It is amazing how het-centric it is, coming from an AO3 perspective. But this aligns (in terms of relative ranking, if not exact numbers) with my much smaller recent look at ~100 FFN works (as part of my Gender Representation in Movie Fandoms analysis):
However, Franzeska’s FFN analysis is almost certainly more accurate (because it’s based on a bigger sample*), and it also includes other categories like Gen. Yay! Looking forward to citing and reusing her stats in future work.
I’m hoping to have some Wattpad shipping stats soonish for comparison – from what I’ve seen so far, it’s also way more het-focused than AO3.
The one note I’ll add is that since these fics are largely unlabeled, and I was determining het vs. gen myself, somebody else might class a chunk of the plotty stories with canon(ish) het ships as gen instead.
“Het” being a distinct category in need of marking is something you find much more in slash-heavy spaces. I was trying to classify by an AO3-ish standard, but an oldschool FFN user might draw the line elsewhere.
This is really interesting info!
I remember having some of my slash fic deleted without warning during what I think was the first of FFN’s purges, and I have gone back to the site exactly once since, to download some favorite old fics that no one had imported anywhere else. Having my hard work yanked off the internet definitely left an impression, and combined with other similar events is why I’m a diehard AO3 supporter.
It’s hazy, because I was a baby fan at the time and not very plugged in, but I seem to recall there was some… lets say variation in how “adult content” was defined when it came to gay and straight pairings.
Since FFN is an older platform you’d expect it to have older members, but (very anecdotally) all the folks that I know who do use it are either much younger than me or only discovered fandom fairly recently.
FFN seems to have considerable turnover. When AO3 was starting, there were complaints about trying to displace the one true archive from people who’d clearly been on FFN for a long time–but who’d gotten into fandom there after a lot of us slashers ran off to LJ in a huff.
It wasn’t just slashers that ran off to LJ in a huff. Back in the late 90s/early 00s, I was writing exclusively het fic under a different pseud. They were all “porn with plots,” and so they all got “purged” back in 2002.
Thankfully, with fandom still being so decentralized, that wasn’t the only place I’d posted those fics. (And even more thankfully, they were later collected in a paper fanzine.) But that experience left a nasty taste in my mouth, so even before I got my first LJ account, I had pretty much stopped using FFN to fulfill any of my fanfic needs.
What do you get when 50-some Starsky & Hutch fans come gather in a hotel in Baltimore? SHareCon!
Our first episode (out of three!) about SHareCon is up on our site! Come listen to me and Rachel tell Jen all about the wonderful time we had at the con – the zines and merch we got, the games we played, the vids we watched, and the friends we made!
I missed this piece when it came out (I worked with the University of Iowa on this project as the OTW liasion), but in fact I think much of fandom has since come to terms with having their work preserved as important.
I met with the archivist this August. They could really use help with the indexing. and need a fresh infusion of volunteers. These are old sci-fi fantasy fanzines from the 1930s onwards.
Executive dysfunction has kept me a serial lurker at the edges of fandom for at least 20 years. Tumblr has been great for me bc it lets me curate content instead of producing it. I don’t have to have a prolific presence, I can throw out an original thought or edit or fic only occasionally and still be heard, whereas my lj was a barren wasteland. I hate what’s happening. I don’t want to go back to filling the occasional kinkmeme while feeling like an outsider.
Tumblr has, for better or worse, shaped a different kind of engagement with fandom together with progress in technology that made us have so much fun with moodboards, gifsets, imagespam, etc. I don’t think people will easily leave this, but rather transition and try to find somewhere that will offer them something similar, or something slightly different without really losing what they already had.
We’re likely on the edge of a new phase, and it will take a while to find our bearings again, but it’s likely you’ll be entirely free to do what you’ve done till now, either on tumblr (but sans what’s out of their ToS), or on any other fandom friendly tumblr-alike social that gets created (pillowfort, to name one). Even different sites with different formats can be tweaked till they come as close as possible to what you were used to before. It takes patience though.
I remember when finding fic for one of my fandoms was like trying to find a speakeasy: you had to know someone who would vouch for you, because if the archive even showed up in a search engine, the lawyers might find it. And those disclaimers at the beginning of fic started because of real fear, people got C&D letters and around the same time the RIAA taking people to court to make examples of them was big news. Antis should try living like that and then see how they feel about censorship.
2009 - GeoCities shuts down, taking old fannish websites
2010 - FFN forums deleted
2011 - Delicious destroyed by Yahoo’s incompetence
2012 - major FFN crackdown on porn
2014 - Quizilla shuts down
2015 - Journalfen’s servers become fully robust, deleting Fandom Wank
Didn’t quizilla have purges before finally shutting down? And I know basically every vidding home hot destroyed, repeatedly taking out the entire history of vidding online.
All these had horrible formatting and became outdated though. Consider how reddit had a purge of their worst subreddits and now it’s more popular then ever. I don’t think framing this as an attack on fandoms is correct either. Unlike most sites of this size tumblr had no effective way of censoring and reporting child porn and they got in trouble for it. If this site gets shut down it’s not because the fandoms are being attacked it’s because tumblr staff couldn’t keep up with the rest of the internet. Their own incompetence will kill this site not because the internet has a vendetta for people who write porno fanfics.
This isn’t about blame. This is about the reality that our history keeps getting deleted.
Garry Marshall was filming the Michelle Pfeiffer/Al Pacino romance Frankie and Johnny in the same studio as Star Trek VI. He decided to take advantage of this fact when a key shot relied on Al Pacino’s complete surprise upon opening a door and seeing who was on the other side. Marshall asked Nicholas Meyer if he could borrow his two leads for a few minutes and had them waiting on the other side of the door, in full costume.
I literally did not believe this was a real thing until I just tried it.
Holy cow.
I have spent the last two weeks increasingly irritated with (what has seemed to me) the dramatically alarmist attitude about the shit that’s going down with tumblr but….damn.
Like, I still don’t think it’s over. I still don’t think this is the end. But that’s a far larger speed bump that I anticipated. Tumblr, what the fuck.
I’m considering going back to DW or LJ, but as I was saying yesterday, an Ao3 based social platform would kick ass. I’m really tired of packing & moving every X years, ffs.
@samshinechester I am thinking about dusting my old accounts there but I don’t want to lose you guys 😢, but an ao3 based social platform sounds like heaven ❤️
Wet is banned too 💦💦😂😂😂
Wow. I remember way, way back in the day when one of the services (CompuServe? AmericaOnline? one of the ancient ones) banned words and ended up inadvertently banning things like breast cancer survivor groups because they contained the “pornographic” word “breast”. My only theory on how “chronic pain” is banned is (sadly, like some actual doctors) they’ve assumed chronic pain is just an excuse to access drugs or something.
Wet? Well, yes, it’s going to turn up in sexual contexts, but seriously? I thought we’d learned this lesson decades ago. Like, even if we wanted the site to turn into a Sunday-school zone, banning searches like “chronic pain” and “wet” is not the way to go about it.
Also, I never imagined Tumblr of all places would end up going all Puritanical.
Just wanted to say thank you for the message of Not Without You. The thought of trying to migrate elsewhere is stressful as all get out. I remember the end days of LJ, when people were finally so sick of the place and enough people had finally moved over to Tumblr that following after felt relatively easy. Right now I feel like we're looking at the end days of Tumblr but I'm not really sure what comes next, and knowing that I'm not going to be left behind helps a lot.
Well, I don’t think we’re at the end days yet, but we’re definitely in the “it would be worth investigating what a next good move would look like” phase of things.
I tell you, I have had the advantage of my life of being the technically stupidest person in a lot of rooms, and so I totally understand the feelings of helplessness and terror. But this helps me a lot in teaching because I don’t automatically assume that the person I’m talking to understands what I mean at all!
The tl;dr is that I am learning that there are a lot of new tools that can be deployed to connect networks of people just like ours - what lim was saying in her post is that our network, fandom, is itself a huge resource that we have, because networks themselves have power in distributed systems! However the question of which tools and in what order to deploy them and how to use them and to what result has to be evaluated, but you know–don’t worry, we can do this! I reblogged lim’s post because she’s like, 100 miles ahead of me on this stuff and there are other people who 100 miles ahead of me too, out on the frontiers, but I wanted to say that I will always straggle behind and try to figure out where we’re going and leave signs and wave my arms around a lot. xo
Having been there too, I am confident that we are in the anxiety and procrastination phase.
