no but how much audacity and sheer entitlementdo you have to have to tell people they need to stop posting their darkfic and porn fic and any other fic you don’t like to ao3 so you can have a safe space when ao3 was literally created as a safe space for writers to post their content without fear of it being randomly wiped out by pro-censorship assholes with an agenda like what has happened to plenty of other fic archives before?
“but a lot of us see ao3 as a safe space to get away from that kind of nasty content” - lol you can see the middle of a busy interstate as a safe space all you want too but that doesn’t mean that you get to walk into the road and scream at all the cars going by that they’re the ones infringing on your safe space either
ao3 is not, has never been, and will never be a site meant for nothing but children’s stories. you can “see it” like that as much as you want but there’s a difference between fiction and reality and that view of what ao3 is like is as fictional as the stories posted on it.
The only thing I will ever ask be removed or reported is anything involving pedophilia or incest, end of story.
Write what you want. Just don’t romanticize of sexualize fuckingpedophilia and incest.
I take that shit seriously. Minors shouldn’t be writing pedophilia/incest, adults shouldn’t be writing pedophilia/incest, y’all need to stop using those as a harmless uwu kink trope. because that’s fucking disgusting. and go get fucking help.
Soooo… let’s say a young abuse survivor posts a story that’s a fictional reflection of their own abuse.
What might happen if that story is left up? Well, people can have a conversation about it. Someone might comment, “That’s disturbing.” Or, “I love reading about fucked-up dynamics like this.”
If the author didn’t realize it was a fucked-up dynamic before, now they have. And they might reach out to the person who commented about it and ask questions.
What might happen if the story is taken down?
None of those conversations start, the young abuse survivor is left feeling like there’s something wrong with them for wanting to talk or write about what has happened to them, and you have harmed the people you want to protect.
Fortunately, AO3 does not take down stories for addressing difficult and dark topics. That is not against their rules.
So people like the young abuse survivor in my example - theoretical, but based on real people - can post their work there without fear of removal, although the dead-end scenario can still happen if others harass them into silence.
If you report stories that don’t break the rules, though, you do create a backlog and make it more difficult for the abuse team volunteers to respond to things that actually are against the rules, like racist/homophobic/transphobic harassment. It benefits vulnerable people if no one clogs the queue.
Speaking as an abuse survivor, I do vent. Frequently.
BUT, AND I’M WRITING THIS IN ALL CAPS SO MAYBE IT’S READ IT THIS TIME, THE CONCEPT OF WRITING THESE THINGS AND POSTING THEM IS FUCKING DISGUSTING. BECAUSE IF YOU GENUINELY THINK YOU’RE THAT FUCKED UP, YOU DON’T NEED TO VENT THROUGH A FUCKING FANFICTION SITE.
YOU NEED TO GO GET HELP.
AND LET’S NOT MENTION THE DOZENS OF PEDOPHILES AND BRAINWASHED KIDS HAPPILY READING THAT SHIT AND THINKING IT’S NORMAL, RIGHT? LET’S JUST BRUSH ASIDE THE SHEER AMOUNT OF CHILDREN EXPOSED TO THIS SHIT THINKING IT’S NORMAL.
WRITING IN THIS WAY SHOULD NOT BE NORMALIZED. IF YOU NEED HELP YOU NEED TO GO FUCKING GET IT. YOU NEED TO TAKE THE FUCKING STEP AND FIND A DAMN THERAPIST. WRITING ABOUT DISGUSTING TOPICS AND EXPOSING OTHERS TO THEM WILL DO ABSOLUTELY NO GOOD IF YOU AREN’T ACTIVELY SEEKING HELP.
Holy fucking shit. I can’t believe this. Has it occured to you that writing about breaking up with an abusive ex isn’t on the same level as creating disgusting works-that are illegal- that you’re basically handing to terrible people on a silver platter.
At this point, I’m detecting that this conversation has seemingly left “the reality-based community” behind and maybe you would be better off seeking whatever activity is therapeutic for you personally, rather than continuing. But if you do choose to engage further, some questions:
Illegal where? It is legal in most places to read Nabokov, and he isn’t the only writer who’s ever addressed these topics, he’s just famous because of being a dead white guy with a flowery writing style.
