like, u know there is a degree of moderation there, right? someone has to order the books to stock in the library. a library that lets any old creep stash their hastily scribbled shota pwp in between the shelves is a library that’s going to be shut down p quick. by the police. for providing ppl with child porn. (and yes if a picture of a tree or a description of a tree can make someone experience a tree, then the same can be said about a picture or description of a child in a sexual situation ffs)
I mean there’s like a million other logistical differences, and idk who checks erotica out of a library, but hey ppl can be wild abt these things
Hooboy. Well, as a librarian who has worked in many varieties of libraries, let me… try to… respond to this from a library and librarian perspective.
1) It is true that libraries have a process to go through for accepting materials, and that there is a degree of selectivity involved–this is because libraries have limited budgets, limited physical space, and limited staff to process and manage materials.
So, yes, any random junk written and left in the library would be thrown out. Not because the library would be concerned about its liability if anyone should see it; because we like to keep the library clean and organized, and leaving stuff on the shelf is not how we add things to the collection (how would they get CATALOGUED and LABELED???) And, of course, any adult attempting to show pornography (or, say, themselves) to actual children would be Removed From The Library because this would involve actual children being harmed by an actual adult in direct contact with them. Police do not shut down the libraries where this happens. They arrest the people harming the children.
Meanwhile, libraries spend VAST SUMS OF MONEY and ENDLESS STAFF HOURS to keep copies of Fifty Shades of Gray on the shelves where children actually can find them quite readily (and have them checked out on their library cards if mom’s has too many fines). Same with Last Tango in Paris and Flowers in the Attic and Year’s Best Erotica collections. (And Bibles, which get stolen at a ridiculous pace. I don’t know why, we were just forever having to order more of them.)
In an online space, which has effectively unlimited space, where adding new material costs nothing, and where the process of organizing that material and making it available is fully automated and what labor is involved is taken on by the contributing author, literally none of those constraints apply, so more content is more content! It’s catalogued and labeled as soon as it’s posted! It cannot be misshelved. Perfect!
2) This is not to say that no physical library has handwritten erotica in its collection somewhere. Many, many libraries collect rare local works such as self-published zines, and unique items like the personal papers of notable people (San Jose State University, for instance, holds the papers of the Kensington Ladies’ Erotica Society; The University of Iowa Zine Collection includes fanfic zines with erotic content; UCLA has the personal papers of Anais Nin), and doubtless some of these zines and personal papers include erotica. Because this handwritten material would be unique and its value would be presumed to lie mainly in the fact of its authorship, it would be properly collected, not in a library, but in an archive or special collection, where some archivist would dutifully folder it and make a note of what it was so future visitors to the collection could readily access it.
The main goal there would be to protect the material, not the person who might potentially view the material.
I worked in a public library which had an extensive collection of Playboy on microfilm, for instance. We kept it behind a desk where it had to be requested and checked out with a library card before it could be viewed. This was partly to prevent children viewing material inappropriate for their age–just as, say, the AO3 clearly marks adult material as such–but mainly to prevent vandalism of the material by people who disapproved of it. Several of the images on the film had been damaged by people trying to scratch them out; for the safety of the microfilm, we restricted access to it. This is also why the AO3 doesn’t allow people who dislike a fic to force it to be taken down.
This is also why most libraries celebrate Banned Books Week by eagerly higlighting works which people have ATTEMPTED to force to be removed from libraries–including work like Lolita, which is read by many as a titillating pedophile love affair. Librarians are not celebrating Lolita. They are celebrating the principle that they will not be stopped from collecting materials of interest and making them available to readers.
3) From your description of a library where children can freely access anything on the shelves, you seem to have only one conception of a library–a public library with open stacks, or perhaps a school library. There are, in fact, many kinds of libraries, with academic libraries being the most obvious foil to your description.
In an academic or university library, all authorized users of the library are adults who take adult responsibility for what they find in the library, much like when adult internet users indicate on a website that they are choosing to view adult content.
When I worked in a university library, I asked one of the librarians what do when a guy was sitting at a computer very obviously watching porn while a young woman, sitting next to him doing something text-based, seemed like she might be uncomfortable. I was told in no uncertain terms that the library’s policy was to relocate the person who was uncomfortable. The library was a repository of information and a place to access information: any kind of information, including the erotic. Under no circumstances would we curtail a library user’s access to that information.
(Unless he got his own actual dick out where people could see it, then we could call the campus police. Because, again: actual humans directly involved.)
Duke University Library Erotica Collection, 1940s-1960s (”An archive of original illustrations, sketchbooks, and erotic stories, depicting transgressive sex acts including (but not limited to) lesbian and heterosexual sex, incest, pedophilia, sadomassochistic behavior, and copulation with objects as varied as sex toys, produce, and household appliances. The stories and illustrations appear to be the work of a single individual, with nearly all narrative told from a female’s point of view. Also includes some amateur pornographic photography and magazine clippings.”)
i didnt realise ao3 was started in response to lj deleting account relating to p//edophi|ia and they explicitly support the posting of such works yikes
it wasn’t, like, ~~~we luv pedophilia, it was way more complicated than that!
although it’s true AO3 does allow all fannish content provided it’s properly warned for, there’s a long history there – of spaces being used by fans until the host decided whatever we were doing was too weird and distasteful and either kicking us off, banning certain content, or changing the nature of the site until it was no longer viable as a host.
you’re referring to the LJ Strikethrough of 2007, which, being an ancient crone, I lived through, and since I was hanging out in the last vestiges of SGA and in bandom, I saw some of the fallout. this was before LJ was sold to the Russians (which is a whole ‘nother story), when it was still owned by Six Apart; in an effort to clean up LJ’s act, Six Apart decided to delete all accounts using tags like underage, incest, rape, etc.
this was supposed to get rid of actual child porn on the site, and I hope it did, but it also targeted fan communities. this was a problem for a couple reasons; for one thing, not every story tagged with these words is in favor of them; for another, these things happen to real people and these personal posts were also potentially in danger of being attacked; for the last one, look, I ain’t into this kind of fic but people write about what people write about, and if it’s fictional and not explicitly banned in the TOS (correct me if I’m wrong; I don’t think written content about this stuff was banned?) then it’s not cool for a content host to just start deleting communities without warning.
but that’s what happened! these deletions were also primarily targeting slash communities, which smacked of some serious homophobia since things were deleted that had nothing to do with any of this kind of content.
eventually someone found out it was this super conservative religious group who’d sent a list of journal names to Six Apart, and who if I remember correctly targeted slash fic on purpose, even after it became clear that the fic was, well, totally fictional. after a while, Six Apart admitted they’d made a mistake and started to reinstate journals, but all of fandom was pretty shaken up.
