oneshiptwoshipishipyouship:

flanoirbunny:

Shipping 10 Years Ago: YOUR SHIP IS BAD BECAUSE MINE’S BETTER AND YOU’RE A STINKY DOO DOO HEAD FOR LIKING IT

Shipping 5 Years Ago: hey guys let’s just ship whatever the hell we want and leave each other alone about it all right? cool

Shipping 2 years ago: Please write a minimum five-page feminist critique of your ship, examining any and all problematic aspects through the lens of queer and marxist theory, double spaced, 12-point font, MLA style citation, and wait 7 to 10 business days for council approval before shipping the thing

Shipping Now: I’m literally reporting you to the FBI for writing about fictional characters fucking

Trust me, there was no Golden Age of universal fandom harmony. I’d break it down more like…

Most Fans Forever: Ship and let ship, don’t like don’t read, let’s all have our own spaces and enjoy ourselves.

Minority of Fans Shitting Up The Place For Everyone Else, Forever: No one gets to ship my NOTPs for Reasons, now watch me throw a tantrum that would make a two-year-old child tell me to chill the fuck out.

70thousandlightyearsfromhome:

carlynroth:

Some thoughts on “Mary Sue”

First: What is a Mary Sue?

• Max Landis: “A Mary Sue is a character who is too good at stuff… And you can say that’s a strong female character, but that’s not what a strong female character is. A strong female character is not a character who is physically strong… Strong means well-drawn.”
• Beyond The Trailer: “The term was actually coined in 1973 by a woman, Paula Smith, when she decided to call out the unrealistic female characters popping up in Star Trek fan fiction.” A Mary Sue is a female character who is never humanized by failure, and is often the only woman in a sea of men (promoting women competing against one another over a single spot).
• WatchMojo: “Characters who, much like Lieutenant Mary Sue, are innately good at things for the sake of narrative convenience, and whose flaws are always endearing.”

So a Mary Sue is a female wunderkind or young genius, whose apparent disabilities of gender and age are not portrayed as disabilities at all, and who lacks the flaws and failures expected of the everyman archetype. Instead, she is more like an underaged version of the paragon archetype, but without the limitations or experiences that normally define a paragon-typed character. She is…

• Female
• Young
• Physically attractive
• Innately and unrealistically skilled at all or most things she tries
• Gently and endearingly flawed, but never really struggles with inability
• Never humanized by failure
• Often (but not always) the only female at the center of a story full of men
• Universally adored

But what if the Mary Sue is a natural result of the cacophony of messages thrown at girls and women regarding what makes a woman valuable? Consider the stereotypical portrayals of leading women in film and television media, and the concurrent expectations placed on women. A modern woman is expected to be…

• Female
• Young
• Physically attractive
• Innately and unrealistically gifted at an eclectic array of tasks and skills
• Gently and endearingly flawed (often so that the male hero can have a built-in reason to save this otherwise perfect woman… or so that she can fallback on using ‘feminine wiles’ to save herself, thus sexualizing her character)
• Smarter, kinder, and more insightful than the men around her (which is used to serve the goal of the male hero)
• The only prominent female in a story full of men
• Likeable in some way to the male characters around her, in order to earn the respect of men

Let’s be real: the woman I just described is the ideal counterpart to the everyman archetype. She is everything good that men value for themselves without being intimidating or threatening to the man’s privileged status, and without suffering from any flaws that could be interpreted as sexist stereotypes.

She also reads very similar to the Mary Sue, but with one very important difference: A true Mary Sue can fulfill this sexist narrative without capitulating to male dominance and privilege.

This isn’t about girls being shallow, or stupid, or bad writers. This is about systematically instilling an impossible standard in girls, and then shaming them for imagining female characters who can actually fulfill those impossible standards without men’s help. This is about wish-fulfillment characters looking different for men and women, due to men and women living under different sets of social expectations and values.

The sexism behind the Mary Sue trope isn’t that the term is disproportionately used against women over men; that’s been built into the definition of a Mary Sue since the trope’s inception. Males cannot be a Mary Sue. Male characters are wunderkinds, or young geniuses, or chosen ones; they are not Mary Sues. Men are not socialized to be flawless the way that women are. Men are socialized to use their brains or brawn to overcome their flaws.

Ironically, this has long been the accepted (and expected) formula for a so-called “well written” protagonist, regardless of that protagonist’s gender identity.

Some may argue that this type of character arc isn’t male or female, but simply human. I agree. It is human to be flawed, and to want to overcome. The problem is, women have systematically been treated as something less than human for so long, that accepting male-created archetypes as the human default can feel a lot like capitulation to systems that still oppress us.

“What, so men can pat themselves on the back for experiencing personal growth, hoard all of the credit for saving the day, and then expect to receive the love of an ideal woman like some kind of a reward for doing the right thing? Well, fine then. I guess I’ll just have to become an unattainable goddess who makes them all look like fools, and who nobody can have at the end. Fuck you, patriarchy.”

- a Mary Sue, probably

There is something to that.  I think the reason Mary Sues were so predominant in early fandom is for basically sexist reasons: fanfic writers were mostly female, and there really weren’t any female characters they could identify with in the canon.  So they wrote their (idealized) selves into their stories.

(As for why fanfic writers were over 90% female: I think Henry Jenkins, author of Textual Poachers, is correct.  Entertainment is skewed to male tastes from a young age.  Boys won’t watch “girl” movies, but girls will watch “boy” movies.  Guess which movies - and TV shows - tend to be made?  So from early childhood, girls learn to mentally re-write mainstream movies and tv shows to suit their tastes.  It’s a small step from there to fanfic.  Men have much less reason to do this, because they are more content with the product as-is.)

All that said…Mary-Sue is not necessarily female.  Wesley Crusher was widely considered a Mary-Sue, back in the days of TNG.  (Some tried to create a male version of the name, calling him a “Marty Stu,” but that never really caught on.) Barclay was another character who was frequently called a Mary-Sue.  (He is not as blatant a Mary-Sue as Wesley, but he was seen as a sort of fan avatar, and the other characters all loved him.)

I don’t understand how anyone can take AO3 for granted

fanfichasruinedmylife:

But then I remember what it was like trying to find fic back in the day.

Back in the early 00s, I used to maintain a site called Farscape Fan Fiction Links. It was an offshoot of something I’d started on the Farscape Bulletin Board called “The Church of Fanfiction Appreciation” where I’d begun trying to collect links to Farscape fanfic sites for other people to use.

As I did this, I developed the following process:

1. Click on a link provided by someone on the Board. This would take me to their site which I would then classify by pairings and whether or not it was Gen, Adult (Het pairings only), Slash, or a mixture of any of these.

2. Check to see if the site had its own links page. Follow these links to see if there were any sites on there that I hadn’t previously discovered.

3. Check to see if the site was a member of a Web Ring I hadn’t come across before. Click on those links to see if there were any new sites in there.

4. Check out the site’s Guest Book to see if anyone had left a site link in their sig. See if the site contained any fic. 

And so on. If I hit a dry period where nothing new appeared on the Board, I’d use a search engine. This was before Google had conquered the Internet, so I used a search engine called Dogpile. It would search the other search engines like Alta Vista and Yahoo and give a much larger grouping of results.

This went on for a few years until two things happened at once: 

1. Farscape was canceled.

2. I got accepted to grad school.

So, I stopped maintaining the site, and I have to admit that I felt a little guilty about it. Fortunately, this was about the time LiveJournal’s role in fandom was kicking into high gear, and with the advent of LJ Farscape Fic communities, I no longer felt like my services were going to be missed.

Oddly though, I found myself actually missing the process. There was a certain amount of satisfaction involved in finding new sites, especially ones that weren’t linked anywhere else. It felt like I was planting my flag all over the Farscape fandom, and it didn’t matter how small your site was. I would find you in the end.

Still, I’d be lying if I said I wanted to return to those days. Because Farscape wasn’t my only fandom, and I’ve always been a multi-fandom shipper. So, even without working on the site, I spent years doing the following:

1. Fall into a new fandom. 

2. Find all of the major fic archives in a fandom.

3. Read them dry.

4. Hunt for individual author sites.

5. Read them dry too.

 LJ made this process easier, as more and more people brought their work over there. But you still had to do a certain amount of searching, for like-minded accounts and communities. And if the fic you wanted to read was “friendlocked,” well, then you were just SOL, if you know what I mean. 

Fanfiction.net was always an alternative, of course, and I’m not saying there aren’t good fics over there. But the ones you found in individual fandom archives were often better, mostly because this was where the hardcore fans went to bleed all over their words.

AO3, thankfully, was built by those hardcore fans, so it’s been full of quality writing pretty much from the start. It paired that quality with Fanfiction.net’s “one stop shopping,” and slowly but surely, has been developing filters that make it easier and easier to find what you want.

Which for someone who used to have to click on a site and then read stories that didn’t even have their pairings marked is amazing.  Stories that didn’t come with warnings, or tags, or author’s notes, or any of the things we take for granted these days.

I remember having to blindly click and pray. 

And as much as I miss the thrill of discovery, I don’t miss the trauma of screaming “EW! Back Button! Back Button! Back Button!” at the top of my lungs.

I was willing to suffer so my fellow fans didn’t have to. But there’s no longer any need for that.

Now, we have AO3. A place where we have quality fic that’s clearly marked, and maintained by our fellow fans who have been with us through all the wars, through things like Cease and Desist letters and Takedown notices, through Strikethrough and the Purge.

It’s amazing to me that anyone could take this for granted.

Because speaking as someone who has traversed the jungle, I know how bad it can be, and more importantly, how bad it could someday be again.

redshoesnblueskies:

silks-stuff replied to your post “hello my name is redshoes - and I’m going to be really intense about…”

Agree with the sentiment but there’s nothing on this post that tells us HOW WE CAN HELP…

@silks-stuff - right now, so far as I can tell, what we have is:

1) Keep OTW funded (and they exceeded their fund drive goals this season - they fund raise 2x a year - much yay!) (it’s possible, incidentally, to make a monthly contribution of just a few dollars, which is super helpful to them and really minimal strain on us.  a Patreon payment model, if you will)

and

2) Speak clearly about the real reason there’s this ‘defund AO3/OTW, they’re just pocketing your money/the archive is no good anyway/they’re a haven for child abusers’ - the real reasons are censorship, purity culture, homophobia, misogyny and other gatekeeping/bigotries.  

This second point is what I’m talking about in my post specifically, since at the time I started reblogging on this situation, OTW/AO3′s fund drive had been successful.  

In a turn-about of nice irony for once, it was the OTW fund drive exceeding their goal that set off even more BS posts that seem to catch a lot of attention.

It is an age old strategy of those who wish to smear the good name of a person or organization, to simply tell the same lies over and over until they are accepted as truth.  This only works if we do not tell the truth, louder, longer, and with more passion.

Keep telling the truth - 

about how AO3 was founded
about how it is fan-owned and fan-managed
about how you can contribute about ten bucks and be a voting member
about how it is a non-profit
about its financial transparency
about the legal protection the OTW can offer fan creators

and

about how non-fan-owned-fandom-spaces inevitably treat fanworks - censorship - which is why owning our own archive is so fucking critical.  

Hope this helpful!

.

I’m ending up with a collection of posts that are *cough* rather a lot, so I’m reblogging several every day.  Some are dense fact-based posts on how AO3 is run, how it works, where it came from. Others are ‘why censorship is fucked up’ posts.  Others are ‘why we write what we write’ posts.  Others are fandom history (LJ, DW, AO3, strikethrough etc.) posts.  A couple are informative but also lighthearted (gasp).  

