Normally, I post about fandom wank over porn or darkfic, but today, I’m here to tell you to knock off another kind of dumbass AO3 wank:
Stop saying that AO3 is only for fic!
AO3 was always intended to host more. We had a long, drawn-out fight over whether “original slash” and other such original writing belonged. We decided it did. We had a second long, drawn-out fight over whether “meta” belonged. Again, we decided it did.
Dozens of people sat through hundreds of hours of committee meetings. Site users wrote in and blogged and debated for years. Meta is allowed. Full stop.
Ephemeral, twitter-sized episode reactions probably don’t count as meta in most cases, but analyses and essays are more than welcome. Charts and graphs and the detailed, longform text that tumblr sucks at are great on AO3!
Embedded vids, art, and podfic are welcome. AO3 can’t host the files directly. There’s plenty to criticize about that. If you say “AO3 is a fic archive” and you mean that it’s a deeply inadequate fan art archive, I get you. That’s a valid shorthand.
But if you say “AO3 is a fic archive” and you mean that it offends you when other types of fanwork clutter up your search results, then I’m here to tell you that you’re both an asshole and an idiot.
AO3 is one of the best places to put vids–miles better than tumblr! I tag my works with the ‘fanvids’ tag so they’re easy to find, and when work types are eventually implemented, I’ll make sure they have the correct one. I’ve seen people demanding that vids have “[VID]” in the work title and other bullshit like that. No. Fuck you. I will use the work title for the actual title of the work, just like anybody else who uses AO3. Additional tags are where these other types of metadata belong. This isn’t Youtube, where the vid name and ship and seventy-two other things end up in the title field simply because Youtube’s search function is garbage for fanworks.
The people who built AO3 always intended for it to host more than fic. There have been other types of fanworks on it for years. Readers who’ve wandered in lately have no business telling podficcers and meta writers and vidders and artists that we are unwelcome.
Stop that.
Yes this. AO3 welcomes ALL THE FANWORKS.
There’s no easy way to host fan-made RPG worldbooks and character sheets, but they are welcome. So is filk. So are video games, even though the code has to be hosted elsewhere.
OTW’s long-term plans include being able to host non-text media, but that’s both very expensive and requires a whole different upload structure, so it’s a back-burner thing. But they absolutely want all kinds of fanworks at the archive; it was never intended to be fic-only, just “let’s get fic figured out first, and then work on whatever resources we need for not-fic.”
Probably, someday, there’ll be a “sort by media” category - something that lets you say “only show me fic” or “show me just the podfic” or similar. It’s not they’re yet; we have to rely on tags. But ALL FANWORKS ARE WELCOME AND WANTED. AO3 was created to host fanworks, especially those at risk of takedown elsewhere, and that includes non-text fanworks.
yayyyy! this crossed my dash right after I put my latest music video on ao3, it feels very affirming
in case you wonder how to do this– there is no really great way. the embedding for videos has a lot of flaws and I ended up never getting it to work completely reliably
but here is my janky weird workaround
first, upload the video someplace where you can hotlink it.
I don’t know the best place for that. I personally uploaded it to my own website under the domain “juiceboxbride.com,” which at the index.html level of things is a painfully stupidly absurdist simple-html website that my partner and I made in the early 2000s when that sort of bullshit was popular
but which I currently use mostly as a file-sharing device by sticking things I wanna share in random directories in there
anyway. on ao3, I could not get an actual embed to work for the video
sooo I just embedded a still image file that linked to the video. The code looks like this, when I wrote it in the code editor (I write all my fic in a code editor, it’s the only way I’ve found to keep the formatting actually consistent when I put it up on ao3, which I suppose is fitting for me being a goddamn nerd and a goddamn TRON shipper, i guess.)
and then I just set the ao3 field to html-mode and pasted this in as the Work:
and then, since I try to be the kind of image poster who reliably includes descriptions, I added a play-by-play of the whole video below that (you can see the beginning here)
…anyway. I am VERY MUCH not saying I even recommend this. Just that it’s one way. And that ao3 is super flexible if you sorta vaguely know what you’re doing, and there are lots of ways to do stuff.
including weird ridiculous ones like mine.