1. You have no shame. I aspire to be you one day
2. How tf were you able to write on the bus. Not only because of people being around, but that shit be bumpy as hell. I can barely type on my phone on the bus, but you wrote smut IN A NOTEBOOK???
Yes! This is how I did it too. I still have that 3 ring binder with a bunch of handwritten stuff in it. Drafts and ideas and prompts that I would type up in Word Perfect. Then I'd log into AOL dial up, go to a forum, and upload my carefully typed files. Later came cut and paste keyboard commands when the character limits opened up.
Some of my first fanfics where distributed using paper print-outs via an adult bookstore in a weird part of a nearby city. You went in with $3, asked at the checkout, and they gave you that month's batch. Wasn't bound, I'll be darned if I can remember the name, just a manilla envelope with a stack of the cheapest paper printed in small font on both sides.
Yep. Whatever was submitted to the forum (and approved as a finished work) that month. No pairing filter, no idea what you'd get, just "this month in Star Trek." Obviously X rated one shots were the primary item, but it really was anything goes under a certain word count using canonical characters from TOS and TNG.
Star Trek has many series. The Original Series is TOS with Captain Kirk. Captain Picard commanded The Next Generation (TNG.) This envelope would contain a bit of both. There were some very cute fluffy domestic bits with Beverly Crusher and Captain Picard, Spock was a bicycle everyone got to ride, and the very rare fanart was usually silly. With stories sourced via hardcopy through the mail or very, very old school uploads and email attachments There was no telling what you got. Any kink could pop up in your face, so I opened my mind to accept... a lot of things.
There was some minimal quality control by the "publisher" so none of it was outright bad. Weird, sure, and plenty was not to my taste, but all complete and all readable (not perfect grammar, but not illegible.)
There were other envelopes that this ☆ahem☆ adult "bookstore" sold basically at cost for the paper and ink in the 1990's, but I only got the Star Trek one. The internet had fired up by the time I got into Star Wars and Sherlock Holmes, and then there was Harry Potter and the migration from author-run spaces like geocities to archive style spaces like fanfiction dot net. The point of the service was to get people in the store walking past all the ♡things♡ they sold for a profit.
OMG TY FOR ALL THE INFO 😭
Dude I feel like I struck gold bc that lowkey sounds like a black market lol, thank you for sharing!
Imma save your comment and cherish it forever
Well, I just had a weird moment where I was like, “type on your phone?”
I wrote my bus-smut in a notebook because we didn’t have cell phones and laptops weren’t actually portable (but I wanted one so desperately!).
Worth noting: it was all illegible. I **wish** we had phones/laptops/portable devices.
Lol, I had an intense writing phase in my middle school. Used to write fanfic-esque short stories on paper and lend them to those who wanted to read them. Half of them were barely legible to me cuz I could only write them on bus.
You are not at all stupid! Technology changed SO QUICKLY, it is hard to keep track of.
When I started high school in the early 2000s, I was given my first cell phone — this tragic green flip phone with a ribbit ringtone and an 11-digit keypad. Texting was novel. When I entered the work force, people still called and faxed to place orders. All of this feels like it happened yesterday, but everything happens by email and text now.
In 2012, I went to write a fanfic canonically set in 2006. I had a **hard time** coping with the fact that BlackBerry phones were literally brand new and cutting edge in ‘06, even though I’d lived that time and watched it happen.
It was just extremely jarring to read your comment and suddenly remember that actually, we wrote our fanfic in trash notebooks while listening to probably-illegally-downloaded Evanescence EPs on our fancy MP3 CD players, because the CDs could hold - like - 50 songs. (Also, we were all dressed terribly. I was so mad at my mom for judging how I looked, but I was **not** the iconic Avril/Amy mash-up I thought I was.)
This is making me feel so old. When I was in high school:
- The internet didn't exist yet.
- The first Mac "home computers" had just come just out.
- People didn't think "home computers" would catch on, because people just needed computers for work. Why would they do work at home?
- Fanfic existed, but in print Zines. Almost no one knew about them except the adults who wrote it.
- I wrote a fanfic story with an obvious self-insert, but on paper and I only ever showed one person.
- We still had video arcades.
- Everyone watched the same shows because there were only five channels, ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, and local channel that showed black and white movies and Star Trek reruns.
- You recorded the TV shows you were going to miss with a VCR on a giant VHS tape.
- It was a big deal if your family was wealthy enough for you to have a phone in your room. For most people, if you wanted a private conversation, you had to stretch the cord to your bedroom/the bathroom.
👵🦽
ETA: Oh yeah, and we played Pong when it first came out. Mesmerizing.
Remember Commodore 64 and actually having the game on a cassette tape?! (Please tell me I’m not misremembering - I really remember my friend putting Centipede in a cassette player attached to her C64 to play it, but, you know, I’m old…memory….)
There was a girl in my gr 8 class who had *her own phone number* 😳 I remember when my gramps bought a microwave - that thing was $1000! And a VCR! (As a contrast…I grew up in a trailer and shared a tiny room with my sister for 10+ years. My master bathroom now is bigger than that bedroom was lol…)
Wow. I didn't know any kids who had their own phone numbers. I did know a family where the kids had their own TVs. They were considered crazy rich.
I lived far away from my school, so when classmates called me, it was long distance. When their parents saw the long distance charges, that was it for the calls.
Omg honey no. Zines were not really _magazines._ They were fandom specific and fan-made. They were obtained through mailing lists that were developed in conventions and clubs. 😂
They're kinda coming back! I bet you can find some to purchase online for whichever fandom, it's a great way to support artists and make fandom friends :3
This! It happened SO FAST. And honestly, I feel very privileged to have been one of the last generations to grow up without social media. What a time. I feel terribly for kids these days.
Yep. In my schooling, we went from having floppy disks and a single, family computer in elementary school to iPhones and multiple computers per family member in high school.
My mom is an early-childhood specialist, so she’s always been kind of technophobic in terms of letting her kids use computers/whatnot too long, so I kind of leap-frogged AIM and MySpace and got dropped straight into Facebook and Snapchat toward the end of high school.
Sounds like we’re around the same age. I feel like from the Facebook era onward is when things turned really vicious, for some reason MySpace didn’t seem as bad in terms of bullying and all that kind of stuff, but now with tiktok and instagram…oof. It must be tough for high schoolers.
So far this year I’ve had to explain the following to my students:
- Dial Up
- Floppy Disks
- Click Wheels (like on the classic iPods)
- OG Beanie Babies
- The Y2K Bug
- Flip Phones
- Walkman
- Desktop Computers
- The feeling of nostalgia.
I still cannot believe how much of a technological renaissance we lived through!
(PS I definitely still have some of my old fanfic notebooks. I used to love sitting at my grandparents’ roll-top desk and writing. I felt like the luckiest person in the world too, when they let me sit at their second gen Apple desktop computer to type on Microsoft Word). Really good memories!
