English: a longing for something or somewhere which no longer exists, to which you can no longer return; the longing for the lost homeland of your ancestors, which you know only through blood and tradition, and will never feel under your feet
English: ladybird
Welsh: :) :) :) :) :) :)
English: look, you literally just made fun of me for my lexical limitations, why are you -
Welsh: little red cow :)
English: aw :)
Welsh: :)
There may be a day I do not reblog this post but today is not that day!!!
English: raisin
English: Come on French, isn’t raisin a word in you vocabulary?
English: French?
French: …
French: DrY gRaPe
English: grape
French: you’re not gonna like it.
English: what?
French: in my defence I was first.
English:What?
French: raisin
In defense of “in the ass of the world” English does have “bumfuck nowhere”
Yeah, I grew up saying we lived in East Nowhere to avoid the curse word.
Live slug reaction and it’s me boy I’m the ps5 are so fucking funny because they became tumblr favorites in literal hours and the posts hadn’t even gotten to every blog yet imagine going to sleep thinking you’re used to tumblr’s bullshit then waking up to everyone slapping some nasty ass slug on pictures of gay people like ok guess we’re doing this now
i love it when tumblr’s own home grown memes end up trending it gives this webbed site such wholesome and cozy vibes. like a cursed farmer’s market from eeby deeby peddling fresh horse plinko, twilight renaissance, ps5, and our newest cultivar: live slug reaction. not to mention all the lovely crossbreeds springing up.
It’s too early in the morning for me to decipher this
soooo today i learned that back in the early 90s, coca cola tried making this thing called “ok soda” as a marketing stunt to beat out pepsi since they had way more of a hold on the “younger/rebellious” generation at the time, and their way of doing that was naming it “ok soda” so that they could copyright the word “ok”, the most popular word in the world, and at the same time brand it as an…ironic soda??? like the whole thing with it was that they tried to brand ok soda as a counterculture soda but instead of making it about typical 90s RADICAL EXTREME!!! fodder the theme of it was uh. unsettlingcapitalist brutalist dystopia. instead of being bright and colorful the color scheme was only stark whites, grays and reds and the cans looked like this. bold shapes and labels stating ominous, robotic things with a figure always staring dead into you on the front, no coca cola branding on it at all.
sometimes there would be “prize cans” of this stuff where instead of having soda inside it there would be hats. and they didn’t sell this option in boxes by the way they just put prize cans in random vending machines. and put like 25 cents in it so hey. you could get an actual soda that isn’t just hats. maybe.
did i mention that this soda also had a fucking MANIFESTO??? because yeah it sure had that printed on some cans and it goes as follows
and there’s these things called “coincidences”, which… yeah it doesn’t make it sound any less ominous
and you might be wondering how the soda itself tastes like does it taste good? ok? well apparently it was just a regular “citric” tasting soda but somehow they fucked it up so bad that it was compared to “carbonated tree sap”, and instead of trying to make the drink taste better they included that it tasted like shit, INTO THE ADVERTISING SCHEME ITSELF. they would literally advertise that it tasted like ass as a part of the ironic marketing, no i am not kidding.
but if you thought that’s where it ended there’s one more curveball and without any exaggeration, you will not expect what i am about to tell you.
take a look at this guy.
this guy is the “face” of ok soda, as in he was printed on the most cans and technically served as a mascot of sorts for the entire thing. his face was a major part of the branding, and this design for the cans was one of if not the most common.
okay. cool. no issue there right?
take a guess on who this guy is based off of.
the artist’s coworker? a generic guy? the artist himself? a relative? some random reference model they hired?
CHARLES MANSON. YES, THIS IS REAL. MEANING FOR A BRIEF MOMENT IN TIME, CHARLES MANSON’S FACE WAS USED AS A MEANS TO SELL COCA COLA.
the lead artist himself has even come forward to say this is the case. and now you may be asking wait. how’d he do this? how’d he possibly get away with this, years after the crimes had been committed?
well according to him, it was simple. apparently none of the contracts he signed said anything against putting a mass murderer on the can. so. there’s THAT.
unfortunately or fortunately depending on how you look at it, ok soda never really caught on since *surprise surprise!* teens really don’t want to buy soda that looks like a brutalist art museum, and it never had a wide release so it was only a thing for like two years between 1993 and 1995. but from what i’ve heard there’s still people who are giving this soda a small modern following, collecting all the cans and merchandise and even coming up with stand in recipes for the soda formula itself.
so yeah! that was ok soda.
what the fuck
There’s things you learn on this site that just stay with you. You know?
i made a comic in google slides for some ungodly reason
the long-awaited sequel, Untitled #2
Untitled #3 explores the formulaic entertainment mass-produced by the pawns of capitalism. Or I just wanted to say ass. One of the two.
