In science fiction, AIs tend to malfunction due to some technicality of logic, such as that business with the laws of robotics and an AI reaching a dramatic, ironic conclusion.
Content regulation algorithms tell me that sci-fi authors are overly generous in these depictions.
“Why did cop bot arrest that nice elderly woman?”
“It insists she’s the mafia.”
“It thinks she’s in the mafia?”
“No. It thinks she’s an entire crime family. It filled out paperwork for multiple separate arrests after bringing her in.”
I have to comment on this because this is touching on something I see a lot of people (including Tumblr staff and everyone else who uses these kind of deep learning systems willy-nilly like this) don’t quite get: “Deep Reinforcement Learning” AI like these engage with reality in a fundamentally different way from humans. I see some people testing the algorithm and seeing where the “line” is, wondering whether it looks for things like color gradients, skin tone pixels, certain shapes, curves, or what have you. All of these attempts to understand the algorithm fail because there is nothing to understand. There is no line, because there is no logic. You will never be able to pin down the “criteria” the algorithm uses to identify content, because the algorithm does not use logic at all to identify anything, only raw statistical correlations on top of statistical correlations on top of statistical correlations. There is no thought, no analysis, no reasoning. It does all its tasks through sheer unconscious intuition. The neural network is a shambling sleepwalker. It is madness incarnate. It knows nothing of human concepts like reason. It will think granny is the mafia.
This is why a lot of people say AI are so dangerous. Not because they will one day wake up and be conscious and overthrow humanity, but that they (or at least this type of AI) are not and never will be conscious, and yet we’re relying on them to do things that require such human characteristics as logic and any sort of thought process whatsoever. Humans have a really bad tendency to anthropomorphize, and we’d like to think the AI is “making decisions” or “thinking,” but the truth is that what it’s doing is fundamentally different from either of those things. What we see as, say, a field of grass, a neural network may see as a bus stop. Not because there is actually a bus stop there, or that anything in the photo resembles a bus stop according to our understanding, but because the exact right pixels in the photo were shaded in the exact right way so that they just so happened to be statistically correlated with the arbitrary functions it created when it was repeatedly exposed to pictures of bus stops over and over. It doesn’t know what grass is, what a bus stop is, but it sure as hell will say with 99.999% certainty that one is in fact the other, for reasons you can’t understand, and will drive your automated bus off the road and into a ditch because of this undetectable statistical overlap. Because a few pixels were off in just the right way in just the right places and it got really, really confused for a second.
There, I even caught myself using the word “confused” to describe it. That’s not right, because “confused” is a human word. What’s happening with the AI is something we don’t have the language to describe.
Anyway what’s more, this sort of trickery can be mimicked. A human wouldn’t be able to figure it out, but another neural network can easily guess the statistical filters it uses to identify things and figure out how to alter images with some white noise in exactly the right way to make the algorithm think it’s actually something else. It’ll still look like the original image, just with some pixelated artifacts, but the algorithm will see it as something completely different. This is what’s known as a “single pixel attack.” I am fairly confident porn bot creators might end up cracking the content flagging algorithm and start putting up some weirdly pixelated porn anyway, and all of this will be in vain. All because Tumblr staff decided to rely on content moderation via slot machine.
TL;DR bots are illogical because they’re actually unknowable eldritch horrors made of spreadsheets and we don’t know how to stop them or how they got here, send help
This stuff is cool and much more interesting than the general-AI doomsaying anyway (which I will drag in the tags anyway). 🙂
Here’s an article about adversarial attacks on image recognition neural networks, and here’s another one about how your training data may mean that your system learns the wrong thing, like “this photo has sheep in” actually being “this photo has places that sheep graze in”.
Tag: interesting words
I’m pretty new to the BDSM stuff, and was curious why everyone says 50 Shades was so bad. I hope that’s not a stupid question…. I’m just really curious what’s the matter with their portrayal of that sort of relationship
The issue was how things were portrayed. Readers focused on the sex and not on the scenes between fucking.
BDSM is not about spanking, or handcuffing, or sliding an ice cube down your lover’s chest. It’s about mutual respect and consensual alternatives to pleasure. It’s often not even about sex. You can be a virgin who is into BDSM. (Please read “Nana to Kaoru” for an example of good BDSM between virgins.)
“Fifty Shades of Grey” is a story about suppressing a woman and attempting to mold her into a BDSM slave, mostly against her wishes. It crossed lines the BDSM community would never dare cross. There was not full consent, there was a massive lack of mutual respect, and the dominance went beyond playtime. It claimed to be about sadomasochism, when what it really portrayed is a domestic abuse relationship.
I’m going to partially quote this website and this blog to show what actions Christian Grey uses against Ana which are in direct violation of the very essence of BDSM.
- Duties of the Dom – This is the heart of BDSM. There is mutual trust between two or more people, a Dominant and a Submissive. There are rules and restrictions to keep everything safe, sane, and consensual. That mutual respect was not shown in the books. The BDSM community, and the duties of a Dom, were completely mocked. First, the contract was shown as a literal legal binding contract,
which is WAY over the top. Normally, contracts are just verbal, “Can I
do this? Is this okay?” Only rarely are they written down, mostly if the Dom has multiple Subs and needs to remember which restrictions to
follow. Granted, Christian is some rich-ass bloke so he might need that
legal side so some Sub doesn’t turn around and sue his ass for being an
abusive fucker, but then he pressures Ana into signing it,
which is precisely against the reason to have a contract between a Dom and Sub in the first
place. If someone is not comfortable with an act, you NEVER pressure
them into it. If they are not interested in BDSM and don’t want anything
to do with it, holy fucking hell, DON’T EVER DEMAND THEY DO IT ANYWAY.The first rule of BDSM Club: don’t force others into BDSM Club.
As
a Dom, as soon as he realized she was NOT into the BDSM scene, he should have
left her. You can’t force someone into being your Sub. Oh God, I can’t stress enough how utterly WRONG that is!!! Now, he could have dated her, eased her into it, started off
with light things, worked her into more. But no. He flat out did not want to date her. He only wanted sex and a
slave, and he didn’t want to wait for her to get used to it. He had
ZERO consideration for her emotional well-being, which is against the very ESSENCE of being a Dom. He could have gotten an actual Slave, but no… for some
godforsaken reason, he wanted her. Maybe that was part of the appeal to him: getting his way with
someone who was not fully willing, breaking her in. That’s horrible to
think about and puts a terrifying twist on the entire series, but it explains why he pressured Ana into this instead of going out and getting a real Slave.Give me a moment to explain something important. What Christian Grey wanted is not out of bounds for BDSM. What he wanted was a Slave, and that’s fine. There
is an actual category of submissives known as Slaves. They are a
rarity, because not many people are willing to have their lives so
thoroughly controlled. BDSM Slaves crave to have that control
placed over them. They want someone to control what they wear, what they
eat, who they hang out with, etc. Mentally, they need this extreme
level of control placed over them, or they simply can’t function well.
