1. How do you define explicit? Does this mean no depictions of child abuse, even for the purpose of telling a story about how wrong it is and showing a victim’s recovery? Can younger teens have realistic sexual encounters in stories so long as nothing is shown on page, or is it wrong to imply explicit goings-on even if they’re not depicted? Where, exactly, do we draw the line between heavy petting and sex? Can a character have a wet dream or masturbate? Can a character think about sex in detail, even if they’re not depicted having it? I’m not trying to be difficult: I’m just trying to make it clear that what you’re proposing, even when you phrase it simply, is inherently difficult to implement. Stories would have to be vetted and actively moderated, a massive undertaking that AO3 isn’t equipped to manage, and any such process would still ultimately hinge on individual judgement, which means you’d still have people dissatisfied with the outcome.
2. Teenagers who choose to ignore age-ratings and warnings for the material they consume are responsible for their own experience beyond that point: it is not the job of authors or the website to say, “Okay, we know this content is explicitly meant for adults, but let’s make it less adulty just in case a teenager gets in here.” You can’t protect people from their own bad judgement and its consequences without making their lack of responsibility someone else’s responsibility, which is decidedly unfair.
3. Abusers groom victims with a wide range of material and arguments, and have done so long before the existence of AO3. Whenever this happens, we blame the abuser, not whatever story they used to justify themselves. This is also why, when murderers or other criminals take their inspiration from crime fiction novels or psychologically darker works, as has happened on multiple occasions, we blame the criminals, not their taste in fiction. Locking down on what can be written about child abuse won’t get rid of paedophiles, but it will make things more difficult for victims who use fanfic as catharsis.
Here’s the thing: tagging works on AO3 is how we protect vulnerable fans, by giving them tools to navigate away from distressing themes or content. Taking something away from one person so its mere existence doesn’t upset someone who was never going to read it anyway isn’t a protective act, but a judgemental and dismissive one. To use an analogy, there are plenty of people in the world with deathly nut allergies, but that doesn’t mean we ban an entire food group: it means we label things that have nuts in them, even trace amounts, so that nobody gets hurt. Do accidents still happen? Yes! Are some people assholes about food allergies and dietary restrictions? Yes! But does that mean the solution is to ban nuts entirely? No! And it’s the same with fanfic.
For those who want context surrounding the debate whether women should be allowed to continue reading or writing non-con erotica. Additional context is also provided regarding fandom harassment of abuse survivors who write or read non-con fiction.
An excellently written piece, if rather hard to swallow for the crowd which believes fannish expression that includes dark kinks / sexual fantasies should be constantly policed.
However, it should be noted that the expression ‘debate if women should be allowed to continue writing non-con erotica’ makes my hair stand on end and typifies what I can’t abide in this entire thing. I didn’t come into fandom to be allowed or disallowed to write something or other. I came into fandom do straight up do so, there was no concept in my mind of ever giving someone the power of disallowing me to write the thing. Fandom was never about control for me, it was about solace, about joy, about pleasure, about deconnecting temporarily from the drudgery of a difficult and often unpleasant life.
I already live my life, as a woman, under a constant stream of being told what I’m not ‘allowed’ to do. I’m not allowed to be too harsh, too sharp, too abrasive. I’m not allowed to say I’m childfree and mean it. I’m not allowed to get a buzzcut (I’ve straight-up had hair-dressers who refused me!) I’m not allowed to continue being interested in video-games at nearly thirty, whereas with my brother it’s ‘eh, boys mature much more slowly.’ I’m not allowed to criticize street-harassers and gropers without being insulted for it.
And now it’s ‘I’m not allowed to explore my darker fantasies in the safe, secure medium of writing, without potentially becoming a target for Purity Culture Wank.’ Fandom was my refuge from all the ‘not allowed’ nonsense and I’ll be damned if I ever let it become filled with it!
I’m like, at most 30% woman, but my reaction to this was still try and stop me, motherfucker
“… I think this is true for many women and people who are sexual or gender minorities. We exist in an environment permeated by the threat of sexual violence. Some people cope with that fear by eroticizing it. Like the horror movie or roller coaster, noncon fanfic is a way of scaling down something terrifying until the fear becomes manageable, even, for some people, thrilling.”
An interesting essay. Long, but worth reading.
That was a long essay but god what a good one. Especially the part about how demonizing darkfic ultimately ends up creating spaces where people stop tagging for it because they don’t want to be demonized for it or because they’ve convinced themselves that since all noncon is bad and they’re not a bad person, the fic they wrote that is noncon must not REALLY be noncon because that would make them bad.
