Silence Magnifies Sound

(this came out of a conversation in the comments on a previous post about an author threatening to stop updating a fic because of lack of engagement)

So there’s this idea that fic writers should write for themselves and not care too much about stats or engagement,

and i totally get the sentiment behind that. if writing becomes entirely about stats and external validation, something important does get lost - creative freedom and joy, conviction in your own writing

but i also think:

“i write for myself, but i post for others.”

because posting fic is not only self-expression. it’s social. ao3 is called an archive, but emotionally it often functions as a community space.

people post for connection, for participation, for others to bear witness to their pain and trauma and grief,

and i don’t think most people are asking to be admired so much as acknowledged. there’s something deeply human about wanting another person to encounter something that mattered to you and go:

“ok, yeah, I see what you were trying to say. I see you.”

especially because fanfic is often people processing very real feelings through fictional characters at a safe distance, one step removed,

and then uploading that deeply personal thing into a shared archive and hoping somebody else might connect with it.

And i think that’s why it hurts so much when you summon up the courage and post a fic into the void and you get nothing back,

and then it’s like,

> disables a new AI feature that was turned on by default

> opens my email

> disables a new AI feature that was turned on by default

> launches a software

writing “long” paragraphs is not a sign of AI — it’s a common narrative choice many writers make both in fanfiction and in traditionally published novels, and AI stole it from us.

using an em dash is not a sign of AI. it’s a stylistic sentence choice that’s been an option in place of commas and semicolons for a very long time, and AI stole it from us.

long sentence structures are not a sign of AI, but are yet another stylistic choice writers often make to create a cadence and tone that mimics the flow of poetry, and AI stole it from us.

“YA narrative breaks”? i don’t even know what the fuck this means, but i can guarantee that AI stole it from us.

italics are once again a stylistic choice that many writers love to use to create emphasis, and it’s a more stylistically acceptable and traditional form of emphasis than bold or underline text. oh, and just to be extra clear: AI STOLE IT FROM US.

stop creating fandom witch hunts over AI when you know fuck all about what it means to sit and write a story, and to spend hours fiddling with sentence structure and dialogue to get the exact right tone. writers will stop writing out of fear that their work “sounds like AI” — IT DOESNT! AI STOLE FROM US! AI SOUNDS LIKE US! — and after a while, all that will be available on AO3 is shitty AI-generated fanfiction.

because yeah, people are going to continue to use AI to write fanfiction whether you “call them out” or not. but making a laughable thread on X that uses asinine criteria is not going to fix that problem. it will just push the real writers out because people will accuse them of using AI when they haven’t, and they will (rightfully) stop writing for spaces that attack them.