photogenic compost

'i hate this fandom'

'i don't want to read noncon/dubcon'

'i don't like 'x/y/z' and i shouldn't have to read it'

'i hate this character'

'i don't want to read explicit stories'

a resolution for you:

My housemate's cat came into my room while my dictation was on...

the minute you say a number your readers can check your math and you cannot do math better than your most autistic critic. i guarantee. don't let your readers do any math. when did something happen? awhile ago. how many bullets can that gun fire? trick question, it shoots lasers, and it shoots em HARD.

This is a point I have often found myself refuting during my many (and sometimes painful) debates with MHA readers. When I talk about a peaceful way to solve the conflict with Shigaraki, by talking to him and offering him help, I am often told that talking to him would not work, that it's impossible. I think a clarification is necessary : Shigaraki has never been closed to dialogue and the heroes have never tried any other way than repression by violence. Let's look at the facts now.

The USJ attack. Yes, he is the one who attacks the heroes but when All Might arrives, Tomura criticizes him for the brutality of the heroes, a criticism that All Might rejects without listening. Obviously, he doesn't have to listen to the criminal who comes to kill teenagers, I am well aware of that, but it's one of many examples that show that heroes have never tried anything other way than to respond with violence.

The shopping mall where Shigaraki came to meet Deku to express his frustration and exchange with him on what differentiates him from Stain. Even when Deku irritates him by telling that Stain doesn't run away from difficulties unlike him and that he says that Tomura is not fighting for any ideal, the latter remains relatively calm, listens to what Deku tells him and learns from it.

After kidnapping Bakugo, he tries to put him at ease and make him understand that society despises and rejects those who differ from the norm, in order to propose him to join the League (which is literally a refuge for rejected people with nowhere to go and who want to destroy the system that oppresses them). Bakugo doesn't listen to him of course, it's hard to argue with the one who just kidnapped you and put your comrades in danger, but while Shigaraki talks, we can see that his point is relevant. Look at this journalist who publicly insinuates that Bakugo's aggressive temper would make him a potential super-villain.

And I answer right away to those who say that it was an attempt of manipulation from Tomura : Not at all. It would be totally out of character, Tomura having nothing of a manipulator. On the contrary, it's him who is victim of them and who must be saved by the protagonist. We have also this panel which shows us that he was quite serious when he spoke to Bakugo.

And next, we have this :

This scene where as Twice gets hysterical and Toga threatens him with a knife to the throat after Tomura tells them they're going to associate with those who killed Big Sis Magne, he chooses to calmly explain his decision and show the trust he has in them by revealing his face, instead of getting nervous and trying to kill Toga like at their first meeting.

Same here, Spinner gets legitimately angry when he sees that they have no solutions to improve the society and gets upset against Shigaraki who tried to explain himself without violence but is interrupted by the arrival of Machia.

And here we have the best example. After almost getting killed in his sleep by the "heroes", Shigaraki is lectured by Endeavor about his presumed lack of ideals (lol, that's so ironic), to which Shigaraki (whose scorched body is cracking and still regenerating) responds with a speech about how criminals like him are only the consequence of the intentional neglect of heroes and civilians, that this is a systemic problem and that he's now fighting to destroy this toxic system that always rejects him. A powerful speech that Endeavor doesn't care about and answers with another murder attempt.

It will be pointed out to me that in some situations, Shigaraki attacks first to try to discuss later. Yes indeed, but when you have been traumatized as a child several times, brainwashed since the age of five by a sadistic psychopath who also exploited your traumas to make you an emotionally unstable weapon of mass destruction and cut you off from the outside world for more than a decade, it's rather logical that you are not very good at establishing a healthy discussion. However, it can be noted that from the arc on Overhaul, his social skills have become much better, as evidenced by his interactions with the League.

They Called Us Mutants

an X-Men/My Hero Academia crossover

You? Me? A committee of my friends? Of yours? Of those who have the most kudos? Of those who have no interest in fandom, but want to protect other people from dangerous content, whatever it may be? Who gets that power, and how long will they have it?

Who are you comfortable with giving the power of regulating all the content? What happens in grey areas? What happens when something you like isn’t liked by the Decider? Is there an appeal? Who gets to make the arguments for and against something?

Certain people are screaming that AO3 is bad because it’s not a “safe space.” The real problem they have, though, is that AO3 was created to be a safe space - for writers. And it does a pretty good job of that. It was designed to be a place where writers are safe from arbitrary content rule changes, random and unwarned deletions, and abuse-report abuse (which is common on ff.net). The Four Big Warnings + CNTW system is beautiful in its fairness and simplicity.

