sometimes I’m reminded that there are still people who don’t know ao3 was literally created by incest shippers — and the site’s sole purpose is to 1. be completely against censorship and 2. host all kinds of dark, taboo fics that are banned on other platforms — and the first ever fic that was posted on ao3 was a fic about an incest ship from supernatural.

you are in the house that was created by freaks. for freaks (affectionate). every disgusting thing you can think of is rightfully allowed and welcomed on ao3, because they are exactly the reasons why ao3 was created in the first place.

ao3 was created because its creators got tired of censorship, they got tired of dark and taboo fics getting banned on pro-censorship platforms, and they wanted a place that was safe for ALL FICS THAT WERE DARK AND TABOO.

ao3’s main principle is being against censorship and being proship / profic.

there are some things in fiction that make me uncomfortable, but instead of shaming people who are just minding their own business and not harming anyone in real life, I choose to curate my own internet experience by blocking/muting what I don’t want to see. ao3 has excellent tagging system, so instead of being a bitch, use their tagging system properly and you won’t see the things you don’t want to see.

it’s your job to curate what you see. it’s not other people’s jobs or responsibilities to censor themselves for your personal comfort. the world does not revolve around you.

also you cannot censor “only the things you personally hate” without expecting everything else, that isn’t of conservative beliefs, to be censored too. because censorship is a slippery slope and a fascist tool. I promise you there are people who think “why do tags for queer love even exist on ao3? they’re grooming children”.

if you allow the things that you hate to be censored — because someone with enough power gets to control what other people can and cannot create/consume, it will not stop at the things that you hate.

My father finds gay men uncomfortable.

He's told me before that it's like a knee-jerk for him. Something he doesn't consciously control. He sees two men behaving romantically, and his body reacts with mild discomfort.

In the 1960s, when he was in high school, most of the boys in his form thought he was gay on the simple fact that he wasn't homophobic. He wouldn't participate in insulting queer people, he didn't care if someone was gay, he wouldn't have a problem hanging out with gay people. So people thought he was gay. That's how prevalent homophobia was in his formative years.

When I was 10, my dad told me very seriously that Holmes and Watson were gay. That it was obvious from the literature and the time period that they were meant to be a gay couple. When I was 14 and I came out to my parents as bi, when my mum was upset my dad ripped into her for it. Told her that she was being stupid, that it was my life to live how I wanted to and that she needed to get over herself.

My dad formed my views on censorship: that being that it was completely ridiculous and thoroughly evil. He didn't believe in censorship of any kind. If I asked him a question about sex, he answered it honestly. When I was 12 and I asked him about homosexuality, still young and uncertain, he told me that there was nothing wrong with it. That it was just how some people were. That there was likely an evolutionary reason for it. And that for some people it was uncomfortable on an instinctual level.

He taught me that just because you're uncomfortable with something, doesn't make it wrong. He also taught me that most people don't understand this.

I see a lot of this on the internet as of the last few years. The anti shipping movement, the terf movement, the anti ace movement. It all stems from discomfort that people have crossed wires into believing means wrong. Really every -ism and -phobia out there stems from this same fundamental aspect of humanity.

However... as a fandom creator (writer and artist), I sometimes feel like too much pressure is concentrated on creators. I don't know if this is a frustration others share? Not only should we keep making things, but somehow we also end up becoming these central fandom figures who can feel pressured into responding to comments (or else we're called arrogant or ungrateful), making friends (or else we're rude for ignoring well-meaning people who reach out), and being the drivers and pillars of that community (running events, responding to memes, etc. – and everything falls silent if we stop). It's a lot of work!! I don't always have the time and energy to make things for fun and then also engage in all the ways people might sometimes feel entitled to because they enjoy my works.

I really wish that more "non-creating" fans in the community would discover their fandom power!! and not just rely on the visible "producing" creators to be the only people worth engaging with. It takes nothing more than passion to write a meta-post about a character or a plot point, or to create an ask game, or to DM someone else who you see posting funny tags – not just the creator! Maybe your followers have other tips for evening out the balance a little more?

Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this, anon. This is an observation I've seen in many parts of life, not just fandom.

