Analyzen

I know this post is for a very small audience here on Tumblr but some of my oldest friends I met on LiveJournal are still here, so I'm making it anyway just in case.

But there have been some changes at LJ recently that do not bode well at all. Rahaeli made a thread about it on bsky with some more worrying details. For a bit of background on this, LJ is surprisingly big in Russia. Like way more than on the western side, and it's been owned by a Russian company for a long time now (it wasn't always - there was a big controversy when LJ got sold to the Russians back in the day).

The Russian side of LJ dropped a very big change on Dec 29th without warning on their users, essentially making it so they'd have to register their ID or bank info with LJ to post or comment. Any posts from people outside of Russia, or without Cyrillic services turned on, are invisible and can't be interacted with by people inside Russia. It's nearly impossible to turn Cyrillic services on if you're not in Russia either, so there's a big wall now between both sets of users. Rahaeli speculates that this could mean the Russian company that owns LJ could be considering selling off or just shutting down the western side of LJ soon, thus why they're sectioning it off. There's been no mention of this on the western LJ news comms or anything which is also worrying.

Fandom's moved on from LJ now, but that doesn't mean that a large chunk of old fandom didn't take place there before, and if LJ does go down then tons of fic, fanart, meta, communities, kinkmemes, discussions, rp, goes down with it. Everything up in smoke! I think people underestimate sometimes just how much stuff went on there. LJ being dead is much different than LJ being gone... the thought of it really disappearing after all this time breaks my heart. I've spent so much of my life there, even after everyone else left. ;_;

I'm finding myself more and more annoyed in specific anime/manga fandoms where people love to go on Twitter and scream about lesbian scenes, but then you go into AO3 and the most kudosed and commented fics are all M/M, even when F/F fics are a majority.

(Complaining about) wanting more F/F seems to be on a different plane from actually reading and interacting with existing F/F fanworks.

I've been wondering if this is caused by the type of F/F fics that are out there. I know I would love to see longer, kinkier works, which in my fandoms are pretty uncommon. Generally, even when an F/F ship is more popular then other M/M, the M/M fics tends to be more explicit in %.

But also this is a problem that can only be solved by either interacting with those F/F works that are longer and kinkier, and letting more people know that there is an actual interest for more. Complaining on social media while also doing nothing to make authors feel welcome and appreciated is really not it.

Before same sex marriage was legal a fair few gay couples got married in foreign countries; it had no effect in Australia but it was the principle of the thing. When it became legal, their marriages took effect in Aussie too.

See, people had gotten married in Massachusetts when it legalized same-sex marriage, but then they broke up with that person and didn’t get a divorce because it wasn’t really real, right? So they got together with someone else, maybe moved in between, and decided to get married when California legalized. And then they broke up. And didn’t get a divorce. Because it wasn’t really real; it’s only in that state, right? (And no, there isn’t a good country-wide system to check these things.) So then they got together with someone else, and hey, it’s legal to get married in New York, we’ll do that! …and then they broke up. (Sensing a pattern yet?)

But then. Obergefell. Your marriage is recognized in EVERY state! Yay! Except… you have three or four marriages, actually. Concurrently. Which is, y’know. Illegal. AND one or more of your spouses could now be also married to yet another person, or people, if they did the same thing. Who could then also… (you get the picture).

Apparently there were a NUMBER of VERY BUSY family lawyers and estate planners untangling the absolute mess people created by getting married in multiple states to different people during that period.

Shakespeare's Richard III and Julius Ceasar were Historical RPF (among others, he did like eight plays based on historical figures lmfao). So is The Crown. The Scarlet Pimpernel is fix-it fic of the Reign of Terror, and it also kick-started the entire superhero genre (you can thank the Baroness Orczy for Batman's existence). Back in the day, writers could look at some story that someone else came up with, say 'hey, wow, that's pretty cool, I'm gonna rewrite this, stick in these bits too, and do it my way' and no one could say shit about it. That's what separates modern fanfic from the landscape of literary canon Back In The Day, but pointing out that if something were being created today in the modern literary landscape it'd be going on ao3 with a set of fandom/genre tags is relevant to the general 'fanfic is dumb and stupid because it lacks originality' argument.