Untitled #4: the plot thiccens. also there’s a plot apparently
Untitled #5. This whole comic is 23 strips long, and I’ll be doing daily uploads until it’s all posted. Thanks for the great response y’all.
Untitled #6. Okay so firstly, HOLY FUCK Y’ALL. I did NOT expect this comic to get notes, let alone fanart. The most recent strip will always be linked at the bottom of my pinned post, so you can check there to see if you’re caught up.
Untitled #7. Not much to say here. I hope you’re having a good day!
Untitled #8. The true plot begins.
Untitled #9. The Creator can possess Red because I, like Red, have a phenomenal ass. That’s it. It’s not that deep.
Untitled #10. *slaps roof of blue square* this bad boy can fit so much fucking existential despair
Untitled #11. Bet you didn’t expect the ass jokes comic to come to this now did you
Untitled #12. Red is fucking pissed at me. sorry buddy
Untitled #13. I indeed cannot have a comic without characters. Well played, Red.
Untitled #14. Red has his priorities straight.
Untitled #15. It would be funny if this were the last strip but I promise it isn’t. I put too much effort into the end of the comic to stop it now.
Untitled #16. Nice try, Red. Nice try.
Untitled #17. The paradox of omnipotence perpetually vexes me :(
Untitled #18. Let’s not have any ambiguity: Red’s dead. Hey, that rhymes! Neat!
Untitled #19. While strip 18 coincidentally didfall on April Fool’s, it wasn’t a prank. This comic has two characters now. Remember when this comic was about ass jokes?
Untitled #20. Three more strips to go. Holy shit.
Untitled #21. ass haha
Untitled #22. What am I going to do? Who knows… Find out tomorrow at roughly 8:30 AM EST!
Untitled #23.
Probably the happiest ending this comic could have had
World Heritage Post
I can’t believe you made me cry over a fucking red square.
Hey, i know y'all love the fact that Vico Ortiz or David Jenkins or Con O’ Neil are so vocally supportive of fanworks. I do too.
But.
Quelch the parasocial attitude now that it’s early. Don’t treat these people like your best friends or ask their opinions on fandom things. It’s very nice that they like fanwork but for fuck’s sake, try to leave them alone. Don’t look for their approval. Have a chuckle and move on.
I saw countless times what happens to approachable crew when they meet with overentusiastic fanbases on twitter and it. never. ends. well.
I know it sounds overparanoid but I can spot the fandom growing incredibly fast (100 fics per day AT LEAST) and - with that - the pool of vocal drama increases. And, with that, the attitude towards crew changes.
It’s manageable now but it will become A Thing and the best we can do is:
1) make your corners to interact in/share ur thoughts. small friend groups good and foster creativity!
2) block and move on if you see shit you dont wanna see. it’s fine. don’t vague about it either, cmon.
3) dont dig into what the actors say and do, they’re people. Don’t elevate them as unproblematic icons, this will make the switch to “they suck” more brutal. Leave the actors alone and limit what you tell them. Check yourself for the parasocial attitude and calm it.
4) there will be a point between seasons people WILL get bored and try to pick fights. ignore them. Be vocal about fandom events! Make AU weeks, make zines, make big bangs! Try to channel that energy into creativity.
5) this is fandom. have fun. if you’re not having fun, log off and take care of yourself, yes?
IF YOU’RE READING THIS I NEED YOU to go to neocities.org and make an account.
It’s an emergency. Look. People are really getting into it now. Do you want to be the last kid on your block still depending on corporate social media for your self-actualization?
I sharpened my skills making psshaw.neocities.org and it’s still made up of mainly basic code like <img> and <table> tags. It’s only in the later pages that I’ve decided to try advanced stuff like responsive CSS.
I feel like there’s so much personality that’s just waiting to be brought back into Web 1.0. It’s a whole sandbox you can learn how to wrangle, and shockingly fast. I want to see what everyone can do!
