The Fiction Treehouse

things fall apart and there’s anarchy everywhere; falcons fly freely and can’t be compelled.

Dimming the tide there is blood in the water and everywhere customs of innocence drowned.

Held by the worst is a fervent intensity; lacking conviction the best run aground.

Surely there must be some kind of apocalypse; surely epiphany must be at hand!

Visions unbidden from Spiritus Mundi of something awakening out on the sand:

Head of a man with a leonine frame and a pitiless gaze that’s as blank as the sun;

sleep became nightmare by passage of centuries long before eons of slumber were done.

Higgledy piggledy, beast of antiquity, imminent, just as the prophecies warn,

To 2025:

Hell, they even cover the devastating heaviness of MASS SHOOTINGS without censoring or watering anything down.

They've been doing this for YEARS, and it's ALWAYS handled with dignity, respect, seriousness, understanding, and love.

Or how about when someone is put into the foster care system because their home isn't safe anymore and their needs aren't being met?

Maybe some discussions about group therapy/getting help and support?

Hey look! Here's a segment about gender expression vs taught expectation, including unlearning harmful biases and what to do when you hurt someone on accident because you didn't know it was wrong!

Look! The topic of race and diversity! The importance of unity and equity!

They even also have a more allegorical take on discrimination and being looked down on for who you are, featuring Big Bird. The conflict is about how he's not being let into a club because the one bird running the club personally decided he didn't want someone like Big Bird there.

Big Bird goes out of his way to keep changing parts of himself in order to "prove" he can fit into this club if he just changed enough. The truth comes out though, and there's nothing he can do to gain the approval of that bird. He will never be good enough in his eyes, and Big Bird starts to hate himself. His real friends see this finally put their feet down, emphasizing that you should never change yourself just to fit into one singular narrow idea someone else has.

There's A LOT of different situations this can be an allegory for. Racism, sexism, homophobia, basically ANY form of exclusion is put on full blast in this 15 minute clip. Sesame Street can be both blunt and allegorical when approaching difficult topics, and it NEVER misses or looses the point.

It does an exceptional job in both styles of representation WITHOUT watering anything down. The more sanitized everything gets, the more radical Sesame Street is suddenly considered, hence why so many "particular groups" want it gone. Hmmm! I can only imagine why that could be, in this current political climate! (I'm being sarcastic)

When Sesame Street is suddenly labeled as "questionable" or "politically/agenda motivated" content...it says A LOT about where we currently are and who gets to decide what's "best" for kids or not. Don't fall for the censorship and topic-dodging excuses that are covered by the "But think of the children!!!" movement. Never fall for it, because you know which side you're on if you do.

Sesame Street proves kids can be taught and trusted with learning about these topics when it's handled with the right amount of understanding and care. It shows what all this "controversy" is all really about. What it's always been about, actually.

Fanworks are not illegal. Most all fanart and fanfic are “transformative works,” which fall under the protection of Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law, the statute of fair use. Fair Use allows you to use sections and elements of copyrighted material to critique, expound on, or create using that material as long as you’re creating something new. You can read about fair use here: https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/what-is-fair-use/. And learn about how to decide if something is fair use using this simple guide of the four factors of fair use: https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/.

Why is AO3 built by the Organization for TRANSFORMATIVE WORKS???? Because it stands by fair use and creators of new, unique fanworks.

Common law countries like the US make this more difficult through the vagaries of a system based on precedent and pontification by judges; civil law countries make this more difficult through judges being biased and on power-trips and refusing to read statutory law in the abstract way it is meant to be read, that is: applied to real life at this moment in time, not in their heads, or a distant past.

(Ya, judges. Can’t live with them; can’t live without ‘em.)

Also to be clear: we had warnings on our fic WELL before that (edited to add: I mean the “not mine, no profit made” type warnings). We did that as common courtesy in the fanfic world at the time. And long as I’m going down memory lane and spilling tea along the way, I’m gonna point out that many of us who got those C&Ds also worked hand in hand with Anne, her publisher, and her family business to promote her books and business dealings purely for the love of the fandom. I, personally, left a part-time job at a web company when they asked me to do what amounted to allowing them to profit off of Vampire Chronicles fanfic. When I told them that legally and ethically I could do no such thing they said I could do it or they’d find someone else. I said see ya. (AFAIK they never found someone else).

So the amount of respect those of us in fandom had for Anne’s work and right to profit off of her material was large. What changed in our case was when 1) Anne got some of the rights back to her characters which meant she could profit off of them in ways she couldn’t before and 2) she realized us fans and our fanworks made for GREAT free market research into what her personal company could try to profit off of. The most perfect example of this, and how Anne’s greed ruined so much, was the Talismanic Tour company which was created by fans, worked with Anne and her official biographer to come up with walking tours of New Orleans based on things from Anne’s life and books, fully had Anne’s blessing, then, once it proved successful, Anne gave THEM a C&D and created her own tours at ridiculously jacked up prices.

Karma being what it is, nobody wanted to pay for that bullshit and Anne’s tours ultimately failed. But since she used her lawyers to scare the fan business out of running this then became another example of why Anne is the reason the fandom can’t have nice things.

(Can you tell I have so much tea from the VampChron days? Oh Anne. Bless your fandom-destroying black heart.)

Making this more fandom general, the points to take away here are a few:

Sometimes it’s not about law, or what the law “should” be. If a well known author, or TPTB from a TV show or a movie studio sent you, personally, a C&D letter for your fanworks, would YOU have the ability to thumb your nose at it? Do you have the resources for that lawyer battle and possible court case? Or are you like us Anne Rice fans were, living meager paycheck to paycheck, and not having it in you to even put up the fight with your ISP, let alone a millionaire’s legal team?

The blessing of the original creators means nothing. They love us until they don’t. Relying on their goodwill to keep fanworks safe is like relying on the skills of the person driving you around to keep you out of an accident: sure it’s possible, but you wanna put that seatbelt on and hope the car has airbags just in case.

If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine

Not everyone would want to live like that, of course, but I'll bet you that a lot of people would. It's a great living situation for single people, young people just starting out, and people who are in a city on a temporary basis. Cooking at scale is significantly more time- and cost-efficient than each individual cooking or getting takeout. Cleaning kitchen facilities scales similarly well. Employ a few people who know what they're doing and are paid well to do it, and they'll keep that kitchen running safely, efficiently, and cleanly in a way that a few hundred pressed-for-time 20-somethings never could. And a lot of people simply do not care enough about what they eat to want anything else.

Moreover, not putting a full kitchen in each unit means that the units can be smaller without cutting into living space, cheaper to build, and safer. Lots of people who live alone don't cook a lot, since cooking for one is not very time-efficient, which means that for all those people the kitchen is practically just dead space. You could replace its function with a microwave and a minifridge, and if you do, you've given that person a whole extra room.