THEN Boldthrough happened, which was essentially the same debacle several months later, at which point fandom began its long slow migration from LJ to GJ, IJ, and eventually AO3, Twitter, and tumblr.
AO3 was opened in 2008 in response to several incidents, of which Strikethrough was a really intense one. remember, also, that back in 2008 the stigma surrounding fandom was significantly greater and more shameful than it is today, so finding hosts willing to archive fic was difficult unless someone had the dough to pay for server space – often not an option. this was also back when fanfic.net’s HTML restrictions were so great that users couldn’t use any special characters or bold or italicize anything, and it didn’t allow R-rated content, so it was clearly not ideal. in addition, although cease & desist letters were much less common than they were in the early 2000s and before, DMCA takedowns were still a phantom on the horizon.
LONG STORY SHORT, even though pedophilia is reprehensible and I personally cannot stomach fanfic that involves that kind of content, AO3 was founded specially as a safe space for fandom communities that could not find homes elsewhere. it requires warnings precisely for that reason, and if you find a story that is not properly warned, you can alert the admins and get the story labeled appropriately.
IDK, maybe it’s just because I am, again, ancient, but I was in and around fandom before homosexuality was legal in all 50 states. so were most of the people who started AO3. for most of my formative life, being gay was associated with pedophilia, and so was writing about gay characters. just – it’s a lot more complicated than you might expect, and there’s a reason many older fans who have been involved in several generations of fandom were so grateful to have AO3 as an option.
I don’t read, for example, Hydra Trash Party fics. They squick me, and I generally feel they are pretty gross. But writing noncon body-horror is not the same as saying “yeah, I totally want to go out and rape and torture people for years while brainwashing them!” or even “yeah, I wouldn’t do it myself, but it would be totally okay if someone did!” Nobody is hurt by it, and nobody is going to be hurt by it. So should I have the right to go, that is gross, you don’t get to write or read that? No.
In the same way, writing about underage teens getting it on–sometimes with each other, sometimes with adults, sometimes consensually, sometimes not–is not the same as child pornography, nor does reading a fic about Hermione and Snape getting it on while she was his student mean someone thinks that would be a good and/or healthy thing in real life.
Fiction affects reality, but fiction is not reality. And writing about something does not mean you want to do it in real life, or believe that anyone should.
Let’s take a closer look at that “Ao3 supports pedophilia!” shall we?
1) The only fics I have ever come across that had actual pedophilia (i.e. someone having sex with a child), it was clearly and explicitly abuse. It was not meant to titillate or arouse. It was meant to horrify. It was seldom explicit.
2) There’s a lot more incest, but it is usually portrayed either as explicitly mutually consensual (i.e. Sam/Dean) or as abusive.
3) I’ve been in fandom for a decade and a half. When people start getting upset at “omg pedophilia, think of the children!” the fics they are usually objecting to aren’t actually pedophilia. Usually, it is teenagers having sex, especially queer sex. And people don’t like that, and use pedophilia as an excuse to shame people for writing/reading sex they don’t like.
Let’s look closer at Strikethrough, shall we? I hope that, if there were any communities of actual pedophiles on LJ, they got taken down, too. But here are some of the communities that got taken down that were not in any way supporting pedophilia and/or rape and/or incest that got taken down:
1) at least one support community for survivors of sexual abuse.
2) a literary book discussion group that was reading Lolita.
3) lots of slash fanfic communities, for things like Draco/Harry fic set in their fourth year (when both boys would have been 15).
Basically, this very conservative “family values” group hated porn, and they hated queer stuff even more, and used “but think of the children, it’s pedophilia!” to pressure LJ to get rid of huge swathes of things they didn’t like. And one time taking down the worst of it wasn’t good enough for them. No, this was step one on a moral crusade. If you acceded to their demands, all that did was whet their appetite, and soon they would be back with a new list of demands. This is why the 2007 strikethrough was not an isolated event, but rather one of a series of events, nor was LJ the only website thus targeted. It starts with anything that can get labelled “pedophilia” or “incest” because that’s low-hanging fruit. But they use that to go after anything relating to queer teen sexuality. Then anything with teen sexuality. Then once the community is already divided and diminished, they go after anything with non-con. Then whatever is next on their list. It doesn’t stop until they’ve won the point and nothing but suitably “family-friendly” fics that match their purity test are allowed.
Which is why AO3 has no morality content in their terms of service. You can’t break copyright beyond fair use (and AO3 has an expansive view of “fair use” and a team of lawyers on call). You can’t use AO3 for commercial advertising. And you can’t post ACTUAL child pornography, i.e. the things that are legally prohibited, i.e. actual photographs or videos of actual children (not teens) in sexually explicit positions–you know, the stuff that actually hurts kids. Other than that? It’s fair game. You can post anything you want, and the archive will not judge. There is no handle for the Moral Majority Family-Friendly Thought Police to latch onto, no cracks they can exploit to divide and conquer.
We’ve been down that road. It doesn’t lead anywhere good.
Reblogging this for the excellent explanation of what exactly the moral crusaders did last time. They had an explicit agenda of anti-queerness, and they specifically targeted slash and femslash communities in particular, such that many ship communities became (or started as) deliberately members-only. You had to apply, and your personal blog had to look like a real person and a fan. You were vetted, a la 1990s private servers.
During this period, Dreamwidth was also targeted by attacking its payment processor. They had to get a new one. These “Warriors” (literally called themselves that!) were totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom they didn’t like.
If you’re carrying out harassment of people right now because they’re posting works with sexual elements you don’t agree with? (And it’s always sex, never non-sexual violence, how strange….) If you’re doing that, you’re also totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom you don’t like. Because your tactics are fandom-destroying, and so is your agenda.
reblogging because this is important: strikethru and boldthru and all the various “purges” that fandom went thru about 10 years ago: this had to do with OUTSIDERS deciding that fandom in general and fanfiction in specific were evil and needed to be destroyed; unless we were writing and shipping good vanilla M/F married people. These were outsiders, going after fictional writing about fictional characters.
AO3 and OTW are HUGE, because now we have an organization, with very smart women and a lot of lawyers, that have our back. Fannish history is important, people! It has not always been this way.
