I began my writing journey on fanfiction.net after a fan page on wetpaint.com went down (wetpaint was my OG springboard for all things fanfics, then ff.net, livejournal and tumblr). I still visit it from time to time, reading fanfics that are not present on AO3.
What about you? Do you still visit ff?
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.
Ahh that’s true. I think AO3 caters more to ships and romances. So many gen fics on ff.net but man, the people there rarely reviews anymore. At least in my fandom, people are quicker to comment on AO3. I still get notifications from fics I wrote 2 years ago. And that says a lot about the level of engagement (or maybe the amount of users) in AO3. I like that it’s community driven and run by donations too, unlike Ff which is run by ads and we all know how twitter and reddit turns out.
I only fear that so many of the fics I love will disappear if the owner of ff.net somehow decided it’s no longer profitable.
Almost everything is on Ao3 now for me. It’s just ridiculously easy to read how I want, organize my fics, etc and of course very easy posting. I’ll go on FFN when I run out of fic for a fandom on Ao3 though. There are a few gems that haven’t been crossposted, so I go fight against FFN’s cloudflare to download them with FanFicFare lol.
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.
Reading FFN is “scrapping the bottom of the barrel” for me. Like I’ll go there if I mine out a fandom in AO3, but it’s definitely not my starting place.
Some of the older fandoms started out there and it existed when majority of the internet users are younger and just starting out so I can understand the quality. Some of my older works are still there and I cringe at them. But that said, there are some hidden gems in FFN not otherwise seen elsewhere.
