April 2017

olderthannetfic:

surfacage:

jenniferrpovey:

freifraufischer:

Okay, some fandom history, why show writers and authors say “for legal reasons” the can’t read fan fic.

Back in ancient times in the 1970s there was a show called Star Trek the Animated Series.  It was on the air as fandom culture around Star Trek was really taking route and there were many fanzines (things on actual paper that people bought) being published and the first conventions to attend.

David Gerrold was a writer for Star Trek the Animated Series who had also written one of the most famous episodes of the original series The Trouble with Tribbles.  While he was around the production office for STtAS he was introduced to a couple of fans who proceeded to tell him all about their ideas for an episode–essentially a sequel to his famous episode–which it so happens he had already written a script for.  When that episode aired he received a letter from one of those fans lawyers demanding “credit”.  It so happened that he could prove that the episode existed before the meeting but the involvement of lawyers and a threat to sue became widely known.

Marion Zimmer Bradly was, before recent horrifying revelations decades after her death, a titan of fantasy writing.  She also welcome fan fiction and published it in anthologies and in a magazine she published.  One day she opened a story sent to her and the plot of the story was essentially the plot of a a novel she had nearly finished writing.  More than a years worth of her work was now unpublishable because it was provable that she had read this story with this similar plot and she couldn’t prove the work on the novel existed before she saw the story.  She stopped publishing anthologies and fan fiction and in particular the MZB story is the one a lot of professional writers know as representative of the dangers of fan fiction.

So when a writer says they can’t read fan fiction for legal reasons it’s that their own lawyers are protecting them from outside lawsuits.

And this is why knowing your fandom history matters.

Exactly.

And writers don’t want to be influenced by your fan-fic either. We don’t want to end up inadvertently stealing your ideas because we read them three years ago and forgot we did.

So, just don’t show fan fiction or sequential fan art to writers. Actors also often have contracts that prevent them from reading it so they aren’t influenced.

If some people are wondering why I rarely read extended/worldbuilding fanfic set in the Ash universe, even if you send them to me (i.e., I usually say sorry but I can’t read this), this is why :) 

Even if it won’t come down to legalities I don’t want to accidentally use someone else’s idea and create conflict over it.

Boy howdy, does knowing your history matter. And the reason is that THAT’S NOT WHAT HAPPENED WITH MZB!

It’s certainly what plenty of authors thought happened or claimed happened for years and years, but it has been debunked. Authors who hate fic still regularly trot it out though.

We may never know exactly what really happened, but we have accounts both from the fan in question and from very pro-MZB people that agree: the fan never tried to sue.

MZB had a massive stroke and thereafter “wrote” a number of books with “cowriters”. This was some V.C. Andrews level “Totes wrote it! Plz give $$$” nonsense. From much later accounts, MZB was in no state to write, and some of those books were later quietly changed to give complete credit to the “cowriter”.

MZB had possibly planned to eventually expand on some bit of her canon. She liked a particular fanfic that expanded on the same bit of canon. She tried to buy the rights to this fan’s writing, but the fan didn’t like the deal she was offered, fearing that it was a payoff in exchange for using her work wholesale and giving her zero credit. (Seems like a reasonable fear to me, given what was going on with MZB’s writing at that point!) They had a falling out over money and contract negotiations, just like eleventy-billion other creative professionals have.

However, to keep the MZB brand and money machine going, it was important to shit all over everyone in the vicinity.  All that “A yeeeeear of my woooorrrrk!” bullshit was to explain why MZB wasn’t writing much, since the real reason–that she couldn’t write–was something they were keen to keep under wraps. In fact, according to the fan involved, the only time anyone actually threatened to sue was when MZB’s lawyers threatened her should she reveal MZB’s situation.

https://fanlore.org/wiki/Marion_Zimmer_Bradley_Fanfiction_Controversy

MZB’s cronies fucked us fanfic writers for decades over a total urban legend. 

(And, yes, I’m sure this got debunked five trillion times already, but it’s Tumblr, so I can’t expand all the notes and see.)

windcalling:

my mom has a fanlore page

why antis do the thing: being an anti with problematic canon

freedom-of-fanfic:

meeedeee:

freedom-of-fanfic:

why do antis stay in fandoms where the canon material itself is problematic? Relatedly, why do antis stay in fandoms where the creators support - or fail to denounce, at least - bad ships and nasty shippers?

