ST753M

On November 24th, 2018, I posted a list of major deletions of sites or of content on sites that stripped fandom of its history. A bunch of pro-shipper blogs had just been deleted, and people were nervous. I suppose I was thinking “All this has happened before…”

On December 3rd, 2018, Tumblr’s Department of Irony announced the NSFW ban. Thanks for providing this salutary lesson to The Youth and a billion reblogs to me, I guess.

Today, we have AO3 for writing. Audio, images, and video are in as much danger as ever, yet fans attack AO3 every donation drive. For those of you who forget our past…

HERE IS WHAT HISTORY HAS TAUGHT US!

1992 - Chelsea Quinn Yarbro forces a zine to be destroyed

1995 - Viacom/Paramount goes after fansites

1995 - Anne Rice gets IWTV fic deleted everywhere

1997 - Fox and Lucasfilm go after fansites

1998 - AOL goes after X-Files fansites

2000 - Warner Brothers goes after Harry Potter fansites

2000 - Anne Rice anne rices again

2001 - Tripod Massacre

2001 - Anne Rice goes after IWTV fic on FFN

2001 - The Bronze shut down as Buffy changes networks

2002 - FFN bans porn

2002 - FFN bans RPF

2003 - Gryffindor Tower implodes

2004 - FFN bans script format

2005 - FFN bans CYOA, Readerfic, 2nd person, Songfic

2005 - Sheezyart bans adult content; y!gallery founded

2005 - Viacom/Paramount goes after fansites again

2006 - Sakura Lemon Archive suddenly closes

2007 - Strikethrough, Boldthrough on Livejournal

2007 - Youtube institutes Content ID, deleting many fanvids

2008 - Slash Cotillion closes, taking much historical m/m with it

2009 - GeoCities shuts down, taking old fannish websites

2009 - Greatestjournal shuts down; RPGs deleted

2009 - Marvel gets scans_daily deleted

2009 - imeem, major vidding hub, closes suddenly

2010 - FFN forums purged for inactivity

2010 - DeviantArt purges adult fanfic

2010 - Literate Union goes after Twilight fandom on FFN

2011 - Delicious destroyed by Yahoo’s incompetence

2011 - China arrests women for writing m/m; destroys danmei.org

2012 - major FFN crackdown on porn

2012 - Megaupload deleted for piracy; also destroys vids, podfic

2013 - Max-Dan-Wiz.com purged of fan-generated content

2014 - Quizilla shuts down

2014 - China purges m/m story websites; arrests female authors

2014 - Blip.tv deletes vids

2014 - Viddler deletes vids

2015 - Journalfen’s servers become fully robust, deleting Fandom Wank

2016 - y!Gallery deleted

2016 - Elfwood goes offline

2016 - Audiofic Archive corrupted; major blow to podfic

2017 - Chinese author jailed after being ratted out over fandom drama

2017 - Parents get queer Warrior Cats fic purged from Wattpad

2018 - Tumblr deletes pro-shipper blogs

2018 - Tumblr announces NSFW ban

2018 - Wattpad deletes accounts/fics without warning

2019 - China purges weibo of m/m; more women jailed

This is only a small taste of the many times that:

Fannish moderators got bored, ran out of money, or had a falling out, deleting a site/list/forum along the way.

Sites got bought out and closed for being unprofitable.

Fandom got hit as governments targeted piracy or political dissidents.

Fans grudge reported each other.

Official forums got deleted when the canon finished.

It’s not always malicious. It’s not always about us. But we lose every time.

Some of these purges hit everyone. Many of them hit m/m content specifically or female gaze-y material in general. This is why antis are dead wrong. This is why anti-fujoshi policies end up being anti-m/m policies. This is why we need clear labeling, not content restrictions.

This is why we need AO3.

#op has an extensive list (2nd person pov there!!!! i was there for that rip)#but it cuts off at 2020 when the xz fans imploded + mass reported fics to the (chinese) government for lgbtq content -> govt ban on ao3#truly a disgraceful moment lol

The original post is from October 15, 2019. I have no doubt that we could fill in every year since then with more of this same bullshit. It never lets up.

