgbt+ content, explicit fics, etc.) and let’s take this opportunity to be grateful that our community has worked together so well for so long in order to create this sanctuary. I’m delighted that that effort can now be helpful to Chinese fans facing censorship, and I’m excited to see how Chinese fans and fan culture will interact and co-create with English speaking fandom.

I’M D YINGGG 

“Oh you mean they weren’t made of the fire rat too? Well why didn’t you say something?”

“I did say something.”

@coquinespike  is absolutely correct that you can refer to the white undershirt he wears as a hadagi, though! That is one very appropriate word for it. It’s sometimes also called a hadajuban.   For the record, “kosode”, IS a real word for a Japanese clothing piece; however, it is an outer garment, a common form of kimono with shorter sleeves (hence “ko” for “small” in front of “sode” which means “sleeve”) compared to what say, the furisode (which  is named after its “swinging” sleeves), has. Sango sometimes wears a type of kosode, for reference, as does Rin...and many other  random commoners in the series, actually, since a kosode’s shorter sleeves are far more practical compared to furisode for people doing say, farm work.

Holy crap, I just learned that there are ways to filter fics on AO3 down to those that have only *one* pairing and those that have *no* pairings. (Give or take a few non-canonical tags that AO3 doesn’t yet recognize as ships.)

Searching for rarepairs and genfic is suddenly no longer practically impossible! 

No pairings: Put  -relationship_ids:*  in the “search within results” box

Before: 1 - 20 of 51715 Works in Loki

After: 1 - 20 of 7081 Works found in Loki

One pairing: Put  otp: true  in the “search within results” box (after clicking the pairing tag for the pairing you want first)

Before: 1 - 20 of 8852 Works in Mycroft Holmes/Greg Lestrade

After: 1 - 20 of 3980 Works found in Mycroft Holmes/Greg Lestrade

(Also really good for finding friendship fics that aren’t also tagged as relationships.)

—

Lev Grossman (via theadventuresofcargline)

This is very true - I’ve seen innumerable fanfics of people saying, “I could do this better than they did.”

And quite frequently, they do.

I posted the same meta to tumblr and I got people calling me satan.

Now don’t get me wrong, I LOVE being called satan for a meta post. Pissing people off because I slapped them in the face with EMOTIONS is deeply satisfying.

But I still very much miss having deep extended meta conversations with fans who really care about spending extended amounts of time questioning character’s motivations.

And I finally got to have that kind of in-depth interaction today on AO3 for the first time in a very long time.

And I can’t WAIT to post more meta on AO3 so I can have EVEN MORE interactions of that nature.

And now I’m angry all over again that people tried to drive my meta post off AO3.

How dare anyone tell me that AO3 is not a place for meta when clearly there are people on AO3  – a community on AO3 – who like me are fed up with corporate, fan-hostile sites like tumblr and twitter, unable to find an audience on dreamwidth, and relieved to find a haven for their ideas on AO3.

At its heart, that is what AO3 was designed to be – a haven for fannish interpretations of media (wherein the word interpretation is meant to be used as broadly and inclusively as possible). 

What really infuriates me is that this person had the gall to tell me “I’d love to read your post if you put it on tumblr, where it’s appropriate”

First off I DID post my meta to tumblr, but nobody in the fandom was able to see it because tumblr’s broken censorship algorithm fucking banned my blog from search engine results. Tumblr isn’t the “appropriate” platform for anything. Tumblr is a cesspool. Tumblr is the last resort platform you use because you lack better options, and it’s BARELY useable as it is, and becoming less useable by the day.

I’m un-banned for now, but I don’t expect to stay that way, and I don’t expect this site to even still exist in 2 years given what happened to every other formerly fandom occupied platform that failed to turn a profit for its corporate owners.

Secondly, and more importantly, how dare this stranger ask that I tailor my fanworks to their preferences like some kind of entitled shopper yelling at a checkout clerk in Target, demanding a refund on a product they bought from Walmart.

Of course! Because, y’know, what really takes up space on a website is text.

another casual reminder that some large businesses, ESPECIALLY in tech, ESPECIALLY ones owned by ya*hoo or v*rizon, seem to actively “sabotage” themselves possibly deliberately when they don’t make enough money for the CEOs’ or shareholders’ tastes, and that as we see from even brick and mortar stores like B*rnes & N*ble and T*ys R U*s, sometimes the head honchos will pretty clearly and blatantly do stupid crap that nobody “in their right mind” would seemingly do when running such a business, to deliberately drive a bus*ness into the ground so they can use loopholes to make out like bandits and that I think we pretty much all know that’s what’s going on here by now? AND SUPER CASUAL JUST SAYING REMINDER THAT

 AO3 doesn’t have ridiculous limits like that and doesn’t censor your tags or criticism of them and they literally allow for meta essays  and canon guides and such so long as they’re “fannish” in nature and effort is made to correctly categorize and tag it, they allow for image embedding (though the images need to be hosted elsewhere, please keep that in mind), and both internal and external links too, that you can literally copy paste text/images from tumblr into the Rich Text Editor on AO3 IIRC and it works, or even directly edit it in HTML view, and they have a robust user-generated tag system and ZERO bans on “adult content” or mention of female-presenting anything so long as it’s content that is ~legal to post in the United States~ and on that front too the Organization for Transformative Works literally has volunteer lawyers on staff to help make sure fans are protected from governmental overreach at least in the USA just, you know

saying HAHA ON AN UTTERLY, YOU KNOW, UNRELATED NOTE I still have like, eight extra Invites for AO3 if people need them as do other longish-term AO3 users maybe still since that was a thing they did to celebrate Hannukah a few weeks back, so pls reblog so I and others who have invites can see the requests if you need an invite to snag yourself an account

For those of you going through this for the first time: everything will be okay. Fandom always survives stuff like this. We’re good at it.