There were years on LJ where we knew it was dying, and some people went to IJ and some to DW, but nothing was really working. People felt abandoned both because of others giving up on LJ too fast and, conversely, because of people not giving these other hosts a chance early enough, in sufficient numbers.
We have a chance to handle the inevitable change better this time.
This blogger remembers when we had to put disclaimers at the head of our fics and pray that someone didn’t take it into their heads to sue us for what we created.
This blogger remembers brilliant artists and writers getting decades of work obliterated on LJ because someone who wanted to tell people what they were allowed to create went running to someone who wanted a profit, and told them the artists and writers had been naughty.
This blogger remembers just how hard the creators of AO3 worked to build the thing we all seem to take for granted now.
This blogger watched friends dive into the creation process so heartily and determinedly that they all but disappeared from the writing/gaming/artistic side of their fandom for YEARS while they worked to make the archive happen.
This blogger remembers the sense of giddy wonder that there would possibly be LAWYERS involved, willing to defend our right to create these works, and not leave us hanging at the mercy of corporate legal teams.
This blogger is aware that she reads between twenty to fifty books’ worth of material every year on AO3, and is never REQUIRED to pay a penny for the privilege of getting access.
This blogger is aware that she will not ever see advertisements on AO3, and that her personal data and reading preferences won’t be sold to advertisers in order to raise the money that AO3 needs to pay for the services they provide.
This blogger is aware that AO3 is, and has always been, a labor of love; by fans, for fans, and not for profiting off fans – and this is what makes it unique in the whole of the media universe.
This blogger has NEVER taken AO3 for granted, and has ALWAYS been damned glad to have access to it. Even in years when this blogger didn’t have the means to support it financially.
Same.
AO3 is an archive of the content fandom has produced, not a curated collection. The point wasn’t to be a home for GOOD fanworks it was to be a home for ALL fanworks, to provide free access to them and preserve our history as a subculture.
This blog will never apologize for supporting that.
What happened with cousinjean? I’m familiar with the author, but none of the drama. But also I recognize you’re not required to play fandom historian just because you were there, and recounting stuff like this takes time that you don’t owe anyone, so please feel free to ignore this.
There’s a pretty good rundown of the whole thing at Fanlore, I think. But to make a long story short, she had been drifting out of fandom for a while, and had left several WIPs, including the MASSIVELY popular “Dancing Lessons” series, unfinished. She had said and done some things which had alienated a lot of her old co-writers from the Television Without Pity boards (exactly what, I don’t know; I’m just going by mysterious comments made by said friends.)
And she hadn’t gone out of her way to make new friends; she had a stated policy of not LJ-friending or responding to the comments of anyone she didn’t feel was worthy of her attention. So she had a circle of fervent fans and admirers, for certain, but a lot of other people had started to lose patience with her long before the Post Of Doom. She was living rent-free with her parents, working what appeared to be a very undemanding part time job, and totally focused on planning a Dream Wedding with her boyfriend, who, judging from her posts, miiiiight not have been as into the Dream Wedding concept as she was. She also wanted to work on an original novel, and she complained a great deal about not having time to write.
Eventually, she made a Livejournal post in which she made a proposal: all the fans of her fanfic, who would presumably buy her original fiction if it were published, should, right now, send her the price of a hardcover novel (about 20$ at that time.) She would use this money to take a year off and write said novel, and have her Dream Wedding, and maybe (nudge-nudge wink-wink) finish “Dancing Lessons” if she had some spare time. On the Paypal account she set up for this, she put “For Fanfic.” (She never really explained whether the people who sent her $20 would get a free copy of her hypothetical novel for their pains, or if they were just supposed to bask in the knowledge that they had contributed to its existence.)
Fandom EXPLODED. Firstly, in those days, before Patreon, before Kickstarter or Indiegogo, before the OTW, when many studios and authors were virulently anti-fanfic, when Fox had been sending cease-and-desist orders to fans who ran popular BtVS websites within the last three years, you did NOT ask for money to write fic. Even obliquely. Doing so risked bringing the wrath of lawyers down on all fandom. It was a stunningly ill-advised thing to do.
Secondly, “Dancing Lessons” was a collaborative project, with at least a dozen other co-writers, and Cousin Jean had not consulted any of them about her plan. She acted as though it was her personal project, with which she could do as she pleased. This created a lot of bad feeling among people who might otherwise have defended her.
Thirdly, the thing that got many people really angry was her attitude. She gave people the impression that she thought that she was so special and brilliant that the world owed her a year off with pay, for a book she might or might not ever finish, and if finished, might or might not ever get published. Other fan-trying-to-go-pro writers had full time jobs and children, and yet they somehow carved out time to write. Many of them deeply resented Cousin Jean’s apparent sense of entitlement.
Cousin Jean herself compounded the problem by refusing to understand why anyone was angry. The reaction did get way out of hand. Her journal was overrun by hundreds of angry, insulting comments. Eventually, she posted a series of non-apology apologies, and then deleted her journal and left fandom. Last I heard, she was writing self-published romance novels or something. (I don’t know if the Dream Wedding ever came off or not.) To the best of my knowledge, she never did get why people were pissed at her.
I wasn’t in Buffy fandom and I came across this post by searching for something else entirely but….fucking yikes! Even to this day, the idea of asking people to pay for my fanfic writing is something I’ve yet to fully embrace for all those reasons.
The Fandom Lore page is here for anyone that wants to read more, but bloody hell, she founds completely full of herself.
2009 - GeoCities shuts down, taking old fannish websites
2010 - FFN forums deleted
2011 - Delicious destroyed by Yahoo’s incompetence
2012 - major FFN crackdown on porn
2014 - Quizilla shuts down
2015 - Journalfen’s servers become fully robust, deleting Fandom Wank
Didn’t quizilla have purges before finally shutting down? And I know basically every vidding home hot destroyed, repeatedly taking out the entire history of vidding online.
… they deleted Fandom Wank???
Well, not specifically. Journalfen failed completely and has never come back. FW was on Journalfen, so while you can see some entries on the Wayback machine, I think (?), the long comment threads aren’t archived.
As of today, the journal exists with exactly two entries, which is too bad. The wanks there were bloody hilarious!
I lived through it. You know what else I did? I stubbornly ground my heels in and stayed on Livejournal for several years.
When we’re talking about it, I think everyone thinks the big scary words up there meant that like… swat teams showed up and made us delete our accounts at gunpoint or something and that’s not the case.
First of all: Let me confess: Strikethrough and boldthrough? Didn’t even effect me, or any of my communities. I was mostly into RP back then, where we had these neat little single-universe ‘’’jamjar’’’ groups of crossover hell (it was a blast! Tumblr RP can never compare.) At the time of Strikethrough and boldthrough I was one of the people who didn’t care because it didn’t concern me– though I was at the time a prolific writer of darkfic and those themes through my RP as well
But I did notice when entire tags and a few communities went under, and or stopped allowing certain kinds of content all together out of fear of being next. Sex positivity was still a burgeoning thing even then, and you were likely to get laughed out of town if you liked or focused on sex and or romantic relationships in your writing or even just– shipping in general. There was a grind to a hault of everything but the most canon, vanilia romance crap in almost all fandom circles from day one (when shipping had already been a ‘persecuted’ part of fandom)….
People who had been cool with you and your content before changed over night. Suddenly their squicks and or intellectual superiority complexes were ‘proven correct’ by staff’s actions and reports of people getting harassed, bullied, and told that they should never write another fic if all they could write about was gross gays– SKYrocketed
After a while, content became SO sterilized that interest dropped off. I wondered where everyone had went, and ended up in fandom limbo for a few years before making my first tumblr in like 2009 or 2010 or so.
Tl;dr: the death of live journal that all us old codgers are talking about did not happen overnight. It was a slow, painful, awful death of malady where your loved one forgot who you were and called you slurs before they finally died and the pain was over. Btw, you can still go make an LJ account today. Goahead if you want!
When we talk about tumblr dying it’s not about the site blipping out of existence, it’s about the fact that it’s going the exact same route as LJ. If you don’t believe me, you should look into the tags that have been completely purged (the yaoi tag for one, which I know or a FACT was mostly used by gay nsfw content artists).