If folks want the whole list I’m drawing on thus far it’s here:

Foz’s great ‘Straight dudes of the world’ twitter thread

‘fanfic & capitalism’ - great explanation of how fanfic teaches youth about sexuality

Foz - On depression and hurt/comfort

Big Fair-Use post - legal stuff, well explained

the masterlist for Foz’s why censorship can’t work posts

the one that has a great breakdown of stats on how HUGE AO3 actually is

an explanation of how authoritarianism is the problem in this purity gatekeeping

AO3 is in the top 300 biggest websites in the WORLD serving out more that the library of congress & then ‘how a huge site like this works’

the AO3 origin story - wow

MASSIVE history post from strikethrough until now, ending with a Neil Gaiman quote in favor of ‘icky text’

the same MASSIVE history post with a different final addition worth reading

How AO3 is run and how to participate

AO3 fund drive post that that then dives into why they don’t censor

‘Archive of our Own’ - ‘A Room of Our Own’

AO3’s transparent financial reporting & a good rant

someone found their old Strikethrough graphic plus a sweet story of a young fan watching it unfold

A timeline of the LJ strikethrough & boldthrough mass blog deletions, the founding of DW, OTW/AO3 and tumblr (with subsequent tumblr blog deletions in a very similar vein).  (note: DW is not an OTW project - more below)

AO3 is a non-profit and exists for all of us to benefit from - readers, writers, fandom.  It’s not exploiting anyone for fuck’s sake.

Hello, my name is redshoes post - with specific AO3 history links (drawn from the above) now including this list.

.

DW wikipedia page says: Dreamwidth is an online journal service […] set up by ex-LiveJournal staff Denise Paolucci and Mark Smith, born out of a desire for a new community based on open access, transparency, freedom and respect. Dreamwidth was announced on 11 June 2008 and went into open beta on 30 April 2009.)

Antis: the possible origins

fiction-is-not-reality:

So I was looking around on the internet, and stumbled upon a few articles mentioning the anti movement in its earlier stages, before it took over tumblr and made a home there. 

First and foremost, a distinction: it’s always difficult to differentiate the line between fandom critical and fandom anti, especially in a time where there weren’t yet hard rules for how to act and how to speak if you wanted to belong to the community, but I think it’s necessary to observe that ambiguous razor edge since it’s what allowed sj rhetoric to be co-opted entirely for shipping purposes. 

Indeed being a critical fan isn’t new nor progressive. 
The Literate Union, Fandomination, sporking, Warriors For Innocence, Critics United all date back around 2008-2010 and even 2002. Hell, Mary Sue was coined in the early 70s, and badfics were a pillar of cringe culture. Couldn’t write this, shouldn’t have written that, it’s a chorus fandom writers have been hearing non-stop for decades. 

Fandom entitlement too, has been a thing ever since media has allowed a more direct interaction between fans and creators. Gaiman had to explain something very basic like “You’re not entitled to someone’s work when you’re not their boss” back in 2009, in an environment that more and more looked like needed not the remainder, but the lesson as if new altogether.

Whedon reflected on the incident when spotted in the lobby bar of a San Diego hotel. He said the relationship with fans had changed dramatically from when he was working on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s.

“Now that everybody can reach you directly, if you happen to be on social media, there is definitely a sense of not just 'We know better,’ but also 'We should have the right to dictate.’ That’s mean, but I was sent lots and lots of – not death threats – but more just polite inquiries as to why I have not died or killed myself yet, all because of Natasha and Bruce having a romance.”

But something happened that led to the anti phenomenon to take the shape we know today, with its hybridization with social justice rhetoric, fandom activism, and hard-wired violence, and it was a change that got hard to dismiss by the time 2013 rolled in. 

The Tumblr Your Fave is Problematic (YFIP) has one purpose: making sure you have a list of all the uncool things—read: racist, homophobic, sexist, ableist, sizeist, transphobic—your favorite celebrity has allegedly done or said. Normally it flies under the fandom radar, serving its intended purpose as a resource for people looking for the other side of the endless waves of praise that fandom can bestow on its chosen heroes.

Where SJ rhetoric and fandom activism meet and have a baby, the article points its finger at the 2013 blog for the call out culture that started surrounding VIPs and later on fandoms and fans, and it’s interesting to note that: 

“No one is saying these celebrities are inherently terrible people who should not have any fans, no one’s trying to demonize them,” a YFIP mod explained after the aforementioned John Green post. “We’re just making their problematic behavior, as well as their responses to criticism over it, readily available.” 

Which is a way different take from what we’re used to today, but it doesn’t look like fandom-related blogs inspired by YFIP took that memo too seriously.    

Talking of the normalization of violence in fandoms, instead, where the term “anti” arose because tumblr sucks and we were all missing LJ dearly (“because Tumblr has no functional community structure, meaning people started using the tags themselves to replace the communities from back on LJ. In that context, tagging a negative post with the tags that apply was making the posts show up in the only viable community structure, which was a violation of LJ etiquette (where communities were self-selecting and moderated). This was exacerbated by the lack of functional cut tags, so everything was all completely visible, and you had to scroll past every post in its entirety. The culture of “don’t post anti in the tag” was a social concept developed to deal with Tumblr’s non-functionality for fandom purposes”), the association between a certain anti-like behavior and fandom ships was already a problem on tumblr and twitter around 2012 when 1D was going hard and strong. 

If you’re thinking “Man, bandfandoms sure tend to attract fans that are out of control” you’re probably 1) not the only one, and 2) not all that wrong. Ship wars have always been extremely vicious, but there’s an argument that could be made about anti-like behavior suspiciously resembling what in bandfandoms and RPS spaces was known as being a “stan” (mind that now the meaning has lost its negative connotations in several newer fandoms).

“But the concept of an anti-fandom as a fandom all on its own may have arisen from K-pop fandom, where “Antis” have been at work for years bonding around their dislike of certain band members.”

We go far back in 2006 when an anti-fan poisoned a TVXQ member. 11 years later, an anti will give an artist a cookie with a needle in it, and it’s a bit like going full circle. 

I’ve read extremely interesting meta regarding antis’ cult and how it relates culturally to purity wank in the US culture (hello, @freedom-of-fanfic), but here, the link to kpop and bandfandoms is something I had yet to see floating around (but maybe I just missed it). 

5 Author Interviews Recorded by The Sunnydale Fanfic Club in 2018

thenewbuzwuzz:

Prepare for an onslaught of rec reposts from buffyversetop5.dreamwidth.org.

The podcast @thesunnydalefanficclub​ is one of my favorite things that have been happening in Buffy fandom lately. I love how interactive and community-oriented it is, and I love getting writing advice and story trivia from some of my favorite authors, hearing about the experiences of other fans, and discovering bits of fandom history. This list is going to be highly subjective, so if interviews with Buffyverse fanfic authors sound fun, I recommend browsing their annotated episode list on libsyn to see for yourself which episodes might interest you. Below are some of the ones I have enjoyed most. Assume all episodes are NSFW by default.

Keep reading

Back in My Day:

lierdumoa:

On Being a Teen in the Late 90s/Early 00s & Reading Fictional Porn Before AO3 Existed

.

So like, when I was a horny high school sophomore, I greedily hunted down – and masturbated to – all the fictional porn I could get my hands on. I hadn’t discovered fandom yet. But my parents let me read whatever the fuck I wanted at Barnes and Noble.

Some of my masturbatory material included:

Romance novels by popular romance novel author Johanna Lindsey – typical hetero romance novel fare, usually featuring an innocent young virgin and a love interest at least 15 years her senior. Pretty much all of the sex scenes were dubious consent at best, with some outright rape fantasies thrown in.

Jean M. Auel’s Earth’s Children series, book 2: The Valley of Horses in particular. A ton of porn in that book. There’s a fairly graphic scene in which the main protagonist gets horny watching horses go at it. There’s also a sex scene in which the male romantic lead gets super excited to have finally found a woman whose vagina is deep enough to take his entire giant horsecock schlong without banging up her cervix. Or was that book 3?

Sex scenes buried in sci-fi novels. 

My parents had a huge sci-fi collection.  Octavia Butler’s Imago has a long, involved dub-con poly sexfest between two fraternal twins and an alien hybrid. 

Scott Westerfeld, before he got into young adult fiction, wrote a very adult sci-fi novel called Polymorph about a shapeshifter who has a ton of kinky shapeshifter sex with people of all genders. One of the sex scenes towards the end of the book involves the protagonist battling the villain while he’s fused his nervous system with hers and is giving her a ton of orgasms while simultaneously trying to murder her. 

The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror anthology series. I bought like 5 of these. There was usually at least one short story in there with queer people, and it usually had a sex scene, and the sex scene usually had a bunch of dub-con or non-con because it was a sex scene in a horror anthology.

By the time I discovered fanfiction at age 16, I’d already been reading and getting off on book porn for years – published romance, fantasy and sci-fi novels geared towards adults, featuring adult characters having sex.

I didn’t read these stories because I wanted to have sex with adults. I didn’t even want to have sex with older teens. I didn’t even want to have sex at all at that point. I just wanted to read porn, and masturbate to it, in the privacy of my own teenaged bedroom. My wanting fictional porn to masturbate to had nothing to do with wanting to have sex in real life. I didn’t even try to lose my virginity until I was 21.

My first fandoms were Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Smallville, and Harry Potter. The characters in those fandoms were mostly close to my age. I was excited to be reading porn about characters who I could kind of relate to for once.

I didn’t care how old the people writing said fanfic were – though I noticed that the porn written by adults tended to be a lot better, in terms of writing quality, than the porn written by teenagers.

It never occurred to me to think of the adults who wrote that fanfiction as predators who wanted to molest teenagers. First off, I had to lie about my age in order to read it, which was a glaring sign that the adults who wrote this fiction had no interest in targeting people my age with it.

For another, I was a teen reading and writing pornography about characters older than myself, who did not, at the time want to have sex with either adults or fellow teens. So I didn’t assume that adults writing characters my age wanted to have sex with people my age either.

Fictional porn and real-life sex have always been to very clearly separate categories in my head.

Now that I’m an allosexual adult, who has had and enjoys sex, I still don’t want to have the kind of sex I like to read about in fanfic porn. The kind of sex I like having and the kind of porn I like reading have very little in common.

I think the same goes for the adults who were writing pornographic Harry Potter fanfic back in 2007 when strikethrough happened.

I find that often when adults do write about teenagers, it’s more about remembering themselves as teens, and exploring the unfulfilled fantasies they themselves remember having as teenagers, and re-living their own pasts, and re-examining their own psycho-sexual development, than it is about having any interest whatsoever in the teens that exist in the real world now. 

It’s perhaps worth noting that the Harry Potter series seems to take place pre-internet, even though the internet had already been around for many years by the time the books came out. Meaning: Rowling was likely drawing on her own teen experiences to write the characters, rather than trying to relate her books to contemporary teens. 

Which also explains why the books garnered such a large adult audience when they were initially released, and also why most millennials found the series epilogue particularly difficult to relate to.

.

TL&DR I’m just using my own anecdotal experiences as someone who’s been in fandom since I was a teenager, to explain why I find the current anti-discourse surrounding AO3, and underage fiction on AO3, spurious. The arguments against AO3 porn seem largely predicated on false equivalencies, and a misunderstanding of the pschology behind and the sociological function of textual porn in fandom in particular or in fiction in general.

antishipping as the ‘cool new trend’

freedom-of-fanfic:

freedom-of-fanfic:

or: why are most antis under 25 years old? (posted June 2017)

I really think that antishipping is a movement that’s gaining ground with the younger & newer arrivals to fandom spaces; a kind of ‘cool trend’, so to speak. In aggregate, antishipping culture is beautifully constructed to be particularly appealing to teenage or college-age people in the late 2010′s - and especially American people - who are marginalized, oppressed, often social outcasts in real life and often under-educated about their own marginalized identity, and I kind of wanted to get into why.

