a short selection of concepts and phrases that used to be commonplace in fandom and we’d really benefit from making that a thing again:

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.

(definitions lifted more or less wholesale from fanlore’s relevant pages)

bring the healthy fun back to fandom!

If ever a time comes when I don’t reblog this when it appears on my dash, assume I’m dead

I wondered about the big belly a lot after I heard it criticized. I knew he was possessed, but I didn’t realize he was also a zombie. The beating heart at the end made me think he’d been straight up resurrected, but if the restless spirits did a half-assed job of that it explains a lot.

Foe fiction is probably my relationship with Elden Ring. I just wanna kill everything for being so difficult while the previews and the demos made it look like it might - for the first time in a Soulsborne - let you be powerful without the grind.

Then it came out and actually being able to carry stuff was a separate stat from being able to use it and all the other stuff I hated too much about past Soulsbornes to ever consider them.

A redux of the Mercury Theater's The War of the Worlds with a kaiju 7 years before Godzilla... can't believe I've never heard of this

HOW HAVE I NEVER HEARD OF THIS?!!

Okay, giving it some more thought I’ve put together a flowchart that IMO kind of illuminates how Godzilla came to be and, based on this new info, FINALLY draws a line between 1941′s The Arctic Giant and the original Godzilla that nobody has really been able to do before:

Okay, so basically:

WVTR’s Sea Monster radio play is the missing link in Godzilla’s DNA.

It’s already well-known that The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and the original King Kong were strong influences on Godzilla - both films got released and re-released in Japan not long before development of the film got started, and the original working title of the movie (The Giant Monster from 20,000 Miles Beneath the Sea) is clearly inspired by Beast.

But now we have WTVR’s radio play!  Based on the description, the play is explicitly a remake of the War of the Worlds radio play (thus the breathless documentary-style reporting of the military engaging with an unstoppable enemy as it wreaks havoc on a major city) but a very (IMO) significant point is the revelation that the “Sea Monster” is revealed to be a parody of the the dragon from 1941′s The Reluctant Dragon.  That means the creators were drawing their inspiration from cartoons, and considering anyone familiar with The Reluctant Dragon should have also been familiar with The Arctic Giant (the Superman cartoon having been very popular in America) it’s pretty easy to deduce how the US servicemen who wrote the radio play brainstormed it:  it’s an adaptation of The Arctic Giant in the style of War of the Worlds, with a reference to The Reluctant Dragon tossed in as a funny conclusion.  (And it’s not hard to see how they drew a line between the two, since not only did the two cartoons come out barely a year apart the two characters - the Giant and the Dragon - actually LOOK fairly similar in character design).

And that, I propose, is where the core of Godzilla as a character comes from: this radio play.  The general plot of Godzilla is clearly derived from Beast, but while King Kong obviously was an influence it’s the WVTR Sea Monster radio play that really is what Godzilla as a whole is trying to be.  I think when Tomoyuki Tanaka was looking out that airplane window and thinking of a sea monster rising from it, what he was really thinking of was remembering this long-forgotten radio play and the minor panic it caused in Tokyo only six and a half years earlier.

@tyrantisterror​, @scatha5​, @glarnboudin​ - I feel like the three of you would like to see this if you don’t know about it already.

I have read (and possibly written) enough unhinged Skyrim fanfiction that I can hear Serana saying this.

Reblogging again

So much this

You know, kudos and comments are much beloved by all esp. yrs truly, but I have to say: I’ve been posting fic for 20 years, and I have never in my entire life had a story stay above a 1:9 kudos to hits ratio (or comments to hits, back when kudo wasn’t an option). Usually they don’t stay above 1:10, once they’ve been around for a few weeks.

I also have a working background in online marketing. In social media 1:10 is what you would call a solid engagement score, when people actually care about your product (as opposed to “liking” your Facebook page so they could join a contest or whatever). If BNFs are getting 1:5 - and I do sometimes see it - that is sky-high engagement. Take any celebrity; take Harry Styles, who has just under 30M followers and doesn’t tweet all that often. He regularly gets 3-400K likes, 1-200K retweets. I’ve seen him get up to just under 1M likes on a tweet. That’s a 1:30 engagement ratio, for Harry Styles, and though some of you guys enjoy my fics and have said so, I don’t think you have as lasting a relationship with my stories as Harry Styles’s fans do with him. XD;

Again, this is not to say we, as readers, should all go home and not bother to kudo or comment or engage with fic writers. That definitely is a recipe for discouraging what you want to see in future. But this is not the first post I’ve seen that suggests a 20% kudo ratio is the equivalent of yelling into the void, and I’m worried that we as writers are discouraging ourselves because our expectations are out of whack.