We see a Slave in the ex-submissive, and we see how Christian dropped
her so coldly, she honestly could not handle the freedom. That was
horrifically cruel of him. Slaves have a delicate mental state, and a
good Dom caters to their emotional needs even after they no longer
want that person as their Sub. Ana is not a Slave. She doesn’t
want this level of extreme submissiveness, and she’s vocal about it.
Most of the not-sex storyline is her balking at his restrictions. It’s
the main source of conflict in the first novel: she doesn’t want her
diet to be restricted, he forces her to eat more, sometimes sitting
there and intimidating her until she eats. He KEEPS PRESSURING HER and
demanding that she obey all those rules, and she keeps attempting to
reassert her freedom only to have her opinions and requests bluntly
ignored, or only grudgingly compromised. THAT RIGHT THERE is a huge violation of BDSM. The biggest thing separating BDSM from domestic abuse is consent and intent. She did not give her consent to be a pure Slave. He kept demanding it. BAM! NOT FUCKING BDSM!!! The entire relationship, each and every act, is not BDSM, because it lacks the respect and mutual trust a Dom and Sub must have.- Intimidation – He threatens to hit Ana for getting drunk before they’re even in a relationship. He again threatens to hit her if she rolls her eyes at him, and when she does, he follows through. When he attempts to feel up her leg at the restaurant and she pushes his
hand away, he glares at her, as if to say “you’ll pay for this.” In
chapter 18, they’re discussing his desire to spank her
again. When Ana asks if he’s going to hit her, he replies: “Yes, but
it won’t be to hurt you. I don’t want to punish you right now. If
you’d caught me yesterday evening, well that would have been a different
story…” So, basically, had he seen her the previous night, when
she simply forgot to call him, he’d have hit her in order to actually hurt her,
rather than as a part of a sexy, consensual BDSM scene. That’s called
physical abuse, guys. He also has a habit of yanking her arm or forcefully carrying her whenever she doesn’t want to go with him. It’s passive at times, but he uses intimidation and flat out threats through all aspects of his life, not just in the playroom. Threatening to hit someone as punishment for perfectly normal actions, like forgetting to call, drinking with friends, or not wanting intimacy in public, is abuse.- Possessiveness – He shows anger when she visits her own mother but does not tell him. He gets jealous of her male friends and demands she not hang around them. These are classic warning signs of domestic abuse.
- Stalking – THIS was plain creepy, maybe because I’ve had a few stalkers in my life. Christian Grey takes stalking to a whole other level. He shows up at her workplace, her apartment, he repeatedly calls her when she won’t respond, he even flies across the country to harass her at her mom’s house when she obviously went there to escape from his abusiveness.
- Imprisonment – It was right in the fucking contract. “The Dominant reserves the right to dismiss the submissive from his service at any time and for any reason. The submissive may request her release at any time, such request to be granted at the discretion of the Dominant.”
She even catches it. He’s allowed to drop her at any time, for any reason, but if she wants to break up… nope, she
has to BEG FOR PERMISSION which may or may not be granted. That…
shiiiit… I hope I don’t have to explain how utterly wrong that is.- Dubious Consent – He bypasses consent. A LOT. Even with the contract, he openly
admits that he got her drunk so that she would agree to it. What. The.
Fuck. Oh, but she “communicates better” when she’s drunk. Folks, never trust someone who purposely gets you drunk so you’ll have kinky sex with them. This means the entire contract is legally void, since she agreed under the influence. It means their entire relationship as a BDSM couple is void as well.- Gaslighting – This term has been in the media a lot, and you can find it in many things Christian Grey says. It boils down to saying and doing things which makes a person’s perception and sense of reality invalid. He preys on her lack on confidence, right from Chapter 3 and their first date, makes her question just about everything that is her reality, and then invalidates her opinions by enforcing his demands.
- Bodily Respect – There are so many examples of this through all three books. In the “sex on her period”
scene, he actually yanks her tampon out, without asking if that’s okay
first, which by her reaction, IT WAS NOT. Many women compare such a
personal violation as equal to rape itself. Having been a victim of
something similar, that scene really angered me. Even worse was about birth control. Ana didn’t want to be on the pill. Christian flat out demanded and threatened her to take it because he didn’t like condoms. Holy fucking shit, NO! A thousand times NO! And then every time she doesn’t take them, he’s outraged. When she ends up pregnant, he’s so furious that she honestly fears he’s going to leave her. HE COULDN’T JUST PUT A RUBBER ON HIS DICK??? No, he has to force his girlfriend into taking a pill with horrible side effects, a pill she has to take daily rather than him just covering his dick when he wants sex, or get a shot which is painful for her, all because he doesn’t like fucking with a condom on. And then he’s practically like, “If you don’t obey me, you won’t get sex.” Godfuckingdammit, I cannot even begin to express how outraged I was at Christian for THAT ALONE!- Comfort Zone Breach – Not just Christian, but Ana has flaws. It’s okay if our partner doesn’t want certain levels of intimacy. What’s not okay is when you’re in a longterm relationship, you want something, your partner does not, and you try to demand it. One of them wants to go out on dates, the other hates that idea. One wants to sleep in the same bed, the other wants their partner in a completely separate room, upstairs, away from them. That’s a sign that this isn’t going to work out, and that’s what Ana and Christian struggle through. He compromises, but grudgingly. He doesn’t WANT to compromise, he shouldn’t NEED to, and she shouldn’t FORCE him to change his comfort zone. Then there’s the touching his chest thing. He repeats many times, don’t touch his chest. Simple, right? She keeps trying. Now, I picked up on this because my husband has the same issue. I can touch everywhere but his nipples. Those are a hard limit no-touch zone. I couldn’t understand why until he finally told me about his issue. Hard limits are often connected to abuse, so they’re difficult to explain even to a loving partner, which is WHY they should be HONORED. Ana does not honor Christian’s bodily comfort zone. She keeps trying, keeps at it, becomes fixated on touching his chest. Jesus, woman, he doesn’t want it touched, don’t fucking touch it!
