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.
Also… maybe parents should do their job in monitoring kids’ content? When my parents found out I was looking at age inappropriate things when I was a minor, like they intervened.
Strikethrough 07 was such a well-conducted operation that communities dedicated to survivors of sexual abuse and fans of Lolita fashion were suspended, but the journal of the baby rapist, ohbutyouwillpet, stayed up. And it’s still up to this day, though it hasn’t been updated it over a decade as its owner is still in prison.
Whooo, I guess it’s my turn to take a shot at this.
I’m a nold. I’m in my 40s. When I came out as queer, in the early 90s, it was in the middle of what were called the “feminist sex wars”. If you want a really good book to read about that period, which has a LOT of resonance with Strikethrought and with the current Tumblr discourse, I cannot recommend this highly enough:
A preview is available on Google Books, or it should be readily available secondhand, or in academic libraries (though it’s not a very heavy academic read). I recommend Booko for finding cheap secondhand copies. Support independent bookstores!
I haven’t read “Defending Pornography” for a while – I actually last re-read it about a decade ago because of the impact that Warriors for Innocence were having on Dreamwidth’s payment providers at the time, subsequent to Strikethrough itself – but here’s a quick summary, as I remember it.
1. In the late 80s and early 90s there was a vocal group of radical feminists who believed that pornography inherently harms women, not just in its production but also in its consumption (i.e. watching/reading pornography caused people to develop attitudes that were harmful to women). All explicit content was considered to be harmful, from eg. girlie magazines to hardcore XXX videos to a book like “The Joy of Gay Sex”, no matter who made it, its purpose, its intended audience, or its context. (Yup, even m/m content was considered to be degrading to women for reasons that didn’t make a lot of sense tbh.)
2. These anti-pornography feminists teamed up with the religious right and managed to get anti-porn laws passed. In particular, a law was passed in Canada preventing the importation of “obscene” material. Canada, of course, imports a lot of material from the US. Stuff started getting seized at the border.
3. Guess what was seized first? “The Joy of Gay Sex” and the like. Guess what businesses started finding all their shipments seized or delayed – sexually explicit or not – to the point where they were being put out of business? Gay bookstores. Guess what wasn’t seized at all? Mainstream porn made for straight men.
Around this time, Little Sisters bookstore in Vancouver (a gay bookstore) found that huge amounts of merchandise was being seized at the border, regardless of the actual content. They were being discriminatorily targeted on the basis of their sexuality. The queerness of the material they were importing was seen as inherently obscene.
Remember that this is before there was much information available online for LGBTQ+ people, so if you were a young person maybe just coming out and trying to understand things, or wanting to learn about safe sex (and yes it was at the height of the AIDS crisis, too) you’d go to a bookstore like this. Which now had empty shelves. I remember endless fundraising and activism in the LGBTQ+ community to try and keep Little Sisters open. In the end they spent half a million dollars on court cases. Read more about their struggles.
(You know what businesses weren’t impacted and didn’t have to basically ask their friends and community for help to stay open or spend a decade in the courts to defend their right to run their businesses? The powerful companies making porn by and for straight men.)
The book goes into a large number of analogous situations. Time and time again, anti-pornography laws intended to protect women are disproportionately used against women themselves, against LGBTQ+ people, and against basically any marginalised or minority group, rather than against the mainstream male-oriented porn that would seem to be its primary target.
Here’s the key point: Strossen is a legal scholar who’s looked at a lot of attempts at censorship, and you know what she found happened every time? When you try to censor pornography, even in the interests of protecting vulnerable people, that censorship will be applied first, and hardest, against the people who are most vulnerable.They won’t come for actual abusers, they’ll come for the abused, and prevent them from accessing resources, education, talking to each other, creating art to express themselves, or organising against those who are actually causing harm.
Read the book. The stories it tells are from the early 90s but they perfectly mirror what happened a decade ago with Strikethrough and what’s happening now with all this Tumblr discourse.
This is old, old business, we’ve seen it more than once before, and it never goes the way the antis think it will. Censorship is a tool that gives power to abusers and lets them inflict more harm on those who are abused, vulnerable and discriminated against. Don’t fall for it.
History they should have known: The Comstock laws in New York were this one dude (Comstock) who managed to get a mail regulation re-written to categorize anything related to contraceptives as pornography, which was already illegal to mail.
(Which is one reason for the pornographic playing cards etc, because the 19th century was almost as big on mail-order goods as the 21st, because getting to shops in person was hard for a huge subsection of Americans.)