I know there’s lots of advice posts out there. This isn’t an advice post. I’m just going to tell you why it’ll be okay.

So far, on every commercial platform fandom has called home, there has come a tipping point when we leave. There have been a few scares on Tumblr before, but I didn’t think that we’d reached the tipping point back then. I do think so now. Given the way I’ve seen fandom leave platforms before, yes, this is the real thing. It won’t happen all at once, but in waves. You can afford to wait, but start thinking about it so you’re not taken by surprise when you reach your limit.

Take note of those advice posts that are going around, and especially of the things the BNFs in your fandom are planning – people will tend to follow them in clusters, so that’s a good place to start. But even if you leave it all to the last minute in the hope it won’t happen, and then realise you need to leave after all, it will still be okay.

We are fans, and the internet has always been our playpen. We all have multiple social media accounts, many with the same handle. We can find each other again. It won’t be the same. Of course it won’t. Tumblr fandom is different from Livejournal, is different from GeoCities. But it will still be fandom, it will still be good, and you will still find people you like, including some of those currently in your fannish circle.

We have the advantage of the OTW now too – this kind of thing is exactly why we built it. It’s our safe harbour, no matter what, because we own it.

Once you decide to leave Tumblr, it won’t be as scary as you think. You’ll recognise people’s handles. You’ve probably already done this without realising it – remember the people you used to share a fandom with, but no longer do? Their handles are still seared into your brain, and you’ll always feel that pang of nostalgia when you see them again.

It’s just the same when fandom migrates.

Some people will disappear, and you never will find them again. But mostly, you will still see the same handles, having the same conversations, sharing love for the same favourites, just in new places. You will find them on Dreamwidth, Pillowfort, Instagram, Twitter, Google docs, discord, fanfic.net, Wattpad, Deviant Art, YouTube, Vimeo, and so on. Most importantly, you’ll find them on Fanlore and AO3, because they are run by the OTW and we own it.

Fans and fandom will still be here long after Tumblr is full of rolling tumblrweeds.

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As a Support Staffer and Tag Wrangler for AO3, I beg you:

Separate your / and & ships / is for romantic and/or sexual relationships. & is for platonic relationships only – ones that are neither sexual nor romantic. (Pre- and Post-Relationship are still /.) & was created for those Gen fans who don’t want anything non-platonic in the ships they’re searching for. You can help both Gen fans and shippers by carefully choosing the tag that matches your work!

/ is for romantic or sexual relationships

- In particular, what stood out to me was the first result the site suggested, “ 御神体 “, (which indeed carries an alternate spelling where the first kanji is replaced by the simple phonetic “go” I should add), the pronunciation of which according Jisho, is “ ごしんたい “ or “Goshintai”. This is the definition given for the term:   “Noun 1. shintai; object of worship believed to contain the spirit of a deity, typically housed in a shrine​. Shinto term, Honorific or respectful (sonkeigo), See also 神体  “ (bolding  mine) - It’s really REALLY worth noting here that the kanji at the end of that, “ 体 “, is the part pronounced as “ たい “ (”tai”), and that part is used for  “ body, substance, object, reality, counter for images “.  The kanji at the front, which is frequently replaced with the phonetic spelling and can in some cases be dropped to form the word “shintai”? That just means “ honorable, manipulate, govern“.  - So basically a “shintai” is an object believed to contain great spiritual power from a deity or deity-like being aka a Sacred Object which connects very directly to/contains a divine source of power; thus “goshintai” (if I had to guess) is just a very Respectful way to refer to one and/or refers to a particularly important/powerful one, and the “tai” part just means “object/thing”. Literally, it goes “Goshin” = something to do with great spiritual/deity power, and “tai” = “object [that houses it]”.

Soooo basically if you replace the “tai” part of this compound word with the  “boku” (”tree”) kanji you have the “Goshinboku” term that canonical sources use to refer to that tree that Inuyasha was pinned to. I assume then that when people refer to it in translation as a “sacred tree” or even “God-Tree” they are in fact translating it about as directly as they can.  That is no ordinary tree, is what I am saying. Again, I don’t believe the arrow was normal either, and priestesses of great power, like Kikyo, who practice the (often used in sacred practices) Japanese longbow like she does, could definitely (according to native Shinto belief/Japanese folklore) have the power to use an arrow/bow “seal” things or curse/bless them in ways we in the West might consider borderline “magic”/”spells”. So that was a large part of it, I’ve no doubt. But the fact you can literally translate “goshinboku” as more or less “god-tree”, tells me that it’s not impossible that the seal was partly due to, or at least strengthened by, the particular tree she “happened” to pin him to. I say “happened” in quotes because...this was a tree within walking distance of the village/shrine she worked as a priestess in. I am not sure if it was referred to as a “goshinboku” BEFORE he was pinned to it, but I would not be surprised if that was not only the case, but the entire reason she chose to pin him to that specific tree.