This is so, so important: there’s that other post about AO3 and fanfiction floating around, about our history. People decry violent video games but no one is trying to force companies out of business. But people can and do attack fanfiction: an activity primarily written by women for women, about fictional characters. And often about sex. We have to constantly defend ourselves, protect ourselves, support each other against charges like “paeodophilia”.
^^^rebageling again for excellent commentary
Throwing this in because I was also present: This was during the American Government’s attempts to pass censorship laws on the internet. As MOST of those domains had their serves in America, they were beholden to those censorship laws. A great deal of fanfiction.net was removed because they happened to lose a goddamn courtcase. I’ve been on the site since 2002. They may not have ‘officially’ allowed NC-17 rated content (what it used to be listed as in the filters), it never did a damn thing to remove it. Ever. They had it listed as a rating option during ‘New Story’ uploading after all. It was i nthe search filters. After they lost the courtcase however, they legally had to start doing things about the mature content reports they got. The admins and mods were not actively looking for fic to remove, they were just responding to reports they had already received.
tl;dr – I know tumblr is all about black and white “you’re either all right or all wrong” thinking, but it’s important to understand what actually happened before going “ew ao3 was made to give pedophiles a safe place to post” because that is 110% not what happened.
This is why so, so many of the comparatively older fannish folks on tumblr like me are so vehemently against stuff like the anti movement and “all ships are valid UNLESS”. It smacks of censorship and content policing – and we’ve been there. We got our shit deleted and our accounts banned because someone else thought what we were reading or writing or talking about needed to just… not exist. No warning. Literally overnight. We just woke up and stuff was gone.
And yeah, the group was legit called Warriors for Innocence (or maybe of). I knew several people that were members of survivor/support groups that lost their groups – and their main support network – when Strikethrough happened (ten years ago holy shit).
You antis need to listen when us older fans tell you that the censorship you’re advocating for, when put into practice, is NOT a positive thing; it’s an extremely scary thing!
I can guarantee that you would be very, very upset if another event like LJ Strikethrough were to happen today because *you* are just as vulnerable as the rest of us! If you support the rights of marginalized groups of people, if you’re a slash or fem slash shipper, if you support gender identities that aren’t defined by biological sex, if you care about representation, if you support women, if you have any kind of kink, if you care about fandom in any capacity beyond its eradication, YOU DO NOT ACTUALLY WANT THE SORT OF CENSORSHIP YOU’RE ADVOCATING!!
People were terrified during Strikethrough. I was there. Communities were being shut down, individual users were being shut down. People were losing access to their own fics, their feedback, their comments – a LOT went on in comments on LJ. Think more coherent reblogs, much more personal, very widespread. Comments were also very important, and in terms of networking/communicating, were absolutely critical.
LJ was, for many people, central.
It was a fundamental part of the infrastructure of fandom at the time.
Having it attacked, having parts of your fandom’s territory just deleted like that, was very very scary. People didn’t know who was next. Every day, the list of stricken journals grew. And not all of them came back, not all of them recovered their content. Some people even voluntarily deleted their content as a form of protest. It was a bad time.
You do not have to interact with fic that grosses you out or makes you uncomfortable. Tagging is a thing. And even outside of tags, you are responsible for curating your own fandom experience. It is not right to expect it to be curated for you. And it is not right to lash out when someone refuses to do so and expects you to walk away from things that do not concern you.
I was gonna say “things that don’t harm anyone” but I realize you can argue that. If you get triggered, that’s upsetting. That could be considered harm. And I have sympathy for that. I do.
I have run across fic that triggered me. I have pretty specific triggers, and people don’t always think to warn for them because they aren’t that big a deal for a lot of people. Or it’s sort of bundled into kink and is presumed, that if you’re okay with certain kinds of kink, you’re okay with this. So I’ve been blindsided by it before. And it sucks for a couple of days while I get over it.
That was not the fault of the authors! You could argue that tagging should have been used, and maybe it should, but ultimately that’s not an ironclad obligation. It’s a tool people provide out of courtesy.
That was not the fault of the site! The site is there to give authors a way to make fiction available, not to judge each work and interrogate its validity and make sure everything is tagged so that nobody has to see anything bad, ever.
That was not even my fault! It was my responsibility to try to curate my experience, and I tried, but it wasn’t my fault because I didn’t deliberately set out to trigger myself.
When I get triggered, unless it is by a deliberate act, it is actually the fault of the people who hurt me in the first place! And I refuse to let them off the hook and blame perfectly innocent people who just wanna write their fanfiction! I may hate that fanfiction, but that is irrelevant to the question of whether or not people should be allowed to post whatever they want.
Also, some people cope by writing about fucked-up shit. My best friend in the whole wide world has shared her fic with me, and HOO BOY it is messed up. She wrote it during a time in her life when she was in and just coming out of a horrifically abusive relationship. I mean, it was exactly the kind of relationship all of us here on Tumblr love to hate. She was married to a shitty, abusive man who preyed on someone younger than he was and used his influence over her to treat her in a way that would be right at home in that Lundy Bancroft book Why Does He Do That? He was a real rapist, a verified grade-A bad fuckin’ guy. (She was lucky to escape. I have immense respect for her.) And she wrote some fucked up fic to deal with it, and she shared it, and people were invested in it. And because this was early 2000′s, she had to host it on a foreign server and cover her tracks, because at that time no-place was safe to post it.
“Yeah, but if she’s writing it for therapy, she doesn’t have to post it where other people might have to see it!” I hear you say.
But like … what the hell??? “Shut up, don’t talk about it, it’s bad to talk about these things, because these things are bad!” is something used against folks with trauma.
“This isn’t good for me, I can’t talk about this, I can’t be your audience for this,” that’s fine, those are boundaries that people with trauma use to defend themselves. You should learn to say those things! It will help you!
But expecting other people to never create and share art about trauma is just so thunderously oppressive I lack the ability to fully articulate it.
And nobody should have to disclose their history of trauma to prove their motives are pure or virtuous enough for their speech to be protected. I’ve only really been able to openly say “I was assaulted, it was traumatic, I am a little fucked up from it” for the past couple of years, tops. I couldn’t talk about it before that. Couldn’t! And it was over 20 years ago!
I also believe, very firmly, that you don’t need a history of abuse to find writing really messed-up shit satisfying, or to find reading it cathartic. I believe 100% in the freedom of creative expression, and the freedom to read whatever fucked up shit you want to read.
