FFVII Fanfiction

[Clement Rage]

I'm still ashamed of that last conversation about the fortunes of war. What in hell was I thinking?

Re: the rest of that conversation, now I want to revive some of my ff fics.

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

Your last conversation at Genesis Awards? All I can remember is that T.Costa grew progressively more poisonous towards a group of people; there was a boy who was keen on Zack who died in a car crash; and the whole thing collapsed in a cloud of spite and mutual recriminations.

 

[Jairus]

That's not good. Sad that something that started out well fell apart like that. I'd been on FF.net for years under my old name but never heard of them. I never really frequented the forums there, though, so that might be why.

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

Oh, they had their own website and forums and everything. It was a lot of fun for a while, but there was an element of old guard who really couldn't handle the influx of new people with their own ideas about the canon, their own headcanons, their own approaches to fanfic.

 

[Ite]

Yeah their brand of fanon really became Law but I still have a lot of fond memories of those folks. If I weren’t there I never woulda found this place (and at the time, THIS place was the hostile one lol)

 

[Jairus]

Ah, ic. Too bad about what happened. Nothing wrong with new approaches, they should have welcomed that, not fought against it. Everyone has their own ideas about how or why things happen in games, and there's nothing wrong with that. But anyway, feel free to check out my old stuff anytime if you want. Do you go by a different name there, or is it the same as here?

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

I go by the same name everywhere.

 

[FFAddicted]

Oh, the Genesis Awards. There’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time. Probably my first and only foray into the world of fandom. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve dipped my toes into FF fanfiction since those days. It always felt kind of strange to do so after the forum’s collapse.

Might be time to return to those waters. I seem to recall that there were a few good stories back then that I never quite got round to finishing.

Shame really. I was never the most active member, but I didn’t realise how much of an effect the collapse had on my enjoyment of the fandom until now.

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

It's good to hear GA had some positive effects.

 

[Vortigern]

I know I may be reaching with this question given its concerning events from over 18 years ago. I'm currently working my way through fanfiction.net to compile a list of stories to highlight in upcoming posts and have seen mentioned in a couple stories and author profiles dating from around 2002 discussing a NC-17 ban. Was there a purge of stories from the site way back in the day? Not much I can do about it now but it is a bit sad if a selection of stories are long gone from what I'm trying to pull from.

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

Yes there was.
https://fanlore.org/wiki/FanFiction.Net's_NC-17_Purges:_2002_and_2012
A lot of what got purged ended up on AO3, so probably not lost forever. Honestly I think you'd be better off working your way through AO3; that's the serious place for posting fanfic these days.
If you want to go further back in time, there's also Livejournal, tho quite a lot of fanfictioneers removed their stuff from LJ. IIRC they also had a purge but I was never really active on LJ and don't remember well.

 

[Glaurung]

Yes there was.
https://fanlore.org/wiki/FanFiction.Net's_NC-17_Purges:_2002_and_2012
A lot of what got purged ended up on AO3, so probably not lost forever. Honestly I think you'd be better off working your way through AO3; that's the serious place for posting fanfic these days.
If you want to go further back in time, there's also Livejournal, tho quite a lot of fanfictioneers removed their stuff from LJ. IIRC they also had a purge but I was never really active on LJ and don't remember well.

I think I remember the Great Purge of 2012. I've been so many years away from FF.net that when i tried to log in this past year I had to reset my password But FF.net is different than I remembered. It was way more dynamic ten years ago when I binge readed and wrote my shit. People reviewed a ot more and were more engaging. I noticed that I keep getting visits but everyone is silent. Are youngsters lazy to type a review, or are they too scared to offend the author?

Won't close my FF.net account and I will keep publishing there what I write, but I applied for an AO3 account today. Will post on the FFXV category next, where there are 23.724 stories, maybe more than the other FF (spin-offs included) together. Wish me luck

 

[Jairus]

Yeah, people don't review near as much as they used to, MD. I've been fortunate to get a few, but it's mostly just views, hits, and favorites that I get. It's the same on AO3, not many people actually review, more just visit or send kudos. It took a bit of getting used to for me since it had been over ten years since I'd last written anything when I started Lifestream this past summer. But don't be discouraged and keep at it. Readers will come around eventually. Good luck!

 

[Obsidian Fire]

Fan-Fiction.Net has a lot more... buttons to press to leave comments I feel. And there is no kudos system at all.

At with Ao3 it feels like there's a system that doesn't take a lot of time to just leave a simple "i liked it".

The place i see the most interaction between people is tumblr. But that's tumblr and is a nightmare to set up no matter which way you go about it.

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

There's been such a powerful anti-concrit lobby, that it's now considered bad form to leave anything less than a gushingly enthusiastic review. I suspect people are just generally becoming more timid about engaging online, lest they accidentally say the wrong thing and be damned to hell forever, so it's safer to say nothing and simply leave a like or a kudos. Possibly they're also lazier. I really miss the good old days when readers gave unsolicited concrit and you could strike up conversations and even friendships.

 

[Clement Rage]

Apparently I lived through the 2012 purge without noticing it. Huh.