–

Most antis seem to have a funny little disconnect between mass media creations and fandom creations.  Despite insisting on purity in their fandom spaces, antis will consume mass media-created works that canonically contain terrible things that they regularly fight against: incest, adult/teen relationships (‘pedophilia’ in anti parlance), noncon/dubcon, etc.

How can they do this?

In my experience: Antis hold fandom to a higher standard than the mass media on which fandom is based.

Fandom tumblr and social justice tumblr heavily overlap because fandom is where many queer, marginalized people go for acceptance and refuge. Additionally, much of English-speaking fandom comes from regions where LGBT and women’s histories are very undertaught. The direct result is that many antis have received the large majority of their social justice education in fandom spaces.*

That makes it only natural that antis would expect fandom spaces to be better at things like maintaining safe spaces, prioritizing queer/LGBT stories, prioritizing PoC stories, etc. than the very media that caused a fandom to exist in the first place.  In the eyes of an anti, fandom should be fixing the canon problems by cleansing fandom space of the canon problems and patching those problems with good fanon.  Fandom certainly shouldn’t be taking the bad parts of canon and running with them to ship or create things that are less than wholesome and positive.

Fandom should, as a collective, know better.

Of course, reality is that fandom - like the media it’s based on - is made up of fallible humans who are steeped in the same culture as the media creators, and therefore fandom is generally just as prone to the same problems, both real (cultural misogyny and racism/bias towards white male characters, etc) and imagined (dark themes and fanworks, heavy focus on romance/sex, not always shipping the Most Correct ship, etc). This infuriates antis, who then set about fixing it by yelling at the bad parts of fandom until it shapes up, and often to the exclusion of creating or encouraging fan content that would meet their standards of correctness.

In contrast, mass media creators generally get a pass for reasons that are likely as varied as the antis that cut them the slack, but in general, mass media creators - particularly white, cis, male mass media creators - just aren’t expected to know as much about activism. Antis don’t bother to try to fix them because they won’t even understand what antis are getting up in arms about in the first place.

Other prominent reasons for cutting mass media creators relative slack:

• they don’t respond as strongly as fan creators do, if they respond at all, to anti pressure/harassment, and calling people out isn’t as interesting/doesn’t feel productive if the target doesn’t react
  
• antis, like all humans, are prone to double-standards, and mass media creators are put on a pedastal that fan creators are not
  
• antis feel that as long as they recognize the problems with the canon work and don’t interact with them in fandom it’s ‘safe’ to be in problematic fandoms
  

It is, however, worth noting that if a creator shows the slightest awareness of social justice issues but in some way falls short of anti-shipping purity standards, antis will frequently go after the creator as brutally as they go after fellow fans. Additionally, antishipping tends to be more prominent in mass media fandoms where the canon content is socially aware, like Steven Universe.

*in 2013-2014, social justice education on tumblr took a very hard, very sudden turn directly into REG territory. About the same time, anti-shipping culture sprang up. Coincidence? I think not.

What does REG stand for?

REGs = ‘Reactive Exclusionary Gatekeepers’. It’s people who believe that sexuality and gender identity have strict categories and that those categories should be strictly maintained.

In my observation, REGs got a foothold on tumblr during the extreme inclusivity era where ppl were doing such things as identifying as galaxies and comparing these sorts of identities to being trans* or nb. The backlash to this kind of over-inclusive gender identity gave those who wanted to regulate non-cis genders a chance to lay their groundwork. At the same time, asexuality awareness was on the rise. The ace awareness language was co-opted by radfems to regulate the expression of sexuality, particularly by non-male people, and the split-attraction model encouraged by asexual communities were turned into a weapon to prove non-straight sexualities and non-binary gender identities could still be ‘straight and cis’.

Like REGs, anti-shippers believe it is their job to regulate and define others by their perceived behavior, and to maintain strict standards and categories in fandom. Much of the language of REGs is co-opted by antis to attack shippers. Though their targets are (somewhat) different, they spring from the same kind of controlling mindset and share methods to an alarming degree.

