I’ve read and watched a number of things with that. It ALWAYS makes me uncomfortable. It’s pretty easy to tell the difference between when it’s romanticized and when it’s condemned (as it SHOULD be!). And unfortunately, a disproportionately large amount of people in fandom like to do the former: romanticize it.

The glamorization of coffeeshop AUs needs to stop. Nothing they sell is good for you, it’s all caffeine and sugar and we’d have a better world if people would just stop living like that. Please, please, if your fiction isn’t 100% healthy, take the time to understand how problematic it is.

Because AO3 is a hosting service. They don’t exist to police the content on their site as long as that content doesn’t breach the Terms of Service.

AO3 has a robust tagging system so that users can either find or avoid content. The site doesn’t moderate the content because the users do. If authors fail to tag or readers fail to pay attention to tags, that moderation slips and people are exposed to content they don’t want to see. 

I love the fact that AO3 puts the power over what I see in my hands. I have control, not some faceless person and certainly not my government. I can see whatever I want to see and avoid whatever I want to avoid and every other user of the site can do the same thing. 

It would be fantastic if we could trust users to always follow community guidelines and tagging procedures but that is just not the reality. The first time I was exposed to explicit porn was on a site aimed towards children, and one stray bad actor decided to post tons of it all over the site. Fortunately, it was stopped and deleted within a few minutes - because I was a moderator for the site and was able to ban them and delete the posts. I hope that I acted quickly enough to keep other people, many far younger than me, from seeing it. It was certainly upsetting enough for me.

Users absolutely should do as much as they are able to self-moderate but it really sucks when people who have been hurt or traumatized by unmoderated, unmarked content are told that actually they must have chosen to seek out that material and that it is their fault and they’re asking for additional protection for no reason. Even if you are adamantly against the removal of any works of fiction for any reason and adamantly supportive of relying on a tagging system, at the absolute minimum it seems like people should be able to agree that sites should be responsible for moderating content /that does not appropriately use the tagging system in place/. Like people posting misinformation on Facebook as if it’s the truth, or untagged explicit content in fandom spaces with a high population of kids.

Second, as far as misinformation goes, the entire site is works of fiction. By design. Nobody is guaranteed a single fact on the entire site! Are there some facts anyway? Sure. But that’s not the point. AO3 does not have the same sort of responsibility as a news-reporting organization.

Next, I’m sorry about your experience on that other site. The Internet is not always kid-friendly even in spaces where people try to make it so.

Apparently by being at TGIF/F last week and being sick this, I missed fanfic fandom losing it’s collective freaking mind the weekend before last.

https://fanlore.org/wiki/AO3_App_Wars

WTActualF, people? I hate panic and mob mis-/dis-information bringing out the worst in fandom. It’s truly painful to see.

For fuck’s sake, people: Yes, one of the apps was apparently scraping and storing content on their site–which is Not Cool. But to go all-out screaming incoherent dogpile over the course of  hours on it, instead of, you know, starting by contacting the developer and saying “Hey! What the hell?” is completely out of line.  

(And doxxing?!?–Oh HELL no! Not ever, people! No one with any moral standing or standards ever doxxes. It’s an on-line equivalent to *lynching*–the deliberate digging out of someone’s basic RL information so that they can be more efficiently and severely attacked–not by words on-line, but by an angry mob by physical means in the actual physical world? I don’t give a damn how pissed you are or how much you think they deserve it. You do not do that!)

Not to mention the three (or more?) alternative browser apps that also got crushed under the same ‘righteous’ fury. (If you don’t like them windowing the AO3, then tell them so, but realize that they’re explicitly allowed to create a new window frame for people to look at the AO3 through, just as you are.) 

Charging for it could be problematic, but is worthy of a discussion of whether recouping costs for developing the app is akin to actually monetizing the fanworks. (Is OTW “monetizing” fan works by raising and accepting money to cover their operating costs?) 

Not to mention the one perfectly innocent completely free and open-source app that was also crushed underfoot in here.

What summaries really are when it comes right down to it is a kind of thesis statement about your fic. “In this story, I will tell you about two people falling in love in a particular place/time/way” or “In this story, I will explore a genre-specific take on a particular topic or theme.” A good summary will let readers know the main point of the story with enough information to know whether they want to click in or not. 

Issues to be wary of would be: not having anything in your summary at all, saying “I suck at summaries,” having poor grammar and/or spelling in your summary, or apologizing for being a bad writer. Other than that:

Here’s a list of do’s and don’ts I made a while back that might be helpful to keep in mind. (all just suggestions rather than hard and fast rules)

Here’s some examples of questions you can answer in your summary, depending on what genre of fic you’re writing.