Pre-Supernatural, popslash was huge in the early 2000s, on LJ and in places like Geocities. It generated a lot of strong anti-RPS sentiment in fandom, even amongst other slashers. I recall it being equated in all seriousness to actual rape. I went to a slash con back in 2003 where there was a panel which was basically: RPS, acceptable or not? (Somewhat complicated by the anti-RPS panelist having been converted to a more-or-less pro stance by the time of the con.)
The questions I would ask myself and anyone around me are:
- Why was bandfic different than actorfic in terms of fandom reception in their own circle? How much hetero vs slash RPF play a role in this? How much was slash vs het self-insert? - How much gen vs smut content play a role in this, with RPF crackfics being more easily tolerated but sex becoming the issue? - How much was the shock of different fandom communities coming together on ffnet?
@mannafrancis Oh god, was it Escapade? We do that thing where one panel every year is a throwback to a panel from the con 10 years ago or 20 years ago or whatever. The con chairs read through a list of things from the program that year, and attendees vote on which panel they want to revisit.
A couple of years ago, we were doing this, and the con chair read off “RPS, Taboo or old hat?”, and we all blurted out “Old hat!” Heh. (And then we picked some other panel that was still relevant.)
How times change!
My memory is that popslash was adopted by a bunch of fans who hadn’t thought about RPF before. It was the latest hot thing that slash fans were leaving other slash fandoms for (always a cause of bitterness in and of itself if you like the old fandom that’s emptying out). Actorfic wasn’t necessarily on those people’s radar at that time. I don’t know that actorfic was seen as different so much as baby’s first RPF fandom was seen as a unique outlier in a way that RPF fandoms just aren’t now.
(I wasn’t in popslash, but my friends who tried to get me in at the time presented it very much as ‘This is a unique case where the canon is this band, but it’s like your other fandoms’, not as a general ‘We like RPF now’ thing.)
RPF only got called that later. I remember it being “RPS” for ages and ages, even when there was some amount of het mixed in with all the slash. But the het would be the Brittney/band guy pair the spares side story in somebody’s m/m epic. There has always been a ton of Famous Guy/Female Self Insert content, but my memory is that different people were producing it in different spaces. It’s not even that fans judged one more harshly than the other–though I’m sure we did–but that they just weren’t seen as the same genre at all.
An early 2000s slash fan evaluating whether “RPS” was bad or not wouldn’t have been thinking about OFC self-insert romance at all.
RPF crackfics are something I associate with Quizilla type spaces. The early RPS I was aware of was all conventional shippy stories, some more pornographic than others. The shipping was what was controversial, not so much the porn itself. I suspect the fundamental issue for a lot of people was that it was “disrespectful” to imagine a famous person in a gay relationship. I remember this being a startlingly common feeling at the time, even among people who were otherwise not homophobic.
MediaWest*Con, that bastion of bad policies, still segregates slash vids, regardless of level of explicitness. They play after “gen” (i.e. low-rated het and actual gen) and “mature” (dirty het). Rating is not important to how oldschool fandom evaluated slash. Gay cooties are.
It used to be common for dicks who hated slash to complain about slash being “disrespectful” to the authors or actors of canon. The argument against that was that they’re fictional characters, and the audience’s take is valid. The rise of a big RPS fandom risked making that claim look like the dumb excuse it was. (”Fuck you, I ship what I want” not being seen as sufficient justification back then.)
Popslash fans, like fans of kpop and such now, argue that these types of musicians have manufactured public personas, so the people who are being slashed aren’t really two actual humans but two characters. This is a reasonable argument for boy bands, less so for most actors. It’s still how RPF fans talk about the difference between actual real life and the celebrity news they’re basing their fic on, but I wonder if it might have been a hard sell back then–e.g. when LotRiPS got big. I definitely remember some of the talk about popslash being very “my one exception”, not a broad defense of RPF.
I don’t remember being aware of ff.net’s RPF ban at the time. (But I was observing popslash through friends, so that’s probably why.) A lot of the oldschool slash fandom people I knew were only just starting to discover ff.net when it repeatedly enacted policies they hated. It only started at the end of ‘98 and banned everything fun in ‘01/’02. So we’re talking about a roughly 2-year window of lots of people discovering ff.net and then lots of them leaving it. There were other archives springing up. I started in X-Files, which had its own archive that predated ff.net. It wasn’t the institution it is now, and the people I knew in popslash fandom weren’t discovering fandom through it. Most of them were more active on usenet or mailing lists. Around 2003 (as popslash’s boom was waning and LotRiPS was exploding), that crowd was all moving to LJ, but the discussions were very much “Is LJ killing lists?” Nobody was talking about ff.net.
My experience of the cultural effects of popslash was that it was less about different communities coming together and more about people who had formerly been part of the slash fandom old guard getting into a different, new thing and their friends going “Don’t go where I can’t follow!”
I don’t think it was so much the gayness that was seen as disrespectful–a lot of anti-RPS folks were slashers. It was simply the fact that it was real people, people fans had even interacted with at cons (Brit SF fandom especially, where the circles were smaller) that crossed the line into squick for a surprising amount of people. You really did get people who wrote saucy m/m (and not all of them straight, either) saying they could never do RPF. Even with slash itself, the whole “it’s disrespectful to the actors” angle was *the* hot potato–you only have to dig in to the history of Blake’s 7 fandom to see just how nasty it could get. (Long story short: anti-slash fandom faction A shows slash art/zines by faction B to actor, actor is homophobic about it, wants to ban all slash materials from fan activities; faction A rejoices over a petty triumph and for getting various members of B ostracised).
All I can say, thank fuck hobbit RPS and bandom changed all that around 2000-2003 and RPS finally became normalised. I’m pretty sure RPF fics now outnumber FPF fic on Ao3, don’t they? Bandom certainly is one of the hugest fandoms out there.
Signed, someone whose very first online fic circa 1997 was RPS of two actors she fancied because she didn’t find suitable characters of them to slash, and who did not know RPS was just Not Done until she was told off for it. Think About The Actors/Creators Whose Feelings You Might Hurt!
B7 was also one of those clusterfucks where TPTB thought they had a cash cow like Star Trek when really they had a cult classic. They were paranoid about cooties from fan stuff they didn’t like ruining their chance to cash in. (Or so I’ve seen speculated.) Of course, it was all absurd because they never would have raked in the Star Trek $$$, and they managed to tank some of the opportunities they did have by messing up the fandom.
RPF is an overwhelming majority of fic on Wattpad from what I’ve seen. It’s big on AO3 but definitely not the majority.
Looking at the RPF metatag, it’s 200k+, while AO3 overall is around 4 million works. (i.e. around 5%–though not all RPF fandoms are under that umbrella.) That’s a bit bigger than the Supernatural or Harry Potter tags and a bit smaller than the Marvel metatag.
There are 46,197 works in the ‘Bandom’ tag, which makes it a medium-size fandom by AO3 standards, half or a third the size of the true megafandoms.
To give some perspective:
Castiel/Dean Winchester (76,206)
Sherlock Holmes/John Watson (58,625)
James “Bucky” Barnes/Steve Rogers (35,877)
Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter (31,060)
Dan Howell/Phil Lester (14,756)
Jeon Jungkook/Kim Taehyung | V (14,656)
Frank Iero/Gerard Way (8,877)
Patrick Stump/Pete Wentz (5,514)
Tom Hiddleston/Original Female Character(s) (2,504)
Sidney Crosby/Evgeni Malkin (2,462)
That “they thought they had a cash cow” thing with B7 was with those guys who got the rights in the 00s; the fanfic fiasco was way before that (we’re talking decades earlier) and more to do with schisms between fans. (B7 never even had RPS apart from like… three fics, and 15 years or so after this brouhaha. The schism was all about fictional character slash itself being “creepy” towards the actors). The doofuses who bought the rights later LEGIT thought it was a wholesome family adventure series like Trek/Star Wars and completely missed the dark dystopian bits… which made B7 what it was in the first place. I’m glad to see their reboot attempts haven’t got off the ground; they sound awful.
I guess the RPF thing depends on how you do the statistics, yeah. But I do remember being really surprised at just how huge it’s got after Ao3 happened, and I’m really glad people aren’t prudish about it any more. What I wanted to contribute was the angle I experienced the backlash from–but that depends on which fandom you were in, what kinds of circles, obviously. I only ever got the “it’s disrespectful and creepy” angle, less of the “slash itself is creepy” angle since I started out in slashy fandom communities to begin with. The squick wasn’t the gayness; it was the real people-ness.