EDIT (October 2018): this post is was originally put up in June 2017. I’ve tweaked it a bit to correct some stuff I now think is just patronizing/incorrect, but overall, I now think it’s overly reliant on adolescent growth stages when the best explanations are societal changes (fandom being on viral social media, fandom being conflated with social justice activism, and increasingly authoritarian trends in 21st century America.)

the other day I posted to talk a little about why I think antis tend to be young (and American). To sum up & simultaneously add a little more:

• a brain still growing - until the age of 22-25, the frontal lobe of the brain does not finish development. the frontal lobe handles higher reasoning skills and complex problem-solving. Thus: the growing mind is particularly prone to incomplete reasoning, black and white thinking, and total empathy failure, making it hard for those under 25 to fully comprehend the impact of their actions, sympathize with others, or tackle social problems with nuance. Truly comprehending that others come from entirely different worldviews or have entirely different experiences and that being different doesn’t make them wrong and that most deep-seated problems need complex solutions that require nuance tends to come with this final brain growth. (Not always, of course. but often.) nah I’ve completely changed my mind on this. It’s true that physiological changes are still occurring in teens that make empathy harder, but they can respect the choices of others just as well as an adult can.
• current American sex education being mostly scaremongering and abstinence-only + ready availability of sexual content, specifically pornographic material, online + hypersexual marketing = a deeply fucked cultural understanding of sex that adolescents are particularly unequipped to detangle
• escaping religious/Christian fundamentalism but not  black&white thinking or authoritarian ‘us vs them’ mindset: the moral/communal purity that organized Christianity often demands can take years to deprogram (and this is not to mention the gender essentialism, homophobia/queerphobia, and anti-sex/anti-kink messages, accompanied by a strong undercurrent of anti-intellectualism to discourage self-education on these subjects!) teens just breaking away from this toxicity are especially unequipped to untangle themselves. Young ppl tend to take the same worldview/us vs them/b&w thinking they grew up with to a more liberal cause instead (such as enforcing ‘social justice’ in shipping), with a side-order of internalized, unexamined anti-lgbt/sex/kink/etc rhetoric that dovetails rather neatly with exclusionist rhetoric.
• exclusionary gatekeeping as baby’s first lgbt/queer culture lesson - transformative fandom is a frequent haven for marginalized people who don’t see themselves in the media they consume (so they change the media to meet their emotional, sexual, social, etc needs, you see?). because it’s not taught in schools here in the US, it’s not too uncommon for newcomers to get their first big dose of history and cultural education that’s not centered around straight white men in fandom. but what are they learning? here on tumblr, since about 2013, exclusionists have used the relative lack of education on queer history to build an false history, one where the gender binary is strongly enforced and sexualities can only exist on the binary axis: nb/queer/ace/pan and sometimes even bi and trans -identifying people are erased or ‘not oppressed enough’. this history is the one that young entrants into fandom are more likely to encounter first and have no knowledge with which to counter it.  Antishipping derives its mode of operation and principle values from exclusionists. It dictates who can write or do what based on their sexual/gender identity (and sometimes race as well). Its definition of social justice is also heavily influenced by exclusionists because its members are mostly young people who learned all their queer history from exclusionists.
• the particularly adolescent vulnerability to peer pressure (the need to belong & the fear of being ostracized): teens are particularly inclined to be influenced by friendships and maintaining social ties. […]  it’s easy to become an anti in order to keep your friends and almost impossible to quit without losing everything, and teens are especially vulnerable to this kind of social structure.  I think this was a factor 18 months ago, but not so much now. both ‘sides’ of this argument are pretty well-known and people in fandom can have strong opinions on shipping or anti-shipping from very early on.
• less focus on teaching critical thinking & self-government. Education in America has long been aimed towards adequate training to work an assembly line, but 21st century American parenting and education both have neglected teaching young people how to make decisions for themselves & how to engage in critical analysis of what they see and read. antishipping is a highly cohesive, insular culture with enforced rules of conduct, striking clear in/out lines and valuing loyalty and groupthink over originality and intellectualism. also: keeping the party line & persecution of outsiders is encouraged, further strengthening the need to conform.
• having a just cause & a space to control: antishipping rests its laurels on a(n incomplete, corrupted) form of social justice/righting the wrongs of the privileged. being an anti feels like making a difference b/c your actions have visible impact on your immediate surroundings. (and having a space you feel you can control can be even more urgent with additional pressures like abusive home situations, past traumatic experiences, academic pressure, untreated/unrecognized mental illness, being forced into the closet b/c of queer/transphobia, etc.)
• an American (and to a lesser degree, western European) post 9/11* cultural shift from prioritizing personal freedom to prioritizing communal safety; those under the age of 20 were 3 or younger or not yet born when the shift happened. antishipping prioritizes communal ‘safety’ (‘bad’, ‘dangerous’, or ‘inappropriate’ things must never be mentioned to protect people from hearing about them and being either corrupted or harmed) over personal freedom (allowing ‘bad’/’dangerous’ things to be  discussed, and it is up to the individual to personally decide what content to avoid).

(*actually, this shift started in the US before 9/11. 9/11 just sped it up.)

of course, all of this is conjecture based on my own experiences and observations, and it’s not a set of rules - just circumstances that I believe absolutely encourage young fandom members to end up falling headfirst into antishipping and either never notice how hurtful it is or never get the courage to leave it behind. And I think there’s a lot more the popularity/prevalence of antishipping today, but this post is already longer than I meant it to be.

(I always go light on racism when i talk about antishipping because while antis frequently accuse shippers of racism, it’s disingenuous to class racism as the same kind of oppression as lgbt+-phobia & misogyny, particularly in America - they’re related, but not the same. Centering non-white (and especially black) voices does not get the same focus as centering lgbt and women’s voices in fandom, and I think it’s easy to dismiss legitimate charges of racism as ‘anti bullshit’ when we class all these types of marginalization together.)

edited an old post a bit because it’s pretty outdated. fandom anti-shipping has changed a lot, and my understanding of fandom anti-shipping has also changed a lot. this edit reflects that to some degree.

What “Archive of Our Own” Refers to

olderthannetfic:

olderthannetfic:

I just saw a bunch of “Stop shoving your feminism in my face” type comments on that other post. So I’m going to be pedantic and point out, yet again, where the name came from.

Astolat’s post proposing an archive was titled “An Archive of One’s Own”. This is a reference to A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, which is described on Wikipedia as:

“An important feminist text, the essay is noted in its argument for both a literal and figurative space for women writers within a literary tradition dominated by men.”

Astolat called for name suggestions for the archive. Nobody ever came up with anything more popular than the original reference, and the slightly modified ‘Archive of Our Own’ stuck.

AO3 welcomes people of all genders, but the very name itself is a reference to feminist thought and female writers. This should be–but isn’t–obvious to many fans today.

Answering this comment because I think it’s important:

ellieintheskywithroxy

this is fine and all but I and many other people don’t really appreciate the type of feminism that puts women on a pedestal above men and acts like men are the root of all evil. a lot of the time in fandom I really get the feeling this is the sort of mindset people have here. I think people in that post assumed it was that sort of thing, having no context.

ftr the people I saw on the post are people I’ve talked to and/or am mutuals with, so I think my assessment of the situation on their side is pretty accurate.

There are assholes in every movement. I’ve certainly seen the occasional piece of truly anti-male rhetoric. But, on the whole, you’re talking about a type of feminist strawman who rarely exists in practice. Anti-feminist dickheads have been spreading the idea of this type of strawman for years to try to discredit the entire concept of feminism. (And, yes, many people who spread this dumb view are themselves women.) They have a vested interest in suppressing feminism.

Fanfiction has always had enthusiasts who are men and who are other genders, but it’s very much a piece of women’s history. When your kneejerk reaction is “But men!”, that’s not coming from a good place, even if you’re not conscious of it.

It’s like trying to reclaim knitting and quilting for men.

Fanfiction is just as self-evidently associated with women as knitting and quilting are, but it has become mainstream and cool enough in recent years that people constantly try to shake off the ~icky girl cooties~. They claim they’re being “equal” or “fair” or “inclusive”, but what they’re actually doing is getting upset that the overwhelming majority of fic writers are women and trying to minimize that any way they can.

It shouldn’t be necessary to always provide context to prove that men tried to steal something from women. Men regularly take not-for-profit crafts done by women and try to monetize them. Men regularly take a women’s thing mainstream. Men regularly get lauded for doing something women have done before. This isn’t anti-male to point out: this is the reality of the sexist world we live in.

Look at any discussion of Henry Jenkins vs. all of the female scholars of fandom history for a good example. Henry actively credits and promotes female scholars, but reporters and their like still turn to him before they’ll call up a woman for a quote. Even men who are well-meaning and try to curb this tendency can’t magically fix our culture. No one person can.

In this case, a bare bones history of AO3 is that astolat got pissed at FanLib, a venture capital startup site run by men to monetize and sanitize fic. It ran ads that implied fic writers are men. She made a post referencing Virginia Woolf. Lots of women got on board because we too were pissed about FanLib.

The monetizing was shitty, but more than that, this was always blatantly a gendered conflict.

We all knew it back then, and it was driving our rage. That’s part of why the name ‘AO3′ stuck. We named the archive after a famous feminist essay about making space for women’s writing in a sexist, hostile, male-oriented world because that is the problem we were facing.

I get that you guys lacked that context. That’s part of why I made this post. That doesn’t change the fact that your reactions were coming from the same anti-feminist propaganda that has infected our whole culture. The problem isn’t that anyone said something mean or that I think you need to be called out or anything like that.

The problem is that your first instinct was to assume it was all bullshit. It never occurred to you guys to even wonder whether the twitter poster might have known more than you and been referencing real events that happened exactly as they said.

It doesn’t make you bad. It does mean you need a history lesson.

elfwreck:

jascel:

I swear this happens every couple of months (either on Ao3 or here) where people shout about how Ao3 endorses child porn because of the underage tag

you know what, there are actually some really grizzly fics out there that I would never touch, I think they’re so gross and I wish they’d never been written… but there’s a handy dandy filter we have now that excludes the underage tag (so you don’t have to see that - it was made just for you!) or you can also, you know, just scroll past and not click on the fic!!!

and on that note, not everything under the underage tag is child porn… there are thousands of fics marked underage because a 19 year old and a 16 year old have sex/engage in sexual activites… is that child porn now?

NO

I’ve also read numerous, so well-written they should be novels, fics where rape/non-con of adults or minors is used as a plot point… the character(s) get to work through it, heal and sometimes maybe find love…

it’s not all bad - you want to start a purge/banning of Ao3 over tags that encompass a whole bunch more than just child porn and violent sexual fantasies

it’s one of the few quality sites for fics we have left

Don’t worry; AO3 is not going to start banning/purging the underage fics. AO3 was founded so that fics that got thrown out of other archives would have a place to stay.

There were discussions, when AO3 was set up, about what needed the “underage” tag; they eventually settled on “human under the age of 18 having sex” - this was mostly for the benefit of Australian fans, who could get in legal trouble just by reading such fics. 

Nonhumans? No standards. Nobody knows what underage is for elves. Nor dragons. Nor clones that were decanted yesterday with a hundred years’ of mental training.

What “Archive of Our Own” Refers to

olderthannetfic:

jghillegass:

olderthannetfic:

I just saw a bunch of “Stop shoving your feminism in my face” type comments on that other post. So I’m going to be pedantic and point out, yet again, where the name came from.

Astolat’s post proposing an archive was titled “An Archive of One’s Own”. This is a reference to A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, which is described on Wikipedia as:

“An important feminist text, the essay is noted in its argument for both a literal and figurative space for women writers within a literary tradition dominated by men.”