Like, fanfic is not only repurposing characters and real life people into a story. As anon says, that's been common since the dawn of times, it is how literature was born. But you simply cannot extract fanfic from fannish community and expect the word to still make sense. The way fics are created, shared and enjoyed is so specific, and it has very little connection to how the classics named have been created, shared and enjoyed.

You wouldn't find Dante's Divine Comedy on AO3 simply because that was not the intended way of sharing a story. Fanwriters do choose their audience, and that audience is their fan communities.

One could argue that authors wouldn't actually be able to publish their stories without filing the serial numbers off and that means that they don't really have a choice, but truth is, all of the Regency Era inspired stories and all of the Original Slash fiction that's freely posted on AO3 daily could very well be released as indie books, and still that's not the choice those authors make even now that self-publishing is a real, potentially low-cost alternative.

(By the way, in my experience what's considered "amateur" original fiction is not really differentiated much from fanfic, especially when it comes to queer original fiction. The published romance genre in general is fanfic's most closed cousin, and in fact romance books suffer from the same type of sexist criticism as fanfic—but that's a discussion for another day.)

Fanfic as a genre couldn't have existed without fan communities, so while a story does not "turn" into a fanfic only if it's shared online, at the same time we can't act like fanfic history was born out of stories kept in private notebooks never to be read by any other fan.

It's true that you can define "fanfiction" as broadly or as narrowly as you want. You prefer a narrow definition and me and the OP prefer a broader one, and I guess you can stop reading at this point :D but your post made me think a lot, so I'm putting these thoughts here.

You talk about the necessity of a fan community. How do you define that? Dante wrote about his OC hanging out with Vergil, a poet whom he admired. He expected his audience to know and admire Vergil as well and to be excited about seeing a poem that featured him as a character. What definition of "fan community" would include modern fandom but exclude Dante and his contemporary Vergil fans in Florence? It's obvious to me that fan communities have always existed. For example, the Sarashina Nikki: The autobiography of a woman in 11th century Japan who squees about fiction and forms fan networks in exactly the same way as I do.

Being a fangirl is an innate human impulse. Loving something so much that you make more of it, connect with other people through it or transform it into what you wish it were, those are all innate human impulses. That's why I mentioned unshared fic in notebooks.

Dante did not create an OC to fanboy over his idol. Dante put himself next to what he considered his literary guide, which he then proceeded to surpass. Never mind the fact that I'm not big on backdating modern concepts and applying them to times when they didn't exist yet (what in Italy is called Authors' rights did not exist in 1300s, which would make it impossible to define anything from that time as derivative fanfic), but this interpretation also flattens the intent behind the Divine Comedy, which was created with a very specific purpose and shared to a very specific audience, which was not Virgil's medieval fan community, but instead politically and theologically inclined intellectuals (with the obvious caveat that to be an intellectual in medieval Italy you also needed to know and study Virgil).

Does this mean that you cannot be politically and theologically inclined if you label yourself as a fan? No, but what I'm saying here is that the Divine Comedy exist in a specific context, and that context is simply not a fan community. Just because a work is inspired by something else it does not make it a fanwork, and I think that saying otherwise takes away from the crux of fanfic shared in fandom.

I want to quote this 1997 interview by Henry Jenkins: “Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk.” Hardcore shit right here. It gives insight on the subversive power of fans and fanfic, and also specifically highlights the limits that fanfic is forced to live within, which is relevant to the discussion and still does not limits the artistic merit and dignity of fanworks.

Note that this does not apply to all derivative works. No one stopped Hamilton from becoming a huge success, and although you could, potentially, call that a RPF fanfic, does it have the limits of actual fanfic? Does it exist in conversation with fanfic history? Was it created with the intent of sharing it with like-minded fans? Or was the purpose always wide, mainstream reception?

This brings me back to the first question. While a work does not become a fanwork only once it's shared online, the fact that it exists in a very specific legal space and it inserts itself into a very specific, already existing tradition does define what said work can become. This seems somewhat counterintuitive, but it's true that fanworks are only fully defined once they are shared around.

I think the question in your earlier reblog was akin to "Does a sci-fi story only becomes Real Sci-fi once you discover that sci-fi as a genre exists?". And to me that is not really a question that makes sense in context because what defines sci-fi is the content of the story, meanwhile what defines fanfic is first and foremost its legal existence.

