Miles to Go

I'd add that, as with any archive, AO3 can and does remove things that are not within its mandate to host. Those include: commercial promotion, non-transformative works (someone's economics homework, the entire text of The Great Gatsby, plagiarized fics), spam, ephemeral content (e.g. fic finding posts, update plans, reaction posts), and illegal-in-the-US content. The rest of it?As long as it's a fanwork, our mission is to preserve. It doesn't matter if you think it's unimportant, doesn't have artistic merit, is offensive or in poor taste or badly written. As an actual professional archivist for about as long as I've been an AO3 volunteer, that's the "quality control" that we engage in.

The "they let in any old trash" is extra funny when you remember that there are libraries that have an actual assignment to keep EVERYTHING. I think here in Sweden there are seven (I could be wrong about the number) libraries who have a duty to collect everything that's printed here. That newsletter from your folk dance group. The rantings of the local extremist party. IKEA catalogues. EVERYTHING. There's so much they don't even have the time and money to sort through it all. And they're the most prestigious libraries in the land.

This just in Ao3 is Fanfiction's Library of Congress, pass it on

does anybody else remember that reality show where they gaslit a bunch of americans into thinking they were competing to marry prince harry but it was really just some guy

#oh they GASLIT gaslit them

You can control white people by giving them cheese

cheese is so good tho

I got one

actually that fits w my theory that fanfiction is closer to literary analysis than it is to creative writing. like i feel like so much of fanfiction is more about "this is my interpretation of the text, and i'm teasing out the complexities of this interpretation by writing it in the format of a creative writing piece" than it is about an original piece of fiction

but arguably, i adore aus because its the author analysing the characters - what makes them innately themselves and to what extent are they defined by their surroundings? if their surroundings changed what needs to remain the same for me to recognise the character? if you read enough AUs about the same two characters you notice that certain elements of the original text always creep in (in every single AU Zuko still has an abusive dad, etc) which is the fic writer's way of deconstructing a character and studying what would have been the original writer's approach to building the character