Why Did Fans Flee LiveJournal, and Where Will They Go After Tumblr?

meeedeee:

“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.”

centaurianthropology:

olderthannetfic:

maleccrazedauthor:

bonibaru:

naamahdarling:

sulphur-crested-cocktease:

shidgephobe:

wrotemyown:

araceil:

denaceleste:

nwcostumer:

wrangletangle:

beatrice-otter:

tomato-greens:

joestrummin:

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.

No, reading/creating dark fiction to deal with ptsd or other mental illness is not just re-traumatising selfharm

mob-zombie:

Apparently not typing this is costing me sleep because I can’t stand people being this aggressively wrong on the internet and actively harming other people’s treatment because they’re a fuck wit who thinks their feelings are more true than medical research and other people’s personal experiences.

1. I’m going to upfront state if someone’s re-traumatising themselves using dark fiction they are DOING IT WRONG.

This is why the variety of warnings exist. This is why tags exist. We’ve created a space in which the viewing experience can be more informed than that of the average book or tv show explicitly to protect people and allow them to inform their viewing experience. Hell we even broke down rape and sexual assault tags to cover multiple varieties of these things to make sure people were as safe as they could get.

While objectively rape, non-con and dub-con are all rape tags, it’s not about softening that it’s rape, it’s about classifying the type of rape or grade of content so someone can inform their viewing experience. Can you senseless fucks please stop insisting it’s claiming these things aren’t rape. Two seconds of googling the tags would tell you up front they’re all rape, they’re just differentiating the variety of rape so people can inform their viewing experience and not be triggered.

For people who claim to be fighting for victims you sure fucking love actively removing things victims have to protect themselves.

2. Shipping to cope isn’t just exposure therapy. God there’s a million fucking ways people can use fiction in recovery and only like two of those are forms of exposure therapy.

The more common usages are:

‘using fiction to break down the events that happened to you into a manageable set up’ because post abuse for a lot of people the thoughts, memories and understanding of the experience are a big old noodly jumble that gets tangled up and eventually fucks with the ability to move past it. By reading or writing about the experience the feelings and thoughts can be de-tangled and ideally turned into something manageable to process.

‘creating a fictional version of events of how you wish things happened’ which is simply a variety of wish fulfilment that can make the experience in the past less painful or otherwise lessen the effects of the trauma sustained.

Seeing a character you love experience what you went through and come out the other side of it possibly recovering or working towards recovery can help enable seeing yourself eventually doing the same. if you can’t conceptualise recovery or surviving, it’s very difficult to move forward, sometimes seeing a character you love doing it is the push needed to think ‘I could do this.’

Alternatively, simply seeing a character experience the same thing can just make you feel less alone.

Sometimes fictionalising the experience helps separate the experience from you.

Sometimes sexualising the experience makes the event less threatening to reduce the fear of future victimisation or take control of existing experiences. This doesn’t diminish the seriousness of the original event, it’s simply how the person chooses to handle this.

If you’re unable to express what personally happened to you, sometimes putting those experiences on a character and vicariously experiencing sympathy through the audience or the story can help.

And there’s so many more, this is just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. The fact is everyone recovers differently and there’s as many ways of utilising fiction in the process as there are people who’ve experienced some form of sexual assault. As long as they’re not hurting themselves (re-traumatisation), tagging correctly (preventing others from accidentally being triggered), and listening to tags on the fics they read (again preventing re-traumatisation) AND thus not hurting anybody else, it’s legal, it’s safe and it isn’t your business.

3. Not everyone is coping with victimisation. Specifically generalised anxiety disorders and OCD which is also an anxiety disorder are two obvious examples of mental illness that can be treated through fiction.

The biggest thing with an anxiety disorder is that they love to jam random intrusive thoughts into your brain, and it really isn’t as simple as just ignoring them or pretending a douche bag is telling you to do something.

In an anxiety disorder, trying to ignore it will make it worse. Worrying about it will make it worse. Trying not to worry about it, guess what? makes it worse.

Sometimes the only way to ditch a thought is to address it directly.

People who’ve experienced intrusive thoughts about how if they don’t perform the rituals they’ll murder their family, therapists have them write out plans about killing their family to prove that despite what the brain is telling them, they aren’t going to do it. Therapists have handed people knives to prove they can be trusted not to murder people.

