Fully convinced that the reason asshole characters are so beloved by their fandoms is it lets people believe they too can get their happy endings without having to put in any work or effort at being better people.
I feel like one of the biggest misconceptions out there is that all fanfic is written by 12 and 13 year olds
Like the other day I read a fanfic where Jason Todd is remodeling his kitchen and is concerned about wooden countertops because what if you get raw chicken on your wooden countertop?
You think a 13 year old thinks about countertops? Think again my friend that fic was written by an Adult
Somebody tag sacrificethemtothesquid for me please
fIRST OF ALL, wood countertops WARP unless done properly and oiled regularly, but raw chicken on a wood countertop would pose the same risk as raw chicken on anything else. There are studies I can’t be bothered to cite that indicate the enzymes and structure of wood cutting boards make them be more effective for sanitation than plastic or stone, so that would probably hold true for countertops as well.
A good butcher block will last approximately forever if looked after. Personally, I did concrete for our countertops and I flipping LOVE them. Super cheap (like $100 of Henry Feather Finish over existing ugly-but-serviceable laminate) and looks like soap stone.
So. Your fic may be written by a twelve-year-old, but there’s a good chance that that twelve-year-old is cleverly disguised as a thirty-year-old remodeler who aggressively armchair-quarterbacks HGTV.
I was just informed by my brother (who thinks he’s a better writer than anyone else because he has some fancy degree in writing) that fanfiction “doesn’t count” as “real writing” because you aren’t using your own “ideas.”
He doesn’t know that I write fanfiction. He probably wouldn’t have admitted his opinion if her did. But it has pretty much solidified that I will never tell anyone I know in person what I write.
I’ve already been told by several family members that my obsession with a “stupid tv show” is ridiculous and that I’m “too old” to fangirl.
Sigh. /rant
In Defense of
Fanfiction
I am a professional writer and editor in real life. I have a
double degree in English and writing and am currently in school once more to
obtain a master’s degree. If your brother’s fancy writing degree was worth anything
at all, he should be able to admit that the vast majority of all literature is
in fact fanfiction of someone else’s story and its elements. In other words, no
one’s idea is, by definition, original.
Let’s take a look at just
a few examples to support my theory that some of the most important or
well-known pieces of literature ever created qualify as fanfiction:
Ancient/Old Literature
· Around
2000 BCE:The Epic of Gilgamesh
was inspired as a fanfiction of a historical King of Uruk, mixed with
Mesopotamian mythology. The story includes the character Utnapishtim, who lives
through a world-wide flood by building a ship per the instructions of the god
Enki and ultimately landing on a mountain in the Middle East, similar to Noah’s
story from the Bible (dates for the book of Genesis vary anywhere from 1400 BCE
to 800 BCE). Many historians suggest that the story of Noah was directly
inspired by Gilgamesh’s story of
Utnapishtim. Other historians suggest the two were simply inspired by a similar
source. Either way, there’s too many startling overlaps to classify Utnapishtim
and Noah as only a coincidence.
· 20-ish
BCE: The Roman author Virgil wrote The
Aeneid, which is a direct sequel to the previously created epic The Iliad attributed to Greek bard Homer.
Virgil was also known for writing pastoral poems based off and inspired by the
work of the great poet Theocritus (280 BCE). As a fun addition, Theocritus
himself was known for rewriting the cyclops villain (Polyphemus) of Homer’s Odyssey into a love-sick idiot in his
work, Idyll XI.
Medieval Era (500-1500-ish CE)
· 700-1000:
The Alphabet of ben Sirach was an
anonymous Hebrew collection of satires that included a parody of the biblical
Genesis story of Adam and Eve. The story gave Adam a totally different wife by
the name of Lilith, the character of which was inspired by Babylonian
mythology. The whole of the collection is additionally wrapped in a fictional
account of telling the stories to the historical figure of the Babylonian king
Nebuchadnezzar—another real person fanfiction of a celebrity from that time.
· Around
1000: The world’s first novel, The
Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki Shikibu, inspired the massive outpouring of Japanese
Noh theater plays involving characters from the novel, such as Aoi no Ue (Lady Aoi), which has been
attributed to a few people (Zeami Motokiyo and Inuo). This play appropriates
the Lady Aoi from Shikibu’s psychological novel to explore her death and is
only one example of the available fanfictions of the novel.
· 1308-1320:
Dante’s Divine Comedy (known most
famously for the Inferno) is a
literal OC self-insertion of the Italian Dante Alighieri himself into the hell,
purgatory and heaven from Catholic / biblical texts. Its format is in an epic,
in an attempt to outdo the Aeneid and Iliad before it. It also includes an insertion
of a ghostly Virgil, who copied the Iliad to write the Aeneid. Furthermore,
Dante’s work includes insertions of real historical people that Dante didn’t
like. It’s possibly the most self-indulgent fanfiction ever created while also
being named one of the greatest poems in literature.
· 1392:
Geoffrey Chaucer (known as the father of English literature) wrote a famous
collection called The Canterbury Tales.
The collection takes its basic format and inspiration from Italian author
Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron (written
in 1351). It’s suggested that some of the tales Chaucer uses actually
originated from Boccaccio’s work.
