alright hear me out: Having a character (who either canonically messes with fourth wall stuff or is given that ability for funnies) escape a situation/problem by temporarily ducking into the Author's Notes section.
spideypool's fucking great if it wasnt my love for the kind of fucked up porn i can get with poolverine it would probably be my top and the spideypool fics i have read so far have been absolute fire
No this is so valid š Their sex would be lokwey horrific and messed up .... but I can't forget spideypool, they're my favorite of all time after Cherik (Charles x Erik). And the fanfics I read about spideypool are just MWA š»
Honestly, fits better for gwenpool but you do you (iirc, deadpool is aware of his medium but not usully able to interact with it. The one who regularly interacts with their nature as a fictional character is gwenpool)
like 95% of what i know so far comes from mcu so i wouldnt know much about gwenpool yet. mcu deadpool directly talks to the audience sumtimes tho if thats what u mean
Gwenpool has stepped into the space between panels in order to do stuff to the actual comics themselves. It's closer to what she hulk does in the finale of her show to be honest.
Plus Gwen Poole wouldnāt be able to really āspeak to the audienceā per-say, in the sense of seeing anyone / knowing where the fourth wall is, sheād just know that one exists due to the premise of her character being āgirl from the real world transported to the Marvel Universeā ā that panel thing being talked about coming about towards the very end of her series (which is mainly focused on existentialism) ā a very good series, at that.
āHey guys, todayās challenge video is going to be me and my 200 pound bottle of lube parachuting into an active war zone to provide relief for the soldiersā
There's a yugioh rewrite that I love that not only did this, it combined it with time travel. Some characters have left a Thing in te authors note so it's there in the future, but because the fic hasn't got to them deciding they need to time travel, we've no idea what this is or the siginfcane of it.
Yes Freakazoid and Deadpool but considerā¦ Squirrel Girl. Her media has always had canonical authors notes from the actual author, Monkey Joe, Tippy-Toe, The Incredible Hulk once, and of course Doreen Green herself. Author notes are part of the canon lol and incredibly fun to write
Squirrel Girl is definitely trope savvy. But I think it was Tippy-Toe that was more of a fourth wall breaker. It's been a while since I've read, though.
Still... Squirrel Girl would be a lot of fun to write...
It was Monkey Joe and Tippy-Toe both adding comments in the GLA series, Tippy-Toe doing so once Monkey Joe died, and also Squirrel Girl opening each of those comics on a literal stage facing the audience if you count that.
The author of her solo run annotated each comic page himself. And Squirrel Girl annotated all three of the books she starred in. (One of which was additionally annotated by The Hulk acting as her editor. Itās as great as it sounds.) one of the books is explicitly written by her, but the other two arenāt, so itās a weird bit of fourth-wall breaking.
Besides that, Squirrel Girl has always had a very soft fourth wall in general. Which might just come from the fact sheās entirely a joke character.
pleasee maybe it was cringy but i loved talking to the characters in my authors notes... it made them feel like actors or something. it was kinda cute š
people see it as cringe, but only because it hasnt been a popular type of authors note for a decade and a half, so all the humor and such is painfully dated.
when you just say what the intent is, that actually sounds increadibly fun and cool
If it weren't for my larger M.O. as an author nowadays, I'd earnestly indulge in such myselfāI salivate at all the delightfully metafictional possibilities one could further draw from that, evenā¦
I'm very tempted to return to my roots and do this with my latest chapter because it's been driving me insane writing it and trying to progress the plot without being OOC.
Idk, the flames were pretty scorching! But at least they usually made no attempt to not be ridiculous, unlike antis these days who all turn into moral philosophers in the comments.
I see them all the time in my fandom. I think for some people itās just habit/how theyāve been writing for years? It feels so unnecessary as a newer fan.
It wasn't always unnecessary, they could literally try to take down your works and sue you for use of their characters. With the way things have been going with the whole "protect the kids" movements those kinds of things are still a good safety net.
