/bl/ - General BL

>>4398
Most of this would be fixed if canon divergence didn't imply AU. If it's set in the same universe and most of the same events apply I want to see it in my search.

Is there any pairing/fandom you always return after some time of exploring other things?
For me it’s canon ACD johnlock, not only because there is plenty of fanfics about It, exploring many different settings (not in an Alternative Universe way) but also because I’m always satisfied with what I find after 5-10 minutes exploring.

>>4398
I read so much Canon Divergence but for fandoms where there's literally 100 Mer AUs or "no powers" I hate the idea of filtering out AU.

Marvel is the worst for this. Because the whole universe is an AU of an AU

>>4400
I will always return to FF15 and see if anyone's written anything new for the fandom. The popularity is at its lowest but the universe is the best for fanfic because the game is 25% plot, 75% camping and exploring. One of the hardest things to write in a tight storyline where something's always keeping the narrative in motion is finding when something can happen. Even with 0 sidequesting the downtime is so massive you spend in game days doing absolutely nothing but traveling, sleeping and basically having real in game time of where a fic could happen. Even the movie allows room for things to happen given the protagonist can actually sit and watch television.

It sucks FF15 is a point of shame for the franchise because Square will pretend it doesn't exist outside of the yearly crossover with XIV

>>4400
Watchmen is my comfort fandom and I love to check in every year to see what new Rorschach x Nite Owl stories have been made and re-read favorites. I feel like my fandoms are very cylindrical and repeat every few years but Watchmen is my one consistency.

>>4400
I always go back to Spock/Kirk when I'm in the mood for fanfiction but can't find anything good in the tags of more recent interests. A lot of people (rightfully tbh) hate the AoS movies, but I like how they gave us 2 distinct flavors of Spirk to play with. If I'm not in the mood for that I'll go check Garak/Bashir (which recently got some fresh entries thanks to the cartoon). Thanks Star Trek!

I sometimes hate that I am a weeb because western fandoms tend to have a much higher percentage of adult women writing quality, no-nonsense, novel length fics. I wish I could pay some of them to play some of my favorite jrpgs and write for my dead fandoms haha.

>>4400
Wrightworth/Narumitsu from Ace attorney. It's not technically my first gay ship but it's the first one I got obsessed with that has never been fucked with by canon so it's very comforting to return to. Actually I guess they kinda did fuck with it once but that plot point was forgotten after one game. I'm sure capcom knows by now that fujos are a significant part of their audience. The appeal of Wrightworth to me is that they have a different dynamic to play around with during multiple stages in their lives from young crushes in school to angsty and snarky rivals to married dads. There's also a timeskip that canon has always kept vague, meaning that fic writers can imagine whatever they want. There's still new fics coming out to this day and it probably helps that the original trilogy has been put on modern platforms and gone on sale all the time, bringing in new people.

>>4403
>I wish I could pay some of them to play some of my favorite jrpgs and write for my dead fandoms haha.
Be careful what you wish for, I found it really obvious to spot Untamed fic written by slashers from western TV fandoms because everyone will be talking like a pair of American guys and the basic cultural research i.e with food will be lacking.

I am not sure if it's just me but recently I stumble upon more and more fics that are so bad that they're literally written like summaries, not stories.

I am usually the type who doesn't have high standards for fics, I enjoy almost everything as long as it's about a series I like and I mainly read non-fiction books, so I lack the experience of a seasoned novel reader anyway. But those "summary" types of fics are unreadable, even for my standards.

They fail to convey any sort of emotion because there is none. I recently even saw a porn fic that reduced the sexual act to a single sentence. It was basically "then they had sex and X cummed onto Y's head", another one "one night he slept besides him and felt to urge to do more. He took his dick and started rubbing. He then notices [name] giving a silent moan and then he cummed" etc. text slightly edited by me because I don't want it to be googleable since I don't want to shit on specific writers. These fics have more than 130 kudos.

Recently even a person I know posted a fic PV and it was the same. One of the most important parts of the fic are literally described with "That night, many things happened: the house was filled with eerie winds. It was quiet outside too even though it usually wasn't. [MC] saw a shadow in front of his room for a moment and it was strangely cold". The character is shocked and those events are supposed to convey an eerie atmosphere, but it's just listed so it reads like a synopsis. At least some of the writers are in their 20s so it's not teens either.