I think about this a lot, because it’s important to know what a realistic goal to expect from an audience is, even though I admit it definitely is kind of depressing when you look at the numbers. I was doing reading on what sort of money you can expect to make from a successful webcomic, and the general rule of thumb seems to be that if your merchandising is meshing well with your audience, about 1% will give you merch. I imagine ‘subscribe to patreon’ also falls in this general range. 

Stuff that is ONLY available for dollars are obviously going to have a different way of measuring this, but when it comes to ‘If people can consume something without engaging back in any fashion (hitting a like button, buying something, leaving a comment)’ the vast majority will.

And as a creator that is frustrating but as a consumer it’s pretty easy to see how it happens. I have gotten steadily worse at even liking posts, much less leaving comments on ones I enjoy, since I started using tumblr. It’s very difficult to engage consistently. I always kudo on any fanfic I read and comment on the vast majority, but then again I don’t read a lot of fanfic, if you are someone who browses AO3 constantly/regularly for months or years, I could see how it’s easy to stop engaging. I don’t remember to like every YT video or tumblr fanart I see, much less comment on them.

When we are constantly consuming free content it’s hard to remember to engage with it or what that engagement means to the creators. And lol, honestly that sucks. Certainly as consumers we should be better about it. But also like, as a creator be kinder to yourself by setting a realistic bar of what you can achieve. 

And IMO, if numbers matter to you (kudos, comments, etc) be honest about the fact that you CAN improve those things by marketing yourself better. The ‘I just produced my art and put it out there and got insanely popular because it was just so brilliant’ is less than a one a million chance. Lots of amazing content is overlooked every day because there is a lot of good content and a metric fuckton of mediocre to bad content. You can only SORT of judge the quality of your work based on the audience it generates, but if what you WANT is an audience there is way, way, WAY more you can be doing than simply producing whatever you immediately feel like. Marketing yourself is a skill and if you want the benefits of it you have to practice it.

I have a professional background in internet marketing as my day job and a moderate hobby business. My definition for “moderate” is “it pays for itself, keeps me in product, and occasionally buys groceries.”

In the day job, which is for an extremely large global company, there are entire teams of people whose entire purpose of employment is to ensure a 3% conversion rate. That’s it. That is for a Fortune 100 company: the success metric is for 3% of all visitors to a marketing web site to click the “send me more info” link.

My moderate business that pays for itself has a 0.94% conversion rate of views to orders. Less than 1%, and it’s still worth its time – and this is without me bothering to do any marketing beyond instagram and tumblr posts with new product.

I know it feels like no one is paying attention to you and you’re wasting your time if you don’t get everyone clicking kudos or commenting but I promise, I PROMISE, you are doing fantastically, amazingly well with your 10% rate. You probably aren’t going to go viral AND THAT’S FINE. You’re only hurting yourself if you’re expecting a greater return – don’t call yourself a failure, because you’re NOT. You’re just looking at it the wrong way. I promise, you’re lovely just the way you are.

Reblogging this bc it is a take on fan engagement at AO3 that I haven’t seen before, and as a writer I find it helpful to have this reality check. Also I wonder which came first: the overall low engagement rates in internet commerce, or the freaking shit-ton of unwanted spam and advertising we’re constantly bombarded with?

I think as writers our assumption (my assumption anyway) is that the portion of hits that don’t convert to kudos equals the portion of readers who looked at your fic, didn’t like it, and never finished it. But it would seem that is an overly pessimistic assumption. 

I should know this, because I ‘like’ very sparingly here and reblog only less sparingly, and yet I read and enjoy a lot of posts I don’t like or reblog. 