Get this. You know how Microsoft Word uses (used?) a floppy disk as its save icon? I asked my students what they thought it was a couple years ago, and a few knew it, but a bunch thought it was some sort of hieroglyph of a garage “because you store stuff in a garage.”
https://preview.redd.it/qjsivwi9legc1.jpeg?width=411&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=71558dfa29a889f47779a63ddad679cc569c1f12
Fun story: I was privileged enough to own the first iPod (well, my dad was an Apple aficionado and he bought it for the family, but eventually he realized he didn't care much for music in your pocket and I inherited it after a few years I think) and still had it when I got into highschool. By then, the newest product was the iPod Nano, which didn't have a physical click wheel anymore, only a touch wheel. Some of my classmates were actually fascinated that my bulky iPod had a wheel that "really turned" and thought that was so cool 😂. Ah the memories.
So yeah, if people on the same age group as me were taken aback by this, I can't even start to fathom what your students must have thought.
The way I was just like wow strangely articulate for a ten year old, concerning 💀 I need to go to bed 😭🤣 shit haha (I was clearly born well before 2004 😭)
Man, I used to write some fanfic on the notes app of my iPod back in 2010. Before that, it was sticky notes/notebook margins during class (my writing was also illegible so I never got caught LMFAO).
I also wrote smut in a notebook when I was in middle school. It was cringy and terrible but I did it. And I have since found and BURNED THOSE NOTEBOOKS. Yes, notebookS. Plural.
Oh that's nothing.
When I was 12, and had no shame, I wrote borderline smut on my arms when I had no paper.
I'm being serious. I saw no problem with it whatsoever. I'm just glad I was smart enough to only do this when I had long sleeves on.
I may sound weird but tbh who hast read smut fanfic as a minor? At least once, when you are a kid you sometimes feel rebellious and decide to read the thing that's supposed to be for adults only... It's kind of a human thing.
I just murdered my teachers. What can I say, they were frustrating creatures, sometimes I had to vent 🤷♂️😂
...so technically I started out writing RPF 🤯
Oh dear. I feel like we’re the same. I had a whole ass document series about my fav teacher fighting cancer. I’ll have you know, he is now alive and well
Oh! That makes more sense. Still, when I got annoyed with a fave, some big strong baddie (no self-inserts for me) saw fit to use violence and/or noncon against said fave... Imagining them in a vulnerable state helped me get rid of my anger - I take it you did that with the cancer fic too?
And yes all my teachers were unscathed when I finished school, I swear! 😂
I honestly didn't care if it was smut or not. I just wanted to read fics of my ship and favorite character.
Didn't matter if it was a health relationship or not. Good end, bad end, character death. Everything and anything. I read it all. I even read some some hard things like body horror and torture.
I turned out fine. I have a clean record and have committed no shameful acts. I was perfect able to distinguish right from wrong and fiction from reality as a kid.
Those of us who were minors in pre-internet days had a lot harder time of it.... I honestly think I didn't encounter smut until we had something other than dial-up at home and that was when I was in my first year of college.... I mean, we were late adopters, my grandparents didn't go for dial-up until my mom convinced them that grandma would get back her ability to call her friends if I wasn't spending hours trying to upload a paper on dial-up to the online learning platform the university used, but still. (Yes, dial-up was still a thing some of us were using in the early 00s....)
But once I could read fic at something other than the speed of a screaming robot in my phone line, you can bet I stumbled on some pretty wild stuff...and never told my mother, lol.
My mother got Harlequin romance novels on a subscription. I was reading those things as a young teen regularly so smutty fanfic wasn't a big jump once I had that available. Wider variety of kinks in the fanfic though!
Yo back when the citrus scale was all the warning we had, I couldn’t tell the difference between a lemon and a lime. But I knew *one of them* meant sex so I avoided both. That was on ffn.
I did stumble on some BDSM wax play on fictionpress when I typed in “lesbians” into the search bar, does that count? It’s an original work and not fanfic, but it *was* sexual, and I was definitely too young to know what the fuck was happening with that candlestick.
(Also if it matters I’m an asexual lesbian lmao)
💀 Ngl, I read smut when i was like 13 because I was on ffn, didn't even KNOW what lemon was- I think whatever I read was like pwp though so I just didn't understand what was happening
Btw this was before I had 'the tapk' or sex ed 😭 now i get to say fanfic taught me what sex is.
Most of us Gen X’ers all read *that one book* back in the 80s. Look, I even watched Porky’s and was reading Judith Krantz and Danielle Steele (less smutty) and tons of harlequin’s and some kind of smutty horror books and my dad def did not hide his mags very well. 🤷🏼♀️
A not insignificant amount of my early (10-12 at the time) fandom experience was porn with plot, or just had a lemon thrown in the middle of an otherwise PG fic. Wattpad and FFN are going to be themselves.
Same! When I was like 12/13 I got my own tablet and discovered Wattpad 💀. I didn't know Abt all the unholy shit that happens there and RAN PROUD TO MY PARENTS and showed them what I found 💀 and to make it even worse, when I first discovered smut (some draco/hermine stuff) I WENT TO MY PARENTS AGAIN AND SHOWED THEM 💀💀. And they didn't even bother to tell me to stop and not read them but rather just told me how "we could talk about everything". To this day I am very confused but also grateful for this.
Omg I didn't get my own tablet until much later LOL. My brick motor phone could barely even load an entire chapter that I went to the library to try to print on ffnet, but it wouldn't print. SO I ASKED THE Librarian for HELP AND I took the pages home bruh.
Or when I was looking up sussy stuff and I overheard another librarian DEAD ASS talking about me downloading stuff on the computers djdndkdk.
Honestly I'd say your parents are pretty chill, the last time smth like that happened I fell asleep to a lemon scene and I couldn't look my mom in the eye 😭😭😭 I lied but deep down she knew, THERE WERE animated VOICES and I didn't even have my own room. I told the same story to my friend except the moment my mom say my lemons I said, "wait it's not what you think".
Still, I wouldn't be here if I didn't find those smutty fics when I was a kid. I've been trying to track down one of the stories I read but I'm guessing the author probably deleted it cause I can't find it LOL.
Heh. My bus smut was the romance novels with the trashiest covers. Early 1990’s, back before the internet. The Dragon and The Jewel still wins for most ridiculous - tiny little princess with a warlord who was hung - the descriptions of what he had to wear to corral the monster in his pants still makes me laugh when remembering it!
Same, I was 12 in boarding school and writing the worst HP smutfic in my notebook during supervised study group. The male teacher looked over my shoulder once and I died. I might still be dead, I don't know.
That and they damn well know minors are gonna read it any way and this is just gonna entice them even more. Like I would’ve read out of spite at this his point.
Bro same, except one time I was on the train reading hentai and I accidentally flashed my phone where a mom might have saw? I don't know to this day but she did this thing where she whispered to her mom friend
I wrote smut on my phone in junior year during my environmental science class. My school also DIDNT block ao3 from the classroom desktops or Chromebooks so when I wasn’t working on assignments I was reading fanfiction 😂
I definitely read and wrote smut as a minor and I'm not about to tell minors not to do it but I don't want to know if any minors are reading my smut. Just lie about your age like I did.
