I’ve never really expected anything, not when posting my fics on fandom-specific forums, even less when posting them in generic places where they’re more likely to confuse people.

@🇰 🔵 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️ wrote:

I like them so long as I actually get the payoff. I really hate media that ends on a cliffhanger and then never gets finished.

Although, to be fair, this is high-octane fanfic fuel. See Disney’s Gargoyles.

Mine are very strange to say the least because they probably only exist in one fandom and even there only in its inner core: self-introduction fics and mass-insert fics.

They’re a bit hard to explain, much less justify. They only exist at the Acorn Cafe, the central forum of the (pre-2022 movie) Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers fandom, and they imagine it as an actual café with all kinds of extra amenities imaginable or unimaginable that’s frequented by the Rangers, their friends/significant others/family and the fursonas of at least some of the forum users.

Both are subgenres of self-inserts. The difference between these and more common self-inserts is that the self-insert is absolutely blatant and obvious because these stories only work if it’s clear that they’re self-inserts. The self-insert OCs are practically never humans and always anthropomorphic animals to make it easier for them to interact with the Rangers. Thus, they’re only your usual wolves, foxes, dragons etc. if the author has had this fursona before becoming a Rangerphile/discovering the Cafe. More often, we’re talking about mice, rats, chipmunks and squirrels and self-insert OCs purpose-made for the Cafe.

Self-introduction fics are stories which tell how a new user’s fursona arrives at the Cafe for the first time, usually meeting the Rangers there. Not rarely, self-introductions are also mass-inserts.

Mass-insert fics, in turn, aren’t always self-introductions. They are when someone not only includes their own fursona in a story, but also those of other Cafe users. Care is always taken to write them in-character, also because there have usually been enough “templates” from which to see what’s in-character for them.

Mass-inserts can be a lot. They could be a self-introductions that includes Dr. Indy, the Cafe admin in real life and a chipmunk in the story, having tap duty when the new first-time visitor arrives. There could be other Cafe patrons sitting at tables or maybe chatting up the new visitor before the Rangers show up. They could also be casework, either along with the Rangers or taking the place of the Rangers who happen to be on another case themselves or actually rescuing the Rangers from some villains. This could delve more or less deeply into Mary Sue territory, but that’s okay because just about everyone else is a Mary Sue, too.

A specific sub-subgenre of the mass-insert is what’s called a “round robin” at the Cafe. It isn’t really a round robin; authors aren’t fixed, their order isn’t fixed either, and instead of planning the story to be written ahead, everyone roleplays and makes up stuff on the fly. The Mary Sue factor may be even higher here to the point at which many of us got themselves spaceships based on various franchises.

Technically on the edge of the mass-insert subgenre, too, were the annual Golden Acorn Awards ceremonies. Not only did the fandom have its own awards in quite a lot of categories, but instead of just nominating, voting and then giving away awards, they were turned into full-blown written ceremonies, what with the writing talent amassed at the Cafe.

These ceremonies took place in various places, the first ones at the Radio City Music Hall, the others at annually changing places nominated by the Cafe patrons and then voted. Most are real locations which once included a cruise aboard the Disney Fantasy, but I’ve once managed to get the Muppet Theater voted, not spectactular per se, but it promised even wackier shenanigans than all the previous locations because we could cross the whole thing over with the Muppets. The promise was kept.

Most of the writing was done by the Cafe patrons. Dr. Indy organised the whole thing, he’d put everything together and post it in the end, and he wrote a kind of parallel storyline in which Fat Cat and his gang always try to steal the Golden Acorn Awards.

The presentations were written by other patrons who picked one or multiple ones. Normally, they didn’t use their own fursonas as presenters. Instead, these were either canonical characters (the Rangerphiles love one-shots, so there are many to choose from) or their own fanfic OCs or their own roleplay/round-robin OCs or sometimes crossover characters. Sometimes they did use their fursonas which became kind of awkward when they had to give an award to themselves. The presentations sometimes entered mass-insert territory when the writer had someone else’s fursona throw in a commentary or something from within the audience.

The acceptance speeches were, of course, written by those who won an award, but they had to keep it secret until they had officially received the award. It was then up to Dr. Indy to graft the acceptance speeches into the presentations.

The ceremonies themselves were led in by the “Live from the Red Carpet” segment which everyone wrote and posted themselves, and in which everyone described how, with what kind of vehicle and in which attire they arrived at the location. It started a few hours before the ceremonies.

The actual ceremonies were posted by Dr. Indy, starting with an opening and a first Fat Cat segment. The presentations came in three blocks with breaks in-between (this went for hours!) in which Fat Cat appeared again. They ended with Fat Cat’s defeat and a closing and led into a party.

Afterwards, there was always a round-robin party which, in real-life time, could go on for days, weeks or months even, depending on how wacky it went and what occurred in its course.

I’ve actually decided to follow the ceremonies in real-time a few times. This wasn’t easy for me because they started at 8 pm EST/5 pm PST which was 2 am for me, and then they went on for three full hours. On two occasions, I pulled an all-nighter and stayed for the party. Otherwise, I went to bed around 5 am and came back to the party going on at full bore. It felt worth it. Later, however, I read the ceremonies the next morning.

I might consider going to AO3 if FF.net should ever shut down. After all, I’ve still got my fics which I’ve written 17 years ago plus backups. I can repost them whenever I please. I can also publish them here on my Hubzilla channel, maybe even nicely typeset in LaTeX. If they disappear, I can always have them come back.