With the use of fiction an intrusive thought can be assigned to a characters actions. Fiction can be used as a way to think about an intrusive thought without becoming anxious you might turn the thought into action and by having directly addressed the intrusive thought you can get rid of it.

If you’re anxious about an event, you can write about a character experriencing the worst case scenario to reassure yourself that the thing your scared of is fictional. Or you could write about what you’re worried about going well as supporting evidence you’ll be fine.

Again these are just examples, there are many many more ways people manage mental and physical illness with fiction just as fiction can be used and mental health upkeep after a traumatic event.

And hell, even if you’re not mentally ill and haven’t experienced a traumatic event, if you want to write about a dark scenario, you should. Because not everyone going through these things can write or draw and rely on others to provide content to manage these things.

for people who are not involved in the fandom discourse

restoringsanity:

freedom-of-fanfic:

zorilleerrant:

‘incest’ means people exploring any depiction of fictional characters who are related or ‘family coded’ in any type of romantic or sexual situation, whether the depiction is positive or negative, regardless of whether they are depicted as related in the fanwork, regardless of rating, tags, or warnings

‘pedophilia’ means people exploring any depiction of fictional characters who are under the age of twenty in the main canon, in any type of romantic or sexual situation, regardless of how old they are in the fanwork, whether the depiction is positive or negative, regardless of how small the age gap is (including no age gap, if the artist is over twenty), regardless of rating, tags, or warnings

‘abuse’ means people exploring any depiction of fictional characters who have a less than 100% healthy and friendly relationship in canon, including those characters who only have a difficult or unhealthy relationship in extended materials, headcanons, or popular fanon, in any type of romantic or sexual situation, whether the depiction is positive or negative, regardless of whether the relationship is depicted as healthy and having a healthy history in the fanwork, regardless of rating, tags, or warnings

‘objectification/fetishization’ means people exploring any depiction of fictional characters who are part of any marginalized identity the artist is not also part of, or who can be confused with an outside group due to their stances or opinions, regardless of whether they’re deconstructing or exploring the canon, or why they’re choosing to depict this particular character or ship, regardless of whether they’re depicting problematic elements in a positive or negative way, regardless of rating, tags, or warnings

Please don’t read these words and assume they’re being applied to real life situations, or that they’re strictly about works that present these things as positive, or that they’re strictly about works presented in areas that are intended for children. If you see the word ‘anti’ in someone’s name or blog description, please be aware that they’re part of a pro-censorship movement that frequently involves suicide baiting, threats, harassment, sexual harassment, and even doxxing and making false police reports.

If a blog identifies itself as ‘anti-[x]’, this is how they misuse loaded terms like ‘pedophilia’, ‘incest’ and ‘abuse’ specifically to deceive you.

and repeated for emphasis from the above PSA:

please be aware that they’re part of a pro-censorship movement that frequently involves suicide baiting, threats, harassment, sexual harassment, and even doxxing and making false police reports.

For further emphasis

These are not the actual definitions of the terms. On Tumblr, these have become abstract colloquial ‘buzzwords’ that are devoid of logic, reason, and context.

If you see someone misusing these terms, correct them. The actual definitions of these terms are readily available on Wikipedia.

The point is not to stifle criticism, but your criticism needs to be informed.

techtonicactivity:

cancerously:

seerofsarcasm:

cursmudgeon:

bawlgoblin:

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

mirandadeservedbetter:

pandavalkyrie:

pandavalkyrie:

pandavalkyrie:

I like how fanfiction culture decided to drop all pretense about self-insert oc characters hooking up with canon characters and just leaned into “character x reader” stories. These were just non-existent in my early FF days, we’re talking 15+ years ago, and they’re everywhere now. I appreciate it, chase your bliss dears

GOD I WISH I HAD THAT SPINE OF STEEL

WHY DID YOU LEAVE OUT THE BEST PART, THIS IS A LEGEND

@xenokiryu

discoursecatharsis:

discourse-and-suffering:

discoursecatharsis:

I haven’t had a good rant in a while and I just saw a post that pissed me off so here we go.

It infuriates me whenever an anti calls a sha/ad1n ship “pedophilia.”