Thank you!

man-from-uncle-slash-recs:

kaciart:

rocket-sith:

francisperfectionbonnefoy:

vulgarweed:

hiddenlacuna:

fluffmugger:

madmaudlingoes:

tygermama:

every time I see more of the ‘ao3 is evil’ crap circulating I think, ‘well, tumblr is evil too and I don’t see you stop using it’

You know, the more I think about this, the more I think the real complaint isn’t that AO3 hosts “evil” content, it’s that it doesn’t allow harassment/dogpiling of “evil” creators as easily as Tumblr. Abuse won’t remove or even re-tag a work except in a handful of very specific cases, but they will suspend or ban users for harassment, including filing repeated unfounded Abuse reports. Authors also have at least some ability to screen/block comments on works, and there’s no direct messaging system outside of commenting on works through which to pursue harassment. You can follow a creator but you can’t block them (much less encourage others to do the same).

Tumblr, by contrast, generally ignores any abuse report that doesn’t involve the DMCA, and aggressive anons can and have driven bloggers off the site entirely. The fact that the same tactics are used by social justice bloggers and neo-Nazis (for instance) doesn’t matter – they’re the affordances of the site, by accident or design, and an entire fannish generation have gotten very used to performing their fannish (and moral) identity in this fashion.

(I thinks it’s relevant that AO3 was designed by fandom’s LJ generation and in some respect mirrors the affordances of LJ circa 2010. Tumblr is a very different site and that, moreso than age differences, seems to be at the root of this – though of course age intersect with site experience in a non-trivial way.)

ding ding ding ding.

Ao3 requires you to police your own consumption of content.  Ao3 won’t let you destroy someone’s online presence simply because you don’t like it.   Ao3 won’t let you impose your own morality on other without cause.

If you have issues with this, and the fact that Ao3 requires you to have responsibility and agency,  then you seriously need to sit down and have a damned good long hard look at yourself.

The question I usually fail to see being answered when people bitch about the content on AO3 is - so who gets to decide?

You? Me? A committee of my friends? Of yours? Of those who have the most kudos? Of those who have no interest in fandom, but want to protect other people from dangerous content, whatever it may be? Who gets that power, and how long will they have it?

Who are you comfortable with giving the power of regulating all the content? What happens in grey areas? What happens when something you like isn’t liked by the Decider? Is there an appeal? Who gets to make the arguments for and against something?

The world is complex and there are no easy answers.

The impossibility of creating a censorship board that curates based on content is a great reason why those things don’t exist, and shouldn’t.

Certain people are screaming that AO3 is bad because it’s not a “safe space.” The real problem they have, though, is that AO3 was created to be a safe space - for writers. And it does a pretty good job of that. It was designed to be a place where writers are safe from arbitrary content rule changes, random and unwarned deletions, and abuse-report abuse (which is common on ff.net). The Four Big Warnings + CNTW system is beautiful in its fairness and simplicity.

Antis can’t take control of it. And because control-freakdom is at the heart of their “movement,” this drives them into frenzies. Good. It motivated me to dig a little deeper into my pocket to donate on the last drive. For all the pleasure AO3 has given me over the years, that’s money well spent.

The real problem they have, though, is that AO3 was created to be a safe space - for writers. 

Preach it loud and hard!

I’m a member of the LJ generation, and when I first came to Tumblr (grudgingly and out of desperation, I might add, since it tragically seems to be the only place to really connect with other fandom peeps) I was horrified at how people here had established this sort of fucked up bully culture, where nobody is responsible for monitoring their own consumption, and rather they expect everyone else to custom tailor content to the whims and desires of the Shrieking Banshee Masses. And woe be to the person who doesn’t bend and break! “I’m going to bully you while accusing you and your Big Mean Poopie Content of being the actual bully, so I can hopefully distract you and others from realizing I’m being a royal intrusive asshat who failed Astronomy 101 b/c I clearly believe the world revolves around me.”

The irony here is that this in itself is an abuse tactic - victim blaming with a side of gaslighting. Pot, meet kettle.