That being said, I do ship. But I don’t write 100% pure shipfics in which nothing else happens. I only really have one ship developing throughout my 'verse right now. And all ships in all my fics are het which might upset the typical AO3 user.

Speaking of which, I’ve only ever written and published pre-movie Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers fics. I’m a Rangerphile. Few people even know that the fandom exists. But those who do are very likely to have prejudices that’ll want them not to have any of my kind on AO3. And indeed, if I look around the CDRR fics on AO3, there’s one story by one author who’s halfway known in the fandom, there’s another story that was written by someone who clearly knows at least one fanfic classic, and only three CDRR fics were published on AO3 before 2018 at all. The rest was written by people who either don’t know there’s a fandom, or who do know and deliberately steer clear of it. FF.net has a lot of fics by writers with no connections to the fandom, too, but it’s also one home of some classics by well-known authors.

Also, I think there are obvious differences between fanfics written by casual fans and fanfics written by people deeply involved in a fandom who not only know the canon inside-out, but who have discussed it with their own likes a lot, and who have also read a lot of fanfic from within that fandom. Fandoms tend to be echo chambers that produce and cultivate their own specific flavors of fanfic which may be hard to get for people outside the respective fandom, featuring very fandom-specific tropes and requiring detailed canon knowledge to such extents that even footnotes don’t help.

I was way “down the rabbit hole” when I wrote my fics. I didn’t read the most well-known classics at first, also so they wouldn’t influence my own fics too obviously, but I guess the typical fanfic style had already rubbed off on me when I wrote my first multiple-chapter fic.

I’m not sure how welcome such fics from deep within a small but dedicated fandom would be on AO3.

I’ve discovered fanfic itself around the mid-2000s. I was neither a particularly active reader, nor was I bound to any canonical material.

What really got me going was when I discovered the Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers fandom in late 2005. I had been a fan of the show since its German premiere in early 1991, and I was glad there was a fandom full of like-minded people. And especially, there was fanfic.

I had read some before I joined the fandom and the main forum. Mere hours later, I think, someone suggested I could start writing fanfic. Many of the few fans wrote fanfic in those days. First the suggestion seemed weird, also since I’m not a native English speaker. But then I decided to give it a try.

Let’s just say that I was bursting with ideas just days later. That’s how my fanfic-writing craze of 2006/2007 began. A pity it slowed down a lot afterwards.

By the way, I refused to read the often-recommended classics at first. I didn’t want them to influence my writing too obviously. I guess they did later on, or my ideas for certain details were too similar.

One of my pet peeves is similar, namely writers who simply can’t write for the canonical setting. This actually has a fairly wide scope, and OOC can be a side-effect.

Harry Potter fans in rural Alabama transferring the whole setting from 1990s’ England into modern-day redneck country and having everyone speak y’allbonics because that’s all they know. Bonus points for stuff like the Weasleys’ home having been destroyed by an F5 tornado, nothing close to which ever occurs in Great Britain.

Stranger Things fanfic with the same setting as the TV series, but suddenly, everyone has current-day smartphones and uses Instagram, Discord and TikTok because the author can’t imagine what life without all that used to be like. Bonus points for references to early 2020s’ pop culture.

Similarly, elements from the real-life human world (smartphones, certain websites/online services, Christmas) in settings where they shouldn’t exist because they’re sci-fi, fantasy or otherwise not taking place in any imaginable version of this world. This is even more blatant than writing every place in the world like it’s the USA with all its culture. Imagine the canonical characters in a Miraculous Ladybug or Harry Potter fanfic celebrating the 4th of July. Now imagine the characters in a Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings or Star Wars fanfic doing so.

Something I’ve actually seen is My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fanfic in which the ponies are written as ponies but like humans, and Equestria is much closer to the human world than in canon. Not only can ponies do everything with their front hooves that humans can do with their hands because the author is incapable of going with the limitations that come with hooves, but there are also things like guns that don’t exist canonically in Equestria, that wouldn’t fit into the setting anyway and that’d be next to impossible to operate without fingers and opposable thumbs (never mind that so are many musical instruments in the show). Bonus points for clopfics in which ponies have human anatomy between their hind legs and have sex in human positions. I mean, the author could have made it an Equestria Girls fanfic instead, but they hate Equestria Girls. Or they could have written the characters as humans or anthro, but they don’t like the former either, and they’ve never heard of the latter.

And something I think I’ve gladly never come across is when fanfic in mousepunk settings like Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers makes the characters human-sized in either a fully anthro setting or even the human world because the author can’t write the size difference, or because the author wants to ship their human self-insert with one of the rodent protagonists while not bothering with creating a fursona. I mean, I’ve written the Rangers human-sized myself, but with a very good explanation and in a setting rather unfamiliar to themselves. I’m actually pretty certain that there’s sloppily-written Zootopia fanfic that completely disregards species sizes.

IMHO, that’d actually justify its own dedicated Lemmy community instead of only one thread.

It’s been more than a decade since I’ve published my last fanfic.

But while AO3 was a thing back then already, I stuck to only fanfiction.net. For one, I didn’t want to crosspost too much. And besides, AO3 didn’t seem to have the target audience for my fics. Sure, AO3 didn’t have FF.net’s restraints, but FF.net’s restraints have never restrained me, and those who felt restrained by FF.net, I guess none of them would even be remotely interested in my fics anyway.

Then again, most of my target audience were members of one or two fandom-specific forums where I published my fics as well. And the one forum that saw all my fanfic premieres is PG-rated. I think that says something about my fics and what kinds of appeal they lack.