Comstock built a non-profit with the support of the YMCA and oh shoot, some millionaire whose brand is still going strong, to enforce this law because the postal system didn’t have the personnel. They were granted the right to do so.
He and his posse of honorary mail inspectors with police powers (I kid you not) spent years engaging in endless skullduggery to prosecute people for selling contraceptives by mail. Which was how everyone got them in the 19th century, you couldn’t walk into a shop for a pack of condoms but mail-order packages were nicely anonymous. They dragged Margaret Sanger into court repeatedly. There was a huge cottage industry of contraceptives in NYC at the time, most of the manufacturers being female, Jewish, immigrants, or some combination of the above.
There was one woman whose name escapes me they kept trying to prosecute for selling contraceptive devices and the juries kept nullifying it because the average New Yorker in the 1890s were like ‘yeah no condoms are not a crime,’ but not everybody had her stage presence and resources.
You know who they never even tried to touch? The big rubber companies were were getting into mass production of condoms. Their big funder owned the company that produced Vaseline, and was claiming in ads at the time that it worked as a spermicide.
Only the poor and vulnerable felt the impact of the Honorary Postal Inspectors of righteousness.
It’s been touched on a little before but really it’s hard to explain just how confusing and scary the crackdowns were. I was only a reader on FanFiction when the crackdown came but it felt like I was standing in a coal mine full of canaries. Canaries that were either silent or /screaming/.
Every where you looked, authors where posting warnings about how x stories were getting deleted. All of the warnings feeling rushing, panicked, most of them including notes about how they didn’t know how long they had before their warnings were taken down or they were deleted. It felt a bit like all the stars going out, everything just dying around you. Like a stampede of people had fled from some oncoming unnamed horror leaving silence in their wake. Finding AO3 later on was like finding a safe haven in a world gone mad.
Also FanFiction doesn’t really encourage socialisation aside from authors notes to readers on their chapters or homepage. Meanwhile all the warnings of the crackdown were really rushed and vague. So, as a not very sociable reader, I really didn’t have a clue what was going on at the time of the crack down and the confusion and uncertainty was almost the scariest part of the whole thing. (Not knowing if the authors should come back and if fanfics were gone for good was scarier.) It’s only years later, reading fanfic history posts that I’ve started to piece together what happened.
Also an interesting point was that during the crack down all I ever heard about was /gay/ stories being deleted. Perhaps this was just because I was reading gay stories but I didn’t even realise it was mature stories in general that was supposedly the aim of the crack down until much later.
Hot damn, this post just keeps going!
I very much second the rec about the feminist sex wars. Understand those, and you’ll understand why those of us over about 30 are so opposed to tumblr’s purity crusade.
If you haven’t been TOSsed you really don’t get it, imo.
If you haven’t spent your time wondering if the thing that will get your content deleted is the dark stuff or the nipples, you really don’t get it, imo.
Hell, way way back in the day, I had moderator types private message me going “I really like your writing, but you need to be less obvious about it, or I will have no choice but to tos you.”
A long reblog, but a worthy read. So much history and experience recounted here. If we don’t remember our past, remember why AO3 and many fandom spaces work the way they do now, we will be condemned to repeat it.
Please do not let us return to the dark ages of fear, censorship, and oppression in fandom.
For the original ask, requesting the definition of squick, please see this post.
Squick is a fun term that was often used as both a noun and a verb. Either X was one of your squicks, or X squicked you, or squicked you out, or squicked you hard.
It was often used in fic exchanges. They would ask for a list of your squicks so that the gifting author would know not to include any hint of them. It was also used in casual conversation with fandom friends, authors, artists, etc. It could be left in comments, or as a reason you just didn’t read your best fandom friend’s latest fic. “Sorry, bff, you know I love your writing, but you have X tagged at the top, and that just squicks me out.” “Hey, no worries, best reader friend! I totally get it. Give this one a pass, but I’ll send you a note when I post my next one! I promise it will be totally X-free!”
Here’s the thing though. In your example, you explain why X is your squick with Y. But the beauty of squick was that (at least in my experience) no explanation was necessary. Not only was it not necessary, it was rarely asked for. A squick is a squick, and there doesn’t have to be any rhyme or reason. In fact, why would you have a rational, bullet-pointed, well-thought-out argument as to why something squicked you out? Very often it’s a visceral reaction, and if you don’t like the thing, you’re likely not going to sit and do deep meditation on why not.
Squicks were respected by fandom. You don’t like the thing, okay, we will tag the thing appropriately, you do not have to read the thing, no judgments on either side. There was no fandom policing, only respect.