For a discussion on the idea of using quotes from the fic as the summary, there’s an ask over here that tackles that. I’m not a fan personally, but a lot of people are.

Long fics got something like “Character X is — and Character Y is —. Plot A happens.” That was the general formula. Oneshots and the like usually got either a single line of description or a few lines. Sometimes, I used a line of quote as decoration of sorts.

Nowadays, it’s a mix of description and quotes, with the latter dominating. So, basically a part of the story - often but not always - with dialogue - so that readers will get a good idea of both my writing style and the fic content. Then, 1 to 3 lines of description that kind of gives a gist of things.

So, first of all, it’s important to note that AO3 doesn’t run these collections, or any others to my knowledge. AO3 hosts them. That’s an important distinction, because, if you have a problem with AO3’s posting guidelines, you need to be very clear what it is you are criticizing. It’s neither fair nor useful to call out AO3 for running a collection of works you object to, because they absolutely don’t.

So let’s rephrase your question: How do I feel about AO3 hosting collections of pedophilic works and defending their hosting of such works?

How do I, personally, feel about it? Well, friend, I think that’s kind of a silly question. AO3 was founded with the express purpose of hosting any fannish work that anyone wanted to post to it, provided the work was legal and belonged to the poster, and to then defend the legal rights of the creator to create and publish the work. That is literally what AO3 is for. That’s what the people who made it designed it to do, that’s how the people who run it direct its resources, and that’s what the people who post their work to it expect of it.

So asking what I think of AO3 hosting any particular kind of fannish work and defending their hosting of it is sort of like asking what I think of a pickle jar containing pickles. I don’t know, man. It’s a pickle jar. It’s got pickles in it. If it didn’t have pickles in it, it wouldn’t be a pickle jar, you know?

That’s not to say people aren’t entitled to have problems with AO3’s goals and policies. But those goals and policies aren’t going to change, because those goals and policies are what AO3 is. So whether or not I like that pedophilic works exist, they will continue to be hosted on AO3 as long as AO3 exists to host them. And if you or anyone else has a problem with that, the solution isn’t to tell AO3 to stop being AO3. If you want a jar that isn’t full of pickles, get a different jar. And if you want a fanwork hosting platform that doesn’t host works you don’t like, make a new hosting platform.

Saying AO3 could not refuse pedophile works because it would be like saying a pickles jar should not hold pickles is a very bad comparison. First because pickles aren’t causing ptsd to most of their victims, but also because if the goal of a pickles jar is to hold pickles, the goal of AO3 is not to host pedophilia, it’s to host fan content, and fan content can very well not be pedophiliac. A better comparison would be: marriage gave men the right to rape their wives. One day,someone saif “hey, it’s shitty” and that became illegal. But marriage still existed.

Absolutely.

First off, darkfic as an umbrella term encompasses a lot of subjects and ‘dark’ topics, abuse being only one of many. It may be therapeutic for people who’ve endured abuse, but it can also be helpful for people who’ve struggled with other forms of trauma, or with mental illness, or other negative things. Depictions of intense, dark experiences can serve as a catharsis by being a direct analog for one’s own experiences, but they can also function more indirectly as a parallel, or a metaphor. Someone who has not been assaulted, but who has struggled with mental illness, may find a story about an assault victim resonating with them as they can identify with the fear and lack of control. And someone who has never been through a specific traumatic experience, but has a lot of fear of it and cultural anxiety around it, may feel bolstered by stories of characters surviving and recovering from that experience.

So for many people, with many different experiences, there can be a direct, therapeutic/comforting benefit to darkfic. 

But darkfic doesn’t need to be therapeutic.

There are, of course, other kinds of benefits. Someone who has never been abused might read a story featuring abuse (and clearly tagged for it) and because of it, identify potential warning signs in a real life relationship down the road and know to get out early before things get worse. Or, they might develop a better understanding of what abuse victims go through and as a result, have more empathy for real-life survivors they encounter. 

But it’s also 100% ok to like darkfic purely for entertainment value! It is, after all, fiction. 

Dark stories challenge us – and we can really enjoy that challenge. They take us to extremes of emotion and the human experience. They plumb the depths of the human id. Even someone with the most charmed life still lives in a world where bad things happen, and even the sweetest, naive person has the capacity for darkness in them. Darkfic lets all of us explore those in relative safety. It makes us feel, and can thrill and horrify us as much as any thriller or horror movie. It can make us consider our own darkness, and be more aware of it. And it can take us to a place so much worse than our reality, that when we resurface into our mundane lives, there’s a sense of relief; we’ve escaped from our escapism, and our hum-drum lives seem so much better and more manageable by comparison. 