Shakespeare's Richard III and Julius Ceasar were Historical RPF (among others, he did like eight plays based on historical figures lmfao). So is The Crown. The Scarlet Pimpernel is fix-it fic of the Reign of Terror, and it also kick-started the entire superhero genre (you can thank the Baroness Orczy for Batman's existence). Back in the day, writers could look at some story that someone else came up with, say 'hey, wow, that's pretty cool, I'm gonna rewrite this, stick in these bits too, and do it my way' and no one could say shit about it. That's what separates modern fanfic from the landscape of literary canon Back In The Day, but pointing out that if something were being created today in the modern literary landscape it'd be going on ao3 with a set of fandom/genre tags is relevant to the general 'fanfic is dumb and stupid because it lacks originality' argument.

Like, fanfic is not only repurposing characters and real life people into a story. As anon says, that's been common since the dawn of times, it is how literature was born. But you simply cannot extract fanfic from fannish community and expect the word to still make sense. The way fics are created, shared and enjoyed is so specific, and it has very little connection to how the classics named have been created, shared and enjoyed.

You wouldn't find Dante's Divine Comedy on AO3 simply because that was not the intended way of sharing a story. Fanwriters do choose their audience, and that audience is their fan communities.

One could argue that authors wouldn't actually be able to publish their stories without filing the serial numbers off and that means that they don't really have a choice, but truth is, all of the Regency Era inspired stories and all of the Original Slash fiction that's freely posted on AO3 daily could very well be released as indie books, and still that's not the choice those authors make even now that self-publishing is a real, potentially low-cost alternative.

(By the way, in my experience what's considered "amateur" original fiction is not really differentiated much from fanfic, especially when it comes to queer original fiction. The published romance genre in general is fanfic's most closed cousin, and in fact romance books suffer from the same type of sexist criticism as fanfic—but that's a discussion for another day.)

Fanfic as a genre couldn't have existed without fan communities, so while a story does not "turn" into a fanfic only if it's shared online, at the same time we can't act like fanfic history was born out of stories kept in private notebooks never to be read by any other fan.

Shakespeare's Richard III and Julius Ceasar were Historical RPF (among others, he did like eight plays based on historical figures lmfao). So is The Crown. The Scarlet Pimpernel is fix-it fic of the Reign of Terror, and it also kick-started the entire superhero genre (you can thank the Baroness Orczy for Batman's existence). Back in the day, writers could look at some story that someone else came up with, say 'hey, wow, that's pretty cool, I'm gonna rewrite this, stick in these bits too, and do it my way' and no one could say shit about it. That's what separates modern fanfic from the landscape of literary canon Back In The Day, but pointing out that if something were being created today in the modern literary landscape it'd be going on ao3 with a set of fandom/genre tags is relevant to the general 'fanfic is dumb and stupid because it lacks originality' argument.

Like, fanfic is not only repurposing characters and real life people into a story. As anon says, that's been common since the dawn of times, it is how literature was born. But you simply cannot extract fanfic from fannish community and expect the word to still make sense. The way fics are created, shared and enjoyed is so specific, and it has very little connection to how the classics named have been created, shared and enjoyed.

You wouldn't find Dante's Divine Comedy on AO3 simply because that was not the intended way of sharing a story. Fanwriters do choose their audience, and that audience is their fan communities.

One could argue that authors wouldn't actually be able to publish their stories without filing the serial numbers off and that means that they don't really have a choice, but truth is, all of the Regency Era inspired stories and all of the Original Slash fiction that's freely posted on AO3 daily could very well be released as indie books, and still that's not the choice those authors make even now that self-publishing is a real, potentially low-cost alternative.

(By the way, in my experience what's considered "amateur" original fiction is not really differentiated much from fanfic, especially when it comes to queer original fiction. The published romance genre in general is fanfic's most closed cousin, and in fact romance books suffer from the same type of sexist criticism as fanfic—but that's a discussion for another day.)

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Which is about people wanting an AO3 app, but then it became large and way off topic, so here you go.

Nobody under the age of 20 knows how to use a computer or the internet. At all. They only know how to use apps. Their whole lives are in their phones or *maybe* a tablet/iPad if they're an artist. This is becoming a huge concern.

