No Joke, After I Read Good Omens For The First Time, If I Ever Turned On The Radio For A Month Afterwards

If Chibnall ever wants to throw in some major darkness to Thirteen's storyline, there is a loophole to her kind personality.

Nowhere in the English language does it say that kind means nice.

Best soundtrack ever made. Seriously.

Non-Disney Challenge⇒1 Soundtrack

↳The Prince of Egypt

A Brief Guide to Supporting Authors

As a minor change of pace, I’d like to share some information about how to support fanfiction authors. Many readers don’t believe that their comments, kudos, or bookmarks are important to authors, but they are. 

So, great! Now, let’s talk about the various ways to give feedback - including those other than comments and kudos - as well as the strengths and weaknesses of each method. 

(Note: this guide is focused on ao3, but many parts apply to other platforms.) 

Bookmarks

Summary

Bookmarks let you keep track of a story for reference, re-reading, or just because. 

Public bookmarks are displayed on the story’s main bookmark count, and private bookmarks are not. 

Authors can see the total number of bookmarks on a story, both private and public, from their stats page. They cannot see who has left a private bookmark, or when it was made. 

Works can be sorted/filtered by the number of bookmarks. 

Bookmarks can be tagged, annotated, etc. 

The bookmark feature also as a “recommendation” option

Pros and cons

Pro: a bookmark serves as a more specific form of feedback than kudos, because it also means the reader likely wants to come back to the story later, and/or that they recommend this story to others. 

Pro: if a bookmark is public, authors will probably see it (we check those!). 

Pro: because notes/tags/annotations on bookmarks are optional and not intended for the author, readers feel less pressure to have a specific depth or format - anything goes. 

Tips and tricks

how to use the bookmark tool to create a rec

how to tag bookmarks

Kudos

Summary

Kudos are the easiest way to let an author know you like their story. 

You can only give kudos once per account, or once per IP address if you’re logged out. You cannot remove kudos. 

If authors have enabled this notification, they will get one email per day that lists who has given kudos on which works. These emails are magic. 

Kudos serve as a method to sort/filter fics, and readers often use the number of kudos or the kudos/hits ratio to determine whether or not to start a story. 

Pros and cons

Pro: quick and easy 

Pro: more kudos make other readers more likely to read the story

Pro: authors do tend to see kudos, whether via email, their stats page, or the story page itself. 

Con: kudos are a one-time thing, so if you leave them early in a multi-chapter story, the author has no way of knowing if you’re still reading. If you wait until the fic is complete (since kudos can’t be removed), the author won’t know you’re reading/that you enjoy the story until after it’s complete - and a perceived lack of reader interest is a leading cause for abandoned WIPs. 

Con: authors tend to interpret kudos less positively than readers. Therefore, if you leave kudos and mean “I love this story so much!!” the author doesn’t know that, because people leave kudos for many different reasons. 

Con: they’re not specific. The impact of praise tends to increase with specificity. For example, “this fic is great” is nice to hear, but “your dialogue and characterizations in this story are great” is more specific and will generally inspire more emotion in the author. Because kudos are both the lowest effort and lowest specificity form of feedback, they don’t have the same impact as other methods. 

Tips and tricks

If, for some reason, you don’t want to leave kudos on your username, you can quickly leave guest kudos without logging out by copying the address, opening a private browser session, and leaving kudos as a guest.

You can also do this if you want to leave multiple kudos 

Subscriptions 

authors can see how many users are subscribed to a story from their stats page

authors cannot see who is subscribed to their story 

authors do not know if a subscriber is still reading, or if they are inactive/not checking updates 

subscriptions to authors do not show up in the story subscriptions count 

subscriptions can give an author a general indication of their audience for a multi-chapter story, but it’s almost exclusively a tool for readers rather than a feedback mechanism. 

Comments

This has been covered in depth before - check the links for more info. 

Your Guide to Reviews

Appreciation Without Anxiety: Commenting 101

How to Write A Good Review on FFN (most of this also applies to ao3)

tips and tricks for commenting on mobile

Why People Don’t Comment

“Can I Say This?” Culture, Comments, and Concern

101 Comment Starters

Recommending and Sharing Fics

Simply posting a link to a fic on tumblr is a great form of feedback, if the author sees it - it’s fine to leave a comment on the fic saying “I recommended this story!” with a link to the post, or to tag them on tumblr if you can find their account. 

If an author shares their tumblr account, liking and reblogging their story-related posts is a great way to show support, because it means that you enjoy their story enough that you want other people to read it. 

Authors on tumblr will often check both their notes and the tags people add, and tagging it with something along the lines of “I love this story” or “please read this” will make an author cry happy tears. 

