Hiatus

Me, just trying to enjoy my absolute BULLSHIT game of WWE-First-Person-Shooter-With-Zero-Balance:

You can’t be

Transphobic

And like

Metroid

Because

Samus

Is canonically a

Trans woman

And you can

Die mad about it

Sorry

Terfs and tranphobes

Literally the screen cap of the article acknowledges that the term itself is an example of outdated language. That doesn’t negate the fact that there is reasonable evidence to argue she’s a trans girl.

https://www.themarysue.com/metroids-samus-aran-transgender-woman/

“However, “newhalf” wasn’t always used in a pornographic or insulting context, especially in 1994 Japan. The term is older, and stems from popular use of the term ハーフ, or “half,” used to refer to Japanese people of mixed-race origin. This form of self-identification became popularized throughout the early 1980s. By 1982 it had been picked up by the press and was used to refer to transgender performers such as actress and singer/songwriter Rumiko Matsubara.”

At best I would say in the context it’s used like transvestite, which isn’t Great™️ but was some of the terminology available to people before the LGBT community was realized by activists primarily in the US.

This post is based on a presentation I gave at a seminar organized by a European Cooperation in Science and Technology (e-cost) network dedicated to understanding digital reading through the lens of interactivity and reading’s game-like elements. My talk mostly relied on existing literature, but as it seemed to have many prominent gaps, I asked some of my fan-fiction-reading and -researching friends and colleagues (thank you!) some convoluted questions about their reading habits, practices and experiences. Their answers provided informal, anecdotal data that I have used to elaborate and illustrate what I’m throwing up in the air here.

What’s going on with reading?

For decades now, people have been worried about reading. Scholars, teachers, parents, writers, publishers and activists are anxious about the possibly waning reading habits, vocabularies and comprehension levels. When digital technologies and social media are introduced, the discussions tend to turn sour with moral panic. Psychological research has shown that reading fiction gives us models of the social world, which in turn facilitates empathy and increases social support (Mar & Oatley, 2008; Mar, Oatley & Peterson, 2009); reading fiction also helps us instigate self-change; alters how we think (Mar & Mullin, 2011); and modifies our self-understanding through producing new metaphors of personal identification (Miall & Kuiken, 2002).

At the same time, a body of literature known as “new literacy studies”, keeps pointing out that just reading (and writing) printed texts is no longer enough. Pierre Levy (1997: 121) noted nearly two decades ago that the “distinctions between authors and readers, producers and spectators, creators and interpretations will blend to form a reading-writing continuum, which will extend from the machine and network designers to the ultimate recipient, each helping to sustain the activities of the others.” Simply put, traditional forms of literacy alone are considered insufficient for effective participation in the networked societies (Levy & Murnane 2004) instead a literate person now needs to have many multiple, dynamic and malleable competencies and literacies like reading online newspapers or participating in virtual classrooms (Black, 2009).

Additionally, it’s argued that literacies should be understood as socio-cultural practices enabled by digital technologies, virtuality and participatory culture (Olin-Scheller & Wikstrom 2010: 45), where meaning-making is contextual (Black 2005: 120).

This brings us to the topic at hand. Where better to seek understanding of (digital) reading experience of the early 21 century than in internet fanfiction (fanfic).  

What is fanfic anyway?

In her doctoral dissertation on the topic, Juli Parrish (2007:11) defines internet fanfiction as:

writings by amateur fans of a particular media text (television program, book, film, role-playing game, anime, cartoon, etc);

that starts from (but is not limited to) some of the characters or premises of the source text;

which explicitly self-identifies as fan fiction;

and is published on the internet.

Fanfiction texts often extend the plots, timelines and relationships in the source texts (Black, 2007); critique elements or ideologies of canon (Pich, 2013-2014); and weave new tales by remixing ideas from different sources (Thomas, 2007).

Fanfiction is published in specialized online archives like Archive of Our Own, Fanfiction.net or on blogging pltaforms like Livejournal or tumblr. Right now there are 147 739 stories for Marvel movies and comics, 117 139 stories for the TV show Supernatural, 83 974 for Harry Potter books, 42 652 for the band One Direction, 30 219 for the video game Dragon Age, and 13 855 for the theatre show Les Miserables on Archive of Our Own (which funds itself through donations and allows explicit content). On fanfiction.net (which funds itself through ad sales and therefore recently purged a lot of explicit content much to the dismay of its writers and readers) there are 393 000 stories for the anime series Naruto, 728 000 stories for Harry Potter books, 109 000 for the TV show Glee and so forth. In other words, it’s not really a marginal practice.