I'm a private tutor for middle- and high-school students, and since 2020 my business has been 100% virtual. Either the student's on a tablet, which comes with its own series of problems for screen-sharing and file access, or they're on mom's or dad's computer, and they have zero understanding of it.

They also don't know what the internet is, or even the absolute basics of how it works. You might not think that's an important thing to know, but stick with me.

Last week I accepted a new student. The first session is always about the tech -- I tell them this in advance, that they'll have to set up a few things, but once we're set up, we'll be good to go. They all say the same thing -- it won't be a problem because they're so "online" that they get technology easily.

I never laugh in their faces, but it's always a close thing. Because they are expecting an app. They are not expecting to be shown how little they actually know about tech.

I must say up front: this story is not an outlier. This is *every* student during their first session with me. Every single one. I go through this with each of them because most of them learn more, and more solidly, via discussion and discovery rather than direct instruction.

Once she logged in, I asked her to click on the icon for screen-sharing. I described the icon, then started with "Okay, move your mouse to the bottom right corner of the screen." She did the thing that those of us who are old enough to remember the beginnings of widespread home computers remember - picked up the mouse and moved it and then put it down. I explained she had to pull the mouse along the surface, and then click on the icon. She found this cumbersome. I asked if she was on a laptop or desktop computer. She didn't know what I meant. I asked if the computer screen was connected to the keyboard as one piece of machinery that you can open and close, or if there was a monitor - like a TV - and the keyboard was connected to another machine either by cord or by Bluetooth. Once we figured it out was a laptop, I asked her if she could use the touchpad, because it's similar (though not equivalent) to a phone screen in terms of touching clicking and dragging.

Once we got her using the touchpad, we tried screen-sharing again. We got it working, to an extent, but she was having trouble with... lots of things. I asked if she could email me a download or a photo of her homework instead, and we could both have a copy, and talk through it rather than put it on the screen, and we'd worry about learning more tech another day. She said she tried, but her email blocked her from sending anything to me.

This is because the only email address she has is for school, and she never uses email for any other purpose. I asked if her mom or dad could email it to me. They weren't home.

(Re: school email that blocks any emails not whitelisted by the school: that's great for kids as are all parental controls for young ones, but 16-year-olds really should be getting used to using an email that belongs to them, not an institution.)

I asked if the homework was on a paper handout, or in a book, or on the computer. She said it was on the computer. Great! I asked her where it was saved. She didn't know. I asked her to search for the name of the file. She said she already did that and now it was on her screen. Then, she said to me: "You can just search for it yourself - it's Chapter 5, page 11."

This is because homework is on the school's website, in her math class's homework section, which is where she searched. For her, that was "searching the internet."

Her concepts of "on my computer" "on the internet" or "on my school's website" are all the same thing. If something is displayed on the monitor, it's "on the internet" and "on my phone/tablet/computer" and "on the school's website."

She doesn't understand "upload" or "download," because she does her homework on the school's website and hits a "submit" button when she's done. I asked her how she shares photos and stuff with friends; she said she posts to Snapchat or TikTok, or she AirDrops. (She said she sometimes uses Insta, though she said Insta is more "for old people"). So in her world, there's a button for "post" or "share," and that's how you put things on "the internet".

She doesn't know how it works. None of it. And she doesn't know how to use it, either.

Also, none of them can type. Not a one. They don't want to learn how, because "everything is on my phone."

If someone adds your fic to their collection, they can hide it! They can mark the collection as unrevealed and your fic will be unreadable to anyone other than them! If you're writing works for a surprise event, like a Secret Santa, this is really nice.

But if you're just writing and someone adds your fic to a collection for their own personal use and marks it as unrevealed, that. . . really sucks.

I bookmarked this fic in 2017, almost 5 years ago. Knowing me, the fic itself was probably at least a couple years old at the time I bookmarked it.

This is a 5+ year old fic that is completely inaccessible now because it was added to a collection that, as far as I can tell, is literally just for the collection owner's own reference. There's almost 30 fics in the collection, all of them unrevealed.

If you're the creator of the work:

1) Select the "Edit" button from the work's page and scroll down to the "Associations" section.

2) Select the red (×) beside the collection name you want to remove next to "Post to Collections / Challenges".

3) Select "Post" to apply the change. The work will be immediately removed from the collection.