An easy way to create rec lists is to bookmark fics or use the mark for later feature as you read them, and once per week, make a list via tumblr post. Generally, you’ll want to list the title, author (tag them if you can find them on tumblr!), fandom, pairing(s), and character(s). A brief description is nice but not necessary; if you want to add more but you’re not sure what, simply copy-paste the author’s summary from ao3. Then, if you haven’t tagged the author, leave a comment on the story with a link to your rec list. 

I don’t actually have words to describe how amazing it is to find that someone has recced my fics, but wow. I have literally cried. 

Misc.

if you can find an author on tumblr, feel free to tag them in posts (for example, “this photo makes me think of your story, @author!”) or send asks about their fics. 

If you’ve written or drawn something inspired by their stories, let them know! Don’t worry about whether it’s “good enough,” because I promise they will love and appreciate it (and you!). 

If you’ve made playlists, moodboards, metas, etc, also let them know! 

If you see someone else recommending or mentioning their fic, tag the author - they likely haven’t seen it. I’ve only found out about several things like this after a friend saw the post and sent it to me. 

If you see someone posting negatively about their fic, don’t let the author know - it’s stressful, upsetting, and they can’t do anything about it. 

This guide is not exhaustive, but I hope it’s given readers a bit more information regarding how authors receive and interpret feedback!

- Mod Rose

“acephobia isn’t real”

hhmmmmm?

hhmmmmmmmm?

HHHMMMMMMMM??????

HHHHHMMMMMMMMMMMMM?????

what the fuck do you call all of this bullshit then????

The moment when one of your new favorite books references/reads like your absolute favorite poem. Dear God what is it with all these awesome parallels to Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’? My fangirling cannot be contained!

This right here is one of my favorite moments for the dynamic between Hardy and Ellie. Throughout the first series he’s the one teaching her the finer points of interviewing suspects, he’s the one who leads. Then things go all to hell the last couple episodes and Ellie has to be the one who leads the questions. (Her talk with Susan Wright is fantastic, and showcases exactly what sort of detective Ellie is-- hard and steely when needs be, but soft and sympathetic when that’s needed too.)

And then here we have the climax of Sandbrook, when they’ve got their suspects in custody. Hardy leads initially, as he’s done throughout so much of the series, but as soon as Ellie finds a way to crack their suspect’s armor there is no moment of hesitation, no glances aside to see if Ellie should take the lead or not. No, he simply sits back and lets her.

He has absolute faith in her abilities as a detective, and this moment right here is where he proves it.

Also that grin on Ellie’s face conveys so much, and I love it. She’s been constantly looked down upon and underestimated in her abilities as the DS and it turns out she’s the secret weapon that breaks Sandbrook’s case wide open. That grin and her sitting forward like that is a hound smelling a hare, and it’s both thrilling and terrifying to see it.

This post fascinates me because I love psychology and a few months ago I labelled the Broadchurch characters as to what personality type they were, and when I looked back at the list I’d made, Alec was INTJ.

Broadchurch: Alec Hardy [INTJ]

OFFICIAL TYPING by Charity / the mod.

Introverted Intuition (Ni): Alec is reluctant to draw conclusions on evidence until he has fully explored all the possibilities, but he does so internally without brainstorming with Ellie. He often says that he has “a feeling” about how things will turn out, but no evidence to support his hypothesis. Alec is so out of touch with “how things work” (lacking Si) that he fails at social niceties and customs, and sometimes over-compensates as a result (“I got you flowers… and chocolate… and wine; I didn’t know which to choose, so I got them all”). He is able to read people very well, in a short time, and gauge their abilities.

Extroverted Thinking (Te): He wants to finish the job and doesn’t mind who gets the credit. He demands facts, evidence, and “proof.” When confronted with a dead child, he immediately runs through all the usual procedures as well as makes due with the resources around him (including CCTV cameras). Alec demands a high work ethic from his employees and puts in the same hours himself. He has a frankness when dealing with people, and always points out the logic (or lack thereof) in their decisions. “I don’t care about anything but this case,” he says, inferring they can tell him anything that doesn’t have to do with the murder and it won’t wind up in his police report.

Introverted Feeling (Fi): No one knows he has a daughter; he does not open up about his marriage, his former cases, or his illness, instead preferring to deal with his guilt and pain on his own. Alec’s compassion is not often evident, but does run deep; his method in “protecting people” is to warn them not to talk to journalists and to threaten said journalists in order to get them to back off. He is rarely emotional in public and does not like to discuss his feelings.

Extroverted Sensing (Se): Even though he is very ill, Alec continues to work—pushing his body beyond its limits, into a total collapse. He is so eager for a physical human connection that he propositions a woman, who says no only because she’s “afraid [he will] collapse on top of me.” He has almost no connection to his own inner sensations, and as a result, overdoes it; he is also semi-reluctant to engage in his environment on a regular basis, down to his eating habits.

‘A long time ago in a galaxy far far away... there lived a Monster.’

Frodo & Bilbo play Scrabble regularly and are VERY competitive