- Ignoring Instincts – She completely ignores and suppresses her inner voice. (Not the pirouetting thing, but the sane side of her brain.) She complains about Christian to her roommate, she does not feel comfortable around him, she despises the idea of being his “sex slave” when he first mentions BDSM. Once Ana has experienced being spanked, she finds that she has mixed
feelings about it. She emails Christian and tells him that she was
shocked to find herself aroused by it, as during the spanking, she felt
abused. ABUSED. Any caring Dom would immediately realize their partner isn’t up for BDSM at all, or they need to slow this WAAAAAY down. But Christian? No. He
replies: “If that is how you feel, do you think you could try to
embrace these feelings? Deal with them for me? That’s what a
submissive would do.” Are you kidding me you fucking little manipulative piece of shit??? Yeah, so in other words, “Hey, sorry you feel like
I abused you, but you know… you gotta just accept it,
because other girls would.” And she doesn’t even realize she’s just told him he’s being ABUSIVE and he’s just slammed her down. Fuck, girl! She even calls her mother in tears when she realizes how horribly her relationship with him is. Instead of realizing she was right from the very first spank and she’s being abused, she keeps returning to him.- “He Will Change” Mentality – Oh God, this one! It’s so common that people (no matter the gender) don’t see just how wrong it is. “He will change. I’ll change him. I can make him better.” Or even worse, this idealistic concept: “If you try hard enough, be patient, love enough, the person you are
with will eventually come around and treat you the way you deserve to be
treated.” Jesus Christ on a popcicle stick NO! This is dangerous, potentially DEADLY. This is how you get into toxic relationships that can seriously harm you. When making important decisions, such as entering into a
relationship, it’s important to base that decision on who the
person is today – not who they may become tomorrow. You likely won’t change them. You shouldn’t be burdened to do that. It’s seriously fucking dangerous, okay???- Rape – I saved this one for last, because it shocks almost every casual reader who liked the series. Yes, Christian Grey rapes Ana. He’s a rapist. She was sexually violated by her boyfriend. Okay, so here’s the scene. Christian turns up at her apartment (uninvited). He tries to seduce Ana, she tells him that she
doesn’t want sex and would rather talk. He does not respect her wishes and continues to be forceful. “‘No,’ I protest, kicking him off.” After such a definite “no” to sex, he replies: “If you
struggle, I’ll tie your feet, too. If you make a noise, Anastasia, I
will gag you. Keep quiet. Katherine is probably outside listening,
right now.” He then proceeds to have sex with her, in spite of her
trying to kick him away and saying a rather firm “No!” That’s rape, by the way. EL James writes that Ana enjoys the sex that
Christian forced on her, so we’re meant to ignore the fact that she asked
him to stop and even physically tried to force him away. She enjoyed it, so that makes it all okay, right? Fucking Satan with a dildo NO!
I don’t care if he’s got a cock to rival Zeus, rape is rape, even if it
felt good! If a person doesn’t want sex, and sex is forced upon them, especially under threat like what he did,
I don’t care if you’re dating, married, if you orgasmed, if it felt
FUCKING AWESOME … it was still a rape.Meet Christian Grey: confirmed
rapist!Ugh… I hope this wordy rant explains why “Fifty Shades of Grey” is not about BDSM, but about abuse and the suppression of a young and rather naive woman by a powerful and dominating man. Maybe the sex scenes were hot (when they weren’t utterly repulsive), but when you take out all the fucking and spanking, what happens between the two of them in day-to-day life is a terrifying example of domestic abuse.
BDSM is so much more beautiful than that. It’s mutual, it’s respectful, it honors the Submissive as something precious, a gift bestowed upon the Dominant, to be cherished and spoiled … not a Dominant who demands, pesters, belittles, coerces, threatens, and ultimately rapes the Submissive.
When people in the BDSM community learn about a person like Christian Grey, they shun that person. They warn Subs against getting involved, because that’s not BDSM. It’s abuse. It’s dangerous, potentially life-threatening. I can’t help but wonder if that’s precisely WHY Christian Grey chased after a neophyte like Ana. Maybe the BDSM community in Seattle had heard the stories and knew he was bad news. He apparently left a trail of shattered Slaves in his wake, and that doesn’t go unnoticed, even if it’s not reported due to respect for privacy and not “outing” someone to the police.
Maybe he went after Ana because the BDSM community knew not to get involved with him, and since he simply couldn’t find a real Slave, he decided to create one of his own, someone who wouldn’t know the boundaries, wouldn’t see when he crosses them, and wouldn’t realize the idea that “you can’t leave me unless I give you permission” is total and utter bullshit.
Abusive behavior is something you really do have to watch out for, not just in the BDSM scene, but in every relationship. BDSM practitioners just happen to notice the abuse easier, since we know the vital importance of consent, intent, and mutual respect. EL James obviously did not understand the importance of consent to the BDSM community. She wrote a fanfic about Twilight characters fucking, she turned it into a novel, and she truly had no understanding of the community she was so poorly portraying.
Fifty Shades of Grey is not about BDSM. It’s a story about abusiveness interspersed with kinks. Not BDSM fucking. Just kinky fucking.
every time I see more of the ‘ao3 is evil’ crap circulating I think, ‘well, tumblr is evil too and I don’t see you stop using it’
You know, the more I think about this, the more I think the real complaint isn’t that AO3 hosts “evil” content, it’s that it doesn’t allow harassment/dogpiling of “evil” creators as easily as Tumblr. Abuse won’t remove or even re-tag a work except in a handful of very specific cases, but they will suspend or ban users for harassment, including filing repeated unfounded Abuse reports. Authors also have at least some ability to screen/block comments on works, and there’s no direct messaging system outside of commenting on works through which to pursue harassment. You can follow a creator but you can’t block them (much less encourage others to do the same).
Tumblr, by contrast, generally ignores any abuse report that doesn’t involve the DMCA, and aggressive anons can and have driven bloggers off the site entirely. The fact that the same tactics are used by social justice bloggers and neo-Nazis (for instance) doesn’t matter – they’re the affordances of the site, by accident or design, and an entire fannish generation have gotten very used to performing their fannish (and moral) identity in this fashion.