Astolat called for name suggestions for the archive. Nobody ever came up with anything more popular than the original reference, and the slightly modified ‘Archive of Our Own’ stuck.

AO3 welcomes people of all genders, but the very name itself is a reference to feminist thought and female writers. This should be–but isn’t–obvious to many fans today.

Wasn’t a Room of One’s Own also a reference to a place to write?

Woolf is being both literal and figurative, yes.

olderthannetfic:

actualaster:

shipping-isnt-morality:

betaadamantium:

shipping-isnt-morality:

honestly all discussion of strikethrough and AO3 moderation seems to me to miss the actual point of strikethrough, which is: don’t give any site moderation powers that you wouldn’t be comfortable with homophobes having

“but I’m not comfortable with homophobes having any power!”

👀

This is what drive me nuts about this narrative. They think we’re okay with CP (while also apparently being ignorant to the fact that written and illustrated CP – while abhorrent – are not illegal, at least in America) and ignore the fact that we’re saying “If this particular objectionable thing is censored, The Authorities are going to come after what you love next.”

And we’ve seen it happen time and time again in history. It’s all very, “First they came for…” rhetoric.

The language they’re using is the same as that used by those who condemn homosexuality, just couched a little differently as “won’t somebody think of the children.” Which is weirdly reminiscent of how TERFs frequently spout alt-right rhetoric.

I wonder if there’s a connection there.

I’m reminded of that fable of the horse and the hunter:

A quarrel had arisen between the Horse and the Stag, so the Horse came to a Hunter to ask his help to take revenge on the Stag.

The Hunter agreed, but said: “If you desire to conquer the Stag, you must permit me to place this piece of iron between your jaws, so that I may guide you with these reins, and allow this saddle to be placed upon your back so that I may keep steady upon you as we follow after the enemy.”

The Horse agreed to the conditions, and the Hunter soon saddled and bridled him.

Then with the aid of the Hunter the Horse soon overcame the Stag, and said to the Hunter: “Now, get off, and remove those things from my mouth and back.”

“Not so fast, friend,” said the Hunter. “I have now got you under bit and spur, and prefer to keep you as you are at present”.

we have to assume that any moderation power we give to authorities will be exploited and turned on us. what part of the fiascos of moderation on twitter, Facebook, livejournal, YouTube, Instagram, fanfiction.net, do I need to keep going, has given you the impression that won’t be the case?

For all the kids out there:

This isnt a slippery slope argument. This is something we have literally witnessed REPEATEDLY when it comes to digital spaces and fandom in particular. (To say nothing of pre-internet instances, that is)

This has happened before, multiple times.

Every time people said “it won’t happen THIS time” IT DID.

So unless you want to only be able to have 100% EC (for early childhood) rated content with no violence, no even romance (kissing not just sex because kissing leads to Impure Thoughts), zero content that isnt straight and cis…

Then shut up, sit down, and take to heart that if one doesn’t pay attention to history they are doomed to repeat it.

That’s what’s so galling about it all: These aren’t vague hypotheticals from the distant past. They’re things that happened in fandom, recently, to people who are talking about them on Tumblr.

kiiyarayne:

i think what bothers me the most about the little shits who hate AO3’s donation drives and assume that OTW is pocketing the money is that these little shits are taking the site for granted. for some of these kids, they’ve never had a real fandom experience without an ad-free site that cracks down hard on harassment and allows literally any kind of fanwork under the sun regardless of fandom, content, or rating.

because they have a legal team composed of people who believe fanworks are covered under fair use and aren’t copyright infringement, they can defend our right to create fanworks in the first place.

because the creators lived through purge after purge, with fanworks being removed by the purity police or personal archive sites shutting down, they wanted a place where all fanworks could be safe from slash-and-burn tactics that frequently end up targeting queer stories and authors first and hardest, and wouldn’t be subject to a single person no longer being able to pay to keep a domain or server space for their favorite fics.

I remember the days of ff.net’s refusal to allow NC-17 works, which you could safely ignore if you were writing a straight pairing, but as a slash author? i was terrified of having my work permanently removed and all my hard work to get reviews undone. I remember when they banned songfics, and the author of one story i followed that had written completely original lyrics to an instrumental song had to take that section out of his fic for fear the whole 100k+ fic was taken down

with AO3, people no longer have that fear. sure, they could use ad revenue to fund the server costs, but then they’d either have to rely on ad networks that use tracking data and intrusive ads or else hand-select ads that are safe for everyone’s computers and phones. and THEN they’d have to hope that enough people didn’t use ad blockers on their site to actually pay the server costs

if OTW and the AO3 go down, kiss all that shit you kids in fandom take for granted goodbye. cease and desist letters from Disney (who owns Marvel) because you’re writing a popular Steve/Tony MCU fanfic and posting it to your personal blog, and that kind of thing “makes the company look bad” and could somehow be stumbled on by someone who doesn’t know what fanfiction is and thinks it’s an official Disney/Marvel-owned story

think that’s bullshit? it happened to an owner of a Batman erotica fansite before ff.net existed. WB sent her a cease and desist letter with that exact same reasoning. they probably sent out hundreds of those, but what can an individual do to stop a major corporation from taking down their personal fanfic site? but if you have a company running that archive, with a legal team that will fight back against those takedown notices because fanworks can, do, and always should fall under the label of “fair use” then people can continue to make their fandom a safe place… for fandom creators. take away the safety for creators to produce their content, whatever content that might be, and you’re on the way to losing fandom.

kari-izumi:

One last post on AO3 and fanfic archives, then I’m done (at least, until the next drive)

Because frankly, I’m tired of repeating myself and beating this dead horse and hopefully the next time AO3 has a drive P!llowfort will have taken off and we can all have our separate comms again.

I took a look at a few other places that used to be big to see. I’ll start with Adult Fanfiction dot org to see how their monthly drive is going:

Oh, look at that! Nothing! In fact, I haven’t seen one solitary dime get donated there in the years since they’ve started taking donations, not the least of that being because the site actually hasn’t updated it’s layout ever in it’s sixteen years of existance, except to change from a purple to tan layout and an age filter that was added around 2006. You can barely even navigate that site and it was a headache and a half to use, even way back then.

And there’s Media Miner that sorta co-existed with FF dot net for a while, and was big with anime fandom. This too was a site that never did much to keep up with the times. I would never use that site, except for the fact that one of my favorite authors still has a WIP there and somehow had not heard of AO3 until I told him about it upon reaching out last month:

Note that they use ads, and that there ads are obnoxious as fuck, even with ad block.

Again, apart from the layout of the theme, there’s not much in the way of user-friendly features, either. The search feature is better than AFF’s, though.

However, my search, I came across a number of older archives that could no longer afford hosting costs, or find anyone with time to keep up the archive that decided to transfer all their works to AO3 rather than just delete outright (as was common in the old days of free Geocities sites). Many of the other active ones, like the HP Archive asked for donations to cover server costs. For that site specifically, $750 covered them for six months.

In summary: there’s a reason we defend AO3. Hell, the scattered websites and email circles are the reason why even ff dot net was a godsend twenty years ago for rarepair shippers, niche writers and teenage girls like me who were far too broke to create my own webpage. It was a way into fandom and that is an idea worth defending.

Bonus:

I’m gonna add links to a few of the archives I came across for those that would like alternatives:

Asian Fanfics: dedicated to Asian fandom and Asian centric works. Looks like the tag system is pretty straightforward and may be a good place to find fic for titles not well known in the West.

Ficwad: pretty small and I don’t think it allows anything above an R rating. Still in beta and maybe will be glad for increased traffic from those who want to not use AO3. They even have a suggestion box for new categories for fandoms and/or characters.

kari-izumi:

HAPPY 20 YEARS TO FF.NET!

It was launched twenty years ago today, and single-handedly changed the fandom game. It opened Fanfic hosting to anyone with an email address, including fangirls like myself that couldn’t afford servers or connected to fandom to get hosted anywhere.

It’s fallen in decline in recent years, but I feel like it deserves a shout-out for being the predecessor for all that’s come after it, AO3 included 👍👌

hello my name is redshoes - and I’m going to be really intense about this ‘Fucking Save AO3 from Idiots’ thing for the next little while.

redshoesnblueskies:

I will be reblogging a lot of posts about the attempts to defund/tarnish/etc. AO3/the OTW that have fucking amazing important content FOR THE FORESEEABLE FUTURE. (tag http://redshoesnblueskies.tumblr.com/search/censorship if you want to find a pile of them)

…frankly if y’all aren’t doing the same, I’m boggled as to WHY NOT - but hey, maybe not everyone gives a shit that fandom would lose our homebase and be instantly opened up to actually quite really large quantities of legal action against us from all sides if AO3 goes down.

Reblog this shit people - we can’t do very much other than vote when it comes to current politics BUT WE CAN SURE AS FUCK DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS.

STEP UP.  Name the truth about why the attacks on AO3/OTW’s ‘finances’ are happening - it’s fundamentally the same attack made against every fandom space ever: “I find your story-content preference to be amoral and I will take the whole archive down to Defend Purity.”

Name the real reason.  Keep naming it.

If we don’t defend AO3 with every means we have, we don’t deserve to have it.

____

fandom history links - read them. this is why we need AO3. this is why we made AO3.

what fanfic, fanworks and fandom were like before AO3, before we had that home, before we had the safety of owning our own spaces (’We have to own the servers’!), and before we had the freakin’ legal help that AO3 gives (can you defend yourself against a ‘fanfic isn’t fair-use’ lawsuit from a motion picture company? cause I know I sure can’t….).

‘We have to own the servers.’  fuck yes we do

fantastic Foz posts from a while ago, addressing the ‘well just censor content and then you’re not godless heathens’ fallacy...

redshoesnblueskies:

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]

fozmeadows: Consider my metaphoric table well and truly flipped.

fozmeadows: And if pointing all that out ruined your post, then maybe it needed ruining.

fozmeadows: but I genuinely don’t believe there’s a safe, reliable mechanism for excluding [some fanfic] that won’t massively fuck over a whole bunch of other stuff in the process.

fozmeadows: 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

fozmeadows: when people single out the kind of fics that are classed as badwrong porn without considering that they might play a role in the sexual enjoyment and healing of victims, it’s very difficult to accept the simultaneous claim that all this moral crusading is for the benefitof victims.

.

The series of posts begins:

“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.“

shipping-isnt-morality:

honestly all discussion of strikethrough and AO3 moderation seems to me to miss the actual point of strikethrough, which is: don’t give any site moderation powers that you wouldn’t be comfortable with homophobes having

“but I’m not comfortable with homophobes having any power!”

👀

supercalvin:

Y’all are brats complaining about ao3- I would happily give a $10 donation once or twice a year if it meant the continued research and preservation of transformative works- Not to mention you little shits never had to deal with the fucking horrible and counterintuitive sites like 2009 ff.net or lj or wordpress. Talk to me when you have to deal with zero filters with thousands of fics in one category or searching for part 4/12 on a lj blog with hundreds of entries

On the AO3 all these years later

olderthannetfic:

drst:

olderthannetfic:

drst:

olderthannetfic:

cesperanza:

olderthannetfic:

redwingstarling:

cathexys:

fairestcat:

fairestcat:

The tenth anniversary of the OTW and all the AO3 discussion going around this week inspired me to go look at astolat’s original post about creating an An Archive Of Our Own, and found my comment on it:

“I think this is needed and long past needed.

There are of course huge fanfic archives out there like ff.net, but the bigger and more public the site, the more restrictive it is, the more stuff around the edges gets cut off. I don’t WANT the public face of fanfic to be only the most easily palatable stuff, with the smut and the kink and the controversial subjects marginalized and hidden under the table.

And I particularly don’t want to see us all sitting around feeling frustrated while this fabulous community is commodified out from underneath us.