(I might also bring up the people who pay *me* via Patreon to make Fansplaining, and any other independent creator that you support—we don’t think of it as charity, but we sure as hell don’t make a profit. But I would not make a public media argument for our podcast lol, for the record.)

And the ones with budgets knew damn well they’d be supporting the ones without, and a huuuuge swarm of teens and college students who didn’t have any money now, but might at some future point in their lives. 

If you can afford to throw the price of a movie at AO3, great! If you can’t, or if you could but it would mean missing one of the three movies you can afford to see this year… don’t feel guilty for deciding to hold on to your money. AO3 was not founded on the idea, “if you like it and read two hundred fics, you’re supposed to start forking over money.” 

On November 24th, 2018, I posted a list of major deletions of sites or of content on sites that stripped fandom of its history. A bunch of pro-shipper blogs had just been deleted, and people were nervous. I suppose I was thinking “All this has happened before…”

On December 3rd, 2018, Tumblr’s Department of Irony announced the NSFW ban. Thanks for providing this salutary lesson to The Youth and a billion reblogs to me, I guess.

Today, we have AO3 for writing. Audio, images, and video are in as much danger as ever, yet fans attack AO3 every donation drive. For those of you who forget our past…

HERE IS WHAT HISTORY HAS TAUGHT US!

1992 - Chelsea Quinn Yarbro forces a zine to be destroyed

1995 - Viacom/Paramount goes after fansites

1995 - Anne Rice gets IWTV fic deleted everywhere

1997 - Fox and Lucasfilm go after fansites

1998 - AOL goes after X-Files fansites

2000 - Warner Brothers goes after Harry Potter fansites

2000 - Anne Rice anne rices again

2001 - Tripod Massacre

2001 - Anne Rice goes after IWTV fic on FFN

2001 - The Bronze shut down as Buffy changes networks

2002 - FFN bans porn

2002 - FFN bans RPF

2003 - Gryffindor Tower implodes

2004 - FFN bans script format

2005 - FFN bans CYOA, Readerfic, 2nd person, Songfic

2005 - Sheezyart bans adult content; y!gallery founded

2005 - Viacom/Paramount goes after fansites again

2006 - Sakura Lemon Archive suddenly closes

2007 - Strikethrough, Boldthrough on Livejournal

2007 - Youtube institutes Content ID, deleting many fanvids

2008 - Slash Cotillion closes, taking much historical m/m with it

2009 - GeoCities shuts down, taking old fannish websites

2009 - Greatestjournal shuts down; RPGs deleted

2009 - Marvel gets scans_daily deleted

2009 - imeem, major vidding hub, closes suddenly

2010 - FFN forums purged for inactivity

2010 - DeviantArt purges adult fanfic

2010 - Literate Union goes after Twilight fandom on FFN

2011 - Delicious destroyed by Yahoo’s incompetence

2011 - China arrests women for writing m/m; destroys danmei.org

2012 - major FFN crackdown on porn

2012 - Megaupload deleted for piracy; also destroys vids, podfic

2013 - Max-Dan-Wiz.com purged of fan-generated content

2014 - Quizilla shuts down

2014 - China purges m/m story websites; arrests female authors

2014 - Blip.tv deletes vids

2014 - Viddler deletes vids

2015 - Journalfen’s servers become fully robust, deleting Fandom Wank

2016 - y!Gallery deleted

2016 - Elfwood goes offline

2016 - Audiofic Archive corrupted; major blow to podfic

2017 - Chinese author jailed after being ratted out over fandom drama

2017 - Parents get queer Warrior Cats fic purged from Wattpad

2018 - Tumblr deletes pro-shipper blogs

2018 - Tumblr announces NSFW ban

2018 - Wattpad deletes accounts/fics without warning

2019 - China purges weibo of m/m; more women jailed

This is only a small taste of the many times that:

Fannish moderators got bored, ran out of money, or had a falling out, deleting a site/list/forum along the way.

Sites got bought out and closed for being unprofitable.

Fandom got hit as governments targeted piracy or political dissidents.

Fans grudge reported each other.

Official forums got deleted when the canon finished.

It’s not always malicious. It’s not always about us. But we lose every time.

Some of these purges hit everyone. Many of them hit m/m content specifically or female gaze-y material in general. This is why antis are dead wrong. This is why anti-fujoshi policies end up being anti-m/m policies. This is why we need clear labeling, not content restrictions.

