*** AO3 and spam bots.
in a turn of events from my last microblog post, i shared my story to AO3 and the reception was so kind overall that i decided to start sharing my longer DMC fic there too. i'm going about it kind of slowly, posting a chapter a week so it gets bumped to the top of the list haha. i have been calling this AO3maxxing to my boyfriend...if you aren't familiar with devil may cry, the tag is kind of a shitshow on account of the fact that it's a story centered on a family and their crazy family drama, which means the two guys people ship with each other happen to be brothers, which means finding something that isn't just someone's incest yaoi fic is a tall order. i'm not gonna get into debating about if this is okay or whatever because i'm not 16, not on twitter, and don't care, but i also can't say that this is what i want to see when i try to go into the tag. all this to say is that i am already proud of my writing at a base level and i think i write these characters better than about 95% of the other writers in there, so i want more people to see my stuff. that's all. LOL. #ao3maxxing
as mentioned in my previous microblog i don't really post there very often. i'm not much of a fic reader myself, i only really read sonic fic and the like when i was like 11 and stopped reading as much when i hit 13 or so... so all this to say is that AO3 'etiquette' is sort of beyond me. however, nothing could have prepared me for this: my fic attracted a lazy digital artist scammer in the style of a spam bot.
a spam bot! on AO3! this wasn't even a guest account, this was someone who had made an account and gone around using chatgpt or something to try and bait writers into paying them for their "visual artistic services" to "draw" their fic for them.
i hesitate to say the account was an entire bot itself, because unlike sites like twitter where the mere mention of the word t-shirt sets off the horde of "hi i am digital artist i can make that for you _" qrts and replies, this person went to the trouble to EMAIL ME. but there's no better way to explain it succinctly to people.
this is the long version of what happened: they commented on chapter 1 of my fic with vague pleasantries about the writing being inspiring, to which i said thanks and i hope you can write something too. they then asked if they could message me about it off-site. at this point i was just assuming this was a kid or something who wanted to draw a scene from the fic and wanted to ask my permission or a kid who wanted to write something inspired by it. the very same day i had received a comment (since deleted) from someone who asked me if they could draw a comic adaptation based off the story i wrote (the reason they deleted it is because the part they wanted to adapt was not in my story at all so they must have commented on the wrong fic lmaooo). so i gave this user my art commission email since i wasn't really sure what else i could give lol.
in the way i give my email everywhere, i gave it like the email on my about: clearglass [dot] site [at] protonmail [dot] com (but with my art email). so this person had to type out my email manually. it even came from a pretty normal looking email address, a coco.a.simmonss at gmail.
the first email i got:
Hey
How are you?
the emails didn't pick up much from there. naturally i took to discord at this point to share it with my friends. "look at the email this person sent me" i said. "this is either a bot or a very scared 12 year old" responded my boyfriend "this person has the energy of a chihuahua puppy" said my friend rain. i gave a hi response back and said if they had things they wanted to ask about the work, to go ahead. but i got this back:
Glad to see you here
Your welcome 🤗
Btw, I’m coco from US wbu?
at this point alarm bells began to ring in earnest. i attempted to goad them further into getting to the point and eventually had to ask if they liked DMC for long, got "yeah" as a response, and then got this email after they asked me, "So, Can we start the discussion?":
As I mentioned to you earlier, I had some really cool ideas after reading it, so let me tell you a bit about myself first.... I'm a digital concept artist and I mostly create Art scenes for writers based on their stories and projects.
the immediate uptick in grammar is crazy lol. by this point i knew i was dealing with a bot but i still tried to offer the benefit of the doubt (or perhaps it was just copium) so i said this
If your question is that you want to draw a scene from the fic, you are by all means welcome to do so. I don't own any of these characters (except for Cam anyways but she hasn't been properly introduced in the story yet haha) so you are free to draw them :)
coco was not fuckin interested in what i had to say.
I mostly work on art scenes, and by that I mean scenes from stories or books that writers really love the kind they wish they could actually see and show others in a realistic illustrated form they usually hire me for that and then I charge depending on the details and complexity of their projects but you don’t need to worry about that I’ll fully cooperate with you.
That's the kind of work I usually do. If you’d like I can show you some examples too, and your story has actually given me some ideas as well so before moving forward, I wanted to ask do you already have a specific scene from your story in mind that you’d like to see illustrated?
Or would you be interested in hearing the ideas I’ve come up with?
to which i politely declined and then reported their account to AO3. honestly i wasn't sure if AO3 would be able to do anything due to the bulk of the encounter taking place off-site but they deleted the user.
anyways this is CRAZY!!! going to such pains to get me to give up my email address and funneling everything through some genAI chatbot to try and bait me into paying them to "draw" (see: use genAI) artwork for my devil may cry FANFIC is insane. anyway, spam bots sure are different from what i had grown accustomed to back when i used twitter. the thing i find most baffling about it is that they decided to email me at all instead of just ghost me and move on to some easier to reach target (someone with twitter and/or IG, probably, since their bot script was treating the emails like it was basically a chat client).
other than that and the person who commented on the wrong fic entirely (which was still a nice comment but funny to read because i was like uhhh i did not write any of that but happy for you.....) everyone has been really nice though which has been very motivating.