All y’all fandom youngsters can spit nails all you want over gross rape fic, incest fic, whatever.
Fine, I don’t like it either!
But that fucked up shit? That fucked up shit helped carve out the spaces we have today. You don’t have to like it, but campaigning to get it deleted, harassing content creators, calling people rapists and pedophiles who have never done and would never ever do such a thing, that is not the way to improve the world, it doesn’t keep actual kids or teens or assault/rape victims safe. It wouldn’t have made me feel safe when I was 16 and did’t want what was going on. It doesn’t make me feel safe now. I can say with the perspective of someone 24 years away from that event, it doesn’t make the world safer for people like I was. It actually makes it worse.
Learn to steer clear of the messed-up stuff you don’t like. It’s a skill, you get better with practice. Have someone else vet stuff for you if you need help doing it now.
Everything that is sketchy and gross is not criminal, and writing about a thing is not morally the same as doing it. Please stop acting like writing about an adult and a teenager having really questionable, gross sex is as bad as the actual registered sex offender they caught hanging around an actual elementary school two neighborhoods over from mine, just trying to talk to the kids. The former is, at most, in poor taste, and potentially triggering to abuse victims. The second makes me want to vomit because even though he was just talking, that guy was gearing up to try something and create another abuse victim. A g a i n.
The first can be avoided because it is imaginary and you, an adult, have power over your back button so that you don’t have to witness harm to imaginary people. The second, those very real kids had to rely on real adults and real law enforcement to keep them safe from very real assault.
(It worked! The neighborhood rallied! He was arrested for violating parole!)
Pretty sure Sleazebag McDongface didn’t read some gross NC-17 Draco/Lucius fic before deciding to harm an actual human being. Pretty sure not having read it didn’t keep him from doing it. ‘Cause he fuckin’ did it. And he would have done worse. But actual people stopped him.
I get wanting to protect victims when so many of us are victims ourselves, but man, going after fiction is not the way to do it.
An author is not a perpetrator. Stop trying to make those things synonymous in the minds of other fans, and in the minds of other recovering victims.
I’m a crone who also lived through strikethrough, and all y’all young fans need to read this and understand it if you don’t want history to repeat itself someday.
Here’s the thing, also: it doesn’t stop with fic about objectionable stuff.
If you have a website with TOS that includes any kind of “objectionable content” rules, there will be parties who will use those rules to try to silence other people whom they want silenced.
Let’s look at the alt-right and MRA movements today, or GamerGate a few years ago. What is one of their primary weapons? They report black or feminist or really any leftist YouTube channels (or Twitter accounts, or whatever) whose message they don’t like and claim those channels are are violating TOS by posting hate speech or incitations to violence or whatever bullshit they can come up with, in an attempt to silence those channels.
When Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequence came under fire for starting a crowdfunding endeavor to fund the production of her Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series of videos, male gamers tried to get her KickStarter and various social media accounts shut down by reporting her for for hate speech and promoting terrorism.
Luckily, that became a big enough story that the dudes failed and their efforts backfired. But a lot of times, these tactics work.
How do I know this? Because it happened to me. Not over major shit like the examples above, but over something completely petty.
Back in the mid-to-late 90s, before LiveJournal really became the place for fandom, before FF.net was really a thing, you had to create your own personal website on whatever free webhost you could find (GeoCities was popular, but there were others) if you wanted to host your fic somewhere.
And back then, TV studios and book authors were still sending their lawyers after people who wrote fanfic, issuing cease and desist letters to not only the authors, but also to their webhosts.
At the time, I was writing perfectly het Mulder/Scully fanfic. No rape, no pedophilia, no slash. Maybe a little BDSM. But largely it was unobjectionable.
Then the 8th season of X-Files started, David Duchovny decided he only wanted to be involved part-time, and the show decided to bring in another male character. The fandom lost their shit–as fandoms do–over the idea of “replacing” Mulder blah blah blah.
One of the most popular fanfic mailing lists–one that had previously had no restrictions on what characters or pairings could be posted–decided that if you wrote fanfic involving this character, you were no longer welcome. Well, this was the mailing list with all the readers. Sure, authors could go to other mailing lists, but they wouldn’t have exposure to the sort of readership this other list boasted.
I spoke out, saying that this change was unfair to fic authors and that the moderator of this list was behaving in a pretty vile way. The moderator and her friends took aim at me and began a campaign of harassment, and a few days later, suddenly my website with my XF fanfic was TOSed because someone had reported it. So was the next site I tried to create to host my fic, and the one after that.
Thanks to the way AO3s TOS are constructed, that sort of shit doesn’t happen now. I can speak up if I need to, and while I may receive harassment on my various social media accounts, there’s no chance they can have my fic taken down just because they have an agenda and don’t like me for reasons not relating to my fic.
So yeah, AO3′s rules protect fic a lot of us might find objectionable. But they also protect fic that is in no way objectionable from being targeted by unrelated harassment campaigns. And since any of us could find ourselves in the sights of those sort of campaigns at any time, we need to thank our lucky stars for that.
I like this last addition.
When I helped write the ToS for AO3, I wasn’t primarily thinking about strikethrough. I was primarily thinking of FFN, where so many people post things that are technically against the ToS but that the community tolerates. Any time someone gets pissed off, they can go on a grudge-reporting spree and target their enemy’s work. Often, that means guys targeting slash or Twilight fic because it’s “for girls” and thus sucks. Sometimes, it’s one ship vs. another. I was also thinking of Miss Scribe and all of that other Harry Potter fandom drama. (And if you think fans are above destroying an entire archive just to strike at one enemy, think again!)
We can’t force people to like each other. We can’t force people to be nice to each other. But we could take away fandom bullies’ favorite tools.
So we did.
Watching young (ostensibly liberal) bloggers and fans take up the deeply conservative rhetoric and moral crusading of the right wing and evangelical groups from the 90s has been both fascinating from an anthropological perspective, and fucking horrifying for someone who lived through this time period and the death of LJ.
This thread keeps getting better.
It galls me to think that those of us who went through all this shit might have to go through it again because people who were still in primary school at the time don’t see anything wrong with harassing us over
Like, I hate to pull this argument, but we are your fandom elders, we did what we did to preserve fandom for y’all, so y’all would have space to safely explore the sane things we did and still do. And in doing so we rightly realized that if we wanted to protect the comfortable, cuddly parts, we also needed to protect the dark parts.