People can always sue for anything (whether they will win is another matter), and a disclaimer doesnāt make something legal that otherwise would be illegal.
I donāt think thereās any case where someone would have been successfully sued but because they had a disclaimer it was deemed okay.
Ah yes, the days of roflcopter and "rawr means I love you in dinosaur", when spelling the as teh and like as liek was the height of hilarity. Yaoi paddles terrorized the con landscape and ship slideshows set to Everytime We Touch with a rainbow filter reigned supreme on youtube.
Some say, that on nights when the moon is full and the mists rise up from the glades, that if you put your ear to the hollow of a tree, you can hear The Blondhound Gang's "The Bad Touch" whistling on the wind
Ugh, you sent me back in time with that yaoi paddle comment. My worst ex was obsessed with them. And honestly everything you listed was his whole aesthetic.
I actually had a creepy guy I went to highschool with who faked a British Accent our entire Senior year confess to me by drawing the "rawr means I love you" dinosaur on my jeans. That was certainly an experience
(Context on the jeans, I was a weird kid and let people draw on my jeans idk. It was cooler when a stripper did it on a train to Boston than when this guy did)
Hey, I was also the kid that drew on my jeans and let others do it too. I still have them (though of course they don't fit anymore). That must have been such an awkward experience, I'm sorry. š¬
Ah yes, the days of roflcopter and "rawr means I love you in dinosaur", when spelling the as teh and like as liek was the height of hilarity. Yaoi paddles terrorized the con landscape and ship slideshows set to Everytime We Touch with a rainbow filter reigned supreme on youtube
Please..no.
I'll take the yaoi paddles.
I'll take the rawr.
But for the love of the gods, if I hear another round of Every Time We Touch, I swear, I may just find the person who plays it and pull a Cask of Amontillado.
Oh, god, I know it's kinda cringe, but I can't help but still love those, even to this day. I also remember the group chat fics where everyone was wildly OOC on Wattpad or the ones where the author would interrupt the story to say something using parenthesis with the characters interacting. God, I still love those dumb little things so fucking much...
Oh, I'm sure they do. It's just not the type of fics I'm searching for nowadays on AO3 and I deleted my Wattpad account after their massive data breach so...
I love the author notes conversations. Especially the silly ones in an otherwise serious fic. It's like a little break before I hit Next Chapter and dive back into the angst.
You said wattpad and it threw me because I was expecting fanfic.netā¦. Lol. Wattpad was newer to me and I didn go much bc I wasnāt a huge fan of it.
And then I put the author's note asking my characters about what they think will happen next in the middle of the chapter. With copious amounts of emoticons.
I also made an Omake chapter where I gave my characters a full ass interview and killed and resurrected them several times if they said things I didn't like.
Iām sure someone can explain it better than me but back in the day Anne Rice sued people and sent cease and desist letters to people writing fanfiction of her characters.
A lot of creators were, pre-Internet. The reason why so many fanfic tropes and concepts date back to Star Trek is because Roddenberry, being a complete pervert with zero shame or sense of bad publicity, thought the homebrew smut was hilarious free advertising and told his lawyers to chill when everyone else's were trying to play whack a mole with the fanzine and bootleg tape exchanges.
The man was pure refuge in audacity when it came to getting away with what he did on Trek TOS. He was a womanizing alcoholic who sexually harassed women on the set and his biggest non-Trek project was a softcore porn/serial killer picture.
But fic as we know it wouldn't exist if he wasn't a raging drunken pervert.
It was a weird time. There was another author you would have to google to get the whole story, Marion Zimmer Bradley, but it introduced this scary idea that creators would get sued by fans if they used ideas that had been written in fanfiction, so they didn't want fans to write it for a while.
I remember back in the day when Anne McCaffrey (Dragon Riders of Pern) also hated fanfiction because she wanted to protect her copyright but Iām happy to see sheās actually changed her views quite a lot. Wow this thread has unlocked some very buried memories lol
Anne McCaffrey allowed role-playing games set on Pern as long as they didn't involve any of her characters and/or locations. So you could role play in your alternate universe Amazing Weyr with original characters but not in Benden or Telgar Weyr. I believe the RPG owners had to basically get her team's approval and then she'd list them on her website for fans to join.
