FFVII Fanfiction

Obsidian Fire

Obsidian Fire

Ahk Morn!
AKA
The Engineer
AO3 has modern things like custom tagging and filtering by tags. And their search engine got a huge update a month or two ago for filtering out content you don't want to see. And it's a lot easier to do custom edits and reading styles. And you can do things like download PDFs and E-Reader formats of fics. And comment easily on fics. It's just a way more modern website and is being actively updated.

FF.net is still in the days of "pick two genres and four characters from a drop-down list" and it still has crossovers in their own section. Yeah. It's just not up to modern internet standards anymore. Filtering for things you want to see/not see feels so clunky comparied to AO3. I barely use it anymore because finding things on it is so much more difficult then it is on AO3. And the few authors I still follow form my FF.net days are now all on AO3 too. For them, publishing on AO3 is much less of a headache then FF.net is.

I'll just put it this way, Adult content has never been my cup of tea. But it's so easy to make it all disappear on AO3 that I don't really care about it being on that site. And it is much easier to make everything I do want to see not get filtered out.
 
C

Clement Rage

Pro Adventurer
I find it varies fandom to fandom. FF7 you're pretty good for both, but FF.NET is better for feedback, a lot of AO3 users just drop kudos and vanish.

I try to look for good Resident Evil or DCEU fic, and get pages and pages of porn. Danganronpa is better on AO3 though.

Honestly prefer FF.NET'S system, although that could be just familiarity.
 
C

Clement Rage

Pro Adventurer
Tried using tags tonight to see if I could get it to work. It works well if you're looking for/don't want something specific, but people often tag things that aren't actually a big part of their story, and characters with similar names or alternate versions get swept in unless you're careful. How do you use it properly, Obsidian, if you don't mind me asking?
 
Obsidian Fire

Obsidian Fire

Ahk Morn!
AKA
The Engineer
I usually don't filter by tags all that much as it can get unreliable. That and I'm often not looking for things that are too specific when I'm just browsing. Individual tags are great when I'm looking for specific stories I want to re-read since I usually have a good idea what the tags for specific stories are.

Tags are pretty great when a fandom is huge and has a lot of tags specific to that fandom. It saves me a huge, huge headache when looking though stuff like Harry Potter, Naruto, Final Fantasy VII, etc. Tags aren't as useful when a fandom is small.

What I do use (mostly in the Exclude section) is the Ratings, Warning and Categories section. Those get rid of the bulk of the Adult Content.

But what gets used the most is the "Search Within Results" box. It's probably the most useful way to filter tags and I highly recommend clicking on the blue question mark icon next to it as that shows you all the different ways you can use it. Probably the most useful takeaways from it is that adding a "*" to the end of a letter sequence will run a search for all tags that start with that letter sequence regardless of the way the tag ends. The other one is adding a "-" to the start of a tag will filter out everything with that tag.

IE: Typing "book*" into the "Search Within Results" box will return all the stories with the tags "book", "booking", "books", etc. It's one of the easier ways to get around the similar terms/names problem. Typing in "-"Character Death"" would filter out all the stories with the "Character Death" tag. And you can combine as many of these in the "Search Within Results" box as you like.

So I'll end up searching for stuff like this all in the same "Search Within Results" box: "headcanon magic* worldbuild* -"Alternate Universe"". Or... I'm looking for works that mainly consist of world building, have magic, but that are not Alternate Universe fics.

One of the big things to realize about tagging is that when the Author is tagging a work, AO3 will suggest tags to them based on what tag they are typing at the moment. So if a tag is used often enough, the system recognizes it as a "standard" tag and will suggest it to the author. If you type in the "Other Tags to Include" box, you'll see a list of "standard" tags that all start (or include) what you are typing. This is why in the above example, headcanon and world building are all one word; they're standard tags that the system recognizes and suggests to authors, thus helping more fics use those tags. All of which makes it easier in the long run to search for fics with similar tags.