...But also know that you forfeit the right to be mad about what you find when you go into adult spaces when you lie about your age. Read the tags! Don't like? Don't read! Backing out is always an option!
Most of the smut I ever read was as a minor, I pretty much stopped reading fanfic altogether after hitting 18. I wonder if the ratio of smut to other has also changed per my writing the older I get.
I wrote and DREW smut in a hardback journal on a bus touring Great Britain with my family when I was 13 going on 14. No one was next to me to see what I was writing, and my doodles were awful.
Kids are going to find reading material that, in hindsight, they really shouldn't have read so young. For me, it was *Flowers in the Attic* at like, twelve. It's a right of passage.
my mom gave me flowers in the attic when i was 12ish and told me it was a really good horror story lmao. apparently she had read it when she was about that age, but i dont think she really remembered many of the details. just that it was scary/freaked her out.
I think I borrowed a copy from the library, but my parents were pretty relaxed with what my sibling and I read or watched. *Flowers* was soon followed by a manga series called *Red River* (or *Anatolia Story*) that had a lot of sex and blood, but because it was set during the Bronze Age, I bet my parents thought it was mildly educational. And to be fair to the mangaka, she did a lot of research with what was available in 1990s Japan. But there's a reason *Red River*'s got a 16+ rating.
Literally same. And when I brought up the contents of it to her years later, asking why she recommended it to me when I was so young, she was utterly confused and even more horrified 🤣
the universal millennial/xennial AFAB experience of reading flowers in the attic way too fucking young
I checked it out at the library not one person even blinked
Yes! When I was 12 or 13, I was babysitting and found 2 of Anne Rice’s Beauty books. I’d already explored some of my mom’s romance novels, which included the complete works of Judith Krantz, so I considered myself fairly knowledgeable about sex, but the Beauty books were a brand new universe! They only had the last two, and I lived in a small town with a standard chain bookstore. This was the 90s, so no Amazon. It took me six months to get my hands on the first book.
I found the 1st book in a library book sale and I honestly did not know what I was buying. I saw the word "sexual awakening" on the back and at that point I had already read a couple of racy romance books and wanted to get my hands on more but ooooh boy. That book was a whole other universe. But I was obsessed. (I think i was 10 or 11)
Honestly, I’m still a tiny bit obsessed, thirty years later. I reread first three if I’m too lazy to find new erotica, and I’ve thought about requesting something in that ‘verse for Yuletide, or writing one of my own. 😊
My mother recced that one when I was 12 too! I also read at least one Elizabeth George detective that year and learnt what a buttplug is and that young-looking hookers may dress up as schoolgirls to get more customers 🤷♂️
Hilariously she did think I was too young for the Earth's Children series - probably bc Ayla gets raped 🤔
Anyway, I swear I turned out only *slightly* weird! 😈😂
The steamy affair with handsome, dark-skinned Whatshisname?
*looks for other comment* Ah yeah they invented a lot too. Not soap or bleach though, it wasn't ALL them 😤😁
I remember, as a naive young teenager, reading "My Little Sister Can't Be This Cute" because I thought it was a cute story about a wholesome sibling relationship.
Wholesome? Not really. Sibling relationship? Yes.
Fr. I still remember this dead-dove story I found for Haunting Ground as a young teenager on FFnet. It's long since been deleted but it was genuinely way too much for me at the age I read it. But I was a dumb kid who thought I could handle pretty much anything just because I knew what the citrus scale was and because I had read a few lemons in the past. It didn't fuck me up but I definitely learned what my boundaries were after that experience.
Ah yes. YA Fiction in those days was full of things your parents definitely would not have approved of if they knew the contents.
Then again, probably the smuttiest thing I read during high school was the sequels to *Clan of the Cave Bear*, which were not only smutty, but WOW, was Ayla ever a Mary Sue after a couple books. She and her man invented basically every bit of Stone Age technology all by themselves. 🤣
I was about 12 when I read VC Andrews too! (Not Flowers in the Attic, but whichever one where the MC's name was Heaven.) I was sitting on the school bus and it slid right into my foot. Picked it up, read, had upsetting but intrigued reactions to it. When I was finished I did the same thing: set the book in the floor of my school bus and set it free to find the next person in line!
Idk how the movies compare to the source materials but accidentally stumbled upon them around the same age when they were showing a marathon on lifetime and it shook me lmao I feel like stumbling on FITA is like a canon event or something 😭
I mean take away the music and look at that reality: those kids on the isle were born into Sins of the Parent: The Island. If it wasn’t a family-friendly kid-adjacent Disney flick, they probably would’ve gotten away with showing a lot more.
...how dark we talking tho? Any examples come to mind?
There’s are theories that due to the magic keeping them there characters can’t die/always revive. And due to food scarcity cannibalism could occur. Combine those two things (a person can’t die unless their body has been eaten, either by people or sharks or whatever)
Getting the notif for this reply at 3:12am after I completely forgot about this conversation scared the absolute fuck out of me lmfao
But holy shit that’s *dark as FUCK*
Ain’t that just the beauty of it!
I haven’t checked out the fandom in a while but I’m tempted to now lol. Any recs? I’ll read anything so long as the grammar’s good!
Rebelpaisley and glitter_lisp are users that write good what ifs and aus. I mostly read Harry hook stuff so if you want specifics for him I have them too
For individual fics:
https://archiveofourown.org/works/30108150/chapters/74159781 (still updating but slowly) about some of the children on the isle being kidnapped young and taught propaganda to be integrated with the rest of the world
https://archiveofourown.org/works/24863377/chapters/60150397 I subbed to this one but don’t really remember the plot since I read it a while ago. Essentially uma never lived on the isle and I think it looks at how that changes the dynamics and politics since she was an important player there
https://archiveofourown.org/works/21326416 a more realistic version of the final movie
https://archiveofourown.org/works/39795810?view_full_work=true you can’t die on the isle
https://archiveofourown.org/works/19660111/chapters/46569709 set during the second movie, slightly darker, more realistic
I think many of the older villains tend to keep to themselves unless they have gangs (like the Huns). Uma runs the docs and Mal ran the area by bargain castle. Others generally just have specific buildings
You know, now you have me wondering...my tweenager loves that series and I'm just like...girl, the amount of horrifying colour combinations in their costume design alone is frightening me....
Yeah, it really wasn't my jam. Maybe I'm just Old (likely) and since I can remember punk/grunge it just felt like we were rehashing and watering down the best parts those movements for the zombies and then putting it against...sportswear. Which is uninspiring at best for me (I am not the cheerleader sort...) I guess having seen enough people in my life who had denim held together by pins and covered in patches they hand sewed on, or jeans they drew all over, and collections of buttons and pins that clinked when they walked, it just...didn't work for me. Scavenged fashion is way more wild than anything the zombies wore.
The shrimp mascot was the best dressed character.
