homestuck anon for pros

Lemme just preface this with saying that I am a writer. I have been writing for most of my life. I have taken actual classes about writing and about what fiction can offer you, me, and people as a whole. I have won an award for something that I wrote. I know and love fiction, be it in written form, graphic novels, or film. It is all so good and complex and it’s something I am passionate about. That said, let’s get into this.

A good majority of the discourse that goes on in most of the fandoms I’m in stem from the idea that violence and forbidden sexual acts in fiction will encourage those actions in reality. It is important to know, firstly, that the only time this happens is when a person is immature enough or not mentally healthy enough to distinguish reality from fiction. Growing up, my parents would often stop horror movies (back when I first started watching them) to ask me questions. To be fair, they were pretty shitty people, but in this one aspect, they were so good about making sure I knew this difference. “You know this is just a movie, right? None of the stuff on the tv is real.” They’d assure before continuing the film.

It’s not real.

Now, half of the stuff I read or watched back then was nowhere near pushing boundaries or making me think critically about society or whatever. However, I knew that what I watched wasn’t real. It was images on a screen. If I don’t like what I’m seeing, I can walk away. It doesn’t have to affect me, personally,  unless I let it.

Now, lets circle back. School. College. I took a writing class that used this book:

Granted, it was a screenwriting class and most of the chapters were about various script formats, but the beginning chapters focused on why we write and why we make the stories we do.

It had a section in it describing how human needs and desires are met through fiction. It detailed those needs in a list. This list:

Please draw your attention to the ones on the list that say that fictions helps people to:

Be purged of unpleasant emotions

To have vicarious but controlled emotional experiences

To confront, in a controlled situation, the horrible and terrible

To explore taboo subjects without guilt

Just because you personal don’t need various forms of ‘taboo’ media, doesn’t mean that others don’t. Media, in all of its forms, is a way for people to explore things safely. It’s an outlet that doesn’t harm anyone and it offers the creator and viewer/reader a safe way of exploring the complexities of situations (or in some cases relationships) that these people do not want to be involved in irl. Because we can distinguish reality from fiction. Because none of us are going out killing people or getting into abusive relationships or fucking our sibling.

While being critical of the media we consume is important and it is vital to dissect the whys of the media being created, there is a line between creating open discussion about these taboos, about the society and personal experiences that makes one need these outlets, and verbally abusing and harassing strangers.

If you want to create a dialogue about media or a ship you don’t agree with, fine. Talk about it. Dissect it. Really dig deep into the human condition and the psychology behind these outlets, but don’t shame people for them to the point of telling them to kill themselves or telling them they are human garbage or what the fuck ever.

so many of ao3′s userbase is so adamant that ao3 is nonprofit 

Yeah because it is. Look up the Organization for Transformative Works in the IRS database of tax exempt organizations, or GuideStar’s non-profit report listing. EIN 38-3765024, BRIDGE Number 5584273916.

Let’s check out their Form 990 and see how much they paid their staffers:

And it’s a whooping $0.00.

They invest in stocks

Oh heaven forbid. It’s pretty standard for any moderately-sized nonprofit to make conservative investments, so that their reserves do more than simply accrue interest in a bank account. Nobody is taking a vacation to Comoros on that money.

“Once nonprofits get larger, however, some are able to start thinking for the future. Taking money and putting it toward longer-term goals like capital spending or a permanent endowment requires prudent investment. In order to take initial seed money and grow it into a substantial nest egg for use toward those longer-term charitable purposes, nonprofits are allowed to invest in stocks, bonds, funds, and other typical investments.”

https://www.fool.com/knowledge-center/can-a-nonprofit-organization-invest-in-stock.aspx

it’s owned by a corporation

Yes, AO3 is part of the Organization for Transformative Works, which is indeed incorporated. Again, pretty standard for a charity. Let’s review the OTW’s Certificate of Incorporation:

it’s been in beta for literal fucking years

Finally… who cares? Gmail was in beta for five years, and that was with all the resources of Google behind it and 100 million people already using it.

“the label is just a way for Google to signal users that they’re still tweaking the e-mail service and adding new features”

Same thing for AO3. The reason AO3 is in beta is because it doesn’t have a finalized codebase and it’s too unstable to make an API out of. They could put out a post tomorrow saying ‘we’re out of beta’ and nobody would bat an eye. The website isn’t perfect, but it’s more than functional. And yes, there are a lot of features that can’t be added without overtaxing the existing hardware resources, so why not try a GreasyFork userscript?

Their filtering system, meanwhile, is literally, LITERALLY the envy of academic archives/databases worldwide, because it is the best there is for what it does. And if you regularly search fics for a certain fandom and you don’t want to see certain tags, you can literally filter those tags out and then BOOKMARK THE SEARCH RESULTS, which can THEN be further tweaked to any given day’s particular search parameters.

I’ve seen this before. I’ve seen this all before. 

Let’s go back to my time in an elite boarding school in Britain. I went there as an exchange student, after my senior year of high school. I was in the Upper Sixth form, and the girls in lower forms wore uniforms, but L6 and U6 didn’t have uniforms. We were expected, instead, to adhere to a dress code.

It said “professional attire”, and said “nothing too casual”, and was very clearly open to interpretation. When in doubt, they said, go to one’s house warden, and present yourself, and she would decide whether your outfit was suitable.

That’s all well and good if you’re wealthy, but I was not particularly wealthy, and had come with a very small baggage allowance. I bought myself a pair of trousers, which were quite expensive and that I thought looked quite smart, only to find that the house warden considered them unsuitable. I could not return them, and was stuck with a pair of trousers I could not wear, and no funds or opportunity to replace them.

I loaned them to a friend, who was thinner than I was. (I was and am quite fat.) On her, they were looser. On her, they passed muster; she could wear them to classes. She even asked specifically, and the house warden approved them.

The problem was not the trousers. The problem was my body. But the problem was mine, either way. I saw similar issues with the very few non-white girls at the school; they were held to much higher standards of dress than the white girls. The fat girls, the brown girls, the gender non-conforming girls, all of us together had to spend extra time and money on our appearances not to get caught up in the subjective enforcement of the dress code that got us harassed by the various authority figures. I spent most of that year in an ugly blazer and a midcalf skirt I hated but that teachers didn’t look at. (And, oh yes, when I started having an affair with another female student, the scrutiny intensified, and I was almost expelled. Fat, foreign, and queer wasn’t a good combo for getting left alone.)

Before you think, this old granny is ranting, understand that I am talking about censorship. This is how censorship works. It suppresses deviance. And it may seem straightforward what deviance is, but anytime it’s subjective, it is not straightforward. And the very idea that all content has to pass through some filter before it is presented, that’s censorship. That everything must be subject to controlling decisions? that’s censorship.

“I know it when I see it,” the censor says. And then where does he look? He looks at the outspoken. He looks at the nonconforming. He looks at the “troublemakers”. He looks at the outliers. He looks at the ones that don’t look like him, and don’t talk like him, and don’t think like him.

The ones who are like him, he lets slide. “They don’t mean it like that,” he says. “They mean well.”

No graphic depictions, it says. Nothing hard. Nothing too dirty. What does that mean? What does it ever mean?

It means, nothing I don’t like. It means it’s not up to you. It means Only things I think acceptable. It means accept control. It means conform and be nice to us, and we’ll let you do what you want, provided you stay Acceptable.

It means I don’t participate in any exchanges or events with subjective content limits. It means if it’s not for everybody it’s not for me.

thereawas a lot of reqs with lalondecest

Hi anon :D

Trickster Kankri <3 Karkat request

Draw the first Trickster mode.

These days, it often feels like you draw karkat. o_o