Okay, I’ve been on the internet since before the great Y2K scare and *old person voice* Back in my day, everyone had websites like this. I had several. It was normal, everyone’s websites were a reflection of themselves and their interests, and it was beautiful. I’ve been lamenting a lot lately missing this era because of how badly social media has distilled and homogenized the internet experience
Your sites remind me so much of web 1.0 and it’s beautiful. I love this. Please keep doing this. Please keep expressing yourself.
Please everyone bring this back. Bring back personality, bring back individuality, bring back fun
And if you’d like to have a fine pairing to go with your website, I suggest going to proboards.com and setting one up. Still want social media, but want a smaller and more close-knit community without the same constant fear of some rando finding you and sending you threats, or something accidentally going viral and giving you a panic attack? Individual forum communities. You make your own rules, you can make your own aesthetic, and if you use add-ons or know CSS you can get a lot of customization. Also, forum signatures! They’re a great quick little way of expressing yourself! Use imgur.com to host your images!
Seriously, Forums are AMAZING for sharing both long and shortform content, shitposts, art and writing, everything! Love roleplaying? They’re the best and most organized way to do that and be able to have everything tidily archived and easy to search for!
And best of all, you don’t have shit like twitter’s algorithm breathing down your neck or promoted shit being shoved in your face!
Please please please if you hate all this corporate homogenizing bullshit and attempts to do shit like manufacture fandom, this is a way you can fight back and express yourself!
I’m seeing people in the notes going “that sounds nice and all but I don’t know how to code.”
And you don’t have to make a website that looks like a shining, professional corporate product. You can just kind of slap some colours and images on a webpage and add to it from there, as you learn. I learned to build basic websites when I was 10. It’s a little more work than just signing up for a social media profile and filling out a few forms, but it’s so incredibly rewarding when you start to see your idea taking shape.
And there’s a whole community of people out there who want to see you succeed and would be happy to help. Check out the Yesterweb, they’ve got a Discord community and a Mastodon instance and even a Minecraft server. Sadgrl/Sadness, who runs the community, is super sweet and helpful. They’ve got a ton of manifestos from community membersaboutwhy it’s so important to bring back the spirit of the old web. Oh, and they hate crypto, so you know they’re not just a bunch of tech bros.
I’ve also seen people in the notes saying “But nobody’s going to follow me there.” That is always a concern when it comes to moving to any new space on the web, especially if it’s outside the big social media platforms, but even though I’m a huge supporter of reducing and/or entirely removing your presence on the big platforms, there’s no one saying you can’t stay on them in order to keep in touch with the people who matter to you — or even to use those platforms to promote your site! I’ve distanced myself from Facebook, for example, but I still have an account there and keep the Messenger app open. I’ve set it so I appear offline to everyone, but I’ve told the people I care about that I’m still there and they can reach me any time, I just won’t look like I’m online. You can use status updates/tweets/posts/whatever to tell people “Hey, I added an art gallery to my website!”, “Hey, I added my latest fic to my website!”, “Hey, if you’ve ever wanted to learn everything there is to know about snow leopards, they’re my special interest and I’ve built a web shrine to them now, so check it out at this link.” You can set up a guestbook or a forum on your website to keep the lines of communication open. And Neocities is set up in such a way that you can make new connections with other people in the community. So not only can you still keep in touch with everyone you still want to keep up with, but you can also make new friends and follow new people!
Really, the only big drawback is that you’d have to accept that it’s a bit of a slower space. The old web wasn’t about a constant deluge of new content from one source — it was about exploration. It was about going down rabbit holes and finding all the weird content that makes you happy in a bunch of different places, and keeping those sites bookmarked for whenever you want to check them out again rather than following their feed. But you even can follow them on a feed — even if they’re not on Neocities — if you use RSS. And with RSS, there’s no algorithm and no advertising. It’s just simple, chronological updates.
There’s a bit of an extra learning curve if you want to get in on this stuff, but it is so, so worthwhile, and honestly so much better for your mental health. A slower web built around your specific interests means less algorithmic outrage culture: you’re not constantly being shot with a firehose of all the most controversial content to keep you angry and clicking. You’re just having a nice time building your little dedication to nice things that you like, or expressing yourself, or learning new things, and meeting new people who are interested in those things. It’s lovely and especially if you were never around for the old web, you deserve to experience it.
IF YOU’RE READING THIS I NEED YOU to go to neocities.org and make an account.
It’s an emergency. Look. People are really getting into it now. Do you want to be the last kid on your block still depending on corporate social media for your self-actualization?
