TWO DAYS LEFT⌠AND ONLY ÂŁ205 RAISED OUT OF ÂŁ2,000 NEEDED TO SAVE 4 PRECIOUS LIVES đđ We donât want to say it, but it really feels like we a
My next foster needs a helping hand to get to the UK!

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@luki-fanfic
TWO DAYS LEFT⌠AND ONLY ÂŁ205 RAISED OUT OF ÂŁ2,000 NEEDED TO SAVE 4 PRECIOUS LIVES đđ We donât want to say it, but it really feels like we a
My next foster needs a helping hand to get to the UK!

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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The legal age is at least 15-16 in Sorcier, and most aristocrats were probably married around the 18~20 YO mark (or as young as 17 in some cases). So anything past that would be considered relatively late lol
Not to mention, children of royalty/high nobility can get engaged as early as 8 years old (just like Geordo and Katarina's case). Plus, Millidiana was still a younger woman in her late teens when she and Luigi first met, and we know that the succession war lasted for about 2 years until the time Geoffrey and Ian were born, and therefore 4-5 years before Luigi and Miri got wed; giving birth to Katarina shortly afterwards. Which would make them at least 23~24 at the time of her birth.
Also, Tom doesn't look too old despite having a hard life as a gardener (likely in his 60s). And since he's roughly the same age as Katarina's grandfather, he should be over 20~24 years older than Duke and duchess Claes.
Thoughts?
To be honest, I haven't really thought about it. Arranged marriages and engagements are shown to be expected, but not mandatory for everyone in the upper class, with marriage by the time the men came of age - being in their 20's seems reasonable. Especially since this is a world that lends itself to Otome game happily ever after expectations.
As the end of the year approaches, the pressure on us grows heavier. This season often brings reflec⌠Reema Shafiq needs your support for He
Do you think Geordo and OG Kat's relationship improved after the events of TTLG?
Yes, though I doubt they ever became friends. Most of Geordo's issues with Katarina came from her refusal to break the engagement and how she treated Maria. With her agreeing to break it and no longer having any interest in bullying Maria, they might have eventually made it to the point where they could have a polite conversation with each other. Doubt either would have pursued much more however - pride is something they both have in spades.

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This is a mock cover for the fanfic Jackrabbit by Luki (KelpieCodyne) on A03 for the Rotg fandom.
The cover art is beautiful and was created for the fic by @arieldraw. I spent most of the time adding the image outline to be able to make it fit a larger space and make the 2 characters, Bunny and Jack stand out in contrast even more. It took quite a bit of time and I Di alot of colour matching with the original art to try and make it as seemless as possible.
As with alot of the fic mock covers I've been doing, sometimes I just do not want to do much on the back or the front as the artwork is such a beautiful focus to have. This cover reminds me a lot of another rotg cover I did and I can't wait to physically bind them to be able to see them together.
It took about 1 hour and 5 minutes to create the cover on Canva. I also have a sped up process video of the cover posted here:
Keep fanfic free.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
For the worse, Iemitsu returns, and Natsu has a few unexpected reunions.
---
Who had this on their 2025 bingo card?
Please enjoy a very long awaited chapter. It's been a long time since I sat down and focused on this, so hopefully it still fits.
will you miss me if the uk gov decides tumblr is evil and bans me?
Yes (You will be missed my dear british mutual
no (the less brits on here the better
you're british?
Trashki has the chance of a lifetime which he will miss if the funds aren't raised soon. A home has been found for him, one that truly unde
Help a feral gremlin make it to their forever home!
The charity I've fostered for is trying to raise money to get 2 disabled cats to the UK - supposed to leave this week but still lacking funds T_T
We are really desperate and we really need your help đđđ We are missing ÂŁ462 to save the lives of these two handicapped kittens and we have

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Maybe we should simply give up and stop our mission here. Maybe itâs not worth it anymore to rescue animals and not be able to give them the
Can anyone help out the charity who I foster for? Every little helps.
Can I share this poor pooch? One of the fosters for the charity I've fostered cats for - he's been waiting over a year for a home. Anyone willing to share and find Odin a home? Based in the UK so sorry any US followers who want to adopt!
