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*The fic reads like a preachy instruction manual about the Most Correct Way To Do Things mixed with the most therapised speech you can imagine* D:

I've talked in the past about how Hasbro's efforts to deceptively market Dungeons & Dragons as universal entry-level game have fostered a culture of play in which any appearance that D&D isn't a universal entry-level game is regarded as evidence that you have a "bad GM", and how, in order to avoid being a "bad GM", it's necessary to treat it as a normal part of the GM's responsibilities to constantly monitor the outputs of the rules and quickly paper over any gaps between the game the rules want to produce and the game the group wants to be play, like a cartoon train conductor frantically constructing the very tracks along which the train they're conducting is riding.

The trouble is that most players aren't stupid, and readily see through the act. They (correctly!) observe that the particulars of the rules don't actually seem to matter all that much, because most of the desired experience of play is the product of the GM's constant interventions, rather than the product of interpreting the outputs of the rules – but instead of identifying this as a problem, they conclude (again, quite reasonably, as they've probably never seen it done differently) that this is what tabletop roleplaying is. The GM merely pretends to be moderating a game; in truth, they're a pantomime-leader whose job is to maintain the illusion that we're playing a game with rules, when in fact what we're really doing is guided improv theatre.

And of course there's nothing wrong with guided improv theatre – it's a fine pastime, and one I've enjoyed myself on many occasions. However, it does put folks who really do want to play a game in a bind, because now there's this insurmountable communication barrier. You can say "I want to play a game, and these are the rules of that game", and receive what seems to be enthusiastic agreement with that premise; however, a significant portion of the people expressing that agreement think they're participating in a bit of kayfabe, like very dedicated professional wrestlers who stay in character even outside the ring.

Critically, nobody is necessarily acting in bad faith in this equation. The folks who don't bother to learn the rules because they think games aren't real mostly aren't fucking with you on purpose; they honestly thought they were yes-anding your improv prompt by pretending to care about the mechanics of play, and when they discover that you really do expect them to do all that fiddly dice math, from their perspective it genuinely looks like you were the one misleading them. It's just a fucked up culture of play garbling all the signals in both directions.

The medieval peasant I went back in time to give a bag of Doritos to, concerned: what terrible and powerful sorcerers they must have in your age, to be able to veil the vault of heaven itself from view, as you say

Me, sniffling: I didn’t realize, I can’t, it’s so much, I, I… are the chips good, at least?

AO3 savior is a godsend, and those various scripts to hide everything with too many fandoms listed are helpful, but some searches end up with 19/20 fics per page blocked, and you still have a million pages to sort through. While AO3 doesn’t have “not” filtering built in, there is a workaround that you can use in the “Search within results” box.

-filter_ids:IDNUMBER

(Where IDNUMBER is the number of the tag as seen in its RSS feed.)

Now, there’s an easier way to find that number. Check out this bookmarklet by flamebyrd.

But it’s time consuming to look them up, so here are a few I’ve done:

I just saw a bunch of “Stop shoving your feminism in my face” type comments on that other post. So I’m going to be pedantic and point out, yet again, where the name came from.

Astolat’s post proposing an archive was titled “An Archive of One’s Own”. This is a reference to A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, which is described on Wikipedia as:

“An important feminist text, the essay is noted in its argument for both a literal and figurative space for women writers within a literary tradition dominated by men.”

Astolat called for name suggestions for the archive. Nobody ever came up with anything more popular than the original reference, and the slightly modified ‘Archive of Our Own’ stuck.

Whoops. Just deleted my post. Go me.

I wanted to pop this out because I think it’s an interesting cultural point. Many die-hard AO3 fans probably don’t even think about this because they never use search.

How do “all” fic archives work? Obviously, you go to the fandom listing, which is probably by media type, click on your fandom, and add whatever kind of metadata filtering the site allows. That’s how it always works, right? Right?

Or at least that’s what you think if you’re from the Before Times.

On AO3, you don’t even have to start from the fandom tag. You can start from any tag and filter from there.

My guess is that a lot of people, like me, start typing in AO3′s URL and click on whatever autocompletes. In my case, The Rightish Reasons in BTS fandom. From there, they click on tags in the header to take them where they want to go, assuming their autocomplete wasn’t their favorite tag in the first place.

Here’s my front page, for example:

Once at the tag, you’ve got the SIDEBAR, which is the real reason nobody likes search.