And this, I think, is super important, because fandom policing is a problem, especially when it comes to triggers. “Trigger” has become so overused, so all-encompassing, that people feel they have to defend their legitimate triggers. If X triggers you, it triggers you, and you DO NOT need to provide an explanation. But because “trigger” is so often used in place of “squick,” some people feel they have the right to “call out” those who use the word. They want explanations, they want you to tell them what that triggering concept does to you, so they can call bullshit and feel superior. You don’t have to explain either your squicks or your triggers, but using the correct word stops the fandom police from feeling as though they have the right to ask.
Bring “squick” back, people. Don’t devalue triggers, which are horrible, nasty, dangerous things.
the culture of justifying dislike on an ideological/moral basis in part one: chapter one of my novel, Let Me Show You My Issues With Tumblr Fandom. the requirement for ideological purity has become so impossibly strict, and is valued so highly, that tearing the thing you dislike from an ideological standpoint is the quickest way to shut it down. it’s a cheap, disingenuous shortcut that exploits social justice language for personal leverage. it’s not like we were free of wankery and ship wars back in ye olde lj days, god, far from it, but at least the insults we flung at each other were subjective: A is so bad for B and if you can’t see that you’re an idiot!!! B/C OTP!!! (i should also disclaim that we did have moral policing as well, it was just FAR less extensive.) leveraging social justice concepts is an attempt to gain a kind of objective superiority. “they’re a dark ship and i don’t like that” holds little power; “they’re abusive and you support abuse by shipping this” is a trump card to shut down the content you don’t like and the people who fan it. that kind of rhetoric is all over the damn place and it continues to be propagated because it works and it has created a culture from which a variety of problems like the trigger issue explained above consistently arise.
…i would go into further chapters on my novel but i am tired now
As an additional data point, as far as I know the term “squick” comes from the BDSM community, originally. At least that’s where I first encountered it, on BDSM message boards on usenet in the mid-90s – yes, I was on BDSM message boards in the mid-90s; long story. As such, the implicit lack of judgment is important to the meaning of the word; you need a word to mean “I really don’t want to do that, and I don’t want to watch you doing that, but I don’t judge YOU for liking that and I don’t mind if YOU do it … somewhere far away from me.”
I can’t really think of any other words we have for the same concept that aren’t judgmental to some extent. Anything I can think of to try to define “squick” using non-slangy words (disgusting, unpleasant, etc) have a judgy sort of vibe. And we really do need a word to talk about tropes and kinks in the same kind of way we can talk about how you like that ship and I like this ship but that doesn’t make your ship bad.
(Er, ideally we’d be able to talk about ships that way, obviously, in a perfect world … XD)
I was also thinking about how the original ask implies a very modern fannish mindset that’s just … not there, in the original fandom milieu that the squick concept came out of. Not that I’m saying fandom was better in the old days or anything, god no. But trying to explain why you have a squick, or asking someone else why they have theirs, is just not a thing you’d generally do. Squicks are irrational; that’s baked into the meaning of the word. Squicks aren’t something you explain. They just are. I mean, you could obviously try to figure it out, just like you can try to figure out why you have a particular kink, but in both cases, you don’t have to explain or justify it in order for other people to accept it as valid. I don’t need to explain that I like h/c for X and Y reasons in order to request it in an exchange. And squick functions the same way.
All of which makes it a very useful word for talking about fandom concepts without implying that someone else’s tastes make them a bad person!
My tired old soul reflecting on how ideas, concepts, sensibilities, can just disappear.
Squicks are not triggers. I have both: much better as I’m feeling these days, certain visuals can trigger my OCD. Once triggered, my OCD must be handled or it will fucking impair me.
This is so utterly different from encountering a squick. Look, dude, Omegaverse dynamics are a squick of mine. Stumbling over Omegaverse Turkfic will not force me to get my CBT and exposure practice going on. It will make me feel icky and I will stop reading and move on, grateful for all the kind souls who tag their Omegaverse fiction.
Now I live in this world where no one, apparently, should produce content that squicks anyone else, because squick=trigger, and triggering people is immoral. I can’t figure out how we landed here, as fans.
An important distinction like the difference between “squick” and “trigger” should not disappear in the name of protecting people from culture.
I must’ve have slipped under a rock, at some point, and not noticed…
When, how, and why, did “Squick” ever fall out of use?
Why are we now talking about it as if it were some kind of archaic term in fandom? How long have I been using it, and utterly confusing people?
I noticed squick falling out if common use around the LJ Strikethrough in 2007. I don’t know if the two are related, but it was about that same time that I noticed the decline. I thought little of it at the time, because language is ever changing. Like you, I kept using it and probably confusing newer fans (though it’s probably something you can figure out from context.)