I'm not sure if you get an alert if your fic is marked as unrevealed though, so keep an eye on the collections that your works are part of.

Having been in a fandom once (bronies) where there was a lot of F/F written by dudes… as a lesbian, yeah no thanks. And it’s not even that I dislike all F/F content made by or for men. I’ve liked plenty of F/F movies by straight male directors, even the kinda blatantly male gazey ones. But it’s just so obvious in fanfic and a lot of it is so gross or inaccurate and so obviously has nothing to do with actual women who are into other women as opposed to what men want us to be like, that I’ll gladly take F/F being a rarity as long as it’s the kind that actually does something for me over a deluge of dudey F/F like the brony fandom was. (Also I also like M/M and even some F/M so I am not upset about sharing fandom space with them and I’d rather just put all my stuff in one place regardless of genders involved or if it’s even shippy in the first place)

I think this goes deeper, obviously, because you cannot discard how much general culture and the published romance sphere has influenced the fannish sphere, and vice versa. But do we remember how many How To Write Better Gay Sex Scenes blog posts/journals/discussions existed back in the day? So many of those posts also had terribly contradicting ideas, because obviously not everyone practices gay sex the same way, but that’s exactly what has made a difference. The open discussions (about sex, and prejudices, and misconceptions, and how real life gay relationships work), often born out of badly written fics, that would then spawn new fics, maybe written a little better, a little more realistically—or also not, but still, in the long run, we’ve definitely seen a change in how gay relationships gets written in fannish spaces. This doesn't exclude the fact that some bad fics still get written, but because there is space for everyone, we also get to pick and choose what works for us.

M/F works are a bit on their own, in the sense that I don’t feel like they’ve ever been in need of explaining (considering how they’ve always been the “norm”), but conversations around better cishet sex and relationships both in mainstream culture and in the romance sphere have definitely also influenced the depiction of M/F sex and relationships in fanfic. Like, I remember when romance book blogs used to pick apart why a scene was hot or not, and how many sex acts have been “legitimized” as hot in the romance sphere, even when once they were completely taboo. Also how many discussions about bad relationships in YA books have we had? How many conversations around consent, toxic/healthy relationships, etc. have been had? Again, it's not like bad fics don't keep being written, but we still have so many of them, and we can, again, pick and choose.

But even here, do you know how hard it is to find femdom or female-led F/M relationships in fanworks? There is still so much work to be done about everything that isn't mainstream, and when I think about it, it all comes down to the fact that this is still a relatively small genre where people don't see the appeal of it, mostly because the pool of writers is so small and you don't see it being talked around much.

Both the M/M and the M/F genre have benefited so much from how “mainstream” they are, in the sense that the more people are participating, the more conversations there are, and more importantly, the more voices are allowed to join said conversations.

F/F is still a genre (both in fanfic and in published spaces) that feels very—I don’t want to say restrictive, but in a sense definitely gate-kept. And I 100% get the reasons why. I think so much of it is a coping mechanism against the prejudice that queer women and nonbinary people go through on a daily basis, and I definitely feel it in how I also approach F/F works written by other people. But also it doesn’t escape to me how sometimes I, as a nonbinary femme bisexual, kinda sabotage my own self for the purpose of keeping this one thing “safe”.

Also, do you know how hard it is to find the type of queer fucked up sex I wanna read, and how hard it is to find a place where I can share the type of queer fucked up sex I want to write? Like, if this takes more “cishet men” writing F/F works, and the following discussions born from that that do not stop at “this is our space, you cannot enter”—so be it. I honestly would prefer for the F/F genre to be more visible and easily available, than for it to stay hidden, if the goal is to have a bigger space for it in the future.

"literal(ly)" constantly being used for anything, both when it's applicable and when words like "actual(ly)," "figurative(ly)" etc. would make way more sense

"trigger(ed)" being used when people talk about annoyance or irritation... like mate, I get irritated when people use "literally" in nearly every sentence, I get triggered when I see someone getting strangled or choked. Getting a bit annoyed at one's pet peeves and getting flashbacks to one's trauma and being in excessive-rage mode for half an hour and then unable to calm down for three hours is not the same. (Sorry for TMI, I thought it was a relatively straightforward example.)

