Given that you can't mention or link your patreon and you will get shit taken down for advertizing about commissions, I'd say that that's definitely close enough to hit their no commerce rule. I would say someone should probably tell them that before they get their shit taken down and get in trouble with the staff.
I'm almost 100% sure it breaks the TOS, yeah. Nothing that even hints of giving the authors money is allowed on AO3 proper. A link to their ko-fi in their Tumblr is maybe okay, but no ko-fi or patreon or mentions of commissions in the fic. That risks the legal foundation keeping it afloat.
yep — if you link to your tumblr, and your tumblr links to your patreon/ko-fi, you should be fine. but linking straight to the ko-fi is a no-go
Yyyyyeah, I'm absolutely sure that that breaks the TOS and that someone should warn them about it because that's the sort of stuff that does (if it doesn't get taken down) cause the mods to ban people. It's a very blatant "hey, plz give me money", which is Not Allowed under the TOS.
Ftr, if you report the fic for breaking TOS, that won't result in the fic being taken down or the author banned necessarily. AO3 isn't youtube, abuse and TOS reports are gone through individually - they'll reach out to the author and tell them to remove that (via email) and it's only if the author refuses repeatedly that they'll have the fic deleted or wind up banhammered. So if you don't want to deal with trying to privately let the person know and whether or not they'll react politely, AO3 does actually have a protocol in place for this, and it's meant to work with the authors in question, not punish them. Source: about three years ago someone was shitstirring about AO3 deleting all their works with "no warning" despite them not violating any of AO3's content policies and it eventually turned out that this was the issue. OP kept putting their direct links back in, despite AO3's explicit guidelines.
If I remember right, someone on the AO3 mod-team actually ended up having to go "no, we're not deleting your work 'with no warning', we've warned you repeatedly about what the content policy is and given you multiple chances to fix things and behave yourself. your work is getting deleted because you keep putting in direct links to your patreon and saying that you do commissions, and that's a TOS violation and you know it" because people were getting so worked up over the idea that there might be some mod-driven Strikethrough or some shit going on at AO3. It included posting screencaps of the emails warning the shitstirrer about the problems.
It is a TOS violation, but everyone else has mentioned that by now. I'm pretty sure that linking to the main page of your social media is allowed, but directly linking to commission pages/Patreons/Ko-fis/etc. is forbidden--so if your Tumblr has a link to commission info somewhere on it you're fine, so long as you're not linking to the commission info itself or otherwise explicitly mentioning taking commissions. But as a second-person fic writer in a non-Homestuck fandom I am legit so fucking offended by the implications re: second-person. Like, I made my longfic that way for a specific reason (I wanted it to be immersive but I suck at first-person narration), and not to brag but like. It worked. People actually really liked it and said it added to the effect of the work. Yeah, it CAN be done badly, but so can first- and third-person. It strikes me as frankly really narrow-minded and tbh if I saw a comment like that from an author on their fic, I'd kinda assume they weren't that good a writer?
Yes!! Yes that is absolutely against the TOS, and someone should tell them. A "here's my other social media" is not, but "here's my other social media so you can give me money" definitely is.
Ok im gonna see if i can find it again and report it so ao3 will take it up with them edit: done They also link it in their profile so i assume ao3 will also bring that up yee haw
Fic gripe: ive been watching a lot of historical costuming enthusiasts on youtube and then i read this assassins creed fic where people in like 1780 are dressing and undressing very quickly im not an expert, and this is picky as hell, but i would prefer that i not get the impression everyone is wearing 2020 clothing all the time Also, character repeadly thinking pants = easier to move in, which, ok yeah maybe but dont act like ye olden skirts were Torture Devicez and that mens fashion was always like, comfy pants and white pirate shirts mentiom of someone working in a field in america wearing a short skirt, which, nah i know u want ur character to be able to show some Leggy but i will be picky here
For the commission of fic thing, I follow someone who posted that their work was paid work - I knew their tumblr so I sent a DM to let them know about TOS, and they changed the label to "gift for X on [website]" which I guess is vague enough to not break the rules
This isn't a gripe, precisely, because I wouldn't read the fic either way so it's no skin off my nose, but it's so weird to me how seemingly almost the entire ecological niche of ridiculous OC-insert fic has been co-opted by AU Harry Potters. I can see how it got there: decades of bile at OCs for being Mary Sues like it's the ultimate and unforgivable narrative crime; a megafandom that's still mega 13 and a half years after its last book, so the younger members of the fandom have been familiar with its entire run literally since they learned to read; the increasing backlash by that fandom against its own canon and author in a variety of forms, hastening the proliferation of fanon and divergence from the material that spawned it; Harry's main personality traits boiling down to "protagonist" in the first place. But the universality still somehow keeps surprising me whenever I stumble onto yet another summary where Hepatitis Triangulum Black-Evans got adopted by some random character from another fandom and named Renesmee Winchester and there's no other characters from HP tagged, and I can't help going, "...You know you can invent a character who isn't Harry Potter, right?"
I have a soft spot for all OCs though. The point of fanfic is to make yourself happy Or make people sad sometimes idk It's FUN and DUMB and thats why i love it
i really wish oc insert/self insert fic was popular again, i really miss being able to go into whatever fandom i was enjoying at the time and find twenty different "i fell into the plot of the story!!!!" fics many of which were like 40 chapters long
I still see the classic kind occasionally, especially in video game fandoms with highly customizable or nonentity protagonists that encourage straight self-inserting. I creep the Pokemon fandom tag a lot when I'm looking for funny summaries, and it's got a fair share of both "this is me on a Pokemon journey" and "here's my cool OC with awesome magic powers." But when I'm wandering around in weird freeform tags instead, most of the "here's the canon main characters ✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*AND ME, THEIR NEW BEST FRIEND*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧" genre seems to be Harry. Except he's usually Hadrian. Or Hadriana. Or Hippocampus.
there's for some reason a LOT of this "harry is here now" fic for katekyo hitman reborn, which...like, the only explanation i can come up with is that the writers were 14 at the time they were consuming both media
