Its even worse when you're reading shitty ninja fic and everything's tense, then suddenly a character becomes weary which in that situation could be instant death
This is an art delight more than a fic one, but... Homestuck trolls with monster/animal features, even if it doesn't make much canonical sense. One idea I liked recently was trolls with feet like their lusii, but the art piece in question didn't go far enough in applying it (TW nudity). Vriska ought to have little fuzzy spider feet. On the other hand, the raptor feet the artist gave her instead... I wanna apply that to all the trolls now.
A low-key delight for me as a person who likes cruising for ridiculous fic summaries: there is a lot of Among Us fanfic. This makes a lot of sense, since it's a game with a very strong narrative premise where everything that happens is completely emergent. "There's a bunch of people on a space ship but one of them is secretly trying to murder everyone and they're trying to find out who it is in time to save themselves" makes stories that are all about interpersonal drama and how people feel about each other, but the characters can be literally anything you want them to be; the canon itself is functionally a fanfic trope plot. So there's all this fic ranging from horror to torrid melodrama to angsty enemies-to-lovers monster porn, and... every time I see one of these summaries I vividly remember that every single character looks like this: While I know it isn't the intended reaction, this juxtaposition fills me with joy every time.
Update: it was indeed nominated for Yuletide and got 11 fills, for a total of 20 fics in the fandom tag, literally all of which are actually about the poster. I was reminded to check on this because I looked in the Resident Evil tag on AO3 because a bunch of people on Tumblr have been losing their minds over a giant vampire lady in a hat and discovered that, in only a week and a half since the trailer with her dropped: And, as with the Cordelia poster, all I could think was, "Shine on, you thirsty diamonds."
Different fandom but a thing about Star Wars fanfic that I find absolutely hilarious is how different people have different takes on wtf Chewie is in Earth AU. It ranges from a large dog to a very hairy and silent man. I also love any sort of ancestral/prophecy fulfillment in fics. Homestuck fics did this a lot and so do some Star Wars fics and I go wild for it EVERY TIME. I attribute this to reading Holes at a young age. Also any sort of fics where they like, rewrite the whole ass plot and do it a million times better than the canon. Also unfortunately common in Star Wars fic -_-
this is a generalist thing, but i love getting into fandoms without being familiar with the canon because guys, the complete lack of homogeneity in how people perceive and write fandom interpretations of characters is wild and i absolutely adore it there is so much whiplash because in some fandoms, it really can feel like opening up a new fic and stepping sideways into a brand new fandom every time
More a fic writer delight, but I updated my fic yesterday and the very first comment on the new chapter was pointing out a line I was particularly proud of. I was and am so thrilled!!
I find amusement in fics where characters who were genuinely threatening villains in canon end up more at the status of The Friend Nobody Likes to the good guys. It's kind of adorable, and as Karkat said in Paradox Space, there's nothing wrong with imagining a universe where everyone's a little happier.
Shout out to the Detective Conan fic writers, who have the gargantuan task of inventing new murder mysteries in a series with one thousand episodes and five hundred corpses (I mean the same sentiment could be applied to Gosho Aoyama, but 1) he's getting paid and 2) the series length is his own fault. Nobody asked him to write murders for twenty seven years)
Being up all night working on a My Immortal pastiche. I think we pulled it off pretty well! (Read the warning tags carefully though.)
Saw the term plot bunny used in a fic recently! It reminded me of other older terminology and mannerisms i grew up with 15+ years ago and i feel so nostalgic
my discord server actually has a #plot-bunnies channel, i guess i didn’t realize the term had fallen out of use xD
Found this cool fanfic counting video rating the highest number of written fanfics on AO3 from different fandoms and I thought it was a neat lil history of authors and fandom in general! Published 2 months ago so it's still pretty relevant. Was a bit surprised that Stargate Atlantis held the top for so long: The video has no sound
Ohhhh I am 200% watching this when I get home. Also, my own delight of the moment: when someone is looking for a type of fic that happens to be exactly what you wrote, and when you link them they love it!!
So was I, but when I looked up the dates it made more sense to me. I knew a lot of AO3's founders and early adopters were heavy into live-action m/m fandoms, and it looks like today about half the SGA fic on AO3 is for one slash juggernaut. It aired 2004-2009, so it was still going when AO3 was founded, unlike most of the early big fandoms other than Supernatural and House MD. But Supernatural only introduced Castiel a few days after the data starts, and before he was added the slash potential was limited to only people who were fine shipping sibling incest. SGA ends in January 2009 and the fandom keeps on trucking along. HP and Buffy both jump up several hundred at once each in late 2009, which probably represents other archives being imported to AO3. But Supernatural is still going and getting progressively gayer and it rises up on the bubble of Superwholock until it finally takes the top spot from SGA in 2011. And then from there all the live-action shows that the early adopters were into that are getting a little old by this point start falling down the rankings in favor of open canon fandoms, and Supernatural doesn't get dethroned until mid-2020 when the show has become a punchline and the momentum of Destiel fanon can no longer keep it ahead of the perpetual motion machine that is the Harry Potter fandom. (You can see a distinct uptick of spitefic after Super Hell, though, lol.)