We want to remind you that our handsome Odin is still looking for a home đŤ this dog seems to have no luck even though he is perfect in every
Odin is a truly special boy with a heart full of love and loyalty, patiently waiting for his forever home. His journey hasnât been an easy o
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 wasnât, like, ~~~we luv pedophilia, it was way more complicated than that!
although itâs true AO3 does allow all fannish content provided itâs properly warned for, thereâs 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.
youâre 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 ânother story), when it was still owned by Six Apart; in an effort to clean up LJâs 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 ainât into this kind of fic but people write about what people write about, and if itâs fictional and not explicitly banned in the TOS (correct me if Iâm wrong; I donât think written content about this stuff was banned?) then itâs not cool for a content host to just start deleting communities without warning.
but thatâs 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 whoâd 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 theyâd 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.netâs HTML restrictions were so great that users couldnât use any special characters or bold or italicize anything, and it didnât 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 itâs 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 - itâs a lot more complicated than you might expect, and thereâs a reason many older fans who have been involved in several generations of fandom were so grateful to have AO3 as an option.
I donât 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 âyeah, I totally want to go out and rape and torture people for years while brainwashing them!â or even âyeah, I wouldnât do it myself, but it would be totally okay if someone did!â 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 donât get to write or read that? No.
In the same way, writing about underage teens getting it onâsometimes with each other, sometimes with adults, sometimes consensually, sometimes notâis 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.
Letâs take a closer look at that âAo3 supports pedophilia!â 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) Thereâs a lot more incest, but it is usually portrayed either as explicitly mutually consensual (i.e. Sam/Dean) or as abusive.
3) Iâve been in fandom for a decade and a half. When people start getting upset at âomg pedophilia, think of the children!â the fics they are usually objecting to arenât actually pedophilia. Usually, it is teenagers having sex, especially queer sex. And people donât like that, and use pedophilia as an excuse to shame people for writing/reading sex they donât like.
Letâs 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 âfamily valuesâ group hated porn, and they hated queer stuff even more, and used âbut think of the children, itâs pedophilia!â to pressure LJ to get rid of huge swathes of things they didnât like. And one time taking down the worst of it wasnât 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 âpedophiliaâ or âincestâ because thatâs 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 doesnât stop until theyâve won the point and nothing but suitably âfamily-friendlyâ fics that match their purity test are allowed.
Which is why AO3 has no morality content in their terms of service. You canât break copyright beyond fair use (and AO3 has an expansive view of âfair useâ and a team of lawyers on call). You canât use AO3 for commercial advertising. And you canât 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 positionsâyou know, the stuff that actually hurts kids. Other than that? Itâs 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.
Weâve been down that road. It doesnât 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 âWarriorsâ (literally called themselves that!) were totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom they didnât like.
If youâre carrying out harassment of people right now because theyâre posting works with sexual elements you donât agree with? (And itâs always sex, never non-sexual violence, how strangeâŚ.) If youâre doing that, youâre also totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom you donât like. Because your tactics are fandom-destroying, and so is your agenda.
reblogging because this is important: strikethru and boldthru and all the various âpurgesâ 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: thereâs 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 âpaeodophiliaâ.
^^^rebageling again for excellent commentary
Throwing this in because I was also present: This was during the American Governmentâs 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. Iâve been on the site since 2002. They may not have âofficiallyâ 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 âNew Storyâ 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.Â
tl;dr - I know tumblr is all about black and white âyouâre either all right or all wrongâ thinking, but itâs important to understand what actually happened before going âew ao3 was made to give pedophiles a safe place to postâ 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 âall ships are valid UNLESSâ. It smacks of censorship and content policing - and weâve 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 youâre advocating for, when put into practice, is NOT a positive thing; itâs 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 youâre a slash or fem slash shipper, if you support gender identities that arenât 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 YOUâRE ADVOCATING!!
People were terrified during Strikethrough. Â I was there. Â Communities were being shut down, individual users were being shut down. Â People were losing access to their own fics, their feedback, their comments â a LOT went on in comments on LJ. Â Think more coherent reblogs, much more personal, very widespread. Â Comments were also very important, and in terms of networking/communicating, were absolutely critical. Â
LJ was, for many people, central. Â
It was a fundamental part of the infrastructure of fandom at the time. Â
Having it attacked, having parts of your fandomâs territory just deleted like that, was very very scary.  People didnât 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.
You do 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 âthings that donât harm anyoneâ but I realize you can argue that.  If you get triggered, thatâs upsetting.  That could be considered harm.  And I have sympathy for that.  I do.
I have run across fic that triggered me. Â I have pretty specific triggers, and people donât always think to warn for them because they arenât that big a deal for a lot of people. Â Or itâs sort of bundled into kink and is presumed, that if youâre okay with certain kinds of kink, youâre okay with this. Â So Iâve been blindsided by it before. Â 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 thatâs not an ironclad obligation. Â Itâs a tool people provide out of courtesy.
