Part of accepting yourself completely is reframing your mind to make it about you, so that “will they like me?” turns into “will I like them?” and “did they like what I said?” turns into “did I say everything I wanted to say?” Everything you do should ultimately be brought on by what you think is important and by what you want. Not by what you think will be most accepted or most liked.
As you may have heard, Gallaplacidia will be taking down her work from AO3 and the Gallapod. However, she said in her announcement email that saving and sharing her work is fine with her, so I’ve archived it all here.
Here you’ll find:
Epub downloads of all her fics from AO3
MP3s of the entire Gallapod, organized by fic and edited to include all the relevant metadata
If you love her work, I’d highly encourage you to download all of it for yourself. Please let me know if you find any errors in my labeling. Otherwise, enjoy!
Finally! This scene is insufficiently giffed, seeing as Sam is in fact the sex here.
OH
YES thank you
Also I must flail once again with even more love for how Sam, despite being unpowered, just goes right in there, going after a guy armed with a machine gun with a two-inch knife and nothing else. <3 <3 <3
There are many new friends on the archive, and many are young and have only known social media, which is why I wanted to say something!
Ao3 does not have an algorithm! It isn’t a social media site, it’s an archive.
Posting fics on Tumblr isn’t the same as posting fics on Ao3
Ao3 is like a giant virtual bookshelf, and everyone is able to add their own stories to the bookshelf, all stored with different tags and different fandoms. Works are automatically sorted by newest to oldest, but filters, looking at bookmarks, and using the search function can change that.
Certain works are not pushed to the top like social media posts. More kudos and reads don’t push a single work to more viewers by some algorithm. Unless otherwise filtered, works will be at the top of the page based on how recent it was posted.
Smaller fandoms get less views, less kudos, less bookmarks, and larger fandoms get more simply because of the number of people inside the fandom.
Ao3 is a giant virtual bookshelf- there is no algorithm, and there is no man behind the shelf pushing certain books forward.
Happy reading, and if you’d like to have more people notice a fic, why not share it with them! Send a dm to a fandom friend and it might turn into one of their favorite fics!
And why is there no algorithm? It’s not just because AO3 is a virtual bookshelf for you to browse, a cornucopia for fans of all sorts, not a form of SoMe.
One of the most important reasons is the principle “if you’re not paying to use a product (website/app/SoMe etc.) you are the product”. Algorithms are used to detect what you are most likely to pay for outside of the “free” product you’re using, and that information is what the providers of that “free” product are making money from. They’re not used to benevolently provide you with specific content you enjoy, that’s a side effect of making you a better product.
AO3 is literally free to use. Information about you is not sold to third parties. The responsibility to curate your experience on AO3, and to market what you place there yourself, is entirely on you. AO3 gets by on voluntary donations and a lot of the work is done by unpaid volunteers. The goal of AO3 is not and has never been to make money.
Happy filtering - because the only algorithms needed on AO3 are the ones you create for yourself, in your own brain, and apply to searches there.
And also, happy reccing - because that’s a way of trying to bring more attention to fanworks you enjoy, regardless of algorithm essential factors like their achieved popularity and mainstream appeal.
“you’re not hungry?” the restaurant they’re in is cluttered with the din of a nighttime rush. yoongi is twenty and feels much older but also far too young to be worrying this much. yet here he is, hands folded neatly at the edge of their table, a big-eyed ball of nerves sitting across from him with his head down and his knee bouncing off beat.
“um.”
“eat.”
he doesn’t mean for it to come across cold but maybe it does a little because jungkook raises his head and yoongi is faced with the youngest’s bottled-up panic dead-on. it’s not panic the way one does before a test or audition, not the panic of ‘where are my keys’ or ‘oh no i forgot your name and you just introduced yourself literally two second ago’. it’s much worse; it’s the panic of 'did i do something wrong i did something wrong did i do something wrong i didn’t mean to’, something to that effect. yoongi knows this because he’s felt it himself, still feels it fairly often. but somehow seeing it in jungkook hurts more.
it’s an interesting experience he’ll relive in the years to come – this feeling of feelings not his own and yet very important to him.
but he doesn’t know that right now.
right now, what he knows is this: he wants to make jungkook feel better.
“here,” he says and takes a bite of one skewer, chewing thoughtfully and nodding approvingly after.
then he holds the skewer out. jungkook blinks, notably still hasn’t found his voice.
but he does reach out, does gently take the skewer from yoongi – their fingers brush of course – and almost drops it but doesn’t quite. yoongi’s feeling of guilt gets steamrolled by another surprising feeling: fondness. deep fondness. warm fondness.
what’s going to actually end up being a lifelong fondness.
for now he just smiles because he can’t help it, his eyes going crescent as jungkook smiles too – a little less nervous as he nibbles and then gets braver and eats the next bit. they continue on like this, back and forth until that skewer is done. then they eat the second. that’s all there is. this is a splurge even so. it was nice of the waitstaff to let them sit despite their small order. yoongi figures it was jungkook’s bunny smile that did it, though he won’t say as much.
at the last pass, yoongi holds it out and maybe jungkook really is more comfortable. he leans forward and eats it right off like that.
only when he rests back and sighs a little louder than expected, does yoongi stop staring, sets it down and asks,
“good?”
wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, it’s a relief to see jungkook’s still smiling when he lowers it, when he smiles wide enough for his overbite to show and says,
no offense but idk how ppl act like bts isn’t special when they literally dedicated an entire era, two years of their career, to teaching us to love ourselves above all