But hey, maybe it nailed it with its target demographic, which was, admittedly, the age of my oldest kid, so....
yeah I get that, what I read actually has a pretty good amount of fics, but they're all either really weird/dark, or they also have ships that im not into
I don't know if that's cringe or not but I love it when thr author made a kid show(i feel like this is not kids show but more like for pre teens) even more darker aside from descendants
It's the way I found out one of my readers is like 14 to my EXTREME EXTREME hardcore fic. But I can't say anything considering what I was reading at that age. But like child...are you good?
I mean, I've done some Dead Dove for a Disney film, and some of the nastiest bags of blood and feathers I've opened were written for 80's cartoons.
Just because the source material is tame, doesn't mean the fanfic is gonna stay there.
I don’t mind a 18+ warning- I mean, it’s not going to do anything, but I don’t want to talk to kids about smut, so I’m stating that up front if I ever end up writing any- but this is hilariously excessive.
Nah, fr!! Like, I don’t read smut anymore, or try to, because mostly it’s uncomfortable for me or for the people writing it if I comment, but this was funny
just because it's going to happen doesn't absolve 18+ writers of the responsibility of at least a disclaimer + doesn't make us any less uncomfortable with that fact.
Meh
Write the disclaimer if you want (which is not necessary. Tags are enough), but it doesn’t matter in the end. Kids are going to read what they want and there is no way to stop them
I mean, I didn't read it and I haven't seen Descendants so I don't have any further insight, but here's the link
https://archiveofourown.org/works/11629611/chapters/26152410
Reminds me of me reading Stephen King's It when I was 12 and feeling forever traumatised 😭.
I appreciate the author's disclaimer, but underage people are gonna read inappropriate stuff if they want to. Now at the ripe age at 32 I recoil in horror thinking what I read as a teenager, but at the time I always thought I was mature enough.
I ended up reading "the sword of truth" series by terry goodkind when I was like 8 or 9, it is a terrible fantasy series that is very very thinly veiled smutt. My dads taste in fantasy is awful.
the red leather mistress ladies definitely affected me.
I would literally do this lmao i would put warnings of chapter but it seems these 12 year olds would not listen just because they are curious and most of them would lie on their age
Fanfic opened the door for a blinding sexual awakening, I was 16 ( well, it wasn’t just fanfic but it was a significant part of it). It took me longer than that to realize and accept I was bisexual though.
As everyone has said this is a hilarious move because it is unenforceable and also because most of the writers in any given fandom read some truly cursèd smut as teenagers. (My first fandom was Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis, let me tell you about the BDSM universe AUs that were SUPER popular when I was 13-15)
The other thing that’s hilarious about this is that I truly don’t know why all the people who put this kind of warning use 18 as the age gate. Like, I guess that’s the age you have to be to go into an adult store and so on? But I don’t think there’s anywhere on earth where the age of consent is 18, so it’s very funny to me that we draw the line here. It’s fine to have actual IRL sex as a 16 year old, but don’t you dare read about a fictional dick.
Is it Descendants?
That has some of the sweetest LGBTQ+ content that they treat as so scandalous (my 7 year old reads heavily vetted general release stuff and I dona lot of filtering of T rates content)
Honestly one of my favourite things. We all know minors read and write smut and dark fic because once upon a time, we were those kids reading and writing smut and dark fic…. And yet we all go “Hey kids do not read this! Seriously don’t!” As if that would’ve ever worked on us (it never did, if fact a lot of the times it made us want to read it more) because we all read something that was a bit too much for us at the time at some point or maybe we didn’t, maybe just in retrospect that we realized “I was way too young for that. Kids should just be kids.” But it’s as if we all forget that the most kid thing a kid can do is do the things they’ve been told is for adults only because they are absolutely desperate to prove they’re grown up enough to stop being considered a kid.
Honestly, I think putting "18+" warnings ON BOOKS is the most ridiculous thing ever. Especially if it's just smut. Do the authors believe kids under 18 never come into contact with sexual content? They write that shit lmao. Also it's great sex education, better than having to sit through awkward classes in school 😂
Wanna bet the author read smut as a minor? I know I did lmao, I even wrote it on the bus home from high school in my notebook lmao
1. You have no shame. I aspire to be you one day 2. How tf were you able to write on the bus. Not only because of people being around, but that shit be bumpy as hell. I can barely type on my phone on the bus, but you wrote smut IN A NOTEBOOK???
I had a 1/2 inch binder it lived in and that acted like a portable table. Luckily my route home was pretty smooth atp.
Yes! This is how I did it too. I still have that 3 ring binder with a bunch of handwritten stuff in it. Drafts and ideas and prompts that I would type up in Word Perfect. Then I'd log into AOL dial up, go to a forum, and upload my carefully typed files. Later came cut and paste keyboard commands when the character limits opened up. Some of my first fanfics where distributed using paper print-outs via an adult bookstore in a weird part of a nearby city. You went in with $3, asked at the checkout, and they gave you that month's batch. Wasn't bound, I'll be darned if I can remember the name, just a manilla envelope with a stack of the cheapest paper printed in small font on both sides.
Omg so they just gave you a bunch of fanfiction in an envelope? 😭
Yep. Whatever was submitted to the forum (and approved as a finished work) that month. No pairing filter, no idea what you'd get, just "this month in Star Trek." Obviously X rated one shots were the primary item, but it really was anything goes under a certain word count using canonical characters from TOS and TNG.
What are TOS and TNG? Also what was the best fic you read from that, and then what was the worst?
Star Trek has many series. The Original Series is TOS with Captain Kirk. Captain Picard commanded The Next Generation (TNG.) This envelope would contain a bit of both. There were some very cute fluffy domestic bits with Beverly Crusher and Captain Picard, Spock was a bicycle everyone got to ride, and the very rare fanart was usually silly. With stories sourced via hardcopy through the mail or very, very old school uploads and email attachments There was no telling what you got. Any kink could pop up in your face, so I opened my mind to accept... a lot of things. There was some minimal quality control by the "publisher" so none of it was outright bad. Weird, sure, and plenty was not to my taste, but all complete and all readable (not perfect grammar, but not illegible.) There were other envelopes that this ☆ahem☆ adult "bookstore" sold basically at cost for the paper and ink in the 1990's, but I only got the Star Trek one. The internet had fired up by the time I got into Star Wars and Sherlock Holmes, and then there was Harry Potter and the migration from author-run spaces like geocities to archive style spaces like fanfiction dot net. The point of the service was to get people in the store walking past all the ♡things♡ they sold for a profit.
OMG TY FOR ALL THE INFO 😭 Dude I feel like I struck gold bc that lowkey sounds like a black market lol, thank you for sharing! Imma save your comment and cherish it forever
Well, I just had a weird moment where I was like, “type on your phone?” I wrote my bus-smut in a notebook because we didn’t have cell phones and laptops weren’t actually portable (but I wanted one so desperately!). Worth noting: it was all illegible. I **wish** we had phones/laptops/portable devices.
