fun fact: painters back then painted yellow fruits (most often lemons/other citrus fruits) to show off their skills. yellow is one of the most difficult colors to shade for with paint, so it showed off their skill in mixing colors. oftentimes, when theres a PEELED yellow fruit, the peel is way longer than it should be, too, just because the painters wanted to flex on people.
for example:
if you put the peel back on the lemon in your mind, you’ll find its way too long. this is genuinely just bc this painter in 1643 wanted to flex his painting skills
This is so fucking stupid. Why can’t artists and writers even give the option of pay? It’s not like anybody is holding a gun to reader’s heads forcing them to donate. It’s donated money! You’re telling me Article 13 removes people’s option to even donate???
Article 13 is causing all sorts of bullshit, but this is nothing new for Ao3 and it’s important for folk to know. Writers or anyone hosting content on Ao3 should never ever link back to a ko-fi or patreon or even mention needing donations due to legal restrictions placed on Ao3 in order to exist. If you are found out or reported, they can delete your account.
So the way Ao3 works? Is that the only way they can protect us from content creators and their legal teams, is to be like “hey, look, this is transformative work for fun! It earns no money!” And that’s how they get around what many authors still in this day and age think of as plagiarism and defemataion.
It’s actually in Ao3′s Terms of Services, not because they are monsters who don’t want you to thrive, but because it’s the only way to protect fan creators from the proverbial wolf at the door. I’m just old enough to remember when Anne Rice and Star Wars were going after people and filing official take downs for fan works and threatening to sue people. I know actual people who got real letters telling them to take down their fanzine or else.
And every time I see someone creating a patreon or ko-fi for the fanfic, my heart jumps up into my mouth. Like sure, let people know you have those things? But don’t have tiers that say things like “fanfic updates”. And for the love of god never post links to them in your Ao3. @deadcatwithaflamethrower nearly lost their account some years ago because they mentioned having a donation drive on their tumblr and someone reported them.
TLDR: One of the prime reasons why AO3 has managed to exist as long as it has is that it’s strictly non-profit. If you even so much as encourage people to pay for the fics you host there within your content on the site, you are putting them at risk at losing that argument, losing their status as a non-profit and all the legal protections that come with that, and AO3 and all its writers getting sued.
Things you should not even mention anywhere on your AO3, much less link, including in comments, author’s notes and your profile:
Ko-fi/Patreon accounts
Go Fund Mes
other donation drives
any other instances in which you receive money for the fic
If u do happen to mention it make it very clear that it has nothing to do with writing fanfics. Say that it’s cause u wanna ‘go on a holiday’ or that it’s for ‘creative ORIGINAL fiction’ but if you say it’s for writing fanfics u’re a shit person cause you’re putting the whole website, and everyone on it, at risk.
You should be allowed to get paid for your work.
Non profits are neither the time nor the place for that.
I know this is old, but I want to correct this idea.
AO3 doesn’t just ban commercial spam because fanworks are more legally defensible when they are not done for actual money.
AO3 also takes a generally non-commercial stance. It’s trying to protect a specific kind of “fannish gift economy” and to give readers and writers a space where they won’t be advertised to. Getting paid for your work is antithetical to the type of fandom that OTW came out of is about. I get that this is not the cultural norm for everyone on Tumblr now, but it was our cultural norm and is a cornerstone of the philosophy that built AO3.
AO3 donation drives are the only kind of “please donate” thing that is allowed on AO3, full stop. No “but it’s a good cause”. No “But this patreon is not for fic”. AO3 users come to the site knowing that they can have a vacation from the e-begging posts all over the rest of the internet.
It doesn’t matter why you’re mentioning your ko-fi or what it’s for. That is commercial spam, which has been banned on AO3 from day 1.
Did you guys know Elon Musk sent that STUPID car into space without sterilizing it, and if it hadn’t gone off it’s intended path, and it had reached mars as he intended, it could have permanently ruined the search for life on Mars by contaminating the red planet with Musk‘s cooties. This may sound silly to you but I assure this is very real and serious. He could have ruined the entire field of astrobiology all for his stupid advertisement. Let’s kill him
![creatureofgrimm:
“ awwcutefuzzyanimals:
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”
[A small tabby cat sitting on a step, resting their head on the next step above]
”](https://64.media.tumblr.com/c83738825e6157830b06c14ee5f008d3/tumblr_pb9oh42kGu1teo09yo1_500.jpg)