A lot of people feel as though they need permission or an invitation of some sort in order to contribute. That's why I always end my answers by asking people to share their thoughts. I want to make it explicitly clear that I want people to add things into the reblogs (which I can then share out for more people to see) and the replies (which people can at least read even if I can't reblog).

I have heard fans who are readers but don't write fic say that they think they can't get an AO3 account unless they plan to post something. This is incorrect, of course, but a lot of people make that assumption.

I think at least some people (I don't know what kind of percentage) assume that someone who is writing fic or posting art or making podfics and video edits etc. has some sort of expertise that "allows" them to post.

People with less confidence or with less practice etc. sometimes need an extra nudge before they realize that they're welcome to contribute too. If that's the case for you, please allow me to say:

You are welcome to post in your fandom, even if no one invites you to. Even if you think you're not good enough. Even if your idea isn't "popular."

Start a conversation. Share a thought. Talk to folks who reblog cool shit. Be a folk who reblogs cool shit. You don't have to do everything in order to do something.

make a rec list

make a "here's all the fics I've found in this fandom with this one trope/general vibe/very particular setup I just think is Neat" list

make a "welcome to the fandom, here's the fics that people will just assume you've read/know about to get you started" list

Create whumps lists

Create lists of shippy moments

Make screenshot collections

Record and post clips of your show to get more people into your fandom

Make incorrect quote memes

Make silly little TikTok-style edits of your favs

Make character playlists

Figure out the layout of buildings/cities

Recreate those building in the Sims or with an online floor planner or even just draw it out because holy hell writers will be so thankful for that

Make your blorbo in various video game character creations

Build a pokemon team for your blorbo

Make up silly headcanons! What does everyone do at the fair or the beach or during a fire drill?

Outline a fic idea you have — maybe you don’t have the time or energy or you just don’t feel confident enough to create it, but share it anyway!

Create outfits based on your blorbo’s design or outfits they would wear

Because I am increasingly bored with the conversation around racism in fandom coming back to which characters get fic and which characters get shipped. I think that conversation becomes a symbol of racism in fandom because there are clear number to point to -- but simultaneously I think it also takes away from conversations around racism in fandom, because everyone zeroes in on the numbers and then it becomes a question of interpreting statistics and an argument about the quality of canons and a million tedious, heard six hundred thousand times before arguments about why someone may or may not choose to consume fic or art about a character or ship. Its uninteresting, it brings nothing new to the conversation and frankly I don't think it engages with the most upsetting parts of fandom.

But then what are these upsetting parts of fandom? This is really more qualitative and again, this is upsetting to a certain sort of (white) person who wants a simple quantitative fix which is why non-white fans, I think, get pulled into the trap of fixating on numbers as a discursive practice - to make people pay attention. I am not interested in having this conversation with white fans who are interested in absolving themselves of guilt or minimizing their own culpability or who are interested in ensuring that they are good people. I'm interested in the question of what is upsetting as a fan of colour? And well, the answer unfortunately embroils a lot of very well-meaning people who don't think of themselves as overtly racist but who have nevertheless absorbed racist and imperialist attitudes from immersion in cultures that privilege a certain worldview, which privilege a certain method of seeing, understanding and knowing the world and which obscure other possibilities of knowing and seeing the world. (Please note: I am trying to avoid cliched discourse phrases, because I am trying to make people think about what it is I am saying here, instead of fixating on words). Some of the most common ones I’ve seen:

The reproduction of imperial/colonial attitudes:

Fannish arguments about what constitutes imperialism/colonialism/genocide in the context of a particular piece of usually speculative media - the person in question is defining imperialism/colonialism/genocide with such a narrow lens that about 70% of imperial/colonial/genocidal violence in your country would be disqualified.