On the war of attrition side, some Spanish language sites have disappeared for tired moderator reasons. That one SGA archive never did come back either, did it? On the snitches side, fans continue to grudge report each other, whether that’s low stakes like tumblr or the Chinese government continuing to go after original danmei.

binghe: what if.... i wasnt as good a person as you think? would you still spend time with me, yuan ge? sorry just forget i said that...

as long as you smile and nod, people are satisfied. it’s just to show that you are nice and there with good intentions. we’re small in a big world and have to rely on other people to be decent to us. so we do our little human dance to each other to say, “i’m not here to hurt you. here’s something we have in common, like the weather or sports or itchy sweaters, so we both know we’re on the same team. we both agree on a basic fact, like that it is rainy or that being itchy is uncomfortable, and this proves we can get along. i’m being light-hearted and non-threatening right now.”

small talk isn’t to get to know a person. it’s just a greeting to affirm you’re buddies in the universe.

Wisptober Day 26 - Ophelia

yes, it is. and it is strictly forbidden. don’t do it. your work can be reported and taken down for it. anything that involves money — be it a link or a direct or indirect mention — is against ao3’s terms of service.

ao3 — as a non-profit organization that’s known for hosting millions of works about others’ copyrighted characters — legally cannot allow any of those. no donation links. no mention of patreon, kofi, or any other monetary platforms. no “please help my family”. no “please donate to”. no “you can support me here”. no “I’m open for commission”.

they’re not being unkind by not allowing donation links, commissions — any monetization — on their platform. they literally just legally cannot allow it, because they risk getting sued for it otherwise.

the reason ao3 can exist is because nothing posted on their site is being profitable. donation counts as profitable because it still earns money, doesn’t matter who the money is for or why the money is needed. money is money. (the lawsuits ao3 will face, if they let people monetize fanfics of copyrighted material, will be ugly.) so they have to make sure it stays that way: nothing posted on their site is being profitable.

no donation. no commission. no money involved on their platform in any way, shape or form.

*you can, however, link your tumblr or twitter (or any platform that is not a monetary platform) on your ao3. and on your tumblr you can post the donation link as many times as you want. but you can’t say or imply anything about “find how you can donate on my tumblr” on ao3.

you can say “here’s my tumblr”.

All of which is to say: A big part of what makes Jiang Cheng the way he is, post-timeskip - part of the reason you don’t want to cross Sandu Shengshou - is that he’s spent 16 years standing on the track that leads to the Jiang Sect disciples, being the immovable object holding back the trolley that Wei Wuxian diverted their way. And that changes him from his pre-timeskip personality, as OP points out.

The first successful human-to-human blood transfusion was in 1818, saving the life of a woman suffering from postpartum hemorrhage. The obstetrician who did it, James Blundell, used his own blood, which is a real commitment to care. But transfusion sometimes caused a bad reaction, and they didn't know why, and this is the first clue that blood types existed.

There are a few things that different blood types do, but for the most part, it's very hard to tell what blood type a person has without a direct test of the blood. The most important reason to know your blood type is for transfusion or transplantation, so it understandably doesn't come up.

Interestingly, when blood from two different blood types react, they clump up (agglutination), and this is visible to the naked eye. This is, in fact, how we test blood types now, though we use antibodies directly rather than a blood sample. Which means that in theory ancient people could have observed this! All the ancient Greeks would have needed to see was the blood of two different people reacting, and then see the blood of two different people not reacting. And of course they would have had all kinds of wrong theories about why this was the case, but they could have made a direct observation about incompatible blood!

And there's something so fantasy-coded about it too, different groups of people who look alike, but when you mix their blood it curdles? This is literally just the best way to test whether someone has the same blood as you or not, you both have to take a wound and then stir the drops of blood together?

In modern vampire fiction, vampires often know about blood types and have a preference for one or the other, it's a stock bit of worldbuilding. But I like to imagine a vampire living through the period when blood types were discovered who suddenly has a lot of things slot into place.

I remember a while back having the thought, "I wonder if anybody's ever made up some kind of phrenology type psuedoscience based on blood types? Blood types seem like the kind of thing humans would make up that kind of psuedoscience about. I guess maybe they were just discovered too recently, the gap between their discovery and the establishment of the liberal norm of suspicion toward phrenology-type bio-essentialist theories was just too small?"