This is why we need AO3.

One too many times, the klutzy hammer of righteousness blew down swaths of fannish creativity much wider than it should have. Out of those ashes rose AO3, determined that everyone had a right to their creative voice, regardless of how small. Yes, even those who dwell in darkness: even they have a right to tell their stories. No one has to read them; but no one who hates all darkness has the right to demand their deletion, either.

Because the only cure for darkness is light. Violence and making people shut up and banning them only ever shoves the problem down the road for someone else to deal with. Most likely, someone less able to shove than you.

So here’s the situation: AO3’s not going to bow to demands for censorship. Its back has been up on the subject for pretty much its entire existence. Picture a hissing cat.

If people want a site that doesn’t allow gross stuff, it is entirely and 100% on them to go build it. Build one better than AO3! Build one that has reasonable and evenly enforced rules that everybody agrees are good rules, and then ban anybody who breaks them! I hope you make a great site that’s kid-friendly and has awesome content and nothing too distressing! Heck, with very little effort, you could probably make an application that just browses AO3 while cutting out all the bad stuff.

At the end of the day, all of these fics were tagged “author chooses not to use warnings” or tagged with trigger warnings, so they had no reason to target the authors they did, but they did, both with hate messages and by encouraging others not to read their fics on a variety of social media platforms. It’s disheartening and immature and has made something I enjoyed ugly and frustrating and hurtful. I have no idea what to do. (2/2)

-

If you’re receiving “hate messages” that is something that you can file abuse reports for. All of the social media sites have this function, and so does AO3. Harassment is not okay, and one way to fight back against it is to call it out - not just on your blog or in conversations but through official channels, wherever they exist. 

I don’t write dark fic myself, so I haven’t personally had to deal with this kind of bullshit, but I know that some members of blog definitely have. How have you dealt with it as a writer? And if you’re a reader, what can you do to help? 

Figure out who the people you want to be in fandom with are, and organize and promote around that. That can be emphasizing good behaviour, talking about the kind of fanworks you want to defend, or focusing on a character or aspect of canon that you all love. Your fandom as a whole contains both the people like you, and the bullies; find a way to define your subset of the fandom, where people write what they want and don’t attack other people. That lets you create community hubs–a Tumblr tag you all agree to use, a Discord, etc. That way you can do a lot of your fandom socializing through #bullyfreefandomtag instead of #fandomtag. Then you automatically have friends and allies who will support and encourage each other in making different kinds of fanworks and dealing with hate.

Work to encourage good feelings in your community/subfandom. Consider encouraging people to post rec lists or do challenges to leave more feedback, or encourage remixing or sending each other gifts. Work to promote the kind of fannish interaction you do want to happen.

Be really open and clear about what your community’s ethical standards are–eg. tag your stuff, put NSFW stuff behind a readmore, don’t send people death threats. Let people know really clearly how to be in your good books.

This can include making it really clear how to handle disputes and differences of opinion, so you can go, “If you’re upset that story aspect isn’t tagged, you can just ask the author to tag it. We’ll signalboost your request to have those things tagged. That works way better than sending them vague hatemail.”

The same way, make sure people know about ways to avoid the kinds of fic they don’t like. That can include posting about filtering devices (New XKit, AO3 Savior, Washboard, etc) or going to AO3, filtering your fandom’s new fic by all the stuff these people don’t like, and showing off the URL. (That way if people bookmark that URL and go to it instead of the main AO3 feed, it’ll be pre-filtered for them.) 

If you argue in public, you’re not trying to make the bullies stop being bullies–you’re letting people know this conflict is happening, and persuading the bystanders to side with you. Your life can be a lot easier or harder depending on how many neutral parties will reblog callout posts or feed the bullies information, vs. how many will support you and promote good fannish behavior. 

If you want to control who reads your writing, then don’t post it on the internet. 

1. Make a pseud on your account, and post under the pseud. This doesn’t do a lot, tbh: your subscribers will still be notified and people looking at your account can see that there’s a pseud and click on it. But it will keep that story from showing up in your main Works section.

2. Lock the fic to AO3 users only. Kids are supposed to be 13+ to get an account. It’s not perfect and could keep people who don’t browse logged in (for whatever reason) from seeing your fic, but I figure people with an AO3 account are pretty likely to be aware that there’s smut on this here website.

3. Post anonymously. You can do this by putting ‘Anonymous’ in the Post To Collections box. Note: if someone is serious about detective work, they can see on your account that you have a work posted to Anonymous, so if it’s a small fandom you may want to check if it would be obvious which work is yours (ie if there is only one fic in your fandom posted to Anonymous—larger fandoms don’t have to worry about this as much.)

