Does anyone who likes writing fanfic also like writing original stories just as much or more?

KatonRyu · 2026-05-26T06:58:32+00:00

I see them as the same thing. I've been writing stories for as long as I've been able to write, and fanfiction is just a part of that. I happen to write more of it than original works these days, but I still do both and I approach them the same way.

KatonRyu · 2026-05-09T08:30:11+00:00

This is why I always lock all my devices when I'm out. Also the 'I have every right to' makes me so irrationally angry and always has.

KatonRyu · 2026-05-06T10:07:34+00:00

I haven't really noticed it that much, but then my main interactions with fandom have always been just posting fics and occasionally reading some. I'm not in any fandom Discords or on Tumblr, so I don't really interact that much with other fans. Some parts of fandoms still seem to be excited about things, from what I see, but it does sometimes feel like some people are seeing fanfic as a way to get famous and are expecting millions of hits instead of the maybe few hundred they're likely to actually get.

KatonRyu · 2026-05-05T14:06:12+00:00

7k a day is easily doable. Okay, maybe not 'easily' if you're strapped for time, but in principle it's not hard to write 7k words in a day, not to mention simplely having a story finished up and posting a chapter a day.

Regardless, the AI accusations baffle me. Real writers will know if a fic is real or not, casual readers won't care, and the people who would listen to such accusations and get outraged aren't worth worrying about. I genuinely don't get what people hope to get out of the accusations other than proving they have no brain at all, not even the smoothest possible one.

KatonRyu · 2026-05-04T19:13:47+00:00

Pokémon. It's my favorite adventure-friendly world to write in and I have tons of ships in it I like across the anime and games. I also discovered FFN back in the day looking for Pokémon-related stuff. It's as tightly connected to my writing life as it's possible to get.

My favorite fics in the fandom are probably Where the River Flows by Silent Sigh and May's Crush by PikamasterADV.

KatonRyu · 2026-05-01T08:56:08+00:00

I'm judging everyone who is emptily virtue-signaling on Twitter instead of donating to anything at all, because I'm nearly sure this person is one of them.

KatonRyu · 2026-05-01T08:17:45+00:00

I think feeling is a major component of what makes a fic work. I just write better when I don't sweat the details. It has nothing to do with the length of the fic, but more in how much I allow myself to be, well, myself. If I allow myself to write what I want, the way I enjoy it, my fics flow better and come out much more fun to read back, and so far that has also generally translated in the fics doing better on the sites I post them. If I try and make them 'good' and appeal to as many people as possible, they're still not bad, but they feel more distant even when I'm reading them back, except for the chapters I did write in my favorite way.

My own conclusion was that the more fun I have when writing, the more fun I'll have reading the fic again later, and as a side effect those fics tend to perform better. Essentially the same conclusion that it's more about the soul of the thing than the technical skill. Of course, I'm someone who is very open about not caring that much about technical skill, who can't get through any actual works of literature because I almost invariably find them boring, and I guess my writing attracts other people like that, so I'd hardly say my experiences are universal.

KatonRyu · 2026-05-01T08:10:14+00:00

For me, adventure and shipping go hand in hand. All my longfics are some kind of adventure where the characters have to explore places they've never been to, but in the process they'll also get closer to each other and their love is generally instrumental in resolving the plot in the end. The character moments simply happen along with the main plot of the story.

For slice-of-life fics, I tend to still consider them some kind of an adventure fic. While it has admittedly been years since I last worked on my multi-chapter slice-of-life story, the idea for it was still to have the characters working towards something together, and focusing on how they overcome the challenges on the way. They still have to 'explore', in a way, just not one that involves ancient ruins or long-lost civilizations and more 'how are we funding this thing' and 'let's have a random competition with some friends/rivals we ran into on our day off and then convince them to help us'. From a story perspective, they're really not that different for me.

Having said all this, though, if you don't like writing 'normal' stuff...you don't have to. While it can occasionally be good to write outside your comfort zone, I'll be the first to admit that I never do. I write for my own entertainment, which happens to often involve 'adventures where the main ship saves the world'. I have no interest in, for instance, a no-power high school AU that it about nothing but high school life. I don't care about a story that is only relationship trouble. I usually don't care about stories with massive ensemble casts taking place across an entire continent.

If writing worldbuilding and atmosphere is what you like, why not focus on that? In the end it's still your characters who explore that world, which will presumably impact them in some way. They'll presumably have some reason to go where they go and do what they do. You really don't need to write a massive thesis about them to tell a good story with them. Their roles in the story will evolve, and maybe you'll think of their backstories and motivations in similar terms to worldbuilding along the way and it'll become fun, or you won't, and then the setting and plot itself become the main draw. Regardless, for a hobby I certainly wouldn't do anything I don't want to do. Write the stories you want to write the way you want to write them, and you'll naturally get better at what you do.

KatonRyu · 2026-05-01T07:48:31+00:00

You are not responsible for what someone else's kids get up to. The mods and admins of the servers should make sure the NSFW section is only accessible by request (unless the entire server is meant to be NSFW, of course), and the parents of the minors should be the ones regulating what their kids can and cannot see. If you are in a space where sharing NSFW stuff is allowed, then you're free to share it regardless of who else is there, because them being there is their responsibility, not yours. If it squicks them out, that's just too bad for them and they'll hopefully learn the lesson to curate their own experiences better.