(I thinks it’s relevant that AO3 was designed by fandom’s LJ generation and in some respect mirrors the affordances of LJ circa 2010. Tumblr is a very different site and that, moreso than age differences, seems to be at the root of this – though of course age intersect with site experience in a non-trivial way.)
ding ding ding ding.
Ao3 requires you to police your own consumption of content. Ao3 won’t let you destroy someone’s online presence simply because you don’t like it. Ao3 won’t let you impose your own morality on other without cause.
If you have issues with this, and the fact that Ao3 requires you to have responsibility and agency, then you seriously need to sit down and have a damned good long hard look at yourself.
The question I usually fail to see being answered when people bitch about the content on AO3 is – so who gets to decide?
You? Me? A committee of my friends? Of yours? Of those who have the most kudos? Of those who have no interest in fandom, but want to protect other people from dangerous content, whatever it may be? Who gets that power, and how long will they have it?
Who are you comfortable with giving the power of regulating all the content? What happens in grey areas? What happens when something you like isn’t liked by the Decider? Is there an appeal? Who gets to make the arguments for and against something?
The world is complex and there are no easy answers.
The impossibility of creating a censorship board that curates based on content is a great reason why those things don’t exist, and shouldn’t.
Certain people are screaming that AO3 is bad because it’s not a “safe space.” The real problem they have, though, is that AO3 was created to be a safe space – for writers. And it does a pretty good job of that. It was designed to be a place where writers are safe from arbitrary content rule changes, random and unwarned deletions, and abuse-report abuse (which is common on ff.net). The Four Big Warnings + CNTW system is beautiful in its fairness and simplicity.
Antis can’t take control of it. And because control-freakdom is at the heart of their “movement,” this drives them into frenzies. Good. It motivated me to dig a little deeper into my pocket to donate on the last drive. For all the pleasure AO3 has given me over the years, that’s money well spent.
The real problem they have, though, is that AO3 was created to be a safe space – for writers.
Preach it loud and hard!
I’m a member of the LJ generation, and when I first came to Tumblr (grudgingly and out of desperation, I might add, since it tragically seems to be the only place to really connect with other fandom peeps) I was horrified at how people here had established this sort of fucked up bully culture, where nobody is responsible for monitoring their own consumption, and rather they expect everyone else to custom tailor content to the whims and desires of the Shrieking Banshee Masses. And woe be to the person who doesn’t bend and break! “I’m going to bully you while accusing you and your Big Mean Poopie Content of being the actual bully, so I can hopefully distract you and others from realizing I’m being a royal intrusive asshat who failed Astronomy 101 b/c I clearly believe the world revolves around me.”
The irony here is that this in itself is an abuse tactic – victim blaming with a side of gaslighting. Pot, meet kettle.
And it’s the exact same mentality that drives right-wing lunatics to kick up a fuss about the existence of icky cootie gay people in media because we need to “protect family values”, or who take to screeching at Starbucks because their particular religious symbolism isn’t portrayed on the winter holiday cups and OMG WAR ON CHRISTMAS, STARBUCKS STOP OPPRESSING ME BY NOT CATERING TO MY PERSONAL TASTE.
The mentality is one and the same – “Cater to ME ME ME or FACE MY DIVINE WRATH even if it means taking away other people’s freedom!” while hiding behind a flimsy-ass shield of faux righteous anger.
And when these bozos find an environment or situation where they’re unable or not allowed to bully people into silence and submission, they stomp their feet and pitch a tantrum and claim that they’re the ones being oppressed. Identical shit, different pile, and it’s the exact same infantile, schoolyard rubbish no matter which side it’s coming from.
This was a really interesting read. The last poster in particular but all of it.
Okay, so I find the history behind this discussion really interesting, because there are two things that stand out to me. One is the thought AO3′s culture is equivalent to LJ circa 2010. This is almost true, except you actually have to go back further. Ao3 and Dreamwidth are both specifically trying to recreate the fan culture of Livejournal from 1999-2007, and I can say that with some authority because A) I was there (olllld) and B) both were founded in 2008/09 as a direct response to the shit happening on LiveJournal and Fanlib.
The other thing is the idea that anon-harassment culture started with Tumblr. Because, kiddos, did it ever not. Tumblr is very much Fanfiction.net circa 1998-forward. (That’s right, FF.N was basically always awful.) But how we got from there to here is actually really interesting And tangly. And long.
Up to the late 1990s, fan communities were often small and decentralized because there was a huge fear that fans would be targeted by content creators if they drew too much attention. Since several authors (Anne Rice, Mercedes Lackey, Anne McCaffery) actually DID issue cease&desists to fan creators, it’s kind of understandable where the fear came from. It’s also why you still see fanfic floating around with disclaimers, something young!tumblr loves to mock.
Harry Potter changed *everything*. Like, I really can’t emphasize how much. Fanfiction was always there, being shared on email lists or privately hosted or literally mailed cross country. But Harry Potter hit BIG in 1997. It had a massive crossover appeal that hadn’t been seen since probably the original Star Trek, and the baby Internet was all. over. it. If you weren’t there, imagine Twilight. But bigger. And J.K. Rowling stood out from other creators by condoning fanfiction in her very early interviews. Not to mention there was a lot of down time between books and, as you might know, the fans do not do well unpoliced.
This led to, I’m not kidding, an explosion of sites like FF.N. I don’t think a lot of younger users get how revolutionary AO3 is: not just because it created a safe space, but because of how much it’s done to centralize fanfiction on the internet. We used to get our fix through webrings and e-serves, so in the late 90s/early 00s we thought nothing of having dozens of scattered fanfic sites.
At the same time, the Digital Millennium Copywrite Act was coming down. The legality of fanworks was getting more and more complex. And no one knew how to handle these questions, because they had literally never come up before. When it was just authors going after individual fans, things usually went quick and brutal. Fans had neither the money nor the legal teams to stand up to creators, even if (as we were slowly beginning to realize) we had a strong case to create and share fanworks. So, if you got hit with a takedown notice, you took your fic down and laid low, hoping to avoid any further interest.