Literally use any other word. There are a lot of words that can describe discomfort with those age gaps. Here’s a few examples:

predatory

inappropriate

creepy

weird

uncomfortable

I understand that the idea of a 25 year old dating someone 18 or younger (16 or 17) squicks people out. I really do. In most cases, it squicks me out too. There have to be certain non-creepy circumstances for age gaps like that to be okay.

So what makes an age gap relationship predatory/inappropriate/creepy? Lots of things.

If the older person only wants to date them for a physical/sexual relationship.

If the older person only wants to date them because they’re younger and easy to take advantage of.

If the older person doesn’t have approval of the younger person’s family.

If, not getting approval, the older person isolates the younger from their family and friends.

If the older person does not allow the younger to pursue individual interests/life stepping stones, i.e. not allowing them to go to school or get a job or have hobbies, so the younger is forced to be dependent on the older.

If there’s an additional power imbalance (i.e. a teacher and student, or a boss and employee, etc)

If none of these things are happening, the relationship is probably okay. You can think it’s gross all you want, but it’s not necessarily predatory just because of an age gap. Predatory actions make a relationship predatory.

The reason I get so upset when ant1s call Sha/ad1n ships, particularly She1th, pedophilia is because my parents met at similar ages.

My parents started dating at 16 and 23. And there was nothing creepy or predatory about it.

First of all, this was back in the 70s/80s, when it was a little more common, I’ll admit that. My parents grew up in the same neighborhood, so they had mutual friends. My dad never did anything against my mom’s parents’ wishes. In fact they loved him and approved of him (and vise-versa). My dad never tried to isolate my mom from her friends. One of my mom’s best friends at the time is still one of her best friends now. My mom graduated high school and went to community college with my dad’s full support. My mom started working in her own career, doing her own thing. My mom played sports at the YMCA with her friends on weekends. My dad supported her all the time, with whatever she wanted to do. They dated for over 12 years before they got married. And then when they got married… they moved into a house in the same neighborhood they grew up in! My mom was literally only one mile away from her parents. And now they’re been married for over 26 years. They’re not perfect, they argue sometimes. But my dad, despite being older than my mom, is not and never has been a predator.

Meanwhile, another one of my mom’s friends married a man 10 years younger than her. And guess what? He’s an abusive jerk!

My 6-year-old self got bad vibes from him the moment I met this man at their wedding. Now years later, I realized he reminds me of Hans from Frozen, and we know how Hans turned out. My mom’s friend constantly vents to my mom about how her husband treats her poorly, disregards her feelings and all that. My dad went to an event with the both of them once, and when he came home, I asked how it went and he immediately said “(her husband)’s an ass.”

But yeah, it’s always the older one who’s the abusive predator, right antis?

I’ll give another example of an age gap relationship that, in my opinion, is borderline predatory because of the above bullet points. This couple are public figures too so you may know them: the Youtubers 0nision and his spouse Laineyb0t.

Quick rundown of this couple if you’re unfamiliar: a few years ago, 27 year old 0nision started talking to 17 year old Laineyb0t, a fan of his. The two dated and married soon after La1ney (who now goes by “they/them” pronouns) turned 18. I believe they got married secretly and La1ney’s parents were unaware, they thought La1ney was away attending college. 0nision moved La1ney out of their home state to his state. Not long after that, La1ney got pregnant. They’ve been married for like 6 years now and have 2 kids. Problem is their relationship is… tumultuous. 0nision chronicles their personal lives on his Youtube channel. It’s… too much to summarize. Their relationship drama rivals telenovelas.

But I get very bad vibes from 0nision, as do many others. First of all, he seems to have a penchant for younger girls. His girlfriend before La1ney was also a 17 year old. A couple years ago, he and La1ney tried to bring in a 18/19-year-old girlfriend into their relationship. He’s in his 30s now so it’s a little eyebrow-raising. He also comes off as a very manipulative person (he’s even kind of admitted to manipulating his spouse during drama with their girlfriend).