That was not the fault of the site! Â 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! Â It was my responsibility to try to curate my experience, and I tried, but it wasnât my fault because I didnât 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 fuckinâ 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 2000â˛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.
âYeah, but if sheâs writing it for therapy, she doesnât have to post it where other people might have to see it!â I hear you say.
But like ⌠what the hell??? âShut up, donât talk about it, itâs bad to talk about these things, because these things are bad!â is something used against folks with trauma.
âThis isnât good for me, I canât talk about this, I canât be your audience for this,â thatâs fine, those are boundaries that people with trauma use to defend themselves. Â You should learn to say those things! Â It will help you!
But expecting other people to never create and share art about trauma is just so thunderously oppressive I lack the ability to fully articulate it.
And nobody should have to disclose their history of trauma to prove their motives are pure or virtuous enough for their speech to be protected.  Iâve only really been able to openly say âI was assaulted, it was traumatic, I am a little fucked up from itâ for the past couple of years, tops.  I couldnât talk about it before that.  Couldnât!  And it was over 20 years ago!
I also believe, very firmly, that you donât need a history of abuse to find writing really messed-up shit satisfying, or to find reading it cathartic. Â I believe 100% in the freedom of creative expression, and the freedom to read whatever fucked up shit you want to read.
All yâall fandom youngsters can spit nails all you want over gross rape fic, incest fic, whatever.
Fine, I donât like it either!
But that fucked up shit? Â That fucked up shit helped carve out the spaces we have today. Â You donât 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 doesnât keep actual kids or teens or assault/rape victims safe. Â It wouldnât have made me feel safe when I was 16 and didât want what was going on. Â It doesnât make me feel safe now. Â I can say with the perspective of someone 24 years away from that event, it doesnât make the world safer for people like I was. Â It actually makes it worse.
Learn to steer clear of the messed-up stuff you donât like.  Itâs 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. Â Please stop acting like writing about an adult and a teenager having really questionable, gross sex is as bad as the actual registered sex offender they caught hanging around an actual elementary school two neighborhoods over from mine, just trying to talk to the kids. Â The former is, at most, in poor taste, and potentially triggering to abuse victims. Â 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. Â A g a i n. Â
The first can be avoided because it is imaginary and you, an adult, have power over your back button so that you donât 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 didnât read some gross NC-17 Draco/Lucius fic before deciding to harm an actual human being. Â Pretty sure not having read it didnât keep him from doing it. âCause he fuckinâ did it. Â And he would have done worse. But actual people stopped him.
I get 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. Â Stop trying to make those things synonymous in the minds of other fans, and in the minds of other recovering victims.
Iâm a crone who also lived through strikethrough, and all y'all young fans need to read this and understand it if you donât want history to repeat itself someday.
Hereâs the thing, also: it doesnât stop with fic about objectionable stuff.
If you have a website with TOS that includes any kind of âobjectionable contentâ rules, there will be parties who will use those rules to try to silence other people whom they want silenced.
Letâs 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 donât 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 shitâas fandoms doâover the idea of âreplacingâ Mulder blah blah blah.
One of the most popular fanfic mailing listsâone that had previously had no restrictions on what characters or pairings could be postedâdecided 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 wouldnât 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 doesnât happen now. I can speak up if I need to, and while I may receive harassment on my various social media accounts, thereâs no chance they can have my fic taken down just because they have an agenda and donât like me for reasons not relating to my fic.
So yeah, AO3â˛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 wasnât 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 enemyâs work. Often, that means guys targeting slash or Twilight fic because itâs âfor girlsâ and thus sucks. Sometimes, itâs 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 canât force people to like each other. We canât force people to be nice to each other. But we could take away fandom bulliesâ 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. Â
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 donât 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 donât have to see it because I sympathize, but I will never support people who want to make sure that it isnât even there to be seen. Iâve been through that once. It didnât help anyone. It didnât fix anything.
Please, learn to curate your own online experience. You are responsible for not clicking, or clicking away. Donât try to force others to do it for you. Thatâs not cool. You arenât 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 kidsâ 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 itâs still up to this day, though it hasnât been updated it over a decade as its owner is still in prison.
Whooo, I guess itâs my turn to take a shot at this.