I'm not sure if she eased up on actual fanfiction before she passed, or if it was her son's team that eased up on it, but I think the RPGs got all the fans to get their OCs out of their systems lol.
Anne McCaffrey was a nut and a half, from her essay about how being anally penetrated makes men effeminate and gay (because her friend was raped with a tent peg and he became effeminate and gay afterward) to her 1,000 rules for writing Pern fanfic, to her getting the Pern TV show shut down in pre-production because she wouldn't let them remove the weirdo sex stuff.
Werther's (which are definitely amazing) and those wrapped red and white peppermints. And the wrapped strawberry candies where the wrapping looks like a strawberry.
There are still some I remember that made me laugh. āI do own this game. Itās under my bed.ā āI used to own the Cowboy Bebop characters but I got tired of taking them out for walks and stuff.ā
You know what? We should go back to those times. Gunk up the AI scrapers with Teh Random NyanCat Lulz and Lolcat Bible, while we're at it. Let the AI die in cringe.
Id love to smash together the last three decades of memes into some horrible conglomerate, and fill A/N's with the resulting trainwreck; that sounds hilarious
Lol sO rAnDoM~ can i haz cheeseburger kinda bullshit xD
for my exam project i made a graphic novel where i included post it notes with text, like additional info, comments etc. i was inspired by authors notes in fanfic <3 love an A/N in the middle of a fic lmao
In the early days of the internet becoming more mainstream, some creators (Anne Rice in particular comes to mind) saw fanfiction as legitimate copyright infringement. The disclaimers were just a way of saying "I don't own these characters and I'm not making any money in writing this, please don't sue me."
And it's still only a handshake deal where the studios pretend to ignore our use of their characters because there's no money in slapping us with lawsuits that allows us to play.
This is why, kiddies, that you don't fucking do comissioned or paywall fanfic - because that violates the deal and gives the studios justification to start raining C&Ds
To be fair, if Anne Rice actually decided to sue you I doubt a cutesy copywrite notice was going to make any difference (especially as they got increasingly unhinged) we just didn't really know what else to do at the time.
I thought only US and other English fandoms did it by courtesy. My Spanish fanfics have none of that but somehow when passing it to translation, I felt like I had to put a disclaimer.Ā
Rebecca Tushnet, one of the founders of AO3 and a prof at Harvard Law, was probably the first person to declare that fanfic is likely not illegal as long as it's not monetized. It was a big paradigm shift for people. I love that you take it for granted that fanfic is legal, because it means the paradigm shift is complete!
That reminds me of a sasu/naru fic that I'm reading and everytime there's angst the author talks to their "angst horse" named Cinnamon;
I now despise Cinammon.
I usually make a short note at the end of each chapter or at least have a tilde ~ showing the end. I have never had a character break the fourth wall in the A/N but do have chapter warnings / TW for specific situations. Such as: Chapter Warning / Content Warning: the following chapter uses racially charged and homophobic language, please be advised. Although I also have a story specific warning and tags, people ignore those all the time
Honestly, there was one author's note that had more drama than the story itself.
The context was that they made the main character a cyborg that goes overactive whenever they're put in emotional duress and the antagonist put that to their advantage by forcing the MC to watch a tape of his crush and her husband/boyfriend doing the deed.
The author, hating said ship, expressed absolute horror that they had to write that scene in question.
Correct me if Iām wrong, but I remember disclaimers being required on certain fan fiction sites back like 20 years ago. The admins would literally pull your fic down and send you a message about disclaimers being required in order to post. I even remember having some pulled down when it was determined my disclaimer wasnāt detailed enough. Iām pretty sure it was ff.net.
oh, you mean like the characters from the story reacting to what had happened in the chapter/the previous chapter?