I *do* remember those times where you were basically bullied into tagging all slash as R or NC-17, though, even if it was mere kissing or UST. There were some LJ comms that kicked you out if you didn’t do that, AND insisted you put the term “NSFW” in both the post title and the fic header just in case some innocent might stumble onto a porny fic/artwork under a cut if you didn’t warn them twice. (And again, these were the slash-positive comms, with queer members). The self-policing back then was insane. It is insane now, too, but in different ways.
“Others pointed out that Tumblr’s implementation was chaotic and lacked human review. For example, fan art that depicted robots having sex with tentacle monsters was deleted for bestiality, which led one fan to mourn that even Hollywood Oscar award winning movies were at risk:
“I guess this means The Shape of Water is a no-no as well? /stares mournfully at gifs of fishloving" [25]
When the artist attempted to explain to Tumblr that the “characters” were cartoon dinosaur robots, they were told: “"This termination is final, and replies to this message will not be reviewed.” [26]
Complicating matters was Tumblr’s shadow ban of certain keyword searches that could have assisted in ascertaining the extent of the impact: searches for “tumblr purge” led to no results. [27]Other banned searches included “fandom wank” possibly due to one of the words also having sexual connotation in the UK. The list of search terms blanked included: “"breast cancer,” “safe sex” and “chronic pain”.[28]
Perhaps one fan summed it up best:
“Tumblr dies the way it lived: completely fucking ridiculous.
SO. IF YOU KNOW YOUR FANDOM HISTORY, YOU CAN SEE THE WRITING ON THE WALL RIGHT NOW.
AND IN CASE YOU DON’T, I will tell you a story.
I don’t know if Yahoo as a corporate entity hates fandom, or if it LOVES fandom in the way a flame longs to wrap its embrace around a forest. Or maybe it’s just that fandom is an enticingly big and active userbase; but just by the nature of our enterprise, we are extremely difficult to monetize.
It doesn’t matter.
Once upon a time - in the era before anyone had heard of google - if you wanted to post fandom (or really, ANY) content, you made your own webpage out of nested frames and midi files. And you hosted it on GeoCities.
GeoCities was free and… there. If the internet of today is facebook and tumblr and twitter, the internet of the late 90s WAS GeoCities.
And then Yahoo bought GeoCities for way too much money and immediately made some, let’s say, User Outreach Errors. And anyway, the internet was getting more varied all the time, fandom mostly moved on - it wasn’t painful. GeoCities was free hosting, not a community space - but the 90s/early 00s internet was still there, preserved as if in amber, at GeoCities.com.
Until 2009, when Yahoo killed it. 15 years of early-internet history - a monument to humanity’s masses first testing the potential of the internet, and realizing they could build anything they wanted… And what they wanted to build was shines to Angel from BtVS with 20 pages of pictures that were too big to wait for on a 56k modem, interspersed with MS Word clipart and paragraphs of REALLY BIG flashing fushia letters that scrolled L to R across the page. And also your cursor would become a different MS Word clipart, with sparkles.
(So basically nothing has changed, except you don’t have to personally hardcode every entry in your tumblr anymore. Progress!)
And it was all wiped out, just like that. Gone. (except on the wayback machine, an important project, but they didn’t get everything) The weight of that loss still hurts. The sheer magnitude…
Imagine a library stocked with hundreds of thousands of personal journals, letters, family photographs, eulogies, novels, etc. dated from a revolutionary period in history, and each one its only copy. And then one day, its librarians become tired of maintaining it, so they set the library and all its contents on fire.
And watch as the flames take everything.
Brush the ash from their hands.
Walk away.
Once upon a time - in the era after everyone had heard of google, but still mostly believed them about “Don’t be evil” - fandom had a pretty great collective memory. If someone posted a good fic, or meta, or art, or conversation relevant to your interests? Anywhere? (This was before the AO3, after all.) You could know p much as soon - or as many years late - as you wanted to.
Because there was a tagging site - del.icio.us - that fandom-as-a-whole used; it was simple, functional, free, and there. Yahoo bought it in 2005. Yahoo announced they were closing it in 2010.
They ended up selling it instead, but not all the data went with it - many users didn’t opt to the migration. And even then, the new version was busted. Basically unusable for fannish searching or tagging purposes. This is the lure and the danger of centralization, I guess.
It is like fandom suffered - collectively - a brain injury. Memories are irrevocably lost, or else they are not retrievable without struggle. New ones aren’t getting formed. There is no consensus replacement.
We have never yet recovered.
Once upon a time… Yahoo bought tumblr.
I don’t know how you celebrated the event, but I spent it backing up as much as I could, because Yahoo’s hobby is collecting the platforms that fandom relies on and destroying them.
I do not think Yahoo is “bad” - I am criticizing them on their own site, after all, and I don’t expect any retribution. I genuinely hope they sort out their difficulties.
But they are, historically, bad for US.
And right now is a good time to look at what you’ve accumulated during your career on this platform, and start deciding what you want to pack and what can be left behind to become ruins. And ash.
…On a cheerier note, wherever we settle next will probably be much better! This was never a good place to build a city.
i forgot that yahoo was the one that destroyed both de.li.cious and geocities too, dang. But yes - tumblr is a loss and the writing is on the wall. Yahoo won’t run this site purely for charity reasons, so unless something wildly changes, tumblr’s days are numbered.
(Maybe now is a good time to check out pillowfort.io …)
I have been involved in online fandom since AOL was new, and yes, I witnessed the destruction when Geocities went dark. It was a real loss. The Wayback Machine saved some pages, but not all.
But I think it’s wrong to blame Yahoo. They weren’t the only ones. And they won’t be the last. It might seem like Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter are here to stay, but that once seemed true of AOL, Geocities, MySpace, etc. If it stops being profitable, it goes away…or becomes a useless shadow of what it used to be.
AOL still exists as a company, but the fannish message boards, filled with discussion and fanfic, are gone forever. So are all the personal webpages where fans used to archive their stories. Free mailing lists at Yahoogroups, Onelist, and Egroups were once the heart of fandom - where people posted discussion and fanfic, and expected them to be archived forever. Yahoogroups ended up absorbing the rest, then put Draconian limits on posting and archiving that basically made the mailing lists useless for fannish purposes.
Usenet is still around, but the archiving services (Remarq, DejaNews, etc.) mostly went away. Because of the nature of Usenet, it was pretty useless without multiple archives (posts tended to get lost, they were only available for a couple of weeks, and you couldn’t depend on one ISP or one archive to get them all - a pain if you were trying to read a 30-part story).
So, I am wondering how long Tumblr will be a viable platform for fandom. Yahoo recently sold off Flickr, and the new owner is making huge changes. You used to get 1 terabyte of space for photos; now you only get 1,000 photos, no matter what size they are. If you don’t buy a membership for $50/year, they will start deleting your photos until you are under the limit, oldest first. If they decide to sell Tumblr as well, who knows what the new rules will be.
Many Flickr users are upset at the changes. They expected their photos to be archived there forever. Now that won’t be the case, even if they pay - since once you die and stop paying the fee, your photos will be deleted.
I fear that applies to fannish works as well. Switching to Pillowfort.io or Dreamwidth isn’t really a solution. They are likely to face the same pressures Yahoo, etc. faced. Any commercial service can’t be relied on.
I’m reminded of something a biographer of Steve Jobs said. He writes a lot of biographies, and said Jobs was difficult, because his early journals were on magnetic tape and other obsolete media, written with software that is no longer readily available. Leonardo da Vinci was easier, because his handwritten notebooks can still be read. I guess there’s something to be said for dead-tree fanzines. :-/
A good post to revive!
I don’t think it’s the commercial nature of a site by itself that’s the issue. DW never really took off like a lot of us hoped and never created that second era of LJ-style fandom, but it has been chugging happily along ever since. Its ambitions were modest and its business plan sound.
The problem is that most commercial sites are venture capital startup nonsense that does not have a clear business plan that will be sustainable in the long run. The aim is to drive users to the site in such numbers that they feel unable to abandon it, then inflict advertising or new fees on them after they’re stuck. “We’ll figure it out later” is a key feature of all of these, but the assumption that lots of users mean lots of ways to monetize isn’t always valid.
