the reason im here today: the fandom im currently in only has 10 pages of fic on ao3. of those ten pages, many promising starts were long since abandoned, there were crossovers galore, and the worst- several fics with my otp were in russian thus, i weep
every time someone misspells appetite as apatite i think they mean the mineral. "i lost my apatite" oh i think i found it, is this it?
Which makes it all the more strange because if you're putting in that much effort while going that far outside of canon, why not just write OFic at that point?
because original fic doesn't get as much attention. i've gotten more commentary and fanart on my homestuck fic than i have on even 'god eaters'. that's just how it be, and it doesn't bother me, because i don't write for attention; as long as i have a few people who enjoy my stuff and are interested in talking about it with me, i'm happy, whether it's five people or five thousand. but a lot of folks judge their worth as a writer on number of comments and kudos. original fic just doesn't get the numbers.
Regarding D/s AUs again, the idea of someone being assigned dom or sub at birth is just a little unsettling. I don't want to know how that works.
Tangentially, I have a fandom-specific gripe: Why does every Jaspis fic have Lapis as the sub? Seriously, I cannot see Lapis Fucking Lazuli subbing for anyone, personally, but like...ESPECIALLY not Jasper. I can see literally no situation where she would. (See also: the whole Malachite situation.) And literally all of the sub!Lapis shit I've seen is also just...hideously OOC generally? Like, if you're going to write her as a sub, at least make her a bratty sub or something, not some whimpering she-uke! #lousy goddamn stupid steven universe fandom and its tendency to ooc-ify literally everyone in literally any context
i mean, we kinda do know how that works... gender roles and all... which is why that kind of au gives me the screaming mimis. and the 'assigned omega at birth' kind of abo fics too. way too much of that in meatspace already.
Yeah, but there are physical cues which are at least often correlated with gender. How the hell do you tell what a newborn's behaviour will be just by looking? The time travel idea is the only one I can think of.
the way i’ve seen some authors handle it is that it’s not apparent in birth or even in childhood, but that it’s something the child discovers in adolescence.
Yeah I´ve seen many fics go "Everyone thought i was a sub but actually I´m a dom" or vice versa as a plot point.
I mean, in one origfic I can think of, a point was made about how arbitrary it was—it was assigned based on where you were in your age rank of siblings, to the point that Middle Child in an odd number (or god forbid, Single Child) was an actual thing you could experience prejudice based on. It was a really interesting way of handling it, actually. Especially since it, y’know, caused a lot of issues when a family planned for four children and oopsie five happened so now our older Sub Child is a Dreaded Middle Child so what if we just, like, kicked them out of the family, that’s a solution right there. Absurd concept taken to logical conclusion and actually handled well, all things considered. edit: Also because social expectations =/= what a given individual’s preferred role in the bedroom actually was, so it’s not like Every Youngest Child Was Actually A Sub For Realsies, which helped sell the premise better.
I'll see if I can dig it up again. I have.... a not insubstantial amount of OrigFic on my ereader from trawling the AO3 tag, and a lot of it gets deleted routinely whenever the authors move on to try and get published.