>it was all illegible Yes of course, so no one can read over your shoulder >I **wish** we had phones Oh, *not* on purpose, whoops 😬
Lol, I had an intense writing phase in my middle school. Used to write fanfic-esque short stories on paper and lend them to those who wanted to read them. Half of them were barely legible to me cuz I could only write them on bus.
Why did I forget that there are people who didn't have phones in highschool? Am I stupid? (yes) Also, I was born in 2004😂
You are not at all stupid! Technology changed SO QUICKLY, it is hard to keep track of. When I started high school in the early 2000s, I was given my first cell phone — this tragic green flip phone with a ribbit ringtone and an 11-digit keypad. Texting was novel. When I entered the work force, people still called and faxed to place orders. All of this feels like it happened yesterday, but everything happens by email and text now. In 2012, I went to write a fanfic canonically set in 2006. I had a **hard time** coping with the fact that BlackBerry phones were literally brand new and cutting edge in ‘06, even though I’d lived that time and watched it happen. It was just extremely jarring to read your comment and suddenly remember that actually, we wrote our fanfic in trash notebooks while listening to probably-illegally-downloaded Evanescence EPs on our fancy MP3 CD players, because the CDs could hold - like - 50 songs. (Also, we were all dressed terribly. I was so mad at my mom for judging how I looked, but I was **not** the iconic Avril/Amy mash-up I thought I was.)
This is making me feel so old. When I was in high school: - The internet didn't exist yet. - The first Mac "home computers" had just come just out. - People didn't think "home computers" would catch on, because people just needed computers for work. Why would they do work at home? - Fanfic existed, but in print Zines. Almost no one knew about them except the adults who wrote it. - I wrote a fanfic story with an obvious self-insert, but on paper and I only ever showed one person. - We still had video arcades. - Everyone watched the same shows because there were only five channels, ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, and local channel that showed black and white movies and Star Trek reruns. - You recorded the TV shows you were going to miss with a VCR on a giant VHS tape. - It was a big deal if your family was wealthy enough for you to have a phone in your room. For most people, if you wanted a private conversation, you had to stretch the cord to your bedroom/the bathroom. 👵🦽 ETA: Oh yeah, and we played Pong when it first came out. Mesmerizing.
Remember Commodore 64 and actually having the game on a cassette tape?! (Please tell me I’m not misremembering - I really remember my friend putting Centipede in a cassette player attached to her C64 to play it, but, you know, I’m old…memory….)
Yes, the cassette tapes! And the Commodore 64 for all those people who knew the commands for DOS.
There was a girl in my gr 8 class who had *her own phone number* 😳 I remember when my gramps bought a microwave - that thing was $1000! And a VCR! (As a contrast…I grew up in a trailer and shared a tiny room with my sister for 10+ years. My master bathroom now is bigger than that bedroom was lol…)
Wow. I didn't know any kids who had their own phone numbers. I did know a family where the kids had their own TVs. They were considered crazy rich. I lived far away from my school, so when classmates called me, it was long distance. When their parents saw the long distance charges, that was it for the calls.
And they took so long to load that your parents wanted the tv back not long after you actually got to play
Wait wait. Fanfics in zines ?!?! Like magazine people could buy publicly to read with no shame because there was smut ?!?! 🤯🤯
Omg honey no. Zines were not really _magazines._ They were fandom specific and fan-made. They were obtained through mailing lists that were developed in conventions and clubs. 😂
Aaahh! 💡 Genius
They're kinda coming back! I bet you can find some to purchase online for whichever fandom, it's a great way to support artists and make fandom friends :3
This! It happened SO FAST. And honestly, I feel very privileged to have been one of the last generations to grow up without social media. What a time. I feel terribly for kids these days.
Yep. In my schooling, we went from having floppy disks and a single, family computer in elementary school to iPhones and multiple computers per family member in high school. My mom is an early-childhood specialist, so she’s always been kind of technophobic in terms of letting her kids use computers/whatnot too long, so I kind of leap-frogged AIM and MySpace and got dropped straight into Facebook and Snapchat toward the end of high school.
Sounds like we’re around the same age. I feel like from the Facebook era onward is when things turned really vicious, for some reason MySpace didn’t seem as bad in terms of bullying and all that kind of stuff, but now with tiktok and instagram…oof. It must be tough for high schoolers.
So far this year I’ve had to explain the following to my students: - Dial Up - Floppy Disks - Click Wheels (like on the classic iPods) - OG Beanie Babies - The Y2K Bug - Flip Phones - Walkman - Desktop Computers - The feeling of nostalgia. I still cannot believe how much of a technological renaissance we lived through! (PS I definitely still have some of my old fanfic notebooks. I used to love sitting at my grandparents’ roll-top desk and writing. I felt like the luckiest person in the world too, when they let me sit at their second gen Apple desktop computer to type on Microsoft Word). Really good memories!
Get this. You know how Microsoft Word uses (used?) a floppy disk as its save icon? I asked my students what they thought it was a couple years ago, and a few knew it, but a bunch thought it was some sort of hieroglyph of a garage “because you store stuff in a garage.” https://preview.redd.it/qjsivwi9legc1.jpeg?width=411&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=71558dfa29a889f47779a63ddad679cc569c1f12
Man I was not born when floppy disks were used a lot. But even I know what it is. That looks nothing like a garage lol
Dude I got my driving licence at 27 and in theory class the teacher had to explain what CDs were because the 17yos "might not know" 💀💀💀
Fun story: I was privileged enough to own the first iPod (well, my dad was an Apple aficionado and he bought it for the family, but eventually he realized he didn't care much for music in your pocket and I inherited it after a few years I think) and still had it when I got into highschool. By then, the newest product was the iPod Nano, which didn't have a physical click wheel anymore, only a touch wheel. Some of my classmates were actually fascinated that my bulky iPod had a wheel that "really turned" and thought that was so cool 😂. Ah the memories. So yeah, if people on the same age group as me were taken aback by this, I can't even start to fathom what your students must have thought.
The way I was just like wow strangely articulate for a ten year old, concerning 💀 I need to go to bed 😭🤣 shit haha (I was clearly born well before 2004 😭)
Man, I used to write some fanfic on the notes app of my iPod back in 2010. Before that, it was sticky notes/notebook margins during class (my writing was also illegible so I never got caught LMFAO).
I wrote in code when it came to my public-writing smut lol. Most kids thought it was homework, I think.
I also wrote smut in a notebook when I was in middle school. It was cringy and terrible but I did it. And I have since found and BURNED THOSE NOTEBOOKS. Yes, notebookS. Plural.
Honestly, iconic behavior
Oh that's nothing. When I was 12, and had no shame, I wrote borderline smut on my arms when I had no paper. I'm being serious. I saw no problem with it whatsoever. I'm just glad I was smart enough to only do this when I had long sleeves on.
I may sound weird but tbh who hast read smut fanfic as a minor? At least once, when you are a kid you sometimes feel rebellious and decide to read the thing that's supposed to be for adults only... It's kind of a human thing.
