You May Well Ask Why I Write. And Yet My Reasons Are Quite Many. For It Is Not Unusual In Human Beings

Feedback culture is dead, long live feedback culture!

AO3, fanfiction, and comments: the system isn’t working. 

Fic authors have a problem with feedback – or rather, with the lack of it. Fanfiction has a notoriously low ratio of comments to hits, and many of us have expressed our frustration that we can get a hundred, two hundred, five hundred, even a thousand views on our stories, but only a handful of readers will leave kudos, let alone comments.   

Unfortunately, this only gets worse for long, multi-chapter stories (aka, the longfics we know, love, and would sell our souls in a second if it meant an update), which also happen to be the stories that authors need the most support to continue and complete. Law of diminishing returns, y’all, and it sucks. 

We’re not here to guilt you into leaving comments. We want to address the problem by changing the format, and we need your help to do it. 

The goal is to increase the amount of feedback authors get from readers, especially on stories with multiple chapters, and to make it easier for everyone to show how much we love fics. We’re opening a discussion with ao3 to figure out how/if any of these options can be implemented, but first we need options to present! 

Some of our current ideas: 

Ability to leave a form of kudos on every chapter, instead of only once on the entire story: this lets authors know that you’re here and you’re reading their updates, so their hard work isn’t getting tossed into the internet void. 

Comment templates: suggested comments that can be customized or posted as-is. Many of us draw a blank or get nervous when we try to think of a comment, so having pre-made options will both increase the total level of feedback and serve as practice, making it easier to leave more in-depth comments in the future. 

Upvoting/leaving kudos on comments themselves: positive reinforcement makes giving feedback more fun and rewarding, and it lets the author know that readers are present and agreeing with other comments, even if they don’t leave one themselves. 

We’ll contact AO3 to discuss the possibility of adding any of these as native features, and if that won’t work, we’re looking into creating and sharing a user script. 

 What you can do to help: 

 As a reader, what would you like to have? What would you be most likely to use? New ideas, opinions on ideas that are listed here, they’re all good. 

As a creator, how would you feel about each of these options? Can you think of other ways of receiving or encouraging feedback? 

Pros and cons of these (note: our thoughts on this are discussed in this google doc) 

GET THE WORD OUT! Reblog this post, send it to your friends, link to it from your stories. We need as much input and support as possible to get this off the ground. 

Feedback makes for happy authors. Happy authors make for more stories. Let’s keep this part of fandom alive! 

More details about our thoughts, discussions, and ideas can be found in this google doc.

Norway | Kai Grossmann

When you realize your overpowered goody two shoes, co-worker laughs in the exact way that the mild manner, clumsy, loveable oaf Clark Kent you dated, fell in love with, and then dumped because you knew you could never tell a civilian much less a reporter about your villgantly night “job”. Resulting in ruining the best thing in your life. 

The weirdest guy I ever met in a church was this boy who referred to “Buzz Aldrin and his husband” going to the moon. I was completely baffled, and when I asked if he’d misspoken, he got really angry and accused me of being deliberately ignorant of the facts. It turned out that he was somehow comvinced that Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong were married. It took five Wikipedia articles to convince him otherwise.

Y’all can pry alterous attraction from my cold dead hands.

It’s such an important concept. As a community we cannot let it die.

Ive been thinking lately about the Tony-deletes-his-brain arc from Iron Man (2008).

Steve is dead, the Registration Act is done, the Skrull invasion has put Osborn in power, and, thanks to Extremis, Tony is carrying the entire Registration database in his head. The logical and very Tony solution is to slowly delete his own brain by traveling the world and plugging into repulsor terminals he has stashed in various places. Each time, he loses chunks of his intellect and his memory and heads closer to total brain death. It’s the culmination of all his angst over Civil War and Steve’s death.

But one thing that really gets me is this scene in issue #17 when Tony is writing an email to Maria Hill:

Tony is thinking about Steve when there’s no particular reason to be thinking about Steve, which is very in character for him. But more importantly, he’s forgotten that Steve is dead.

It’s thing that destroyed him in the aftermath of the Civil War, the one thing he couldn’t live with, and he’s forgotten. There was no reason to put this in the scene, other than to highlight that.

I think this was exactly what Tony wanted, and the real reason why he didn’t just eat a gun or “throw himself into a volcano” as other characters suggested. Tony didn’t want to die. He wanted escape from the guilt and to and dull of his mind and lose his sense of self. And when he reboots, he gets to lose the entire year of memories he couldn’t handle. And it’s so, so in character because those are the same desires that made him alcoholic years earlier.

More than that, I think Tony knew exactly what he was doing when he put the database in his head. If things went wrong, really really wrong, he had a ready made escape. A planned loss of the worst of himself and the worst of his memories. (I’d also like to think that if Steve put these pieces together after he returned and Tony had lost a year, he’d be furious.)

So anyway, that’s my over-10-years-too-late extremely angsty analysis of post-Civil War Tony that no one asked for... carry on

♪  Who d'you think you’re kidding 

He’s the earth and heaven to you 

Try to keep it hidden, 

Honey we can see right through you   ♪