Squidge-style sites also don’t usually have good long-term plans. (IDK about Squidge in particular though.) The ones that last are the ones run by fans with deep pockets and good offline fannish support networks. Many others die when the owner forgets to renew the domain name or gets tired of paying or can’t pay any longer.
Look at the Smallville Slash Archive: it was one of many fannish sites that Minotaur hosted. When he died unexpectedly, his many fannish friends stepped in to save his work. SSA ultimately got imported to AO3 to preserve it. This worked because he had plenty of actual friends in fandom–people he saw offline at cons too–and not just casual acquaintances who followed him on social media. It’s true that donation drives can be signal boosted on social media, but all of the liking and goodwill in the world won’t do jack if nobody has access to the hosting/business side of a site to use those donations to keep it open.
This is one reason a lot of older fans I know have started talking about fannish estate planning. All those paper zines are a better archival format than any computer drive, but they also often get thrown in the trash by clueless relatives. Out of an original print run of a couple hundred, how many are extant?
AO3 is distinctive in that it has an entire organization in place to make sure it continues. (So while nothing is forever, AO3 is about as solid as it gets.) But I’d probably trust DW second most, and I’d trust it over many single-owner not-for-profit fannish spaces.
Not to hijack the thread, but this is Walter from Squidge.org. Yes, we’re still out here, though we’re such a small part of fandom now as opposed to the early 90s when we started. Squidge has a future, I think, and I’m looking at replacing several of current sites (Peja’s WWOMB, NCISFiction.com, and a couple more eFiction sites) with a single AO3-based archive.
And as for the future, yes, we’re all getting older. I have a will that bequeaths Squidge.org fandom sites to the OTW (the folks that run AO3). My husband has instructions, and OTW has been told of my wishes.
Great to hear you’re around! I used to read WWOMB so often–and again whenever I get into a new-to-me old fandom. There are so many fics on older archives that aren’t crossposted anywhere else.
There is, apparently, a purge going on, or just ended. To my knowledge, it claimed few pro ship discourse blog, one controversial writer (sinning-satan), and a couple of controversial artists from China and Japan, all from thorki fandom. Antis are abusing the new TOS.
Yeah, I know for a fact that wilting-blooming got hit, with an absolutely shoddy lack of proper response from staff. I didn’t know that sinning-satan was gone as well, but it’s confirmed, their blog doesn’t exist anymore. Also, why am I not fucking surprised that it was Thorki artists who also got purged, given the absolutely rabid campaign against incest ships that this miserable place has been wallowing in for years.
And here is why I showed no enthusiasm whatsoever for the new ToS and staff’s supposed ~*~commitment~*~ to rooting out hate-speech and the like with a larger team dedicated to the task – because I suspected what would happen, I went through fucking Strikethrough. The worst spewers of hate would slither their way through the cracks, as they always do, while the shitty-ass, seemingly-no-checks-before-deletion system would be abused by the purity wankers through mass-reporting campaigns. Which is exactly what we’re seeing here and exactly what happened to LJ, just over a decade ago.
In terms of my banning -
Sinning-Satan here, under a new form!
My side-blog was deleted alongside the entire account. I lost a vague and barely used fandom blog, my main personal blog, a SFW shipping blog, my discourse blog, and my writing/fanfiction blog … antis only knew about two of those blogs, while none of them broke any rules. This blog is vaguely linked to my controversial AO3 works, my discourse engaged sporadically in MAP discourse.
What this means -? I have no idea why I was deleted.
I legitimately don’t know if their email about ‘inappropriate content’ involving ‘minors’ is in response to my anti-censorship support of all writing and literature or in response to my open discourse regarding human sexuality and fandom politics. They deleted five blogs for one blog’s ‘issue’.
So when you see multiple people going at once -? It’s sometimes the same person. I once knew a blogger with around 12 blogs; all used, all for different fandoms, all with anywhere between 60 and 3000 followers a piece, and imagine a blogger like that going … no warning, no explanations, all for one mistake on one blog … it seems worse, as you’re losing multiple blogs in multiple fandoms. In some respects, it is worse, as it’s completely unethical and unjust.
I had issues on AO3, where they explained in detail what the problem was, gave time for an appeal, and then explained the infraction applies to users and not to IPs or account, and all this was with 24 or 48 hours max between emails, and I was able to respect that and deal with issues and work with them. If the issue wasn’t on my end, they’d sort it, and on my end, I’d sort it.
Even if someone has made a mistake, it’s impossible rectify said mistake - and become a better person and obey site rules - when you don’t know which blog made the mistake, how it was made, or when …
God forbid you have a blog with multiple mods.
One mod screws up -? You - as the owner - are the one totally gone.
This is exactly what wilting-blooming also said – that their entire account was deleted, not just the blog that supposedly broke the ToS, with no prior warning whatsoever. And I’m supposed to sit here and trust staff that, direct quote: ‘an overwhelming amount of care and nuance is needed to evaluate reports
fairly and accurately, so we’ve increased the size of our team to review
the reports we receive?’
i have no sympathy for people being purged over child porn
yall r acting like this purge is such an awful thing (innocent accs ARE getting deleted but you can get those back) but honestly you guys? the guys who drew nsfw of the bnha kids?? and other minors in fiction?? you fucking deserve it and you know it. whether you age up the characters to make yourself feel less guilty or whatever, i dont give a shit. youre a danger to minors.
and if you were using your main blogs to take commisions and get money, you should have considered that before drawing child porn.
this is fine to rb
i keep adding to this i know but the email posted by jaspurrlock proves this shit isnt happening accidentally so shut the fuck up, you know what youre doing, they will fucking tell you upfront that your aging up does not fucking matter, your content still involves canon minors.
Just Anti Things: I can’t imagine having the gall to compare fan art to child porn made with the suffering of actual human children
Last I checked, BNHA was not reality.
Okay, but see the new reason for reporting is:
“Is the content you are reporting an illustration or other depiction of child sexual abuse that does not feature a real person.”
Tumblr made the rule/the reason for reporting available so that content like drawn cp, shipping children (even fake children), lewd fics about canonically minor characters, and posts of cp where the artist says “no they’re 18, they just look 6 to people that don’t know my OC” can lead to blog termination.
It is tumblr’s new rule. It’s included in “Reporting harm to minors” because there are children on this site. Whether or not it’s grounded in legality is moot, because being on here is a choice. You choose to agree to the TOS/TAC.
You don’t have to agree, but you do have to follow the rules to be here. If you don’t like the rules enough to not want to use the site, then you can leave.
Nobody is forcing you to be here.
There’s a huge difference between “this is reported because it’s fictional NSFW content and that doesn’t follow site rules anymore” and OP equating drawings to the suffering of real children.
Not once in reading OPs statement do I see that drawn cp is as bad as real kids in cp. What OP is saying is that they have no sympathy for blogs with any kind of cp getting purged/termed. The statement does not equate the two types of cp except for on taste level and personal morality.
And any person that’s studied psychology and art can tell you that images of real people and images that are “just cartoons” can often elicit the same emotions. So when talking about the rush a pedophile has when they see kids in compromizing positions vs. drawn cp, it’s roughly the same. (Until you hit the wall of “no, I need the real thing.”
That is not to say that somebody had to suffer pain and degradation to make drawn cp (unless it’s a still-life, God help us all) but because of the emotions it elicits, it can be dangerous in the wrong hands. I also want to note that creating art as a means of coping is fantastic and a positive way to cope, however I believe it should be done in a way that it can’t be saved (example: chalkboards or dry erase boards) when it comes to dealing with paychological trauma stemming from CSA. Most CSA victims actively want to let their pasts go so keeping, posting, and yes selling the drawings isn’t exactly letting go. There is a freeing aspect in erasing a scene you’ve drawn from your past and never having to see it again.
I’m ignoring legality here, because it isn’t something I know well, but I do know psychology and art.
And of course, it’s personal taste as to what the person wants to see and who they want to show sympathy for.
In OPs case, they don’t like any kind of cp and don’t feel bad for the blog owners that lost their accounts because of cp.
They said they had no sympathy for blogs purged because of CP, which most people would assume means real children. And then they went into detail about fictional content. It’s very clear they’re equating the two.
