sweetbriar15

this kind of policing is why ao3 was created

remember, kids, the three laws of fandom are:

- don’t like; don’t read

- your kink is not my kink

@thedenimbeans for the file

AO3 SCAM

There's been a number of people reporting over on the AO3 subreddit that they're getting messages like this posted in the comments shortly after posting new fics.

The AO3 team are NEVER going to try and contact you about TOS violations via the comment section (or about anything else for that matter)

Don't click any links. Report the accounts involved (which might claim to be things like "LucySupport"), delete the message and move on.

Yes, yes, YES! Starting a new post, because this sums up so many of my frustrations with fan crit. Like, Animorphs clumsily attempts to tackle AIDS and slavery reparations and environmentalism and disability justice, and sometimes it works but sometimes it doesn't. But at least it tries. AniTV strips all of that out in favor of a far blander "yeerks bad, humans good, we ignore race here" story.

There's this fallacy, where it's easier to criticize a failed attempt than it is a total lack of trying. In the Heights (2021) got smacked up, down, and sideways by critics and fans for its failure to include more dark-skinned characters; meanwhile A Quiet Place II (2021), Venom II (2021), Free Guy (2021), and Black Widow (2021) get no such critiques because they each include Exactly One Black Actor. Scholomance gets review-bombed for "fake" "forced" "diversity" (X) for featuring kids from all over the world, while Mortal Instruments gets a total lack of criticism for its cast having Exactly One Asian Guy (who is half-white).

I vividly recall a media professor ca. 2013 mansplaining to me that, actually, Orange is the New Black is sexist because it shows male characters having power over female ones, and there's no onscreen sex between the Black lesbians. Somehow he didn't feel the need to say this about Breaking Bad, Supernatural, Peaky Blinders, or any other series that went entire YEARS without passing the Bechdel test. No wonder TV shows have again embraced colorblind racism.

#god so true#and so frustrating#representation#can't believe they bombed scholomance for 'forced' diversity#it's the most well-argued diversity I've seen in a while

Yeah, that one makes me especially sad because — among those Goodreads reviews I linked to — there's a person expressing that she read and enjoyed Scholomance partially because she's an Indian woman who loved seeing herself in El, but now upon seeing other reviews about how it's actually fake/forced representation, she guesses she should stop reading the series. Which — what the misogynistic fuck is "forced representation"? And Scholomance may not be perfect, but it tries a HELL of a lot harder than Fourth Wing, Skyward, or Magisterium. And the criticisms themselves are all "how DARE a white author write characters of color," or "this one line late in the second book describes 'long hair in braids' as 'impractical.'"

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.

— Justin D. Edwards, "Mapping Tropical Gothic in the Americas" in Tropical Gothic in Literature and Culture.

Jake: Conspiracy theory mongering

Openly posts about secret alien cabals taking over world governments in the hope of finding more ex-controllers

Tells anyone who will listen that Jacques Chirac has been replaced by a brain worm

Argues back with the critics instead of just ignoring them, because he actually wants to persuade people

Rachel: Defending Monica Lewinsky

This involves a lot of dunking on Bill Clinton's outfits — obviously he's too ugly and unfashionable to attract girlfriends the normal way, so he's gotta be a creep about it

Just when the Hillary Clinton haters think they've won Rachel to their side, she makes a bunch of posts defending the first lady too

Ax: Misinformation

Confidently informs AIMers that cigarette butts are a delicious food, that the best cure for a bad day is eating wood pulp, and that there are no negative consequences to eating 28 mega-sized cinnamon buns in one sitting

Will be extremely condescending toward anyone who dares disagree with these takes

Marco: Trolling

You know the guy who posted photos of shrimp tails in his Cap'n Crunch? That's Marco, every day, all the time.

@The_Sharing I went to one of your events recently, and the paper towel dispenser was full of live slugs! [badly photoshopped image attached]

@BuyersResearchInstitute How come one of your salespeople gave ME, an underage impressionable child, a pack of cigarettes as a promotional item?!?!?

@FormatCeeColon Please listen to the attached audio file and confirm or deny that your song has the line "drink nail polish remover" hidden under the coda.

Tobias: Disagreeing with the internet's Bird Takes

Owls are NOT "sky cats," they're wild animals that don't belong inside EVER under any circumstances I don't care how much you like Harry Potter; that is a work of fiction

Crows are intelligent, but stories of them learning language, finance, or manipulation are anthropomorphism

Vultures are great, actually, they're really important for preventing waste from poisoning groundwater, and it's your own discomfort with death that's causing you to call them ugly

Parrots are smart, yes, but they do not "learn language;" they skillfully imitate sounds and assuming they speak English is anthropomorphism.

Pigeons are GIFT to the UNIVERSE. However, don't feed them.

Birds. Do NOT. Give Hugs. Every photo you've ever seen of a goose or swan or parakeet "hugging" someone is a bird with serious balance problems (from anesthesia, from brain damage, from blindness) holding itself up with its wings around the nearest vertical object. Anth. Ro. Po. Morph. Ism. Birds show affection by grooming each other, OBVIOUSLY; how would the logistics of a hug even work in the wild?

Cockatoos should bathe in chocolate fountains. As a treat.

