doctorcrocker:

Shout-out to fan-fiction writers who don’t or can’t write the 50k fan-fictions, because of a lack of focus or motivation, or mental illness.

Shout-out to fan-fiction writers who don’t or can’t write smut, but are still lumped into a group that is almost expected to write smut. 

Shout-out to fan-fiction writers who can’t update chapters frequently for maybe a multitude of reasons, and get messages daily from people asking for “their” new chapter. 

Shout-out to fan-fiction writers who aren’t big name fans and hardly get ten kudos or one comment on their fan-fictions. 

Shout-out to fan-fiction writers who stay up all night editing and rewriting and don’t get much attention on their work no matter how much they feel like they promote their writing.

Shout-out to fan-fiction writers who don’t write a lot and are constantly asked to write more but can’t for whatever valid reason they have. 

Shout-out to fan-fiction writers who have the courage to post their writing online and only have it publicly made fun of for grammar or poor characterization. 

Shout-out to fan-fiction writers for writing their fan-fiction, posting it online, and continuing to do it no matter how much or little attention they get, and constantly improving as a writer with every upload.

You all rock.

I have a question. When does a M become E for rating? I have a long slow burn fic and it’ll take at least 100k words to get to the smut part, which will be fully written out but not kinky or drawn out. I feel like M should be enough since tagging it E would imply the story is porn which it’s not, it’s only a small part where they have sex in between a lot of plot. Or am I thinking about this weirdly?

ao3commentoftheday:

M and E can refer to sex or violence or strong language or any other themes or ideas that are for adults instead of younger people. 

That said, the line (for me, at least) tends to be in the details. If there’s sex, do I know exactly who is doing what to whom with what? If you’re naming body parts, it’s probably at least verging on E. A sex scene like you’d see on a network TV show after 9pm is M. One that you’ll see in an NC-17 movie is definitely M and possibly E. Do you see where I’m going with this?

If you’re not sure just how explicit (that’s what the E stands for) you’ll get with your writing, you can always tag it M and add the tag “Rating May Change”. You can also use the tag “Eventual Smut” to let people know it doesn’t happen for a while. 

If the smut is really tangential to the plot, you might also consider posting it as a separate chapter that people who don’t like smut but might otherwise like your story can skip. Adding a note to the summary or to the top of the fic to that effect would give those people the assurance that they need that they can dive in 🙂

-Mod Pi

I like to think of the Mature rating as being rated R movies so you can get movies like Deadpool, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Kill Bill and Basic Instinct.

To me, Explicit is basically porn hub where the tags are the various channels.