Thinking of immigrating back to ff.net at the moment. I haven't written anything there since I wrapped up SOLDIER, but I find AO3 doesn't suit me. You can't reply to reviews without inflating your comment count, and kudoes are kind of ambiguous to me insofar as you don't know if that guest actually liked the story or just drops one on everything they read.

 

[Obsidian Fire]

I know as someone who consumes fan-fiction more than I write it... I left ff.net long ago when the main fanfic writers I liked migratied their stuff to Ao3. The tagging system on Ao3 is... a lifesaver. I'd probably have ditched the entire fanfic community as a whole without it. It was getting to the point on FF.net that I was spending more time browzing fanfics to read then I actually spent time reading the actual fanfics...

 

[Jairus]

Interestingly, though, I get a lot more traffic at FF.NET than AO3. Literally 7 to 8 times as many views and 5 to 6 times as many followers/bookmarks/favorites. I guess AO3 is a smaller community, maybe?

 

[Obsidian Fire]

Ao3 is newer then FF.net by quite a few years. And I think it might have to do with the names too. ArchiveofOurOwn.org doesn't highlight that it's a repository for fanfics quite like FanFiction.net does.

That said... I feel like I find more works for "newer" fandoms on Ao3 than on ff.net. For example, on Ao3 there is 23,806 FFXV fics while on FF.net there is 2,200 FFXV fics. For FFXIV, there is 5,744 fics on Ao3 while on FF.net there is only 382 fics. So I bet when a fandom was formed really effects how many fics there are on what platform. And how much traffic various fandoms get.

 

[Clement Rage]

XV is kind of a special case, though, because slash between the leads is VERY popular. Once you take that out, the numbers go way down. Take out the explicit rating (ff.net doesn't allow porn) and it goes down even further. Not that there's anything wrong with slash as a medium, but if you're not into it, the raw numbers can be deceiving.

Like, there are supposedly 40k fics in the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, but take out Reylo and Kylux, and you're left with barely 10k.

 

[Obsidian Fire]

Even if you take out all the Explict fic from FFXV on Ao3, you are still left with 18,722 fics. Which is still way more than the 2,200 FFVX fics on FF.net. The 16,000 fic difference between the two sites can't just be because one site alows porn and the other doesn't.

For a non-gaming version of it... My Hero Academia has 81,653 Fics on Ao3 and 14,700 fics on FF.net. Take out anything rated Explict and you still have 68,487 fics on Ao3. But My Hero Academia was created in 2014 and is an ongoing series.

You look at something like Naruto, which was created in 1999, the numbers are more like this: Ao3 has 49,507 fics (41,761 fics if you filter out everything Explict). FF.net has 430,000 fics. But Naruto ended in 2014.

The fact of the matter is, Ao3 was created in 2008, while FF.net has been around since 1998. So that's... ten more years of works in FF.net vs Ao3 in some fandoms. And some fandoms (like FFVII) had their original works done and over with before Ao3 really got up off the ground. Older fanfic works in the 2000s didn't have anywhere else to be published in a general fanfic collection other then FF.net. Fanfics from... 2010 and onward do.

I think it will be interesting to see what happens with the new FFVII fanfics that get written as a result of the Remake. There will probably be plenty of new writers (and other content creators) coming into the FFVII fandom and I have to wonder where they will gravitate to.

 

[Rydeen]

I actually didn't know FF.net had a purge in 2012. No wonder there are certain fics I can't find anymore lol. Ao3's tagging system is a nightmare and I've never been happy with how the site became the standard for fanfiction, but it sounds like FF.net did it to themselves.

I, too, am looking forward to the new fan content and pr0n that will arise from the remake.

 

[Jairus]

I didn't know about the purge, either, though it does explain why some fics, even ones that I know weren't explicit, aren't there anymore. Sad that they've been memory-holed.

And I agree with Ryvius, should be interesting to see the new FFVII stuff once the remake hits. And incidentally, I suspect that Clessie may get a lot more popular when it does, though that could be just wishful thinking on my part, lol.

 

[Vortigern]

I didn't know about the purge, either, though it does explain why some fics, even ones that I know weren't explicit, aren't there anymore. Sad that they've been memory-holed.

And I agree with Ryvius, should be interesting to see the new FFVII stuff once the remake hits. And incidentally, I suspect that Clessie may get a lot more popular when it does, though that could be just wishful thinking on my part, lol.

Nah I think it will, I know you had quite a discussion in the LTD thread a couple months back but between that interaction (dat smirk) shown in the TGA trailer and what has been seen in snippets from the leaked demo files, Clessie has more of a canon leg to stand on then Vincent x Tifa did back in the day and that pairing had quite a following from what I've seen during my scouring of archives.

 

[Rydeen]

It seemed for a while that Tifa was always the most popular female character to get paired up with maleCharacter, even in cases where Elena or Yuffie made more sense. I think people just really, really like Tifa; and she is also one of the most developed characters in FFVII in general. I think as Jessie is developed, we will see her paired up with Cloud more often.