Renaissance Era (1550-1660-ish CE)
· 1590:
English poet Edmund Spenser borrowed the legend of Arthur of the Round Table in
his epic poem, The Faerie Queene. In
it, Arthur is pretty love-sick over the fairy queen.
· 1597:
English playwright Shakespeare borrowed various mythologies and historical
figures and mixed them together. Not even his most popular play, Romeo and Juliet, was original. He took
the idea from a poem written by Arthur Brooke in 1562, called, “The Tragicall
Hystorye of Romeus and Iuliet.” Even more interesting, Brooke had taken his
idea from the 1554 Giulietta e Romeo
by Italian author Matteo Bandello. (Shakespeare repeatedly sourced other
people’s ideas or historical existence for his plays.)
Enlightenment Era (1660-1789)
· 1667:
English poet John Milton wrote Paradise
Lost, a fanfiction epic of the biblical story in the book of Genesis about
the fall of creation and humankind into imperfection.
· 1712:
English poet Alexander Pope wrote a mock-heroic epic called the Rape of the Lock to make fun of all the
serious epic writers before him, borrowing such images as the way epic warriors
put on armor and connecting it to the way rich people put on rich clothing and
jewelry. He used other standard epic elements as repeated throughout The Iliad, Aeneid, and so forth.
· 1759:
French writer and inventor, Voltaire, wrote a satire Candide. It borrowed various elements from Tales from a Thousand and One Arabian Nights, a collection of
Middle Eastern folktales from the Islamic Golden Age.
Romantic Era (1789-1850)
· 1819:
In Don Juan, English poet Lord Byron
took the pre-dated legend of Don Juan, which was about a man who seduced a lot
of women, and reversed the original plot so that Don Juan ended up seduced by a
lot of women.
· 1820:
English poet John Keats wrote a poem as a retelling of the Greek mythological
creature called Lamia, which was a half-woman and half-monster (description
varies depending on the Greek source). A lot of his works borrowed heavily from
Greek mythology and literature, and he idolized the English Renaissance poet
Edmund Spenser, to a point where his first work was called, “Imitation of
Spenser” (1814). In it, he borrowed various images from Spenser’s epic, The Faerie Queene.
· 1843:
English writer Charles Dickens wrote A
Christmas Carol, based off the various stories compiled in the 1841 and
1842 TheLowell Offering, a publication magazine written by a group of
intellectual but mostly anonymous women. He borrowed the certain pieces of plot,
language, and descriptions for Scrooge’s ghostly encounters from the stories “A
Visit from Hope” (anonymous), “Happiness” (anonymous), and “Memory and Hope”
(by someone named Ellen). A Christmas
Carol is additionally littered with biblical allusions all over the place.
· 1844:
French writer Alexander Dumas borrowed The
Three Musketeers, as well as many of the story’s side-characters, from The Memoirs of Monsieur d’Artagnan by
French author Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras. He didn’t even change the names or
who the villain, the Cardinal, was.
· 1845:
American author Edgar Allan Poe wrote The
Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade, in which he has the mythical Scheherazade
from the Tales from a Thousand and One
Arabian Nights telling another story about the legendary Sinbad the
Sailor.
· 1861:
Hungarian author Imre Madach wrote The
Tragedy of Man, which reverses the biblical moral principles of God and
Satan: In this story, God is the violent and evil ruler, and Satan is the jaded/trickster
victim just trying to open humanity’s eyes to the truth.
Modern Era (1900ish-1950s)
· 1922:
Irish novelist James Joyce wrote his stream-of-consciousness novel Ulysses, which was based off of Homer’s Odyssey, to a point where he took the
characters and simply renamed them, as well as aligned the structure of his
book to the various episodes in Homer’s work.
· 1930:
The Nancy Drew series was created under
the penname Carolyn Keene, who did not exist. Instead, an American man named
Edward Stratemeyer would write three pages of a story, then send it to one of
several ghostwriters who wanted to write Nancy Drew. The ghostwriter would take
the story and expand it. The anonymous group of ghostwriters all writing about
the same character still exists today. Each individual ghostwriter has made
changes to Nancy’s personality, looks, and age, as well as the type of plots said
character engages in.
· 1937:
English writer JRR Tolkien wrote The Hobbit
and then Lord of the Rings in the
1950s. He borrowed the names of characters and places after those seen in the
Icelandic sagas Poetic Edda and Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson. Tolkien admitted
he based the physical appearance of Gandalf off of the Norse god Odin. He
modeled the character of Aragorn directly after Beowulf, from the old English epic
(700-1000 BCE) Beowulf. Aragorn himself
even paraphrases the Anglo-Saxon poem, “The Wanderer,” as an example of a verse
created by his people of Rohan. Another fun fact is that Tolkien specifically
borrowed the phrase “my precious,” from a Middle English poem called Pearl. Additionally,
Tolkien was a big fan of romantic prose/poetry writer William Morris and wanted
to write like him, so he borrowed a lot of phrases, aesthetics, and even names
from such works like the 1888 The House
of the Wolfings by Morris, including the place called “Mirkwood.” Of
curious note is that Morris’s work was massively influenced by Virgil’s Aeneid.