Again maybe this always existed and I just never stumbled upon this. But I see it so much these days and never encountered it before.

>>4440
I must admit I'm guilty of doing this when I want to get through exposition and get to the juicy scenes I actually want to write as fast as possible. But writing a whole fic like this, and especially the smutty bits, sounds kind of pointless. The whole point of smut is to be titillating and evoke emotion in the reader. Why even include it if you're not looking for that reaction in your readers.
I think it might be due to a lack of sexual experience on the author's part, like they don't want to come off as fakers so they don't include any details that might give them away. Who knows.

>>4440
>It was basically "then they had sex and X cummed onto Y's head", another one "one night he slept besides him and felt to urge to do more. He took his dick and started rubbing. He then notices [name] giving a silent moan and then he cummed" etc. text slightly edited by me because I don't want it to be googleable since I don't want to shit on specific writers. These fics have more than 130 kudos.
This is honestly how most smut fics read to me from what I've seen that I feel like this 'reduction' is exactly because people are ADHD brained and don't want to read that much when looking for porn. That + adding unnecesary amounts of doujin-tier talk like "OH BREED MY SLUTTY HOLE" that's just so unnecesary

>>4443
Having rushed parts is not bad, it's basically the intro or like a text box in a comic. Even professionals might start a story with a short summary of events like "It was on my third day of vacation when I" etc. The problem is when even the core plot of the fic (be it porn or not) is written in the same way, with the same pace and detachment.
>>4444
Considering that some of these fics were among the most popular ones among my fandom (if we talk about kudo numbers) I am inclined to agree. It baffles me that people read that and think it was good writing. But it reminds me of an argument I had with a different fan two years ago because she claimed that it wouldn't matter whether she read a wikia entry about a volume of a manga or said volume itself. Of course it does, wth? In hindsight it's not surprising anymore. I guess a lot of people lost the ability to enjoy fiction and reduce it to pure information.

Besides tiktok I blame the "ironic" culture that made people believe that feeling emotions while engaging with fiction was cringe.

>>4445
A huge fandom's top kudos'd fics are rarely that good. They are usually just a combination of "long" and "posted early in the fandom's lifecycle". I have very vivid memories of getting mad because I was like an hour into reading a 100k fic with 10k+ kudos wondering when the fuck it was going to get good and realizing that it was never actually going to. It was my first time in a really big Ao3 fandom! I didn't know 10,000 readers could just lie like that!

>>4446
I've been having this problem in the Transformers fandom.

Sort by Kudos, and it's genuinely only there because someone fandom famous posted it in 2012. Alternatively, site founder is an author of many.

I tried to give some of them a chance, and was thoroughly bored. I would genuinely get a better fanfic out of the horse show crossover comics. Which ironically did not spawn that many stories. I've searched the longest, popular work as well as crossovers on FFN and it's almost all written prior to 2018.

Tracks for a lot of older fandoms overall vs newer series. But the downside to newer fandoms is being unable to escape written on mobile summary sentences, ethnicity/trans washing, and PROSHIP DNI (posting on AO3, the site founded for the exclusive reason of brotherxbrother incest)

>>4447
>nonna also dislikes the founder's fics
Fucking FINALLY. Everybody keeps telling me how high IQ her TF fics were and that they had a prose that's on par with Shakespeare and her fics just bore the hell out of me and feel OOC and I was a MegOP shipper that should have liked them. Agree about kudo problem with the time that you and >>4446 mentioned, I noticed that too.

I also have the problem that almost everything I care about or like was written before 2018 for some reason. I feel like most newer fandoms don't even get fics to begin with. In the past I always found fics no matter how obscure the fandom was, now even remotely popular anime don't get anything.
For TF I don't simply don't see fics for my favorite ships anymore but that might because I am more into the comics and they with the exception of the big IDW1 hype among fujos that lasted till ~2018 or so comics are generally getting way less fics than cartoons.

>>4440
I actually don't mind prose like this if it works for the fic itself. For example, if the fic is short, like under 3k words, or the writing is somehow poetic or stark in a way that works in actual context. It rarely works in traditional longfic though imo.

