NOT Naming Any Namesbut Some Of My Mutualsare Cool And Hot

NOT naming any names…but some of my mutuals…are cool and hot

i feel like being in a fandom long-term has a very specific repetitive cycle that kind of looks like this

I was walking on a rather remote beach when I came upon this Whip eel drying up in the sun. These are intertidal eels that can actually handle themselves out of water for a bit, but it’s not normal for them to be fully exposed in direct sunlight like this. The tide was at least six hours from coming in and I felt like this eel was in distress, so I made the decision to dig him out and return to the ocean. His body was too delicate to be simply pulled from the hole without injury, so I got to digging.

This endeavor took about 40 minutes as the eel was quite long and difficult to excavate. Also had to continually refill my temporary eel pond to keep him from drying out entirely while I worked.

If you are an eel aficionado like myself, please enjoy this silly little video of the relocation process set to some jaunty royalty-free disco music.

Every time AO3 makes an update, there’s a chorus of ‘and can we please please please be able to leave kudos on each chapter pleeeeease?!?!’

In theory, this is a nice idea. We’ve all smashed the kudos button on our favourite fics, bemoaning the fact we can’t give them all the love.

But ya’ll, kudos per chapter would absolutely fucking suck.

For readers, it would suck because it would compound the existing problem of making it hard to find fics that are good and not just long - not that a fic can’t be both! But there are plenty of Pulitzer-worthy one-shots out there that are buried way way down the list when ranked by number of kudos, because they’re beneath a bunch of 50/? fics where the author lost sight of where the hell the story was going 30 chapters ago, but their fic has had 50x the chances to be viewed so has more kudos. It would encourage authors to release their fics in lots of little chapters instead of a few longer ones/one-shots as they might otherwise have done (and as might otherwise suit the story).

And for authors it would especially suck, as it would compound the existing problem of people not commenting. Kudos are very much appreciated, but comments make an author’s day; but so few people bother, and frankly, it’s disheartening. Let people just click a button to show their appreciation for each new chapter? The hits:kudos:comments ratio would get even worse than it already is.

You can already ‘give kudos’ for each chapter of a fic on AO3 - by commenting. Hell you can literally write ‘kudos!’ It will make the author smile, I promise.

“ I woke up. All I could taste was blood… and metal ”

suit change