I’m a member of the LJ generation, and when I first came to Tumblr (grudgingly and out of desperation, I might add, since it tragically seems to be the only place to really connect with other fandom peeps) I was horrified at how people here had established this sort of fucked up bully culture, where nobody is responsible for monitoring their own consumption, and rather they expect everyone else to custom tailor content to the whims and desires of the Shrieking Banshee Masses. And woe be to the person who doesn’t bend and break! “I’m going to bully you while accusing you and your Big Mean Poopie Content of being the actual bully, so I can hopefully distract you and others from realizing I’m being a royal intrusive asshat who failed Astronomy 101 b/c I clearly believe the world revolves around me.”

The irony here is that this in itself is an abuse tactic - victim blaming with a side of gaslighting. Pot, meet kettle.

And it’s the exact same mentality that drives right-wing lunatics to kick up a fuss about the existence of icky cootie gay people in media because we need to “protect family values”, or who take to screeching at Starbucks because their particular religious symbolism isn’t portrayed on the winter holiday cups and OMG WAR ON CHRISTMAS, STARBUCKS STOP OPPRESSING ME BY NOT CATERING TO MY PERSONAL TASTE.

The mentality is one and the same - “Cater to ME ME ME or FACE MY DIVINE WRATH even if it means taking away other people’s freedom!” while hiding behind a flimsy-ass shield of faux righteous anger.  

Up to the late 1990s, fan communities were often small and decentralized because there was a huge fear that fans would be targeted by content creators if they drew too much attention. Since several authors (Anne Rice, Mercedes Lackey, Anne McCaffery) actually DID issue cease&desists to fan creators, it’s kind of understandable where the fear came from. It’s also why you still see fanfic floating around with disclaimers, something young!tumblr loves to mock.

Harry Potter changed *everything*. Like, I really can’t emphasize how much. Fanfiction was always there, being shared on email lists or privately hosted or literally mailed cross country. But Harry Potter hit BIG in 1997. It had a massive crossover appeal that hadn’t been seen since probably the original Star Trek, and the baby Internet was all. over. it. If you weren’t there, imagine Twilight. But bigger. And J.K. Rowling stood out from other creators by condoning fanfiction in her very early interviews. Not to mention there was a lot of down time between books and, as you might know, the fans do not do well unpoliced. 

This led to, I’m not kidding, an explosion of sites like FF.N. I don’t think a lot of younger users get how revolutionary AO3 is: not just because it created a safe space, but because of how much it’s done to centralize fanfiction on the internet. We used to get our fix through webrings and e-serves, so in the late 90s/early 00s we thought nothing of having dozens of scattered fanfic sites.