In an otherwise well-reasoned meta, you see someone using a historical source to make an argument about a reading that potentially opens up possibilities for a more diverse reading of an otherwise white text. However, this source is a deeply colonialist document and is presented decontextualized from that colonial history (with all the epistemic violence and outright textual racism that colonial knowledge about non-white people went with)

Explicit use of the language/imperialist attitudes linked to the noble savage or exotic other to "elevate" or "represent" a non-white character or non-white culture / non-white representational culture. (I see this one so often being reproduced by people who genuinely think they're doing something good here, because they're making an active effort to write/make art of non-white characters/cultures)

Using language with an uncanny similarity to colonial/imperialist denialism to defend their faves

Using settings with an imperialist backdrop/conflict that is largely about shipping a couple of characters (e.g., Any and all fic where characters serve in the Iraq or Afghanistan war as part of the us army) or is largely about a white character's guilt (e.g., 90% of Vietnam war literature and any time it makes an appearance in fandom with all those tropes)

The tedium of well-meaning representation:

On a similar spectrum as the exotic other spectrum, but the reproduction of cultural stereotypes - usually of a dominant culture within a non-white country (e.g., The preponderance of a very Brahminic, Hindu and frankly Jhumpa Lahiri-esque interpretation of harry potter being Indian). Or sometimes just the endless parade of stereotypes / symbols without any sort of complex emotions or relationships with them, only celebration.

Someone is writing about a character of colour! The character of colour spends the entire fic repressing their complex emotions about a white character who has hurt/violenced them in some way and instead dedicates themselves to comforting said character

Someone is writing a character of colour! The character of colour does no wrong and is a beautifully one-dimensional, boring piece of beige

Someone is writing a character of colour! The character of colour exists entirely to be an emotional sponge for the white character

Someone is writing a character of colour...who has no interiority

The reproduction of "I’m not a racist but" attitudes in heated fandom debates

"Racism in Europe is different, stop importing American ideals" there are Europeans who use the first part of this sentence in good faith to open up discussion/conversation, but usually this is meant to foreclose conversation and also, as a non-white person who lived in Europe: lol. Rofl. Lmao, even.

"It’s different here, because talking about racism here is racist and only racists do that" - I, once more, highly doubt this and maybe this betrays a little too much of the whiteness of the circles you move in

"I’m afraid of writing characters of colour because I will get yelled at" - great! Don't write them! Do you want a cookie, do you want us to call Bella Hadid. (Conversely: this one is funny, because I’m on the edge about whether or not I will run into out and out white supremacists (and I mean this in the sense of actual n*zis) in fandom while the most terrifying thing a certain sort of white fan can imagine is being dubbed racist)

Evoking anti-colonial/anti-racist non-white theorists in defense of white characters and their fictional actions - sometimes, it is good, in fact, to have a sense of proportion and understand that you need to be careful about what sources and texts you decide to pull into a fannish argument that is ultimately and frankly not very important in the grand scheme of things

The last category is like, pretty in your face, but the first two are unfortunately common enough that it is impossible to get into a fandom where there may be a character of colour or there may be a hint of imperialism to the text, without expecting to be made to wince hard frequently. The last is easy to spot a mile away and block, but the first really gets my goat, because to explain how these things can be upsetting to see, you have to delve into the history of imperialism and of seeing yourself reflected through the eyes of orientalists and colonists talking, for example, about the indolent hindoo or the wise and sagely hindoo or about the inscrutable oriental smile or the noble bravery of the Pashtun/Afghan/Arab/Bedouin and so on and so forth. It is basically impossible to articulate and describe, unless your interlocutor has read substantial bodies of 19th century texts - themselves bequeathed to you via the medium of a colonial educational system that insists on teaching them as "English literature". It is always from well-meaning people who would be, perhaps (and I prefer to hope) upset if they understood what they had evoked (ergo: immersion in cultures which obscure certain ways of knowing the world and knowing about how knowledge of the world is produced).

Talking about or defending anything involving gay/queer characters as progressive and thus immune from critique, even when it involves racist / fascist / imperialist characters or attitudes--essentially, the pinkwashing of racism/imperialism

Relatedly, presenting the "pure" or "more enlightened" or "noble" race or culture or people as supportive of queer people, in comparison to the "lower" or "less informed" or "less enlightened" people who are shown as being homophobic / oppressive towards queer people

Defending / supporting / reproducing fascist or imperialist attitudes in sci fi or fantasy settings (e.g., "this repressive regime is good because otherwise there would be chaos" / "we must come in and save these aliens because we know better than them")

Telling racism allegories through non-human characters (especially when the "white" people are all human and everyone else is non-human)

Writing reverse-racism plotlines

For a really long time (at least as long as I've been aware of fandom norms) there has been a point of view that I see expressed over and over that basically says that fandom is a space to be free to write what you want without fear, that it's the anti-capitalist, progressive, utopic, safe space to write anything you want without fear of reproach or criticism--especially for women, who have historically been shut out of a lot of publishing opportunities.