· 1938:
African-American author Richard Wright wrote a collection of stories called Uncle Tom’s Children, with an obvious
borrowing of the title from Uncle Tom’s
Cabin, written by Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1852.
· 1930s-present:
DC and Marvel comics mostly just updated the mythological gods and goddesses
for a modern era, appropriating their names, special relics, and abilities for
their heroes, and then mixing them with some modern-day cover identifies. As an
example, Wonder Woman was originally a nod to the Greek goddess Diana, a nod to
the female Amazon warriors, and a redesigned image of Rosie the Riveter. As
another example, the Flash is a reproduction of the Greek god Hermes, his
winged helmet further clarifying the connection. Even the name Superman was not
entirely original. 1938 Illustrator of Superman, Joe Shuster, took the name
“Superman” from the German “Ubermensh,” a term coined by the philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche. As a final example, sometimes the appropriation from
mythology is incredibly obvious, as in the case of Thor.
· 1949:
English author George Orwell reviewed a book called We by Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin. He wrote a rave review on it
and declared that he would try to write something similar, which ultimately
became 1984, sharing many similar
plot points and concepts while bringing the story of We into a more realistic environment. The novel We also inspired Ayn Rand’s Anthem and Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano, for which Vonnegut
admitted he also borrowed concepts from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
· 1950s: The Chronicles of Narnia by British author
C.S. Lewis was based on biblical stories conveyed through various mythological
elements as well.
Postmodern Era (1950s-Present, debatably)
· 1977: African-American
author, Toni Morrison, wrote a critically acclaimed novel called Song of Solomon, which took its title
name, as well as the names of several characters and plot points, from the
Bible.
· 1988:
British-Indian author Salman Rushdie’s The
Satanic Verses was inspired by the life of the Islamic prophet Muhammed.
Its title is a direct reference to controversial verses once placed in the
Quran but then removed. These highly controversial and sensitive connections to
Islamic and Old Testament personalities of Gabriel and Satan resulted in the
banning of Rushdie’s book from several regions.
· 1997-2007:
The Harry Potter series by British author
JK Rowling borrows heavily from historical alchemy, including the age-old
legend of the philosopher’s stone and the 1652 book Culpeper’s Complete Herbal, which was about the medicinal and
occult properties of plants, which helped her build how magic was used in her
stories. Rowling also admits the 1652 book inspired many of the character’s
names. She appropriates several historical figures as well for her own purposes
(as a sort
of real-person fanfiction), including references to alchemists Nicolas Flammel and
Paracelsus. She even admits to, while writing Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,
dreaming about Flammel showing her how to make a philosopher’s stone.
· 2003:
American author Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci
Code and its twisting conspiracies are based almost entirely on the books
of Margaret Starbird, most of which were written between 1993 and 2003.
· 2009:Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, by American
author Seth Grahame-Smith, is a rehashing of Jane Austen’s 1813 Pride and Prejudice. But with zombies.
· 2015: American
writer of critically acclaimed The Outsiders,
S.E. Hinton, claims that she has posted anonymous fanfictions of her own novel,
as well as at least four Supernatural fanfics, being a huge fan of the show and
of the paranormal.
As a professionally educated and trained writer and editor
myself, I had to study the intertextualities of several of the pieces I
mentioned above. But this is not an exhaustive world list by any means and is missing some other fantastic and influential writers—I’ve included only
what has come to my mind in a short time. Plots and characters and ideas have
been largely passed around throughout the history of literature. Without
fanfiction, a solid portion of well-known literature would not exist.
In fact, many authors and even inventors will say that there
is no such thing as an original idea. Certain pieces get touted as creative
because they combine previously suggested elements in a different or
thought-provoking way. (Don’t even get me started on how science fiction is a
driving force behind many scientific advancements today!)
If you’re writing fanfiction, then you’re participating in a
tradition that spans millennia. There is no piece of literature created in some
“original” vacuum. That is precisely why literary critics, and those who have professionally
studied fiction in an academic setting, use the word “intertextuality” to
describe how works of fiction are ultimately interrelated in some way or
another.
Therefore, fanfiction is the legacy of literature. If
Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Keats, Poe, Dickens, Tolkien, and Brown can
write fanfiction about and expand other people’s works, you can too. So the
next time someone tells you to stop writing fanfiction, or tells you that it’s
not a valid form of art, tell them that they obviously have never read the most
important historical works of fiction, or even many popular modern stories,
which are all rehashed fanfiction stories, borrowing characters and names and setting and even syntax.
Rant written for @greenappleeyes and everyone else unfairly shamed for writing fanfiction. Content was retrieved from my own class notes, as well as publically available online interviews and articles.
i didnt realise ao3 was started in response to lj deleting account relating to p//edophi|ia and they explicitly support the posting of such works yikes
it wasn’t, like, ~~~we luv pedophilia, it was way more complicated than that!
although it’s true AO3 does allow all fannish content provided it’s properly warned for, there’s a long history there – of spaces being used by fans until the host decided whatever we were doing was too weird and distasteful and either kicking us off, banning certain content, or changing the nature of the site until it was no longer viable as a host.