I sharpened my skills making psshaw.neocities.org and it’s still made up of mainly basic code like <img> and <table> tags. It’s only in the later pages that I’ve decided to try advanced stuff like responsive CSS.
I feel like there’s so much personality that’s just waiting to be brought back into Web 1.0. It’s a whole sandbox you can learn how to wrangle, and shockingly fast. I want to see what everyone can do!
Okay, I’ve been on the internet since before the great Y2K scare and *old person voice* Back in my day, everyone had websites like this. I had several. It was normal, everyone’s websites were a reflection of themselves and their interests, and it was beautiful. I’ve been lamenting a lot lately missing this era because of how badly social media has distilled and homogenized the internet experience
Your sites remind me so much of web 1.0 and it’s beautiful. I love this. Please keep doing this. Please keep expressing yourself.
Please everyone bring this back. Bring back personality, bring back individuality, bring back fun
And if you’d like to have a fine pairing to go with your website, I suggest going to proboards.com and setting one up. Still want social media, but want a smaller and more close-knit community without the same constant fear of some rando finding you and sending you threats, or something accidentally going viral and giving you a panic attack? Individual forum communities. You make your own rules, you can make your own aesthetic, and if you use add-ons or know CSS you can get a lot of customization. Also, forum signatures! They’re a great quick little way of expressing yourself! Use imgur.com to host your images!
Seriously, Forums are AMAZING for sharing both long and shortform content, shitposts, art and writing, everything! Love roleplaying? They’re the best and most organized way to do that and be able to have everything tidily archived and easy to search for!
And best of all, you don’t have shit like twitter’s algorithm breathing down your neck or promoted shit being shoved in your face!
Please please please if you hate all this corporate homogenizing bullshit and attempts to do shit like manufacture fandom, this is a way you can fight back and express yourself!
I’m seeing people in the notes going “that sounds nice and all but I don’t know how to code.”
And you don’t have to make a website that looks like a shining, professional corporate product. You can just kind of slap some colours and images on a webpage and add to it from there, as you learn. I learned to build basic websites when I was 10. It’s a little more work than just signing up for a social media profile and filling out a few forms, but it’s so incredibly rewarding when you start to see your idea taking shape.
And there’s a whole community of people out there who want to see you succeed and would be happy to help. Check out the Yesterweb, they’ve got a Discord community and a Mastodon instance and even a Minecraft server. Sadgrl/Sadness, who runs the community, is super sweet and helpful. They’ve got a ton of manifestos from community membersaboutwhy it’s so important to bring back the spirit of the old web. Oh, and they hate crypto, so you know they’re not just a bunch of tech bros.
I’ve also seen people in the notes saying “But nobody’s going to follow me there.” That is always a concern when it comes to moving to any new space on the web, especially if it’s outside the big social media platforms, but even though I’m a huge supporter of reducing and/or entirely removing your presence on the big platforms, there’s no one saying you can’t stay on them in order to keep in touch with the people who matter to you — or even to use those platforms to promote your site! I’ve distanced myself from Facebook, for example, but I still have an account there and keep the Messenger app open. I’ve set it so I appear offline to everyone, but I’ve told the people I care about that I’m still there and they can reach me any time, I just won’t look like I’m online. You can use status updates/tweets/posts/whatever to tell people “Hey, I added an art gallery to my website!”, “Hey, I added my latest fic to my website!”, “Hey, if you’ve ever wanted to learn everything there is to know about snow leopards, they’re my special interest and I’ve built a web shrine to them now, so check it out at this link.” You can set up a guestbook or a forum on your website to keep the lines of communication open. And Neocities is set up in such a way that you can make new connections with other people in the community. So not only can you still keep in touch with everyone you still want to keep up with, but you can also make new friends and follow new people!
Really, the only big drawback is that you’d have to accept that it’s a bit of a slower space. The old web wasn’t about a constant deluge of new content from one source — it was about exploration. It was about going down rabbit holes and finding all the weird content that makes you happy in a bunch of different places, and keeping those sites bookmarked for whenever you want to check them out again rather than following their feed. But you even can follow them on a feed — even if they’re not on Neocities — if you use RSS. And with RSS, there’s no algorithm and no advertising. It’s just simple, chronological updates.