But as OP laid out the outcomes this mindset much more articulately than me, and as many people have been talking about for years, that safety and that viewpoint that anything goes in fandom only really applies to white people, and it only really protects white people, because fans of color are often left facing and dealing with white people's ongoing unexamined racist and imperialist attitudes in our writing and the way we shape our fan communities and the way we interact with each other.

And time and again, the message to fans of color just seems to be, figure out how to avoid it! Figure out how to keep yourself safe from white people's racism! Use AO3's exclude function! Use it better! Don't Like, Don't Read! Guard yourself! Protect yourself! Find your own space! Leave us to our own spaces, if you can't handle arbitrary unchecked racism even from people who claim to be allies!

For years and years, fan spaces seem to have prioritized the ability for authors to never have to think critically about their own biases and attitudes over the safety of all of the fans of color who are in these spaces or who would be if the spaces were less racist.

But in addition to the above, I would like to highlight that there is a kind of fannish sex positivity about "other" culture (read: cultures that are not Euramerican inspired) which warps around to a very specific kind of dehumanisation in the description, which I'll try to outline -

1) Those Sexual Lascivious Races - maybe the most obvious version of this, but essentially features wispy, see through clothes and characters who ooze sexuality, where the narrator viewpoint is simultaneously putting them on display re. their sexual availability, but also hostile or denigratory of their apparent sexual availability - there is an implicit madonna/whore dichotomy in this and the character being viewed is failing to match those "madonna" "normative" standards and is therefore, a whore. A lot of this language sometimes comes dangerously close to replicating rhetorical tricks from 19th-early 20th century anthropology encountering non-Euramerican cultures and writing about their sexual practices with the prurient eye of the sexually repressed Euramerican.

2) This Culture Is Enlightened And Can Do No Wrong - this is the other side of this coin, in which the external/other culture is seen through the lens of the narrator and is described as being queer-friendly and many genders friendly and also sexually open, compared to the narrator frame's culture. And this one is so tricky, because on the face of it it is good and nice, but in practice it can become dehumanising in execution and its difficult to delineate the precise moment at which it becomes dehumanising. But to give a perhaps more relatable metaphor, its the difference between writing a female character as a fully rounded individual whose selfhood is acknowledged and valued versus writing a female character whose defining feature is that she's awesome and wise (but we know very little about her interior landscape/desires, except insofar as they relate to the main character's needs and desires).

And I think back to a lot of the fannish wars of nearly a decade ago over whether black characters can top, if latine characters can be sexually expressive and open - and a lot of it boils down to the thing in itself not being wrong, but the question of execution, which is to say: is it dehumanising, does it reproduce historical rhetoric which has been used to enforce racial power relations (that is to say, to humiliate, to exercise control, to cut down to size, to differentiate and delineate the categories of us (good) and them (bad)), does it reproduce historical imagery in a way that accepts the assumptions of such imagery as natural and immediate and without complexity.

The only remedy for this, I find, is not a how-to manual, but rather to have more curiosity about the history and phenomenon of racism, imperialism, colonialism - and therefore to do the research in understanding it beyond the scope of what little makes its way into the popular press. It means, perhaps, engaging with historical sources and writing, with historical anticolonial writing by third world writers, with understanding the forces that have shaped our world. In other words, it is to develop a sense of place, context, of history and power and economics, of sensitivity and humility - through a lens of curiosity, rather than guilt and shame (I personally find guilt and shame the most useless emotions when it comes to this). The question should not be "am I allowed" or "is this okay" but "is this fair to this character, to this culture, to this world" or "where does this fit within the bigger picture of my sociohistorical context".