Why do you assume that writing about a topic you consider “disgusting” will automatically make people think it’s normal?
Do you think that people in therapy don’t do other things in their lives besides going to therapy?
Do you think that therapy, in the real world, is intended to increase feelings of shame and disgust or reduce them?
And again, how do you think that people who are traumatized and need therapy get access to it? How do you think that they figure out they need therapy?
Not a single genuine professional therapist working would tell you that people in therapy don’t *also* need social support, because they do, according to every psychological model we have. Why tell people to go to therapists, if you are also going to tell them to ignore their therapists’ advice?
Can I add one tiny thing:
Many therapists recommend such fiction.
The idea of cope-shipping has been around for a long while, @nonbinaryhadeskid. There are many professionally trained and qualified therapists - both from personal experience and from various articles, and also both from what therapists have told me and what others have publicly said - that recommend to their patients to write and/or read such works.
Now, let’s start with writing.
It can enable the patient to regain control of their trauma - they can write from an objective perspective, stop when they need to stop, control what is happening on page, and see events in a new light. It can help to reassess events and process events. It can help to organise one’s thoughts, which can be disjointed and disorganised.
It can be cathartic - you can relive in a safe manner events, so long as you are not re-traumatising yourself (in which case your therapist would likely not recommend this). You can say and do anything, while finally expressing yourself and getting out everything you need to get out, and you can just write without judgement or pauses or interference. It’s a way of getting out everything on page without concern of response.
It can be a way to escape - you can rewrite your trauma into a happy ending, or maybe a revenge fiction where harm befalls the abuser, or maybe a story in which you were in love with the abuser and the character falls for him and changes him … none of that undoes the fact the abuse is horrific, but it does allow you to ‘change’ what happened into something positive to you and something like a fantasy in a way
It can be a way to explore ‘what if’ scenarios - most survivors always have questions and concerns … ‘what if I fought back -?’, ‘what if I went along with it -?’, ‘what if I told so-and-so -?’ … these stories can help people explore those questions and gain closure from them, finally thinking up answers and possibilities to otherwise lingering uncertainty
The thing is that not everyone can write. It may be that they have a physical disability that prevents typing/writing, or maybe a disability like dyslexia where they are unable to properly communicate via written word, or maybe they just lack the confidence or self-esteem to write down their thoughts in such a manner. In this case, reading can be an alternative. If I were to read x’s work, I can still compare to my circumstances (in the hypothetical). I can still use that for escape/fantasy, or to regain control, or to find a sense of catharsis.
It is a way to explore one’s trauma in a safe manner - if you are triggered or upset, you can close the window or back-space, which means you can explore trauma in a safe manner and walk away when you need, and this isn’t always possible in conversation or therapy or other areas
You can explore the same ‘what if’ scenarios above mentioned - if I were attacked in x place, maybe I can find a story in which someone was attacked in y place, and answer questions I had about what would have happened and how I would have coped and what I may have done differently, and gain some closure from that
I think the most important factor in publishing … aside from providing material to people unable to produce that material themselves, allowing them a means to cope and experience release … is actually a very simple reason:
It builds a community of like-minded people - it might not just be survivors, no, but people with kinks or curiosity or other reasons, but … do you know what means the world to me? Any time someone says to me: “I thought I was alone and now I feel less alone”. In some cases it’s survivors who struggled to cope, but now have gone on to get therapy or join support groups or feel they have closure, and in other cases it can be people with specific interests who were demonised and ostracised and finally feel they can be accepted and understood. I have seen friends made. I have seen groups formed. I have seen others inspired, so that they have written stories and made groups in turn.
Writing and posting is ‘getting help’.
It is recommended by professionals. It enables you to meet other survivors. It lets you feel less alone … it cannot “normalise” abuse to children, as they should not be on such sites in the first place, and as such cannot see such material to be affected. It cannot harm other survivors, as there will be tags and warnings for them to avoid such works.
YOU CANNOT DENY OTHERS A SAFE SPACE SIMPLY AS YOU DO NOT WANT TO TAKE CONTROL OVER YOUR MEDIA CONSUMPTION. You can avoid such works with an ‘exclude’ feature or switch over to a site like fanfiction.net that bans such works from being produced.