There’s a bit of an extra learning curve if you want to get in on this stuff, but it is so, so worthwhile, and honestly so much better for your mental health. A slower web built around your specific interests means less algorithmic outrage culture: you’re not constantly being shot with a firehose of all the most controversial content to keep you angry and clicking. You’re just having a nice time building your little dedication to nice things that you like, or expressing yourself, or learning new things, and meeting new people who are interested in those things. It’s lovely and especially if you were never around for the old web, you deserve to experience it.
omg i can have a geocities (NEOcities, haha i love it) site again!
Look, some “creepypasta monsters” really don’t deserve the mockery they have gotten in later years as generic and juvenile, especially things like Slender Man, Momo and Siren Head whose origins are all infinitely interesting rabbit holes just based on subtle horror art from simple, everday artists who rarely are even mentioned as the original creators of these massive media phenomenon adaptations. The looming eerieness and vagueness of the original creators’ work that beckons and forces people to create elaborate backstories as a means to comfortably process and understand their own feelings of dread when seeing it, it’s genious and monumental, and reducing it to something that glue eaters snort-laugh at Youtubers and peers getting low-effort-jumpscared by is such a shame.
…
anyways, I’ll take the chicken quesadilla and a Sprite, please
Do your part - use literally anything other than Google Chrome
Reminder that switching to Firefox is incredibly easy and takes just a few minutes, you WILL be able to copy over all your cookies, browsing history, logins etc, as well as change the look/layout so it feels like what you’re used to.
If you’re like me and you’re trying to keep an open mind that there may someday be a non-scam application of blockchains, you’ve probably read some articles about “Web3”, which promises to re-decentralize the web by something something Blockchain.
I realize this is far from the most important criticism but i think it’s really interesting that the standard explanation you find replicated nearly word-for-word at the beginning of most “Web3” articles has a big ol’ chunk of historical revisionism in it. It goes like this:
“First there was web 1.0, which was, like, geocities pages and stuff, and it was decentralized. Then there was web 2.0, which was the centralized silos of social media - facebook, twitter, etc. Now Web3 is gonna re-decentralize everything by letting you own your own data on the blockchain…”
No! Stop there! Web 2.0 was not social media! You’re rewriting history that’s less than 20 years old!
Web 2.0 was:
blogs with comment sections
wikis (wikipedia was far from the first wiki!)
forums (that is, discussion that was previously on Usenet migrating to like phpBB web forums)
bookmark sharing sites like Del.icio.us
user-defined tagging systems as in del.icio.us (and computer nerds who spent a lot of time defining taxonomies being blown away when it turned out you could let users define their own tags and a useful system could organically emerge)
on a technical, behind-the-scenes level, static HTML files, server-side includes, and Perl CGI scripts were getting replaced with structured, database-backed web frameworks (Ruby on Rails, Drupal, etc.)
AJAX as a way of loading content dynamically into a page without the user navigating to a new page
Javascript in general allowing more full-featured applications - as did Flash
RSS feed as a user-defined way of aggregating content
when someone tried to buzzwordify all these disparate trends they noticed that what a lot of them had in common was “Website owner allows website visitors to enter words that will be seen by other website visitors” and summed that up as “User-generated content” and branded it “Web 2.0” around 2004-2005.
I was there. I worked on backends for a lot of this stuff!
The key shift was where things were hosted. In Web 2.0 you might use off-the-shelf software like WordPress or phpBB or whatever but you were still hosting all that stuff on your own server. Your server, your rules; you’d set your own moderation policy and wield your own “banhammer”. The free speech compromise was “don’t like my moderation policy? Make your own website.”
It was a huge paradigm shift in 2005-6 when YouTube started and said “we’ll host your videos for you”. (What? trust a third-party website to host my videos? Sounds sketchy) That was the beginning of the end, because once people gave up running their own server in favor of letting a big company host their stuff on a centralized server, we gave up all the power.
Social media wasn’t web 2.0, it’s what killed Web 2.0!
You might think I’m arguing over mere nomenclature but the important fact is that this era existed, and the Web3 pitch pretends it didn’t. We already had decentralized internet with social features. This fact contradicts the story the Web3/blockchain advocates want to tell you, so their story skips this entire era.