You can hate non-con fic all you want, and I will always advocate for adequate tagging/warning (especially with franchises that are aimed at younger audiences, e.g. MLP:FIM and SU) so that you don’t have to see it because I sympathize, but I will never support people who want to make sure that it isn’t even there to be seen. I’ve been through that once. It didn’t help anyone. It didn’t fix anything.
Please, learn to curate your own online experience. You are responsible for not clicking, or clicking away. Don’t try to force others to do it for you. That’s not cool. You aren’t protecting children. You are asking fandom to treat everyone like a child. There is a massive difference.
Reblogging for the history (was there; can confirm), and also–
Come on. When you hear an extreme claim like “ao3 supports pedophilia,” an entire protocol should kick off in your head. Who, exactly, is saying it? How much confidence do you have in your knowledge of this person? (A more important question than it used to be; I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that 15% of “fandom leftists” are actually Russian bots.) What basis do they have for this claim–were they in a position to know first-hand, are they known to have studied the topic carefully? How complete is their knowledge? Could they be missing important context? Do they have any known biases or preferences that might slant their reading of something? Do they have motives to be untruthful? Could they just be mistaken? What are the underlying facts supporting their claim? Are there other readings of those facts that you can think of? Do you have any biases/preferences that you need to keep in mind that might lead you to prefer an inaccurate reading?
Honestly, were you all raised by wolves, that you need this explained to you? Why do we have to tell you not to set everybody’s house on fire because you want to drive out imaginary intruders? Kneejerk reactions to buzzwords is for followers of our current president. Do better.
Allow me to start of by saying, I in no way support, anyone or anything that promotes or endorses that kind of content. It makes me physically ill even knowing it exists.
There are however entire screeds in the Ao3 terms and services talking about what is and is not allowed on Ao3, and child porn is pretty high up the list of what Ao3 does not deem as okay.
I don’t doubt that there have been genuine incidences of inappropriate content, because this is the Internet and people are awful sometimes, but I also know that Ao3 does deal with people when they breach their terms of services, and they are swift about it. What they do not do is throw the baby out with the bathwater which is what this is, and I’m extremely wary of anyone who is in favor of mass censorship like a lot of “antis” are clamoring for.
I was your age during the fandom purges that went on in LiveJournal and Fanficnet, and this exactly is how we lost our fandom spaces before. It’s how we lost thousands and thousands of stories and writers and safe spaces that were in no way promoting that kind of content, but a select few people decided we were writing about “immoral things”, and do you know what those “immoral things” were? Being gay. Being anything other than what they deemed “normal”. Anything at all to do with sex was also removed regardless of context, anything tagged as “rape” was removed too, including forums set up to support survivors of assault. We were deleted without discrimination, or without proof of the validity of their claims.
And they used the same argument that they’re using now. They called it child porn and demanded that sites cater to children, even if those sites were never intended for a child audience.
They forced any and all LGBT+ content regardless of actual explicit material, onto NSFW sites intended for adults and kink, because that’s all we were to them. They made it less safe to talk to people and to spread awareness about certain issues, and to group together with people like ourselves.
So you’ll have to pardon me for beingtired that this kind of thing is happening again because by and large for the most part, this is a puritanical witch hunt spun to sound like moral concern when really it’s another attempt at censorship because people don’t like something so they do the easy thing and cry “pedophile!” because they know it’s a real easy way to discredit someone and ruin their life. They know it, and they do it anyway, regardless of the harm it causes, or how it invalidates those of us who are actual victims of predatory adults. And yes, I speak from personal experience. And no I’d rather not to have to talk about it in public again.
I’ve been a minor in fandom. I know not everyone is as careful as me
about tagging my work and making sure no one under the age of 18 can
accidentally stumble onto my adult works.
I also know not all adults are good adults and you deserve to be protected from them. But I also know people making false claims to the FBI is not going to end well. For anyone.
And if it turns out Ao3 is actually investigated and found to be harboring such content, you can tell me I was wrong and I’ll gladly watch it burn. But I’ve seen this shitshow before, I know the tactics used, and I know it just opens up a whole other can of problems that we’re already seeing the effects of online and off and they are not easy to fight.
If any of this makes you uncomfortable with following me, you don’t have to reply, you can just block me and leave, as you should any other adult who makes you feel uncomfortable. You are in charge of your own online safety, and curating what you see on your dash. Take care of yourself and stay safe.
Adding onto what Joy said, because I have a very bad feeling about what the original asker thinks “child porn” is, and as I know a good deal about this from research back during Strikethrough:
There’s a stark difference between “child porn” in the legal sense and “written stories about an underage character having sex and/or being a victim of sexual trauma”.
Legally, and also from the moral standpoint that the ask attempts to invoke, child porn is visual live pornography of actual minors, ie photographs or videos of actual human children in sexual positions, which by its nature requires at least one actual human child to have been put in a sexual position, and therefore traumatized. Which is why child porn is so horrifying- because a child was literally deeply harmed to produce it. Writing about minors in sexual situations does not require any actual living underage human being to do anything at all, let alone be forced into sexual situations they aren’t ready for.
AO3 DOES NOT allow child porn, and if you find any, you should report it for TOS violations. AO3 DOES allow fanworks featuring various underage situations, regardless of whether these situations would be morally okay in real life. Because writing is NOT REAL LIFE, and with appropriate warning labels, written stories don’t hurt anyone.
Right now with the bullshit being thrown at the OTW and AO3, these articles are a must-read and I’ll keep reblogging them for the duration. But because they take up a lot of dash space, i’ll only reblog them individually every few days – meanwhile this post with direct links will be reblogged as daily as I can.
[cw rape mention cw sexual abuse mention (content warnings do not apply evenly across each of these posts…and frankly the only one that really triggered *me* was the one put forth by the ‘pro-censorship’ questioner – for stupid shock value. fuck. what a fucking asshole move]
“ISTG if I see one more fandom post on this hellsite aggressively misidentify something as paedophilia I’m going to flip every goddamn table.