Yeah, no. I’ve studied both myself, and these results don’t suggest a slippery slope fallacy. In fact, results such as those suggest that if using sim CP elicits the same response, that should effectively reduce the instances of real children being abused. If you’re arguing they’re the exact same, why would they ever need to escalate? The truth is that this is a way more complex subject that no-one can draw definitive conclusions on.
The fact that there are other ways of coping doesn’t give you the right to police other people’s. Anything can be used as a tool to elicit harmful and negative feelings. What about the stereotypical grooming tools like candy or puppies? Should we ban those? That something could be used for harm isn’t a valid reason to remove it. Anything can be.
Legally, sim CP is allowed in the US. Tumblr is US based. Ignoring the fact that most of these users were absolutely not posting CP, considering Tumblr has a very muddied definition. Sheith discourse being case in point. This rule was likely implemented because staff couldn’t sift through reports of harm to real minors versus depictions of fictional ones. Which wastes FBI time, by the way.
The sky isn’t falling, Tumblr isn’t deleting all the dirty fan art on purpose, and fandom isn’t going to leave Tumblr tomorrow.
However…
Once a site starts using bots to delete content willy-nilly, it has a serious problem and is not a safe home for fandom. In this case, the aim was to get rid of child pornography. (Actual child pornography.) The problem was already so out of control that they hit a bunch of innocent blogs by accident.
If this happened once, it’s going to happen again. It’s going to keep happening until Tumblr’s limited staff is so overstretched that they stop even a vague pretense of caring about false positives and accidental deletions of other content.
I’ve already seen several posts going around telling people to “calm down” and assuring us that Tumblr isn’t out to get us. Tumblr is not out to get us, but they’re not out to help fandom either, and you should definitely not calm down.
Make your other accounts now.
Have somewhere to go when Tumblr finishes imploding.
Two bits of advice:
-back up your stuff. make copies of your important text posts. save your media elsewhere. tumblr has a built in backup tool. use that.
-let your friends know where else to find you. fannish exodus works best when we end up the same places. (may I suggest dreamwidth?)
Last I heard dreamwidth was not a great option because it’s servers are in Russia. Many of us think of the internet as something that lives “in the cloud, up there somewhere” but much of it’s infrastructure is hosted in rooms full of servers around the world. The server’s physical locations are subject to the laws of those areas/countries.
That’s Livejournal, dude, notDreamwidth.
Dreamwidth is a similar-looking site that started off as a code fork of LJ. It is run by a tiny team in the US and is explicitly fandom-friendly. They’ve already been attacked by having people tattle to paypal and get their paypal suspended. They had to find a (more expensive for them) credit card processor that wouldn’t hold them hostage, demanding they change their content policies.
From the ‘open expression’ part of their about us page:
“We believe in sustainability, not profiteering. We want to grow our business slowly and steadily, in a way that can support the community instead of exploiting it. We don’t own you or your content – we hope that you’ll empower us to be your hands and trust us to build a community that can last.
We will remain third-party-advertising-free. We believe it’s possible to run a sustainable hosted service without resorting to third-party advertising or third-party sponsorship – and we’re committed to showing you what we’re taking in, what we’re spending, and where the money’s going.”
The problem with Dreamwidth is that it looks old-fashioned and doesn’t have all of the features fandom likes: The image hosting is minimal, and there’s no reblogging.
What it’s great for is text discussion with threaded comments (for which we use reblogs here, but for which reblogs frankly suck).
The people and policies behind the site are all great.
As someone who’s moved with fandom from BBBoards and Yahoo groups to Livejournal to Dreamwidth and AO3 and Tumblr and most recently to Pillowfort - it seems to be par of the course for sites that are NOT fandom-made to sooner or later become unfriendly or less usable to fandom.
Dreamwidth may be quiet, but it’s made by fen, and I will keep supporting it with my money and looking in now and then to see old friends. I will keep supporting AO3 that was born out of that same needs for the fandom to own the servers. I would suggest people not forget fanlore.org - it’s your fandom lore wiki, and you can create an user page for yourself to direct anyone how to find you in case one of your main non-fandom-maintained fannish-community sites goes boom (a lot of us did when LJ purges and Delicious blowout and other stuff like that happened, here’s mine with my fannish contact info - https://fanlore.org/wiki/User:Calime ).
We will no doubt be ousted from many a wide world web pasture in the future like we were in the past, but fandom network is resilient and stays around. Also, please, don’t forget your history and keep supporting the sites and organisations that fandom has made for the fandom, like AO3 and OTW, or the ones that like-minded people have created to be fandom-friendly, like Dreamwidth.
So this happened to me a few days ago, and I thought maybe sharing my experience could help someone if this happens to them in the future.
I was checking my Tumblr when suddenly I was logged out from it and given the usual Log In page. When I entered the details to access my blog, this appeared:
My heart skipped a bit. I tried to re-enter the details (maybe I got them wrong the first time), but no, the same message about Termination was shown. I typed my blog URL and got the
ominous
:
Same thing with my sideblogs.
So obviously I was very worried. I contacted the Tumblr support but didn’t get an answer for 48 hours, only an automated reply. I already started mentally saying goodbye to my blogs, my posts and all my followers, when finally I recieved their answer:
(In case you can’t see the picture, it says:
Hello, We’ve restored your account. Thank you for bringing this problem to our attention. We’re sorry that it occurred, and we’ll do our best to make sure that it doesn’t happen again. You should now be able to log in just fine with your email address and password. Please let me know if there’s anything else I can help you with.
My blog was restored and working normally. All my sideblogs were intact , and so were my posts and my followers. The only thing that was lost, is all the conversations by Messages. The people with whom you talked are still there, but all the history of the conversation is gone.
Alright so here is what you should do if this happens to you. Don’t panick like I did Click on the “contact support” link provided in the terminated window. Alternatively, go on Tumblr.com/support.
Politely explain your situation - give your blog URL, your mail, tell what happened exactly. I understand that the situation can be upsetting, but the person who will read the message and try to help you isn’t directly responsible for the termination of your blog. And sending an angry message with insults isn’t the best way to get your blog back either.
Wait for the reply of the team. If you feel like it takes too much time (more than few days for example), try to fill the Help/Support form again.
Once the team is in contact with you, keep the polite tone. Normally if your blog didn’t go againt the Tumblr rules and policies, you should getit back like I did.
Voila :)
@monstersandmaw heres something that may help if they come for you
Thank you!! Reblogging for others’ reference. (I saved the info elsewhere)
Damn it, tumblr!
This is how it starts, kids! It’s not that tumblr was being malicious (probably. this time.), and it’s not that every account will remain banned, but when this sort of mass deletion for spurious reasons starts happening, it’s a sign that the site has begun to spiral out of control. It’s not being run well. They might improve things. They might slide farther into chaos and disaster.
It’s time to build your networks elsewhere just in case.
(Yes, I will be reblogging like 50 similar posts in a row. Sorry.)
So I hear tumblr is starting to delete the blogs of nsfw fanartists and writers
I know a couple popular vld blogs that were already deleted
Just…wow..this really is a hellsite
So lemme get this straight…
Tumblr @staff refused for months to do anything about the porn bots that were spamming people’s posts and being general nuisances
But now have no problem deleting real actual people’s blogs? Honestly, let’s talk about how fucked up it is that tumblr advertises itself as a place where anyone can post their content and express their creativity, and then turns on it’s content creators.
Really, who wants to be on a website that punishes people for drawing nsfw or adult content
What pisses me off most isn’t that they waited months to do anything, but that it took getting deplatformed by the major app stores before they tried the laziest method of clean shit up.
And again, just like Strikethrough 2007, the bots will figure out another way in and most of the purged accounts will be gone forever, because if they were too lazy to keep up with a problem that fucked up the site useability, what are the chances they’ll care enough to review every single complain? They haven’t even been doing that for all the bitchbaby antis that were mass reporting accounts way before this.
Jesus. It really is another strikethrough.
All I can say is: Link multiple types of social media together. AO3 doesn’t have private messaging and won’t any time soon, but it does have profile pages on accounts. You can use those to list contact info or links to different social media.
It’s hard with casual tumblr acquaintances, but if you have closer friends, get some kind of proper contact info like an email. That way, you won’t automatically lose touch with them if your account gets deleted.