Web 2.0 lost to siloed social media because:
running your own server is a pain
running your own server costs money, especially if you want to host video
signing up for facebook/twitter/etc is much easier for non-computer-literate users, who outnumber us 1,000 to 1
once there’s a critical mass of users there, anybody who wants an audience has to be there (network effects)
non-technical users didn’t understand about paying with their privacy, and in most cases had no experience with the freedom they were giving up
the price was not apparent until everybody was locked in
Apple made a fateful decision that mobile-phone internet should be app-centric, not browser/website centric. Then Android copied their mistake.
To make the web3 argument you have to explain why “a distributed ledger where each update contains a cryptographically signed pointer to the previous update, replicated across many computers via a decentralized protocol, that rewards people for hosting nodes by paying them pretend money when they brute-force solve a cryptographic hash” is relevant to any of these problems. I suspect it is not relevant, because:
the blockchain is incredibly slow, inefficient, and energy-intensive, and it can only hold miniscule amounts of data. (The ape pictures are not on the chain, only links to them are on the chain). So everything still has to be hosted elsewhere.
for most web3 stuff “the” blockchain means the Ethereum blockchain, where it sometimes costs thousands of dollars to make a single transaction process.
people who don’t want to run their own webserver sure as heck aren’t gonna run their own blockchain node
in practice, people don’t interact with the blockchain directly, but through intermediarires (coinbase.com etc), who inevitably become centralized.
in practice, control over blockchain itself, for any popular blockchain, is highly centralized to a tiny number of the largest mining consortiums
if you want to make the dream of “buy your Minecraft skin as an NFT and bring it with you to wear in Fortnight!” work (why is this the example every article uses?) you would need to get all the games involved to decide to implement equivalent items, or some kind of framework of item portability, and if you could do that then you wouldn’t need the blockchain!
What might help solve any of the problems that killed Web 2.0:
cheap and easy (EASY!) web hosting
portable data standards
antitrust enforcement with teeth
privacy laws around data collection that make the centralized social media business model unprofitable
a critical mass of dissatisfaction with corporate social media
I want a decentralized internet to come back more than anybody, but blockchain is completely irrelevant to that.
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.
Youdo 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 responsibilityto 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 thunderouslyoppressive I lack the ability to fully articulate it.
Andnobodyshould 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. Pleasestop acting like writing about an adult and a teenager having really questionable, gross sex is as bad as theactual registered sex offender they caught hanging around an actualelementary 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 imaginaryand 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.
Iget 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.
This thread keeps getting better.
It galls me to think that those of us who went through all this shit might have to go through it again because people who were still in primary school at the time don’t see anything wrong with harassing us over
Like, I hate to pull this argument, but we are your fandom elders, we did what we did to preserve fandom for y'all, so y'all would have space to safely explore the sane things we did and still do. And in doing so we rightly realized that if we wanted to protect the comfortable, cuddly parts, we also needed to protect the dark parts.
You can hate non-con fic all you want, and I will always advocate for adequate tagging/warning (especially with franchises that are aimed at younger audiences, e.g. MLP:FIM and SU) so that you don’t have to see it because I sympathize, but I will never support people who want to make sure that it isn’t even there to be seen. I’ve been through that once. It didn’t help anyone. It didn’t fix anything.
Please, learn to curate your own online experience. You are responsible for not clicking, or clicking away. Don’t try to force others to do it for you. That’s not cool. You aren’t protecting children. You are asking fandom to treat everyone like a child. There is a massive difference.
Also… maybe parents should do their job in monitoring kids’ content? When my parents found out I was looking at age inappropriate things when I was a minor, like they intervened.
Strikethrough 07 was such a well-conducted operation that communities dedicated to survivors of sexual abuse and fans of Lolita fashion were suspended, but the journal of the baby rapist, ohbutyouwillpet, stayed up. And it’s still up to this day, though it hasn’t been updated it over a decade as its owner is still in prison.
Whooo, I guess it’s my turn to take a shot at this.
I’m a nold. I’m in my 40s. When I came out as queer, in the early 90s, it was in the middle of what were called the “feminist sex wars”. If you want a really good book to read about that period, which has a LOT of resonance with Strikethrought and with the current Tumblr discourse, I cannot recommend this highly enough:
Apreview is available on Google Books, or it should be readily available secondhand, or in academic libraries (though it’s not a very heavy academic read). I recommend Booko for finding cheap secondhand copies. Support independent bookstores!
I haven’t read “Defending Pornography” for a while – I actually last re-read it about a decade ago because of the impact that Warriors for Innocence were having on Dreamwidth’s payment providers at the time, subsequent to Strikethrough itself – but here’s a quick summary, as I remember it.