And it’s the exact same mentality that drives right-wing lunatics to kick up a fuss about the existence of icky cootie gay people in media because we need to “protect family values”, or who take to screeching at Starbucks because their particular religious symbolism isn’t portrayed on the winter holiday cups and OMG WAR ON CHRISTMAS, STARBUCKS STOP OPPRESSING ME BY NOT CATERING TO MY PERSONAL TASTE.

The mentality is one and the same - “Cater to ME ME ME or FACE MY DIVINE WRATH even if it means taking away other people’s freedom!” while hiding behind a flimsy-ass shield of faux righteous anger.  

And when these bozos find an environment or situation where they’re unable or not allowed to bully people into silence and submission, they stomp their feet and pitch a tantrum and claim that they’re the ones being oppressed. Identical shit, different pile, and it’s the exact same infantile, schoolyard rubbish no matter which side it’s coming from.

This was a really interesting read. The last poster in particular but all of it.

This is exactly why I don’t support censorship in fandom. It’s one thing to have a policy for reporting and dealing with abuse, it’s another to claim that one faction or another should have unilateral control of what creators can post. I understand the arguments for protecting marginalized groups by restricting offensive content but I don’t believe that censorship is really a form of protection, as it always ends up limiting everyone. The dark side of tumblr’s (and, by extension, fandom’s) culture really worries me, especially the use of politics to control people’s behavior. 

I, honestly, doubt most people really hold only tumblr-approved opinions. There is disagreement among any group of people and, when that seems to be absent, there is something terribly wrong. People, who set themselves up as self-appointed fandom police, talk a lot about listening to and protecting the marginalized but there is nothing protective about limiting people’s ability to create art or express opinions because, believe it or not, some of those marginalized people are not going to agree with you, even if they belong to the same group/s as you. 

Fandom still appears to be terrible at realizing that people can just disagree with each other. They can know and understand all of the arguments, belong to the same demographic groups, and even have personal experience of the issue and still just plain come to different conclusions. People on tumblr are not talking on behalf of entire marginalized groups. They are expressing their own opinions. No group speaks as one voice and I, personally, have encountered many opinions, which are personally relevant to me, which I have disagreed with and not been offended by things, which someone claimed I should be offended by. I have also been offended by things, which someone claimed were for my own good. Tumblr politics elevates the loudest, angriest, most radical voices, which are often not only not that representative but also tend to seek to impose particular ideas and ways of being on the people they claim to be protecting. That doesn’t make me feel protected. It makes me feel alienated and afraid. 

Just a quick reminder:

ljfeed-spn-j2-bigbang:

If anyone is worried about backing up their past, current, or future SPN J2 Big Bang works due to the recent update of the Livejournal TOS, there is a Master Collection for this Challenge on AO3, with open SubCollections for each year 2007 - 2017.

Happy Tenth Anniversary Supernatural and J2 Big Bang!

Master Collection link :

https://archiveofourown.org/collections/Supernatural_and_J2_Big_Bang_Challenge

Livejournal Backup/Archive Tools

You can back up your journal to Dreamwidth (account is free, but if you can, toss them funds to help deal with the influx of LJ refugees). If you are a member of an LJ community, you can use LJ archive to backup the posts (not the comments): http://syredronning.livejournal.com/1530901.html

And last, you can backup multi-chaptered LJ fic via SqueeBook: http://www.squeebook.net/

Shouting into the void

edmondia:

So I posted a fic last Sunday to absolute cricket chirps. It’s an MCU crossover with a mostly dead fandom, so I wasn’t expecting much, and that was precisely what I received: a handful of kudos and nothing else.

And all I can think of is back in 1998, when I posted my very first fic ever for that same dead fandom (less dead at the time, obvs.) and people actually talked to me about it.

I was fourteen then. Now I’m thirty-two.

Part of this is cultural shifting. Fandoms were much smaller spaces, back then, and all the work was concentrated on forums and fannish websites. The only way to make friends was to talk to people.

Like, I realize that I’m a cranky fandom grandparent at this point, but good goddamn people, if you like a fic, have the decency to at least leave kudos for it.