"trigger warnings" that are none... I just stumbled across a fanfic (oneshot collection for one ship) that had some additional info that the author called "TW" because they always put potential trigger warnings and content warnings at the top of each chapter, always marked as "TW." (The fic in question isn't on AO3 but a german fanfic site, which has quite a different design and layout and different way of categorizing stuff, so it's not like they could have tagged it or put it into a chapter summary, which is why it's put into the body of content of the fic itself.) The thing that irritates me about this is that this particular "TW" is just that one protagonist is related to a side character, and that this piece of info is scary but too funny not to put into this oneshot... Maybe I'm just insensitive but I see no potentially upsetting (for which I'd choose the term "content warning") or triggering (for which I'd choose the term "trigger warning") piece of info in this "TW"... It just reads like "background info," not a trigger warning...

I've seen this happen a lot in Italian, where the difference between TW and CW is not contemplated because obviously how would it be when trigger warnings themselves have been imported. These words are very specifically English, a direct translation does not always work. But the term trigger warning has been adopted at this point, and still I feel that the meaning is a bit different here ("trigger warning" is often used as a blanked statement, but usually the implication is that there is gonna be some talk about sexual violence and/or coercion, because that's the conversation where the term is used the most).

Until 10/15 years ago, we used to use the term "avvertimenti" (lit. warnings) which was a more generalized term for anything that could be warning worthy (say, both noncon and threesomes would fall under the same warning list). That has recently been substituted with the term trigger warning because TWs have become more common in the mainstream, not only in the fanfic lingo. I mean, there are people who are more into the international fandom and have a better grasp on how to exchange TW, CW and tags when needed, but not everyone has that knowledge.

I am a long-time OTW skeptic and I find this information to be horrifying in the most serious possible way; this kind of mismanagement and abuse will have long-term impacts on volunteers, and is indicative of carelessness and incompetency that IMO is likely to threaten the long-term viability of the org. In addition, it is breathtakingly cruel behavior.

Initial thread with descriptions of how OP became the OTW's "go-to person" for handling CSEM, describing how the OTW was unprepared to moderate CSEM, potential CSEM, or attempts to distribute CSEM. OP did not have any time limit on how long she was the go-to CSEM person nor were any supports available to help with this moderation, neither mental health support nor best practice/process support nor technical tooling support.

In the same thread but further down, a comment describing how the mass CSEM spamming OTW volunteers experienced last year was an event that occurred after escalation, and the OTW did not move to protect volunteers until after the final, mass attack that didn't hit "just" PAC/Support.

A thread describing OP having access to OTW internal systems shut off after the CSEM attack last year and then access restored after months of not knowing what had happened. By OP's own evaluation and corroboration from others within the org, the OTW did not like OP and sought to "fire" her for criticizing them, and a few people believed she had spammed volunteers with CSEM, so PAC, the committee she actually worked on/with, was directed to "fire" her (remove all access) without any say in the matter. Keep in mind that this was in the wake of hundreds of people being exposed to graphic CSEM and violent threats of doxxing/death, and that OP was already experiencing regular and unsupported exposure to CSEM when this traumatic event occurred.

A thread describing OTW Legal's unethical prevention of PAC acting on CSEM or suspected CSEM, which again, OP was being routinely exposed to without any support from the OTW.

So, a volunteer who was the "go-to CSEM person" (something no one should ever become and which an organization should prevent you from becoming) was being increasingly traumatized while volunteering. She wanted to take reasonable steps to address moderation issues within AO3, like removing unsourced gifs of bodies that look like childrens' from underage fic and fic that included characters enthusiastically adovcating for pedophilia. She was unable to take action against such content because OTW legal's position was that "maximum inclusiveness of content" includes gifs of genitals that might belong to children. In addition to being poorly treated and traumatized, she was isolated after escalating mass CSEM attacks because members of the Board didn't like her and were looking for reasons to get rid of her. And, finally, she was reinstated with a lie and expected to go back to being the "go-to CSEM person".

I honestly think that emails from AO3 affect the reward system very similarly to gambling. When you get a sudden, random reward (AKA a comment on your fic), it feels great, and you want that again. But as the gambler writer, you have very little control over when the rewards come in or how many. There are games fandoms where you might have a higher chance of getting a response, or tropes, pairings, etc, but in the end, the reward is up to fickle fate (or possibly fantastic marketing on your part if you know how).