Day 13 - Ash

(Black Fine liner on paper)

Dr Bad-Ass is in 😄

Inktober Day 8 - Frail

(Ink pic shown second - Black Ink brush work with white highlights) - digital gif effects added on top 

- The invulnerable man doesn’t need armour

Process under the cut 😊

It’s a rare pair palooza! Calling all fanfic authors (whether you signed up for the SPN_ReverseBang or not:) Who wants to play with Sam&Dean&Cas&The Impala, Sam/Gadreel, teen Dean & Castiel, Claire/Jack or Sugardaddy JDM (with Brock&Colin!) Come over for CLAIMround no. 3! <—CLICK!

As CS Lewis once said, quoting Tolkien, the only people who inveigh against Escape are jailers.

If you knew someone in a bad place, wouldn’t you want to help them to escape? Even if it was just for a few days? And to gift them with knowledge and armour that they can take back to their daily lives, that may help them?

I would.

What do we lose when we condemn the existence of fanworks that include unhealthy, traumatic, violent, or otherwise difficult material?

I grew up celebrating the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week every year, and it has profoundly impacted my views on censorship. While progressive fan communities are generally against banning commercially published literature, sometimes well-meaning fans condemn the existence of fanworks that portray unhealthy, traumatic, or violent material in the interest of protecting people from it. I wanted draw a connection between the kind of censorship that those fans suggest and the kind applied to frequently banned works of commercial literature that we consider politically and artistically vital. What are we losing when we condemn fic that deals with difficult material?

When fanworks are racist, misogynistic, homophobic, etc., we should certainly critique them! That’s not in question here. What I wanted to highlight with this post is what we lose if we attempt to enact a general ban on, or refuse to ever engage with, any fanworks that portray less than perfectly “good” behaviors and experiences.

It would be impossible to talk about this without offering endless thanks to @transformativeworks and their maintenance of Archive of Our Own, whose tagging system works to ensure that readers can navigate difficult material as safely as possible. <3 <3 <3

under the cut: image descriptions

To say that Funhome being taken from the hands of LGBT+ kids on account of ‘homosexuality being a sin’ is the same as decrying a nuerotypical author for glorifying suicide in their story is ????? Such a leap. This isn’t even remotely about the 'illegitimacy’ of fanfiction, I’ve read many pieces of fanfic that were more literary than published books I’ve read. A book like Funhome being censored by homophobic people isn’t the same as, say, people being angry at 13 Reasons Why getting greenlit by Netflix to continue its glorious misrepresentation of the tragedy that is teen suicide.

I know you aren’t saying that work should be beyond criticism, but no action is without consequences. AO3 allowing users to upload child porn is not apolitical, it has real ramifications and I would argue it is not worth the consequences. You can say it’s a slippery slope, but to me what remains critical is that we acknowledge the role that power plays in the media we consume. All of your examples were created by marginalized people, writing their own experiences, and were censored by privileged people in power as an act of violence. The works that many people are objecting to being hosted on platforms like tumblr and AO3 are notably not remotely expressing a nuanced experience of marginalized identity in the way that the public rejects.

This isn’t isolated to the internet or the modern era, there are pieces of “classic media” that I fundamentally disagree with exposing to students with no preparation or regard to the harmful content. (Like Birth of a Nation and The Heart of Darkness.) Giving these works a platform with no context or oversight gives no condemnation on an institutional level and for some things, there needs to be condemnation.

hmm, this is. a complicated question, to be honest

on one hand, i completely agree with you- tags are there for a reason, and it’s not fun to suddenly get something you really don’t want to see thrown in your face

on the other hand, i also see where the writer is coming from. throwing those punches at your reader is a joy, and if it’s a longer fic, warning about the character death from the very start can be kind of frustrating

(though also why a fic that features character death has fluff as a tag boggles the mind)

it would be kind of neat with a spoiler tag system- like it’s hidden unless the user specifically agrees to be shown the spoiler, though how that’d work is a mystery to me

i guess a way around it would be to like. mention it in the author note, or something? like put it behind a link. but that’d be kind of annoying to set up, especially if the writer is very prolific

atm, i guess the solution is the Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings tag, but eeeeeh, i’m not sure that’s particularly helpful? because while there’s a warning that there’s some kind of warning tag, there’s still no actual like. telling. of what tag it is

(and that’s not even touching on the fact that not everyone gets exactly what that tag means)