At the same time, the Digital Millennium Copywrite Act was coming down. The legality of fanworks was getting more and more complex. And no one knew how to handle these questions, because they had literally never come up before. When it was just authors going after individual fans, things usually went quick and brutal. Fans had neither the money nor the legal teams to stand up to creators, even if (as we were slowly beginning to realize) we had a strong case to create and share fanworks. So, if you got hit with a takedown notice, you took your fic down and laid low, hoping to avoid any further interest.  But now the legal burden was shifting from individuals to well-funded corporations. Fanfic.net and LJ didn’t want to shut down their fan-contributors, who were creating a huge stream of free content and bringing in advertising revenue. At the same time, they didn’t want to get shut down by a lawsuit if Lucasfilm found Han/Chewie smut and decided to go after the real money. The next 10 years were basically all of us – authors, fan creators, website executives – stumbling through brand new legal territory and figuring it out by trial and error. FF.N erred on the side of caution by becoming more and more restrictive. They shut down the entire Anne McCaffrey and Anne Rice sections, and eventually banned “pornographic” fanfiction from the site in an attempt to cover their legal rears. (It backfired, unsurprisingly, because say what you will about fandom: we like our smut. Also, FF.N had other issues that we won’t get into here will discuss shortly.) A bunch of other sites folded or waned in popularity as fandom wars divided the fan population. Authors scattered to the winds, and a lot of them ended up on LJ.  LJ started out very user friendly. We’re talking an open source code, an almost entirely volunteer staff. Even after it was sold to 6Apart in 2005, LJ was pretty permissive. A lot of that had to do with the aforementioned DMCA, which protected ISPs and hosting corporations. Like I mentioned above, a lot of the migration from FF.N to LJ (as a place for fanfiction SPECIFICALLY) came when FF.N started banning explicit fanworks. Why? Because FF.N targeted these fanworks based entirely on user reports. “Tell us if you find porn,” FF.N said, “And we’ll take care of it.” Backup real quick. LJ, in many ways, set the standard for online privacy in a way that was far ahead of its time. Friendslocked journals were the norm rather than the exception and many, many communities disallowed anonymous commenting. (I’m not saying LJ wasn’t toxic as fuck, by the way. It is 2017 and let’s all have a moment of acknowledgement for how terrible LJ culture actually could be.) But LJ, on the whole, was much, much better at self-policing than FF.N. On FF.N, all of your stuff was out in the open. It was just there. Anyone could read it, anyone could report it. And these two sites coexisted. All BNFs had a private journal and a public FF.N page. So if I hated someone and I wanted to harass them off the internet, on LJ, I’d have to make multiple sock puppets and concoct elaborate multi-journal ruses to do it on LJ (haha, who would do THAT?). What am I to do? Simple: Head off to FF.N and anonymously flame them there! FF.N became synonymous with anonymous hate long before the anti-smut censorship came down. But once those rules were in place, the system was rife for abuse by the Purity Police or grudgewankers. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaay before it was cool to dm “kill urself” to someone on tumblr, it was happening on FF.N. All you, the early internet user, had to do was post a report link for your rival’s FF.N account on your LJ. Hate a pairing? A kink? Why not post a scathing rant, link included, to this captive audience of ALL YOUR FRIENDS. Yeah, this system had no room for abuse. So. FF.N opened the door and fandom came rushing through like the raging assholes we are. Certain Fandoms Alluded To Previously got so deeply divided that they split and formed their own fanfiction archives that occasionally rained hate on each other. Everyone else slowly withdrew to LJ, where locked communities offered some level of protection. Then, irony of ironies, fandom as a whole got targeted by the purity wankers. And of course, of course, it came back to Harry Potter.  It’s 2007. Things have quieted down since 2001, when certain unnamed people’s fics were targeted for plagiarism and deleted from FF.N even though, just to be clear, they actually were plagiarized and, while there was an element of mob persecution, the actual fact remains that the work in question was legitimately in violation of FF.N’s TOS. Ahem. It’s 2007. And everyone’s fairly chill. Creators are far more comfortable with fanfiction and fan creators are confident in posting their work so long as they aren’t profiting directly from it. Hosting sites, meanwhile, are profiting from fanworks, but they’ve got the legal shield of the DMCA to hide behind, so they’re feeling A-OKAY. And then Warriors for Innocence appears. WfI existed before strikethrough, and they existed after, but they made their mark on fandom when they reported upwards of 500 journals, most of them fan journals and communities, to LJ. The theory runs as follows: 6A, the company who’d bought LJ 2 years prior, realizes that the DMCA didn’t protect them if the fan works in question are “indecent”. Compounding this, 6A is already trying to clean up the famdomier aspects of LJ. Either they’re looking for a sale, or sites like ONTD are bringing in massive amounts of hits. WfI brings 6A a perfect hit list, and 6A goes to work. So one morning we all wake up and find that hundreds of journals, including the pornish_pixies community and several BNF’s personal journals, have been deleted. Literally gone: a lot of the media stored on these communities has been purged forever. Hope you had backups. Also gone: large swaths of the Pretty Gothic Lolita community, Lolita book discussion groups, and rape survivor communities. 

Kids read your fandom history research goddamit.  Here are just a few, and these are not hard to find.  We’re the internet generation - use a search field and read multi-source history checks, okay?  

(almost all of these are linked from my personal reblogs, because i know i won’t change my username meaning the links will always work)

fandom history:

Yes, fic writers were harassed, sued, sent C&D letters - we published underground

Here is Some Fandom ‘Oral History’ for You Guys @copperbadge

The Places Fandom Dwells: A Cautionary Tale @mizstorge - so many must read links - our whole LJ-and-on online history is here

‘Intellislash’ [or ‘Your Fandom Culture of Origin Matters’] @copperbadge

History of Ancient Fanfiction (no really)

We started on Geocities and del.i.cio.us - then Yahoo came…

a brief history of the LJ strikethrough and subsequent fan migration @stardust-rain

Very First Star Trek Fic Published - 1974

What JKR and SMeyer did for fanfic

some good fandom knowledgebase specifics:

bangpaths - when you see slutty!Snape, for example

Squicks and Triggers - not the same thing (multi-thread)

Fandom-wank (what is it)

AO3 says descriptive/story-telling tags are a-okay

all the crap about policing fanficition for any reason:

Fandom and fac can only be a healthy outlet if it stops policing shit - be it taboos, dark sides, gender, orientation, kink, etc. (multi-thread - @televisiontelepath )

“Ship means something you want to see happen.” Bitch, no it don’t.  @pyrebomb 

I’m Done Explaining Why Fanfic is Okay @bookshop & others + links

I think fanfiction is literature and literature, for the most part, is fanfiction, and that anyone that dismisses it simply on the grounds that it’s derivative knows fuck-all about literature and needs to get the hell off my lawn. @inkandcayenne

Foz on Hurt/Comfort fic

Why Do Fangirls Always Make Them Gay?

