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