olderthannetfic: laisai:olderthannetfic: solarianvoidthearoace:aniseandspearmint:dorksidefiker:older
olderthannetfic: laisai:olderthannetfic: solarianvoidthearoace:aniseandspearmint:dorksidefiker:olderthannetfic: aichudechu:olderthannetfic:I see more and more nonsense with “Just ignore” on it, and it tells me that people don’t understand how AO3 works.AO3 is not Wattpad where unpopular stuff sinks out of sight and isn’t bothering anyone: your non-fanwork cruft clogs up everyone’s search results.Nobody should be posting non-fanworks in the first place, but if you’re going to post some crap you don’t want others looking at, you should find an unrevealed collection and stick it in there. That way, it stays out of search results. It’s the “help me find this fic” posts that drive me crazy. It’s like watching someone in isolation who doesn’t understand where the community lives, I understand why they do it but they don’t seem all that clear on what a fanwork is.. do you report these?Examples abound: https://archiveofourown.org/works/search?utf8=✓&work_search%5Bquery%5D=“Help+me+find+this+fic” Works Matching ‘“Help me find this fic’ | Archive of Our Own Yes, I absolutely report those.AO3 allows non-ephemeral fanworks. That means things like fic, meta, original fannish writing (original BL intended for the same audience as fic and that kind of thing), fan art, fanvids/AMVs, podfic, etc. If some new category of fanwork becomes popular, then maybe there will be a gray area while AO3 figures out if it counts…But “looking for a fic”, “can someone please write”, “I’m keeping a list of these tags for myself”, placeholders for fic that will be written later, liveblogs of episodes that aren’t meta analysis, and the like are blatantly not fanworks of the type AO3 covers. I remember a while back there was a problem with people not understanding that Ao3 wasn’t a blogging/RP hunting platform. Like, is it THAT hard to make your own damn tumblr? Ah for the days it was considered polite to lurk for as long as it took you to grok the rules of a place before entering the mainstream…. I know this isn’t the focal point here but… Original Works aren’t wanted/supposed to be on AO3? *disappointed noise* Well, are they AO3y original works?Basically, we had a knock down, drag out fight about it, and allowing original works won.The people on the “allow” side (including me) wanted to allow the kinds of original stuff that showed up on old fic archives that allowed original. This tends to be like “original slash” and “original BL” that uses the same m/m tropes you see in fic. Or it might be original regency romance het in some of those kinds of fandoms. This set of people tended to be from non-English archives and from anime fandom where the inclusion of original was more normal.The people on the “don’t allow” side were from live action US tv fandoms that have not tended to have original work alongside fic.At the time, there was also a fear that allowing original work would lead to commercial spam… Little did we know that it was the fic that would be full of commercial spam within a few years.–So yes, you can post your original work to AO3 if it’s the kind of original work that would normally go on a fic archive. And no, I can’t pin it down for you better than that. i love the original works tag! there’s examples like…there’s one that’s been officially published now which had space husbands and hurt/comfort and many other themes and tropes that you’d get with like, some subsets of AUs, or was aimed very much at the sort of audience AO3 attracts, only the characters and setting and plot were original. but arguably if the original work tag wasn’t there you could’ve been easily mistaken in thinking that that fic was a space opera AU for some fandom you’re not in; and sometimes people do read fics for fandoms they’re not in, because fanfic has many nebulous qualities to it that don’t often show up in original published fiction (but that line is blurring a bit these days; the fic I’m talking about is now officially published by Orbit books!)the monsterfucker (exophilia/teratophilia) fandom is also very big in the original fandom tag since it’s like… yes it’s original and not *exactly* tied to a media fandom but it’s largely written by people on tumblr also in other fandoms and is written in such a way that you wouldn’t often see in, say, published fiction featuring “monstrous” love interests. also most are one-shots and that’s a format you don’t see as often (short stories pub’d traditionally seem to have much longer word counts?). the community and vibe of the works are in-line with other fandoms that have their own canon media so it feels like it belongs as well.I’ve seen D&D OC stories under original works too; they’re often also tagged with the d&d fandom tag but arguably, a lot of the plot elements and character traits are things that represent many fans on AO3, and many fans on AO3 are also players of TTRPGs. But it isn’t exactly “official” content based off official characters – it might not even use any pre-existing setting or plot or anything, really, so it makes sense to file it under original work.original work also includes things like, ao3/pan-fandom meta. people who gather data on fan opinions or write essays about fandom history or even short tutorials for ways to skin your AO3 work. those are all original works in that they aren’t specific to any fandom, but are also definitely the kind of thing that would fit as being archived somewhere like AO3. it’s intentionally left vague though so a lot of it is up to the author to decide if they want to post to AO3, because there are many, many things fans produce that may not technically fall under established categories like fanfic, podfic, fanart, filks, amvs, etc. (and ao3 is mostly geared towards archiving fic, with some people linking to podfics and fanart). it’s a really interesting category but by browsing it, it becomes very clear why it’s so hard to define. i think it’s one of those things that really do require you to lurk and observe a bit to get a “feel” for what seems to be allowed or meant to be in the original work fandom tag, but i hope my examples helped give an idea of the range of things that show up. For fandom meta, there’s also the “Fandom - Fandom” tag. But yes, all of the above ends up in Original Works. It’s a big mishmash of AO3-feeling stuff that isn’t clearly a fanfic of a specific canon.But you look at it, and you’re still like “Yeah, that tracks.”There’s some kind of AO3ness to it, and I know it when I see it. -- source link