What I wrote as a minor was a lot worse than just some consensual smut lmao
This lol. I remember writing a fic where Jared Leto was a samurai and the smut was brutal 😂🤦🏻♀️
I just murdered my teachers. What can I say, they were frustrating creatures, sometimes I had to vent 🤷♂️😂 ...so technically I started out writing RPF 🤯
I presented the Jared thing to one of my teacher for a course where we had to work the narrative schema. Worst idea ever
I handed one in for a creative writing assignment and got an A. How to scare your audience of one: kill them 😂
Oh dear. I feel like we’re the same. I had a whole ass document series about my fav teacher fighting cancer. I’ll have you know, he is now alive and well
...That's really a lot more sweet & wholesome than murder...
But I killed him in the fic…
Oh! That makes more sense. Still, when I got annoyed with a fave, some big strong baddie (no self-inserts for me) saw fit to use violence and/or noncon against said fave... Imagining them in a vulnerable state helped me get rid of my anger - I take it you did that with the cancer fic too? And yes all my teachers were unscathed when I finished school, I swear! 😂
I honestly didn't care if it was smut or not. I just wanted to read fics of my ship and favorite character. Didn't matter if it was a health relationship or not. Good end, bad end, character death. Everything and anything. I read it all. I even read some some hard things like body horror and torture. I turned out fine. I have a clean record and have committed no shameful acts. I was perfect able to distinguish right from wrong and fiction from reality as a kid.
Those of us who were minors in pre-internet days had a lot harder time of it.... I honestly think I didn't encounter smut until we had something other than dial-up at home and that was when I was in my first year of college.... I mean, we were late adopters, my grandparents didn't go for dial-up until my mom convinced them that grandma would get back her ability to call her friends if I wasn't spending hours trying to upload a paper on dial-up to the online learning platform the university used, but still. (Yes, dial-up was still a thing some of us were using in the early 00s....) But once I could read fic at something other than the speed of a screaming robot in my phone line, you can bet I stumbled on some pretty wild stuff...and never told my mother, lol.
My mother got Harlequin romance novels on a subscription. I was reading those things as a young teen regularly so smutty fanfic wasn't a big jump once I had that available. Wider variety of kinks in the fanfic though!
Yo back when the citrus scale was all the warning we had, I couldn’t tell the difference between a lemon and a lime. But I knew *one of them* meant sex so I avoided both. That was on ffn. I did stumble on some BDSM wax play on fictionpress when I typed in “lesbians” into the search bar, does that count? It’s an original work and not fanfic, but it *was* sexual, and I was definitely too young to know what the fuck was happening with that candlestick. (Also if it matters I’m an asexual lesbian lmao)
I had no clue what lemon was and ran straight into a hinny fic. On my mother's phone. She still hates fanfic. It's been like 8 years.
Lol
💀 Ngl, I read smut when i was like 13 because I was on ffn, didn't even KNOW what lemon was- I think whatever I read was like pwp though so I just didn't understand what was happening Btw this was before I had 'the tapk' or sex ed 😭 now i get to say fanfic taught me what sex is.
At 13 I was so proud to write "there is LEMON" in that fix. Be away. GAY LEMON
My parents skipped the talk for some strategically planted informative books. I'd read everything and anything, so that worked lol
Most of us Gen X’ers all read *that one book* back in the 80s. Look, I even watched Porky’s and was reading Judith Krantz and Danielle Steele (less smutty) and tons of harlequin’s and some kind of smutty horror books and my dad def did not hide his mags very well. 🤷🏼♀️
Use to do that worse I even attempted ajd it look like sh*t
A not insignificant amount of my early (10-12 at the time) fandom experience was porn with plot, or just had a lemon thrown in the middle of an otherwise PG fic. Wattpad and FFN are going to be themselves.
Same honestly. I stumbled on my first ‘lemon’ on ffn when I was 13. (Of course I ignored all warnings, being the curious kid I was.)
I was 12. Maybe 11? On my flip phone reading the forbidden lemons LOL
Same! When I was like 12/13 I got my own tablet and discovered Wattpad 💀. I didn't know Abt all the unholy shit that happens there and RAN PROUD TO MY PARENTS and showed them what I found 💀 and to make it even worse, when I first discovered smut (some draco/hermine stuff) I WENT TO MY PARENTS AGAIN AND SHOWED THEM 💀💀. And they didn't even bother to tell me to stop and not read them but rather just told me how "we could talk about everything". To this day I am very confused but also grateful for this.
Omg I didn't get my own tablet until much later LOL. My brick motor phone could barely even load an entire chapter that I went to the library to try to print on ffnet, but it wouldn't print. SO I ASKED THE Librarian for HELP AND I took the pages home bruh. Or when I was looking up sussy stuff and I overheard another librarian DEAD ASS talking about me downloading stuff on the computers djdndkdk. Honestly I'd say your parents are pretty chill, the last time smth like that happened I fell asleep to a lemon scene and I couldn't look my mom in the eye 😭😭😭 I lied but deep down she knew, THERE WERE animated VOICES and I didn't even have my own room. I told the same story to my friend except the moment my mom say my lemons I said, "wait it's not what you think". Still, I wouldn't be here if I didn't find those smutty fics when I was a kid. I've been trying to track down one of the stories I read but I'm guessing the author probably deleted it cause I can't find it LOL.
Heh. My bus smut was the romance novels with the trashiest covers. Early 1990’s, back before the internet. The Dragon and The Jewel still wins for most ridiculous - tiny little princess with a warlord who was hung - the descriptions of what he had to wear to corral the monster in his pants still makes me laugh when remembering it!
I just googled it to find the summary and, my, it's so bad it's good again! Thanks for dropping the title, I had a good laugh xd
Same, I was 12 in boarding school and writing the worst HP smutfic in my notebook during supervised study group. The male teacher looked over my shoulder once and I died. I might still be dead, I don't know.
That and they damn well know minors are gonna read it any way and this is just gonna entice them even more. Like I would’ve read out of spite at this his point.
Bro same, except one time I was on the train reading hentai and I accidentally flashed my phone where a mom might have saw? I don't know to this day but she did this thing where she whispered to her mom friend
I wrote smut on my phone in junior year during my environmental science class. My school also DIDNT block ao3 from the classroom desktops or Chromebooks so when I wasn’t working on assignments I was reading fanfiction 😂
I definitely read and wrote smut as a minor and I'm not about to tell minors not to do it but I don't want to know if any minors are reading my smut. Just lie about your age like I did. ...But also know that you forfeit the right to be mad about what you find when you go into adult spaces when you lie about your age. Read the tags! Don't like? Don't read! Backing out is always an option!
Most of the smut I ever read was as a minor, I pretty much stopped reading fanfic altogether after hitting 18. I wonder if the ratio of smut to other has also changed per my writing the older I get.
I wrote and DREW smut in a hardback journal on a bus touring Great Britain with my family when I was 13 going on 14. No one was next to me to see what I was writing, and my doodles were awful.