Noodling around and branching out a bit - also useful, within the context of fandom, is to remove the equation of your self, your faves and your emotions from the picture and to treat these issues with the genuine gravity they deserve. God knows I've had enough of watching people misuse definitions of imperialism (indeed outright definitions of genocide and war crimes) to defend their blorbos or attack other characters, leveraging these very serious issues in fandom wars where really, they do not belong - while at the same time refusing to engage with the places where these very serious issues do surface within the canons that they're relating to. I also very much mean this on the front of levelling accusations of imperialism, colonialism, fascism, racism especially at characters and canons - too often these accusations mis-state the problem and fail to situate these issues within a broader sociohistorical context, which turns a serious issue into a matter of defending one's faves against another's. This is hard, but I wish we would treat this with an iota of the seriousness we employ (in a lot of fannish spaces) where it comes to sexual assault and sexual abuse and queerphobia. This is only possible if we take discussions of racism less personally (there are a couple of very special individuals in the notes of this post who have had very long and big emotions about Their Role In Racism in Fandom and I cannot state how much how unproductive, useless and frankly annoying this is) and treat it with academic seriousness. Yeah, I'm suggesting we manage our emotions personally, instead of making it other people's problem.

So if it feels inescapable and like evidence of it is everywhere, whether at times or always, that might just because you're in a Western country where you're surrounded by Christians who believe that, fundamentally, in their worldview. And also they talk and make art about it all the time and run the vast majority of news outlets. And spent over a thousand years burning any art or texts that disagreed with them. Etc. etc.

If you're gonna come to as drastic and painful a conclusion as that, at least take the time first to make sure you're not working with biased evidence (surrounded by too many people and cultural products that believe original sin is real)

And I didn’t really know what that meant, only that I always said no, but for some reason or another I was very annoyed and a fight sounded pretty good so for the first time ever I said “yes”

And I don’t know what I was expecting to happen, but I remember my mom just going “Okay, then. Let’s fight. What do you want to fight about?”

And I remember it occurring to me all of a sudden that the onus was on me to generate the energy to pick something to be mad about, and wishing she’d just do something worth fighting FOR me, but she just went, “I’m not the one who wants to fight. If you want to fight, you have to pick something to fight about”

Jermaine Fowler 

April 5, 2026 (Sunday)

This weekend, a betting market opened on whether an American soldier bleeding in an Iranian mountain would be found alive.

Yesterday, he was found.

For 48 hours, the United States and Iran raced through the mountains of Isfahan province for the same man — a colonel, wounded, evading on foot after ejecting from a downed F-15E. One crew member was pulled out within hours of the crash. This man vanished. Iran offered $60,000 to anyone who found him first. The IRGC searched. American special forces searched. A CIA deception campaign seeded false information inside Iran to buy time. Equipped with little more than a pistol and a tracking beacon, he scaled terrain to a ridgeline 7,000 feet above sea level and waited more than a day while two governments hunted him from opposite directions.

Polymarket, a prediction market where anonymous traders bet real money on real-world events, opened a market on which day the United States would confirm his rescue. People placed bets. On a man in a mountain.

He was found. Trump posted “WE GOT HIM.” The market closed. Someone collected.

It was not the only market.

Whether Gaza starves. Whether Gaza is cleansed. Whether the Sudan war ends before December 31. Whether a Ukrainian city falls, and by which date. Whether the Strait of Hormuz closes. Whether Kharg Island changes hands. Whether U.S. forces enter Iran by December 31 — 90% odds, $142.4 million behind it. Whether a nuclear weapon detonates before 2027. Whether a ceasefire arrives before the famine does.

Another market, confirmed open: whether another African coup happens by October 31. Not a specific country. Not a named government. Just the continent. Whether it produces another one before the deadline.

Two hundred nineteen war markets. Still open.

On the morning of February 28, before the first bombs fell on Tehran, a trader placed a bet. Polymarket’s own odds said 17% chance of U.S. strikes that day. He bet yes. By the time smoke rose over the skyline, he was collecting. One trader made nearly $1 million from dozens of bets placed hours before unannounced U.S. and Israeli military actions, winning 93% of five-figure wagers on operations nobody was supposed to know about. Six suspected insiders, identified by a blockchain analytics firm, placed a combined $1.2 million bet that the U.S. would strike Iran. In Israel, a military reservist was indicted for using classified material to bet on Polymarket during the war. During his interrogation, an air force officer said this: “The entire squadron is on Polymarket. The entire air force is betting.”

