#ranthea

Friendly reminder the the only duty fanwriters have when they publish their work online is to follow the ToS of the website they are posting on.

In particular when it comes to Ao3, when you use the website and access its content “you understand that using the Archive may expose you to material that is offensive, triggering, erroneous, sexually explicit, indecent, blasphemous, objectionable, grammatically incorrect, or badly spelled.” 

All of that is allowed to exist on the archive. Your readers should know that, and it’s not your responsibility to change your work according to their moral policing. If it’s allowed on Ao3 you have every right to post it. 

In fact, the ToS also state: “Unless it violates some other policy, we will not remove Content for offensiveness, no matter how awful, repugnant, or badly spelled we may personally find that content to be.”

Don’t let anyone stop you from writing what you enjoy. Moderate comments if you get nasty ones and don’t hesitate to issue a complain if someone harasses you, because while your fanwork is allowed on Ao3, harassment is not.

On Ao3, users can’t post:

spam and commercial promotion;

code and files that would threaten the integrity of the website or be  hazardous to users' computers;

content covered by copyright without trasformative use and/or plagiarism;

non-fiction;

Everything else is allowed.

To be more detailed, fanwriters can post their fics on Ao3 even when they contain:

violence;

abuse;

underage sexual content;

non-con/rape, however badly you might think it’s portrayed;  

death and/or suicide;

mental illnesses;

sexual and non-sexual kinks of any kind;

homophobic, racist, sexist, transphobic and/or albeist characters;

“glorification” of any behaviour;

“fetishizing” of anything;

badly written and/or unrealistic situations;

badly written and/or OOC characters;

other morally dubious content of any nature that I forgot listing;

And you don’t even need to tag anything. That’s a courtesy you’re doing to your readers, because according to the Ao3 ToS: 

“Users are responsible for reading and heeding the warnings provided by the creator. Risk-averse users should keep in mind that not all content will carry full warnings. If you want to know more, you may also wish to consult the bookmarks that people other than the creator have used to categorize the fanwork.

Some creators do not want to put specific ratings or warnings on their works. Our policy aims to enable creators to choose appropriate labels or to opt not to use ratings and warnings, with the understanding that some users will avoid unrated or unwarned content.”

“Our goal is to provide the maximum amount of control and flexibility for all users of the Archive, both creators and audiences, so that each user can customize their experience. It's always possible for creators to use "not rated" or "choose not to use Archive warnings," but audiences will always be able to avoid unrated or unwarned fanworks if that's how they want to use the Archive.”

“This system is designed to offer numerous different ways to customize the experience on the Archive, which should in general accommodate users' desires for warnings or to avoid warnings, along with authors' ability to choose the appropriate warning or to choose not to provide warnings. In most cases, users can control their experiences by accessing only fanworks that have ratings and warnings that are acceptable to them, and creators can use their artistic judgment about what ratings and/or warnings, if any, ought to be on a fanwork.”

People who start crusades against your fics are childish and you should ignore them, report them or prevent them from commenting in the first place (by moderating comments or not allowing anonymous comments altogether, or both if necessary). If they harass you on some other SNS, block them. 

I’ll say more: even if your fic went against the ToS of the archive you’re posting on, people harassing you and insulting you in the comments and outside of them would still be in the wrong. If your fic was against the ToS, another user could a) politely warn you explaining clearly what points of the ToS you violated; b) if you refuse to change/take it down because you think it doesn’t violate the ToS, then report your fic to the archive administrators and let them handle it. Not insult you, not bully you, not starting a crusade against you. That’s never right, and that’s always harassment.

Also, I’m going to quote myself and say:

Seeing that actual books and other forms of fiction (the ones they sell in stores) often do not explicitly condemn morally wrong actions, why do people on this website only go after fanworks written/drawn by literal nobodies on the internet and read/looked at by, what, 1k, 2k people? (if it’s a successful and famous fic/art that is) instead of going after books (ie, but also movies, or other) that sold millions of copies? (ie: some of the books I mentioned earlier, but also books like A Song Of Ice And Fire, some of Irvine Welsh and Chuck Palahniuk’s books and a lot more)

Since “fiction influences reality” (I have to see an actual study on that claim yet), where are your petitions and your criticism against actual literature that talks about problematic themes and reaches way more people than fanfiction? Why do you only want to censor fanworks? I don’t see thousand of posts and discussions about what piece of fiction should or should not be sold in stores. (And I’m glad I don’t, because I’m pretty sure George R.R. Martin would not be happy to be called “gross” and “disgusting” and he could even have the financial means to make you stop through legal measures if he wanted to.)

Think about it, fellow fanwriters. Did you really write something so “problematic” that no work of “official” art has never touched that theme before you? And since the answer 99% of the time is no, why are these people coming after you so concerned with your fic and you instead of being concerned with that book/song/movie? Isn’t it because you’re more vulnerable than a famous and possibly dead writer? Isn’t it because they can guilt you into deleting everything and feeling ashamed about producing something they didn’t like, while that’s not achievable with a famous and possibly dead writer?

