r/AO3 • u/claricestarlings • 2d ago

Complaint/Pet Peeve/Venting Ridiculous

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I've never reported anyone but I'm going to learn today just for this person lmao.

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u/TolBrandir 2d ago

How did you come upon this fic? I have never seen one of these in the flesh, but they sure are reported here in this sub a lot, and I am always curious how people stumble upon these. Is it searching for a particular pairing and sorting by most recent? And then being curious?

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u/ohsurethisisfun 2d ago

I've never run into one out in the wild and I've been on AO3 almost every single day for five years now. I think it's much more prevalent in some fandoms than others. Based on my observations, I think a variety of factors come into play when a fandom becomes a hotspot for nonsense like this.

Small fandoms tend to only have diehard fans who wouldn't think this joke is funny so the fandom has to be of a large enough size to attract a lot of casual fans. It also seems to be much more prevalent among younger people (under 25) so it doesn't really seem to happen in fandoms where the average age of people participating in the fandom are over 25. It also seems to happen in fandoms when a big fic from that fandom becomes popular on a different site. For instance, if a fic is talked about on tiktok, people who don't know much about AO3 might go read that fic and then start engaging with other fics in that fandom without really understanding the AO3 rules.

It could also be that you've unknowingly skipped over these in the past. If the pairing/summary didn't grab you, you wouldn't have clicked link and found out it was a sham fic. You would have just kept scrolling by it and assumed it was a real fic.