But now? Man, I am all for bringing the word back into common use. Because the thing that squicks me out is certainly not the thing that triggers a panic attack because of something the abuser in my past did.
squick is such a useful word.
squick =/= trigger.
now, a thing can be both a squick and a trigger. for me, humiliation kink fic is both. it brings up bad memories and their associated autonomic functions, and also makes me do the eww shudder. but there are also things that are one and not the other.
for instance, in my case, false accusations are a trigger but not a squick. upsetting, but not yucky.
and pee/poop associated with sex is a squick but not a trigger. i find it extremely ishy, and do not want to read about it or see pictures having to do with it, they make me go urp. but it’s not emotionally distressing. it just grosses me out.
important: both squicks and triggers are orthogonal to morality. they’re not on the same axis.
there is nothing morally wrong with someone having a humiliation kink, even though it brings up childhood emotional abuse for me and gives me a terrible day. not everyone has that background, and some people who do find that kink cathartic rather than distressing. this is absolutely ok!
there is nothing morally wrong with someone having a bodily waste kink, even though it makes me queasy. it’s up to them what they want to do with their bodies, and nobody’s getting hurt. i don’t have to clean up after them, so it’s none of my dang business.
and this is hard mode for a lot of tumblr but – there is nothing morally wrong with people writing about morally wrong things happening to fictional characters, because it isn’t real and no actual people are getting hurt. if it squicks you or triggers you, avoid it. it’s ok to feel bad when you encounter it. it’s also ok to not feel bad when you encounter it. it’s ok to hit the back button in a hurry and go look for some fluff to cleanse your palate. it’s also ok to revel in the cathartic release of fictional suffering. it’s ok. you’re ok.
Bring back “darkfic” while we’re at it, so we can have a value-neutral term to describe fics that deal with violent/abusive/morally dubious/etc topics
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.
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.
so my grandma died recently, and my parents have been dealing with the quantities of Stuff accumulated over the course of her and my grandpa’s lives, which could be interesting on its own as a family matter, but, well, grandpa was a science fiction writer, and they knew a lot of science fiction writers, which means a lot of the stuff is classic sci-fi and fantasy. books, artwork, that kind of thing. what i had not realized, but perhaps should have predicted, was that knowing a lot of science fiction writers in the ‘60s meant that they knew people who had written for this one TV show in the ‘60s that some science fiction writers worked on, and these people liked to share stuff.
what i’m saying is that i have now held in my hands one of the original, physical scripts for the star trek episode “amok time”.
it was like holding a piece of history. my own hands, carefully cradling the origin of sex pollen and fuck or die. a work whose influence went far behind what the writer could have expected–sacred, almost, in its way. who knows how much spawned from this episode? how much fanfiction would never have existed were it not for this holy text? indeed, the very concept of slash itself? an artifact, a priceless relic, sitting on my parents’ couch.
i haven’t seen the entirety of the episode itself, so i don’t know if there are any real differences between the script and what was aired, but i had to skim it anyway–and i did find something that is perhaps worth mentioning, whether or not this actually counts as canon. but hey, hard to get more canon than an Actual Official Script, right?
VULCANS BLUSH YELLOW, BITCHES, IT’S CANON
also, this:
thanks for specifying “karate-type”, theodore sturgeon. coulda gotten confusing, that.
anyway, it was a deeply surreal experience and i’m pretty sure the script is getting donated someplace with a lot of the other stuff, but man, my grandparents were cool
So I just read up on some copyright laws and found out fanart and fanfic are technically illegal. Now I’m laughing at the thought of someone getting sued in court for writing smut about their favorite character 😂
THIS IS NOT TRUE!!!!!
Fanworks are not illegal. Most all fanart and fanfic are “transformative works,” which fall under the protection of Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law, the statute of fair use. Fair Use allows you to use sections and elements of copyrighted material to critique, expound on, or create using that material as long as you’re creating something new. You can read about fair use here: https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/what-is-fair-use/. And learn about how to decide if something is fair use using this simple guide of the four factors of fair use: https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/.
Why is AO3 built by the Organization for TRANSFORMATIVE WORKS???? Because it stands by fair use and creators of new, unique fanworks.
FANWORK IS NOT ILLEGAL. READ ACTUAL COPYRIGHT LAW.