1. In the late 80s and early 90s there was a vocal group of radical feminists who believed that pornography inherently harms women, not just in its production but also in its consumption (i.e. watching/reading pornography caused people to develop attitudes that were harmful to women). All explicit content was considered to be harmful, from eg. girlie magazines to hardcore XXX videos to a book like “The Joy of Gay Sex”, no matter who made it, its purpose, its intended audience, or its context. (Yup, even m/m content was considered to be degrading to women for reasons that didn’t make a lot of sense tbh.)
2. These anti-pornography feminists teamed up with the religious right and managed to get anti-porn laws passed. In particular, a law was passed in Canada preventing the importation of “obscene” material. Canada, of course, imports a lot of material from the US. Stuff started getting seized at the border.
3. Guess what was seized first? “The Joy of Gay Sex” and the like. Guess what businesses started finding alltheir shipments seized or delayed – sexually explicit or not – to the point where they were being put out of business? Gay bookstores. Guess what wasn’t seized at all? Mainstream porn made for straight men.
Around this time, Little Sisters bookstore in Vancouver (a gay bookstore) found that huge amounts of merchandise was being seized at the border, regardless of the actual content. They were being discriminatorily targeted on the basis of their sexuality. The queerness of the material they were importing was seen as inherently obscene.
Remember that this is before there was much information available online for LGBTQ+ people, so if you were a young person maybe just coming out and trying to understand things, or wanting to learn about safe sex (and yes it was at the height of the AIDS crisis, too) you’d go to a bookstore like this. Which now had empty shelves. I remember endless fundraising and activism in the LGBTQ+ community to try and keep Little Sisters open. In the end they spent half a million dollars on court cases. Read more about their struggles.
(You know what businesses weren’t impacted and didn’t have to basically ask their friends and community for help to stay open or spend a decade in the courts to defend their right to run their businesses? The powerful companies making porn by and for straight men.)
The book goes into a large number of analogous situations. Time and time again, anti-pornography laws intended to protect women are disproportionately used against women themselves, against LGBTQ+ people, and against basically any marginalised or minority group, rather than against the mainstream male-oriented porn that would seem to be its primary target.
Here’s the key point: Strossen is a legal scholar who’s looked at a lot of attempts at censorship, and you know what she found happened every time? When you try to censor pornography, even in the interests of protecting vulnerable people, that censorship will be applied first, and hardest, against the people who are most vulnerable.They won’t come for actual abusers, they’ll come for the abused, and prevent them from accessing resources, education, talking to each other, creating art to express themselves, or organising against those who are actually causing harm.
Read the book. The stories it tells are from the early 90s but they perfectly mirror what happened a decade ago with Strikethrough and what’s happening now with all this Tumblr discourse.
This is old, old business, we’ve seen it more than once before, and it never goes the way the antis think it will. Censorship is a tool that gives power to abusers and lets them inflict more harm on those who are abused, vulnerable and discriminated against. Don’t fall for it.
History they should have known: The Comstock laws in New York were this one dude (Comstock) who managed to get a mail regulation re-written to categorize anything related to contraceptives as pornography, which was already illegal to mail.
(Which is one reason for the pornographic playing cards etc, because the 19th century was almost as big on mail-order goods as the 21st, because getting to shops in person was hard for a huge subsection of Americans.)
Comstock built a non-profit with the support of the YMCA and oh shoot, some millionaire whose brand is still going strong, to enforce this law because the postal system didn’t have the personnel. They were granted the right to do so.
He and his posse of honorary mail inspectors with police powers (I kid you not) spent years engaging in endless skullduggery to prosecute people for selling contraceptives by mail. Which was how everyonegot them in the 19th century, you couldn’t walk into a shop for a pack of condoms but mail-order packages were nicely anonymous. They dragged Margaret Sanger into court repeatedly. There was a huge cottage industry of contraceptives in NYC at the time, most of the manufacturers being female, Jewish, immigrants, or some combination of the above.
There was one woman whose name escapes me they kept trying to prosecute for selling contraceptive devices and the juries kept nullifying it because the average New Yorker in the 1890s were like ‘yeah no condoms are not a crime,’ but not everybody had her stage presence and resources.
You know who they never even tried to touch? The big rubber companies were were getting into mass production of condoms. Their big funder owned the company that produced Vaseline, and was claiming in ads at the time that it worked as a spermicide.