It’s not a new one either, Henry Jenkins - one of the key figures in early fanfiction scholarship - has traced the origins of it to the 1930s Fanzines, and placed it’s comeback in the late 1960s with the popularity of Star Trek (Jenkins, 1992). In the decades since internet fanfiction has become “an element of popular culture that is ever growing in popularity as new technologies enable native and non-native speaking fans from all over the globe to meet online to share, critique, and build upon each other’s fictions” (Black, 2004).

image: Nogitsune by teenwolffandom on DeviantArt

Isn’t fanfiction all about writing?

Separating reading fanfiction from writing fanfiction is problematic, because the convergence of the two is perhaps one of its defining characteristics and definitely one of the reasons for why it is often used as an example of produsage (Bruns, 2005, 2006) in audience, media and pop-culture studies.  However, for the task at hand – to explore the experiences of digital reading - it makes sense to attempt. I couldn’t find reliable data on the proportions of fanfiction reader/writers compared to just readers, but we could extrapolate from the scholarship on the prevalence of produsage in analogous participatory practices (Bird, 2011) and assume, with the help of eminent new media scholar Jose Van Dijck (2009) and a Guardian report (Arthur, 2006) she has chosen to trust that only one in a hundred people are active online content producers, with 10 ‘interacting’ by commenting, and the remaining 89 simply viewing. Even if we think these proportions to have shifted since 2006 or are somewhat different in fandom culture, we shouldn’t underestimate the continuing practice of just listening online (used here as a conscious alternative to “lurking” cf. Crawford, 2009).

image: Fancy Dean by euclase on DeviantArt

Existing research on reading fanfiction

In general, reading fanfiction seems to have deserved less scholarly attention than writing and related communal or identity practices. To situate my current reading inquiry, I find helpful the work (Black, 2009) that notes the importance of headers (contain information on the canon, genre, rating, romantic pairings, languages used and warnings) and “author’s notes” sections (contain informal, emotional, non fandom-related messages for readers). I interpret both of these as reading guidelines.

Reading fanfiction has also been found to be far less like traditional print literacy. Fanfiction readers integrate their prior knowledge of the canon with the cues found in the web interface to construct meaning in sophisticated ways (Chandler-Olcott & Mahar, 2003). To be able to enjoy fanfic, readers have to understand its hybridity and intertextuality (Black, 2007).

By and large, there seem to be two categories of reading that has captured the interest of fanfiction scholarship:

Beta readers (cf. Black 2005, Karpovich, 2006 Mcwilliams et al 2011), who read a work of fiction with a critical eye, with the aim of improving grammar, spelling, characterization, and general style of a story prior to its release to the general public (fanfiction.net). In a sense, beta readers are voluntary, unpaid editors. The main difference is that they are, similarly to the writer, fans of the canon. Beta readers can amass quite a lot of status in the community, and are, as a norm, explicitly thanked in the header of the fic. This means they are discursively linked with the text’s authorship to a higher degree than editors in conventional publishing schemes are. Interestingly the publishing industry, in particular the self publishing segments of it, seems to have appropriated the concept of beta. When you look around for popular resources on beta readers online, most of them seem to be for and by people, who want to publish or self publish original fiction. 

Reviewers (cf. Campbell et al 2015, Black 2009, Black 2005, Chatelain, 2003), are also portrayed as an important resource for writers. Reviews can be incredibly constructive (in particular for those writers, who are not writing in their first language) as well as relatively perfunctory, but still serve an important social function of networking, communication and community building. 

But what about the rest of the readers/reading?

But howwwwww?!

Since the whole point of this exercise was to see, what we can find out about digital reading experiences by looking at how people read fanfiction, just focusing on reviewers and beta readers isn’t enough. So I asked some of my colleagues and friends, who read and study fanfiction.

It quickly became apparent that different people approached this question in rather different ways. Overlapping elements of motivation (why am I reading), reading intensity (binge reading or scrolling through a hashtag), reading commitment (immersion vs skipping over “boring” bits) reading curating (how I come across the stuff to read) and the emotional investment of reading (reading as a low emotional risk activity vs. emotionally risky reading) were evident in people’s descriptions of how they relate to reading fanfiction. These elements seem to configure into reading repertoires that people switch between with relative ease.