Randomly received rewards are incredibly addicting.

Similarly, not receiving a reward when you think you should get one feels very, very bad.

People who are more satisfied in their lives are less susceptible to the highs and lows of gambling and other addictive behaviors. If you are finding your relationship with you AO3 stats page or AO3 emails is unhealthy, it might be worth it to 1. turn off email notifications (so the randomness of the reward is removed) 2. Pick a time each week to check for comments (now it’s on a schedule) and 3. See if there are ways to improve your life elsewhere so that your mental health does not fluctuate with the whims of strangers sending you comments.

I just sent a message to the OTW Board of Directors that condensed and summarized my thoughts here (because the max message length is 1000 characters).

I am so grateful to the organizers of the End OTW Racism campaign for creating a very focused and goal-oriented campaign to make fandom more inclusive and to hold OTW accountable for commitments they made three years ago. I find myself inspired by the call to action, but I'm also personally reluctant to position myself oppositionally to the org with strong callout language -- especially without knowing more about what's causing the delays. (I basically always prefer to start with an approach of "tell me what's going wrong and how I/others can help.") But I do very much want OTW to communicate more, as a starting point. So here is what I said, for now:

Dear OTW Board of Directors,  Please update us on the efforts you committed to in June 2020 (www.transformativeworks.org/statement-from-the-otw-board-of-directors-chairs-leads/). Let us know about the progress so far, now and via regular updates going forward. If you are facing challenges (as I know can happen when steering big orgs/creating new policies), please share what those are -- and whether there’s anything members can do to help. The OTW does a lot of great work for fandom and inspires me in many ways. But as a member, I am disappointed that we haven’t gotten more updates on the commitments you made 3 years ago to combat discrimination & harassment by giving users & admins better tools and reviewing/updating policies & TOS. Without such transparency, how can we members give feedback or vote for board members with matching priorities? This letter was inspired by the campaign for more inclusive, safer spaces for fans of color: www.tumblr.com/end-otw-racism/716978822501875712/

I find this interesting, because I can sympathize with not wanting to be seen as strange/wanting to fit in, hell, isn't that all anyone wants? But you don't always get what you want, and some people will consider you "strange" for being bi or nb or whatever whether you self-describe as queer or not, and using the word expressedly to claim political solidarity with other people who would also get that reaction is, like, the entire point.

I take no issue with people like anon who have preferences, as long as they don't dictate how others use the word. But do I judge a bit? Yeah. I can't help but think it's a little naive, and the impulse to distance oneself from other "strange" people is one step away from respectability politics. "I may be [insert identity] but I'm not like those freaks and don't want people [especially "normal" people who wield all the social power] to lump me in with them" is the same basic motivation of the growing demographic of right-wing gay men and lesbian TERF women. There are very good reasons why "queer is a slur!" is considered a radfem dogwhistle, after all.

So many queer people have this phase in their queer journey that is all about fitting in, and I feel like realizing that you will probably never be able to do that without having to cut off parts of yourselves (and for some queer and specifically intersex people, the "cutting off" is often quite literal) is really not easy to accept. Because it fucking hurts, man. Those that have gone past that phase might understandably find it naive, but many of us still fall down that spiraling thought process of "I'll never be able to be happy if I don't fit in", especially if we don't have a community that supports us, and especially when some of the bullshit comes from inside the community that should support us.

Being queer is hard. Being openly and proudly queer is even harder. I understand that many of us have been and are being hurt by radfem rethoric, but the point is that sometimes actually listening and having a conversation is what makes a difference in how people will, one day, hopefully, be able to see themselves. And obviously you don't have to go listen to every radfem nutcase and hurt yourself in the process, but that one specific post was really innocent? I don't understand how judging each other will be helpful in the long run, especially when a person who is obviously still questioning is just sharing their personal thoughts on their personal life.

I think these two videos by Kat Blaque might also add another point of view to the conversation. Specifically, Blaque talks about how she doesn't call herself queer, even though she understand that's how other people perceive her to be, because of how she experiences her life as a trans person. I don't think you have to agree with her 100%, I certainly don't, but she does a great job at explaining how that's her specific choice, and often enough it is context-dependent. The follow up discussions with other queer people are also really thought provoking, so if you have some time I'd highly suggest listening to them.