>>4446
This so much. I was reading a still updating fic and it had an interesting premise but like 3 chapters in there was just so much rambling about the pov character being asexual. I thought it was a one time thing, but it just kept happening where the pov character would go on paragraph long monologues about being asexual. I got like 30 chapters in before I just couldn’t take it anymore and blocked/muted the author. The only reason that fic got over 4k kudos and 3k comments is because it was first started in 2017. Like I can’t believe 4 thousand readers just lied like that.

>>4446
Agreed, there's also a point where if it's too popular it'll attract outsiders that'll go "I don't like x pair but this fanfic is amazing", which would not be so bad if they didn't start to flame people that don't have that interpretation of the characters and start to pretend they're shippers of that pair themselves. The worst is when it attracts total outsiders to the fandom though, because they'll never touch canon material or when they do, call it disappointing compared to the fic. The best fics are too canon dependent to be that popular and end up unfinished or deleted anyways…

>>4452
I was thinking of this exact image as I was posting haha. However, there is a way to sort by kudos and get around this problem! With large and long-lived fandoms I use the "Date Updated" category to browse a year at a time. Unfortunately, it doesn't get rid of stuff like you described (posted in the 2010s and running for a decade), but once you recognize those kinds of stories for what they are they're much easier to dodge.
>>4465
I sometimes browse /r/Ao3 and /r/fanfiction and learning that there is a not insignificant amount of people who read fandom-blind was really surprising. I guess it's kind of cool that they just get to skim the cream off of the top of every fandom without knowing the cream is extremely derivative.

>>4470
>insignificant amount of people who read fandom-blind was really surprising. I guess it's kind of cool that they just get to skim the cream off of the top of every fandom without knowing the cream is extremely derivative.

Weird, didn't know people did that. Seems like if you didn't care about the characters you'd be better off reading romance novels.

>>4471
In their defense, the high kudos AU fanfics are indistinguishable from mid-to-decent light literature. As a fan I still think they mostly suck, but I think if I were a fandom-blind reader I could see myself having a good time (for free!).

I once had the stars align for me after Attack on Titan S1 dropped and all the modern AUs were easy to treat as original works because the canon at that point was really shallow and one half of one of the most popular ships was already dead. Strange time. I think that was my first brush with a fandom that was like 75% modern AU.

>>4471
I don't know about others but I've done that a few times when I was vaguely familiar with the characters from being into a franchise a very long time ago like Naruto and felt like reading some fics for nostalgia.
But that might be the only understandable reason cause otherwise I don't know what's appealing about reading fics when you don't even know who they are or where they're from.
Especially if it's a AU fic that still has nods to the original series in some shape or form, isn't that confusing for them?

>>4472
PDFs for normal literature is free too but I suppose there's less barriers to read fanfic vs piracy if you just wanted a quick read.

>>4470
People who read for series they haven't looked into are mostly reading PWP stuff where the canon is negligible so it's not as bad as it sounds. The more egregious thing is people writing for series they haven't watched/read. I've seen at least three authors note this in their fics and it irks me so badly I immediately close the tab. Even if it's a mindless oneshot I have no interest in a fic written by someone who hasn't watched or read a single episode/chapter of the series they're writing for.

>>4474
Yeah I can't stand it, I get writing a story when you aren't done with a multi-season show, long game, or zombie franchise but watch the movie before you write something! I also will immediately exit the story if they disclose it, or if they mention that they just saw a streamer playing it.

Dramatical Murder might take the cake for some of the weirdest crossover fics it's like the VN equivalent to Harry Potter in terms of randomness. I was going to post this in the crack thread but these aren't even crack they're multichaptered serious fics.

>>4440
I don't usually like pointing fingers like this because I find it disingenuous to actual authors who may be new to writing, far advanced, etc. But there's a 50/50 chance that fics like these are AI generated. Specifically due to the summarizing nature that large language models take when writing story-like requests. It's not uncommon, and AO3 has had an AI problem. Although sizeably a much more miniscule one than people make it seem.

I did an experiment a long time ago (and revisited recently where I ran the same basic fic prompts through several LLMs to see how realistic/passable the writing could come accross and the stylistic trends they seem to fall upon. I came out with several LLMs that could be accurately tied to fics I've seen out in the wild. Models heavily flagged for similar writing were; CALM3-22B, Falcon 180B, Yi-34B, Mistral-7B, Qwen 14B, Llama 3.2 3B, Coffee's Erotic Story Generator, Mixtral-46.7B, LLM Uncensored, Zephyr Chat, and Grok. Grok specifically being easiest to get to write NSFW, and the GPT models it runs on have been stated to be trained from internet data, AO3 fics training these things are not out of the picture. In fact it's actually noted to be true. Chatbot software such as Janitor AI and Character AI produced similar results when prompted as well, but far less advanced than the LLMs.