But now the legal burden was shifting from individuals to well-funded corporations. Fanfic.net and LJ didn’t want to shut down their fan-contributors, who were creating a huge stream of free content and bringing in advertising revenue. At the same time, they didn’t want to get shut down by a lawsuit if Lucasfilm found Han/Chewie smut and decided to go after the real money. The next 10 years were basically all of us – authors, fan creators, website executives – stumbling through brand new legal territory and figuring it out by trial and error. FF.N erred on the side of caution by becoming more and more restrictive. They shut down the entire Anne McCaffrey and Anne Rice sections, and eventually banned “pornographic” fanfiction from the site in an attempt to cover their legal rears. (It backfired, unsurprisingly, because say what you will about fandom: we like our smut. Also, FF.N had other issues
that we won’t get into herewill discuss shortly.) A bunch of other sites folded or waned in popularity as fandom wars divided the fan population. Authors scattered to the winds, and a lot of them ended up on LJ.LJ started out very user friendly. We’re talking an open source code, an almost entirely volunteer staff. Even after it was sold to 6Apart in 2005, LJ was pretty permissive. A lot of that had to do with the aforementioned DMCA, which protected ISPs and hosting corporations. Like I mentioned above, a lot of the migration from FF.N to LJ (as a place for fanfiction SPECIFICALLY) came when FF.N started banning explicit fanworks. Why? Because FF.N targeted these fanworks based entirely on user reports. “Tell us if you find porn,” FF.N said, “And we’ll take care of it.”
Backup real quick. LJ, in many ways, set the standard for online privacy in a way that was far ahead of its time. Friendslocked journals were the norm rather than the exception and many, many communities disallowed anonymous commenting. (I’m not saying LJ wasn’t toxic as fuck, by the way. It is 2017 and let’s all have a moment of acknowledgement for how terrible LJ culture actually could be.) But LJ, on the whole, was much, much better at self-policing than FF.N. On FF.N, all of your stuff was out in the open. It was just there. Anyone could read it, anyone could report it.
And these two sites coexisted. All BNFs had a private journal and a public FF.N page. So if I hated someone and I wanted to harass them off the internet, on LJ, I’d have to make multiple sock puppets and concoct elaborate multi-journal ruses to do it on LJ (haha, who would do THAT?). What am I to do? Simple: Head off to FF.N and anonymously flame them there!
FF.N became synonymous with anonymous hate long before the anti-smut censorship came down. But once those rules were in place, the system was rife for abuse by the Purity Police or grudgewankers. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaay before it was cool to dm “kill urself” to someone on tumblr, it was happening on FF.N. All you, the early internet user, had to do was post a report link for your rival’s FF.N account on your LJ. Hate a pairing? A kink? Why not post a scathing rant, link included, to this captive audience of ALL YOUR FRIENDS.
Yeah, this system had no room for abuse.
So. FF.N opened the door and fandom came rushing through like the raging assholes we are. Certain Fandoms Alluded To Previously got so deeply divided that they split and formed their own fanfiction archives that occasionally rained hate on each other. Everyone else slowly withdrew to LJ, where locked communities offered some level of protection. Then, irony of ironies, fandom as a whole got targeted by the purity wankers. And of course, of course, it came back to Harry Potter.
It’s 2007. Things have quieted down since 2001, when certain unnamed people’s fics were targeted for plagiarism and deleted from FF.N even though, just to be clear, they actually were plagiarized and, while there was an element of mob persecution, the actual fact remains that the work in question was legitimately in violation of FF.N’s TOS.
Ahem. It’s 2007. And everyone’s fairly chill. Creators are far more comfortable with fanfiction and fan creators are confident in posting their work so long as they aren’t profiting directly from it. Hosting sites, meanwhile, are profiting from fanworks, but they’ve got the legal shield of the DMCA to hide behind, so they’re feeling A-OKAY. And then Warriors for Innocence appears. WfI existed before strikethrough, and they existed after, but they made their mark on fandom when they reported upwards of 500 journals, most of them fan journals and communities, to LJ. The theory runs as follows: 6A, the company who’d bought LJ 2 years prior, realizes that the DMCA didn’t protect them if the fan works in question are “indecent”. Compounding this, 6A is already trying to clean up the famdomier aspects of LJ. Either they’re looking for a sale, or sites like ONTD are bringing in massive amounts of hits. WfI brings 6A a perfect hit list, and 6A goes to work.
So one morning we all wake up and find that hundreds of journals, including the pornish_pixies community and several BNF’s personal journals, have been deleted. Literally gone: a lot of the media stored on these communities has been purged forever. Hope you had backups. Also gone: large swaths of the Pretty Gothic Lolita community, Lolita book discussion groups, and rape survivor communities.
In a quest to rid LJ of “pedophilia,” 6A wiped out a large swath of ethically questionable fanfic, and woke a beast. Again: We like our porn. 6A took a step back and restored some of the deleted journals, but the damage had been done. AO3 was already being discussed as a response to Fanlib, a hosting site that wanted to charge for access to fanfiction. (Yes, if you’ve been following along, that was a terrible idea. But that’s a post for another day.) But as AO3 began to change and grow, creators specifically wrote provisions into the TOS that guaranteed a strikethrough-esque event could never happen on the site. A specific kink or pairing would never be considered a violation of the TOS. The onus was on the reader, not the author, to protect themselves with the information given. Basically, AO3 took the early fandom nugget “Don’t like, don’t read” and made it policy. When peole say AO3 grew out of Livejournal, they’re specifically referencing this. One event that proved ALL OF OUR LONGSEATED FEARS WERE TRUUUUUUUUUE.
Rising from the ashes of LJ, you also had Dreamwidth. I’m actually kind of surprised DW wasn’t mentioned in the OP, since it grew out of the same ideology as AO3. Run by fans, for fans, because LJ (which at this point had been sold to SUP Media) had no idea what it was doing. Also like AO3, DW went to extreme lengths to make a safe fan culture inherent to the structure the site. Stay within the law, and DW and AO3 will back you up.
It’s worth noting that Tumblr actually predates Strikethrough. But Tumblr, unlike DW and AO3, wasn’t designed for fans. It didn’t carry the legacy of Strikethrough with it the way AO3 and DW did. So I guess– I have no evidence, but I’m surmising – that’s how it fell into the role of Natural Successor to Fanfic.net and Livejournal. It’s kind of inevitable, actually, that since neither LJ nor Tumblr was made for fans, they ended up falling into the same black hole of fandom collision. Kinkshaming people off the internet for literally as long as there’s been an internet. And then, on the other hand, you’ve got DW and AO3, who’ve watched fandom rip itself apart AT LEAST 3 times and are determined not to let it happen again. DW and AO3: We haven’t cared about the filthy shit you’re into since 2008.