Only the poor and vulnerable felt the impact of the Honorary Postal Inspectors of righteousness.
It’s been touched on a little before but really it’s hard to explain just how confusing and scary the crackdowns were. I was only a reader on FanFiction when the crackdown came but it felt like I was standing in a coal mine full of canaries. Canaries that were either silent or /screaming/.
Every where you looked, authors where posting warnings about how x stories were getting deleted. All of the warnings feeling rushing, panicked, most of them including notes about how they didn’t know how long they had before their warnings were taken down or they were deleted. It felt a bit like all the stars going out, everything just dying around you. Like a stampede of people had fled from some oncoming unnamed horror leaving silence in their wake. Finding AO3 later on was like finding a safe haven in a world gone mad.
Also FanFiction doesn’t really encourage socialisation aside from authors notes to readers on their chapters or homepage. Meanwhile all the warnings of the crackdown were really rushed and vague. So, as a not very sociable reader, I really didn’t have a clue what was going on at the time of the crack down and the confusion and uncertainty was almost the scariest part of the whole thing. (Not knowing if the authors should come back and if fanfics were gone for good was scarier.) It’s only years later, reading fanfic history posts that I’ve started to piece together what happened.
Also an interesting point was that during the crack down all I ever heard about was /gay/ stories being deleted. Perhaps this was just because I was reading gay stories but I didn’t even realise it was mature stories in general that was supposedly the aim of the crack down until much later.
Hot damn, this post just keeps going!
I very much second the rec about the feminist sex wars. Understand those, and you’ll understand why those of us over about 30 are so opposed to tumblr’s purity crusade.
If you haven’t been TOSsed you really don’t get it, imo.
If you haven’t spent your time wondering if the thing that will get your content deleted is the dark stuff or the nipples, you really don’t get it, imo.
Hell, way way back in the day, I had moderator types private message me going “I really like your writing, but you need to be less obvious about it, or I will have no choice but to tos you.”
A long reblog, but a worthy read. So much history and experience recounted here. If we don’t remember our past, remember why AO3 and many fandom spaces work the way they do now, we will be condemned to repeat it.
Please do not let us return to the dark ages of fear, censorship, and oppression in fandom.
I hated - hated fandom back when this LJ shit happened, but I was there. I’m both glad this thread is here, and irritated that it was felt necessary. How many times do we need to learn this lesson?
The oldest big fandom brawl I can clearly remember in the internet age would have to be in the alt.fan.dragonlance USENET group, in 1992, after the release of the Tales of the Lance boxed set. I don’t think people quite understand how ferociously passionate people used to get about their favorite AD&D settings.
Some context: Dragonlance was unique in that it was an AD&D setting that never got an official boxed set where everything was all set down in a definitive fashion until a full decade after it started publication. Remember, the world was introduced through a series of adventure modules, followed by tie-in novels that were a hit. Tales of the Lance in 1992 was going to be the big setting box. There’s more, though. The Tales of the Lance boxed set was extra contentious because the original creators of Dragonlance (Hickman and Weis) were forced out because of all kinds of backstage machinations. In other worlds, there was an aura of cold, ruthless commerce and illegitimacy about it all, from an organization that already ousted Gary Gygax from his own company only a half decade before. TSR was also hyper invested into Buck Rogers XXVC, which nobody liked but which existed to be a borderline illegal money pipeline out of TSR (sufficed to say, we are leaving the world of fandom complaint, and entering the world of white collar crime). In other words, the fanbase had some trust issues with TSR.
So, when Tales of the Lance came out in 1992, which not only set down in stone a world that already existed in everybody’s heads for a decade, but was also defined by a vision that wasn’t the original creators’, put out by a company the fandom didn’t trust…well, there were bound to be problems, and the reaction was disproportionate. Honestly, most of the critiques of Tales of the Lance sounded like the ultimate in nerd nitpicking, back when fandoms were way less concerned with ‘ships and way, way more right-brained (though even then, people loved to speculate if Tanis Half-Elf was gay or bisexual). An example of the kind of mistake they brought up was that the boxed set said all Silvanestri elves have hazel eyes, when probably the intent was that was just the line of Silvanost. Yeah, okay, that’s just the telephone game in operation, but…does it matter that much? But in 1992, AD&D fans were really willing to fight over very, very minor things like that, that’s how real all this was in people’s heads.