What you write might be shitty or a masterpiece, but you have the right to publish it on the internet if it doesn’t violate the ToS of the website you chose. Go out and publish all the problematic content you want. And if someone gives you shit for it, please, please, please, do not delete it. As much as some nasty people might hate your work, others like it, others care. I care.

What is this whole argument going around about "problematic" depictions of non-straight characters in fiction being homophobic? Saying that just because a character is gay/bisexual/not straight then they have to be Good and Nice and Sweet and they can never get anywhere near being “problematic” sounds more homophobic to me than the concept of treating every sexual orientation in the same way in fiction. 

It’s natural for people to dislike things just as much as it’s natural for people to like things. But I disagree: people don’t have the right to be against the portrayal of a certain theme in fiction. No one has that right, that’s censorship and it’s something that actually takes away people’s rights.

You can dislike a thing, that’s okay: then spend your time giving attention to things you like, because you cannot change what you don’t like and what you disagree with. You can have conversations about it, but you should understand that you cannot control the world and things that you dislike will always exist and sometimes they even have the right to exist. 

I do criticize anti-KS and antis in general, regardless of the personal reasons they have, because I don’t agree with their opinion and I don’t think their personal problems contribute to the discussion. I am sorry people went through abuse or other terrible experiences, but we cannot ban things because of 10 (or 100, or 1000) people’s personal problem with it. If you want to convince me KS doesn’t deserve to get published, sangbum should not be shipped, etc., you’ll have to give me objective arguments as to why that would be harmful and to whom and why the solution is banning a work of art, not personal reasons.

I don’t agree with antis’ opinion, but most of all I don’t agree with the way they use it to bully other people and I think the way they act and some ideas they support are harmful for people’s freedom of expression. I do understand that they think my opinion is the harmful one, but no one of them managed to change my mind so far. Actually I still haven’t read a good, worthy argument. Besides, all the people I know who actively criticize(d) antis don’t send them death threats and suicide baiting in their inbox, they (we) don’t fill the tags of antis’ favourite fandom with obnoxious hate toward characters, ships and actual people, they (we) don’t personally target and bully antis until they give up and close/remove content from their blogs. Most of us try to engage in reasonable discussions with arguments and sources supporting them, we try to share rational opinions and and don’t rely only the emotional impact of our words (“I was abused so I must be right!” “I’m having a panic attack and you dare argue with me?”). And if someone who shares our point of view did this, well I personally don’t approve of their behaviour and I would probably kindly ask them to stop, but that’s certainly not a wide phenomenon such as “antis”.

I understand we should always put ourselves in the other person’s shoes, but at the same time I can still disagree and argue with them even if I do that. I’ll tell you more: if I think someone’s stupid, I don’t argue with them. Because they’re stupid. And every time I replied to an anti, I did it because I assumed a discussion with them was possible, therefore I was assuming they were not stupid. Also, I want to add another little thing: judging someone’s ideas is legitimate and there’s nothing wrong about it. Once you know an opinion, you will judge it. That doesn’t mean you’ll judge everyone who has that opinion. You can say “that opinion is wrong”, but that doesn’t mean you think that person is inherently wrong because they have that opinion. They might have a whole lot of other opinions with which you agree. I can tell the difference between disagreeing with a single opinion and disliking/bashing/bullying a person.

Oh my god Anon, you really want me to write a book or something here. Holy shit. Well, let’s get to it. Most, if not all, the opinion I’m going to share are (apart from obviously personal opinions) going to be… well, probably not really pleasant from a y//oi fan’s perspective. I’m not going to insult it, but I’m not going to praise it either, so, my ramblings will be under the cut.

Okay, first of all that goddamned post was a joke. I was joking, a verb that the ks tag doesn’t seem to understand the meaning of.

But even if I was deadly serious, I did not express an opinion in that post, because when I do my posts tend to be: a) long ass rants, b) ignored. This is the second time I make a joking post on the tag and people start discourse on it and come to me wanting to discuss. Which is okay, you’re free to do whatever you want, and I will answer discourse if I’m in the mood, but what annoys me about this is that you read my posts and automatically assume what my detailed position on the matter is, how I interpret the characters, my “moral stances” and opinions on the most various themes (rape, cheating, emotional and physical abuse, etc.), and you all don’t even stop for a second to think that maybe (MAYBE) my opinion is not openly stated in that post so you could maybe (MAYBE) stop for a moment and ask for my opinion before criticizing the one you are assuming is my opinion.

So what happened is I went into the tags and I found people saying “aaah, I hate Sangwoo, he cheated on Bum!!!1!1!!” and those same people are against Sangbum because “you can’t ship it, you’re supporting abuse if you do!!!!1!!1! ks is a psychological horror, not a yaoi, you gross fujo perverts!!!!11!!1!!”. So basically the same people who say that Sangwoo and Bum can’t be in a relationship were saying that Sangwoo cheated. Seeing that, I made that post, which clearly states exactly that. Is this too much to understand? Too much information to process? Do you understand that that post was just pointing out inconsistencies in that line of reasoning without expressing my personal opinion on the matter?