So the influx of fics that read just as "summaries", have unnatural pacing that not even an inexperienced writer would come up with, blocky sense of story ("too linear" in a sense), etc. may be the product of an LLM. In an age where most younger users on AO3 are preteens and middle schoolers who rely on AI for homework it makes sense that they've turned to this. Unsure what could be done to prevent this, or if it even should be prevented at all, since my stance on LLMs is pretty neutral at best. But they're definitely evolving and implementing themselves in the fanfic sphere. I'd say, just keep an eye out.

>>4716
Could you post an example of one of those "summary" fics, you don't need to point a finger at anyone on Ao3, I'm just curious and want to see if they're like anything I've stumbled upon before.

>>4705
I really don’t understand winx club autists in general yet I keep running into them.

>>4723
Not really unusual that some people never grow up.

>>4716
Well damn… ain’t no stopping this train, but like… It’s one thing when it’s just silly “haha what can I make Talk to Transformer say?” but it’s another when these “authors” presumably want people to take them seriously- because otherwise they would be very clearly honest and upfront that they’re posting AI output, right?

Does anyone else have writer’s block specifically due to not having finished the media you wanna write a fanfic for? Like I have tons of ideas for this ship but my brain doesn’t wanna function enough to write at least a rough draft before it decides to not even bother because I haven’t gotten through the entire media yet. I applaud the fanfic writers that write in between seasons and chapters. I don’t know how they do it without later feeling like they missed out on certain plot points that could’ve enhanced their fics if they just stuck it out longer and got to the next arc or something.

>>4734
i feel this spiritually, especially when it comes to following ongoing media. and it sucks because then you have people moving on once the series is over (at least for modern “trendy” fandoms) but that’s the only time i actually want to make stuff. and tbh i don’t mind being this way, because so much of my writing comes from analyzing existing canon details anyways so having all of canon works best for me. but i also wish i could hop on the bandwagon so to speak and make stuff when fandom activity is at its peak.

>>4734
Feeling this as a newbie gintama fujo. I'm not even halfway through the anime and I already want to write about gintoki taking it up the ass but what if there's some really juicy bit of worldbuilding I haven't gotten to that would really enhance the buttsex I could write?

>>4741
There are so, so many episodes/arcs in Gintama that don't have nearly enough fic/doujin about them. Including the times Gintoki did canonically take it up the butt.
Don't be discouraged from writing while watching, though. Fanwork made based on someone's initial impressions can be the most interesting sometimes! And the most important thing is catching that creative spark when it comes and getting it done or you may miss the moment and never make it happen.

>>4389
Using modern slang that didn't exist back then.

>>4391
Also to watch anything you had 3 options:
1) cinema
2) TV
3) VHS rental

Mobile phones were rare and expensive. Everybody had a phone book (which also listed your address) and doxing was an unknown concept. I myself did prank-calling random people once as a kid… I regret it to this day.

>>4392
>That also would be something hard for a fanfic writer to research if they didn't have first hand experience so it makes sense.
Not really. Many people post old films from their countries on Youtube/other services.

>>4393
>with rudimentary digital art and games
Oh boy. How wrong. Those rudimentary games (and even Solitaire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Solitaire ) were peak entertainment. The only reason a kid hassled their parents for a computer. Making/editing stuff in basic Paint was also fascinating.

>>4879
And that's why I said "unless". I was obsessed too anon. We have lost this soft filter and now the internet is worse for it.

>>4879
PCs were and are the only reasonable way to go online and they were pretty common in the late 90s. All of my friends already went online with the PC back then with 5-10 years of age and now, 30 years later, we still do it. PCs fascinated kids thanks to all the shit you could do with them even before the internet.