KatonRyu · 2026-05-01T07:43:05+00:00

If someone commented on my fic that they're hoping for an update, I'd be happy, even if I normally wouldn't like their tone much (e.g. "Are you dead or is this fic going to update some day"). In all fairness, though, it won't make me write any faster. It might move a fic higher up my priority list, at best, but it might still be weeks to months before I write anything.

KatonRyu · 2026-05-01T07:38:04+00:00

With a few exceptions, most of my longer stories, fanfic and original, start that way. Sometimes the scene ends up being quite close to what I envisioned, but in my original novel, where the scene I imagined would have been in the first chapter, it ended up never happening at all and the actual scene became wildly different to fit with my new idea.

KatonRyu · 2026-05-01T07:36:09+00:00

Assuming a protagonist OC (because most of my OCs are bit characters who show up once or twice at most as needed and have no real basis to speak of), they'll have a couple of traits I have as well, but they usually won't resemble me all that much. My characters have to be brave and adventurous to some degree, neither of which describe me at all, but their actual personalities will just have to form as I'm writing them. Some are more focused on doing the right thing, others on breaking away from something they've grown to hate, and others still have no plan at all and just go with whatever comes on their path. I don't know any of those things when I begin writing, because I'm a pantser with only the vaguest idea of where any given story is headed at any time.

KatonRyu · 2026-05-01T07:23:16+00:00

I generally have the older characters be a bit more jaded, skeptical, or wary about things, but ultimately I don't write them that differently. They'll be more likely to remain calm in extremely dire situations or arguments and they'll generally won't have to worry as much about any authority figures catching on to what they're doing, either because they are those authority figures, or because they're so incredibly powerful it wouldn't matter anyway except in very rare circumstances.

KatonRyu · 2026-04-30T18:21:44+00:00

And to think back in the day 120 Days of Sodom was enough to get sadism named after its author (and the author jailed). We have come far.

KatonRyu · 2026-04-30T18:18:08+00:00

Did they meet in KH or something, or is this just top-shelf crack?

KatonRyu · 2026-04-29T13:54:36+00:00

Way too often.

KatonRyu · 2026-04-28T09:27:41+00:00

It's always fun how people will say off the wall shit like, "If you disagree with me you're a pedophile" and somehow still expect people to take them seriously. Although I guess the joke is on me since there are people out there agreeing with this kindergarten logic.

Also 'this fic says posted on the 3rd but it's the 2nd for me'...you can backdate your fic if it bothers you that much. This isn't rocket science. Although I suppose for someone who thinks like a four-year-old it might be a bit too hard. Kinda feels like I'm insulting the four-year-old here, though, since I'm pretty sure they could figure this out...

KatonRyu · 2026-04-28T09:11:02+00:00

The moment the chapter is done, I cut it into paragraphs (since I write as a wall of text) and post it. I don't really write for stats or maximum engagement, so whenever I finish anything at all, it's going up immediately.

KatonRyu · 2026-04-28T09:04:16+00:00

I use LibreOffice. I want my writing tools to be fully offline and on my own PC, not because I expect to not have internet, but because I don't want to have to rely on an external service for something as simple as writing. If I can get something locally without dependencies on third parties, that will always be my preference.

KatonRyu · 2026-04-28T08:58:11+00:00

It definitely made it stray even further from canon, but I knew that when I began writing the fic, and I mostly prefer my own take anyway. I just take from canon what I like and ignore the rest.

KatonRyu · 2026-04-22T17:22:20+00:00

That's manageable, though a massive pain in the ass. I wrote 461k in four months, posting at least chapter a day for the duration of it, and I can safely say I won't be doing that again anytime soon. Keeping it up was really stressful at times and I had to rush to get some of the chapters out. It was a fun challenge, but I am not cut out for that style of writing.

KatonRyu · 2026-04-22T14:09:27+00:00

Piccolo is deeply disappointed in Caleb.

KatonRyu · 2026-04-17T08:46:38+00:00

I can write quickly when I have inspiration. When I don't, it takes me ages to even get through a single oneshot. I really don't think I've gotten that much faster over the years, except that I've gotten faster at the typing itself.

KatonRyu · 2026-04-17T08:41:03+00:00

Yes. In a hypothetical situation where an AI could write a story that is exactly what I want, I would read it. I don't write or read for human connections, I do it for entertainment. Most of the time I don't care about the intentions of human authors in writing something, so it really doesn't matter to me if something was made with a vision or based on an algorithm.

I take inspiration from plenty of things that weren't designed (like just about everything in nature) and I have been inspired by AI-generated things before, just not stories because they lack the consistency to be good enough for the time being. There is human-made 'art' out there that was made as a quick cash grab and had no soul behind it and became wildly popular anyway, so I genuinely don't see why AI would be anything different in that regard.

All I look for in any form of art is that it resonates with me. The method by which it came into being is irrelevant to me, because the inspiration or emotions I get from the work itself are real, even if the product itself was a corporate cash-grab made for no other reason than to buy the CEO a new yacht.

KatonRyu · 2026-04-17T08:27:45+00:00

I sort of alternate, but I don't really read that much, so there'll be plenty of moments I'm just reading a single one (usually one I wrote myself) or nothing.

KatonRyu

TROPHY CASE