And of course, once people stop tagging their darkfic then everybody loses.
“Hi, I’m looking for a book with adventure, but no graphic violence.”
“I’m interested in a thriller that doesn’t have any rape scenes.”
“I want a gay main character but I don’t want it to be a coming-out story. And no anti-gay violence.”
“Oh, no, murder’s fine, but no animal cruelty.”
All separate reader’s advisory questions that I’ve answered, and successfully. I don’t know why any of these people asked for those specific parameters, and I didn’t ask, because it’s not my fucking business. And it’s no one else’s business, either–up to and including the government.
Librarians don’t make you reveal your trauma in order to justify what you read or write. You may be confusing us with, uh… *checks notes* …fandom.
We are literally trained not to ask. Any halfway decent reference professor nails it into you. Even if it would help you answer a question, you never ask a patron why they need something.
This is straight up part of the job! This is why librarians are there! They help you find books, any books, judgement free!
Right now with the bullshit being thrown at the OTW and AO3, these articles are a must-read and I’ll keep reblogging them for the duration. But because they take up a lot of dash space, i’ll only reblog them individually every few days – meanwhile this post with direct links will be reblogged as daily as I can.
[cw rape mention cw sexual abuse mention (content warnings do not apply evenly across each of these posts…and frankly the only one that really triggered *me* was the one put forth by the ‘pro-censorship’ questioner – for stupid shock value. fuck. what a fucking asshole move]
“ISTG if I see one more fandom post on this hellsite aggressively misidentify something as paedophilia I’m going to flip every goddamn table.
Consider my metaphoric table well and truly flipped.As of right now, I’ve officially reached my limit for things being called paedophilia that are not, in fact, paedophilic. Specifically: I am sick of seeing fictional relationships where one party is in their late teens and the other their twenties being called paedophilic by default, as though it’s impossible for such a pairing to be anything else. I am likewise sick of seeing anyone who enjoys, creates or otherwise participates in such narratives being called a paedophile apologist or sympathiser. I understand that any conversation about what is or is not paedophilia is going to be inherently uncomfortable for a lot of people, and that’s as it bloody well should be, given the subject matter. But it’s precisely because both the crime and the accusation are so very, very serious that the topic needs to be clearly discussed.“
Like people still haven’t explained why it is that ao3 is still in ‘beta mode’ after like 10 years, why they need so much money in donations each year and why sites like ff.net or LiveJournal never required that. Like yes ff.net doesn’t have as elegant a layout as ao3 but it was still perfectly functional and was a lot of people’s mainstay for sharing and consuming fic. Like I know ad revenue is part of how they make their money to host servers and shit. And then lj has always had the free option and paid/premium member option, and they’ve made good money off that shit over the past 2 decades but they never made it like “oh free version is so rudimentary” and tried to force your hand to buy the premium membership. Lj was free and very fun to use and if not for that Russia bs I would prob still be using it today.
Ao3 has a nice layout and some features (like decorating series, “inspired by” works, etc) that I hadn’t seen on other sites and that’s why a lot of us migrated over there. But all this money being funneled into it legit doesn’t make sense to me because all these other sites don’t make the users pay for server fees…and it can’t cost that much just to have the pretty layout.
I think we need to stop putting ao3 on such a pedestal that we can’t ever have critical conversations about it without someone being reactionary and going “WELL MAKE YOUR OWN DAMN SITE THEN”
Also the fact that ao3 stans keep hiding in the replies on Erikas post says it all cuz they can’t even be bothered to reblog directly from me or other folks to make their rebuttal
Because they don’t accept advertising revenue and they don’t sell user data to advertisers. Sites like fanfiction.net are “free” because they derive profit off their users. This profit comes from people who think they can use this user data in a useful way, and will pay money for it. This can be especially dangerous with sites featuring LGBT content; sometimes people literally will say, “I will give you a shitload of money if you give me all the information you have about anyone reading porn featuring consenting gay adults while living in a theocratic dictatorship where being gay is illegal.” And who wants to know? Well, right now we don’t know. It could be an aid group, a religious group, the theocratic dictatorship’s police force. It’s very easy to obscure who’s paying for what data.