I’m not fit to be a project manager, but I’m great with details and general organizational work. If someone takes this and runs with it, I’d love to help.“

Eleven years and rather a lot of volunteer-hours later, I stand by every single word.

And then I found my original post on the idea that became the OTW/AO3, which says in part:

“However, as I was reading the comments over there, I noticed a frustrating, but not surprising number of comments along the lines of “well, it’s a good idea, but it’s way too ambitious”

I’m not talking about the really useful and practical comments bringing up pitfalls and difficulties to be aware of from the get go with something this massive and complex, I’m talking about all the comments that go something like this:

–

Amen. I want a site like that. I’d pay money for an archive like that, and I’d invest time and effort to make sure it’s as great as it can be. […] But then I hit the realism switch in my brain and it goes ‘splodey. Because sadly it’s not a very realistic concept.

And this:

–

In a perfect world it could be an amazing thing and a great way to “rally the troops” so to speak and provide a sort-of one-stop shop for fan-fiction readers and writers. I see a couple potential problems, though.

Or this:

–

Oh god.

I like what you’re saying, I really do, but I think it’s actually impossible to achieve.

and all the various comments that start with

“It sounds like a cool idea…but”

or words to that effect.

Taken separately, these comments don’t seem like much, but every time a new one showed up I couldn’t help but be reminded of

this post by commodorified, and her oh so brilliant and beautiful rant therein:

“WOMEN NEED TO LEARN TO ASK FOR EVERY DAMN THING THEY WANT.

And here are some notes:

Yes, you. Yes, everything. Yes, even that.

All of it. Because it’s true. We’re mostly raised to live on table scraps, to wait and see what’s going when everyone else has been served and then choose from what’s left. And that’s crap, and it’ll get you crap.

Forget the limited menu of things that you automatically assume is all that’s available given your (gender, looks, social class, education, financial position, reputation, family, damage level, etc etc etc), and start reading the whole menu instead.

Then figure out what you want. Then check what you’ve got and figure out how to get it. And then go after it baldheaded till either you make it happen or you decide that its real cost is more than it’s worth to you.”

And THAT is what Astolat’s post is about. It’s about saying “THIS is what we want, let’s make it happen.” It’s about aiming for the ideal, not for some artificially imposed, more “realistic” option.

And I think that’s fabulous. And I think we CAN do this, we CAN make this amazing, complicated idea happen. But in order to do so we’re going to have to be careful about those little voices inside our heads saying “well, it’s a nice idea, but” and “there’s no point in trying for that impossible thing, let’s aim for this ‘more realistic’ goal instead.”

Because, damn it, why shouldn't we ask for every damn thing we want. And why shouldn't we go out there and get it?”

I am so pleased to have been proved correct. 

(And also, in the category of “women need to ask for every damn thing they want”? I took those words to heart, which is one of many reasons Marna/commodorified and I have been married for going on eight years.)

ETA: I know some of the links are broken, they copied over from my original post and I didn’t have the energy to either delete them or track them down elsewhere.

Asking for it and doing it!!!

So inspiring. And yes - at the time this seemed such a pipedream, but look at it now!

Yup. I remember saying I’d support it regardless, but it would only really be useful to me as a poster if it allowed every kind of content. Heh.

God this brings it back.  People saying we couldn’t do it, that we would never be able to do it, etc. And then there was the sort of six months later moment where people were like, but where is it? (!)  Dudes, we had to found a nonprofit company first! so we could be legal and raise money and pay taxes and have a bank account and enter contracts - and moreover, the archive was written from scratch: from a single blinking cursor on the screen, custom-designed from the ground up.  I remember that I had the job of tracking wireframes in the early days as the real designers figured out how the flow of pages in the archive were going to go. Amazing.

Anyway,  I want to say that the group that came together around the OTW /AO3 in those first years had a track record like WHOA: so many of those people had been archivists, web-admins, fannish fest-runners, newsletter compilers, community moderators, listmoms (kiddies, you won’t know what this is) or had other fannish roles that gave them enormous experience in working collaboratively in fandom and keeping something great going year after year. And  OTW continues to attract great people–and so also, while I’m blathering, let me say that volunteering for the OTW also provides great, real world experience that you can put on your resume, because AO3 is one of the top sites in the world and TWC has been publishing on time for ten years and Fanlore is cited in books and journalism all the time and Open Doors has relationships with many meatspace university libraries and archives etc. so if you think you have something to bring to the table, please do think about volunteering somewhere. It’s work, believe me, but it’s also pretty g-d awesome.

I remember when people started going on about “Where is it? Is it DEAD?” at the six month mark. You know what that was?

Laura Hale trying to start shit.

Her glowing FanLib writeup originally had some language about OTW being dead, and she was actively promoting the idea that it had failed while FanLib remained. It was all cloaked in meta trappings on Fanthropology, but it was her usual PR campaign stuff. People were skeptical independently too, but she was definitely stirring up a lot of the specific “Six months is long enough to build an archive” stuff.

Didn’t she end up selling FanLib to someone, or let bots scrape it and steal shit or something?

Nah. Laura Hale didn’t own FanLib. She was employed by them in some dodgy capacity, apparently? But the site itself was more of a venture capital startup bro thing. They sold it to Disney, who shut it down.

Hale did fill her wiki (the Fan History Wiki) with scraped crap from ffn and other sites. She tried and failed to sell that wiki. She had an embarrassing pitch for it on some kind of pitch site, which caused wank.

I wouldn’t have even known who she was except that she threw a fit when OTW announced the idea of Fanlore–since an actually community-sourced wiki covering fandom history would cut into her power/marketshare/ability to hawk hers to sucker investors.

Right FanLib was the venture capital bros site, I think. I got into a conversation with one of them via email and they forgot to clip out previous parts of the conversation and learned they were calling me “hostile” for my comments.

I remember Hale trying to create a wiki and stealing a bunch of content for it from people too.

Good old Fan History Wiki! /sarcasm

(See Fanlore link here for more detail on its shitty history.)

It wasn’t just that it was full of scraped content. It’s that she used it to out people and was generally a jerk about everything. (Well, “out”. She did out one of us, but then she “outed” me as cesperanza, so… yeah, good job there, Laura.) I think that’s what really did in her various projects: she was so relentlessly self-serving and even her “positive” efforts seemed more like PR tools to subtly tear down somebody else’s fandom thing than an attempt to share fandom history or actually analyze anything.

She had a policy of causing wank as a way of increasing visibility. While drama does stir people up and sometimes makes them go rubberneck, if there isn’t anything more there, they tend to leave in disgust. (So, yes, current discussions made a bunch of people go donate to AO3, but they already liked AO3 before the discussions. This is the piece Laura never seemed to get.)

an observation

cupidsbower:

Within a generation of genuinely good reform that makes things better for particular groups, there will be a backlash from people who weren’t yet alive way back when and don’t remember what it was like in the bad old days, but are sure something about the reform is a scam.

This is true for major things, like vaccines, or women being able to have their own bank accounts, paying jobs, maternity leave, and the vote. And it’s just as true for smaller things like a fan-run Archive of Our Own (so named, after Virginia Wolfe’s famous feminist essay, for a reason) that makes fanfiction available for free with a mandate to legally protect it as long as it conforms to the Terms of Service.

The current backlash against the OTW I’m seeing all over my dash is completely unsurprising, because we’re at that point in the organisation’s life. There are now fans who weren’t in fandom yet when we made the OTW and AO3, and who have no idea what fandom used to be like.

The fact the backlash is riddled with right wing vocab and lack-of-fact-checking laziness is just as predictable. I doubt most of it is even said with genuine worry – it’s just concern trolling. It’s another face of the usual efforts by the right to suppress the work of women, queers, and other minorities. And yes, I’m being serious. Both right wing trolls and Russian trolls infiltrated fandom conversations, where they overlapped with social justice movements, during the USA’s 2016 election, and they haven’t gone anywhere. Fandom is a nice juicy target for that kind of propaganda effort, because we tend to skew left and be full of minority-identifying people.

This anti-AO3 push is not just wank. It’s propaganda, and it’s attempting to sow discord, distract from important issues, and do harm.

Thanks to those of you who have taken the time to point out those posts are rubbish.

Note: The OTW is a charity, run by fans for fans. I was one of the original Board members, but I’m not currently doing any work with them.

You can read more about the OTW and the AO3 for yourself here: http://www.transformativeworks.org/.

On the AO3 all these years later

fairestcat:

The tenth anniversary of the OTW and all the AO3 discussion going around this week inspired me to go look at astolat’s original post about creating an An Archive Of Our Own, and found my comment on it:

“I think this is needed and long past needed.

There are of course huge fanfic archives out there like ff.net, but the bigger and more public the site, the more restrictive it is, the more stuff around the edges gets cut off. I don’t WANT the public face of fanfic to be only the most easily palatable stuff, with the smut and the kink and the controversial subjects marginalized and hidden under the table.

And I particularly don’t want to see us all sitting around feeling frustrated while this fabulous community is commodified out from underneath us.

I’m not fit to be a project manager, but I’m great with details and general organizational work. If someone takes this and runs with it, I’d love to help.“

Eleven years and rather a lot of volunteer-hours later, I stand by every single word.

doughtier:

leanbox-skies:

ussfriendship:

mizstorge:

redshoesnblueskies:

rapacityinblue:

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.

Okay, so I find the history behind this discussion really interesting, because there are two things that stand out to me. One is the thought AO3′s culture is equivalent to LJ circa 2010. This is almost true, except you actually have to go back further. Ao3 and Dreamwidth are both specifically trying to recreate the fan culture of Livejournal from 1999-2007, and I can say that with some authority because A) I was there (olllld) and B) both were founded in 2008/09 as a direct response to the shit happening on LiveJournal and Fanlib. 

The other thing is the idea that anon-harassment culture started with Tumblr. Because, kiddos, did it ever not. Tumblr is very much Fanfiction.net circa 1998-forward. (That’s right, FF.N was basically always awful.) But how we got from there to here is actually really interesting And tangly. And long.

Up to the late 1990s, fan communities were often small and decentralized because there was a huge fear that fans would be targeted by content creators if they drew too much attention. Since several authors (Anne Rice, Mercedes Lackey, Anne McCaffery) actually DID issue cease&desists to fan creators, it’s kind of understandable where the fear came from. It’s also why you still see fanfic floating around with disclaimers, something young!tumblr loves to mock.

Harry Potter changed *everything*. Like, I really can’t emphasize how much. Fanfiction was always there, being shared on email lists or privately hosted or literally mailed cross country. But Harry Potter hit BIG in 1997. It had a massive crossover appeal that hadn’t been seen since probably the original Star Trek, and the baby Internet was all. over. it. If you weren’t there, imagine Twilight. But bigger. And J.K. Rowling stood out from other creators by condoning fanfiction in her very early interviews. Not to mention there was a lot of down time between books and, as you might know, the fans do not do well unpoliced. 

This led to, I’m not kidding, an explosion of sites like FF.N. I don’t think a lot of younger users get how revolutionary AO3 is: not just because it created a safe space, but because of how much it’s done to centralize fanfiction on the internet. We used to get our fix through webrings and e-serves, so in the late 90s/early 00s we thought nothing of having dozens of scattered fanfic sites.

At the same time, the Digital Millennium Copywrite Act was coming down. The legality of fanworks was getting more and more complex. And no one knew how to handle these questions, because they had literally never come up before. When it was just authors going after individual fans, things usually went quick and brutal. Fans had neither the money nor the legal teams to stand up to creators, even if (as we were slowly beginning to realize) we had a strong case to create and share fanworks. So, if you got hit with a takedown notice, you took your fic down and laid low, hoping to avoid any further interest. 