Consider my metaphoric table well and truly flipped.As of right now, I’ve officially reached my limit for things being called paedophilia that are not, in fact, paedophilic. Specifically: I am sick of seeing fictional relationships where one party is in their late teens and the other their twenties being called paedophilic by default, as though it’s impossible for such a pairing to be anything else. I am likewise sick of seeing anyone who enjoys, creates or otherwise participates in such narratives being called a paedophile apologist or sympathiser. I understand that any conversation about what is or is not paedophilia is going to be inherently uncomfortable for a lot of people, and that’s as it bloody well should be, given the subject matter. But it’s precisely because both the crime and the accusation are so very, very serious that the topic needs to be clearly discussed.“
Every year, multiple times a year, they convince ppl to fork out thousands of dollars and….literally nothing changes. There’s no doubt in my mind they’re pocketing most of this money lol
Yep
That’s what’s so wild to me. They’ve made exactly 0 changes other than adding the ‘Exclude’ tags and that def doesn’t take 130k.
Actually you can see their budget right here, and, yeah, it cost about 100k. (For reference an entry-level, full time web developer makes about 40k a year, not including benefits).
Here’s where they talk about all the changes they actually made.
To understand why any of this matters, here’s what you have to understand:
In computers, time is expensive.
“Putting a strain on the Archive’s servers” basically means slowing down the website, which potentially means paying for and maintaining more servers, which is more expensive.
And that’s just bookmarks. Because everything on ao3 is interconnected, any changes made to the tagging system could completely break the functionality of the entire website. This means if you didn’t notice any changes somebody did their job really well. Somebody tested that code extensively, pushed it to it’s limits, fixed all the problems, and then tested it all over again.
And that’s just the things they’ve actively made changes to; every year there’s more fics added, which means more data they’ve got to store and maintain. They’ve got to back everything up that when they lose data (not if), they’ve got a backup so you don’t lose the 500,000 word fic you spent 2 years working on and isn’t stored anywhere else.
And that’s just what they’re storing. Every time you load a fic, every time you make a search, you’re communicating with a server, which can only send information out to so many computers at once. More and more people use ao3 each year, meaning they have to buy more servers (which cost money).
Now, I’m not an expert. And I haven’t thoroughly looked through their budget to see if they actually have spent their money wisely, or if there are cheaper contracting services they could have used, but I’m pretty sure the people working there have a better idea of how much something costs than a random person looking at a number and saying “that looks like a lot.”
Do you have to donate? No. Obviously not (although it is tax deductible). But I personally don’t consider paying somebody for a service they’ve provided to be them “pocketing my money,” especially when they’re a nonprofit, unlike, say, twitter, facebook, or… TUMBLR.
Maybe it isn’t worth anything to you to keep ao3 up and running, and that’s fine! But I use their service every single day, and it’s worth something to me.
Like people still haven’t explained why it is that ao3 is still in ‘beta mode’ after like 10 years, why they need so much money in donations each year and why sites like ff.net or LiveJournal never required that. Like yes ff.net doesn’t have as elegant a layout as ao3 but it was still perfectly functional and was a lot of people’s mainstay for sharing and consuming fic. Like I know ad revenue is part of how they make their money to host servers and shit. And then lj has always had the free option and paid/premium member option, and they’ve made good money off that shit over the past 2 decades but they never made it like “oh free version is so rudimentary” and tried to force your hand to buy the premium membership. Lj was free and very fun to use and if not for that Russia bs I would prob still be using it today.
Ao3 has a nice layout and some features (like decorating series, “inspired by” works, etc) that I hadn’t seen on other sites and that’s why a lot of us migrated over there. But all this money being funneled into it legit doesn’t make sense to me because all these other sites don’t make the users pay for server fees…and it can’t cost that much just to have the pretty layout.
I think we need to stop putting ao3 on such a pedestal that we can’t ever have critical conversations about it without someone being reactionary and going “WELL MAKE YOUR OWN DAMN SITE THEN”
Also the fact that ao3 stans keep hiding in the replies on Erikas post says it all cuz they can’t even be bothered to reblog directly from me or other folks to make their rebuttal
Because they don’t accept advertising revenue and they don’t sell user data to advertisers. Sites like fanfiction.net are “free” because they derive profit off their users. This profit comes from people who think they can use this user data in a useful way, and will pay money for it. This can be especially dangerous with sites featuring LGBT content; sometimes people literally will say, “I will give you a shitload of money if you give me all the information you have about anyone reading porn featuring consenting gay adults while living in a theocratic dictatorship where being gay is illegal.” And who wants to know? Well, right now we don’t know. It could be an aid group, a religious group, the theocratic dictatorship’s police force. It’s very easy to obscure who’s paying for what data.
To keep that revenue stream, sites like FF.N have to keep their advertisers happy. Fandom has often been targeted by religious zealots who approach advertisers on sites we use, like Livejournal and FF.N, and say, “Your ads are being displayed on the same page as GAY PEOPLE KISSING! This is disgusting!” And when advertisers threaten to pull their business, LJ and FF.N have traditionally gone, “No, don’t leave, we’ll delete the stuff you don’t like off the site.” That’s why FF.N doesn’t officially allow explicit fic on the site, and will delete it if advertisers ever get upset about it in the future.
But the AO3 has said, “We are never going to accept advertising and we will never sell user data, because we want to be able to decide entirely on our own what content we will host,” so they run entirely on donations and investment revenue.
It’s possible that an anti archive that agreed to delete anything objectionable off the site would be able to run ads and therefore operate much more cheaply. Though even then it should still be run by people keeping a sharp eye on what data they are giving away, so they don’t, for example, give Saudi Arabian authorities the street addresses of LGBT users there so they can be arrested.
Also, people haven’t explained? This has been explained over and over again, because every time AO3 has a donation drive there’s some bright spark who doesn’t understand how social media revenue streams work or that servers cost money and goes off on a rant about it instead of spending .3 seconds googling the topic.
This has been explained REPEATEDLY. If op is too lazy to look up those explanations (and they aren’t hard to find), then that’s on them.
If @synclaires is going to accuse Ao3 of “fishy” financials it would be nice if they’d provide some sort of proof or explanation besides “I personally don’t like how they manage their leftover funds”
Ao3 is pretty transparent, they provide a service free of charge, if you want to accuse them of fraud or something, then make your case. But vague “they ask for more money than I think they deserve” posts are just shit-stirring.
I wonder if the Russian troll farms take secondary target work outside purely political targets. Because LJ is a main competitor to Ao3 and all, and they are owned by Russians… And this kind of agita does kind of read a bit like the pre 2016 election trolling from where I’m sitting.
M’ jus sayin…
*DING DING DING* WE HAVE A WINNER.
