AO3 Works Page Analysis

[northstarfan]

Picked this up from lazaefair:

Rules: Go to your AO3 works page, expand all the filters, and answer the following questions!

My works page.

Number: 34 works, pretty much just recent stuff and the "best of" list from fandoms past. I'm happy enough to let the old X-Men and Harry Potter stuff be lost to the ether.

What’re your first and second most common work ratings?

General Audiences: 20
Not Rated: 11

Not a huge shock there, honestly. I like smut just fine, but I'm not terribly good at writing it.

What’s your most common archive warning?

No Archive Warnings Apply: 24

See above. And when I do go for stuff that warrants a warning, it's usually violence.

Least common?

Major Character Death: 1

I'm guessing this is because the thing you'll most frequently see me raging over with regard to canon is X-Men writers being lazy fuckers who go for cheap death to raise the stakes rather than putting in the work to make the readers give a damn about the story for its own sake.

Do you consider yourself an adventurous writer?

Not particularly. I'll stretch myself for fun or at a request, but know what I like and tend to stick to it.

How many stories have you made in each pairing category?

M/M (17)
Gen (9)
F/M (2)
Multi (1)

Is this more accidental, or do you have preferences?

Preference, in part, and in part deciding where I'm going to put my energy. I do have a few F/F pairings I like, but they're either problematic enough that I don't feel like dealing with the fandom BS, or obscure enough that I know damn well I'd be writing for my pleasure alone... and frankly, I get just as much out of the story without putting it on paper.



What are your top 4 fandoms by numbers?

X-Men (Comicverse) (9)
The Magnificent Seven (2016) (8)
Dragon Age: Origins (6)
Alpha Flight (6)

Are you still active in any of them, and do you tend to migrate a lot?

X-Men/Alpha Flight: Oh, for certain, though my participation waxes and wanes in accordance with how much page time my faves are actually getting.

The Magnificent Seven: Fuck yeah. It's the baby of the bunch, but the canon hits a lot of my sweet spots and the fandom is tiny, but awesome.

Dragon Age: Eh. Not so much. My interest in the canon was waning already, because the lore is a garbage fire, the games are getting steadily more cash-grabby, and the writers are prime candidates for the "Not As Progressive As You Think" tag. Plus some personal conflicts kinda killed a big chunk of my personal interest in the fandom, so... *shrug*

As for migrations... no, not really. I'm a wee fairy who can't hold much more than one fandom at a time.

What are your top 4 relationship tags?

Goodnight Robicheaux/Billy Rocks (6)
Jean-Paul Beaubier/Kyle Jinadu (4)
Zevran Arainai/Male Warden (1)
Zevran Arainai/Mahariel (1)

Does this match how you feel about the characters, or are you puzzled?

Billy and Goodnight would have more competition if I didn't insist on doing comics for so much of Jean-Paul and Kyle's 'fic. The gap's only going to get wider when the GI Goodnight stuff starts showing up too.

What are your top 2 most used additional tags, and your bottom 2?

Most used:
Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence (6)
Fluff (5)

No shock there, thanks to Billy and Goody and those Elfquest darkfics.

Least used:
Canon Gay Character (4)
Alternate Universe (3)

First one is essentially my "Kyle Jinadu-Beaubier exists, you ungrateful reprobates!" tag. Second one is again the effect of the Cowboy Husbands.

What would happen if you combined all 4 of these into a fic?

In some parallel universe where the post-Schism X-Men books were actually forced to coordinate with each other instead of Bendis and Aaron being allowed to each operate in their own pocket dimensions, it was realized that mutants very fucking badly need PR help, and oh, look, one of the most famous mutant celebs in the Marvel Universe just happens to be married to an excellent PR manager. Cue Kyle bonding with the neglected student characters and showing them how to get their act together in the way the X-Men, who live several steps out of touch with reality, never could.

How many WIPs do you have currently running on AO3? Any you don’t plan on finishing?

Three: Death's Lover Went Riding (Mag7), Ingratiation (DA:O), and Chosen (Elfquest). I am actively working on the first, and the other two are up on blocks, but not abandoned, despite the literal years between updates. I don't have a problem marking something abandoned/unfinished when I have absolutely no interest in ever revisiting, but otherwise, why not?

Comments

[poemsingreenink]

This is so cool!

"I'm guessing this is because the thing you'll most frequently see me raging over with regard to canon is X-Men writers being lazy fuckers who go for cheap death to raise the stakes rather than putting in the work to make the readers give a damn about the story for its own sake."

I was really thinking about how about 12 maybe 13 years ago a character death was REALLY shocking to me, and something I used to think was very brave of an author to do. (To be fair, actual death of a character was much more rare in a lot of stuff) Now I just fine the whole thing very tiresome. I really prefer"actions have consequences that last further than 1 episode" more. Which I think was what I was originally saw in the character death idea.

[northstarfan]

I find it especially egregious with the X-Men, because the writers are killing off characters - usually child characters - that they've put little or no work into, whose deaths they don't even show the older characters mourning, and use it as a shortcut to show how dangerous the fiftieth take on "oh no, mutants are in danger of extinction" is.

And yes, likewise on this nonsense being tireseome. At least George RR Martin was very deliberately setting up and knocking down genre tropes with his kill-fests. He was whittling down the expected main characters and setting up the actual big players and generally putting in an enormous amount of effort in getting there, both in character development and world-building (but even so, I think he went overboard in some respects). Then you get all these imitators who think random slaughter makes an epic story, even though it's perfectly damned clear which characters have plot armor. If you're not putting in the effort, then you're either emotionally exhausting your audience or just plain boring them, and neither one is a good thing.

[lazaefair]

Have you seen The Death And Return of Superman? It explains a whole lot and is entertaining besides. Might play it at the next group movie night.

[northstarfan]

What gets described there is part of the overall problem, but not the bit that infuriates me so much. Death in comics doesn't have much in the way of shock value these days, but if you're above a certain popularity threshold, the writers will go through the trouble of bringing you back. No one with two brain cells to rub together thought Cyclops, Wolverine, Thor, or the Hulk would stay dead. Characters created in the last fifteen years, though? Absolutely disposable, which makes it bad writing on multiple fronts.

[lazaefair]

And I'm guessing that trend dovetails with recent attempts at diversity so the disposable characters are also disproportionately minorities. /cynical

I feel like I've been waiting for a hundred years already for the cishet white men who dominate every mainstream media medium as gatekeepers to die off and make room for the rest of us to take control. Except they keep hiring younger cishet white men to replace them.

[northstarfan]

You would be 100% correct on both counts, yes. Latest casualties were a blind girl, an Hispanic boy, and a Native Hawaiian girl. The next person who tries to tell me Rosenberg was a good choice for this franchise can go right to hell.

The X-Offices only like to hand X-Men books to minority writers when it's a satellite title, or once the white dude headliner has moved on to greener pastures and they need someone to close out the book before cancellation. And I have no doubt it'll be more of the same under the current editor.

[lazaefair]

Ah yes, that good old glass cliff.