But now the legal burden was shifting from individuals to well-funded corporations. Fanfic.net and LJ didn’t want to shut down their fan-contributors, who were creating a huge stream of free content and bringing in advertising revenue. At the same time, they didn’t want to get shut down by a lawsuit if Lucasfilm found Han/Chewie smut and decided to go after the real money. The next 10 years were basically all of us – authors, fan creators, website executives – stumbling through brand new legal territory and figuring it out by trial and error. FF.N erred on the side of caution by becoming more and more restrictive. They shut down the entire Anne McCaffrey and Anne Rice sections, and eventually banned “pornographic” fanfiction from the site in an attempt to cover their legal rears. (It backfired, unsurprisingly, because say what you will about fandom: we like our smut. Also, FF.N had other issues that we won’t get into here will discuss shortly.) A bunch of other sites folded or waned in popularity as fandom wars divided the fan population. Authors scattered to the winds, and a lot of them ended up on LJ. 

LJ started out very user friendly. We’re talking an open source code, an almost entirely volunteer staff. Even after it was sold to 6Apart in 2005, LJ was pretty permissive. A lot of that had to do with the aforementioned DMCA, which protected ISPs and hosting corporations. Like I mentioned above, a lot of the migration from FF.N to LJ (as a place for fanfiction SPECIFICALLY) came when FF.N started banning explicit fanworks. Why? Because FF.N targeted these fanworks based entirely on user reports. “Tell us if you find porn,” FF.N said, “And we’ll take care of it.”

Backup real quick. LJ, in many ways, set the standard for online privacy in a way that was far ahead of its time. Friendslocked journals were the norm rather than the exception and many, many communities disallowed anonymous commenting. (I’m not saying LJ wasn’t toxic as fuck, by the way. It is 2017 and let’s all have a moment of acknowledgement for how terrible LJ culture actually could be.) But LJ, on the whole, was much, much better at self-policing than FF.N. On FF.N, all of your stuff was out in the open. It was just there. Anyone could read it, anyone could report it.

And these two sites coexisted. All BNFs had a private journal and a public FF.N page. So if I hated someone and I wanted to harass them off the internet, on LJ, I’d have to make multiple sock puppets and concoct elaborate multi-journal ruses to do it on LJ (haha, who would do THAT?). What am I to do? Simple: Head off to FF.N and anonymously flame them there!

FF.N became synonymous with anonymous hate long before the anti-smut censorship came down. But once those rules were in place, the system was rife for abuse by the Purity Police or grudgewankers. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaay before it was cool to dm “kill urself” to someone on tumblr, it was happening on FF.N. All you, the early internet user, had to do was post a report link for your rival’s FF.N account on your LJ. Hate a pairing? A kink? Why not post a scathing rant, link included, to this captive audience of ALL YOUR FRIENDS.

Yeah, this system had no room for abuse.

So. FF.N opened the door and fandom came rushing through like the raging assholes we are. Certain Fandoms Alluded To Previously got so deeply divided that they split and formed their own fanfiction archives that occasionally rained hate on each other. Everyone else slowly withdrew to LJ, where locked communities offered some level of protection. Then, irony of ironies, fandom as a whole got targeted by the purity wankers. And of course, of course, it came back to Harry Potter. 

It’s 2007. Things have quieted down since 2001, when certain unnamed people’s fics were targeted for plagiarism and deleted from FF.N even though, just to be clear, they actually were plagiarized and, while there was an element of mob persecution, the actual fact remains that the work in question was legitimately in violation of FF.N’s TOS.

Ahem. It’s 2007. And everyone’s fairly chill. Creators are far more comfortable with fanfiction and fan creators are confident in posting their work so long as they aren’t profiting directly from it. Hosting sites, meanwhile, are profiting from fanworks, but they’ve got the legal shield of the DMCA to hide behind, so they’re feeling A-OKAY. And then Warriors for Innocence appears. WfI existed before strikethrough, and they existed after, but they made their mark on fandom when they reported upwards of 500 journals, most of them fan journals and communities, to LJ. The theory runs as follows: 6A, the company who’d bought LJ 2 years prior, realizes that the DMCA didn’t protect them if the fan works in question are “indecent”. Compounding this, 6A is already trying to clean up the famdomier aspects of LJ. Either they’re looking for a sale, or sites like ONTD are bringing in massive amounts of hits. WfI brings 6A a perfect hit list, and 6A goes to work.

So one morning we all wake up and find that hundreds of journals, including the pornish_pixies community and several BNF’s personal journals, have been deleted. Literally gone: a lot of the media stored on these communities has been purged forever. Hope you had backups. Also gone: large swaths of the Pretty Gothic Lolita community, Lolita book discussion groups, and rape survivor communities. 

In a quest to rid LJ of “pedophilia,” 6A wiped out a large swath of ethically questionable fanfic, and woke a beast. Again: We like our porn. 6A took a step back and restored some of the deleted journals, but the damage had been done. AO3 was already being discussed as a response to Fanlib, a hosting site that wanted to charge for access to fanfiction. (Yes, if you’ve been following along, that was a terrible idea. But that’s a post for another day.) But as AO3 began to change and grow, creators specifically wrote provisions into the TOS that guaranteed a strikethrough-esque event could never happen on the site. A specific kink or pairing would never be considered a violation of the TOS. The onus was on the reader, not the author, to protect themselves with the information given. Basically, AO3 took the early fandom nugget “Don’t like, don’t read” and made it policy. When peole say AO3 grew out of Livejournal, they’re specifically referencing this. One event that proved ALL OF OUR LONGSEATED FEARS WERE TRUUUUUUUUUE.

Rising from the ashes of LJ, you also had Dreamwidth. I’m actually kind of surprised DW wasn’t mentioned in the OP, since it grew out of the same ideology as AO3. Run by fans, for fans, because LJ (which at this point had been sold to SUP Media) had no idea what it was doing. Also like AO3, DW went to extreme lengths to make a safe fan culture inherent to the structure the site. Stay within the law, and DW and AO3 will back you up.

It’s worth noting that Tumblr actually predates Strikethrough. But Tumblr, unlike DW and AO3, wasn’t designed for fans. It didn’t carry the legacy of Strikethrough with it the way AO3 and DW did. So I guess– I have no evidence, but I’m surmising – that’s how it fell into the role of Natural Successor to Fanfic.net and Livejournal. It’s kind of inevitable, actually, that since neither LJ nor Tumblr was made for fans, they ended up falling into the same black hole of fandom collision. Kinkshaming people off the internet for literally as long as there’s been an internet. And then, on the other hand, you’ve got DW and AO3, who’ve watched fandom rip itself apart AT LEAST 3 times and are determined not to let it happen again. DW and AO3: We haven’t cared about the filthy shit you’re into since 2008.

That’s it, folks. Fandom mom wrote almost 2k words on early fandom and now she needs a nap.

AO3 was created to be a safe space - for writers

Kids read your fandom history research goddamit.  Here are just a few, and these are not hard to find.  We’re the internet generation - use a search field and read multi-source history checks, okay?  

(almost all of these are linked from my personal reblogs, because i know i won’t change my username meaning the links will always work)

fandom history:

Yes, fic writers were harassed, sued, sent C&D letters - we published underground

Here is Some Fandom ‘Oral History’ for You Guys @copperbadge

The Places Fandom Dwells: A Cautionary Tale @mizstorge - so many must read links - our whole LJ-and-on online history is here

‘Intellislash’ [or ‘Your Fandom Culture of Origin Matters’] @copperbadge

History of Ancient Fanfiction (no really)

We started on Geocities and del.i.cio.us - then Yahoo came…

a brief history of the LJ strikethrough and subsequent fan migration @stardust-rain

Very First Star Trek Fic Published - 1974

What JKR and SMeyer did for fanfic

some good fandom knowledgebase specifics:

bangpaths - when you see slutty!Snape, for example

Squicks and Triggers - not the same thing (multi-thread)

Fandom-wank (what is it)

AO3 says descriptive/story-telling tags are a-okay

all the crap about policing fanficition for any reason:

Fandom and fac can only be a healthy outlet if it stops policing shit - be it taboos, dark sides, gender, orientation, kink, etc. (multi-thread - @televisiontelepath )

“Ship means something you want to see happen.” Bitch, no it don’t.  @pyrebomb 

I’m Done Explaining Why Fanfic is Okay @bookshop & others + links

I think fanfiction is literature and literature, for the most part, is fanfiction, and that anyone that dismisses it simply on the grounds that it’s derivative knows fuck-all about literature and needs to get the hell off my lawn. @inkandcayenne

Foz on Hurt/Comfort fic

Why Do Fangirls Always Make Them Gay?

The Importance of Mary Sue unwinona

random fan history fun reads:

Fangirling after 30 (multi-thread)

Older fans run our Infrastructure (also, 90+ year old author who writes darkwing duck slashfic how awesome is that (multi-thread)

we built this kingdom, motherfuckers, with the trekkie zine housewives before us (multi-thread) older fans fun tories

STRAIGHT DUDES OF THE WORLD [in which @fozmeadows explains the best way to learn about female desire…is to read words written by actual females :D]

On Fanfic & Emotional Continuity (multi-thread)

It’s [never] Just Fanfic

Fanlore

Fan is a Tool Using Animal

my  odds  and  ends  cause  i  have  actually  been  here  a  while 

We made AO3 TO PROTECT WRITERS WHO WERE BEING SUED,AND HARASSED,AND ATTACKED.,you don’t wanna read something? check the tags and move on,that’s YOUR RESPONSIBILITY TO YOURSELF,not our responsibility as the writers, as the fanartists,as the vidders,as the content creators of all kinds,ARTISTS MAKE ART,YOU DON’T LIKE THAT PARTICULAR ART? MOVE ALONG. THERE’S PLENTY MORE WHERE THAT CAME FROM.,and for FUCK’S SAKE read the GOD DAMNED TAGS,we the writers TAG OUR SHIT TO HELP YOU KEEP YOURSELF SAFE.

So, I was reading this, and taking notes, and *boom* “Hey, that’s my article!” Thanks!

I will lament the death of LJ for the rest of my life. Fuck, I met my partner on LJ, for fuck’s sake, but I don’t blame the site or the parent company for what happened.

Making comes AO3 with the most comprehensive tagging system on the Internet, allowing for writers to specify exactly what they are about and users to filter exactly what they do (and now, do not) want, and I cannot abide by assholes bitching about it. If something is mistagged, by all means, report it. Beyond that? If it isn’t for you, it isn’t for you. It is literally that easy. It is OK if something isn’t for you. X out of it and move the fuck on. For fuck’s sake, it isn’t difficult.

People who use Tumblr and complain about a03 being bad have NO RIGHT to say that when this hellsite is perfectly fine with shit like MAPs, cocaine & methamphetamines fandoms, suicide baiting, etc.

We made AO3 TO PROTECT WRITERS WHO WERE BEING SUED,AND HARASSED,AND ATTACKED.

This, right here. Right here. Fighting amongst ourselves over what should or shouldn’t exist in fandom puts the entirety of fandom and its peripherals at risk.

It’s important to remember: the OTW isn’t just AO3. In order for AO3 to exist, a whole lot of other aspects that the OTW has picked up were required.

Without fans, there’s no fandom and without fandom there’s no fandom history; (Fanlore - the fannish history wiki)

Without fandom history, there’s no research of what fans need or what fandom is, long-term;  (TWC - the academic journal)

Without knowing exactly what fandom is and what the dangers for fans are, there’s no way to defend them legally; (OTW’s legal advocacy)

Without the legal defence, without the legitimacy given them (and us through them) by the TWC, without the research resources Fanlore provides – there could be no AO3. Fandom couldn’t have been this much in the open, couldn’t have had preserved this much of its history, couldn’t have had a worry-free existence.