you’re referring to the LJ Strikethrough of 2007, which, being an ancient crone, I lived through, and since I was hanging out in the last vestiges of SGA and in bandom, I saw some of the fallout. this was before LJ was sold to the Russians (which is a whole ‘nother story), when it was still owned by Six Apart; in an effort to clean up LJ’s act, Six Apart decided to delete all accounts using tags like underage, incest, rape, etc.
this was supposed to get rid of actual child porn on the site, and I hope it did, but it also targeted fan communities. this was a problem for a couple reasons; for one thing, not every story tagged with these words is in favor of them; for another, these things happen to real people and these personal posts were also potentially in danger of being attacked; for the last one, look, I ain’t into this kind of fic but people write about what people write about, and if it’s fictional and not explicitly banned in the TOS (correct me if I’m wrong; I don’t think written content about this stuff was banned?) then it’s not cool for a content host to just start deleting communities without warning.
but that’s what happened! these deletions were also primarily targeting slash communities, which smacked of some serious homophobia since things were deleted that had nothing to do with any of this kind of content.
eventually someone found out it was this super conservative religious group who’d sent a list of journal names to Six Apart, and who if I remember correctly targeted slash fic on purpose, even after it became clear that the fic was, well, totally fictional. after a while, Six Apart admitted they’d made a mistake and started to reinstate journals, but all of fandom was pretty shaken up.
THEN Boldthrough happened, which was essentially the same debacle several months later, at which point fandom began its long slow migration from LJ to GJ, IJ, and eventually AO3, Twitter, and tumblr.
AO3 was opened in 2008 in response to several incidents, of which Strikethrough was a really intense one. remember, also, that back in 2008 the stigma surrounding fandom was significantly greater and more shameful than it is today, so finding hosts willing to archive fic was difficult unless someone had the dough to pay for server space – often not an option. this was also back when fanfic.net’s HTML restrictions were so great that users couldn’t use any special characters or bold or italicize anything, and it didn’t allow R-rated content, so it was clearly not ideal. in addition, although cease & desist letters were much less common than they were in the early 2000s and before, DMCA takedowns were still a phantom on the horizon.
LONG STORY SHORT, even though pedophilia is reprehensible and I personally cannot stomach fanfic that involves that kind of content, AO3 was founded specially as a safe space for fandom communities that could not find homes elsewhere. it requires warnings precisely for that reason, and if you find a story that is not properly warned, you can alert the admins and get the story labeled appropriately.
IDK, maybe it’s just because I am, again, ancient, but I was in and around fandom before homosexuality was legal in all 50 states. so were most of the people who started AO3. for most of my formative life, being gay was associated with pedophilia, and so was writing about gay characters. just – it’s a lot more complicated than you might expect, and there’s a reason many older fans who have been involved in several generations of fandom were so grateful to have AO3 as an option.
I don’t read, for example, Hydra Trash Party fics. They squick me, and I generally feel they are pretty gross. But writing noncon body-horror is not the same as saying “yeah, I totally want to go out and rape and torture people for years while brainwashing them!” or even “yeah, I wouldn’t do it myself, but it would be totally okay if someone did!” Nobody is hurt by it, and nobody is going to be hurt by it. So should I have the right to go, that is gross, you don’t get to write or read that? No.
In the same way, writing about underage teens getting it on–sometimes with each other, sometimes with adults, sometimes consensually, sometimes not–is not the same as child pornography, nor does reading a fic about Hermione and Snape getting it on while she was his student mean someone thinks that would be a good and/or healthy thing in real life.
Fiction affects reality, but fiction is not reality. And writing about something does not mean you want to do it in real life, or believe that anyone should.
Let’s take a closer look at that “Ao3 supports pedophilia!” shall we?
1) The only fics I have ever come across that had actual pedophilia (i.e. someone having sex with a child), it was clearly and explicitly abuse. It was not meant to titillate or arouse. It was meant to horrify. It was seldom explicit.
2) There’s a lot more incest, but it is usually portrayed either as explicitly mutually consensual (i.e. Sam/Dean) or as abusive.
3) I’ve been in fandom for a decade and a half. When people start getting upset at “omg pedophilia, think of the children!” the fics they are usually objecting to aren’t actually pedophilia. Usually, it is teenagers having sex, especially queer sex. And people don’t like that, and use pedophilia as an excuse to shame people for writing/reading sex they don’t like.
Let’s look closer at Strikethrough, shall we? I hope that, if there were any communities of actual pedophiles on LJ, they got taken down, too. But here are some of the communities that got taken down that were not in any way supporting pedophilia and/or rape and/or incest that got taken down:
1) at least one support community for survivors of sexual abuse.
2) a literary book discussion group that was reading Lolita.
3) lots of slash fanfic communities, for things like Draco/Harry fic set in their fourth year (when both boys would have been 15).
Basically, this very conservative “family values” group hated porn, and they hated queer stuff even more, and used “but think of the children, it’s pedophilia!” to pressure LJ to get rid of huge swathes of things they didn’t like. And one time taking down the worst of it wasn’t good enough for them. No, this was step one on a moral crusade. If you acceded to their demands, all that did was whet their appetite, and soon they would be back with a new list of demands. This is why the 2007 strikethrough was not an isolated event, but rather one of a series of events, nor was LJ the only website thus targeted. It starts with anything that can get labelled “pedophilia” or “incest” because that’s low-hanging fruit. But they use that to go after anything relating to queer teen sexuality. Then anything with teen sexuality. Then once the community is already divided and diminished, they go after anything with non-con. Then whatever is next on their list. It doesn’t stop until they’ve won the point and nothing but suitably “family-friendly” fics that match their purity test are allowed.