Also know your fandom history Anne Rice used to literally sue our asses over this shit which is why old school LJ fanauthors used to always have the “don’t own not mine just playing” disclaimers on their shit
fwiw, I wrote my thesis on this and fic is neither illegal nor illegal – it’s a legal grey zone that has never been tested in any court (in the US, unless there’s an explicit law about something, we function in a common law system, meaning most of the rule of law in our country is a mish-mash of court precedents, differing and debating between jurisdictions, like this this case). There has never been a lawsuit by the copyright holder of a commercial, fictional work, against someone producing a non-commercial, derivative fictional work; thus, there is no case law about fanfic and we’re all living in the grey zone. There have been a few lawsuits from the copyright owners of commercial, fictional work against commercial, fictional derivative work; one lawsuit from the copyright owners of commercial, fictional work against a commercial, non-fictional derivative work.
But the fanwork we all make every day *may* be protected under fair use; fair use is the right the hire a lawyer, being an affirmative defense, and is rarely tested. The other affirmative defense folks might be familiar with is self-defense in the case of a murder – you say ‘yes, your honor, I did murder him, but it’s ok for x, y, z, reasons.’ Then the trial is about deciding if x, y, and z, reasons are good enough, not if you did the murder (since you had to admit it to use the affirmative defense). Using fair use is like saying, ‘yes, I did infringe on their copyright, but I believe it was acceptable’ and then you have to pay lawyers about it.
I believe that fair use for non-commercial works should be assumed, and the burden should be on the copyright holder to prove harm and infringement, rather than on the non-commercial producer to prove they are covered by fair use.
But, given that there’s no case law, and no explicit laws, tons of high-powered lawyers for commercial content producers like to make stuff up, like to send scary cease and desist letters, like to threaten fans who don’t have the money to fight back. Most major content producers have decided that terrorizing their fans is Bad Business Practice and they’ve stopped calling us all pirates and thieves and are instead madly catering to our whims (often, not always); but that’s a marketing trend, not an indication of any actual change in the status of fan works.
If you’re interested in supporting folks working to change copyright law or protect fans within it, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Organization for Transformative Works are excellent places to spend a bit of money, if you’re flush. Our current copyright system isn’t fulfilling its constitutional mandate to encourage the arts and sciences, since some of the most amazing creative work in both spaces is happening in exactly the grey zones we all operate in, which is not how it used to be and not how it should be.
</copyright-soapbox>
The thing about law, it’s not some Black Box you push Facts in, and you get a Decision out – it follows certain rules that you can easily study and go over yourself.
Common law countries like the US make this more difficult through the vagaries of a system based on precedent and pontification by judges; civil law countries make this more difficult through judges being biased and on power-trips and refusing to read statutory law in the abstract way it is meant to be read, that is: applied to real life at this moment in time, not in their heads, or a distant past.
(Ya, judges. Can’t live with them; can’t live without ‘em.)
Either way, worry not about your fanfic if you do it the classic way, i.e. if you don’t sell it. There’s a longer reasoning behind that, but I’d consider that the lynchpin reason.
Speaking as one who was affected by the Anne Rice thing when it happened – which was WELL before LJ was a gleam in a Russian bot’s eye – I’d like to clarify that it never got as far as a court of law. She had her lawyer send Cease & Desist orders out to various high-profile members of the fanfic side of fandom. Some of those C&Ds implicated the private businesses of the people involved. Because all of us were poor, we didn’t challenge the C&Ds. Instead we took our stuff off of the websites they knew about and hid the fic away.
Also to be clear: we had warnings on our fic WELL before that (edited to add: I mean the “not mine, no profit made” type warnings). We did that as common courtesy in the fanfic world at the time. And long as I’m going down memory lane and spilling tea along the way, I’m gonna point out that many of us who got those C&Ds also worked hand in hand with Anne, her publisher, and her family business to promote her books and business dealings purely for the love of the fandom. I, personally, left a part-time job at a web company when they asked me to do what amounted to allowing them to profit off of Vampire Chronicles fanfic. When I told them that legally and ethically I could do no such thing they said I could do it or they’d find someone else. I said see ya. (AFAIK they never found someone else).
So the amount of respect those of us in fandom had for Anne’s work and right to profit off of her material was large. What changed in our case was when 1) Anne got some of the rights back to her characters which meant she could profit off of them in ways she couldn’t before and 2) she realized us fans and our fanworks made for GREAT free market research into what her personal company could try to profit off of. The most perfect example of this, and how Anne’s greed ruined so much, was the Talismanic Tour company which was created by fans, worked with Anne and her official biographer to come up with walking tours of New Orleans based on things from Anne’s life and books, fully had Anne’s blessing, then, once it proved successful, Anne gave THEM a C&D and created her own tours at ridiculously jacked up prices.