What is Strikethrough?
It’s the nickname for when Livejournal deleted a bunch of accounts. (The account names would appear like this, hence the name.)
Livejournal tried to clean up their site and deleted a lot of fandom communities (which was where people were posting fic at the time, rather than archives, so that meant fic disappeared). They also deleted survivor support groups, etc. I’m sure they caught a few accounts they actually wanted to, but mostly, they pissed off their user base. AO3 had just been proposed. Strikethrough made it even more instantly attractive to even more fans.
It sounds like Tumblr had a much more significant level of actual child porn content. The similarity is that both sites wanted to clean up actually bad stuff and deleted a bunch of fandom stuff by mistake.
I don’t think this means Tumblr wants us gone. I do think we’ve seen this pattern before, and it means there are bigger and worse problems to come.
Next year the World Science Fiction Convention plans to offer retroactive awards to science fiction and fantasy fanzines and the works of fan writers and artists published in 1943. They have undertaken a project to locate, scan and post these fanzines online to allow members to vote. Come check out the writings of science fiction and fantasy fans of 70 years ago….
So let me talk about the state of vidding in our little corner of the fandom world.
Nine years ago, the fan vid world was standing on a beach, along with the rest of the fan universe, looking towards the horizon. We wanted to find an awesome fan-friendly island where we could eat, drink and dance to fanworks. The only boat we could access was an ugly commercial cargo ship that greedily agreed to let us on board, only to chain us and when they were done extracting all the value from us, would toss us overboard to the sharks.
“Fuck that”, our little corner of the fan universe cried, and they went off and built their own sailing ship called AO3 and set sail.
The ship solved the problem for the fan fiction passengers. The fan vidders and fan artists… well we didn’t quite fit onboard.* They did build handholds for us to hang on as the AO3 Ship ferried fans from the shore to the island. And they have life preservers to toss at us. They even have a lawyer to advise us what to do when the sharks come: “Hit it! Hit it right between the eyes. YEAH, SMACK IT HARD! Contest that take down notice. You go girl!”
But let’s be honest…..we’re still in the water with the sharks. And there are many more of us on stuck back on the beach.
There does not seem to be many people working on building a boat for fan artists or fan vidders now. Part of the problem is that a vidding or fan art boat is going to have to be very large, made of steel, and have piston-like engines, not sails. Part of the problem is that there are millions of us, and without more visibility, we don’t really know if anyone else is working on a boat. And finally some of really don’t see the need for a boat of our own. That commercial cargo ship is just fine, and if someone else gets tossed over-board…well, it’s not their problem.
But as I tread water, bobbing in the waves, I occasionally came across someone trying to build a raft. This week, one of them started a fundraiser to help buy the vidding.com domain name. Some fans look at the idea of spending so much money on a domain as misplaced effort. Vidding is just a word, what matters is the community and the fanworks, not the name. It would be like giving money to someone to buy a flag for their raft. Very pretty, fluttering in the breeze, but it won’t build the damn raft, and it sure as hell won’t get it launched. And they’d be right …on one level.
Yet….I am still in the water along with the rest of the fan vidders and fan artists. Waiting. I don’t see anyone else building any rafts. I don’t even hear much talk about patching together an inflatable inner tube. But there is this one fan, trying to tie a few sticks together and asking for help buying a flag. I have no idea if that raft will ever get built. I don’t even know if I will ever get to ride on the raft myself. I don’t know if I want to get on that raft with that captain when the time comes. But I do know that a flag is a symbol and a message. Flags raise up high and can be seen by others way down the beach. And sometimes they inspire others.
*To be absolutely clear: this is not criticism of the OTW for not having built a boat for vidders or artists. I know they had those initial intentions and that it was hard enough to get the sails up to work for fan fiction. If you want to argue that point, please take it up with the OTW board. And the OTW is helping vidders: the DMCA Exemptions they obtain for fanvids every few years is a ton of work and incredibly valuable to our community. So please volunteer and see if there is enough interest to reinstate the OTW vidding committee. Maybe even push to get an OTW fanart committee started. And if there are other vidding and fan art infrastructure projects, talk about them and support them in as wide arenas as you can. Let’s keep working to get more of us off that beach to celebrate and preserve the creations from our hearts.
IMPORTANT NOTE: I am neither Fiercynn nor Scribe - hence the link. I just felt it was entirely, entirely, completely necessary to share this with everyone, because this is one of the most amazing things that I have ever seen in my life. I just - fuck. I’m in tears as I type this, because this vid? Is not about a bunch of fandoms, it’s about what fandom is, it’s about a tradition that goes back a long, long time of people looking at stories and saying “here’s what I have to say about that,” and other people listening. Towards the end it gets into fandoms I know, fandoms I’m in or have been in, and that’s when I started crying, because - this is going to sound so ridiculous, but I can’t help it, because that was when I realized that I was part of it, this old often-problematic beautiful revolutionary thing. And then, the last few minutes, it gives us characters who tell stories in the stories (Becky Rosen!), it saysyes, you, this is your story too. It’s two-thirty in the morning, I’m crying, and I may not be coherent but I have absolutely no regrets. Watch this.
fiercynn here! aww, I’ve never actually reblogged WDSTF before! Doing it now because Scribe and I finally managed to get the thing up on AO3, so if anyone actually sees this, it’s available here.
Man, even after all these years, this vid is one of my favorite things I’ve ever made and been part of, and also such a wonderful, wonderful part of one of the most important relationships in my life, my 18 year-long (and counting!) friendship with Scribe. I adore her, and this vid, and all of fandom SO MUCH. <3
If you haven’t watched it, watch it. Grinning ear to ear.
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.
Concerning those AO3 posts, you could ask, “Katta, almost all of your stuff is teen rated. You’re basically a gen girl at heart. None of it is wank material and very little is even disturbing. Why do you care what happens to those gross fics?”
And the answer would be: BECAUSE almost all my stuff is teen rated, and I’m basically a gen girl at heart, and I STILL had trouble with archives before AO3.
Some years ago, fanfiction.net famously all of a sudden decided that it wouldn’t host any sexually explicit fic anymore. It less famously also decided that certain formats of fics weren’t allowed, such as fics in script format, because reasons.
Also, it wouldn’t allow any fic written for fandoms whose authors didn’t approve of fic. That means no Anne Rice, no George RR Martin, no Diana Gabaldon, etc. And if we’re talking about the immorality of various fics, let’s remember for a moment that Diana Gabaldon claimed that writing any fic at all about her characters was like selling her children into white slavery. (She specified white slavery, because she’s classy like that. /sarcasm)
Then there were the smaller, fandom-specific archives.
In one of my earliest online fandoms, out of dozens of sites, only one permitted slash of any kind. One other permitted R-rated het. I had to haggle with the archivist at the archive where I usually posted, to be allowed a sex scene in my plotty romance fic. She only allowed it because I made about five different arguments about why it was relevant to the plot.
Another fandom only allowed G-rated fic. At all.
in yet another fandom, when I asked for a fic of mine to be hosted on a character-specific site, I got a note back saying that they’d only allow it in if I changed it so the character was no longer in an open relationship, but instead in a monogamous one. (To make it more bizarre, the character was Faith Lehane.) I declined.
I had people tell me I needed to “warn” for lesbians in a story with only female characters, marked romance, and rated mature, because clearly those weren’t obvious enough signs that there would be lesbians.
due South had separate archives for people who preferred RayV, RayK, or “swung both Rays”. (I escaped most of that drama because I had a Diefenbaker archive, and people generally could agree on liking Diefenbaker.)
Plus, of course, archives were just up for as long as archivists wanted them to be up anyway. Server space costs money. After a while, they might decide that they wouldn’t bother, and take it all down. (Not to mention that Geocities shutting down meant a whole lot of sites disappeared - but that was after AO3 had already been created.)
And then there was Livejournal, which seemed like it didn’t give a shit what fans were doing in the various communities (much like tumblr) until it suddenly closed down a bunch of journals based on buzzwords like “rape” in the interests, and accidentally got some survivor and fannish communities/journals in the sweep.
I wasn’t affected by strikethrough personally. Most of the people I knew weren’t. Thing is, we didn’t look at that and go, “Ah, well, it’s just those porny pervs, the innocents will get their journals back.” (Which, by and large, they did.) Instead, we thought, “Here we go again.”