The OTW and its various projects are here to protect us, the fans, from outside threats. It’s not here to protect us from ourselves or tell us how we should behave. If AO3 had took a moral stance and banned something (anything), it would have made it all the more difficult to protect everybody else because if even we draw the lines of fannishness, we’re all the more vulnerable. 

olderthannetfic:

marablake:

changingthingslikeleaves:

fangasmagorical:

blooming-wilting:

gladnis:

hey ao3 can you like give the extra $38k you made from this month’s funds drive to charity

You know it legally is a charity, right?

If x charity aims for £10, but gets £15, would you expect then to give back the extra five or give it then to another charity? No. Any extra costs go into the “rainy day” fund; sometimes servers crash or break, sometimes false reports are made that require the legal team, sometimes you need to hire coders or what not to implement new features or fix bugs or deal with broken code … 

The money they aimed for is the bare minimum, which goes towards things like basic server costs and domain names and legal advice and so forth, but they don’t just “pocket” the rest (as people claim). It’s not a business. It has no advertisements. It needs some “rainy day” cash to function. 

You can’t ask a charity to give money to another charity. 

It needs what it gets to function and improve. 

kiena-tesedale replied to this post

They don’t “pocket” excess money. They have a publicly accessible budget - waaaay more info than most charities, in fact. In it, you can clearly see where each dollar goes. (Also, you are vastly underestimating either how much traffic AO3 gets or how much servers/hosting costs.)                    

In my experience, people who don’t work in web design and hosting just have no concept of how heavy a load something like AO3 would have. Not only is the traffic absolutely buck wild, but the quantity of data that archive needs to store is fuckoff crazy. I’m talking “more than the library of congress” crazy. The only reason it doesn’t require Netflix levels of data serving is that it’s text based rather than video.

AO3 is in the top 300 websites in the world, and the top 100 in the US. It is the number 2 literature website.

Number 2 in the entire world. JSTOR is 20.

It sees about 6 million people a day. About 250k an hour. Each of those people is loading multiple pages, many are running searches that execute on literally hundreds of potential variables per search. The demands involved are astronomical.

JSTOR, btw, makes 85 million dollars a year.

It’s 18 ranks below AO3′s traffic, and takes in 650 times the amount of money.

But let’s say you think that’s an unfair comparison. Would you say that the Project Gutenberg Literature Archival Group- another text based archive that handles literature operating outside traditional copyright requirements- is more similar?

Because it sees all of 4% of the traffic that AO3 handles.

Care to guess its budget?

Double that of AO3.

AO3 is doing shit on the kind of shoestring budget that I fully, 100% cannot comprehend. And that’s just the archival service.

The 130k also pays for the OTW’s legal team, which they use to defend the right of fandom to fucking exist.

It’s absolutely batshit fucked up that people are fighting to have the OTW defunded and AO3 shut down. They are the only organized group that actually stands directly between fandom- all the art and the fics and the vids and the music and the chats and the memes and everything we love about interactive, transformative work- and an incalculable amount of lawsuits.

I am honestly reaching levels of “take the toys away from the children” irritation. I mean, obviously that would never happen, nor would I advocate for it, but jesus fucking christ on a rowboat.

Fandom in 1998, when I got started: Hey, the preview for this show I just saw sounds interesting.  It’s already in its second season. I’ll see what information the internet (which has been available to me for about four years) has about this show. (I will later get copies of the show by paying for someone to send me VHS copies of the aired episodes.)

Oh, this site is interesting. I can read episode summaries for the episodes I’ve missed. Huh, there’s a webring thing at the bottom.  I will click on some of these other links.

Oh, right, fanfiction.  I’ve sort of seen that around.  It gets posted on this message board, which wasn’t designed for fiction posting, so people who post here have developed a system for what they put in the subject line of a post, which is usually just a title, and maybe a rating.  Meaning the kind of rating the U.S. movie system uses, which may or may not mean anything to non-U.S. posters.

Shit, I just read a romance story with the show’s big pairing, and at the end the hero DIES TRAGICALLY.  I wasn’t prepared for this!  Oh, man, an author I really like posted a story where two men have sex, but this fandom doesn’t even know what slash is and some homophobic posters are really upset that they “had” to read it, and now it’s a giant kerfuffle.

Oh, now the message board provider is putting ads on everything.  Now they’re shutting down because the ads don’t make enough money.  Some people didn’t save copies of things they wrote. But it’s okay, because one single fan has put in the work and the money to archive everything that was posted to an archive she set up. Including all 239 shitty stories by an author I hate, but who has tons of fans. And luckily, she didn’t refuse to archive deathfic or slash or torture or rape or anything else that might have bothered her.

Except, whoops, now she’s out of touch.  The website stays running for a while, but eventually the hosting expires and the domain registration expires, and now links to that site take you to whoever is now squatting there.

So those roughly 2500 stories are gone. Poof. The only reason anything got saved is because I dug up a tool that would crawl the Wayback Machine and downloaded what was available.  It’s most of everything.  What’s missing?  Hell if I know.  And I can’t even get it into AO3 through Open Doors, because the original archivist is MIA.

Purity wank is one thing. One stupid thing, but still. But bitching about financials for a 501c3 with a budget and an annual report and federal reporting requirements? A site with over, what, four MILLION stories, ad-free, with the search and download features it’s got?  Run by volunteers?  And you’re bitching about $38k, which I’m pretty sure that AO3 didn’t compel anyone to donate? That extra twenty percent is going to help keep the fucking lights on.

(Of course this isn’t going to make a damn bit of difference, because we live in a world where facts don’t matter anymore, so thank fucking god I can download fic from AO3 to put on my Kindle and avoid engaging with reality.)

And lest the young folk think the bad old days are past, I used to post my Anita Blake fic to a site called Pomme de Sang for years starting in 2005. Then a couple years ago the entire site vanished. There was no warning and nobody I’ve spoken with knows what happened to it. One day it was just gone, and so was every single piece of fic published there, which was easily numbering in the thousands.

I was lucky; I had saved everything I posted on that site (only because I have a paranoid streak tbh), including one fic that had over 80 chapters. But I’ll bet many of the other writers who posted their fic only or mainly on that site weren’t so paranoid lucky and lost some or all of what they had posted there, because after the site being online for well over a decade nobody expected it to just vanish. Until it did.

Guess where I’m now republishing all my old fic, where I can be confident it won’t vanish again like PdS did only a scant few years ago?

Nobody should be complaining about AO3. It’s a godsend to fandom.

Wow. I haven’t been in that fandom since obsidian butterfly. I had no idea there had been such a catastrophic archive closure. How awful.

Ao3 Donation Drive

elfwreck:

zz9pzza:

olderthannetfic:

olimlacus:

ao3tagoftheday:

rppadthai:

Just a reminder in the year our lord 2018 that Archiveofourown.org is NON-PROFIT organization that manages a large FREE TO USE site that DOES NOT HAVE ADVERTISEMENTS AND DOES NOT SELL YOUR INFORMATION.