Karma being what it is, nobody wanted to pay for that bullshit and Anne’s tours ultimately failed. But since she used her lawyers to scare the fan business out of running this then became another example of why Anne is the reason the fandom can’t have nice things.
(Can you tell I have so much tea from the VampChron days? Oh Anne. Bless your fandom-destroying black heart.)
Making this more fandom general, the points to take away here are a few:
Sometimes it’s not about law, or what the law “should” be. If a well known author, or TPTB from a TV show or a movie studio sent you, personally, a C&D letter for your fanworks, would YOU have the ability to thumb your nose at it? Do you have the resources for that lawyer battle and possible court case? Or are you like us Anne Rice fans were, living meager paycheck to paycheck, and not having it in you to even put up the fight with your ISP, let alone a millionaire’s legal team?
The blessing of the original creators means nothing. They love us until they don’t. Relying on their goodwill to keep fanworks safe is like relying on the skills of the person driving you around to keep you out of an accident: sure it’s possible, but you wanna put that seatbelt on and hope the car has airbags just in case.
Appreciate and support those who have done the work to explain WTF fanworks even are, let alone why they should be legally allowed (so let me repeat the earlier links to Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Organization for Transformative Works ). If you can donate money to them, great. If you can’t, at least appreciate and be grateful to the teams of people who took the risk of putting their real names out there (C&Ds are another reason many of us write under pseudonyms) at all, let alone on legal documents, and appeared before the US government in person to defend your right to make fanfic and fanvids.
In a pre-social media age, none of [the Harmonians] could really reach or touch Rowling unless she, for some reason, actively sought them out, but, nevertheless, something had changed; the Harmonians, facing extinction, had decided to double-down and bite the hand that fed them. The ship meant more to them than the fandom did.
This is the moment that birthed zero-sum shipping, a kind of blind gamesmanship that only values a ship for whether it not it wins, not whether or not it is enjoyable. Add in the peculiar moralizing of the Harmonians, and, voila, you’ve got the recipe for fans antagonizing creators over appearing to support ships that are, in their eyes, morally unacceptable.
Were these dynamics at play in other fandoms and other ships before the Harmony Wars? Undoubtedly. Heck, there’s an entire documentary about the push and pull of the Star Wars fandom and George Lucas, entitled, fittingly enough, The People vs. George Lucas.
But you have to remember that the Harry Potter fandom was one of the largest fandoms in history. As of 2017, it has more posted works on FanFiction.Net than any other fandom. Its enormity meant that it was a threshold fandom for an entire generation, and that meant it set precedent.
At the height of their activity, the Harmonians did not have sufficient power or a sufficient platform to weaponize their ire towards Rowling into anything but petty, personal insults. But imagine if they had Twitter…
At surface level, this is concerning because they are awesome stories, and everyone’s life is made a little better when they find an awesome story.
On more serious levels, fandom is a wacky place, full of people doing wacky, occasionally damaging things to each other. Some of that has evolved, but some of it is the same as it ever was. History rocks because you can learn from the mistakes of others, and maybe hurt people a little less in the future. Fandom being a giant, convoluted web of passion, some history that could use sharing goes missed.
The two stories linked are from early 2000s Harry Potter fandom. The Ms. Scribe Story is a tale of one person’s aggressive use of sockpuppets to work their way up fandom hierarchy. The Cassandra Claire Debacle is about how the top name in that fandom hierarchy is a plagiarist.
They’re prime examples of fandom being fandom in intensely negative
ways. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a brand of fandom toxicity that isn’t on display in some way within these write-ups, and while that is admittedly sort of depressing, having things to point at that make you stop and think, “Wait, I’ve seen this before, this is not a thing I want to be part of,” can keep you out of some of the deeper fandom pitfalls.
They are also deeply fascinating reads. If you haven’t explored them before, or only know the summary versions, give them a shot.
“What you’ll notice from the chart is that between 2007 and 2009, things were happening with LiveJournal that made people not like it anymore. From the chart, you’ll see that it didn’t start to precipitously dip until a couple of years after that. You can see that Tumblr and Archive of Our Own, or AO3, are both climbing around the same time. I think that those had to get popular enough, enough people moving there so that those were a place for people to move to, because when there’s nowhere for you to go, they don’t go. You can think of AO3 and Tumblr as sort of the archive side and the social side of LiveJournal, so there wasn’t a single place that people could move to, so instead you see people going to both of those places.”
please tell me the wildest shit that happened in homestuck’s fanbase, its like listening to old tales that can’t be true but are.