Part of the reason this bugs me is that most people writing in fandom don’t have my absurd self-confidence and literal years of experience as a writer. Many of them are ickle babby writers, even if they’re adults.

Writers need feedback. We thrive on it. Going to Marrakesh (which is a whole ‘nother kettle of fish for me to rant about) was finished because of it.

Here’s a fun fact about me: I’m a compositionist by trade. My job is teaching college students how to write. My students are of all ages, genders, races, dis/ability, you name it. One of the things I emphasize in my classes is the importance of feedback at all steps of the writing process.

Brainstorming? They freewrite and I offer casual verbal feedback: yes, that’s a good idea; no, that’s too broad; both of those would work so it might be time for a coin flip; no, don’t say what you think would be easy, tell me what you really want to do.

Researching? Constantly discussed. How are we doing, what are we stuck on, what sources are you struggling with, where did you find it and what’s the ethos?

Outlining? Done in-class, with models they can use or not-use at their leisure.

Drafting? Constantly discussed. How are we doing, what are we stuck on, what do we need, are there any questions?

Peer review? In-depth but casual. They very quickly learn to ask me and each other incisive questions: what did you mean here? what are the author’s qualifications to talk about this? who’s your audience? is there biased language in this piece? does anyone know how to properly cite [insert weird thing here]?

Revision? They freewrite about it, and give me such gems as “I need to stop letting myself procrastinate,” “I am feeling better about my commas!”, “I had to redo the whole thing b/c I realized a source was crap,” and my personal new favorite from yesterday, “I am going to look over this again because I DO NOT TRUST THE COMMA MAN!”

(peer review sessions can get derpy in my classrooms)

When I grade their papers, I leave in-line comments, fill out a rubric, and leave them an overall holistic comment.

Once things are graded, we spend time in-class discussing problem areas. They read over my comments and keep track of specific issues on an error log. They have small group discussions about the problem areas they have. They’re able to track themselves getting more comfortable with their writing.

Constant discussion of ideas, constant discussion of their writing, constant feedback: how you turn a class full of students who dread writing papers into an active community of writers.

The thing is, though, when you never hear anything back? You might as well not have written anything at all.

Many of the writers you see in fandom don’t have beta readers–and why would they? My betas are friends I made back in the day when the way you made new friends in the fandom was by screaming into their inbox that you liked their fics.

Maybe this is a tumblr thing–we lost fantastic communities in the move from LJ, and quite frankly it’s hard to keep up with things on here. But people on tumblr will scream about your fics–just never to your face.

I know because I’ve seen it with my own work–people happily sharing and talking about whatever it is that they read, and never once reaching out to me, the actual author, who is right here and completely talk-to-able. Hell, I’ve reached out to people that I know have read and loved my writing and never heard anything back from them at all.

Guys. That is not how you build a community of writers. It does not work. If you want more fanfics, you have to support your writers.

I am not saying I’m looking for validation–I know I’m good at what I do, full stop, and my IRL is busy enough that at this point in my life I feel like a dabbler, if even that. People still read my old stuff. I haven’t taken down a lot of my old and badly-written stuff because I know it still makes people happy, even though they never say a word.

But if we as fic-readers want to have fics to read, we have to at least leave kudos, b/c visitor counts don’t mean shit. Someone could open a fic and immediately click out of it and so you have no way to know if they even read it at all.

And yes, I leave kudos every time. There’s also a fic recs section on my personal website for my absolute favorites.

Is it shyness? The person on the end of the other fanfic is just that, a person, and unlike a celebrity, they are a person that you can talk to.

My students are shy at first, but then they get used to talking about their ideas, talking about their writing, talking about what they struggle with and are trying to get better at and the progress they’ve seen themselves making. By the time they leave my class, they’ve developed a stronger sense of who they are as writers.

Wouldn’t it be fantastic if fanfic writers felt that same way?

The Life of A Lonely Trekker

Decades ago, if you lived in a small town, finding other Star Trek fans was a long and lonely journey.  In the 1970s, one Star Trek fan wrote a letter to a professionally published Star Trek magazine called “Trek”. Her letter was later published in book form, a collection of letters and articles called “The Best of Trek”.