It was THAT sense of fatigue that led to AO3 becoming the huge archive it is. Not just a sanctuary for the fic that had been blocked from LJ, but for any ficcer at all who was tired of the whims of archivists deciding which fic could stay online.
AO3 has all fandoms, all ratings, it’s easy to search, you can filter out content you don’t want to see, AND it’s run as a nonprofit by fans for fans. That’s not something we had before, and it’s not something we can take for granted.
The AO3 staff will remove stuff that’s downright illegal (according to US law), but it’s true, they won’t remove legal stuff for being immoral (as long as it’s adequately tagged). And here’s why: Everyone has different ideas of what constitutes immoral. Shit, the discourse in any fandom at all will tell you that, what with all the “your ship is Bad and Wrong/no, YOUR ship is Bad and Wrong!” going on. And that’s not even going into different countries, religious communities and so on.
(Heck, where I come from it’s legal not just to write about two 15-year-old first cousins having sex, but for real-life 15-year-old first cousins to actually DO it.)
AO3 offers no stamp of approval on the millions of fics on its site. There are probably fics on there which the board members disapprove of, just like there are fics that you disapprove of. But if those aren’t the same fics, you’ll still be able to find the stuff YOU think is okay, even if it’s not what the board thinks is okay. And that’s something to cherish.
None of that means you can’t criticize specific fics, or fic tropes. Of course you can, and you should. (As long as you acknowledge that your opinion is yours alone and doesn’t define the content of the archive. If you can persuade someone to write differently, great. If not, tough titties.)
As for actual abusers using fic to lure kids in, report them to everyone you can think of, because those people need to be in jail. But that’s NOT the same thing as reporting every fic with a subject matter you find squicky.
I LOVE this post so damn much because honestly AO3 doesn’t get half the recognition or credit it deserves as basically one of the only easily accessible places on the internet where content creators are free to post WHATEVER they want to-as long as everything written about is adequately tagged, then people should be allowed the creative freedom to WRITE (because we’re talking about writing here-a healthy, normal, creative outlet) whatever the hell they want to without being abused for it
(1/2) Hi! This is a little out of the blue, but I just wanted to thank you for being a shining beacon of reason on this site. I joined tumblr when I was probably too young to handle it - around sixteen or so, I'm twenty now - and got dunked into the deep end of the worst sides of tumblr culture. I was surrounded by people who hate civil debate and free speech, accuse you of tone policing when you ask them to calm down, and think there is no possible right answer other than their own opinion.
And then you came along! The first person I saw on this site with differing opinions! You explained so perfectly why tumblr culture is toxic and I remember feeling relieved that someone else was on my side. So from an HTP loving, queer-identifying, aroace, nondysphoric trans person – thank you so fucking much for giving me hope on this hellsite. (2/2)
Thanks, anon. It means a lot to me to hear that. I mean, fuck, that’s the hope, right? That all the opinionated grumpiness I fling out into the general cesspit of Tumblr discourse hell will actually help someone. Especially someone stuck smack in the middle of the bullshit with limited tools to resist getting swept away by it.
Like, let’s face it, tossing a bystander a rope (or starting the wheels turning, or setting off the lightbulb moment, or whatever metaphor you want to mix in) is the best thing that could possibly come of yelling at assholes who are Wrong On The Internet, because the assholes sure don’t have any interest in listening to dissenting opinions. And sometimes it feels like a pipe dream–like the idea of reaching people, outside the little circle of oldtimers who already agree with me, is just a prettified excuse for me to give into the ol’ temptation to sharpen my tongue on jerks, under the delusion that it could contribute something positive to the world. So–thanks for listening. Thanks for coming into my askbox and saying what you said. It means a lot.
Also, Christ, I’m sorry your teenage self first got into fandom when it was like this. Something else that means a lot to me–a whole fucking lot–is the accepting, weirdo-friendly sandbox fandom gave me during adolescence. My misfit ass was so fucking lucky to find a community whose values included shit like “other people's investment in things that rankle the hell out of you isn’t your business unless they’re out looking for debate on it,” “the fucked-upness of someone’s tastes doesn’t necessarily reflect on them as a person,” and “judge if you want but leave others in peace if they aren’t hurting anyone.” (Yeah, even though those values were far from universal, and routinely got trampled in whatever the Overinvested Petty Flamewar Du Jour was. The fact that they had actual weight and no organized backlash made for a radically different environment.) I was also lucky my formative years overlapped with the subculture’s peak emphasis–and occasional haphazard education–on harm reduction instead of virtue-enforcement. I was lucky to fall in with people whose rejection of fundie conservatism included scorning any threshold of “harm” that starts at “ambient damage to society from your failure to be some arbitrary type of role model at all times.”
Like, this is important stuff in general, but it made for an extra-awesome, nurturing environment for teenagers, who need room to experiment + loose guidelines for navigating approval/rejection of others’ behavior without causing too much collateral damage. No matter how flawed and dysfunctional that era of fandom could be, it was so fucking valuable as a place for oddball kids to be at home while they figured their shit out.
It half makes my blood boil and half brings me to tears to see present-day fandom do the exact opposite–ripping people to shreds for the slightest failure to conform, teaching everyone that minding each other’s business is not just OK but an obligatory part of their duty to police every theoretical deviation from the One True Social Justice That Is All Things To All People, telling them (from a position of in-group trust!) that it’s right to be wracked with shame and anxiety about not living up to some twisted idea of wholesome, unproblematic, and “healthy.” It’s a sick travesty of something that was a refuge for me when I most needed one. It makes me want to throw up, because fuck, anon, you deserve so much better than this. All the kids it’s been inflicted on deserve better–none of them, not even the ones who’ve thrived and become perfect little righteous bullies, could possibly deserve what it’s done to them. But the weirdos, the kids who have fucked-up unusual tastes or don’t fit neatly in the expected boxes, who are under constant threat of getting shunned and berated for it in this of all places–they’ve been fucking robbed.
The modern social-media landscape doesn’t offer a lot of ways to foster a community where that shit doesn’t fly. Moderated offsite spaces like kinkmemes and Discord servers are something, they’re how HTP developed and survived, but the center of gravity is still Tumblr/Twitter/etc. So I guess contributing to a circle of vocal YKINMKATO holdouts also functions as my small, imperfect, futile attempt to carve out a space that can give people some pale shadow of what fandom once gave me. Amorphous and boundary-less, vulnerable to intrusion, but still a social sphere of some kind. IDK if this corner of Tumblr ever played that role for you, anon, even a little bit, or if it was just nice to hear a dissenting voice. But that’s far and away the best thing I can hope for when I shoot my mouth off–followed closely by being the dissenting voice for anyone who needed to hear one. And it’d still barely make a dent in what I owe this ridiculous, infinitely precious community of nerds, perverts, and freaks.
This is an interesting and thorough exploration of how this trope originated and developed. It’s also a fantastic reminder of everything that was great about Supernatural fandom on Livejournal.
I was active in SPN fandom at the time, and this read very much like a trip down memory lane for me.
Insta-nostalgia for for everyone once part of the SPN fandom.
In the earliest days of fandom, we owned the servers. Of course, the “servers” then were just smiles and words, pen and paper, staples and stamps. We were intimate and secretive—and also small. Fan works passed hand to hand, and there were no unintended audiences, no critical outside eyes. We controlled channels of distribution; we controlled which ears heard our stories. We wrote for an “insider audience” (Bacon-Smith 1992) with an entirely different value and culture than the traditional writing market; it was our own thing.
It is hard to say when the first fan work may have appeared on a server outside our control. The early days of the internet brought us Usenet and email-based mailing lists as popular modes of communication and dissemination. The internet altered the very substance of fandom; fan artifacts were no longer physical, and geographical boundaries no longer existed (Busse and Hellekson 2006). Without these barriers, participation in fan creation communities grew by leaps and bounds. It also meant that posting a story online required relinquishing some control; you weren’t giving it to a person at a fan convention, you were giving it to the world at large, to anyone who could connect to a Usenet server. And suddenly, for the first time, the platform mattered.
The problem with platforms is that they have their own agenda. When deciding on policies, for example, a platform (or, rather, its stakeholders) has its own concerns—about leeway, liability, profit, and public perception (Gillespie 2010)—and these concerns are probably not the same as those of its users.