I guess @synclaires is perfectly happy having her data mined by the Russians – you know, the people who fucked with the American election to install their puppet in office – but I am sure as hell am not. Ao3 is a non-profit, which means that – just like another really valuable entity, the American Civil Liberties Union, the people who literally have been spending millions suing Trump and his minions to prevent him from going full-blown fascist – they depend on donations.
Now, if @synclaires is so damn sure “Ao3 stans” are wasting donations on riotous living, she’s perfectly free to believe that. She’s also perfectly free to believe that Hillary Clinton runs a child sex ring out of the basement of a pizza parlor, or that QAnon is something other than a 4chan joke on stupid conservatives. But if she doesn’t want to look like an idiot, she really needs more than just WHINE MOAN BITCH BITCH THEY WANT MY MOOOOOONEEEEEEYYYYY THEY ARE MEAN AND GREEDY AND WHINE WHINE WHINE to back it up.
AO3 was born as a reaction to events like these, to protect fans from censorship, from their user information being sold, from their stories being deleted.
Without going into a bunch of history you can easily look up, AO3 was founded by fans, for fans. The reason it costs so much money to run: it does not sell any ad space (so it has no ad revenue), and server space and bandwidth are extremely expensive. You can do a little research and see how much it might cost to run a site the size and scale of AO3.
You may not know that a database of user information is considered a hugely valuable commodity. That information can be mined and sold to advertisers. LJ and ff.net are not nonprofit sites. They can, and do, sell their user information. AO3′s user database will never be used for that purpose.
All of the above rebuttals and also…
“all these other sites don’t make the users pay for server fees…“
AO3 doesn’t either. Donating is completely optional, and you can even click the little x on the banner to make it go away.
It’s really unobtrusive as fundraisers go, for that matter. Only one email and an easily removable banner. No pop-ups. No paywall click-throughs.
Nobody is “making” anyone donate, ffs. If you don’t want to, you don’t have to. If you can’t afford to, don’t feel bad. You can still keep using it regardless, and there isn’t even a tiered system that makes your unpaid use inferior to that of paid users (like LJ and DW have).
And you STILL don’t have to look at ads (or “sponsored” content, which is fucking ads) even if you don’t.
I volunteer for the OTW, the parent nonprofit organization that runs AO3. So do, as of the last monthly newsletter, 678 other people. The OTW has no paid employees; everyone there is a volunteer.
The average weekly work expectations for OTW volunteers run around 5 hours per week for most committees. Of course, in reality, people are all over the place. Some do 1-2 hours a week, some 30 or 40 or even more – a full work week without pay.
Let’s say that, hypothetically, a volunteer works only 1-2 hours per week, and their work is only worth $10 per hour. (It’s probably worth more – the opportunity costs of most skilled labor is worth more than that – but let’s low-ball it.) That means that every single week, that volunteer is donating $10-20 dollars of their time to the OTW. Some people are donating hundreds of dollars of their time each week, for months or years on end to help keep all its projects running.
Because of course there are multiple projects. There’s TWC, the freely available, peer-reviewed academic journal that just celebrated its 10th anniversary. There’s Fanlore, our fannish history wiki that has over 46,000 articles. There’s Open Doors, which rescues at-risk archives from disappearing. There’s Legal Advocacy, which donates legal expertise to help fans address copyright and other issues. And then there’s the AO3, which is currently listed as the 264th most popular website in the world (#98 in the US). Any one of those projects could easily encompass an entire nonprofit organization by itself. None of them has even a single paid employee. No OTW website shows any ads.
The real secret to the OTW’s success is not that it pulls in just enough money every year to cover its server expenses and overhead – though it does that, and every volunteer is grateful to our donors for keeping the lights on. It’s that the OTW somehow runs entirely on volunteer power. There’s no way we could pay for all the expertise and effort we receive. Other nonprofit websites like the Wayback Machine and Wikipedia pull in millions in funding every year to cover relatively small staffs. We survive without having to write grants or beg wealthy donors because of our volunteers’ unseen donations of their time, expertise, and effort.
Maybe this year you don’t have any money. Or maybe you do, but you’re saving for a rainy day, or you gave it somewhere else. No worries. People volunteer because we want you to enjoy this labor of love. We want you here, building the OTW with us by using our projects. If you did donate, much love to you. Your generosity is deeply appreciated, and we’ll continue being the penny-pinching, wait-is-there-a-free-option, do-they-give-a-nonprofit-discount volunteers we’ve always been, to stretch your donation as far as it can go.
If you want to give something that isn’t money, consider this: How often is a volunteer thanked by someone who isn’t a fellow volunteer? People volunteer because they want to know they’re making a difference. They want to build up the world. Think of how a kudos or a comment makes you feel, then consider how rarely volunteers get one.
You can read about all our committees here, and you can send one of them a quick thank you via the contact form, if you like. Or you can leave a comment with thanks on a Drive post on AO3. Maybe tell Finance how much you love the budget being available, or thank Development & Membership for all their hard work organizing the donation drive to keep the servers running, or show some love to our Communications Committee that’s keeping all these posts updated, or to the Translation Committee that translated them. Maybe you noticed that AO3 Documentation just put out a Tag Set FAQ in time for the exchange season. Maybe you’re wondering who keeps 679 people organized – that would be our Volunteers & Recruiting Committee. Maybe you want to thank the Systems Committee for getting out of bed way too early in the morning to fix the mailer (or whatever else decides to mysteriously break this week). However the spirit moves you, feel free to show some love. It goes a long way.
I have yet to see a single goddamn person who was active in fandom 10 years ago jump on this “AO3 is evil and should ban some content” train. (I’m sure some exist – probably the same people who felt Strikethrough was a good thing and waxed morally superior about how their communities didn’t get hit with it, so clearly it was just people being mad that their Gross Pedophile Porn was deleted.)
“ban child porn”? cool – they started in 2006/7 with deleting all of the hogwarts-era explicit fic, want to start there? maybe enlist the help of an anti-pedophilia activist organization? don’t worry about whether they have conservative Christian rhetoric on their site, I’m sure they won’t go after gay content either. let’s just hire some more moderators – no way that different people could ever make different judgement calls about a piece of fiction.
this has all. happened. before. AO3’s creed didn’t come from nothing, created by people who were too naive to know what fandom would create given freedom or without half a million other ideas being tried first. we had sites which moderated all entries (a nightmare which ended up being cliquey and highly dependent on moderator tastes), sites that only allowed Unproblematic pairings (which inevitably fell into vicious ship wars with rival sites), sites which banned NSFW content altogether (and ESPECIALLY none of that Gay Shit, what will we tell the children). We had sites get bought out by investors or pressured by advertisers, sites run by for-profit companies, sites get shut down CONSTANTLY by media companies which didn’t like those Dirty Things that fans were doing with their precious IP.