Iâm a nold. Iâm in my 40s. When I came out as queer, in the early 90s, it was in the middle of what were called the âfeminist sex warsâ. 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:
Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Womenâs Rights by Nadine Strossen
A preview is available on Google Books, or it should be readily available secondhand, or in academic libraries (though itâs not a very heavy academic read). I recommend Booko for finding cheap secondhand copies. Support independent bookstores!
I havenât read âDefending Pornographyâ for a while â I actually last re-read it about a decade ago because of the impact that Warriors for Innocence were having on Dreamwidthâs payment providers at the time, subsequent to Strikethrough itself â but hereâs 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 âThe Joy of Gay Sexâ, 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 didnât 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 âobsceneâ 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? âThe Joy of Gay Sexâ and the like. Guess what businesses started finding all their shipments seized or delayed â sexually explicit or not â to the point where they were being put out of business? Gay bookstores. Guess what wasnât seized at all? Mainstream porn made for straight men.Â
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) youâd 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 werenât impacted and didnât 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.
Hereâs the key point: Strossen is a legal scholar whoâs 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 wonât come for actual abusers, theyâll 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 whatâs happening now with all this Tumblr discourse.
This is old, old business, weâve 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. Donât 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 didnât 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 everyone got them in the 19th century, you couldnât 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 âyeah no condoms are not a crime,â 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.
Itâs been touched on a little before but really itâs 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 didnât 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 doesnât 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 didnât 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.) Itâs only years later, reading fanfic history posts that Iâve 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 didnât 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 youâll understand why those of us over about 30 are so opposed to tumblrâs purity crusade.
If you havenât been TOSsed you really donât get it, imo.
If you havenât spent your time wondering if the thing that will get your content deleted is the dark stuff or the nipples, you really donât get it, imo.
Hell, way way back in the day, I had moderator types private message me going âI really like your writing, but you need to be less obvious about it, or I will have no choice but to tos you.â
A long reblog, but a worthy read. So much history and experience recounted here. If we donât 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.
Just to add my voice to the historical context here, but I was one of the main people blogging about the LJ strike through back in the day while it was all happening. I weirdly ended up being a centralized hub (hell, my LJ is even cited as a source on Fanlore, if you can believe it).
If you want a pretty good idea about the chaos and panic and how quickly it spun out of control, you can start with my post here, and then follow all of the links.
By the way, to this day, I was the only one in fandom who managed to get any kind of response out of the âWarriors for Justice,â a right-wing, Christian supremacist group who basically called anyone they didnât like âpedos.â Their real main targets were LGBTQA. Pedophilia was really just a handy excuse.
Read and learn, young âuns. Not everything that squicks you out, not everything that makes you uncomfortable, is inherently bad. Itâs your right to be squicked, itâs your right to be uncomfortable. But itâs also your responsibility to curate your own experience. Targeting people because you donât like their fannish output puts you on the same side as the âWarriors for Justice.â You wind up hurting a lot of innocent people who never did anything to anyone outside of a fictional space.
And if that doesnât convince you, do one thing for me. Look at the person to your virtual right. Look to the person on your virtual left. Then look in the mirror. Then realize this one simple fact:Â sooner or later when you get that perfectly sterile and safe online experience you crave, someone, somewhere, is going to decide that itâs not sterile or safe enough. And that means that one of you, either the person on your right or the person on your left or even the person looking at you from the mirror is going to find themselves out in the cold.
It happens every single time. Every. Time.
Now Iâm not saying that Tumblr wasnât allowing some fucked up shit, but there were ways to handle it properly. THIS IS NOT HANDLING IT PROPERLY.
Itâs the beginning of the end, my Chili Babies. Iâve been in this movie before (hell, I had a significant supporting role in the previous movie). Tumblr will tick-tock along for awhile,but I guarantee people are feverishly looking for the next fandom thing beacuse Tumblr has now proven to be unsafe.
At least fanfic writers have AO3 at least. Right now itâs the fanartists who are pretty much screwed until the next new thing comes along.
SO HERE IS THE WHOLE STORY (SO FAR).
I am on my knees begging you to reblog this post and to stop reblogging the original ones I sent out yesterday. This is the complete account with all the most recent info; the other one is just sending people down senselessly panicked avenues that no longer lead anywhere.
IN SHORT
Cliff Weitzman, CEO of Speechify and (aspiring?) voice actor, used AI to scrape thousands of popular, finished works off AO3 to list them on his own for-profit website and in his attached app. He did this without getting any kind of permission from the authors of said work or informing AO3. Obviously.