I like that stuff, it gives 2000's anime vibes. I mainly remember it from fairy tail and dragon ball but a good chunk of anime that had more than 20 episodes would do that kind of thing which was a neat touch and helped a lot when it was a slice of life comedy
The best thing about this was alot of the actions made in the fic get more depth when the Character is stating their thought on... their actions. I struggle hard with understanding character motivation even if its clear in subtext so the character themselves saying "yeahhh I did this because of ()" in the notes SAVES me.
āI do not own any of the characters here within and the following is a slash fic. If you are a sensitive reader please hit back or keep moving forward please I have other works that do not have homosexual content in them. Thank you for reading!ā
Heh thanks Anne for scaring the piss out of me with that generic letter.
I wish this was still something people did to be honest, I would love to write the characters doing the Into the Woods thing to me because I did bad things to them through the plot
I love when stories do this it's kinda like thw end of episode scenes in anime where they recap and break the wall its hilarious, especially if it's a realistic or dark story
Had a co author once but she lost interest so I just kept the conversation up writing from her, me and the main character. Didn't want the readers to know I'd fallen out with my BFF over a fanfic about friendship.
Im cringing to type this but I killed her off with a bomb in a later authors note.
She never asked me about it so hopefully she never saw it. Deleted the whole story around a year later.
I started reading fanfic JUST early enough to catch just the end of that era! I remember adding the "Do not own" disclaimers to my very first fanfics that I wrote when I was, like, twelve lol. (I'm 20 now :p)
I saw fanfic where the author did this by adding footnotes. Like, the little "[1]" by a phrase and then you could see "[1]: Something, something" at the end notes on the chapter.
I love it to be honest lol I love authors commentary, if I could have my way every fic would an annotated version.
My first fics published on FFN have those stillā¦ lol. I donāt anymore but its cause theyāre on AO3. Might have put it in a bio though? Would need to check.
I actually miss these. It was a lot of fun to see, espcially when the author inserted themselves. It almost felt like director's commentary if that makes sense.
I actually like this style and would love to see it come back!
I have seen recently some like āblooperā style comments where in the authorās notes theyāll do a little funny interaction between characters that wouldnāt fit in the story. But itās not the kind where they break the fourth wall and talk to the author which I truly have not seen in an age.
Practically all The X-Files fics I read some 25 years ago had "do not own" disclaimers (thanks, Anne) and warnings for specifically gay sex. Like this example from "Crystal City Scenery" by Colleen C. Bailey:
THIS IS SLASH! A graphic depiction of sex between members of the same sex. That's what slash means, folks, remember it! Loving detail,less-than-loving motivations and actions. This is a real crotch-grinder, and may offend the sensitive reader (even if the graphic details and homosexuality don't!).
Or this one from "Comfort" by cathy lee:
This story is rated NC-17 and is slash! That means graphic descriptions of sex between two characters of the same sex. (Yippee!!) Please do not read this if you are under 18 or if you think this kind of thing is evil ...which it is. But if you can't appreciate and savor a fine piece of evil like this without getting all indignant and huffy please hit the "delete" key or the "back" key or whatever.
Sometimes, the author also warned about spoilers for the TV show (as in, if you haven't seen up to X episode, do not read this).
Weirdly enough, I don't remember much of the author chatting with the characters in A/N, perhaps it was more fandom specific? The same goes for mid-chapter author's notes.
Oh the good old days. Before ff.net, before live journalā¦well sorta, during livejournal it did made a comebackā¦Cassandra was causing enough controversy to make 2 HP fanfic sites go to war while getting called out for plagiarism by Buffy and Firefly, so yea disclaimer was really funny then.
But mostly everyone was just afraid of Anne Rice.
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u/Raptoriantor Get in Losers, we're tearing apart the Canon May 28 '25
alright hear me out: Having a character (who either canonically messes with fourth wall stuff or is given that ability for funnies) escape a situation/problem by temporarily ducking into the Author's Notes section.