AO3’s a safe space for creators because there never was one before. We had safe spaces for readers, and they fell to goddamn pieces. And sure enough, readers used tools to make their own spaces. AO3 took off because its model works, and the people who want to change it don’t know why the alternatives didn’t.
The tenth anniversary of the OTW and all the AO3 discussion going around this week inspired me to go look at astolat’s original post about creating an An Archive Of Our Own, and found my comment on it:
“I think this is needed and long past needed.
There are of course huge fanfic archives out there like ff.net, but the bigger and more public the site, the more restrictive it is, the more stuff around the edges gets cut off. I don’t WANT the public face of fanfic to be only the most easily palatable stuff, with the smut and the kink and the controversial subjects marginalized and hidden under the table.
And I particularly don’t want to see us all sitting around feeling frustrated while this fabulous community is commodified out from underneath us.
I’m not fit to be a project manager, but I’m great with details and general organizational work. If someone takes this and runs with it, I’d love to help.“
Eleven years and rather a lot of volunteer-hours later, I stand by every single word.
And then I found my original post on the idea that became the OTW/AO3, which says in part:
“However, as I was reading the comments over there, I noticed a frustrating, but not surprising number of comments along the lines of “well, it’s a good idea, but it’s way too ambitious”
I’m not talking about the really useful and practical comments bringing up pitfalls and difficulties to be aware of from the get go with something this massive and complex, I’m talking about all the comments that go something like this:
Taken separately, these comments don’t seem like much, but every time a new one showed up I couldn’t help but be reminded of
this post by commodorified, and her oh so brilliant and beautiful rant therein:
“WOMEN NEED TO LEARN TO ASK FOR EVERY DAMN THING THEY WANT.
And here are some notes:
Yes, you. Yes, everything. Yes, even that.
All of it. Because it’s true. We’re mostly raised to live on table scraps, to wait and see what’s going when everyone else has been served and then choose from what’s left. And that’s crap, and it’ll get you crap.
Forget the limited menu of things that you automatically assume is all that’s available given your (gender, looks, social class, education, financial position, reputation, family, damage level, etc etc etc), and start reading the whole menu instead.
Then figure out what you want. Then check what you’ve got and figure out how to get it. And then go after it baldheaded till either you make it happen or you decide that its real cost is more than it’s worth to you.”
And THAT is what Astolat’s post is about. It’s about saying “THIS is what we want, let’s make it happen.” It’s about aiming for the ideal, not for some artificially imposed, more “realistic” option.
And I think that’s fabulous. And I think we CAN do this, we CAN make this amazing, complicated idea happen. But in order to do so we’re going to have to be careful about those little voices inside our heads saying “well, it’s a nice idea, but” and “there’s no point in trying for that impossible thing, let’s aim for this ‘more realistic’ goal instead.”
Because, damn it, why shouldn’t we ask for every damn thing we want. And why shouldn’t we go out there and get it?”
I am so pleased to have been proved correct.
(And also, in the category of “women need to ask for every damn thing they want”? I took those words to heart, which is one of many reasons Marna/commodorified and I have been married for going on eight years.)
ETA: I know some of the links are broken, they copied over from my original post and I didn’t have the energy to either delete them or track them down elsewhere.
Asking for it and doing it!!!
So inspiring. And yes – at the time this seemed such a pipedream, but look at it now!
Yup. I remember saying I’d support it regardless, but it would only really be useful to me as a poster if it allowed every kind of content. Heh.
God this brings it back. People saying we couldn’t do it, that we would never be able to do it, etc. And then there was the sort of six months later moment where people were like, but where is it? (!) Dudes, we had to found a nonprofit company first! so we could be legal and raise money and pay taxes and have a bank account and enter contracts – and moreover, the archive was written from scratch: from a single blinking cursor on the screen, custom-designed from the ground up. I remember that I had the job of tracking wireframes in the early days as the real designers figured out how the flow of pages in the archive were going to go. Amazing.
Anyway, I want to say that the group that came together around the OTW /AO3 in those first years had a track record like WHOA: so many of those people had been archivists, web-admins, fannish fest-runners, newsletter compilers, community moderators, listmoms (kiddies, you won’t know what this is) or had other fannish roles that gave them enormous experience in working collaboratively in fandom and keeping something great going year after year. And OTW continues to attract great people–and so also, while I’m blathering, let me say that volunteering for the OTW also provides great, real world experience that you can put on your resume, because AO3 is one of the top sites in the world and TWC has been publishing on time for ten years and Fanlore is cited in books and journalism all the time and Open Doors has relationships with many meatspace university libraries and archives etc. so if you think you have something to bring to the table, please do think about volunteering somewhere. It’s work, believe me, but it’s also pretty g-d awesome.
And THAT is what Astolat’s post is about. It’s about saying “THIS is what we want, let’s make it happen.” It’s about aiming for the ideal, not for some artificially imposed, more “realistic” option.
I want to pull this out for a second because I have in fact generally spent much of my life aiming for big unrealistic goals, very few of which I’ve actually achieved, and many of which I didn’t actually want by the time I got close to them.
The thing about aiming for “unrealistic” goals is that the work you do to achieve those goals doesn’t disappear even if you don’t achieve the goal. We still haven’t accomplished everything on our giant AO3 wishlist. There remains plenty of work to be done (and the OTW and the amazing current team working on the AO3 can always use more help, as Cesperanza says!)
But because we collectively threw ourselves at this project, there is an archive, and it’s not just good, it’s better than anything else out there. ❤
@mikkeneko I would say I’m glad that the anti ao3 trolling attempt backfired except I’m pretty sure it didn’t
I’ve been watching the escalation of this shit since sometime in the summer and it’s really concerning how easy it is for them to get people talking now
Once upon a time it would have been so laughable to say some of this stuff, no one would even take time to rebutt it
I’m concerned the point IS to keep it top of mind, make people think it’s reasonable to question ao3’s existence
Every time you whack one of these moles they come back with something else, because they are playing straight from the alt right handbook of engagement
i'll apple your turnover 