Well there was the girl who nearly killed herself by soaking in a bathtub full of vodka and grey sharpies to try and dye her skin for her troll cosplay. And the fact that a bunch of fans sent the creator a MASSIVE horse dildo that later ended up in the comic. And the two people who spent $10,000 dollars a piece to have their OC’s appear for one frame and be immediately killed. And the one time a homestuck flash update ended up DDoSing newgrounds by accident. And the totally irregular update schedule made it so there was an application developed to tell you when the comic updated. The culture around homestuck is really surreal to look back on just for the sheer volume of alternate universes and fans works and in jokes and subcultures that developed within one fandom. It really makes me wonder if anyone will be able to capture that level of obsessive enthusiasm again. Like people joke about Steven universe being the new homestuck and I can see some parallels but that fandom still seems way smaller and way less messed up than homestuck at it’s peak.
It wasn’t just internet concentrated either, it pretty much set up a lot of standards and practices for conventions today. In-characters panels were no where near as popular until Homestuck popularized them and now there’s ones for every fandom out there, versus only a scattered few (mostly Hetalia) before Homestuck had 5 going at any given con. The concept of a “draw party” was also a Homestuck invention, I believe, draw parties being midnight meetups at dead parts of the con center where people sat around, trading art cards and generally hanging out but with the common theme of them all being Homestuck fans. “Gotta go fast” and “first” took on whole new levels because as soon as a new design were released the first person to put together a cosplay for it got an intense amount of notoriety, mainly because it was generally just a few hours after the design appeared. Hell, I was once at a con where Homestuck updated on Friday and the next morning someone had made the cosplay in their hotel room and wore it to the con.
Sadly there were also downsides which is where the crazy stories come from. Homestuck was something absolutely new because it was a perfect storm of being huge, having almost all characters you could cosplay require body paint, and having a really disproportionate amount of fans being very young and inexperienced at how conventions worked.
Many conventions put limits on body-paint after Homestuck got popular because of young, inexperienced cosplayers not sealing their makeup and tarnishing convention centers. Going to a small con that forbids body paint? Homestuck is why. Homestuck became feared at a lot of cons because a non-consensual hug from anyone at a con is awkward and shitty, but if it was from a Homestuck fan you ran the risk of having grey stains all over your costume, and I had seen it happen to people on multiple occasions. Homestuck was also the first fandom to finally force conventions start making rules and limitations on fan-run photoshoot gatherings, which they had previously just ignored or discouraged all together. Homestuck shoots were so big conventions had to start working with them. The Saturday photoshoot at Otakon that Alex and I ran at Homestuck’s peak had an estimated over 700 attendees, and the next year was the year Ota started regulating their photoshoots through official channels.
Speaking of that photoshoot and crazy stories, Michael Guy Bowman and Tavia Morra, two of the most prominent members of Homestuck’s music team at the time, literally showed up on a whim with a guitar and asked Alex and I if they could perform a three-song set in the middle of the shoot, then came back for the next day’s shoot in their Mobius Trip and Hadron Kaleido costumes and did it again.
Don’t even get Alex started on how she ran in-real-life Promstuck events in Manhattan for years with official venues, decorations and literal tickets.
Being in Homestuck for the time I was there was an incredibly surreal experience, because having been going to conventions for years before Homestuck, and having been somewhat in the center of these events (Homestuck was the only fandom where I was considered a “BNF”), I can still see the way Homestuck has changed aspects of fandom events at cons. I was in one of the first in-character Homestuck panels back in the summer of 20fucking11 and ended up being in some incredibly popular ones in 2012-13 that still get hits on YouTube today. Alex and I’s model for photoshoots are still being used by friends and people who we don’t even know who run other fandom’s events. Some cons I had reached out to so I could get official approval to run photoshoots of hundreds of people are still using my model and system to regulate shoots at their events years later. Hell, by the time I was hitting my peak along with Homestuck I was going to 10 conventions a year and running an average of 3 photoshoots per con, not to mention an average of 2 in-character panels per weekend that I was either in or running. At some of the cons I attended staff knew me so well because I had to secure the shoot details in advance and had so many panels under my name they had my number listed under “in case of Homestuck issue call her” because Homestuck was a category of attendee cons literally had to separate from other attendees and learn to anticipate ahead of time. I will emphasize, I was never on staff, they just knew me as the liaison for the massive hoard of grey 13 year olds that scared the shit out of them.
When people who have been in the fandom five years like me try to emphasize how big Homestuck was we’re not just talking haha it was huge, Homestuck fundamentally changed the landscape of conventions for years and a lot of those changes stayed.
