Old Self-Shipping Lady

NOTP: the opposite of an OTP (One True Pairing). It is a ship a fan strongly dislikes. The word is a portmanteau of ‘no’ and ‘OTP’ and thus is not a contraction of any particular phrase.

Squick: anything that is a deep-seated, visceral turn-off. Squicks may be shared by many fans or be specific to one; one person’s kink may be another person’s squick.

YKINMKATO, or kink-tomato: Your Kink Is Not My Kink, And That’s Okay: used to indicate support for fannish diversity and to distinguish between disapproval or kink shaming and simply having different taste.

DLDR: Don’t Like, Don’t Read: a phrase used to warn against complaints about an aspect of fic or meta. A “live and let live” philosophy of fandom, which places the responsability for avoiding content one doesn’t want to see on the side of the fanwork consumer, rather that on the creator’s.

SALS: Ship And Let Ship: similar to the above specifically about shipping tastes.

YMMV: Your Mileage May Vary: a phrase used to acknowledge that any given individual’s personal opinion on the topic at hand may differ due to their own tastes, standards, values, experiences, etc.

As the OP points out, all of these crucially imply no moral judgment of what they’re designing.

Even if you get a romantic partner in real life, you still always have your platonic f/o’s.

Even if you keep your romantic f/o’s, that okay, too. Why? Because they’re fictional characters. You’re not ‘cheating’ on your partner by still loving your f/o’s.

Even if you’re ‘getting older’. Who cares? If they bring you comfort, keep them. They help.

I swear to god after like a week people will still be reading but nobody leaves comments anymore and I just want to make it absolutely clear that I would be excited and elated to get a comment on these fics one hundred years after I post them.

Your feelings are this beautiful garden of flora inside of your chest. When you express how you feel honestly, you allow for it to grow freely. But when you hide how you feel out of fear of rejection, and try to make it smaller and smaller, the flowers become cramped inside of you, until you choke on your own feelings. Every flower you cough up is something you’ve felt, but refused to say.

The whole “dying” thing is intended to be more symbolic especially. You’re killing off bits and pieces of yourself and how you feel, because you’re afraid to express yourself.

It’s not really supposed to be, “The one I love doesn’t love me back, and I’m dying from it.” Rather, it’s more along the lines of, “Repressing your emotions is bad for you, and it’s better and healthier to express them freely, even when it’s scary.”

Which is to say that, one, the cure for the disease should be telling the person that you are in love with how you feel. How the other person feels about the person afflicted should have nothing to do with it, as the trope is meant to be about feeling your emotions unapologetically.

And that, two, it’s not an inherently romantic trope. Obviously, it has romantic applications, but it can be written for any situation where a character is hiding how they truly feel. This can include a refusal to address a specific trauma, a desire to indulge in something that they’re ashamed of, and even really practical things, like wanting to ask one’s boss for a higher position.

Although (as an aromantic person myself) I don’t agree with this conclusion about the trope, this application would also avoid people calling it arophobic. When the thing killing the character is a refusal to be honest with themselves, rather than an unrequited love, it’s on nobody’s hands but their own to save their life.

(not to mention that this isn't fic of a fic, its literally finishing someone's writing)

No, you should never do this. Author's put a lot into writing those works, using an A.I to finish them would never be the same as them finishing the fic. An A.I can only "add" from what it knows from scrubbing works that people do not consent to.

Do not use A.I to finish fics that authors abandoned or haven't finished. That is super disrespectful to them.

I understand wanting to see a fic finished and wanting to know the outcome but doing it with A.I would never fulfill that for you. It's merely guessing and adding from multiple different things/works that it's stolen from and might not even make sense. It doesn't know what direction the author was going in, it doesn't know the twists and turns the author was going to add, it doesn't know anything about the author.

An A.I generated fic is Completely Different from a fan-made art or fic based off your work. It's Completely Different than someone asking to finish your work themselves.

A.I is not a "cool way to finish unfinished fics" .

Please don't use A.I on fics just because you are curious about the ending.

It will never be the same as actual human writing. And it is super disrespectful to authors who put time and care into their work.

Sorry if this comes off annoyed, I just really don't like this whole A.I writing fanfic thing lol

Calling it AI is just the dude bro way of making it sound more than it is. It's theft. It's just plain theft.

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Or even if the author hasn’t updated in a few months (which is common for me given my current life situation) and is a major assumption on the part of the reader. I had one person try to add a fic of mine to an “abandoned works” collection, and it pissed me off.

Unless you have explicit permission from the author, it’s unacceptable. And even then, you need to be up front about using “AI” because that’s a whole other can of worms.

“Oh but I can’t write!” And I can’t draw, but that doesn’t mean I shove a bunch of fanart into the AI grinder and act like what comes out is mine.

There's such recency bias in fandom. As an author you post something, get a few reactions, and then it goes off into the bin. As a reader you check the tags, see what's new, and move on. But a lot of old stuff is really good. It's just sitting there, gathering dust, waiting for someone to take a peek.

So go on. Treat yourself.