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cause hes always posing a lil fruity you know

positively crying rn 🥲

you just write whatever you want, however you want. because ao3 is not a social media platform like tiktok or instagram. it’s an archive. there’s no algorithm, no going viral, no popularity contests. and writing fanfic is a hobby, it’s about passion and the joy of writing. it’s not a form of content farming.

this does not mean you should never promote your fics. obviously, you can promote them on tumblr and/or other social media platforms. seriously, promote them as many times as you want. you can use catchy summaries that will grab people’s interest too.

that said, the best way you can make sure your works reach the right target audiences is by tagging them truthfully and properly on ao3.

Have we reached a point in hyper-capitalism that kids no longer understand the difference between a labor of love and a marketable product? Have we become so brain-rotted with social media that hobbies are only for external validation, not for the self-fulfllment journey along the way?

I guess judging by how many Ai "artists/writers" there are, the answer is yes.

OP, this is like asking how not to flop in jogging. It's a hobby; you do it for your own fulfillment, and hope that maybe someone else will match your energy and become a jogging buddy so you can enjoy it together. But if you see your jogging as a failure unless you get enough people admiring you doing it, it sounds like you don't really enjoy this as a hobby. A hobby is something you enjoy for its own sake, not only as a vehicle of ego boosts from other people.

Ao3 is not the box office. There's nothing to "flop". You don't "win" or "succeed" by having a lot of kudos. There are plenty of top-kudosed fics on Ao3 that I personally don't think are that good. There are plenty of utterly unknown fics that I think are poetic masterpieces. So what if you learn some secret formula to getting lots of kudos? Will you give up your creative integrity to chase fleeting validation from strangers?

Fandom creators spend hours of their free time to create something to make fandom thrive...for free and for the love of the game.

And what do they get? A wholeass heap of fuck all. No reblogs, no comments, no nothing. And people are surprised that creators are dropping out left, right, and centre??

"Why is there no long fic anymore?" "Why did my favourite writer stop?" "Why is my favourite artist not posting anymore?"

But in general, yes. The quickfire, surface-level, use-once-and-throwaway culture permeates art these days - all glitz and no substance. My more recent style is more pared down for reasons above, but I've experimented with and celebrate other styles too - stream-of-consciousness, long rambling flowery language, everything in between.

I refuse to rearrange my writing to "hook" my readers within the first sentence and make it a blockbuster action script, and maybe I won't be able to get published traditionally due to this, but I can't deal with reducing the richness of human experience down to how desperately I can hold onto a tiktok-addicted teen's attention span.

Only in the USA have I seen such a pervasive culture of sneering at, and shaming, smart kids as "nerds" and "losers".

Insecure people hate other people instead of working on themselves. Stupid people hate smart people instead of working on their stupidity.

This is what the ruling class wants. The dumbing down of education, the constant media noise through knee-jerk reactive social media that eats up attention and kills brain cells, the eradication of liberal arts and humanities. The boot-licking of randomly thanking every soldier you meet, pledging loyalty to a flag, making tribalized sports one's personality. The brainwashing to believe that the ruling class is "just like us!"