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The Joker Is Not Straight

@dracze / dracze.tumblr.com

Joker kinnie femboy. Unwholesome villain appreciation, problematic media, some discourse, some meta, art and fic. Batjokes, general batmans, superheroes, Helluva Boss, Stolitz, ASOIAF, Sandman, comics, Drag Race, OFMD, WWDITS, horror of all kinds, kink, media theory, queerness. You can find me at "Dracze" on AO3, twitter, pillowfort, cohost. Pronouns: "she/her"or "he/him". Genderfluid and queer af.
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Yo but remember when Harley Quinn basically shat on gay bashing?

Oh my god, where is this from?

That one’s from Harley Quinn #22! Harley gets killed and goes to Hell, where she hooks up with some dead buddies and proceeds to plan a jailbreak. So Hell sics this crazed demonic enforcer on her, a bounty hunter from the Old West who even in death is obsessed with finding the one man who eluded him. After said bounty hunter annoyingly foils Harley’s escape plan, Harley finally asks him: “ffs, you’re dead, why are you so obsessed with finding this guy?” and it turns out that he wants revenge against the man who “corrupted” his son, aka his son’s boyfriend. And Harley’s like, “UM, DUH, YOU HAVEN’T FOUND HIM BECAUSE HE’S NOT IN HELL YOU BIGOTED DICKHEAD.” And then Harley proceeds to cause so much trouble in Hell that she winds up being banished back to the land of the living.

Because these are just the kind of things that happen to Harley.

Harley Quinn: Too Good For Hell

dc comics heritage post

To the authors who are unhappy about their hits-to-kudos ratio on AO3: as a kindness to yourselves, please stop. That hit counter doesn’t mean what you think it means.

First, not all those hits are people. A substantial chunk of those hits, as I understand it, are machines, looking to see what the page is. The hits-to-kudos is whack from the hour a story is posted, because a bunch of those hits are machines.

Second, multiple hits can be the same person on their first read of the story. If I open a story in a browser tab to read later, my browser sometimes/often unloads that tab in the interim, resulting in it reloading that tab and creating a new hit when I finally go to read it. If reading it requires multiple sessions, that’s multiple new hits. If I then leave it open for a while to remind myself to leave a comment, my browser will reload it again, generating another new hit, before it lets me write a comment. Altogether, my first read of a story, plus leaving a comment, can easily turn into five or more hits, depending on how hard I’m finding it to find reading and commenting time.

Third, if your story has been up for a while, the people who adore your story are driving up your hit counter with their re-reads. They go away, they come back, they re-read, and they do it again, and they do it again. It’s probably only a small subset of your total readers, but if one of your stories becomes someone’s go-to comfort read for times when they are stressed out (or, if it’s an explicit story, if it becomes their favorite jack-off material), that one person’s devoted re-reading might easily hit your story dozens of times. But most readers feel hella shy about admitting that they treat your story like a fuzzy blanket (or a vibrator); either way, it’s pretty rare for them to tell you about it. (Which I’m sympathetic to! Fuzzy blankets are a very personal thing, and no one wants to feel stared at by the author while they’re having a vulnerable moment.)

Fourth, stories get read by people outside of fandom, people who don’t think of themselves as your friends/neighbors/community-members, and who just… never think to hit kudos, at all, because their social context is so far removed from ours. I’ve got a couple of stories that were linked on TVTropes once upon a time, and their hit-to-kudos ratios are fucking absurd. If your story got linked outside of fandom somewhere, odds are that most of the people coming in from that link will never think to hit kudos, no matter how much they liked it, because they never quite connect that there’s a real live author, breathlessly hoping to be liked and appreciated, standing just behind the screen, and that maybe readers should be polite and say ‘thank you’ to them when they finish the story and leave.

tl;dr Do not assume every hit is new human reader who didn’t like your story and clicked out. Your hit counts will often be ten times greater than your kudos, just for stupid ordinary internet-traffic reasons, and the older a story becomes (and the more times bots and re-readers hit it), the wider the hits-to-kudos gulf will become. Do yourself a kindness and stop calculating that ratio – and if you can’t stop making yourself crazy about it, go into settings and turn off your hit counter displays. Please be tender to yourselves; being an author is hard enough as it is.