Which is why AO3 has no morality content in their terms of service. You can’t break copyright beyond fair use (and AO3 has an expansive view of “fair use” and a team of lawyers on call). You can’t use AO3 for commercial advertising. And you can’t post ACTUAL child pornography, i.e. the things that are legally prohibited, i.e. actual photographs or videos of actual children (not teens) in sexually explicit positions–you know, the stuff that actually hurts kids. Other than that? It’s fair game. You can post anything you want, and the archive will not judge. There is no handle for the Moral Majority Family-Friendly Thought Police to latch onto, no cracks they can exploit to divide and conquer.
We’ve been down that road. It doesn’t lead anywhere good.
Reblogging this for the excellent explanation of what exactly the moral crusaders did last time. They had an explicit agenda of anti-queerness, and they specifically targeted slash and femslash communities in particular, such that many ship communities became (or started as) deliberately members-only. You had to apply, and your personal blog had to look like a real person and a fan. You were vetted, a la 1990s private servers.
During this period, Dreamwidth was also targeted by attacking its payment processor. They had to get a new one. These “Warriors” (literally called themselves that!) were totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom they didn’t like.
If you’re carrying out harassment of people right now because they’re posting works with sexual elements you don’t agree with? (And it’s always sex, never non-sexual violence, how strange….) If you’re doing that, you’re also totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom you don’t like. Because your tactics are fandom-destroying, and so is your agenda.
reblogging because this is important: strikethru and boldthru and all the various “purges” that fandom went thru about 10 years ago: this had to do with OUTSIDERS deciding that fandom in general and fanfiction in specific were evil and needed to be destroyed; unless we were writing and shipping good vanilla M/F married people. These were outsiders, going after fictional writing about fictional characters.
AO3 and OTW are HUGE, because now we have an organization, with very smart women and a lot of lawyers, that have our back. Fannish history is important, people! It has not always been this way.
This is so, so important: there’s that other post about AO3 and fanfiction floating around, about our history. People decry violent video games but no one is trying to force companies out of business. But people can and do attack fanfiction: an activity primarily written by women for women, about fictional characters. And often about sex. We have to constantly defend ourselves, protect ourselves, support each other against charges like “paeodophilia”.
^^^rebageling again for excellent commentary
Throwing this in because I was also present: This was during the American Government’s attempts to pass censorship laws on the internet. As MOST of those domains had their serves in America, they were beholden to those censorship laws. A great deal of fanfiction.net was removed because they happened to lose a goddamn courtcase. I’ve been on the site since 2002. They may not have ‘officially’ allowed NC-17 rated content (what it used to be listed as in the filters), it never did a damn thing to remove it. Ever. They had it listed as a rating option during ‘New Story’ uploading after all. It was i nthe search filters. After they lost the courtcase however, they legally had to start doing things about the mature content reports they got. The admins and mods were not actively looking for fic to remove, they were just responding to reports they had already received.
tl;dr – I know tumblr is all about black and white “you’re either all right or all wrong” thinking, but it’s important to understand what actually happened before going “ew ao3 was made to give pedophiles a safe place to post” because that is 110% not what happened.
This is why so, so many of the comparatively older fannish folks on tumblr like me are so vehemently against stuff like the anti movement and “all ships are valid UNLESS”. It smacks of censorship and content policing – and we’ve been there. We got our shit deleted and our accounts banned because someone else thought what we were reading or writing or talking about needed to just… not exist. No warning. Literally overnight. We just woke up and stuff was gone.
And yeah, the group was legit called Warriors for Innocence (or maybe of). I knew several people that were members of survivor/support groups that lost their groups – and their main support network – when Strikethrough happened (ten years ago holy shit).
You antis need to listen when us older fans tell you that the censorship you’re advocating for, when put into practice, is NOT a positive thing; it’s an extremely scary thing!
I can guarantee that you would be very, very upset if another event like LJ Strikethrough were to happen today because *you* are just as vulnerable as the rest of us! If you support the rights of marginalized groups of people, if you’re a slash or fem slash shipper, if you support gender identities that aren’t defined by biological sex, if you care about representation, if you support women, if you have any kind of kink, if you care about fandom in any capacity beyond its eradication, YOU DO NOT ACTUALLY WANT THE SORT OF CENSORSHIP YOU’RE ADVOCATING!!
People were terrified during Strikethrough. I was there. Communities were being shut down, individual users were being shut down. People were losing access to their own fics, their feedback, their comments – a LOT went on in comments on LJ. Think more coherent reblogs, much more personal, very widespread. Comments were also very important, and in terms of networking/communicating, were absolutely critical.
LJ was, for many people, central.
It was a fundamental part of the infrastructure of fandom at the time.
Having it attacked, having parts of your fandom’s territory just deleted like that, was very very scary. People didn’t know who was next. Every day, the list of stricken journals grew. And not all of them came back, not all of them recovered their content. Some people even voluntarily deleted their content as a form of protest. It was a bad time.