When fandom at large was made aware of his theft and started pushing back, Weitzman issued a non-apology on the original social media postsâusingÂ
his dyslexia;Â
his intent to implement a tip-system for the plagiarized authors; andÂ
a sudden willingness to take down the work of every author who saw my original social media posts and emailed him individually with a âvalidâ claim,
as reasons we should allow him to continue monetizing fanwork for his own financial gain.
When we less-than-kindly refused, he took down his âapologiesâ as well as his website (allegedlyâitâs possible that our complaints to his web host, the deluge of emails he received or the unanticipated traffic brought it down, since there wasnât any sort of official statement made about it), and when it came back up several hours later, all of the work formerly listed in the fan fiction category was no longer there.Â
THE TAKEAWAYS
1. Cliff Weitzman (aka Ofek Weitzman) is a scumbag with no qualms about taking fanwork without permission, feeding it to AI and monetizing it for his own financial gain;Â
2. Fandom can really get things done when it wants to, andÂ
3. Our fanworks appear to be hidden, but theyâre NOT DELETED from Weitzmanâs servers, and independently published, original works are still listed without the authors' permission. We need to hold this man responsible for his theft, keep an eye on both his current and future endeavors, and take action immediately when he crosses the line again.Â
THE TIMELINE, THE DETAILS, THE SCREENSHOTS (behind the cut)
Has anyone else noticed an uptick in requests to give consent for audio videos. Specifically this request:
'Hey, can I make an audio version of your story on my Monetized YouTube channel?'
First got it on my fanfiction.net page, but in the last month, I've gotten the exact wording in comments for the same fanfic repeatedly. First time I thought it was a human being, but given the identical wording, and the fact that these profiles are fairly new, and have no works, bookmarks, or signs of any other legit interaction, I'm suspecting we have a whole new type of bot to worry about.

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The rest of the thread is here.
tl;dr: Donât monetize AO3, kids. You wonât like what happens next.
read this thread. this is by far the most concise explanation of a lot of different issues that iâve seen in fandom spaces in a while. cosigning both the linked thread and the thread about aus/uk/can law thatâs linked in-thread.
AHDHXHEBSG TWITTER WRITERS DID WHAT NOW???? AND PEOPLE PAID THEM????
If someone has never taken a class that includes copyright law, they may not know this stuff, so I donât necessarily blame random people for not knowing what copyright is, but like⌠maybe just maybe itâs something that should be taught????
Just another reminder, because this always drives me crazy, but even if monetizing your fic was 100% unambiguously legal and protected, AO3 would still not let you do it because AO3 was founded and is supported by people like me who want a fandom community that is completely divested from making money off of fic.
Yes, this. Lots of fanworks on AO3 are unambiguously legal. Fics based on Shakespeare plays and fairy tales and Greek mythology and The Great Gatsby and your original character from your D&D game are not violations of copyright, because no copyright applies to those things.
AO3 still doesnât let you monetize those things on the site, because we donât want the site to be commercial! Because thatâs not what itâs for!
Itâs not there for you (generic you) to make money off the efforts of the people who build and maintain the site for free! We arenât getting paid for the work we do to give you a nice site to use, just like you arenât getting paid for the work you do to create whatever art you share there. Because fandom is supposed to be a community where we share with each other, and therefore we all benefit.
The deal is, we give you a free, stable, safe platform to host your works. In exchange, you get a site that isnât covered in ads and tip jars and links to gofundme and âread the next chapter at my patreonâ. You get one goddamn place on the internet that isnât trying to make money off you. And we will defend that space and keep it non-commercial.
current fan creation landscape is kinda like if you went to a party with a homemade cake and everyone takes a slice and silently thumbs up at you with no attempt to start a conversation except for occasionally some guy sits in the corner with a tape recorder critiquing the cake as though he was a restaurant critic and another guy is handing the cake to an uber driver like "yeah i need you to find a restaurant that makes cake like this so i can have more of it" and the only person that's talked to you in 30 minutes is a very sweet little guy who was like "hey i liked your cake" and then ran away apologizing for bothering you the moment you said thank you.
someone brought a cake analysis robot to feed the cake into to determine the exact ingredients and supposedly it can spit out the exact same cake. and if you're like dude. what. then they're like well if it bothers you you should have made more cake. i'm hungry and i deserve cake. and you're like dude we're at a party.
Three months later you find out that fifty people locked themselves in a room to discuss how much they loved your cake and how they wished you made more. None of them ever told you.