Just because it’s bad for YOU, doesn’t make it bad.
It just means it’s made for someone else.
Good additions.
One small quibble: I wouldn’t say that children “cannot” see such material, as it’s quite apparent that some number of them do gain access (and some do so and regret it, perhaps because they haven’t been taught to control their own environment.)
Rather let’s say that structures which mark adult material as such are good to have and use, and (like the rope fence around the amusement park ride, or a warning on a bottle of alcohol, or any kind of road sign) they need to be reinforced by good parenting to work properly.
The problem of bad parental gatekeeping is a perennial one (including parents keeping kids locked in a bubble until 18 or, say, allowing them to smoke cigarettes at an early age - these are both ultimately neglectful acts that harm children) and it’s primarily caused by the toxic structure of the nuclear family, which has fewer checks and balances than community-based family structures.
But prohibitionist approaches (e.g. not letting adults have a thing ever because of the fear that children might access that thing; and, in parenting itself, the “pretend it doesn’t exist rather than explaining the risks and answering questions” approach to these things) don’t keep drugs or smut or dangerous activities away from people who aren’t ready for them. They just make it so that those people are more likely to stumble in unawares, or have their ignorance exploited by someone unsavory.
I don’t want any sh//dowp//ach and s//ntang shipper following. I don’t give a shit why you don’t think it’s weird, just be a freak in your fucking corner.
me: starker and thorki are incest/pedophilia and are disgusting
starker and thorki shippers:
How dare people try to defend themselves when direct insults and implications that they’re a danger to their family members are posted in the main ship tags. Don’t they know to never defend themselves and just lie down and accept whatever hate comes their way because their brains just happened to latch onto a certain ship?
sometimes I wonder what goes through starkers’ heads. are they into pedophilia? is it their kink? i think about this with thorki too… “they’re not blood brothers!” isn’t a valid excuse. are u gonna fuck your adoptive brother? no? then what the fuck do you mean??????????
if yes, you would fuck your adoptive siblings, then you literally need help
Would you like an honest answer? Because you’re getting one.
I’m a thorki shipper with two adopted siblings. I have no desire to do anything romantic or sexual with them. I consider them to be fully my siblings and just as related to me as my blood relatives are. My enjoyment of thorki is entirely unrelated to my siblings.
I like the ship because it’s a complicated dynamic between two interesting characters with a lot of shared history. Yes, I’m aware that a romantic relationship between brothers in real life has a very high chance of being abusive and I wouldn’t support it. In fact, I often write thorki as heavily codependent bordering on unhealthy and sometimes as downright abusive. I don’t like thorki because I see it as some kind of “relationship goals”, I like it because there’s a lot of potential for interesting stories with this dynamic. Also because I relate to Loki and like seeing him feel safe and be cared for by someone he loves. It’s just a story, not a worldview. I don’t personally ship starker, but I would imagine people who do feel a similar way.
i can’t believe thinking shipping FUCKING ADULTS WITH CHILDRENorMOTHERFUCKING INCEST is wrong is an “unpopular opinion” on this hellsite
go outside for once in your life you fucking wheat bagels
really, go outside and tell someone ‘i think it’s okay to glorify pedophilia, abuse, and incest’…… wonder how they’ll react?
and yes, i’m going to crosstag this so all you absolute fuckfaced tree branches can see some common fucking sense in your ‘uwu shipping isn’t reality!!!’ echo chambers
As I’ve said before, I make it no secret that I have problematic ships in real life. I was actually talking to my therapist today about how the thorki community on Twitter was encouraging me when I said I wanted to write kinky stuff and you know what? He thought that was good. It’s a positive influence on my life. My mom knows about some of my weirder ships and she doesn’t care at all. In general, people don’t care about which fictional characters you like to imagine kissing. They care about how you treat people in real life.