Based on my “data” and the existing scholarship I attempted reframing fanfiction reading experiences and came up with the following (mutually non-exclusive) map:

I’m going to set aside “reading roles within fandom” and “interactive responses to reading” for now and instead focus on the three remaining relations to reading I noticed in people’s fanfic reading. 

Looking at the intensity of the reading experience, a rough split into two is possible:

Casual or habitual reading (was also called leisurely or feed-based) happens when a writer updates their story or their content gets reblogged onto your dash. It may also happen because as a reader, you are doing a routine check of all of your feeds before going to bed or because you have some empty time to fill. Neither the activity itself nor the need to read is particularly pressing.

The other kind is vigorous (also called active or intentional) reading. This means that reading material is sought out more urgently, reading immersion is higher and the motivation is more pressing. Typical examples of this are binge reading or reading routinely, but with a clear identification of it as a practice of self-care, stress management or escapism.

 It also seems that emotional commitment or emotional stakes is an important way of framing reading experiences. Among the limited people I talked to, two contrasting descriptions were evident. These could be called low stakes and high stakes reading.

The low stakes reading means people only read pairings, tags and authors that they know they will like. They have created (probably by allocating significant time to this task at some prior point) a carefully curated “safe space” for themselves, where reading is diverting, but not demanding and where they can find suitable reading material quickly and with little effort. Thomas (2007) has written that fan fiction offers young writers a great existing storyline; interesting, three-dimensional characters that have already been developed; and a wealth of back story to both pull from and write about. I think this existing storyline/world is also extremely significant when it comes to reading.

And then for other readers, emotional stakes can be much higher. Reading fanfic can be slightly dangerous, as another member of the fandom can take a character to a place that clashes with how the reader thinks about the character or the fandom.

Finally, there is no escaping people’s motivation when reading. Why do we read what we read? What are we looking for, when we read fanfic? It’s interesting that while for some people choosing to read fanfiction already serves a specific need (escape, emotional release, stress-relief) but for others it is more nuanced. On a particular day, a particular reader looking for particular stimulation might, based on their reading expertise and repertoires, satisfy those needs by looking for a specific genre, pairing, or even traverse fandoms by following an author.

 Here are some examples:

When we need joy or silliness, when we want to laugh WITH, we might choose crackfic (“Crackfic” is a term for a storywhich takes a ridiculous premise as its starting point, such as casting all the canon characters as My Little Ponies. It may or may not deal with this premise in a serious way. Source: fanlore.org)

‪to get off we might choose PWP (Plot, what plot? Or Porn without Plot, basically a story that mostly describes explicit sex)

to get lost in a story we might choose longfic or binge

for anger/catharsis we may pic a fix it fic (fix-it fic refers to a specific type of alternate universe story in which the author attempts to correct or rewrite something that they feel the original canon should not have done or failed to do properly. source: angelfire.com)

for catharsis, to get off and for self care we may follow a specific pairing (“ship”)

to wallow a little and enjoy the twinge of nostalgia, we may select old fandoms

and of course, we read our friend’s fics to strengthen social ties.

So what?

So what are we going to do with this?

First of all, I think there is something to say about how many filtering options fanfiction offers its readers and thus how much control it affords interested readers over their reading experience. You can, if you’re so inclined, curate your reading space with laser-like precision. You can choose the authors, hashtags, pairings, genres and trigger warnings to create repertoires or profiles of more and less emotional investment. You can fine-tune what you want your reading to make you feel. Consider the ‘control to effort’ ratio this has compared to reading jacket blurbs in bookstore, or reviews online. Is this what reading is moving towards? Would more people read original fiction if this level and ease of control would be possible? How is this connected to the availability of a loved and pre-existed universe created by the authors of the canon?

Secondly, of course, there is the inherent multimodality and hybridity of fanfiction texts. Sometimes they come with fanart, sometimes they come with playlist suggestions, sometimes, someone has recorded an audio version of the fic (podfic). They might be translated into multiple languages. Someone has probably made gifs from TV show screen-captures pairing them with text from a fic, making the fix-it interpretations of canon so much more persuasive. Affectively, fanfic can thus cover many more bases than original creative canons can. And again, control. By reading multimodally, we can pull the strings of our favorite fictional characters and make them behave in ways that soothes our weird little hurts and desires. 