To keep that revenue stream, sites like FF.N have to keep their advertisers happy. Fandom has often been targeted by religious zealots who approach advertisers on sites we use, like Livejournal and FF.N, and say, “Your ads are being displayed on the same page as GAY PEOPLE KISSING! This is disgusting!” And when advertisers threaten to pull their business, LJ and FF.N have traditionally gone, “No, don’t leave, we’ll delete the stuff you don’t like off the site.” That’s why FF.N doesn’t officially allow explicit fic on the site, and will delete it if advertisers ever get upset about it in the future.
But the AO3 has said, “We are never going to accept advertising and we will never sell user data, because we want to be able to decide entirely on our own what content we will host,” so they run entirely on donations and investment revenue.
It’s possible that an anti archive that agreed to delete anything objectionable off the site would be able to run ads and therefore operate much more cheaply. Though even then it should still be run by people keeping a sharp eye on what data they are giving away, so they don’t, for example, give Saudi Arabian authorities the street addresses of LGBT users there so they can be arrested.
Also, people haven’t explained? This has been explained over and over again, because every time AO3 has a donation drive there’s some bright spark who doesn’t understand how social media revenue streams work or that servers cost money and goes off on a rant about it instead of spending .3 seconds googling the topic.
This has been explained REPEATEDLY. If op is too lazy to look up those explanations (and they aren’t hard to find), then that’s on them.
If @synclaires is going to accuse Ao3 of “fishy” financials it would be nice if they’d provide some sort of proof or explanation besides “I personally don’t like how they manage their leftover funds”
Ao3 is pretty transparent, they provide a service free of charge, if you want to accuse them of fraud or something, then make your case. But vague “they ask for more money than I think they deserve” posts are just shit-stirring.
I wonder if the Russian troll farms take secondary target work outside purely political targets. Because LJ is a main competitor to Ao3 and all, and they are owned by Russians… And this kind of agita does kind of read a bit like the pre 2016 election trolling from where I’m sitting.
M’ jus sayin…
*DING DING DING* WE HAVE A WINNER.
I guess @synclaires is perfectly happy having her data mined by the Russians – you know, the people who fucked with the American election to install their puppet in office – but I am sure as hell am not. Ao3 is a non-profit, which means that – just like another really valuable entity, the American Civil Liberties Union, the people who literally have been spending millions suing Trump and his minions to prevent him from going full-blown fascist – they depend on donations.
Now, if @synclaires is so damn sure “Ao3 stans” are wasting donations on riotous living, she’s perfectly free to believe that. She’s also perfectly free to believe that Hillary Clinton runs a child sex ring out of the basement of a pizza parlor, or that QAnon is something other than a 4chan joke on stupid conservatives. But if she doesn’t want to look like an idiot, she really needs more than just WHINE MOAN BITCH BITCH THEY WANT MY MOOOOOONEEEEEEYYYYY THEY ARE MEAN AND GREEDY AND WHINE WHINE WHINE to back it up.
AO3 was born as a reaction to events like these, to protect fans from censorship, from their user information being sold, from their stories being deleted.
Without going into a bunch of history you can easily look up, AO3 was founded by fans, for fans. The reason it costs so much money to run: it does not sell any ad space (so it has no ad revenue), and server space and bandwidth are extremely expensive. You can do a little research and see how much it might cost to run a site the size and scale of AO3.
You may not know that a database of user information is considered a hugely valuable commodity. That information can be mined and sold to advertisers. LJ and ff.net are not nonprofit sites. They can, and do, sell their user information. AO3′s user database will never be used for that purpose.
All of the above rebuttals and also…
“all these other sites don’t make the users pay for server fees…“
AO3 doesn’t either. Donating is completely optional, and you can even click the little x on the banner to make it go away.
It’s really unobtrusive as fundraisers go, for that matter. Only one email and an easily removable banner. No pop-ups. No paywall click-throughs.
Nobody is “making” anyone donate, ffs. If you don’t want to, you don’t have to. If you can’t afford to, don’t feel bad. You can still keep using it regardless, and there isn’t even a tiered system that makes your unpaid use inferior to that of paid users (like LJ and DW have).
And you STILL don’t have to look at ads (or “sponsored” content, which is fucking ads) even if you don’t.
I feel like a lot of tumblr culture, especially the particularly ineffective brand of Tumblr Social Justice™, has somewhere along the line lost track of the difference between something having the potential to be bad, and being innately bad.
For instance, a white author writing a character of another race absolutely has the heightened potential for problematic portrayal, since that author lacks lived experience as a member of marginalized racial/ethnic group to draw on, and has a heightened chance to misrepresent that group. However, if they do their research, talk with individuals from that racial/ethnic group, consult with sensitivity readers, etc., they may still tell a very honest, sympathetic, good story with good representation. It is not innately bad, simply because of the author’s race; though I’ve seen arguments on tumblr insisting this is the case.
