Hey anon! In light of some recent Discourse™ I have been seeing the last few days, I’m going to take a short break from silly tags to talk about censorship!
Ok. It is illegal in the United States (and in most other countries I think) to produce, distribute, or possess pornographic images of minors. A thing that is not illegal: writing.
Why is that, you may ask? Why would we want it to be legal to write about adults having sex with children or children having sex with each other? Well, a variety of reasons. First of all, if we treated writing about children having sex the way we treat images/video of that, a large percentage of YA literature would suddenly be illegal. So would writing about adolescent sexuality in other ways, including potentially educational literature or even studies about adolescent sexual health. That would be really bad.
But what about writing about full-on sexual abuse, statutory rape, pedophilia? Shouldn’t that be illegal? No. Banning such writing would risk censoring research and education about sexual abuse. It would also prevent survivors from writing about their own experiences. And it would ban works of real literary merit, like, say, Lolita, which deconstruct and address the psychology of sexual abuse in a literary setting.
Fundamentally, the reason that society bans images of child pornography is that, in order to make them, you have to put children in a sexual context and take pictures/video of them. In other words, to make child pornography, you have to harm children. That’s why it’s illegal. Writing, on the other hand, harms no one in its creation. The only harm it can do is to those who read it, which literally no one has to do. Freedom of speech means we have the freedom to say what we want, so does everyone else, and we don’t have to listen to them if we don’t want to.
So no, AO3 isn’t breaking any laws. And if they were, it would be because the law was wrong.
If you have comments, complaints, or want to scream at me, you can find me at my personal @boytranscending. I won’t be addressing this subject any further on this blog.
uhhh yeah they do, there’s a pretty obvious page that asks you if you’re over 18 to proceed. the only way you *don’t* see that is if you’ve already registered and said you were over 18.
that “proceed” page can literally just link you right to the fic. even without an account. no need to enter any info at all. people lie about their ages online bud
so? don’t enter an adult-only space and be surprised it’s for adults?
Dusty, this building with the giant neon VB sign out the front serves alcohol, how was I supposed to know that was gonna be the case?
also, a thirteen year old absolutely can go to the library and borrow something nsfw in many places. That is their right as a borrower, and often parents have to sign a form acknowledging that the librarians are not responsible for what content kids check out, their parents or guardians are responsible. as in, if you take your thirteen year old sister to the library, it’s your job to make sure she doesn’t borrow fifty shades because it sucks
also, there are adult books that are literally about children but are not for children. lots of them. sometimes authors write books about people without the book being for those people, this is a thing that happens, it has always happened, william shakespeare did not write romeo and juliet as a kids’ play
and if you don’t think people ever lie about their age (or use fake id) to get into 18+ movies (or buy alcohol or cigarettes, or mature rated computer games like gta) when they’re underage, you must only know very, very well-behaved teenagers
Also sometimes there’s a copy of American Psycho in the high school library and neither the librarians nor the parents apparently notice when the seventeen-year-old borrows it and reads it.
That would be the most egregious example I guess. How did that happen? Why would you have that book in a high school library?
I started reading smutty fanfic at about the age of fourteen. Some of it was light, but some of it was stuff I definitely shouldn’t have been reading at that age. Whose fault was that?
Mine.
As inverted as it sounds, give kids some credit. I read all of the warnings hpff.net had to offer. I chose to click on the links marked “mature” and I chose to keep scrolling after reading author’s notes that warned for explicit content. That’s on me, not the people who ran the site, not the people who wrote the fic. It’s not the job of fic housing websites to be parents, babysitters, or moral guardians, and it’s not the job of fic writers to be those things either. If you’re worried about minors being exposed to age-inappropriate content, great! Focus on educating minors about internet safety and making responsible decisions. But blanket “think of the children!” statements don’t actually help .