You do not have to interact with fic that grosses you out or makes you uncomfortable. Tagging is a thing. And even outside of tags, you are responsible for curating your own fandom experience. It is not right to expect it to be curated for you. And it is not right to lash out when someone refuses to do so and expects you to walk away from things that do not concern you.
I was gonna say “things that don’t harm anyone” but I realize you can argue that. If you get triggered, that’s upsetting. That could be considered harm. And I have sympathy for that. I do.
I have run across fic that triggered me. I have pretty specific triggers, and people don’t always think to warn for them because they aren’t that big a deal for a lot of people. Or it’s sort of bundled into kink and is presumed, that if you’re okay with certain kinds of kink, you’re okay with this. So I’ve been blindsided by it before. And it sucks for a couple of days while I get over it.
That was not the fault of the authors! You could argue that tagging should have been used, and maybe it should, but ultimately that’s not an ironclad obligation. It’s a tool people provide out of courtesy.
That was not the fault of the site! The site is there to give authors a way to make fiction available, not to judge each work and interrogate its validity and make sure everything is tagged so that nobody has to see anything bad, ever.
That was not even my fault! It was my responsibility to try to curate my experience, and I tried, but it wasn’t my fault because I didn’t deliberately set out to trigger myself.
When I get triggered, unless it is by a deliberate act, it is actually the fault of the people who hurt me in the first place! And I refuse to let them off the hook and blame perfectly innocent people who just wanna write their fanfiction! I may hate that fanfiction, but that is irrelevant to the question of whether or not people should be allowed to post whatever they want.
Also, some people cope by writing about fucked-up shit. My best friend in the whole wide world has shared her fic with me, and HOO BOY it is messed up. She wrote it during a time in her life when she was in and just coming out of a horrifically abusive relationship. I mean, it was exactly the kind of relationship all of us here on Tumblr love to hate. She was married to a shitty, abusive man who preyed on someone younger than he was and used his influence over her to treat her in a way that would be right at home in that Lundy Bancroft book Why Does He Do That? He was a real rapist, a verified grade-A bad fuckin’ guy. (She was lucky to escape. I have immense respect for her.) And she wrote some fucked up fic to deal with it, and she shared it, and people were invested in it. And because this was early 2000′s, she had to host it on a foreign server and cover her tracks, because at that time no-place was safe to post it.
“Yeah, but if she’s writing it for therapy, she doesn’t have to post it where other people might have to see it!” I hear you say.
But like … what the hell??? “Shut up, don’t talk about it, it’s bad to talk about these things, because these things are bad!” is something used against folks with trauma.
“This isn’t good for me, I can’t talk about this, I can’t be your audience for this,” that’s fine, those are boundaries that people with trauma use to defend themselves. You should learn to say those things! It will help you!
But expecting other people to never create and share art about trauma is just so thunderously oppressive I lack the ability to fully articulate it.
And nobody should have to disclose their history of trauma to prove their motives are pure or virtuous enough for their speech to be protected. I’ve only really been able to openly say “I was assaulted, it was traumatic, I am a little fucked up from it” for the past couple of years, tops. I couldn’t talk about it before that. Couldn’t! And it was over 20 years ago!
I also believe, very firmly, that you don’t need a history of abuse to find writing really messed-up shit satisfying, or to find reading it cathartic. I believe 100% in the freedom of creative expression, and the freedom to read whatever fucked up shit you want to read.
All y’all fandom youngsters can spit nails all you want over gross rape fic, incest fic, whatever.
Fine, I don’t like it either!
But that fucked up shit? That fucked up shit helped carve out the spaces we have today. You don’t have to like it, but campaigning to get it deleted, harassing content creators, calling people rapists and pedophiles who have never done and would never ever do such a thing, that is not the way to improve the world, it doesn’t keep actual kids or teens or assault/rape victims safe. It wouldn’t have made me feel safe when I was 16 and did’t want what was going on. It doesn’t make me feel safe now. I can say with the perspective of someone 24 years away from that event, it doesn’t make the world safer for people like I was. It actually makes it worse.
Learn to steer clear of the messed-up stuff you don’t like. It’s a skill, you get better with practice. Have someone else vet stuff for you if you need help doing it now.
Everything that is sketchy and gross is not criminal, and writing about a thing is not morally the same as doing it. Please stop acting like writing about an adult and a teenager having really questionable, gross sex is as bad as the actual registered sex offender they caught hanging around an actual elementary school two neighborhoods over from mine, just trying to talk to the kids. The former is, at most, in poor taste, and potentially triggering to abuse victims. The second makes me want to vomit because even though he was just talking, that guy was gearing up to try something and create another abuse victim. A g a i n.
The first can be avoided because it is imaginary and you, an adult, have power over your back button so that you don’t have to witness harm to imaginary people. The second, those very real kids had to rely on real adults and real law enforcement to keep them safe from very real assault.
(It worked! The neighborhood rallied! He was arrested for violating parole!)
Pretty sure Sleazebag McDongface didn’t read some gross NC-17 Draco/Lucius fic before deciding to harm an actual human being. Pretty sure not having read it didn’t keep him from doing it. ‘Cause he fuckin’ did it. And he would have done worse. But actual people stopped him.