That’s it, folks. Fandom mom wrote almost 2k words on early fandom and now she needs a nap.
AO3 was created to be a safe space – for writers
Kids read your fandom history research goddamit. Here are just a few, and these are not hard to find. We’re the internet generation – use a search field and read multi-source history checks, okay?
(almost all of these are linked from my personal reblogs, because i know i won’t change my username meaning the links will always work)
fandom history:
Yes, fic writers were harassed, sued, sent C&D letters – we published underground
Here is Some Fandom ‘Oral History’ for You Guys @copperbadge
The Places Fandom Dwells: A Cautionary Tale @mizstorge – so many must read links – our whole LJ-and-on online history is here
‘Intellislash’ [or ‘Your Fandom Culture of Origin Matters’] @copperbadge
History of Ancient Fanfiction (no really)
We started on Geocities and del.i.cio.us – then Yahoo came…
a brief history of the LJ strikethrough and subsequent fan migration @stardust-rain
Very First Star Trek Fic Published – 1974
What JKR and SMeyer did for fanfic
some good fandom knowledgebase specifics:
bangpaths – when you see slutty!Snape, for example
Squicks and Triggers – not the same thing (multi-thread)
Fandom-wank (what is it)
AO3 says descriptive/story-telling tags are a-okay
all the crap about policing fanficition for any reason:
Fandom and fac can only be a healthy outlet if it stops policing shit – be it taboos, dark sides, gender, orientation, kink, etc. (multi-thread – @televisiontelepath )
“Ship means something you want to see happen.” Bitch, no it don’t. @pyrebomb
I’m Done Explaining Why Fanfic is Okay @bookshop & others + links
Why Do Fangirls Always Make Them Gay?
The Importance of Mary Sue unwinona
random fan history fun reads:
Fangirling after 30 (multi-thread)
Older fans run our Infrastructure (also, 90+ year old author who writes darkwing duck slashfic how awesome is that (multi-thread)
we built this kingdom, motherfuckers, with the trekkie zine housewives before us (multi-thread) older fans fun tories
STRAIGHT DUDES OF THE WORLD [in which @fozmeadows explains the best way to learn about female desire…is to read words written by actual females :D]
On Fanfic & Emotional Continuity (multi-thread)
my odds and ends cause i have actually been here a while
We made AO3 TO PROTECT WRITERS WHO WERE BEING SUED,AND HARASSED,AND ATTACKED.,you don’t wanna read something? check the tags and move on,that’s YOUR RESPONSIBILITY TO YOURSELF,not our responsibility as the writers, as the fanartists,as the vidders,as the content creators of all kinds,ARTISTS MAKE ART,YOU DON’T LIKE THAT PARTICULAR ART? MOVE ALONG. THERE’S PLENTY MORE WHERE THAT CAME FROM.,and for FUCK’S SAKE read the GOD DAMNED TAGS,we the writers TAG OUR SHIT TO HELP YOU KEEP YOURSELF SAFE.
So, I was reading this, and taking notes, and *boom* “Hey, that’s my article!” Thanks!
Why I will fight for AO3 and DW:
“Rising from the ashes of LJ, you also had Dreamwidth. I’m actually kind of surprised DW wasn’t mentioned in the OP, since it grew out of the same ideology as AO3. Run by fans, for fans, because LJ (which at this point had been sold to SUP Media) had no idea what it was doing. Also like AO3, DW went to extreme lengths to make a safe fan culture inherent to the structure the site. Stay within the law, and DW and AO3 will back you up.
It’s worth noting that Tumblr actually predates Strikethrough. But Tumblr, unlike DW and AO3, wasn’t designed for fans. It didn’t carry the legacy of Strikethrough with it the way AO3 and DW did. So I guess– I have no evidence, but I’m surmising – that’s how it fell into the role of Natural Successor to Fanfic.net and Livejournal. It’s kind of inevitable, actually, that since neither LJ nor Tumblr was made for fans, they ended up falling into the same black hole of fandom collision. Kinkshaming people off the internet for literally as long as there’s been an internet. And then, on the other hand, you’ve got DW and AO3, who’ve watched fandom rip itself apart AT LEAST 3 times and are determined not to let it happen again. DW and AO3: We haven’t cared about the filthy shit you’re into since 2008.” @rapacityinblue
All of this. So much. Don’t get me wrong, I love the aspect of tumblr that allows fans to be critical of source content and fan content alike. I think we should talk about the issues with things like incest ships and ships with large age gaps, and why white male villains often end up with massive fanbases while Black heroes end up with much smaller ones, or even with haters. And tons of other issues besides. I think the critical side of fandom is important and endlessly interesting. We should discuss and discourse and argue and meta the hell out of things.
But. The side of tumblr that bullies, doxxes, and harasses anyone who doesn’t fall in line with a person or group’s parameters of acceptable content is disgusting to me. And the calls for some kind of oversight or regulation beyond stuff that’s already illegal are concerning, because as others have said…no one calling for it seems to be able to articulate who decides this shit, and where lines are drawn. It’s one thing to talk in terms of what you personally will accept, condone, or do. It’s another thing all together to talk about setting overarching policies that large groups of people are held to.
(Under the cut because it’s long)
I want to especially agree with the parallels between FFN anon culture and Tumblr anon culture. Eerily similar response, though for different reasons (FFN anons tend to skew right and Tumblr anons left).
every time I see more of the ‘ao3 is evil’ crap circulating I think, ‘well, tumblr is evil too and I don’t see you stop using it’
You know, the more I think about this, the more I think the real complaint isn’t that AO3 hosts “evil” content, it’s that it doesn’t allow harassment/dogpiling of “evil” creators as easily as Tumblr. Abuse won’t remove or even re-tag a work except in a handful of very specific cases, but they will suspend or ban users for harassment, including filing repeated unfounded Abuse reports. Authors also have at least some ability to screen/block comments on works, and there’s no direct messaging system outside of commenting on works through which to pursue harassment. You can follow a creator but you can’t block them (much less encourage others to do the same).
Tumblr, by contrast, generally ignores any abuse report that doesn’t involve the DMCA, and aggressive anons can and have driven bloggers off the site entirely. The fact that the same tactics are used by social justice bloggers and neo-Nazis (for instance) doesn’t matter – they’re the affordances of the site, by accident or design, and an entire fannish generation have gotten very used to performing their fannish (and moral) identity in this fashion.