Thirdly, because the canon texts are often initially consumed alone, reading fanfiction allows people to get validation for their embarrassing, too-strong, fannish reactions to the canon. Even without writing, commenting, or going to conventions, reading fanfic offers proof that it’s not “weird” to have such affective reactions or enjoy those. Reading fanfic us thus low-investment validation for some aspects of our identities.

References:

Arthur, C. (2006) ‘What’s the 1% Rule?’, The Guardian (Technology section) 20 July, http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1823959,00.html


Bird, S. E. (2011). Are We All Produsers Now ?,  Cultural Studies, 25(September), 37–41.

Black, R. (2004). Access and Affiliation: The New Literacy Practices of English Language Learners in an Online Anime-based Fanfiction Community. Paper presented to the National Conference of Teachers of English Assembly for Research, Berkeley, CA.

Black, R. W. (2005). Access and affiliation : The literacy and composition practices of English-language learners in an online fanfiction community, Journal Of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 49,118–128.

Black, R. W. (2007). Digital design: English language learners and reader reviews in online fiction. In M. Knobel & C. Lankshear (Eds.), A new literacies sampler (pp. 115-136). New York: Peter Lang.

Black, R. W. (2009). Online Fan Fiction , Global Identities , and Imagination, Research in the Teaching of English, 43, 397–425.

Black, R. W. (2009). Online Fan Fiction and Critical Media Literacy, Journal of Computing in Teacher Education, 26, 75-80

Bruns, A. (2006) Towards Produsage: Futures for User-Led Content Production, [online] Available at: http://eprints.qut.edu.au/4863/1/4863_1.pdf, 1?10

Chandler-Olcott, K., & Mahar, D. (2003). Adolescents’ anime - inspired “ fanfictions ”: An exploration of Multiliteracies, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 46, 556–566.556–566.

Chatelain, Julianne. “Learning from the Review Culture of Fan Fiction.” Journal of Digital Information 3.3 (2003).

Crawford, K. (2009). Following you: Disciplines of listening in social media. Continuum, 23(4), 525–535.

van Dijck, J. (2009) ‘Users like you? Theorizing agency in user-generated content’, Media Culture Society, vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 41?58.

Gee, J. 2004. Situated Language and Learning: A Critique of Traditional Schooling.New York: Routledge

Jenkins, H. (1992) Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, New York, Routledge.

Jenkins, H. (2004). Why Heather Can Write. MIT Technology Review. February. technologyre- view.com/articles/04/02/wo_jenkins020604.asp?p?1

Jenkins, H. (2006) Convergence Culture. Where Old and New Media Collide, New York and London, New York University Press.

Jenkins, H. (2007) ‘‘Afterword: the future of fandom’, in Fandom, eds J. Gray, C. Sandvoss & C. L. Harrington, New York, New York University Press, pp. 357-364.

Karpovich, A.I. (2006). The Audience as Editor: The Role of Beta Readers in Online Fan Fiction Communities, In Busse, K., Hellekson, K. (Eds) Fan Fiction And Fan Communities In The Age Of The Internet, 171-73  

Levy, P. (1997) Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace. New York and London: Plenum Press.

Levy,F. and Murnane,R. 2004. The New Division of Labor:How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market.New York: Sage University Press

Luke,C. 1997. Technological Literacy. Melbourne: Language Australia.

Mar, R. A., & Mullin, J. (2011). Emotion and narrative fiction : Interactive influences before, during, and after reading, 25, 818–834.

Mar, R. A., & Oatley, K. (2008). The Function of Fiction is the Abstraction and Simulation of Social Experience, Perspectives on Psychology Science, 3, 173-192-

Mar, R. A., Oatley, K., & Peterson, J. B. (2009). Exploring the link between reading fiction and empathy : Ruling out individual differences and examining outcomes, 34, 407-428.

Mcwilliams, J., Hickey, D. T., Hines, M. B., Conner, J. M., & Bishop, S. C. (2011). Using Collaborative Writing Tools for Literary Analysis : Twitter , Fan Fiction and The Crucible in the Secondary English Classroom Voices from the Field :, 3, 238–245.

Miall, D., Kuiken, D., Miall, D. S., & Kuiken, D. (2002). A feeling for fiction : Becoming what we behold A feeling for fiction : becoming what we behold, Poetics, 30, 221-241.