They do twice yearly donation drives which the VAST MAJORITY OF goes to paying for SERVER FEES. 

~~~

HERE IS AO3′S TRANSPARENT EXPENSE REPORT FROM AUGUST OF THIS YEAR.

AND HERE IS A LINUS TECH TIPS VIDEO EXPLAINING HOW GODDAMN EXPENSIVE SERVERS ARE.

---

TL;DR: Servers are super expensive, Ao3, a non-profit, asks for voluntary donations to help pay for them.

Hey friends! I know you all value AO3 (because if you don’t, why the fuck are you following me) so help them out if you can!

I’m an IT director and the page link provides another high level roll-up of the actual expenses, nowhere near the level of detail I’m used to, but what this tells me is that they’re maintaining their own hardware in a co-lo (renting space in a data center that provides internet access). Makes me curious why they’ve chosen that model rather than cloud hosting. Having done budgets like this for years, I feel for them. And it’s not just the servers, it’s all the ancillary costs so that they’re usable and the program is viable.

The original idea of AO3 was to own the actual physical servers on the theory that this would give maximum control over our own content and minimum vulnerability to being shut down for spurious reasons. In practice, I have no idea how vulnerable cloud hosting is to false reports like antis/religious wackos/angry rights holders like to send, but that was the philosophy behind the choice.

@olimlacus I would also say as the load becomes higher then having your own servers becomes cost effective as you don’t have to pay for amazon’s profit margin. We don’t pay for staff right now and that takes one of the very large costs away ( it does have its down sides ). If you look at simularweb they say we are in the top 300 sites world wide. On a busy night we push 25,000 pages a minute for a total of about 800 million pages a month.

“The cloud,” as in “I’ll just throw aallll my data and activity on someone else’s computers,” did not exist when AO3 got started. (Gmail was a new amazing service with two whole gigabytes of free storage. You needed an invitation to get an account.) (Open reg in the US started in mid-2007.)

By the time “the cloud” became common for business use, and had high enough capacity that the OTW could even think about it, the legal landscape was creepy enough, with enough data breaches, that the OTW was able to say, “whatever money we might save is not worth the risks of storing all our data on Amazon’s servers.”

minim-calibre:

fangasmagorical:

blooming-wilting:

gladnis:

hey ao3 can you like give the extra $38k you made from this month’s funds drive to charity

You know it legally is a charity, right?

If x charity aims for £10, but gets £15, would you expect then to give back the extra five or give it then to another charity? No. Any extra costs go into the “rainy day” fund; sometimes servers crash or break, sometimes false reports are made that require the legal team, sometimes you need to hire coders or what not to implement new features or fix bugs or deal with broken code … 

The money they aimed for is the bare minimum, which goes towards things like basic server costs and domain names and legal advice and so forth, but they don’t just “pocket” the rest (as people claim). It’s not a business. It has no advertisements. It needs some “rainy day” cash to function. 

You can’t ask a charity to give money to another charity. 

It needs what it gets to function and improve. 

kiena-tesedale replied to this post

They don’t “pocket” excess money. They have a publicly accessible budget - waaaay more info than most charities, in fact. In it, you can clearly see where each dollar goes. (Also, you are vastly underestimating either how much traffic AO3 gets or how much servers/hosting costs.)                    

In my experience, people who don’t work in web design and hosting just have no concept of how heavy a load something like AO3 would have. Not only is the traffic absolutely buck wild, but the quantity of data that archive needs to store is fuckoff crazy. I’m talking “more than the library of congress” crazy. The only reason it doesn’t require Netflix levels of data serving is that it’s text based rather than video.

AO3 is in the top 300 websites in the world, and the top 100 in the US. It is the number 2 literature website.

Number 2 in the entire world. JSTOR is 20.

It sees about 6 million people a day. About 250k an hour. Each of those people is loading multiple pages, many are running searches that execute on literally hundreds of potential variables per search. The demands involved are astronomical.

JSTOR, btw, makes 85 million dollars a year.

It’s 18 ranks below AO3′s traffic, and takes in 650 times the amount of money.

But let’s say you think that’s an unfair comparison. Would you say that the Project Gutenberg Literature Archival Group- another text based archive that handles literature operating outside traditional copyright requirements- is more similar?

Because it sees all of 4% of the traffic that AO3 handles.

Care to guess its budget?

Double that of AO3.

AO3 is doing shit on the kind of shoestring budget that I fully, 100% cannot comprehend. And that’s just the archival service.

The 130k also pays for the OTW’s legal team, which they use to defend the right of fandom to fucking exist.

It’s absolutely batshit fucked up that people are fighting to have the OTW defunded and AO3 shut down. They are the only organized group that actually stands directly between fandom- all the art and the fics and the vids and the music and the chats and the memes and everything we love about interactive, transformative work- and an incalculable amount of lawsuits.

The number of people on this blue hellsite who apparently do not understand how nonprofits work is mind-boggling (pro tip: by definition, THEY DON’T MAKE A PROFIT), as is the number of people with no idea about the cost of running something that gets that much traffic.

AO3 through the years

naryrising:

One odd complaint I’ve seen is that “AO3 hasn’t changed”.  First, if something is well designed and working, it shouldn’t need to change constantly (does anyone actually like it when Tumblr makes random changes to things? no.)

Second, even at a cosmetic level, it’s just… not true? Not unless you haven’t been around very long.

AO3 in 2008 - the first decent cap from the Wayback Machine.

AO3 in 2009.  Still in closed beta.  About 5500 works.

AO3 opens for general signups! 2010.  Also, our logo makes its appearance :3

2011 - the tabs appear at the top of the page.  Things looking generally more tidy and less squished.

2012 - a more chipper intro page.  Things shifted around a bit as well.

2013 - looking a little more classy now.  Tweets available on the main page.

2014 - some more subtle changes, including adding the number of works and fandoms in a prominent place.  1.2 million works at that point…

2015 - look how much it’s changed! The categories move to the front page for ease of access.  Recent news updates also on display.  Nearing 2 million works…

2016 - I admit I picked this one because of the news update about buying a new server “after holding together mail with sticks and strings”.  Nearing 2.7 million works.

2017 - cosmetically few changes but look at the works number - 3.3 million works.  This was just about a year ago (October 2017) and the current number today is about 4.2 million.  You can also see from the news post that this was when we were in the middle of upgrading to HTTPS, which was a difficult but important process.

And here we are at more or less the present - 2018 (September to be precise).  I agree fully that if you joined the site in the last 3 years, you might not have seen a lot of cosmetic/interface changes, but that’s because people - volunteers - spent the previous 5-6 years hashing those out to get them into their present state.

More importantly, you might not have noticed the under the hood changes that necessarily come with going up by roughly a million works a year.  You might not have noticed the updates to site security that came with HTTPS, and maybe you didn’t even notice the huge changes to searching and filtering over the past few months.  I get that it’s easy to say “nothing has changed”.  That’s because there’s a team of volunteers who are working hard to make sure pages keep loading quickly, downloads keep working as expected, searches find you what you’re looking for, and downtime is kept to a minimum.  Without them, I guarantee you would notice a lot more changes at this rate of growth, and not for the better.

In Kind

wrangletangle:

I volunteer for the OTW, the parent nonprofit organization that runs AO3. So do, as of the last monthly newsletter, 678 other people. The OTW has no paid employees; everyone there is a volunteer.

The average weekly work expectations for OTW volunteers run around 5 hours per week for most committees. Of course, in reality, people are all over the place. Some do 1-2 hours a week, some 30 or 40 or even more - a full work week without pay.

Let’s say that, hypothetically, a volunteer works only 1-2 hours per week, and their work is only worth $10 per hour. (It’s probably worth more - the opportunity costs of most skilled labor is worth more than that - but let’s low-ball it.) That means that every single week, that volunteer is donating $10-20 dollars of their time to the OTW. Some people are donating hundreds of dollars of their time each week, for months or years on end to help keep all its projects running.

Because of course there are multiple projects. There’s TWC, the freely available, peer-reviewed academic journal that just celebrated its 10th anniversary. There’s Fanlore, our fannish history wiki that has over 46,000 articles. There’s Open Doors, which rescues at-risk archives from disappearing. There’s Legal Advocacy, which donates legal expertise to help fans address copyright and other issues. And then there’s the AO3, which is currently listed as the 264th most popular website in the world (#98 in the US). Any one of those projects could easily encompass an entire nonprofit organization by itself. None of them has even a single paid employee. No OTW website shows any ads.

The real secret to the OTW’s success is not that it pulls in just enough money every year to cover its server expenses and overhead - though it does that, and every volunteer is grateful to our donors for keeping the lights on. It’s that the OTW somehow runs entirely on volunteer power. There’s no way we could pay for all the expertise and effort we receive. Other nonprofit websites like the Wayback Machine and Wikipedia pull in millions in funding every year to cover relatively small staffs. We survive without having to write grants or beg wealthy donors because of our volunteers’ unseen donations of their time, expertise, and effort.

Maybe this year you don’t have any money. Or maybe you do, but you’re saving for a rainy day, or you gave it somewhere else. No worries. People volunteer because we want you to enjoy this labor of love. We want you here, building the OTW with us by using our projects. If you did donate, much love to you. Your generosity is deeply appreciated, and we’ll continue being the penny-pinching, wait-is-there-a-free-option, do-they-give-a-nonprofit-discount volunteers we’ve always been, to stretch your donation as far as it can go.

If you want to give something that isn’t money, consider this: How often is a volunteer thanked by someone who isn’t a fellow volunteer? People volunteer because they want to know they’re making a difference. They want to build up the world. Think of how a kudos or a comment makes you feel, then consider how rarely volunteers get one.

You can read about all our committees here, and you can send one of them a quick thank you via the contact form, if you like. Or you can leave a comment with thanks on a Drive post on AO3. Maybe tell Finance how much you love the budget being available, or thank Development & Membership for all their hard work organizing the donation drive to keep the servers running, or show some love to our Communications Committee that’s keeping all these posts updated, or to the Translation Committee that translated them. Maybe you noticed that AO3 Documentation just put out a Tag Set FAQ in time for the exchange season. Maybe you’re wondering who keeps 679 people organized - that would be our Volunteers & Recruiting Committee. Maybe you want to thank the Systems Committee for getting out of bed way too early in the morning to fix the mailer (or whatever else decides to mysteriously break this week). However the spirit moves you, feel free to show some love. It goes a long way.

Thanks for being part of the journey.

mojoflower:

anarfea:

People keep asking “How can anyone have a problem with AO3 doing fundraising!”

And I’m just like…. Have people not noticed all the virulent anti-AO3 hate on tumblr propagated by the anti shipping community? Antis have a problem with AO3 raising money because they hate the fact that AO3 won’t allow them to censor content they don’t like and doesn’t tolerate bullying. That’s who is putting out these posts like, “how can this nasty site raise so much money?” Read between the lines.

And for all the people who are just like, “If they don’t want AO3 to to raise money why don’t they just not donate?”

Because antis are incapable of saying “this isn’t for me so I won’t support it but I don’t care if other people support it. They have to actively discourage other people from supporting the thing. At the same time, they also won’t stop using AO3 because 1) they’re a bunch of fucking hypocrites who want readership and that’s where the readers are and 2) they’re too lazy to put together their own archive using AO3′s open source code because that would require doing coding and buying servers and doing all the moderating they want, which is hard, and they just want to engage in empty virtue signalling, which is easy

Anyway, my point is, people need to be aware that these people are out there and they hate AO3 and they want it to go away even though they’re actively using the platform. They’ve even said they want AO3 to fail so something “better” (re, something they control) can take its place. Some of them are blatant about it, calling AO3 a cesspit of pedophilia, and some of them are subtle about it, saying more innocuous things like ‘Does AO3 really need 130K a year?” “Shouldn’t you give your money to individual needy people doing gofundmes for stuff that’s more more important?”

But all of these people have the same end goal, which is the destruction of the archive, and the way they’re going about it right now is to try to discourage people from donating.

So instead of asking, “Why do people object to AO3 raising money?” start telling people “Hey there are people out there who hate AO3 and want to destroy it and we have to protect the archive from them.” And donate, if you can, and signal boost, if you can’t.

I really like that, because of all this kerfuffle about anti-ao3 posts, ao3 has surpassed their fundraising goal (as of now) by $60,633.77. I resoundingly approve. ;P

What “Archive of Our Own” Refers to

olderthannetfic:

I just saw a bunch of “Stop shoving your feminism in my face” type comments on that other post. So I’m going to be pedantic and point out, yet again, where the name came from.

Astolat’s post proposing an archive was titled “An Archive of One’s Own”. This is a reference to A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, which is described on Wikipedia as:

“An important feminist text, the essay is noted in its argument for both a literal and figurative space for women writers within a literary tradition dominated by men.”

Astolat called for name suggestions for the archive. Nobody ever came up with anything more popular than the original reference, and the slightly modified ‘Archive of Our Own’ stuck.

AO3 welcomes people of all genders, but the very name itself is a reference to feminist thought and female writers. This should be–but isn’t–obvious to many fans today.

themardia:

One thing I’ve been seeing a lot on Tumblr from older fans is the notion that fandom is wankier/more toxic on Tumblr than it ever was during the supposed good old days on LJ/DW and man–that is just not true. The current wanks are different in that they’re co-opting social justice language and have a weird focus on “purity” or whatever, but ship wars have been happening since literally FOREVER (check the old school Harry Potter fandom, or the Ray Wars in Due South, or literally every major fandom that has ever existed).

People in fandom have always been insanely over the top about their ships. What’s happening now is that we’re not able to f-lock and stick to our own corners the way we did before. So, for example, if I’m a fan of Spock/Uhura in Star Trek AOS, if I go out on Tumblr and search by that pairing tag, I’m just as likely to see awful racist garbage as I am to see a nice piece of fanart to reblog. So yeah, that is a mess–but it’s a mess based in the structure of the platform we’re using, not because the good old fandom days were filled with people that were just INHERENTLY more tolerant and “nicer” than current fans are today.

I’m just really suspicious and wary of the nostalgia for the good old days of fandom, because I think that it’s not only inaccurate, it completely dismisses the progress that has been made in fandom since. You know what we didn’t have back then? A widely accepted content warnings system for triggering content. Open discussion of racism/sexism/homophobia in fandom and fic, and how we can and should be doing better. The good old days a) weren’t that good to begin with and b) you can’t try and bring back the stuff you liked without also acknowledging the parts of fandom that were awful.

dawnfelagund:

cataclysmofstars:

friendly reminder that the tolkien fandom is what it is today and still going strong not because we get new material to work with and explore, but because of the sheer creativity of the fans and their willingness to continue engaging and analyzing the texts in different and evolving ways

WORD.

Tolkien-based fanworks have been documented since 1958. The fandom is older than that. We have been in continuous existence since then.

In my work as a fandom historian, I have found that the Sherlockians are the only major fandom still around that is older than we are. And their fandom’s energy is largely powered by the show.

All of PJ’s films brought in droves of new fans, and those fans who stuck around almost universally turned to the books rather than remaining film/media-only fans. That’s pretty incredible and unique, and I think that is a testament to the fandom too that makes exploring the books a worthwhile and valuable experience.

Fanlore Featured Article: The Foresmutters Project

otw-fanlore:

The Foresmutters Project was an “anarchic” effort to preserve some of the very earliest slash fanworks in digital form. It sparked heated debate among fans over whether it was right or necessary to preserve stories - as well as the merits of print versus digital, the value of feedback, and much more.

Revisit the debates about the earliest days of recorded slash fandom in this week’s Fanlore Featured Article.

From Sandy Hereld on Virgule-L, August 1999, just before the site went up:

“It’s an archive site, dedicated to bringing old forgotten zine stories  into  the light.  I haven’t made it all the way through it yet (to know if…for  example…they have permission or anything), but the first story I found  was  the *classic*, “End of the Hurt-Comfort Syndrome”, so as far as I’m  concerned, these babes can do no wrong.  (ok, I’ve looked a little further, and it seems like it’s pretty new – sounds like they’d love some volunteers to type in old stories as well…)  So, how long before everything in fandom is available on the web – 5  years,  10, never?

Fanlore Featured Article: The Foresmutters Project

otw-fanlore:

The Foresmutters Project was an “anarchic” effort to preserve some of the very earliest slash fanworks in digital form. It sparked heated debate among fans over whether it was right or necessary to preserve stories - as well as the merits of print versus digital, the value of feedback, and much more.

Revisit the debates about the earliest days of recorded slash fandom in this week’s Fanlore Featured Article.