While it's certainly not perfect, it does makes me cringe at how many things I can't search/filter for on FF.net that I search/filter for on AO3 without even thinking about it now.

Also, do take a look at Ao3's Unoffical Brower Tools page. There's some very useful userscripts on there, particularly the Floaty Text Box + Last Chapter Shortcut userscript...
 
T@ctic

T@ctic

Pro Adventurer
AKA
Orah, Iju
there was this rly cute short fic called touch and it about cloud trying to get closer to the cast by sitting nearer to barret, placing his hand on vincent's shoulder, hugging yuffie etc. i tried to find it but i guess it was deleted :( :(
 
Kai Schulen

Kai Schulen

... ... ...▼
AKA
Trainer Red
I can't believe you guys mentioned The Fifth Act, but have not mention Dear Kunsel.

(by the same author, Sinnatious, so, wink wonk.)
 
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Clement Rage

Pro Adventurer
In theory, AO3 has a better system, but in practice ff.net's work better to find things. Character tags are nearly worthless on AO3, because everything is tagged, so if I look for Yoda or Yuffie it picks up the stories which they're tagged in but have no major role, where with only four slots available, if someone is tagged, they're much more likely to actually be part of the story. I also like the ability to have long private conversations without inflating your review count.

I'm mostly using AO3 right now, because I want to keep my Lucrecia works together (available now, in all good internets) and because they're intended to be a bit more mature than my normal, but if I wrote something new, I'd probably go back to FF.net, despite the sword of Damocles that is my horrific early work still there.
 
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Jairus

Jairus

Author of FFVII: Lifestream & FFVII: Reflections
I've been using both FF.net and AO3, though I have more experience with FF.net. They're both pretty good, I think, though I don't care for FF.net's inability to use images within chapters the way AO3 allows you to - I like my image dividers between sections, but I have to use a simple horizontal line on FF.net. I get almost ten times more views on FF.net than on AO3, but only a few reviews on both. I guess most people just read, though stories in the past that I've put on FF.net when I wrote under another name got a lot more reviews, though that was many years ago and things in the fandom may have changed since then. At least people are reading it, and I guess that's all that really matters. :)
 
LicoriceAllsorts

LicoriceAllsorts

Donator
People have fallen out of the habit of reviewing. There was a time when readers would leave substantial reviews, often with concrit. Nowadays, though, etiquette seems to dictate that one must be relentlessly positive. TBH I don't really understand why people who would crumble psychologically at the least criticism of their writing would even risk posting it online, but so it is. I'd rather get one review with honest concrit than six comments gushing "OMG love it askghd;jjd.hvG so AMAZING!!!!" That kind of comment is cheap and meaningless.

When I first got into writing fanfic, I just wanted to play around writing stories and I really didn't care about reviews and kudos. It seems to have become much more competitive, or else that's just the atmosphere created by the fanfic writers who post on tumblr. That atmosphere rubs off on me even though I don't want it to. It would never even have crossed my mind to do things like tag minor but very popular characters or ships that aren't in my fic just to get more hits, or go into fic and tinker around with a few words in order to "update" it and so move it to the first page. It's kind of depressing when people spend more time marketing their fics than writing good stories.

I used to have a lovely little group of fellow Turkfic writers and we'd review each other's fic and collaborate on fic, but they've moved on into other fandoms. I'm still friends with them but I miss the way we used to work together.

I'd love to know what name you used to write under, Jairus, though I quite understand if you don't want to tell me. I used to be quite active in the Genesis Awards, if you remember them. It eventually imploded under its own cliqueiness and became an abandoned website overrun with bots - a digital ruin.
 
Jairus

Jairus

Author of FFVII: Lifestream & FFVII: Reflections
I never heard of the Genesis awards, actually, hehe. Kinda passed me by, I guess. Anyway, my old stories can be found on FF.net under the name Axwind - that's what I went by back when I was at FFWA and for a long time afterwards. They're over ten years old now at least, and while I'm happy with the one-shots I did, the longer ones I could see revising if I ever got back to them one day, though I don't know that I will.
 
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