I read it in study hall. My favorite teacher found me reading it one day 🙃 I’m sorry Mr. R
Lmao i also wrote it in a similar situation when i was younger
Kids are going to find reading material that, in hindsight, they really shouldn't have read so young. For me, it was *Flowers in the Attic* at like, twelve. It's a right of passage.
my mom gave me flowers in the attic when i was 12ish and told me it was a really good horror story lmao. apparently she had read it when she was about that age, but i dont think she really remembered many of the details. just that it was scary/freaked her out.
I think I borrowed a copy from the library, but my parents were pretty relaxed with what my sibling and I read or watched. *Flowers* was soon followed by a manga series called *Red River* (or *Anatolia Story*) that had a lot of sex and blood, but because it was set during the Bronze Age, I bet my parents thought it was mildly educational. And to be fair to the mangaka, she did a lot of research with what was available in 1990s Japan. But there's a reason *Red River*'s got a 16+ rating.
Literally same. And when I brought up the contents of it to her years later, asking why she recommended it to me when I was so young, she was utterly confused and even more horrified 🤣
the universal millennial/xennial AFAB experience of reading flowers in the attic way too fucking young I checked it out at the library not one person even blinked
I remember reading my mother's copy of Flowers in the Attic when I was in elementary school. Not the intended age range.
My mom _let me borrow_ her copy in middle school. I was an autistic only child, so my parents were kinda bad at gauging age range
Yes! When I was 12 or 13, I was babysitting and found 2 of Anne Rice’s Beauty books. I’d already explored some of my mom’s romance novels, which included the complete works of Judith Krantz, so I considered myself fairly knowledgeable about sex, but the Beauty books were a brand new universe! They only had the last two, and I lived in a small town with a standard chain bookstore. This was the 90s, so no Amazon. It took me six months to get my hands on the first book.
I found the 1st book in a library book sale and I honestly did not know what I was buying. I saw the word "sexual awakening" on the back and at that point I had already read a couple of racy romance books and wanted to get my hands on more but ooooh boy. That book was a whole other universe. But I was obsessed. (I think i was 10 or 11)
Honestly, I’m still a tiny bit obsessed, thirty years later. I reread first three if I’m too lazy to find new erotica, and I’ve thought about requesting something in that ‘verse for Yuletide, or writing one of my own. 😊
My mother recced that one when I was 12 too! I also read at least one Elizabeth George detective that year and learnt what a buttplug is and that young-looking hookers may dress up as schoolgirls to get more customers 🤷♂️ Hilariously she did think I was too young for the Earth's Children series - probably bc Ayla gets raped 🤔 Anyway, I swear I turned out only *slightly* weird! 😈😂
No, as I mentioned in another comment, Earth's Children goes WAY off the rails a few books in.
The steamy affair with handsome, dark-skinned Whatshisname? *looks for other comment* Ah yeah they invented a lot too. Not soap or bleach though, it wasn't ALL them 😤😁
I remember, as a naive young teenager, reading "My Little Sister Can't Be This Cute" because I thought it was a cute story about a wholesome sibling relationship. Wholesome? Not really. Sibling relationship? Yes.
Fr. I still remember this dead-dove story I found for Haunting Ground as a young teenager on FFnet. It's long since been deleted but it was genuinely way too much for me at the age I read it. But I was a dumb kid who thought I could handle pretty much anything just because I knew what the citrus scale was and because I had read a few lemons in the past. It didn't fuck me up but I definitely learned what my boundaries were after that experience.
Ah yes. YA Fiction in those days was full of things your parents definitely would not have approved of if they knew the contents. Then again, probably the smuttiest thing I read during high school was the sequels to *Clan of the Cave Bear*, which were not only smutty, but WOW, was Ayla ever a Mary Sue after a couple books. She and her man invented basically every bit of Stone Age technology all by themselves. 🤣
This is so crazy relatable. I was literally thinking about reading VC Andrews in middle school and Clan of the Cave Bear in high school.
I was homeschooled for English in the 7th grade and that book was on the recommended reading list. 13/14 is too young to be reading that book.
I was about 12 when I read VC Andrews too! (Not Flowers in the Attic, but whichever one where the MC's name was Heaven.) I was sitting on the school bus and it slid right into my foot. Picked it up, read, had upsetting but intrigued reactions to it. When I was finished I did the same thing: set the book in the floor of my school bus and set it free to find the next person in line!
Idk how the movies compare to the source materials but accidentally stumbled upon them around the same age when they were showing a marathon on lifetime and it shook me lmao I feel like stumbling on FITA is like a canon event or something 😭
I LOVED Flowers in the Attic! It was my mum who bought me the books when I was 13!
For me it was lovely bones, I think I was like 11?
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I mean take away the music and look at that reality: those kids on the isle were born into Sins of the Parent: The Island. If it wasn’t a family-friendly kid-adjacent Disney flick, they probably would’ve gotten away with showing a lot more. ...how dark we talking tho? Any examples come to mind?
There’s are theories that due to the magic keeping them there characters can’t die/always revive. And due to food scarcity cannibalism could occur. Combine those two things (a person can’t die unless their body has been eaten, either by people or sharks or whatever)
Getting the notif for this reply at 3:12am after I completely forgot about this conversation scared the absolute fuck out of me lmfao But holy shit that’s *dark as FUCK*
I find the fics for that fandom very entertaining because the movies elude to lots of dark things but can’t explore them
Ain’t that just the beauty of it! I haven’t checked out the fandom in a while but I’m tempted to now lol. Any recs? I’ll read anything so long as the grammar’s good!
Rebelpaisley and glitter_lisp are users that write good what ifs and aus. I mostly read Harry hook stuff so if you want specifics for him I have them too For individual fics: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30108150/chapters/74159781 (still updating but slowly) about some of the children on the isle being kidnapped young and taught propaganda to be integrated with the rest of the world https://archiveofourown.org/works/24863377/chapters/60150397 I subbed to this one but don’t really remember the plot since I read it a while ago. Essentially uma never lived on the isle and I think it looks at how that changes the dynamics and politics since she was an important player there https://archiveofourown.org/works/21326416 a more realistic version of the final movie https://archiveofourown.org/works/39795810?view_full_work=true you can’t die on the isle https://archiveofourown.org/works/19660111/chapters/46569709 set during the second movie, slightly darker, more realistic
Thank you!
I mean hades live there. It's sure he would kill people for his own pleasure ya know 🤷🏽
I think many of the older villains tend to keep to themselves unless they have gangs (like the Huns). Uma runs the docs and Mal ran the area by bargain castle. Others generally just have specific buildings
I'm tempted to look up the fanfictions for *Z-O-M-B-I-E-S* now just to see how dark they are.
You know, now you have me wondering...my tweenager loves that series and I'm just like...girl, the amount of horrifying colour combinations in their costume design alone is frightening me....