Olin-Scheller, C., & Wikstrom, P. (2010). Literary Prosumers: Young People’s Reading and Writing in a New Media Landscape, 1(1).

Parrish, J. J. (2007). Inventing a Universe: Reading and Writing Internet Fan Fiction. Ph.D. Diss. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh.

Pich, H. (2013-2014). Talking back: ‘Fanfiction, fandom and the collapse of the fourth wall,’ Voiceworks, 95, 63-65.

*DEADED*

I’m sure a ton of people already know how to do this, but I only learned recently, so I wanted to share one of my favorite thumbnailing tricks! Color matching is SUPER helpful to quickly map out potential color schemes :D

Wrong time period: witch hats as we know them seem to have only started appearing in art around the 17th-18th century; in the period when the Judenhut was well-established, witches in art just wore whatever was common for women of the region.

Wrong region: the pointed witch hat originated in English art, as far as i’ve seen. Antisemitic laws in England mandated badges, not headwear.

Wrong gender: Jewish hats were mandated for men, not women—illustrations of witches with pointed hats very rarely included male witches, until fairly recently.

Wrong shape: there are many styles of mandated Jewish hat throughout history, but few of them are even a near match for the very specific look of the Witch hat.

You know what kind of hat does closely fit?

The hat in this painting (“Portrait of Mrs Salesbury with her Grandchildren Edward and Elizabeth Bagot” by J.M. Wright; circa 1675) was “a type worn by affluent women throughout Britain at this date”. Look at that hat. Any modern viewer looking at this painting might think it was supposed to be a character created by J.K. Rowling.

It’s a match in design, gender, region, and most importantly, time period: by the time that pointed witch hats started to appear in artwork in England and English colonies, this style of hat would have been associated in the cultural consciousness with elderly women, especially those who were clinging to decades-old fashions.

The easy, simple answer to where the witch hat came from: it’s exactly what a woman with all the stereotypical qualities of a witch would have worn in the first place, in the time and place the trope originated. 

This is why so many classic movie monsters were rendered as green—because public appearances and the rare color image of he actors in full makeup would be a blueish-green. Filming for black & white even affected the props and scenery. This is what the Addams Family’s house really looked like:

Where beauty (according to 17th century standards) was young, witches were old. Where beauty had fine, delicate features, witches had exaggerated, rough features. Where beauty was relatively unmarred (a rarity in pre-vaccination days), witches had moles and other marks. Where beauty had silky blonde hair (a treasured prize in Renaissance times, to the point that women falsely lightened their hair or wore wigs), witches had rough black hair.

As I said, some of these line up with antisemitic tropes. However, I’d argue that associating Jews with these tropes was a result of already-established patriarchal beauty tropes that had been ingrained in northern Europe for centuries. The fact that the stereotypical Jewish woman happened to defy the beauty ideals of northern Europe was used as an excuse to further oppress Jewish people, not the other way around.

In other words, I’d guess that it went like this:

“Ugliness/evil looks like this” -> “Some Jewish women (who we hate) look like this” -> “here’s proof that Jewish women are ugly and evil”

Rather than:

“Jewish women look like this” -> “we hate Jewish people” -> “Ugliness and evil looks like this”

Who used brooms mounted above the door as a way to signal their trade to passerby: 

And who made their trade making strange concoctions in cauldrons: 

And who happened to wear hats just like this:

Brewsters/alewives used to have a monopoly on beer-making. They handed down brewing secrets from mother to daughter and basically controlled the alcohol market. And men weren’t terribly keen on that - they wanted in on this immensely lucrative, influential field. There were some male brewsters, but the trade was overwhelmingly female, to the point that even male brewsters were still called brewsters - a female noun. 

So what do men do when they want to push women out of a trade? They demonise them. 

Suddenly the broom isn’t just a business sign, it’s a tool for going to meet the devil. The cauldron isn’t just a tool, it’s a place to create evil. The hat isn’t just a trade uniform, it’s a mark of malevolent intent and arcane knowledge. 

Coincidentally, many women who became brewsters/alewives became independently wealthy and quite powerful locally. They didn’t need to marry and could provide for their entire households with their trade. They could grow old without marrying, or they could stay unmarried after their first husband dies rather than remarrying. They could also pull strings and influence things in their favour, making local politics ‘mysteriously’ go their way.

And so the stereotype of the ugly spinster brewster-witch is born.

