who is old enough to be part of the fanfic.net era where we literally talked to our characters? like, had conversations with them?
cause I do. as a lonely child of 12 who had no friends, it was a favorite pasttime of mine to boot up the dial-up internet and type out imaginary conversations with ouran high school host club characters in the beginning notes before even starting the damn chapter (which was inevitably 500 words long and absolutely awful)
Modern Author’s Note on Ao3: might discuss some possible triggers, thank readers for comments, apologize for a delay in update, etc–talking to reader, essentially.
Author’s Note on FFN back in 2010:
Author: Y’all are gonna love this cahpter!!!! [Character] not sooooo much
Character:…wh–what’s gonna happen?
Author: Don’t worry about it! ^.^
Character: WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO ME??
Author: 😉
Character: D:
those were dark, dark days, man. Today’s Fandom Freshman are sure lucky they missed this.
This when right alongside the detailed disclaimers to avoid lawsuits.
Don’t forget that the author was broken into at least five separate voices, ‘Inside Out’ style.
or where you would have ask blogs for your ocs except it was just in a ff.net story. basically an entire classic authors note except people would ask questions. that was my childhood.
Y’all forgot that sometimes we also appeared in the middle of the text with notes like “(author: noooo >:( character is such a b*tch!!!! character: I’M NOT!!!!)” And it was the crimgiest shit ever but we had fun doing it lmao
I miss this so much. But do you know what I miss more?
Fanfics on Quizilla.
Those fics that were broken into chunks with questions about how you liked the story. And the result you received was either the author thanking you and offering hints for the next chapter OR the author just absolutely shitting on you. I miss that so much. Holy shit. Top tier interactivity.