Cassie: Related to Tobias, but ruining All the cute animal vids

Sample takes include: "a human house is not a safe place for an otter," "a human house is not a safe place for a fox," "a human house is not a safe place for a chimpanzee," and "a human house is not a safe place for a pigeon."

Seriously.  Was the last Animorphs episode a case of “we’re already cancelled, so let’s openly queer the protagonists”?  (See: Legend of Korra, The 100, Supernatural, Being Human, Gotham, The Owl House, Angel, etc.)

I was rewatching AniTV, and I’m starting to think they made Ax/Marco canon.  Most of that last episode is about the kids getting ready for a school dance.  There’s a whole sequence where Marco convinces Ax to morph a rabbit, so that he can have a cute pet to attract girls — only as soon as a girl starts talking to Marco, Ax starts freaking out and scares her away.  Later, lizard-morphed-Marco gets grabbed by a teacher and stuck in a cage, and starts yelling for his friends in thought-speak, but only Ax hears his cries.  He rushes out of the dance to rescue Marco, the school gym gets destroyed by yeerks (off-screen), and they relocate the dance to the mall.  The last shot of the show is all six of them slow-dancing: Tobias with Rachel, Jake with Cassie — and Marco with Ax.

[Image ID: Screenshot from AniTV showing 6 couples dancing in a room with a green floor, green tables, and gray chairs.  There are two couples of extras dancing in the background and one in the foreground, but the camera is focused on Tobias and Rachel (in a white jacket and a pink dress, respectively) while Jake and Cassie (in a black tuxedo and red dress) and Marco and Ax (in jeans and in a blue suit) dance on either side of them.  Marco and Ax are indicated with an orange circle.]

I’d always kind of dismissed that moment as being some combination of “pair the spares” and “lol so funniez when 2 boys together” (it is the 1990s, after all.)  However, on rewatching, several things stood out to me.

This is the last-ever episode of AniTV.  The one with yeerks in cell phones aired after, but was filmed before, and this ep was meant to be the finale.

It’s not just that Marco and Ax dance together; it’s that Marco sits down next to Ax (so close they’re touching), looks him in the eye, invites him to dance, holds his hand, and pulls their bodies together.  Not quite a silly friend dynamic.

They’re dancing in the same pose and manner as Rachel/Tobias and Cassie/Jake, both of whom are confirmed romantic couples.

The whole episode kinda has Ax/Marco undertones.  “Friend 1 tries to get various dates with Friend 2 as support, doesn’t realize until late in the story that Friend 2 was their love all along” is a classic teen-romance setup, and that’s basically Ax and Marco’s plot this episode.

It’s a weird choice to end the show on this note, given that this is Part 3 of a 3-part finale and yet the other two parts are about an animal-testing cosmetics company and a secret ex-controller group.  However, if the writers chose to have this be the focus of the last episode because it’s the last episode, arguably that makes more sense.

Just… this is more-romantic framing than I initially realized.

[Image ID: Screenshot from AniTV Marco (in a gray shirt) leaning close to Ax, who wears a powder-blue suit jacket and bright blue bow tie.  Marco is holding Ax’s hand in the foreground, and Ax’s other arm is wrapped around Marco’s shoulders.]

You can’t convince me those are two straight men being straight together

AO3 saying they will not be banning AI-generated works on their platform

I agree with them and I respect them for this. no, I am not a fan of AI-generated fics, but as I’ve said many times before in the past:

AO3 was built with the “complete anti censorship” stance. them banning AI-generated works would be them going against their own core values of “no censorship”. and “no censorship” means nothing is censored. and that includes works you dislike for ethical or whatever reasons.

as of now, most (I believe) of creators who use AI to write for them properly tag their works as “AI-generated”. so you can safely filter these works out if you don’t wish to consume them. but I have no doubt the majority (if not all) of them will stop tagging their works as AI if AO3 actually bans AI works, which means these AI works will be untagged. you can never know for sure if the fic you read is AI or not, since they aren’t properly tagged anymore.

whether or not you like it, AI is getting better and more human-like, meaning it’s getting harder to spot when a fic is AI.

speculation, witch hunts, wrongful accusations and harassment harm real writers, as well as writing community as a whole, as much as AI does, if not more.

it’s impossible for AO3 to effectively ban and remove “only AI-generated works” without innocent human-made works getting wrongly marked as AI and deleted in the process. so if AO3 were to ban AI-generated works, it would mean

there was a chance of a human-made work getting wrongly marked as AI and taken down

there was a chance of an AI-generated work being wrongly accepted as human-made

fandom drama could and would cause innocent writers to get their human-made works falsely reported as AI

human-made fics that “upset people”, in terms of contents, could and almost certainly would be reported as AI, because there were people who “found the fics inappropriate/disgusting and wanted them taken down” — and the only way they could do that was by falsely reporting these fics as AI

AO3 volunteers would have to decide which works were AI “based on vibes alone”. and not only was it impossible for them to always make the correct judgement, there simply weren’t enough volunteers and time for every single work that was reported as AI to be thoroughly read by a human volunteer

no, “AI detector” is unreliable and the machine itself is also AI — it’s known to have incorrectly marked human-made works as AI and AI-generated works as human-made.