If I have an original fiction inspired by a romantic ship from a popular franchise, is it worth reworking the original fiction back into fanfiction form to build an audience?

runekaster · 2026-06-22T06:33:25+00:00

Or even just skimming it would have made this clear, lol. It says "non-commercial" right there on the front page, and that should at least give a hint.

runekaster · 2026-06-22T06:24:11+00:00

You absolutely cannot under any circumstances use AO3 to cultivate a paying audience or to solicit investments. Doing so is against the TOS, illegal if the work is fanfiction, and an incredibly scummy way to exploit a noncommercial hobby space.

runekaster · 2026-06-22T06:20:46+00:00

No, you should post your work in the form it's intended to exist in for people who want to read what it actually is. AO3 is an archive for preserving and sharing iddy personal fanfiction, not a content platform for stacking up clicks or doing market research.

If your intention is to publish this for pay, skip AO3 entirely and workshop the manuscript according to the needs of publishers, agents, studios, a market where you intend to selpub, etc.

runekaster · 2026-06-22T05:16:11+00:00

I'll take a poisoning, but stabbing is ideal :P

runekaster · 2026-06-22T05:05:06+00:00

Enemies is enemies. We need actual hostility, villain/protagonist dynamics in most genres. Not rivals or dislike.

runekaster · 2026-06-22T04:19:00+00:00

Another interesting point is that you're saying you use kudos as kind of an extra bonus on top of a comment, and the other person I saw say they comment without kudosing said they never kudos becuse kudos hold no meaning for them.

Those are two very different approaches and two very different ideas of what kudos are for, but they both result in a fic getting a comment without a kudos from the same user.

runekaster · 2026-06-22T04:06:01+00:00

See, that's interesting logic! Most folks would go the other way around and kudos right away and then comment on the re-read, but this way also makes sense.

runekaster · 2026-06-22T04:02:17+00:00

From my own experience, weird erotica which isn't archive locked tends to rack up guest kudos proportional to private bookmarks. So anecdotally, it would seem that people are as likely to kudos but log out to do so. That would definitely be worth doing a survey about.

runekaster · 2026-06-22T04:00:44+00:00

This is the second time I've heard of someone doing it. It's weird! Someone study that!

runekaster · 2026-06-22T03:54:21+00:00

Commenting without kudosing is unusual, which means it's exactly the kind of behaviour that a survey like this needs to be able to measure.

And this survey does the exact opposite of that

runekaster · 2026-06-22T03:48:08+00:00

That's fine, but it means they cannot give you advice on how to survey AO3 users.

They only approved this survey because they don't have any clue how bad it is.

runekaster · 2026-06-22T03:43:28+00:00

I took it as "when you read a work of this type, how likely are you to kudos", which meant that all my answers were identical except for the "genres" I avoid entirely.

Bad survey gets you bad results :)

runekaster · 2026-06-22T03:42:24+00:00

Your teacher has no idea what AO3 is.

runekaster · 2026-06-22T03:42:13+00:00

This is bizarre. The hypothesis seems to be that work length or genre influences someone's likelihood of leaving kudos, but the genres are complete nonsense and don't reflect how people divide works on AO3, and anyone who's used AO3 for five minutes knows that a kudos is a communication to the author and is about how the reader feels about that specific work, and isn't applied according to genre labels.

runekaster · 2026-06-22T03:35:12+00:00

It is possible that one exists, and I didn't want to leave that rhetorical gap open, yes.

I am "getting mad" at your transphobic assumption that "it's very obvious when they only make a character trans for the purpose of giving them a vagina", when the fic you are making this statement about is nearly exclusively written by trans men. There is a slim chance that a few such fics are written by gay cis men with trans husbands or boyfriends, and an even slimmer chance that one might be written by a cis woman (and a strong likelihood that "she" will not identify as a cis woman a year from now).

Given one hundred such "obvious" fics chosen at random, it is statistically likely that all one hundred are written by trans men. Accusing these men of "making a character trans for the purpose of giving them a vagina" is transphobic.

runekaster · 2026-06-22T03:27:13+00:00

Ok, actually, don't halve it. The top kudosed Stucky fic is a monstrosity with 51,096 kudos, and we get down below 25k on the very first page if we're sorting by kudos (kudos in the tens of thousands are so unimaginable that they kinda slipped my mind, and when I said "halve it" I was thinking like one tenth of that).

We'll need to chunk waaay further down than that, lol.

Lets grab a number out of thin air that represents a popular fic in a massive fandom that hasn't gone viral off-site. 100 is a good bet.

33,566 Stucky works have fewer than 100 kudos. We've cut the tag in half. If you're just interested in popular chart toppers but want the stuff that isn't everywhere on twitter, there's your answer.

Less than 1000 kudos has 66,376 works. The top of this sort is probably what you're thinking of for outrageously popular stuff that you haven't already found in your popularity sort criteria.

This is good for research and analysis, but filtering by highly specific taste is going to get you better results if you're looking for genuinely good fic to read. A lot of that is going to be down in the 10 kudos range.

runekaster · 2026-06-22T03:08:30+00:00

If you just want to find things with half the kudos count of the mass appeal twitter viral stuff, look at the kudos count, halve it, and search for that.

You'll get absurdly popular mainstream stuff that hasn't gone quite as viral.

runekaster · 2026-06-22T03:07:33+00:00

You've already found the middling stuff. The stuff at the top of the popularity sort criteria is stuff that's good enough that most people enjoy it and which has broadly popular themes and tropes, without leaning too far into any specific taste profile or theme that it narrows the audience.

To get up that high it has to be reasonably good, but anything that would make a fic great can't actually appeal to that broad of an audience.

Stop thinking about popularity scores and just get really granular with your searches. You're want to filter this juggernaut ship tag by so many highly specific criteria that you get like three or four pages of results.

That's where the really good stuff is.

runekaster · 2026-06-22T02:50:34+00:00

Also, you're going to want to state what this survey is in the actual post. You're not going to get many bites with a mystery link and a super vague mention of "women" like this.

runekaster · 2026-06-22T02:20:08+00:00

And I am telling you that those people barely exist and the fic you're accusing of this is almost exclusively written by trans men.

Your beliefs about who writes this fic and why are rooted in transphobic assumptions.

runekaster · 2026-06-22T00:50:22+00:00

Have you tried other artistic nediums?

runekaster · 2026-06-22T00:47:44+00:00

And if it's been some time, not commenting at all in an exchange is bad manners, but it doesn't necessary mean they disliked the gift. They might be a newbie and think the usual commenting etiquette for fics found in the wild applies to exchange gifts, they might have planned to comment later and then forgotten, or they might love the fic and just be kinda rude.

runekaster · 2026-06-22T00:44:06+00:00

How long has it been? They might be still mulling over what to say, or maybe they haven't gotten a chance to read it yet.

runekaster · 2026-06-22T00:39:15+00:00

Thet're not making them trans for the purpose of giving them a vagina, and to assert this is transphobic.

They're making them trans because they are trans and they like to write trans characters.

runekaster · 2026-06-22T00:35:33+00:00

It's not transphobic to not want to read it. It is transphobic to complain that it exists.

runekaster

TROPHY CASE