And, as I’ve said above, ugly women look a certain way: harsh, marred features, dark, tangled hair, and above all, old.

Note old Mother Louse up there. She was a well-respected brewster in her town, with plenty of influence, but here she is already being portrayed with stereotypical witch features: a big, hooked nose, and a pointy chin, hollow eyes, sharp cheekbones (not a good thing in premordern times - beauties had rounder faces, as sharp cheekbones were a sign of hunger or oldness). Mother Louse isn’t being portrayed as Jewish, but as an elderly, ugly spinster, who engages in the lucrative, powerful - but suspect - business of brewing.

Know who else this happened to? Midwives. Another female trade, passed down from woman to woman, dealing in business secrets from which men were barred - and this in regard to the most mysterious power of all: the power to bring life into the world. And midwives do pretty well for themselves, too: plenty of families are willing to pay a bundle to make sure their babies are delivered safe and sound in a world with high infant mortality. Just like male physicians, midwives knew how to create tinctures and mix herbs, but now, once again, rudimentary chemistry and herb-lore become demonised when women are the ones doing it. Now, if your baby is born sick, deformed, or dead, it’s clearly the spinster midwife’s doing, full of spite because she has no children of her own.

So somebody on my Facebook posted this. And I’ve seen sooooo many memes like it. Images of a canvas with nothing but a slash cut into it, or a giant blurry square of color, or a black circle on a white canvas. There are always hundreds of comments about how anyone could do that and it isn’t really art, or stories of the time someone dropped a glove on the floor of a museum and people started discussing the meaning of the piece, assuming it was an abstract found-objects type of sculpture.

The painting on the left is a bay or lake or harbor with mountains in the background and some people going about their day in the foreground. It’s very pretty and it is skillfully painted. It’s a nice piece of art. It’s also just a landscape. I don’t recognize a signature style, the subject matter is far too common to narrow it down. I have no idea who painted that image.

The painting on the right I recognized immediately. When I was studying abstraction and non-representational art, I didn’t study this painter in depth, but I remember the day we learned about him and specifically about this series of paintings. His name was Ad Reinhart, and this is one painting from a series he called the ultimate paintings. (Not ultimate as in the best, but ultimate as in last.)

The day that my art history teacher showed us Ad Reinhart’s paintings, one guy in the class scoffed and made a comment that it was a scam, that Reinhart had slapped some black paint on the canvas and pretentious people who wanted to look smart gave him money for it. My teacher shut him down immediately. She told him that this is not a canvas that someone just painted black. It isn’t easy to tell from this photo, but there are groups of color, usually squares of very very very dark blue or red or green or brown. They are so dark that, if you saw them on their own, you would call each of them black. But when they are side by side their differences are apparent. Initially you stare at the piece thinking that THAT corner of the canvas is TRUE black. Then you begin to wonder if it is a deep green that only appears black because the area next to it is a deep, deep red. Or perhaps the “blue” is the true black and that red is actually brown. Or perhaps the blue is violet and the color next to it is the true black. The piece challenges the viewer’s perception. By the time you move on to the next painting, you’re left to wonder if maybe there have been other instances in which you believe something to be true but your perception is warped by some outside factor. And then you wonder if ANY of the colors were truly black. How can anything be cut and dry, black and white, when even black itself isn’t as absolute as you thought it was?

People need to understand that not all art is about portraying a realistic image, and that technical skills (like the ability to paint a scene that looks as though it may have been photographed) are not the only kind of artistic skills. Some art is meant to be pretty or look like something. Other art is meant to carry a message or an idea, to provoke thought.

Reinhart’s art is utterly genius.

“But anyone could have done that! It doesn’t take any special skill! I could have done that!”

Ok. Maybe you could have. But you didn’t.

You remember that post about the homestuck t-shirt design contest collaborating with hot topic? And how Hot Topic are the biggest art thieves?  This is recent.  As you can see above, I stumbled upon Hot Topic’s website and they are selling a very popular fan art put on a t-shirt, and did not ask permission from the original artist (rismo).

BY AGREEING TO TERMS AND CONDITIONS ON DEVIANT ART.

THEY SOLD IT TO A THIRD PARTY ROYALTY-FREE.