In the United States, nobody has been charged.

“Super cool,” the CEO of Polymarket called it, that the platform creates financial incentives for insiders to share information with the market.

Named strategic advisor to Polymarket and investor through his venture fund, Donald Trump Jr. also advises Kalshi, Polymarket’s primary competitor. His father commands the soldiers whose survival was wagered on this weekend, and his father’s administration sued three states this week that tried to regulate the industry. A spokesperson said Trump Jr. does not trade on prediction markets. He only advises them on marketing strategy.

Polymarket did not call the market on the colonel’s rescue a death bet. Nobody did. The nuclear detonation market ran for days, at its peak 22% odds, hundreds of thousands of dollars in volume, before disappearing without a public statement, as if it had never existed.

The people it was pricing did not disappear.

Long before there were prediction markets, there were lotteries. The 13 original colonies ran them to fund their infrastructure, and a $1.5 million lottery financed the Revolutionary War itself, and Virginia’s wealthy landowners had already, by the 1680s, formalized horse racing bets into a system with written rules and set stakes and careful limits on who could participate. Gambling built this country, and then the country banned it, repeatedly, whenever it became associated with the wrong people — the wrong skin, the wrong neighborhood, the wrong kind of desperation. The mob ran it underground until Nevada legalized it in 1931, and Atlantic City followed in 1978, and tribal gaming opened in 1988, and state lotteries spread through the 1980s sold as education funding. Sports betting, federally restricted in 1992, was unlocked by the Supreme Court in 2018. Within seven years, 38 states had legalized it. By 2024, commercial gaming revenue hit $71.9 billion.

Every expansion arrived with a rationale — economic stimulus, state revenue, personal freedom — and each one made the next easier to accept.

Although governments learned this last, clinical research had confirmed it long before: what makes a reward addictive is unpredictability. A slot machine programmed to pay out on any spin without pattern produces more compulsive play than one that pays reliably, because the next pull might be it, and that might is the drug. Even loss drives continuation. A near-miss, the horse that finishes second, the slot that shows two of three, activates the same response in the disordered brain as a win. Not disappointment. Want. Governments learned what the industry always knew and built lotteries. Then sports betting. Then prediction markets. Each expansion dressed in the language of the last.

Between the scratch ticket and the war market, a two-hundred-year staircase. The industry built it one step at a time.

Someone has opened a market on whether you will starve.

Not whether aid will arrive. Whether the famine will be severe enough, widespread enough, confirmed by a trusted source, to resolve the contract. Your hunger is the variable. Below the threshold, the bet does not pay. Above it, someone collects. This is the Gaza market, open now, denominated in dollars.

In Sudan, after three years of civil war and more than 150,000 dead, famine spreading across Darfur, an open contract asks whether a ceasefire arrives before December 31. Resolution is what the contract requires. Not peace.

Sudan, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo — banned from accessing Polymarket under OFAC sanctions. Someone else is pricing their wars. They cannot see the odds assigned to their survival. They cannot see the market.

There is a market on whether another African coup happens by October 31. Not a specific country. Not a named government. Just the continent, and whether it produces another one before the deadline. Someone looked at Africa and saw a recurring event, something that happens often enough to price, a pattern that pays.

Your survival is irrelevant to the contract. What it requires is confirmation. That enough of you die, or enough of you live, that the question resolves.

Polymarket told users clicking its most disturbing markets that prediction markets could give people directly affected by the attacks answers that TV news could not. A public service, it called this.

Gaza was not clicking. No reliable internet. No reliable food. Someone else was clicking on their behalf, pricing the threshold, waiting for the confirmation.

There is a word for what Polymarket is. The industry prefers exchange. The Trump administration calls it a swap, a financial derivative. Three states called it gambling and got sued for saying so.

The word underneath all the other words is action. The compulsive gambler does not care what he bets on. He needs the action. Once you have trained tens of millions of people to need it — through two centuries of expanding access, normalizing risk, building the staircase one legal step at a time — you do not need to tell them what to bet on. Someone will open the market. Someone will price the famine.

The nuclear detonation market is gone. The soldier came home, and the markets stayed open.

Gaza is still there. The continent is still waiting.