Children absolutely can gt NSFW content at just about any age from libraries and bookstores. I read my first NSFW romance novel at 12. It was from the library, my nine year old sisters were going and I just asked them to get a book to read and they brought that back. And I got to read words like cock, throbbing manhood, etc…at the tender age of 12.
I continued to read bodie ripper romance novels for the next several years. I bought them used with my own allowance from the local convinience store.
The only people who cared that I was reading these books were my male peers who thought it might give me improper expectations about relationships. And before you ask my mother knew what kind of stuff they had in bodice rippers. She didn’t care she figured bodice rippers only appealed to jr high aged girls anyway.
I somehow managed to rent what should’ve been rated 18+ anime (not hentai but wow was there definitely sexual content despite not being actual sex, and it was violent sexual content at that) when I was 7 years old from our local video store because it was “a cartoon” and they didn’t bother to give ratings to anime when I was a kid.
My fucking 7th grade English class had to read a book set on the premise that a girl runs away at age 13 after an attempted rape, with the rape attempt awkwardly described in the narrative and we had to read this shit out loud in class.
I got my older sister to buy me manga that was 18+ starting when I was 15-16 from the stores that actually checked IDs. I had my first drink of alcohol at 12 and could readily get my hands on it (if I wanted it) by 14-15. I started lying about my age online by the time I was 13? And I was a “very well-behaved teenager” almost to the point of being stuffy and boring, by all accounts.
Young people can and do get access to things they want if they aim to, and that’s on them if they seek it out. Well, them and their parents and guardians. I probably could have pulled bodice rippers off the shelf at home and read them because seriously, my mother had about a million crappy romance novels laying around the house that we weren’t supposed to read but easily could have.
AO3 is no different to this. And beyond that, it actually has tags and warnings that let young readers (who choose to bypass these systems) know what they’re getting into, and which they can use to avoid content that they aren’t ready for or which makes them uncomfortable. Which again, is a lot more than my 7-year-old self got from my local video store, or my 13-year-old self got when I first discovered FF.net.
while on ao3, right click ao3 savior config in the tampermonkey menu (mac users press command + click!!!):
it will take you to a new page where you can scroll down and edit the script, as shown:
now click save!!
and there you are!!
happy ao3ing :))
(and a reminder not to leave hate in the comments on anyone’s work, no matter how horrid you find it. this can result in a ban from ao3.)
Fandom is a big space and there’s bound to be something out there you don’t want to see. Arm yourselves with the tools to curate your experience and don’t be afraid to use them to keep your space safe for you.
You… do realise that people tag works as containing rape/paedophilia/incest when the stories are explicitly about those things being bad, and not just because they’re writing dark themes for reasons that you personally disapprove of, right? That tags merely state the presence of a thing without explaining how it’s dealt with in the narrative, and that stories do not have to be morally instructional and perfect and pure in order to be allowed to exist?
Like. You might as well walk into a bookshop and stamp BLOCKED FOR BADWRONG CONTENT on every book in the Song of Ice and Fire series, half of Shakespeare, every YA novel about rape recovery, every adult novel about rape recovery, every biography of someone who has suffered from rape, incest or paedophilia and been brave enough to write about it, every book of Greek, Egyptian and Norse myths, the fucking Bible – just a truly massive percentage of the entire global literary canon,because there is literally no way to remove each and every reference to these themes otherwise.
Do you know why schools and libraries are pressured to ban books like I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, To Kill a Mockingbird and Laurie Halse Andersen’s Speak? Because dumbass, scaremongering adults think that letting teens read about rape or racism or sexual violence or queerness or half a dozen other topics they think are Bad Things will lead to them down a path of Vice.
What happens to characters in stories, no matter how graphic or awful, is not the same as that act occurring to a real human person in real life, nor does reading or writing such works indicate endorsement of those acts. This is why a story which features paedophilia, regardless of whether it’s written as overtly sexual content or as a damning condemnation of the act, is not the same as child pornography by any legal definition: because no actual children are harmed. Are you personally still allowed to be angry and disgusted about the public availability of the former type of stories, even in instances where the writers are themselves victims of child abuse trying to process their trauma? Yes! You’re under no moral obligation to like any kind of content! But are you correct in asserting that the creation of such stories is illegal and hurting somebody in exactly the same way that a real abuser hurting a real child would be? No! Because fictional characters are not real people, and whatever our motives for creating or engaging with a particular thing, monkey see = monkey approve is not how it fucking works.
