Huh.

Oh, how quickly the past is forgotten. 

They are part of the reason A03 is a thing now. Not the whole reason, but part of it. 

The Great Purges of 2002 and 2012 are when ff.net got a wild hair up their ass about THINK OF THE CHILDREN and nuked any fic posted on there that was explicit. Thousands upon thousands of nc-17 smutfics were lost.

Is there any way to spread this info? 

THE OTW WAS CREATED BY FANS SO WE’D HAVE AN ARCHIVE THAT WASN’T SUBJECT TO CORPORATE REVIEW. 

Nonprofit, so that nobody could ever say, “this isn’t making enough money; it’s getting shut down.” (See: Geocities, Quizilla, Figment, G+.) With lawyers involved and a firm awareness of the legalities of fanfic, so nobody would decide “we’ve gotten a nasty letter from a megacorporation with lawyers, so we’re hiding because we can’t afford to face a lawsuit. (Jedi Hurtaholics, Trevizo’s Millennium site.) With teams, so that an argument between co-mods didn’t result in the destruction of a whole archive. (Gryffindor Tower, Detention.)

AO3 IS OUR SITE.

It is by fans, for fans. Fans do all the coding. All the legal paperwork. All the abuse/tos violation complaints. Fans make all the choices about policies. Fans decide how to run the fundraisers. Fans write the blog posts. All the volunteer staff are fans; all the people who train them are fans. Fans wrangle all the tags. 

(And the other OTW projects, too. Fans manage the entries at Fanlore. Fans run the Open Doors project. Fans publish Transformative Works and Cultures.)

EVERYONE WORKING FOR THE OTW LOVES FANDOM. Wants it to survive. Wants it to be awesome for everyone.

(Knows that it can’t be awesome for everyone; some approaches to fandom just clash hard. But they strive to minimize those clashes as much as possible, because they love fandom.) 

AO3 is not some company that decided, “we’ll make a site for fanfic and then…” I don’t know what people are thinking is the reason. Money? Data harvesting? Tax shelter? Amusement and pity?

Nope; AO3 was fans saying, “Livejournal sucks; we’re tired of this fucked-up ‘rebuild every three years’ garbage; WE NEED TO OWN THE DAMN SERVERS.”

Y'all think fandom infighting is bad now? Picture it with sites where the ban system worked like YouTube and TikTok - you could get slapped with one for any reason or no reason at all. No way to appeal it. Picture it with fans getting in legal trouble because someone didn’t like their work and reported it. Picture it with people getting sued over fanfiction. Because it happened.

That’s why so many fics written by oldtimers like me have that knee-jerk, “I own nothing, please don’t sue.” There was a time when that was necessary.

AO3 changed all that. No more crashes, no more purges, and at least some protection under the law. (We all knew the bit where fanfic is technically covered under the “parody” clause of copyright law, but not a single one of us could have made a case in court cause the thing that unites fans apart from their fandoms is that we are by and large broke.) And OTW has endured not because it’s got all the funding or corporate backing in the world, but because it’s run by people who give a damn.

Not because it’s a “4 hour superior Justice League” but because Zack Snyder’s daughter died, he went off the film to grieve (VERY understandably so), and then Joss Whedon came in and tore his film to absolute shreds while harassing the cast and crew to horrific extents during reshoots.

i have a fuckign collection of these don’t test me

Eren new titan has bones coming out of his backbone which is close to be wing bone.

.

.

That Remindes us of :

Wings of Freedom

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.

the fact that allen, despite the soul-crushing abuse, ridicule, and cruelty he endured as a “child” (or a thirty-some year old, who knows), unerringly treats kids with such compassion, respect, and gentleness… even in situations where he’s in great pain…

i’m choking