meledol84:

elfwreck:

nihilismpastry:

lhugbereth:

eternal-harvest:

misskatieleigh:

sinbadism:

angstprompts:

angstprompts:

softnocturne:

angstprompts:

angstprompts:

Just a heads up, AO3 deleted one of my original works because someone reported it for “not being fanwork” despite original work being a “fandom” with over 35k fics.

“Under Section IV. of the Terms of Service, which you agreed to when opening your account, prompt requests, prompt lists, squee posts, notices about meetups, non–fanwork fiction or nonfiction, fic searches, rec lists, letters to other users, reactions to episodes, blog or Tumblr-appropriate posts, and other ephemeral content (i.e. content meant to be temporary), are not allowed to be uploaded on the Archive of Our Own.”

If you have multiple original works on AO3, you very well could be permanently suspended for violating the terms of service.

Be careful.

I have no fucking clue, especially since they hired people to wrangle the tags, meaning that they’re well aware that original work is an option

IS this true? D: AO3 what the heck?

Here’s the email I got, so yeah, it is true

Can everyone reblog this? AO3 has been dealing with a lot of abuse in their invite system, and if they’re cracking down on other areas like original works, this could affect a lot of writers.

Literally why is this the line they draw? I really do not get it. Heads up, though, I guess

FYI

@cynical-harlequin @bright-elen

Anyone else that has original work up on AO3, make sure you have a copy saved I guess?

Wow, this is ridiculous.

Oh shit :C

@darkcrystaldemon I know your original work is up on your A03. 

We had arguments. We had long, detailed, meta-enhanced, ranty screamy arguments about whether “original fiction” belonged on AO3, and if so, what kinds of original fiction. (Most of the arguments are lost.)

The arguments pointed out things like, if you wrote “fanfic” in the world of Jane Eyre, using the names of a couple of characters mentioned in passing or even a couple of characters hypothesized from canon (like, Jane’s grandparents) – there’s no way to tell that apart from original fic. And there was a long history of BL/Yaoi being part of fandom, and that was all original fic.

While Original Fiction was indeed a tag, many people were using it for “fiction set in a canon world but not using canon characters.” Some used it for things like “events in the SPN universe that don’t connect to Sam and Dean.” Some used it for retellings of fairy tales, or new fairy tales. And so on.

At first, the official rule was, “must be fanfic in some way; we’re not checking for not-fanfic works, but we’ll review them if they’re posted.” Eventually, that was relaxed.

The idea was, it’s okay to have fannish original fic, but not non-fannish original fic. And yeah, that’s a blurry-as-hell line, may require reading to figure out, and so on. (Most of the content policy rules are designed to be implemented without the need to interpret much of anything; they’re supposed to be as objective as possible. Like, you can’t sort out “is this non-con explicit porn” by list of keywords, but we can pretty much all agree on what that is. “Is this fannish-style origific or is it mainstream-style origific” is nowhere near as obvious, and I’m very glad I’m not involved in decisions like that.)

TL;DR – some forms of Original Fiction are fanworks. Some aren’t. AO3 doesn’t want to be Wattpad or Fictionpress; it wants to remained focused on fanworks. It really doesn’t want to be another version of nifty.org. (Very NSFW.) It’s got a very broad definition of fanworks – I’m pretty damn sure that both Neighbor Steve and Grandson Todd the Demon tumblr threads would be acceptable – but not every bit of fiction is a fanwork.

If you think your original fic was some form of fanwork, send them a note and discuss it.

@earlgreytea68