(I thinks it’s relevant that AO3 was designed by fandom’s LJ generation and in some respect mirrors the affordances of LJ circa 2010. Tumblr is a very different site and that, moreso than age differences, seems to be at the root of this – though of course age intersect with site experience in a non-trivial way.)
ding ding ding ding.
Ao3 requires you to police your own consumption of content. Ao3 won’t let you destroy someone’s online presence simply because you don’t like it. Ao3 won’t let you impose your own morality on other without cause.
If you have issues with this, and the fact that Ao3 requires you to have responsibility and agency, then you seriously need to sit down and have a damned good long hard look at yourself.
The question I usually fail to see being answered when people bitch about the content on AO3 is – so who gets to decide?
You? Me? A committee of my friends? Of yours? Of those who have the most kudos? Of those who have no interest in fandom, but want to protect other people from dangerous content, whatever it may be? Who gets that power, and how long will they have it?
Who are you comfortable with giving the power of regulating all the content? What happens in grey areas? What happens when something you like isn’t liked by the Decider? Is there an appeal? Who gets to make the arguments for and against something?
The world is complex and there are no easy answers.
The impossibility of creating a censorship board that curates based on content is a great reason why those things don’t exist, and shouldn’t.
Certain people are screaming that AO3 is bad because it’s not a “safe space.” The real problem they have, though, is that AO3 was created to be a safe space – for writers. And it does a pretty good job of that. It was designed to be a place where writers are safe from arbitrary content rule changes, random and unwarned deletions, and abuse-report abuse (which is common on ff.net). The Four Big Warnings + CNTW system is beautiful in its fairness and simplicity.
Antis can’t take control of it. And because control-freakdom is at the heart of their “movement,” this drives them into frenzies. Good. It motivated me to dig a little deeper into my pocket to donate on the last drive. For all the pleasure AO3 has given me over the years, that’s money well spent.
The real problem they have, though, is that AO3 was created to be a safe space – for writers.
Preach it loud and hard!
I’m a member of the LJ generation, and when I first came to Tumblr (grudgingly and out of desperation, I might add, since it tragically seems to be the only place to really connect with other fandom peeps) I was horrified at how people here had established this sort of fucked up bully culture, where nobody is responsible for monitoring their own consumption, and rather they expect everyone else to custom tailor content to the whims and desires of the Shrieking Banshee Masses. And woe be to the person who doesn’t bend and break! “I’m going to bully you while accusing you and your Big Mean Poopie Content of being the actual bully, so I can hopefully distract you and others from realizing I’m being a royal intrusive asshat who failed Astronomy 101 b/c I clearly believe the world revolves around me.”
The irony here is that this in itself is an abuse tactic – victim blaming with a side of gaslighting. Pot, meet kettle.
And it’s the exact same mentality that drives right-wing lunatics to kick up a fuss about the existence of icky cootie gay people in media because we need to “protect family values”, or who take to screeching at Starbucks because their particular religious symbolism isn’t portrayed on the winter holiday cups and OMG WAR ON CHRISTMAS, STARBUCKS STOP OPPRESSING ME BY NOT CATERING TO MY PERSONAL TASTE.
The mentality is one and the same – “Cater to ME ME ME or FACE MY DIVINE WRATH even if it means taking away other people’s freedom!” while hiding behind a flimsy-ass shield of faux righteous anger.
And when these bozos find an environment or situation where they’re unable or not allowed to bully people into silence and submission, they stomp their feet and pitch a tantrum and claim that they’re the ones being oppressed. Identical shit, different pile, and it’s the exact same infantile, schoolyard rubbish no matter which side it’s coming from.
This was a really interesting read. The last poster in particular but all of it.
Okay, so I find the history behind this discussion really interesting, because there are two things that stand out to me. One is the thought AO3′s culture is equivalent to LJ circa 2010. This is almost true, except you actually have to go back further. Ao3 and Dreamwidth are both specifically trying to recreate the fan culture of Livejournal from 1999-2007, and I can say that with some authority because A) I was there (olllld) and B) both were founded in 2008/09 as a direct response to the shit happening on LiveJournal and Fanlib.
The other thing is the idea that anon-harassment culture started with Tumblr. Because, kiddos, did it ever not. Tumblr is very much Fanfiction.net circa 1998-forward. (That’s right, FF.N was basically always awful.) But how we got from there to here is actually really interesting And tangly. And long.
Up to the late 1990s, fan communities were often small and decentralized because there was a huge fear that fans would be targeted by content creators if they drew too much attention. Since several authors (Anne Rice, Mercedes Lackey, Anne McCaffery) actually DID issue cease&desists to fan creators, it’s kind of understandable where the fear came from. It’s also why you still see fanfic floating around with disclaimers, something young!tumblr loves to mock.
Harry Potter changed *everything*. Like, I really can’t emphasize how much. Fanfiction was always there, being shared on email lists or privately hosted or literally mailed cross country. But Harry Potter hit BIG in 1997. It had a massive crossover appeal that hadn’t been seen since probably the original Star Trek, and the baby Internet was all. over. it. If you weren’t there, imagine Twilight. But bigger. And J.K. Rowling stood out from other creators by condoning fanfiction in her very early interviews. Not to mention there was a lot of down time between books and, as you might know, the fans do not do well unpoliced.
This led to, I’m not kidding, an explosion of sites like FF.N. I don’t think a lot of younger users get how revolutionary AO3 is: not just because it created a safe space, but because of how much it’s done to centralize fanfiction on the internet. We used to get our fix through webrings and e-serves, so in the late 90s/early 00s we thought nothing of having dozens of scattered fanfic sites.
At the same time, the Digital Millennium Copywrite Act was coming down. The legality of fanworks was getting more and more complex. And no one knew how to handle these questions, because they had literally never come up before. When it was just authors going after individual fans, things usually went quick and brutal. Fans had neither the money nor the legal teams to stand up to creators, even if (as we were slowly beginning to realize) we had a strong case to create and share fanworks. So, if you got hit with a takedown notice, you took your fic down and laid low, hoping to avoid any further interest.