Phone fags needed ages till they even touched the net. First they got addicted to phones because of their shitty SMS addiction. Later when smartphones came it was facebook and similar shit. It took till the mid 00s when the smartphone hordes invaded the net as far as I can tell.
>>4392
It's easy to research. Unlike most historical stuff there are billions of photos and videos from that era, regardless of the place. It's also not just about countries but urban centers vs rural areas too. I already downloaded anime as early as 1997 but I heard some anons say that they were still watching the crappy 240p three-parter youtube rips in 2005 because their connection was shit.

>>4879
>getting a random ass photo editing software off a CD from a magazine so you could use airbrush tools on your art
>saving all three artworks to a floppy disk as BMP files
Awww yeeah

>>4882
Yeah I was downloading batch torrents on dial up still in about 2004? Had to leave it running in the day and pray nobody phoned the house, but at least with torrents you didn't lose any progress. If there were no seeds then 3-4 part youtube uploads and later crunchyroll were a great help, and that did happen to series fujo were interested in.

I don't read other fanfic within the fandom when I am currently writing, or planning on writing one myself. I'm afraid of accidentally utilizing ideas/characterization I liked via general osmosis, but more than that, I'm extremely prone to losing confidence in what I've managed so far. Anyone else?

>>4889
Same, once I've decided I'm writing a fanfic for a series I force myself to stop interacting with fanworks until I finish at least one because I don't want to subconsciously borrow ideas or be influenced by fandom characteristics. Part of it is definitely insecurity about my own writing, the other half is about "purity" using only the source material as inspiration.

>>4889
>via general osmosios
I've used this exact phrasing before. I'm SO paranoid about it, especially because the fandom and ship I'm writing for is so small. I worry that my ideas aren't unique and I'm sure they've already been written already, but if I close my eyes and post without knowing that, at least I got my work out there…

>>4890
>>4895
I'm glad I'm not the only one. I managed to resist and get my work out there (I'm still resisting since I'm still writing), but more than a few people compared my fic to one of the fandom's most popular. I tried reading it since I was curious, but I couldn't even finish it. I can see why it's popular, and it was released during that Prime Fandom Popularity window which always helps, but I found it extremely OOC. Like the sort of writing in which the early-20-something woman projects her interests/politics on characters that aren't from Earth to begin with. I know I should take the comparison as a compliment, as it's meant to be no doubt, but… get a feeling so complicated.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/65997688
Finished some mindless Todoiida fluff, mostly just a way to test out writing them/their voices. Hope it's alright, if you read it!

>>5122
Thank you, nonni! TodoIida is so precious

preparing to write my second ever fic, English is my second language and i'm always terrified and ashamed whenever i start writing. has any beginner writer experienced this feeling? my first upload was received warmly by the small fandom so i shouldn't be this scared… and yet. spent all my life reading the good and the bad works but writing stuff myself? i feel unsettled

>>5236
I'm not a new writer and not ESL but I did try translating one of my own fics for the first time over on Pixiv and it was definitely a nerve wracking experience and I was checking for mistakes and obsessing over stats a ton. It has a super low fave-viewcount ratio, which still worries me, but it's also a super rarepair that literally no one but me has written except a small handful in reverse top/bottom order so I don't have much to compare it to.
I figure I probably did make many baka gaijin mistakes but I don't care because I want to represent my rarepair so I'll never take it down.
At least when I'm reading fic myself I have read plenty of dodgy translations but if I can follow the story and it's good then I couldn't give less of a shit, so don't worry. And if you're writing a rarepair or a rare trope combination then the people who really want to read that will click because they're starving. You can also go to Wattpad and remind yourself that plenty of native English speakers can't write for shit either.

>>5236
You're always gonna be your harshest critic. I still have moments where I'll just neg my writing ability super hard, and that hasn't changed despite having 10 fics on Ao3 atm. Best I can say is that what you're feeling is very much a double-edged sword. Like, it sucks because you're constantly slowing your writing down and overthinking and just overall being very negative but simultaneously it shows you're, on some level, super aware of what you're doing and want to create something of merit. You want to make sure a certain level of quality/care shines through and that's super respectable imo. Just don't be afraid to step back and accept that you do want to write it just for the fun of it, and you don't have to freak yourself out over any mistakes (especially since you can always edit down the line.) You can do it.
>English is my second language
lmao don't let that spook you at all, most EFL still screw up their/there.

Ao3 has been down way too long!

>>5239
8 and a half hours of no ao3

>>5240
ITS BACK!!!!!!!!!!!!!

>>5241
We are so back!