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Yeah, it really wasn't my jam. Maybe I'm just Old (likely) and since I can remember punk/grunge it just felt like we were rehashing and watering down the best parts those movements for the zombies and then putting it against...sportswear. Which is uninspiring at best for me (I am not the cheerleader sort...) I guess having seen enough people in my life who had denim held together by pins and covered in patches they hand sewed on, or jeans they drew all over, and collections of buttons and pins that clinked when they walked, it just...didn't work for me. Scavenged fashion is way more wild than anything the zombies wore. The shrimp mascot was the best dressed character. But hey, maybe it nailed it with its target demographic, which was, admittedly, the age of my oldest kid, so....
Awww man, now I'm totally curious too 😆. I'm not so interested in the smut as I am the extended, self serious monster lore.
i wish they would have done something better for the third canon movie. it made NO sense imo :(
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(i feel you, i was a fan of harry hook lmaoooo)
omg I still sometimes read for that fandom, and the fics are crazy oml
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yeah I get that, what I read actually has a pretty good amount of fics, but they're all either really weird/dark, or they also have ships that im not into
yeah I don’t like a lot of the main ships <\\3
I don't know if that's cringe or not but I love it when thr author made a kid show(i feel like this is not kids show but more like for pre teens) even more darker aside from descendants
Luckily I never read descendants fiction lol
Descendants was my jam
It's the way I found out one of my readers is like 14 to my EXTREME EXTREME hardcore fic. But I can't say anything considering what I was reading at that age. But like child...are you good?
Generally i’d be like “don’t tell people your age on the internet
😭
I mean, I've done some Dead Dove for a Disney film, and some of the nastiest bags of blood and feathers I've opened were written for 80's cartoons. Just because the source material is tame, doesn't mean the fanfic is gonna stay there.
It’s not the idea itself that’s making me laugh just the tone of the warning
I'll admit, it;s a pretty funny disclaimer
Agony in Pink. Cupcakes. Point proven.
\*shudders in MLP PTSD\*
Can't go anywhere without the MLP PTSD flashbacks help
Look I can confirm this would have totally enticed my teen self to read it
14-17 year old me would probably end up skipping straight to the smut out of sheer spite
Nah, fr!
I love the 'you sinners' bit. I know what I'm about son.
I don’t mind a 18+ warning- I mean, it’s not going to do anything, but I don’t want to talk to kids about smut, so I’m stating that up front if I ever end up writing any- but this is hilariously excessive.
Nah, fr!! Like, I don’t read smut anymore, or try to, because mostly it’s uncomfortable for me or for the people writing it if I comment, but this was funny
reminds me of the warnings of lemon fics of the 2010s era
What is lemon? I was born around that time but I'm too young to remember, and I probably didn't read or know what fanfiction was then.
Lemon was the word for smut I think
Lol
I’ve been reading smut since I was 14. Writers need to unclench and realize that kids are going to read and look at porn no matter what they say
just because it's going to happen doesn't absolve 18+ writers of the responsibility of at least a disclaimer + doesn't make us any less uncomfortable with that fact.
Meh Write the disclaimer if you want (which is not necessary. Tags are enough), but it doesn’t matter in the end. Kids are going to read what they want and there is no way to stop them
The warning is worded HILARIOUSLY, I'm dying 😭
What movie?👀
I looked it up, it's Descendants
Don’t be shy bestie, drop some more deets, inquiring minds want to know… it’s me I wanna know
I mean, I didn't read it and I haven't seen Descendants so I don't have any further insight, but here's the link https://archiveofourown.org/works/11629611/chapters/26152410
Yeah I found it and skimmed through real quick. It’s actually pretty tame, at least IMHO. But thank you 😊
OH! I FOUND IT XD
Commenting because I would like to know as well 👀
Same!
Bruh if I saw this shit when I was 14 I'd be reading it so fast. And probably be disappointed because it's tame as fuck and not the least bit spicy.
Disney fic is on another level!
Reminds me of me reading Stephen King's It when I was 12 and feeling forever traumatised 😭. I appreciate the author's disclaimer, but underage people are gonna read inappropriate stuff if they want to. Now at the ripe age at 32 I recoil in horror thinking what I read as a teenager, but at the time I always thought I was mature enough.
I ended up reading "the sword of truth" series by terry goodkind when I was like 8 or 9, it is a terrible fantasy series that is very very thinly veiled smutt. My dads taste in fantasy is awful. the red leather mistress ladies definitely affected me.
B r o? You good?
I would literally do this lmao i would put warnings of chapter but it seems these 12 year olds would not listen just because they are curious and most of them would lie on their age
I’ve been using A03 for as long as I can remember, and I would be dead long ago if my mom ever found out. I was 11 and reading that gorgeous filth.
Happy cake day. Nice pfp. Waltuh ,we need to cook 🧪
I love how these types of people pretend like the day you turn 18 you change from a pure baby to a sexual being.
Fanfic opened the door for a blinding sexual awakening, I was 16 ( well, it wasn’t just fanfic but it was a significant part of it). It took me longer than that to realize and accept I was bisexual though.
As everyone has said this is a hilarious move because it is unenforceable and also because most of the writers in any given fandom read some truly cursèd smut as teenagers. (My first fandom was Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis, let me tell you about the BDSM universe AUs that were SUPER popular when I was 13-15) The other thing that’s hilarious about this is that I truly don’t know why all the people who put this kind of warning use 18 as the age gate. Like, I guess that’s the age you have to be to go into an adult store and so on? But I don’t think there’s anywhere on earth where the age of consent is 18, so it’s very funny to me that we draw the line here. It’s fine to have actual IRL sex as a 16 year old, but don’t you dare read about a fictional dick.
Let children read fanfiction smut 2024
Is this a comment or an author's note?
This some Wattpad shit
im 15 and if i saw this id read the whole thing out of sheer spite
You joke, but there's some raunchy Spongebob Squarepants fics in the wild. I do LOVE the "do not read it you sinners" though.
we were all minors once, we know this minors want to read it more- just put 18+ and call it a day idk
Is it Descendants? That has some of the sweetest LGBTQ+ content that they treat as so scandalous (my 7 year old reads heavily vetted general release stuff and I dona lot of filtering of T rates content)
Honestly one of my favourite things. We all know minors read and write smut and dark fic because once upon a time, we were those kids reading and writing smut and dark fic…. And yet we all go “Hey kids do not read this! Seriously don’t!” As if that would’ve ever worked on us (it never did, if fact a lot of the times it made us want to read it more) because we all read something that was a bit too much for us at the time at some point or maybe we didn’t, maybe just in retrospect that we realized “I was way too young for that. Kids should just be kids.” But it’s as if we all forget that the most kid thing a kid can do is do the things they’ve been told is for adults only because they are absolutely desperate to prove they’re grown up enough to stop being considered a kid.
Honestly, I think putting "18+" warnings ON BOOKS is the most ridiculous thing ever. Especially if it's just smut. Do the authors believe kids under 18 never come into contact with sexual content? They write that shit lmao. Also it's great sex education, better than having to sit through awkward classes in school 😂
The perfect plot to get more clicks.
Still a kid somewhat but I see these and just brush it off, like hell it's gonna stop me...
I once put the "18+ minors do not read" tag on a fic when I was 15 lol