Have you ever watched an episode of CSI? Congratulations! By your own logic, you’re pro rape and murder. Ever watched an episode of Hannibal? Congratulations! By your own logic, you endorse cannibalism, Stockholm Syndrome and serial killing. Ever watched a historical drama where a young girl gets married to a much older man? Congratulations! By your own logic, you endorse child brides. And on, and on, and on.
I say again: you are allowed to be critical of particular works and/or the recurrence of certain themes across a particular medium. But arguing that an entire literary platform needs to end because some stories there contain Bad Things makes as much sense as banning the works of Octavia Butler or Sherman Alexie from school libraries because of their content. Which is – spoiler alert – a really bad idea.
You posted an opinion on a social media platform that’s explicitly designed to enable reblogs and commentary from other users, including people who disagree. If you want to write in a broadcast medium where you have total control over replies and their visibility, get a WordPress blog – but even then, the whole point of the internet is that other people get to share their opinions, too.
I appreciate that you think this is a black and white issue, but it isn’t. You, personally, do not get veto power over what the rest of the world imagines when they masturbate or the kind of stories they write for fun, nor do you get to determine where the acceptable overlap between those categories lies, because individual stories impact individual readers differently. No narrative is universally positive or negative, which is why tags exist in fanfiction: to help individuals navigate their needs and preferences safely.
That you, personally, cannot fathom a benign or logical reason why some people enjoy the sorts of fantasies or narratives that you find abhorrent does not mean no such reason exists; nor does it mean that every single person who enjoys those things is as morally pure as the driven snow. What it does mean is that there’s no way to tell at a glance, purely on the basis of the content, which type reader is which, such that you can’t functionally ban the latter kind without also banning the former – and if you’re okay with demonising innocents for the sake of punishing the guilty, then you don’t get to claim moral purity, either.
Which is the crux of the argument, here; the reason why it’s not black and white, even though it looks like it should be. Who decides what fictional content stays or goes, and why? It’s easy to say “no underage, no incest, no paedophilia, no rape,” but if you want to follow through, you have to define those terms in practical, specific ways, and that isn’t easy at all – not for published novels, and not for fanfic. Here’s what I mean:
No underage – okay, so does that mean no romance or sexual content for characters younger than 18, or just younger than 16? Whose definition of ‘underage’ are we using? Are there exceptions for teen characters within three or so years of each other, as there are legally in real life, or not? What are the limits of ‘acceptable’ content for younger characters – can they hug and kiss and talk about sex, so long as they aren’t implied to be having it? What if they are implied to be having it, but there’s a tasteful fade to black? What about stories where a younger character is making realistic bad decisions about sex or is being taken advantage of – can we tell those stories, or are they banned, too? If we do tell them, what are the guidelines for how graphic the content can be?
No incest – okay, does that include characters who weren’t raised together and don’t know they’re siblings? Step-siblings? Half-siblings? Does it include a ban on historical figures who really engaged in incest? What about characters who have an incestuous relationship in the source material – can we write fic about them, provided we take an explicitly anti-incest stance? What degree of separation are we allowing – does it start at first cousins, or do we go beyond that? Are all these things okay so long as it’s explicitly written as abusive and bad in the narrative, or is there leeway? What about people who expressly want to engage in daddy kink, which uses incest-adjacent language without necessarily being incestuous? Is that banned, too? What about fics where the characters aren’t related in the source material, but have been written that way in the story, such that a romantic relationship is turned into a familial one? What about fics where the characters are related in the source material, but aren’t in the fic, such that a familial relationship becomes a romantic one? Is any of this allowed?
