Fimfiction.net
(also known as FIMFiction.net) is a Web site dedicated to hosting Fan Fiction based on My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. It's also a community gathering place for fans of Friendship is Magic.
The site began operating in July 2011. It was created by knighty, who remains its lead developer.
Additional staff can be found here.
Note: Please list only tropes which apply to the site. Since Fimfiction exists to host and promote fan fiction, it's a given that Fanfic Tropes will be found there.
This Web site and its users provide examples of the following tropes:
- Anti-Frustration Features: New authors have to submit stories and have them approved by moderators before they're allowed to go in the update queue. Should an author get enough fics approved for submission by the mods over time, the author is given the chance to use an "Auto-Approve" feature that skips moderation and puts it straight into the queue. An author can still submit stories the old-fashioned way if they so choose, though.note
- Anti-Trolling Features: Users have to submit their new stories into a queue that only moderators can see to prevent spam and/or abuse from coming through. A user can get stories Auto-Approved without submitting them to this mod queue, but only after a certain number of their stories have been approved for submission. This cuts Troll Fics on the site down to almost nothing, since no one is going to spend time crafting even mediocre stories of at least a thousand words each for the sake of trolling with Auto-Approve.
- April Fools' Day:
- Like Equestria Daily, the site admins used to always do something for April Fools' Day. Invariably, because they couldn't seem to find the perfect mix of silliness vs. seriousness, they caused controversy. After the poor reaction to three straight April Fools' Day pranks, the site admins decided to end all future jokes.
- In 2013, knighty announced he was leaving the site and that Poultron was taking over the reins. They also announced that they were banning all Human-tagged stories, and were moving all former Human-tagged stories elsewhere. No one was very happy about the announcement, and the staff were forced to apologize and explain that it was all a joke shortly after.
- In 2014 it was the announcement that Fimfiction had been acquired by Facebook.
- At midnight at the start of April Fools' Day 2015, UK time, they announced changes to the Featured Box that would essentially cement certain authors into the Featured Box if they had more followers by multiplying their heat rating. No one was sure whether or not this one was a prank until Obsolescence posted a blog explaining that it was not a joke in the slightest for roughly 2/3 of the post (until the very end where he does clarify that it was just a joke). They also "banned" all stories of a certain (nonexistent) genre, claiming they reduced the overall integrity of the site.
- Many of the site authors post the usual set of updates (they're leaving, they're deleting their stories, they're done writing for good, etc.) but a good number of authors post April Fools chapters (usually troll chapters) as well. One user went so far as to post a full chapter update that was just all 44 chapters of the badfic My Immortal.
- Like Equestria Daily, the site admins used to always do something for April Fools' Day. Invariably, because they couldn't seem to find the perfect mix of silliness vs. seriousness, they caused controversy. After the poor reaction to three straight April Fools' Day pranks, the site admins decided to end all future jokes.
- Cloud Cuckoo Lander: The review blogs have the site's foremost reviewer staff calmly and logically set up a scenario for the review before getting to the actual reviews.
- Dead Fic: The site tries to make identifying these easier by allowing authors to mark stories as "Complete," "Incomplete," "On Hiatus," or "Cancelled." However, authors often abandon stories, leave them as "Incomplete" or "On Hiatus," and never get around to updating or canceling them.
- Grandfather Clause: The site did not always have rules against meta stories or stories tagged with more than five characters. Stories which already had these things when the rules were implemented were allowed to remain the way they are, with only new stories being affected.
- Hollywood Hype Machine: Embodied by the popular and featured boxes. These two sections on the front page display stories that are currently receiving a lot of attention (generally measured in how many votes/favorites/views it is receiving at the time). As they get into the featured box, they get more attention and more upvotes that let them stay there for longer, before eventually falling by the wayside.
- Konami Code: Keying this in on any page will cause a sprite of Rainbow Dash to appear. She'll follow the cursor around, and has a few lines of dialogue that are either quotes from the show, or references to popular fics.
- MST: The site allowed them originally, but they have since been prohibited. Some users still post them in blogs or on other sites, but they can't be uploaded as actual story entries.
- Obvious Rule Patch:
- When the site was first founded, a person could tag their stories with any number of characters and descriptors (such as "Dark", "Slice of Life", "Comedy", etc.). This was eventually changed to limit the number of characters and descriptors to five apiece, with the expectation that only the most relevant characters and most important styles will be tagged. Stories that existed before this patch were allowed to keep their tags, though.
- Related to this, the main characters of Friendship is Magic are commonly known as the "Mane Six". They eventually got their own "Main 6" tag to show that they were all in the story so that writers didn't have to add each individual character in the tags. The same was later done for the main characters of Equestria Girls, then changed to "Main 7" once Twilight Sparkle's human counterpart joined the lineup.
- Quite a few users have more than one account, a common reason being that they use one account for SFW stories and the other for NSFW stories. The mods and admins eventually declared that this was okay, but users couldn't like/favorite/comment on the same story more than once with all of their accounts, and they could not like/favorite/comment on their own stories with a sock puppet account.
- Poe's Law: The site users really have a hard time distinguishing between serious site updates and joke ones, though the blame partly falls on the mods and webmasters for making it seem like it's an actual serious update.
- Streisand Effect: Discussed in the article "How to Handle Criticism". The article's author advises to not respond to negative criticism or attempt to delete comments that are trying to give Constructive Criticism on one's stories. The reason behind it is that people who weren't interested in your story are going to be attracted to all the drama surrounding it, and the story will be more known for being Flame Bait than whatever it was originally being criticized for.
Commenters mobilize. Friends arrive to support friends. Review-blogs are made, publicizing the scandal further. Eventually the story itself becomes irrelevant to the controversy. The comments section is a wasteland of commenters battling with the author. The story has accumulated dozens more downvotes overnight. Eventually the author either concedes the point, or continues on stubbornly and descends into infamy, their story's reputation a shattered hulk.