I get wanting to protect victims when so many of us are victims ourselves, but man, going after fiction is not the way to do it.
An author is not a perpetrator. Stop trying to make those things synonymous in the minds of other fans, and in the minds of other recovering victims.
I’m a crone who also lived through strikethrough, and all y’all young fans need to read this and understand it if you don’t want history to repeat itself someday.
Here’s the thing, also: it doesn’t stop with fic about objectionable stuff.
If you have a website with TOS that includes any kind of “objectionable content” rules, there will be parties who will use those rules to try to silence other people whom they want silenced.
Let’s look at the alt-right and MRA movements today, or GamerGate a few years ago. What is one of their primary weapons? They report black or feminist or really any leftist YouTube channels (or Twitter accounts, or whatever) whose message they don’t like and claim those channels are are violating TOS by posting hate speech or incitations to violence or whatever bullshit they can come up with, in an attempt to silence those channels.
When Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequence came under fire for starting a crowdfunding endeavor to fund the production of her Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series of videos, male gamers tried to get her KickStarter and various social media accounts shut down by reporting her for for hate speech and promoting terrorism.
Luckily, that became a big enough story that the dudes failed and their efforts backfired. But a lot of times, these tactics work.
How do I know this? Because it happened to me. Not over major shit like the examples above, but over something completely petty.
Back in the mid-to-late 90s, before LiveJournal really became the place for fandom, before FF.net was really a thing, you had to create your own personal website on whatever free webhost you could find (GeoCities was popular, but there were others) if you wanted to host your fic somewhere.
And back then, TV studios and book authors were still sending their lawyers after people who wrote fanfic, issuing cease and desist letters to not only the authors, but also to their webhosts.
At the time, I was writing perfectly het Mulder/Scully fanfic. No rape, no pedophilia, no slash. Maybe a little BDSM. But largely it was unobjectionable.
Then the 8th season of X-Files started, David Duchovny decided he only wanted to be involved part-time, and the show decided to bring in another male character. The fandom lost their shit–as fandoms do–over the idea of “replacing” Mulder blah blah blah.
One of the most popular fanfic mailing lists–one that had previously had no restrictions on what characters or pairings could be posted–decided that if you wrote fanfic involving this character, you were no longer welcome. Well, this was the mailing list with all the readers. Sure, authors could go to other mailing lists, but they wouldn’t have exposure to the sort of readership this other list boasted.
I spoke out, saying that this change was unfair to fic authors and that the moderator of this list was behaving in a pretty vile way. The moderator and her friends took aim at me and began a campaign of harassment, and a few days later, suddenly my website with my XF fanfic was TOSed because someone had reported it. So was the next site I tried to create to host my fic, and the one after that.
Thanks to the way AO3s TOS are constructed, that sort of shit doesn’t happen now. I can speak up if I need to, and while I may receive harassment on my various social media accounts, there’s no chance they can have my fic taken down just because they have an agenda and don’t like me for reasons not relating to my fic.
So yeah, AO3′s rules protect fic a lot of us might find objectionable. But they also protect fic that is in no way objectionable from being targeted by unrelated harassment campaigns. And since any of us could find ourselves in the sights of those sort of campaigns at any time, we need to thank our lucky stars for that.
I like this last addition.
When I helped write the ToS for AO3, I wasn’t primarily thinking about strikethrough. I was primarily thinking of FFN, where so many people post things that are technically against the ToS but that the community tolerates. Any time someone gets pissed off, they can go on a grudge-reporting spree and target their enemy’s work. Often, that means guys targeting slash or Twilight fic because it’s “for girls” and thus sucks. Sometimes, it’s one ship vs. another. I was also thinking of Miss Scribe and all of that other Harry Potter fandom drama. (And if you think fans are above destroying an entire archive just to strike at one enemy, think again!)
We can’t force people to like each other. We can’t force people to be nice to each other. But we could take away fandom bullies’ favorite tools.
So we did.
Watching young (ostensibly liberal) bloggers and fans take up the deeply conservative rhetoric and moral crusading of the right wing and evangelical groups from the 90s has been both fascinating from an anthropological perspective, and fucking horrifying for someone who lived through this time period and the death of LJ.
if you are not in fandom and you see somebody in fandom describing themselves as ‘anti-pedophilia’ or ‘anti-abuse’ I want you to take a moment and apply some critical thinking to that label.
who has to explicitly state they’re anti-child molestation or anti-abusing people? Is this not the normal position? This is like saying ‘I’m anti-cancer’. of course you are. Even actual child molesters and domestic abusers are going to claim they’re morally opposed to what they do in the dark, when they think they can’t get caught.
And if that’s the case, do you really think that self-described ‘antis’ are running into open opposition for their views on pedophilia or incest? do you really honestly think that’s likely? Do you really, honestly think a bunch of people leading otherwise normal lives are going to bat for child sexual abuse and beating your spouse? OPENLY going to bat for it, even?
Is it remotely realistic for there to be such a huge amount of unmaskedsupport for csa, rape, and abuse that people have a reason to label themselves as ‘anti-pedophilia’ or ‘anti-abuse’?
