Would it be okay to print out the ofau? At some point I would like to reformat it and put it on my shelf with my other favorite fanfic fics, but also having it as over 70 pieces of loose paper held together by a hope and prayer is really funny to me. I also just want to force my friends to read it! (They still don’t understand the difference between a slash parring and an & parring; wattpad users.)
(Yes this is also the anon that downloaded the fic on a roadtrip and accidentally preserved it. And the on that asks for update every so often (sorry))
This is the most Tumblr thing that's ever happened to me. Okay list time!
(this is kind of a ramble so look for the bold text for my main points. TLDR is at the end if you only gaf about my terms and conditions.)
Old Friends AU is currently being rewritten. Like, right now. I was literally thinking about plugging my phone in and continuing chapter 4 so I could get some charge on my phone before bed. It is happening, I've already wrote a timeline synopsis, every character has a birthdate and a middle name––OFAU is back in business. I have no idea when I'll post the first installment––I plan to post OFAU by decade, and each chapter title will be MM/YYYY, but I am currently still writing the group's first two college years––but now that I've been reassured people still actually give a fuck, I'll consider posting snippets, whether it be from the fic drafts, or one of the outlines. OFAU is coming back, do not worry.
The original Old Friends AU is in a strangely endearing part of my heart. I have so many good memories of writing and releasing it, not to mention all the love I've gotten from friends in Discord, but there are two big, glaring issues that made me take it all down and try again. The first issue is the source material. FNaF is one of the most unique pieces of media, in that, the story is interesting because we don't know the story. That makes canon really fun to engage with, but really difficult to derive alternate retellings of. Secret of the Mimic literally picked OFAU up by the ankles and shook it upside down for lunch money. It changed everything about how I thought FazEnt was founded. The year between SOTM and now has also resulted in my beliefs about the Clickteam Era lore becoming completely different, and that shakes up character motivations like a motherfucker. The second issue I have with the original OFAU is how I handled mental illness, familial instability, and period accuracy. Yes, it's nice to read about a tragic serial killer disavowing violence and instead choosing to fight for his happiness, but I didn't actually write any of the fighting part of that. Everybody was always too chill with each others' problems, and most of the tension came from anxiety stemming from experiences I have never gone through personally. I fumbled my way through my perception of what I thought went on in broken homes, and ended up with characters using Therapy Speak™ and grounding techniques despite never having gone to therapy a day in their lives, let alone the fact that this mostly takes place under the fucking Regan Administration. I wrote what I thought was the logical thing to do in tense situations with characters who are not logically motivated in the slightest, living in a society that enabled ignorance and excused the abuse that came from it. This time around, I'm really trying my best to channel the whole "I hate everyone for not loving me the way my parents should've and it's also the 80s" vibe that I steamrolled over the first time around.
I love media preservation, and I'm glad to know that if Google Docs shits itself and explodes someday, there's at least someone out there I can reasonably contact for copies of media from my childhood. I'm a very sentimental person despite all the fuckups I can make, and my childhood is especially important to me, down to the very last day I was 17. If I recall correctly, most of the original OFAU was written when I was between age 15 and age 17. My sentimentality over my childhood also means that I am very protective of the things that were a part of it. All that I ask is that, if you do make OFAU physical, please be careful with how and where you share it, especially who you share it with. This kind of feels like letting someone make and print copies of my sketchbook. Like, yeah, I'm happy that someone cares enough about me to preserve my creations, but there's also a lot of vulnerability and obliviousness in that art that could end up in front of the wrong audience, and in the era of anti-intellectualism, that means I could be in danger just because the wrong person saw my work and didn't have the knowledge or emotional maturity to keep scrolling. I don't need your copies of OFAU to spread so far that they end up in the hands of people who think that depicting William Afton as a loving parent is morally on-par with child abuse, because those people really do exist, and as someone who grew up finding stability and love in grandparents who did not provide the same to their kids (my parents), that is WEIRD and INCORRECT.
TL,DR: Keeping downloaded copies of my delisted fanfictions is allowed. Digitally sharing those downloads online and/or digitally storing those downloads on a cloud service is prohibited (this means that no one should have access to the files unless they get access to your local storage, in which case your computer is in someone else's possession, or it has malware installed). If physical copies of these aforementioned downloads are made, they are to ALWAYS be in the possession of the person who first printed them, and printed versions are NOT to be scanned to create additional copies. Digital duplicates of the downloaded files are allowed (since I don't trust cloud service security, but I do believe in creating back-ups). If I want someone to have a fanfiction of mine that is no longer publicly accessible on the internet, I'll give it to them myself, and this includes social media posts. You can chat about my delisted work all you want, just don't send entire paragraphs to people, or post them online. Also, don't reupload my delisted work as your own, or feed it into generative AI––obvious rules are obvious.
Anyways, if you love my work so much to the point where you wanna share it with others, please share my NEW work (once I make it public)! Although I am currently struggling with finding a job in time to pay for my phone bill (which I do have commissions open for on my main blog), that still leaves a lot of hours left in a day, and you best believe I'm spending most of them doing FNaF shit, including rewriting OFAU, so if life doesn't fuck me over any more than it's threatening to, I should be good enough to upload chapter 1 sometime soon. This post has taken me two hours to write. Thank you for enjoying my work, stay tuned for more, and wear your seatbelt. Goodnight. (Or good morning? It's almost 4 AM. Eugh.)
(if anyone wants to peek behind the curtain of OFAU, join my fnaf server)