No paedophilia – okay, does that include stories about survivors of child abuse? What about stories where the source material includes child abuse; is fic not allowed to mention it? Can you portray it if it’s very clearly a Bad Thing, even though some readers might still get off to it anyway? Can you imply that it happened so long as it isn’t discussed in detail or depicted graphically? What if survivors of child abuse want to write graphically about their experiences as a way to process trauma – is that allowed, or not? If so, how do you go about policing content creators to make sure that writers have suffered the Right Kind Of Abuse to be allowed to write those stories? If not, how do you justify the decision to exclude victims from their own narratives? If some victims find it traumatising to read fics that contain paedophilia, but others find it cathartic and helpful to write them, do you acknowledge that all victims have different experiences and try to create a platform where everyone can navigate those differences safely, or do you think it’s better to just close that door altogether?
No rape – okay, does that mean no stories about rape recovery? Can you show rape provided it isn’t graphic? Can it be mentioned at all, or only in passing? What if two characters consent to enacting a rape fantasy in the text – is that still morally wrong? Can rape occur provided that it’s obviously bad and wrong and clearcut throughout, or is the character being victimised allowed to feel conflicted or confused about their experience? What about instances where consent is potentially dubious, such as sex between characters who are drunk, or where one party is drunker than the other? What if a story’s source material is ambiguous about whether sex between two characters was consensual – is fanfic allowed to explore that?
These are only some of the questions you’d need to answer in order to implement your desired changes on a future, hypothetical website. I say again: it’s easy to sit there and say, “No porn involving these four things,” as though AO3 need only delete every work containing those tags in order to save itself from damnation, but functionally, practically, it doesn’t work like that. The wrong story at the wrong age or time can fuck anyone up, just as the right one at the right age or time can be revolutionary, and those might both be the same story to different people. Explicit stories on AO3 are expressly restricted to those over 18 – if younger people are reading those fics, then that’s a risk they’re taking upon themselves: in which case, it’s their responsibility to use the tags to safely curate their own experience.
I understand the worry that paedophiles will use fanfic to groom their victims, and I don’t deny that this has happened to some people. But at the same time, abusers use a lot of things to groom their victims – historical precedents, flattery, novels, movies, lies – and at the end of the day, the only commonality between those things is the abuser themselves, not the content; so unless you’re arguing that the content creates the abuser, removing the content neither removes the abuser nor curtails the abuse. By the same token, it’s also true that fanfic has helped a great many people to recognise or recover from their own abuse, by showing what it looks like or enabling them to write about their own experiences. I know multiple ficwriters who’ve written their own rapes or sexual assaults into fics, or their own mental health diagnoses, as a way to process those things safely, in a cathartic manner. You really want to take that away from them?
People are complex. Sex is complex. Fantasies are complex. Pretending otherwise is how you end up with books being banned or burned, to say nothing of a host of related social evils.
And if pointing all that out ruined your post, then maybe it needed ruining.
oh my god, antis are fucking reporting ao3 to the fbi apparently?? these people really just have no concept of how much they’re not helping do they, holy SHIT
Yes do report to FBI about people writing about fiction
Uhh…can’t you get in legal trouble for a report to the FBI for that? And if the person making the report is a child, aren’t the parents to be held legally responsible?
Yep, it’s a first degree misdemeanor. Those found guilty of false reporting can spend up to a year in jail and have a fine of $1,000. For minors, they’d most likely be put in juvenile corrections and their parents would have to pay the fine.