The default sort is by date updated, but you can pick others:

If you want to add ~engagement~ back into your searching, you can sort by kudos/comments/bookmarks/hits, but it’s not the default.

Lots of people leave it in date order and just exclude or include tags to get results down to a reasonable number of pages.

This sidebar and the paginated view of everything that you get by starting from a tag beats AO3′s work search page and every other fic archive’s search by leagues.

Ahahahahahahahaha!

That’s what I think.

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Let me be clear about two things here: First, anti-RPF discourse is very old. I thought we finished fighting that battle in like 2001 when a combination of Popslash and LotRiPS weakened the resolve of the biggest haters. So new people can re-fight it all they want, but they should not expect OTW to listen to their uninformed n00b opinions.

Second, when we wrote the TOS, we were explicit that:

“Unless it violates some other policy, we will not remove Content for offensiveness, no matter how awful, repugnant, or badly spelled we may personally find that Content to be.”

And that:

“You understand that using the Archive may expose you to material that is offensive, triggering, erroneous, sexually explicit, indecent, blasphemous, objectionable, grammatically incorrect, or badly spelled.”

Many n00bs seem to have understood this as protecting gay fiction from homophobes. That is certainly one effect that it has. We were also protecting RPF from RPF haters--and believe me, there were plenty who showed up on the original post that proposed AO3.

The test case I brought up at the time was the epic quantity of Gillian Anderson rape/snuff porn on Usenet in the 90s that sounded like it was written by misogynist straight men.

That is the level of content that AO3 was always designed to protect.

Nothing has gone wrong. This is what AO3 is.

If people are too uncomfortable with that to use the site, that’s fine: You can go to to Wattpad or Fanfiction.net, found your own site, check out one of the dozens of smaller archives, make a private discord with your buddies where you share google doc fic, yadda yadda. There are infinite options in the modern day.

AO3 was designed to be the archive where the things banned everywhere else go. Of course it has underage RPF.

--

If the concern is “Boo hoo, this will lead to real life child abuse”, all I can say is that AO3′s rules were not written to accommodate fake science any more than they were written to accommodate fake law. Most of the anti-AO3 sentiment going around right now grossly misrepresents what we know of human sexuality, the relationship between fiction and reality, US law, and even the actual nature of the fic everyone’s being a drama queen about.

If it actually were ~child rape~ fic, I would still defend it because that is part of AO3′s mission. In reality, like 99% of the time people have dramatics over a “literal child”, this person is a 16-year-old in the UK.

He is neither a child nor is he a minor in his own country. He has a semi-popular RPF fandom with a few thousand works, out of which 20 use the ‘noncon’ archive warning.

This is a tempest in a teapot created by people who want to destroy all RPF, destroy AO3′s protections of nasty content in general, or see “pedophiles” where there are none. The last 57 times didn’t work, so they’re desperately hoping fandom will be shocked enough by the words “child rape” to react this time.

The people who give money and time to OTW already know what the rules allow. This wank has happened at least once a year for the entire decade plus of AO3′s existence. Nothing here is new.

Whoops. Just deleted my post. Go me.

I wanted to pop this out because I think it’s an interesting cultural point. Many die-hard AO3 fans probably don’t even think about this because they never use search.

How do “all” fic archives work? Obviously, you go to the fandom listing, which is probably by media type, click on your fandom, and add whatever kind of metadata filtering the site allows. That’s how it always works, right? Right?

Or at least that’s what you think if you’re from the Before Times.

On AO3, you don’t even have to start from the fandom tag. You can start from any tag and filter from there.

My guess is that a lot of people, like me, start typing in AO3′s URL and click on whatever autocompletes. In my case, The Rightish Reasons in BTS fandom. From there, they click on tags in the header to take them where they want to go, assuming their autocomplete wasn’t their favorite tag in the first place.

Here’s my front page, for example:

Once at the tag, you’ve got the SIDEBAR, which is the real reason nobody likes search.

The default sort is by date updated, but you can pick others:

If you want to add ~engagement~ back into your searching, you can sort by kudos/comments/bookmarks/hits, but it’s not the default.

Lots of people leave it in date order and just exclude or include tags to get results down to a reasonable number of pages.

This sidebar and the paginated view of everything that you get by starting from a tag beats AO3′s work search page and every other fic archive’s search by leagues.

Yo, for those who don’t know, there’s a specific FAQ linked to from the Terms of Service that answers a lot of questions about policy shit that’s not always explained in the regular FAQ.