The fact that Stephen King really said “fuck you” to Elon and Elon was like “wait but what if it’s $8 instead-” made my respect for Stephen King go up by 500%
Dude also stood against JKR’s TERF bullshit. Stephen King is a very good egg wrapped in a dainty nerd shell.
Dude has also supported queer rights since at least the 1980s.
Dude also wrote an orgy of children in one of his most popular books and sexualised the characters of young girls
Lemon did probably fall out of use (more or less) because it was no longer needed, but it’s not heavily on AO3 because it was always an anime fandom thing, and AO3 has always leaned towards Western fandoms. The old-ass weebs were not attracted initially, and old-ass archives of anime fic have not been imported at the same rate old slash ones have. The anime fans who have finally started using AO3 may be new enough and in new enough fandoms that they never used the term.
Go on FFN, and you’ll see things like this, last updated one hour ago:
The girls are sent in to rescue the son of a powerful CEO who is needed for an important meeting to bring peace. But when they find this powerful and important Son their lives are changed forever. Remastered version of the Original New Spy. Lemons, Harem, Crossover harem, Pregnancy. Lots of Action and improved writing. Enjoy.
‘Hurt/comfort’ I saw all the time in the 90s and ever since. I don’t recall when I started seeing ‘whump’. Stargate: SG1? It never seemed as widespread to me, but it appears to be a whole community on Tumblr? (So from my perspective, it was always less common, and the size of AO3 and variety of fans there are just making that obvious rather than it becoming way less popular than it was.)
Whump occationally gets mentioned in Ao3 tags but, yeah, its not something you can use to search for whump in most fandoms. You gonna need to use terms like hurt/comfort or hurt![character] tags to find whump fics. But the Whump Community in general? Oh, we are thriving. The community’s growing – whumptober as a fandom event is 5 years old and the first one had a handful of completionists, and last year over 200 people finished all 31 prompts. Whump as a term started in the late 90s/early 2000s with the SG-1 fandom (Hi, Daniel, falling down and dying again) but it has grown a lot since then. Still depends on the fandom tho – but DC for example has multiple Whump servers on discord specifically for different characters they want to see whumped. It is a real sense of community.
I love some good whump or H/C and had half of what I needed for this already, so here’s the popularity of whump on ao3 over time. Measured as percentage of fics update last in that year containing whump* as an all fields search term.
Looking at the tag Whump which seems to capture ~2/3 of the works I found for whump*, the most popular fandoms are Marvel, BNHA, Witcher, Batman, Star Wars, Voltron and SPN. So those big ones probably picked it up and really pushed the numbers in the last years – at least on ao3.
We can also look at total works, but that just tends to kind of look the same for a lot of things because of ao3’s general growth pattern.
Interesting.
I always wonder if charts like that are just representative of AO3’s surge in popularity of the last few years rather than any other change in fan behavior or language.
If I’m understanding the chart in yellow, it’s how popular this was relative to all the fics last updated in that period.
To me, “Percentage of whump works” means one is taking all the works labeled whump and charting which year they were all updated, adding up to 100%. That’s clearly not what the chart is though. I’d have to phrase it as “Percentage of works with whump”.
But the description above the chart makes it clear.
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Though, if you mean that the surge in popularity resulted in new fan communities hearing about AO3 and thus importing different trope names or practices, then that does make sense to me.