OHH MAN PROMSTUCK, the final event clocked nearly 500 attendees and cost roughly $12,000 when the whole thing was wrapped. That’s barely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this sort of discussion though.
Homestuck was a phenomenon because with frequent updates and no defined update schedule, the hype train never stopped. Frequently fandoms will go through phases of an explosion of content and then a resting period, which can easily be tracked by when new content appears. With things like TV shows, video games, or even most webcomics, having a schedule means you could tell when everyone was going to be freaking out, and the subsequent planning around that meant the hype train could be quantified. The problem with Homestuck was those curves couldn’t be tracked, especially because there was NEVER any warning what KIND of content we were getting. One day could be an update dropped at 5 AM EST that was two kids pelting each other with fruit. 4 hours later we could get a flash that killed 17 people. Then it could be THREE DAYS before another update where haha it was retconned that was a dream none of those people are dead. It was fucking anarchy. Sure there was a WAY to define the plot but knowing what was going on or what was coming at any given moment was fucking impossible, and the break between these updates is what spawned “update culture”.
The thing with update culture is that most content creators are aware of, and plan content updates around, the idea of what the fans will be feeling and thinking once that content is done being distributed. For TV shows, episodes are released with beginnings, middles, and ends- a narrative arc that allows people to start thinking about media the way the creator wants them to, leading them along with little trails of plot and puzzles to solve. But Homestuck’s updates weren’t planned like that, because they came in chunks of whenever it was done, a carry-over from the original Choose-Your-Own-Adventure format. Because of this, people were theorizing about thing that’d be fixed in the literal next page, but because we didn’t have that information, the weirdest shit started being produced. It also didn’t help that Homestuck has some fucking weird shit happen in it! And sometimes fan theories wouldn’t resurface until literal YEARS down the line (Tricksters, anyone??) and people would be screaming and throwing themselves on the floor. There was no predictability, and therefore ANYTHING WAS VALID. And it created an incredibly interesting, though HORRIBLY chaotic space, that by god, was so much fun. Homestuck was a large-scale production media produced like a fanfiction author and because of the size of the audience lead to PANDEMONIUM on a scale that can’t be easily replicated.
Like it’s not really appropriate to say “oh x is the new Homestuck” because the very nature of Homestuck’s creation and population ensures there will never BE another phenom like it. The landscape of fandom, due to Homestuck, has changed, because update culture can’t exist without the perfect storm of described attributes that this comic had- that now no one else can replicate because Homestuck caused people to move away from that style of storytelling BECAUSE of the hectic fandom! It all feeds into itself. (Sort of like the story of this comic, honestly.) The Homestuck fandom experience will likely never happen again because of the way Homestuck shaped the fan scene. And that’s cool to know about!
Also I feel I should clarify on some of the above points. To begin, they’re all fucking true. – The sharpie dyeing story is unfortunately real. It’s original source is 4chan, the OP posted it on their personal tumblr blog (which for some reason still routes to my page if you google it). It can be found here. – The horse dildo was also real. It was sent as a joke because of a series of horse dick jokes mentioned in the comic; for those not in the know about Homestuck, there’s a character who talks a lot about horses and their rippling muscles. Hussie included it as a find-able item in a later walk-around minigame flash. – Two people did in fact donate $10,000 to the Homestuck kickstarter to have their fantrolls be canon and then murdered. While I don’t personally know the story of the female fantroll, the one in the top hat (Nektan Whelan) was actually made by an American Army veteran who read Homestuck while deployed in Iraq. He credited it was part of what helped him stay positive during active deployment. I can’t find the link to this conversation because it was on formspring like 4 years ago but if anyone has the link, let me know, I’d be curious to have it archived. – The Homestuck flash in question that killed Newgrounds was Cascade. Hussie recorded that at that time he received over 1.2 million unique pageviews trying to access it at once, world-wide. It also crashed the main Homestuck site and forums, then megaupload, and (for a VERY short time), Twitter and Livestream, because people started streaming it and tweeting the links. Someone made a comic about how that experience felt and as someone who was there screaming at Newgrounds to let me in, I can promise it’s accurate. – The update notifier was a godsend, and people would design specific macros, sounds, and images for their notifiers. It became a mini-culture in itself how you heard about the update. For a long time, I used to make tumblr posts about it. Update culture, and how fast you got to the update, was so real.
Anyway, hi, I’ve been in the Homestuck fandom for more than 5 years now, talk to me about it. It’s been a hell of a ride.
Even if you’re not into Homestuck the fandoms cultural significance is fascinating
i'll apple your turnover 