Or … is ‘anti-pedophilia’ actually code for being anti-something else? Something that isn’t utterly reprehensible to the overwhelming majority of people. Something that people would reasonably be willing to go to bat for with their name and reputation attached.
Which is more likely: that fandom is overrun with people who unapologetically and openly support child molestation, incestuous rape, and domestic abuse? Or that people who say they are ‘anti-pedophilia’ – a position so normal, so common it’s hardly worth mentioning – are signaling they oppose something actually controversial to oppose?
Just something to consider.
Interesting concept.
Sorry but am I having a stroke or
so there’s a thing people will do where they want to campaign against something, but if they were honest about what the thing is, they wouldn’t be able to garner much support. they can’t say “I’m against romantic YA literature” or “I’m against porn” because people won’t back them as readily. so what they do is attach a buzzword that people are automatically sensitive to and try to connect the two. “romantic YA lit” becomes “pedophilia”, “porn” becomes “abuse” etc etc, even though they’re not remotely the same thing.
you see this happening all over fandom now, where fanworks exploring dark themes, or adult ships with an age gap, or even real life adults engaging in consensual kink play, are all labeled “pedophilia” in an attempt to make an emotional argument against them. the actual definition of pedophilia, as a serious mental illness causing attraction to prepubescent children, is completely ignored in favor of watering down the word to apply to anything that makes certain people uncomfortable. and this is really dangerous, because it creates alarm fatigue and causes confusion over what this word actually means, which leads to real world cases of child abuse being ignored or misrepresented.
making a big deal about being “anti-pedophilia” is like hollering about being “anti-slavery”; of course you’re anti-slavery, what kind of society do you think you live in where that’s something you need to broadcast! certain people cultivate the impression that fandom is full of abusers and predators so that they can hold the moral high ground and use that leverage to police how others engage with fandom, and they misuse the terms for very serious crimes to do so. that’s what this post is about.
thank you so much for this excellent, level-headed explanation of the point I’m trying to make. (My own addition was less eloquent and much more ‘loud’.)
there are a few reblogs from fandom antis on this post now as well. their reactions have shown me something that I hadn’t fully considered: that many anti-shippers actually buy their own press to the point that they genuinely believe things like:
saying they are ‘anti-pedophilia’ is the same thing as saying they are against the inappropriate sexualization/objectification of teenagers
there is no difference between fandom being full of objectified teens wrestling with their own objectification via fanworks and the objectification/sexualization of teenagers in mass media
it is inappropriate to ever acknowledge or address that adolescents can have sexual desire or sexual feelings and express those feelings
simply acknowledging that adolescents can have sexual desire or sexual feelings and are capable of expressing those feelings (in fiction or irl) is the same as justifying adults who have inappropriate interactions with adolescents irl
no matter what the reason for its creation, fanworks containing fictional adolescents having sexual feelings or sexual interactions of any kind are exactly the same as objectification/sexualization of adolescents in mass media and have exactly the same effect
I knew that fandom antis conflate fiction and reality (and fanworks and mass media) because it makes their cause look much more legitimate and builds the assumption that people who defend fanworks are proponents of awful things irl: that’s literally what this post is about. but the reblogs on this post make it clear that fandom antis either can’t or won’t distinguish between a fanfic writer depicting child molestation and a real life pro-contact MAP or a person who collects and consumes cp of real children.
They can’t or won’t tell the difference between a person who has been sexualized and objectified their whole life against their will now sexualizing and objectifying a fictional character (which, being fictional, can’t even be hurt by it) and a person who sits at the top of a media empire and authorizes a line of ads that uses sexually provocative images of real people to sell a product.
They can’t or won’t differentiate between interest in nsfw fanworks about fictional, animated characters based on ‘looking good together’ or ‘interesting character dynamics’ who happen to be assigned adolescent ages, and interest in a porno film that kinks on a character being young and inexperienced.*
(*in the sense that interest in the porno may be founded on objectification/sexualization of teens, just as purity culture kind of drives up the ‘value’ of inexperience and youth and the taboo of sex as inherently corrupting. the porno itself would be a symptom of the problem more than the cause, imho.)
it’s all the same to fandom antis. they believe their own hyperbolic labels because from their POV, all of these things are equally dangerous, equally corruptive, and equally present in fandom. (Which I guess makes sense, seeing as anti-shipper rhetoric is predicated on black and white thinking. when you can only depict concepts in two shades of morality, it’s hard to see or care about nuance.)
Have you been part of fandom for at least ten years (even non-consecutively)?
We’re Casey Fiesler and Brianna Dym, longtime fan community members, and also researchers in the Department of Information Science at University of Colorado Boulder. We’re conducting a survey about how fan communities migrate across platforms! So if you’ve used multiple platforms in that time (Livejournal, Tumblr, AO3, Usenet…), we would love to have you participate!
The survey is a mix of multiple choice and open answer, and you can answer as much or as little as you like. The survey should take on average about 15 to 20 minutes to complete. (There will be more questions depending on how many platforms you’ve used, though you can skip through questions if necessary.)
We will ask for some demographics (any of which you can skip) so that we can describe how fan communities are different from other communities, but won’t require any identifying information – unless you would like to give us your email address so we can inform you about the results of the study.
Steel Phoenix Studios 