Another example is relationship dynamics; couples who have an age gap or a power imbalance (such as one individual being lower on a professional chain of command from the other) might have an increased potential for an abusive dynamic to form. The couple with the age gap has to be more conscious of differences in lived experience, and the couple with a power differential in the professional side of their relationship needs to overcome more hurdles to equalize things in the context of their personal dynamic. But neither of these things is impossible. These dynamics are not innately abusive; they might make abuse easier, or more common, but they don’t guarantee it. Just as avoiding these dynamics doesn’t guarantee a lack of abusive behavior.
Some situations/dynamics/endeavors have a heightened potential for things to go wrong. And we should be conscious of that potential and keep an eye out for problems – not to destroy the thing, but to encourage course correction (an edit to a manuscript; couples’ therapy; etc.). Many of these things, however, tumblr culture has labelled as innately bad, rejecting any possibility of the thing being done well and thus shutting down that encouraged course correction in favor of flat-out condemnation, without nuance, thought, or consideration. And by drawing clear lines of what is ‘innately bad’ and ‘innately good’ we also avoid giving due criticism of problematic things that have been assigned as ‘innately good.’
This hellsite is allergic to nuance, but damn, do I wish we could all be better at it and recognize that few things are as black & white and simple as we’d like them to be. Shit is messy. Everything is problematic. But not everything that can be bad is, and not everything that’s less likely to be bad is perfect.
I have yet to see a single goddamn person who was active in fandom 10 years ago jump on this “AO3 is evil and should ban some content” train. (I’m sure some exist – probably the same people who felt Strikethrough was a good thing and waxed morally superior about how their communities didn’t get hit with it, so clearly it was just people being mad that their Gross Pedophile Porn was deleted.)
“ban child porn”? cool – they started in 2006/7 with deleting all of the hogwarts-era explicit fic, want to start there? maybe enlist the help of an anti-pedophilia activist organization? don’t worry about whether they have conservative Christian rhetoric on their site, I’m sure they won’t go after gay content either. let’s just hire some more moderators – no way that different people could ever make different judgement calls about a piece of fiction.
this has all. happened. before. AO3’s creed didn’t come from nothing, created by people who were too naive to know what fandom would create given freedom or without half a million other ideas being tried first. we had sites which moderated all entries (a nightmare which ended up being cliquey and highly dependent on moderator tastes), sites that only allowed Unproblematic pairings (which inevitably fell into vicious ship wars with rival sites), sites which banned NSFW content altogether (and ESPECIALLY none of that Gay Shit, what will we tell the children). We had sites get bought out by investors or pressured by advertisers, sites run by for-profit companies, sites get shut down CONSTANTLY by media companies which didn’t like those Dirty Things that fans were doing with their precious IP.
AO3’s a safe space for creators because there never was one before. We had safe spaces for readers, and they fell to goddamn pieces. And sure enough, readers used tools to make their own spaces. AO3 took off because its model works, and the people who want to change it don’t know why the alternatives didn’t.
Do fanfic discoursers ever…read anything other than fanfiction? Like, I feel like it’s only possible to be this horrified by problematic fanworks if you’ve never actually read a book.
Then again, if your only engagement with media is Marvel movies, that explains a lot about why you’d be so blindsided by anything that smacks of moral complexity.
Do they know what’s in books? Or do they sincerely think that all media has the emotional and thematic depth of a PG-13 blockbuster franchise, and naughty fandom pervs are introducing previously unprecedented elements to this uniformly tepid world?
I sometimes wonder if some people here in their late teens/early 20s just rarely or never interact with unrelated adults older than them so they tend to base their understanding of what *adults* are like and how they should act on their relationships with their parents and teachers, and other authority figures. So many seem to believe that other adults, particularly those older than them, have a responsibility to protect them as if they’re still vulnerable children. They don’t seem to realize that they are in young adulthood themselves, and that other adults are not required to act as their mentors or stand-in parents.
And like, I really don’t think they realize that most people in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and beyond aren’t *that* different from them. Most are still dealing with some of the same shit that they were dealing with at age 20. If you don’t accept that humans are complicated and weird, no matter how old they are, you’re gonna have a hard time navigating your own adulthood. If you’re expecting every older person to be more mature and wiser than you, you’re gonna be very disappointed. People are hot messes at all ages.
i'll apple your turnover 