#also something that is really obvious that none of this points out#(probably someone did somewhere in the notes but I do have a life)#your hit count will go up by virtue of PEOPLE REREADING YOUR FIC#a hit count disproportionate to kudos/comments#which are things that are only really done once #is INEVITABLE#and a GOOD thing #people rereading your fic is a good thing

Also, while I will always defend people’s right to take down their work if they want to, I will point out that taking your work down simply because you think it didn’t get enough engagement prevents you from having the experience of seeing it slowly grow over time. You’re doing the equivalent of cancelling a TV show that doesn’t have an amazingly successful pilot episode, without waiting to see if it gains a devoted following by mid-season. It’s short-sighted. It means you’re not going to potentially have the pleasure of someone commenting on it 5 or 10 years later to explain that it was their favourite story, that they re-read it 20 times, that they shared it with their friends, or even just that they’re so glad they found it on that specific day, years after you posted it. You might not even have the pleasure of going back to re-read it yourself and see how you’ve progressed as a writer.

AO3 is an archive - it’s there to preserve fanfic. It has longevity, and if you leave your works there, they can have longevity too. And you never know when something is going to be rediscovered, or who it might mean something to (including yourself).

Due to RL shenanigans, and my brain not working correctly, the last piece of fanfic I published was probably about five years ago? But it is still such a pleasure to get a random kudos from someone in my inbox, sometimes for stuff I wrote at the turn of the century!

The point about people rereading stories they love, or calling the link back up on their web browser to send to a friend, is really key here. If I find myself going back to a story again and again and getting the “you have already left kudos here” message, I try to at least leave a little comment to tell them that it is a favorite.

But yeah, 1:10 engagement is super freaking good for any kind of web content. So yes, as a reader, leave your kudos and comment whenever you can, but also remind yourself as a writer to keep your expectations within the realm of likelihood. 💛

i split it

#i homewreck it

why on earth would it not be shipwreck

you are CORRECT and i am incredibly embarrassed rn

“I shipwreck it” is the perfect way to encapsulate the sentiment, but I’d like to get ahead of the demand and declare that an author who writes this brand of fanfic be called an iceberg for sinking so many ships!

Me: “This offends me as a fan of revenge tropes!”

#yes!!!!!! its not that sam’s contributions shouldn’t be appreciated #but frodo bore like impossible psychological torment and despair #and yet clowns still act like this because #he does actually crack and struggle under the stress #and he doesn’t have some aragorn style battle scene #but GO OFF i guess

“Frodo deserved all honour because he spent every drop of his power of will and body, and that was just sufficient to bring him to the destined point, and no further. Few others, possibly no others of his time, would have got so far.” –J. R. R. Tolkien, Letter 192

Let’s be real, at least half the reason people refuse to see Frodo as the “real hero” of the story is because he actively chooses non-violence and mercy. 

I remember some YouTube commenter writing “Frodo is so overrated, he never even kills anyone” and if that doesn’t win the award for Most Impressive Failure to Get the Point, I’m not sure what does. 

#tbh I adore sam gamgee#but he would throw hands if he knew people were praising him by putting frodo down via @the-artifice-of-eternity

some little hobbit child listening to a story: geez did Frodo even do anything

all the adults in the room: no doN’T

samwise gamgee vaulting in through the window: FIRST OF ALL

Hot Take time:

Neither of them is a hero.

They are two halves of a single hero. (No, this is not a joke about being hobbit-sized.)

Frodo is the one who has to bear the mental torture and hardship of the Ring–but without Sam, he couldn’t have. Who is there to offer a joke, a smile, a hug, an unjudging ear, an extra bite of bread when Frodo looks peaky and ill, a doubled-up bedroll when it’s too cold for a small hobbit used to a good hole with a warm fire? Frodo would have failed long before he reached Mount Doom without Sam to cheer him on.

Likewise: Sam could never have made the journey alone. He doesn’t have Frodo’s mental strength. But he’s a gardener: his job is to make things grow, to nurture them and make them flourish. Who is there to give him a purpose as he travels across a land so big, so far, hoping to save his home?

Separate the pair of them, and neither would have made it. Frodo needed the shelter of Sam’s heart in order to find his way–and Sam needed a leader.

It’s literally love and friendship and camaraderie that save Middle Earth. Neither could be the chosen one alone.

It’s literally love and friendship and camaraderie that saved Middle Earth. Neither could be the chosen one alone.

And that was, in fact, Tolkien’s entire point.