———

3. License To Use Artist Materials. As and when Artist Materials are uploaded to the DeviantArt Site(s), Artist grants to DeviantArt a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to do the following things during the Term:

a) to prepare and encode Artist Materials or any part of them for digital or analog transmission, manipulation and exhibition in any format and by any means now known or not yet known or invented; (DA  can post them on their website and edit them in any way they see fit)

b) to display, copy, reproduce, exhibit, publicly perform, broadcast, rebroadcast, transmit, retransmit, distribute through any electronic means (including analog and digital) or other means, and electronically or otherwise publish any or all of the Artist Materials, including any part of them, and to include them in compilations for publication, by any and all means and media now known or not yet known or invented ; (They can publish your art in any media, use it to showcase their website or even promote certain groups without your knowledge. For all you know, your art could be promoting the KKK.)

c) to modify, adapt, change or otherwise alter the Artist Materials (e.g., change the size) and use the Artist Materials as described in Section 3(b); and

d) the right to sublicense to any other person or company any of the licensed rights in the Artist Materials, or any part of them, subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement. (They can edit, change, or otherwise modify your artwork in any way they want, as well as sublicensing it  to third parties, such as Hot Topic.)

e) Artist acknowledges that Artist will not have any right, title, or interest in any other materials with which Artist Materials may be combined or into which all or any portion of Artist Materials may be incorporated. (By posting on FA, you forfeit your right to dispute any third party profits or copyright infringements upon your art.)

f) During the Term, DeviantArt’s licenses under this Agreement include the right to use any part of the Artist Materials in the promotion, advertising or marketing of the DeviantART Sites. (DeviantArt can use your art to advertise anything they want.)

g) As used in this Agreement, the term “Artist Materials” means any content uploaded to the DeviantArt Site(s) which may include without limitation Artist’s name(s) (including professional names), trademarks, trade names, likenesses, photographs, biographical materials, audio-visual materials, artwork, liner notes, and other graphical, textual, video, film or audio materials and any and all “skins,” computer-generated images or other artwork or images that Artist submits to DeviantArt in any medium or format whatsoever. (ANYTHING you submit to DeviantArt belongs to DeviantArt now. Including  your drawings, your photos, videos, your stock materials, your music/audio, your written stories, and your artist name.)

Koiby🌼

[ Image Description: A colored artwork of several Adventure zone characters, showing different scenes of holiday food preparation and celebration. At the very top is Istus, a Filipino T’boli woman with pale skin and long black hair. She wears long flowing strings of red, white, and black beads with her hair, and is in traditional T’boli dress embroidered with similar colors.

Istus is grinning as she holds up a tapestry to Pan, an old, green-colored goat with branching horns, droopy ears, and a long beard with flowers. He’s smiling kindly at the tapestry. The tapestry snakes down the rest of the artwork, different scenes springing up from it and showing what everyone’s up to.

In the middle scene is Kravitz, Taako, and Merle. Kravitz is a dark-skinned man with black feathers in place of hair. He’s wearing a black chef uniform with an orange apron on top that bears the words “Kiss the Cook.” He is sweating with a focused look as he chops onions on a wooden board, which is supported by ravens. Next to Kravitz is Taako, a medium-light complexioned elf with curly blonde hair. Taako is wearing a white chef’s uniform and hat and is grinning as he holds a large stew pot.

Merle is a medium-light complexioned dwarf with a long white and grey beard and hair tied into a bun, wearing a large sunflower tucked over his ear and a grey tanktop. He’s smiling over at Taako as he carries a container of Buko Pandan.

At the bottom of the tapestry and image  is Mookie, Hurley, and Sloane. Mookie is a freckled dwarf kid with light tan skin and messy black hair with small yellow flowers. He’s wearing a dirty green jumper. He has a gap-toothed grin as he holds up a plate to Hurley, who is serving him Pancit Malabon. 

Hurley is a dryad with warm, medium brown, and tree bark-like skin, some of which is twisted into ram-like horns. She has a small mohawk of fluffy pink petals. Hurley is wearing a white jumper with a rainbow colored turtleneck, and is standing by a table filled with plates and food.

Lastly, Sloane is beside Hurley and is looking at her and Mookie. She is a dryad with dark brown tree-bark skin and long ears. Her hair is made up of more twisting vines and tree-bark in different shades of brown and pink. She is wearing a green scarf over a black jumper with pink sheep designs and the words “KISS GIRLS” on it. Her cheek is puffed out as she snacks on chips.

The background of the picture has abstracted patterns of jellyfish, vines, stars, and feathers, with a red raven eye peering behind Pan. End description. ]