Additionally, imo, it’s kind of immoral to date a fan. There’s a power imbalance there. Of course any 17 year old is gonna jump at the chance to date/marry their Youtube idol. Seems as though he took advantage of that fact and “trapped” La1ney, so to speak. If someone meets and falls for a fan naturally, I think they should take their relationship slow and not rush into things. Yet 0nision did the opposite, married them soon after he could legally do so and got them pregnant. All while not having their family’s approval. He continues to isolate them from their family too, I believe he said once that “La1ney only sees their family twice a year.” Past girlfriends have also said that 0nision seemed almost eager to get them away from their families. I could go on and on, there are whole blogs that keep track of 0nision’s controlling behavior. It’s just… bad vibes, man. Bad vibes.

There is a stark difference between my parents’ relationship and 0nision and Laineyb0t’s relationship. The only similarity is that there’s an age gap. Besides that, the motives and behaviors of the older person in these two relationships are drastically different.

0nision seems to have textbook controlling/manipulative/(possibly predatory) behaviors.

My dad does not.

You know who else doesn’t have predatory/abusive behaviors? Shiro.

Just because there’s an age gap, doesn’t mean it’s automatically abusive or predatory. Abusive/predatory actions and behaviors make a relationship abusive/predatory. Why can antis apply this logic to fictional ships? Leave shippers alone and stop calling every ship you’re uncomfy with “pedophilia” or “predatory” or “abusive,” especially if the characters are not that at all.

Tbh I feel like saying that not having parents’ approval is predatory is… questionable. First of all, I love my parents, but it’s reeeeally not up to them to decide who I date. I would certainly listen to their opinion if they didn’t like my partner, but ultimately it’s my decision. And I have perfectly good relationship with my parents! What about people who don’t? What about people with abusive parents? What about queer teens with homophobic families? Also, plenty of teenagers date other teenagers without family’s approval, I don’t think this is much different.

Isolating your partner from their family is predatory and abusive, yes (and this applies even when there’s no age gap). But I really don’t think you need parents’ permission to date someone.

(I completely agree with everything else you said, I’m just being nitpicky, which is… a common accurence with me)

That’s a good point. I didn’t even take into account queer teens or teens with overbearing/overly-controlling parents.

For sure, if someone close to you, someone that you love and trust, another family member or a best friend, has some uncertainties about this person you want to date, take their concerns into consideration. But of course, it’s ultimately the person’s decision on who they date.

Also I guess I meant more in the reverse like: if there’s an age gap, and the older person has the acceptance of the younger’s family and friends, then it’s usually okay (excluding extreme cases where parents are trying to illegally marry off their kid or something like that).

ashleyfanfic:

thesparkles59:

dqnielhowell:

There’s a fic on fanfiction(.)net that I’ve kept tabs on for years to see if it’s been updated or not. While I’m no longer even in the fandom it’s written for, it just has one of the greatest storylines I’ve ever read. Last time it was updated was 2011.

The other day, I decided to reread the entire thing and leave a very in-depth review of what I thought of each chapter. I also mentioned how I started reading it when I was 13 and am now 21, but always came back to see if it was ever finished because I loved it so dearly.

Today, said author sent me a private message saying that her analytics showed that the story was still getting views even after all these years, but no one ever bothered to leave reviews other than “update soon!!!”, so she never felt motivated enough to finish it. She said that me reviewing every single chapter with lengthy paragraphs made her cry and meant the world to her. She also mentioned that she felt encouraged to write the two remaining chapters needed to complete the story and that she would send me a message the night before she updates the fic.

I’m literally sobbing. I’m so excited :’)

Please always remember to leave a review when reading fanfiction!!! It means a lot to a writer.

Seriously, this is what keeps us going; YOUR COMMENTS.

And you think my ranting about it is just being salty! It’s not! Reviews can mean the difference between feeling motivated and feeling out of place.

cleric-of-sirrion:

cleric-of-sirrion:

cleric-of-sirrion:

i work for a historical association and in one of our libraries i found a hand-gilded book of poetry called “star magic” and im not saying that i work in the real world equivalent of the tower at palanthas im just saying WHO HAS TIME TO HAND PAINT THAT MUCH GOLD LEAF

update: its a 1980s star trek kirk/spock fanzine full of poetry and it has a hand drawn gilded picture of spock in it

Why People Don’t Comment: Data and History from the Tolkienfic Community

longlivefeedback:

by @dawnfelagund

A quick summary:

Commenting is a learned skill

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.

Keep reading