The Importance of Mary Sue unwinona

random fan history fun reads:

Fangirling after 30 (multi-thread)

Older fans run our Infrastructure (also, 90+ year old author who writes darkwing duck slashfic how awesome is that (multi-thread)

we built this kingdom, motherfuckers, with the trekkie zine housewives before us (multi-thread) older fans fun tories

STRAIGHT DUDES OF THE WORLD [in which @fozmeadows explains the best way to learn about female desire…is to read words written by actual females :D]

On Fanfic & Emotional Continuity (multi-thread)

It’s [never] Just Fanfic

Fanlore

Fan is a Tool Using Animal

my  odds  and  ends  cause  i  have  actually  been  here  a  while 

But. The side of tumblr that bullies, doxxes, and harasses anyone who doesn’t fall in line with a person or group’s parameters of acceptable content is disgusting to me. And the calls for some kind of oversight or regulation beyond stuff that’s already illegal are concerning, because as others have said…no one calling for it seems to be able to articulate who decides this shit, and where lines are drawn. It’s one thing to talk in terms of what you personally will accept, condone, or do. It’s another thing all together to talk about setting overarching policies that large groups of people are held to.

(Under the cut because it’s long)

Okay, I… actually disagree with this.  And I know you’re not trying to argue they should be banned on AO3 or anything and that wasn’t the point of your comment, but I really want to respond to this specifically. 

Because the thing is, I do not know a single person who ships incest or abusive ships, or even minor/adult ships who doesn’t realize that in real life these things are harmful and abusive. (age gaps are… well that’s a whole other thing bc what do you even MEAN by large age gaps? Someone who’s 80 dating someone who’s 50 is not the same as someone’ who’s 19 dating someone who’s 25, but the age gap is bigger in the former. So that’s it’s own fucking thing and I don’t think it should automatically get lumped in with other obviously-abusive types of ships).  Those people who take it into real life were doing that regardless of shipping or fandom, and it’s not about them shipping a “bad” ship it’s about them already being that kind of person.

Saying “we should talk about the issues with these ships” is essentially making a judgement call on the morality of a person’s shipping of fictional people and dynamics that I have never seen reflect a desire to see those things happen with real people.  I have shipped, fictionally, a 19-20yo with a 35yo.  In real life that would be so suspect and almost certainly unhealthy and likely abusive, but in fiction it’s fictional, it’s two characters who I think have an interesting dynamic.  I have, yes, shipped incest ships.  In real life they would almost certainly be abusive or at minimum deeply unhealthily codependent, and to be fair I often shipped them as deeply codependent, but like, I would never want these things to happen to real people? If they were real people I would be horrified. 

But to me that’s like… no different than enjoying a film or a book or a fic or tv show that has copious amounts of violence and murder.  Obviously irl I don’t support those things?  But in fiction it can be interesting and even fun to explore.  BECAUSE IT’S FICTION, because it’s not real and I am not limited to only enjoying media that I believe would be right and moral and acceptable in real life.  I love watching horror movies.  Scream is one of my favorites - but that doesn’t mean I approve of murder?

So like, if we notice actual young people coming in and supporting these kinds of things (ships or literally anything else that is fun in fiction but horrible outside of it) in real life, yeah maybe we should stop and say “hey you know that irl these things are NOT GOOD, right?” but that’s not an issue fandom has ever struggled with, because by the time they’re old enough to be in fandom spaces, teens know the difference between fiction and reality, and usually know the difference between right and wrong and what isn’t acceptable or right irl even if it’s done in their favorite movie.

So saying “We should talk about the issues with these ships” is essentially a straw man, because there is no large scale problem with these things being seen as unproblematic if they happened in real life, and that’s just feeding in to all the really gross purity culture bullshit that you find all over tumblr, that’s directly descended, ideologically, from the shit that caused strikethrough.  That’s like saying to Hannibal fandom that “we should talk about the issues with murder and cannibalism” as if the Hannibal fandom doesn’t know that these are things that aren’t to be celebrated or done in real life.  As if there’s people in the fandom who go “but we like Hannibal and he murders and cannibalizes, so it must be okay!”

For tonight’s Saturday viewing, you can see me as a scenery-chewing villain in “HAN SOLO: A Smuggler’s Trade” on the YouTube … while that “other” Star Wars film is still in cinemas!

Many have asked over the years if I’ve ever been in anything Star Wars, and this is my answer!

A slick fan film starring the talented Jamie Costa as Han Solo. Also with Cory Daniel as Chewy and me as the wicked Gyorsho.