-Mod Birb
So it’s basically just weeding gout the people dumb enough to do this without actually having to talk them out of being dumb
Tag filters exist for a reason jesus Christ these people are fucking dumb
>It’ll make space for a better platform for fanfic to pop up
You absolute dingleberries. AO3 is the better platform. Or would you rather deal with the draconian shit FFN pulls? Does no one remember when FFN pulled this EXACT SHIT by scrubbing the site of literally everything higher than a T rating? Does no one remember how you couldn’t post anything slightly questionable because “THINK OF THE CHILDREN WHO USE THIS SITE!”. Remember the trolls? The general lack of organization? Do you fuckers wanna go back to that? Because I sure as hell don’t. And while I realize that things like Wattpad, Quizilla, and LiveJournal exist they pale in comparison to AO3′s tagging system. Also real class act trying to take down a nonprofit site. What these nutbags fail to realize is that if they do manage to get the site down, which will not happen I guarantee because the FBI is never going to take this seriously because Fiction is not fucking Reality, that there goes all the fanfiction they do wanna read. The lack of self awareness is staggering.
I doubt these people are old enough to remember when it was FF.net or fuck all else. You wanna talk about bad shit, fucking FFN HAD no tag filters, or tags period. All you got was a shit summary, possibly any pairings that would show up (2 of them at BEST), a rating, and a vague genre. That’s it. So all the shit they find squeamish that they want gone, that you can easily filter on AO3, you couldn’t on FFN.
AO3 WAS LITERALLY MADE FOR THESE PEOPLE AND THEY’RE STILL NOT SATISFIED
WHY ARE PEOPLE SUCH IDIOTS?? Too dumb to use filters, probably
Dear Fandom Kids: I know you don’t want to hear this, but not everything is for you. Fandom is not your safe space, especially not the fanfiction part. There are ratings for a reason and this is fiction. You are all going to get in trouble for this and I refuse to return to the blackened and pitted out shell of FF.Net for the sake of you idiots getting AO3 YANKED.
I don’t like some of those things either, but there are tags and ratings for a reason. Avoid tags you do not like.
I am not returning to the clusterfuck times.
Sincerely, a fandom-dwelling Old Person who is sick of your idiotic bullshit.
Confusion or Impersonation. Don’t do things that would cause confusion between you or your blog and a person or company, like registering a deliberately confusing URL. Don’t impersonate anyone. While you’re free to ridicule, parody, or marvel at the alien beauty of Benedict Cumberbatch, you can’t pretend to actually be Benedict Cumberbatch.
I don’t know which accounts are doing this, but I sure hope they are getting reported.
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.
Many people avoid commenting not because they didn’t want to comment, but because they didn’t know how to comment.
Commenting is also a matter of confidence
Even among readers who are authors themselves, many aren’t sure what to say or how their comment will be received.
A sense of community encourages commenting
People who feel more connected to the community, perhaps because of personal friendships and a sense of community built through other platforms and forms of communication, seem to have a greater desire to comment. After all, one feels less pressure when writing to a friend than an author to whom one feels little or no connection.
Why People Don’t Comment
The other day, in response to @longlivefeedback‘s initial post about increasing feedback on AO3, I reblogged the post and shared some of my own data and research around the topic. I am a Tolkien fandom historian and own the archive the Silmarillion Writers’ Guild. In 2015, as part of my research, I conducted a survey of Tolkien fanfiction readers and writers. The survey was approved by the Institutional Review Board of the university where I was a grad student at the time, and was administered using Google Forms. There were 1,052 total participants; 642 of them were authors, and 1,047 were readers. As I came out of the survey overwhelmed with data and unsure where to begin, a key area of interest among my fandom friends was commenting, so I have recently been looking closely at the survey items related to commenting, which brought me to @longlivefeedback’s post.
In addition, I am an archive owner myself, contemplating a major software change in the next year or so. Like probably every archive owner ever, I’d like to increase the amount of commenting and interaction that happens on my site. Therefore, I had been considering many of the same questions as @longlivefeedback about AO3 but on a smaller scale for my own archive. They asked me to share some of my research and conclusions from the past several months of crunching data and discussing what it means with other members of the Tolkienfic community.
Under the jump: Commenting as a learned skill, commenting and confidence, the 3Cs, and a case study in the Tolkienfic community.
i'll apple your turnover 