The only surprise is that when the danger closes in at last, and with a golden doctor on the doorstep to rescue her, Edith takes a knife and starts stabbing her own way out. It’s Del Toro’s most satisfying story trick that no one in the movie takes much notice. Often in the gothic, monstrous women are objects of horror—look no further than Countess Zaleska and her Sapphic ilk. But Crimson Peak itself gives no indication this isn’t the way a woman behaves; Lucille is a serial killer who views Edith’s violence as fair play. It’s the traditional gothic that’s taught us to expect a woman paralyzed by fear. That expectation makes Edith’s arc a slowly unfurling subversion.
It finally happened. I finally saw Crimson Peak. And it was everything I hoped it would be. I’ll just point to this A.V. Club article, because it captures almost everything I want to say about it.
A major part of why I love Victorian lit so much and why I ended up studying it is that troping and archetypal stories zing around in my brain like a pinball machine. They do something to me that just lights it up; far from mere narrative laziness, tropes are a message in a bottle, a time capsule. They tell us what that bubble of culture was collectively trying to work through, understand, or solve, and they vary so wildly from place to place and century to century that they provide a highly-specific window into the anxieties of a particular place and time.
And Crimson Peak is clearly crafted by a seasoned gothic horror fan. Every review I’ve read so far (rightly) makes comparisons to a range of gothic horror standards: Rebecca, Jane Eyre, The Monk, etc. The pure innocent pulled into a sexual and murderous death game, the fascination with decay and decadence and rot, the land itself as metaphor, all these are the central calling cards of the genre.
This A.V. Club article comes closest to saying what I wanted to say, though: reusing and rehashing old tropes is lazy. Subverting them is narrative ingenuity. Edith taking up a knife herself, and the narrative refusing to turn her into a monster for it, is incredibly subversive at its heart. The idea that Edith can end the movie changed by what she’s experienced but not a villain herself is incredibly rare and incredibly powerful. A weaker article from the Guardian claims that Crimson Peak is empowering simply for portraying monstrous women, which is not entirely wrong, but misses its mark a bit. Monstrous women are everywhere, and have been forever. From Grendel’s mother to the vampiric women of Dracula, women are monstrous when what makes them women is perverted. In the case of Grendel’s mother, her maternal instincts are over-exaggerated, becoming vengeful bloodlust (though comparing tropes in Beowulf to 19th century ones is a bit anachronistic). Most often, we see monstrous women’s perversion as a warping of their sexuality; Lucille lines up perfectly with her predecessors–overdeveloped appetites, sexual and bloody, is what makes her a monster. The female vampires of Dracula drip sexuality–my jaw actually dropped when I first read this paragraph:
Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and chin and seemed about to fasten on my throat. Then she paused, and I could hear the churning sound of her tongue as it licked her teeth and lips, and could feel the hot breath on my neck. Then the skin of my throat began to tingle as one’s flesh does when the hand that is to tickle it approaches nearer–nearer. I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the super-sensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in a languorous ecstasy and waited–waited with beating heart.
Like, even now, this is diiiiirty. But they don’t even match Carmilla, the “sexuality as vampirism metaphor” to end all sexy vampirism stories. In Carmilla, a pure and innocent girl is perverted by the aggressive sexual advances of her female friend, until she is revealed to be a vampire and killed by a stake through the heart (is it Freudian in here or is it just me?). If you think that surely, no one could have written a lesbian story in 1872, it must have been more subtle than how I described it, see for yourself:
Sometimes after an hour of apathy, my strange and beautiful companion would take my hand and hold it with a fond pressure, renewed again and again; blushing softly, gazing in my face with languid and burning eyes, and breathing so fast that her dress rose and fell with the tumultuous respiration. It was like the ardour of a lover; it embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet overpowering; and with gloating eyes she drew me to her, and her hot lips travelled along my cheek in kisses; and she would whisper, almost in sobs, “You are mine, you shall be mine, and you and I are one for ever”.
Women are monstrous when they want too much, and Lucille is no exception. If I’m remembering correctly, she’s two years older than her brother, which makes the revelation of their long-running sexual relationship even more horrifying and abusive. But she’s not new. Women who have grown too powerful and need to be culled have been around for as long as sexism has taken its contemporary form. But Edith getting powerful, refusing to be the delicate butterfly that Lucille thinks she is? Now, that’s new. And it’s incredible. She gets powerful and she stays powerful, she gets big and bigger.