And the last thing is: where did I say that Sangwoo is a good person that did good things? He’s a fucking serial killer! Where did I ever state he’s a good person, that he’s not a manipulative psycho, that he didn’t abuse Bum, that he’s nice and pure and innocent and holy? Where? Because all your arguments seem to refer to someone who said that Sangwoo didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t say that, because, guess what?, it’s not my opinion.

I love Sangwoo as a character and I love trying to interpret and analyze his actions and his twisted personality. He’s a good and interesting character, but he’s not a good person and he has never been, since the beginning of the comic. If you dislike him, suit yourself, you’re free to think whatever you want about a fictional character, he won’t get offended. But at least be intelligent enough to tell the difference between liking a character and approving of what he does.

Under the cut you’ll find a lot of salt.

First of all, when did I say “it’s not rape”?. Because in no post written by me I have ever said this. This might be your interpretation of something I wrote but I never stated such thing. I am sure because I had decided to wait until we actually had a translated version of chapter 16 before I commented on the rape/not-rape discourse. I did read a translation and I have my ideas about what happened (and I don’t know where you and other people see that “it’s pretty clear he was lying”, it’s not pretty clear for shit, the pov is Sangwoo’s), but there were lots of translations, detailed and not, and I see no point in discussing it if we don’t have a definitive common and clear material we can all rely on when we discuss. Doing it now makes no sense since we only have the Korean officially, and I don’t know about you but I don’t understand Korean.

Why do you think it’s wrong to hate him after ch sixteen? He literally raped Yoonbum.

The fact that what happened might have been rape has no connection with the hate towards him. 

What I implied in the post I assume you’re referring to is that

I don’t agree with people hating Sangwoo.

Which doesn’t mean that it’s wrong. I don’t know about you, but I’m not like antis, and the fact that I do not agree or like something doesn’t mean that that thing should not exist. You want to hate Sangwoo? Do it. I don’t agree with you, I don’t hate him. We have different opinions and it’s fine.

I don’t understand people who hate Sangwoo.

This is the point of the post. 

I don’t understand people who only hate Sangwoo now because he’s supposedly a rapist but didn’t hate him before despite him being a serial killer (and probably raping his victims too). And if they did I don’t see the point is saying it again now: we know you hate him, thank you for your precious opinion, I’ll make sure to add it to the list of things I don’t give a fuck about.

I don’t understand people who hate Sangwoo in general because he’s a very fucked up character, yes, but that’s what you should expect from KS. And if you hate fucked up characters because they do “immoral” shit or crimes you will probably end up hating almost everyone in that manhwa and most likely both the main characters (because Bum is fucked up too and he commits crimes and him being a victim doesn’t make him innocent).

But most of all I don’t understand why the fuck everyone feels the need to plague the tag with 2631825474 posts about how much they hate Sangwoo or sangbum. I don’t understand hate in general. I don’t see the reason why people bother creating hate content instead of content about things they love. The KS tag is full of people who keep feeling the need to point out the obvious (”Sangwoo is a killer, he’s a bad person!” … don’t you say…) or to shame people because they want everyone to have they same opinion they have (“If you don’t hate Sangwoo/if you ship sangbum you’re just a rape apologist/other-nice-things” which is just another way to say “either you agree with me or you suck” and, well, my I-don’t-give-a-fuck list is getting longer by the second)

But anyway, that was the point of the post: why the fuck do people feel the need to produce hate content? I don’t understand that.

Whether Sangwoo raped Yoonbum or not, that doesn’t change my opinion of him, because I don’t expect a serial killer to act according to the law nor to moral standards, and that’s the interesting thing about him. 

I see lots of people on this site going after fanworks and their authors and against ships because they maintain that narrative should condemn certain themes explicitly, and that by not condemning explicitly those things it’s supporting them and “normalizing” them.

First of all unreliable narrator was, is and will always be a thing. An unreliable narrator is by definition not objective and would not condemn morally wrong behaviuor nor admit to obvious truths and will always tell the story through the filter of his own mind and his own opinions. Examples in literature are The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (here is an interesting publication about it), A Clockwork Orange (the book more than the movie), The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger, but also a lot of crime and mystery novels.

The unreliable narrator can be used just to keep some information from the reader, but when morally wrong themes are concerned it is often also used to explore the psychology of a certain character and the reasons why they do what they do, to make the reader understand that character even though they are disgusted by what they do.

Seeing that actual books and other forms of fiction (the ones they sell in stores) often do not explicitly condemn morally wrong actions, why do people on this website only go after fanworks written/drawn by literal nobodies on the internet and read/looked at by, what, 1k, 2k people? (if it's a successful and famous fic/art that is) instead of going after books that sold millions of copies? (ie: some of the books I mentioned earlier, but also books like A Song Of Ice And Fire, some of Irvine Welsh and Chuck Palahniuk’s books and a lot more)