If you’ll allow me to be blunt and discoursepost for a second, I think that some of the responses to wattpad people complaining about certain aspects of ao3 (fanfiction only, an archive and not a social media, etc) recently are a little bit unserious because writing original stuff on the internet is objectively more difficult than writing fanfiction. This is not to say that there should not be spaces for fanfiction, or to pass judgement on fanfiction, but it bears remembering before sneering at people complaining about ao3 being mostly fanfiction that there really isn’t an equivalent of ao3 for original writing, so being nasty to people who wish that a massive site for hosting longform writing also had a bigger community of people writing original work is just a bit callous innit

To make an analogy, I’ve seen people on twitter saying that wattpad people’s complaints that very few people are writing book-length original work on ao3 is like walking into an italian restaurant and complaining that they serve italian food there. As someone who’s used both sites, and used ao3 for original work before, I think it’s actually a bit more like if the only italian restaurant that served pasta in the entire city shut down and you were left choosing between italian places which only serve pizza and maybe 1 pasta dish every 3 weeks, and they won’t be happy if you order it. And yes I’ve seen some people saying to just go to the library if you want original work, but where does that leave writers, or people who actively enjoy the online and amateur parts of the original fiction on wattpad? Like, to be totally blunt fanfiction writers just aren’t the oppressed class in this situation and anyone acting like they are is making them look really bad

the prophecy (1995)

recently I've been noticing the sun setting earlier than it used to. enshittification?