“There’s no words to tell you what your magazine has done for me. I’m stuck here in South Carolina in a small town where most people are very narrow-minded, I work in a plant and I’ve yet to find a Trekkie (by the way, trekkie is my license plate) so I never have a chance to talk to some other Trekkies and your magazine gives me that, with the “Roundtable".

I would love to go to a con, but so far they have all been too far away from where I live for me to afford it. Maybe if there were to be one in Columbia, S.C., or Augusta, Ga. (I live in between the two towns), I could afford it.

I’m a French war bride of twenty-seven years, and I’m now fifty years old; so if my English or spelling is not correct, please excuse my ignorance.

Now, I want to know why everybody calls all those horrible monster stories ST. Where is the science? I hate them, I like to be entertained, not frightened to death. Space science fiction is my bag. I’m giving you my two cents worth about Space: 1999: I enjoy the books a lot better than the TV shows.

Could you tell me why Mr. Gene Roddenberry insists on having Paramount Studios do Star Trek II? After the way they acted in 1968, I would think he’d try somewhere else. Surely the other studios are not blind, deaf, and dumb? They should realize, with all the popularity Star Trek still enjoys, that there must be a gold mine if they knew how to exploit it. It should be soon, because unfortunately we’re all getting old and so are the actors, and in a few years even the best makeup won’t help.

For your magazine, I have a few ideas that might help.

For instance, why not ask your readers to rate all of the seventy-nine episodes of ST and give you and all of us an idea of the most popular on down to the least?

Also, why not have a serial novel? Maybe some of the oldies-but-goodies, or some that fans could write?

I have an SF collection of paperback books of about 400. My most favorites are Doc E. E. Smith (the Lensman series and Skylarks ). I also have all 105 books of Perry Rhodan. (By the way, they try to say that P.R. is better than ST. That’s not true.) I also have Cap Kennedy, the Avenger, most of the Doc Savage series, and Space: 1999.

I don’t have to say that I have all of Star Trek by James Blish and all of the ST Logs series.

Since I see that you have fans from six to sixty-five, it would be nice to have a book review, where you could suggest the right kind of books for young readers, teenagers, etc. Since you are so busy and can’t possibly read all the books, I suggest you ask your readers.

For instance, I thought that all of the Kenneth Robeson books are good for the young set. So are The Ship Who Sang by Anne McCaffery, The Rolling Stones — David Starr by Isaac Asimov, etc.

But the three Rack books by Laurence James and the four Hook books by Eully Zetford are a little more spicy and should be read by grown-ups first.

I watch ST twice a day every week, and I never get tired of them, I love most of them; the only one I don’t like at all is “The Way to Eden,” Maybe it’s because I’m too old for the kind of thinking of those young people.

One more thing I want to tell you about me, I have made my den into a Star Trek museum. I have all the models I could find, and also the toys. Would you believe my children have given me ST toys for Xmas? No, I’m not in my second childhood, I never got out of my first one.

I’m sorry to have written such a long letter, but like I said, I don’t have any Trekkies around me except for my daughter, and I’m training my four-year-old grandson to be- come a Trekkie, so forgive me.

It just occurred to me that sometime if you run short on your publications, you could ask your fans for pictures of their displays of ST and show them in your mag. It could give other fans some ideas. Not mine, of course, for I don’t have the money or the room to do it in a big way.[2]”

The fan helped run COLTS (Club of Lonely Trekkers), a Star Trek correspondence club. She also was a member of The United Federation of Trekkers, a Star Trek fan club founded in 1980 by Eric L. Watts in Columbia, South Carolina.   She died on February 5, 1994 and was buried with her Star Trek communicator pin and a small replica of the Starship Enterprise.^[1]. One of her long-time friends requested that a short memorial be published in The Clipper Trade Ship.

Source: Fanlore

mariana-oconnor:

Sometimes I miss the old days of fandom when there were no centralised archives of fic or social media places and you had to hunt down individual websites for each writer, and then every now and then you’d stumble across a website that had a huge new selection of fics on it and it would be amazing. It was like being the Indiana Jones of the internet.

Sometimes you’d find hidden treasure, sometimes you’d find the same stuff you’d found before. But you never knew what else was out there to find.