But now the legal burden was shifting from individuals to well-funded corporations. Fanfic.net and LJ didn’t want to shut down their fan-contributors, who were creating a huge stream of free content and bringing in advertising revenue. At the same time, they didn’t want to get shut down by a lawsuit if Lucasfilm found Han/Chewie smut and decided to go after the real money. The next 10 years were basically all of us – authors, fan creators, website executives – stumbling through brand new legal territory and figuring it out by trial and error. FF.N erred on the side of caution by becoming more and more restrictive. They shut down the entire Anne McCaffrey and Anne Rice sections, and eventually banned “pornographic” fanfiction from the site in an attempt to cover their legal rears. (It backfired, unsurprisingly, because say what you will about fandom: we like our smut. Also, FF.N had other issues
that we won’t get into herewill discuss shortly.) A bunch of other sites folded or waned in popularity as fandom wars divided the fan population. Authors scattered to the winds, and a lot of them ended up on LJ.LJ started out very user friendly. We’re talking an open source code, an almost entirely volunteer staff. Even after it was sold to 6Apart in 2005, LJ was pretty permissive. A lot of that had to do with the aforementioned DMCA, which protected ISPs and hosting corporations. Like I mentioned above, a lot of the migration from FF.N to LJ (as a place for fanfiction SPECIFICALLY) came when FF.N started banning explicit fanworks. Why? Because FF.N targeted these fanworks based entirely on user reports. “Tell us if you find porn,” FF.N said, “And we’ll take care of it.”
Backup real quick. LJ, in many ways, set the standard for online privacy in a way that was far ahead of its time. Friendslocked journals were the norm rather than the exception and many, many communities disallowed anonymous commenting. (I’m not saying LJ wasn’t toxic as fuck, by the way. It is 2017 and let’s all have a moment of acknowledgement for how terrible LJ culture actually could be.) But LJ, on the whole, was much, much better at self-policing than FF.N. On FF.N, all of your stuff was out in the open. It was just there. Anyone could read it, anyone could report it.
And these two sites coexisted. All BNFs had a private journal and a public FF.N page. So if I hated someone and I wanted to harass them off the internet, on LJ, I’d have to make multiple sock puppets and concoct elaborate multi-journal ruses to do it on LJ (haha, who would do THAT?). What am I to do? Simple: Head off to FF.N and anonymously flame them there!
FF.N became synonymous with anonymous hate long before the anti-smut censorship came down. But once those rules were in place, the system was rife for abuse by the Purity Police or grudgewankers. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaay before it was cool to dm “kill urself” to someone on tumblr, it was happening on FF.N. All you, the early internet user, had to do was post a report link for your rival’s FF.N account on your LJ. Hate a pairing? A kink? Why not post a scathing rant, link included, to this captive audience of ALL YOUR FRIENDS.
Yeah, this system had no room for abuse.
So. FF.N opened the door and fandom came rushing through like the raging assholes we are. Certain Fandoms Alluded To Previously got so deeply divided that they split and formed their own fanfiction archives that occasionally rained hate on each other. Everyone else slowly withdrew to LJ, where locked communities offered some level of protection. Then, irony of ironies, fandom as a whole got targeted by the purity wankers. And of course, of course, it came back to Harry Potter.
It’s 2007. Things have quieted down since 2001, when certain unnamed people’s fics were targeted for plagiarism and deleted from FF.N even though, just to be clear, they actually were plagiarized and, while there was an element of mob persecution, the actual fact remains that the work in question was legitimately in violation of FF.N’s TOS.
Ahem. It’s 2007. And everyone’s fairly chill. Creators are far more comfortable with fanfiction and fan creators are confident in posting their work so long as they aren’t profiting directly from it. Hosting sites, meanwhile, are profiting from fanworks, but they’ve got the legal shield of the DMCA to hide behind, so they’re feeling A-OKAY. And then Warriors for Innocence appears. WfI existed before strikethrough, and they existed after, but they made their mark on fandom when they reported upwards of 500 journals, most of them fan journals and communities, to LJ. The theory runs as follows: 6A, the company who’d bought LJ 2 years prior, realizes that the DMCA didn’t protect them if the fan works in question are “indecent”. Compounding this, 6A is already trying to clean up the famdomier aspects of LJ. Either they’re looking for a sale, or sites like ONTD are bringing in massive amounts of hits. WfI brings 6A a perfect hit list, and 6A goes to work.
So one morning we all wake up and find that hundreds of journals, including the pornish_pixies community and several BNF’s personal journals, have been deleted. Literally gone: a lot of the media stored on these communities has been purged forever. Hope you had backups. Also gone: large swaths of the Pretty Gothic Lolita community, Lolita book discussion groups, and rape survivor communities.
In a quest to rid LJ of “pedophilia,” 6A wiped out a large swath of ethically questionable fanfic, and woke a beast. Again: We like our porn. 6A took a step back and restored some of the deleted journals, but the damage had been done. AO3 was already being discussed as a response to Fanlib, a hosting site that wanted to charge for access to fanfiction. (Yes, if you’ve been following along, that was a terrible idea. But that’s a post for another day.) But as AO3 began to change and grow, creators specifically wrote provisions into the TOS that guaranteed a strikethrough-esque event could never happen on the site. A specific kink or pairing would never be considered a violation of the TOS. The onus was on the reader, not the author, to protect themselves with the information given. Basically, AO3 took the early fandom nugget “Don’t like, don’t read” and made it policy. When peole say AO3 grew out of Livejournal, they’re specifically referencing this. One event that proved ALL OF OUR LONGSEATED FEARS WERE TRUUUUUUUUUE.
Rising from the ashes of LJ, you also had Dreamwidth. I’m actually kind of surprised DW wasn’t mentioned in the OP, since it grew out of the same ideology as AO3. Run by fans, for fans, because LJ (which at this point had been sold to SUP Media) had no idea what it was doing. Also like AO3, DW went to extreme lengths to make a safe fan culture inherent to the structure the site. Stay within the law, and DW and AO3 will back you up.
It’s worth noting that Tumblr actually predates Strikethrough. But Tumblr, unlike DW and AO3, wasn’t designed for fans. It didn’t carry the legacy of Strikethrough with it the way AO3 and DW did. So I guess– I have no evidence, but I’m surmising – that’s how it fell into the role of Natural Successor to Fanfic.net and Livejournal. It’s kind of inevitable, actually, that since neither LJ nor Tumblr was made for fans, they ended up falling into the same black hole of fandom collision. Kinkshaming people off the internet for literally as long as there’s been an internet. And then, on the other hand, you’ve got DW and AO3, who’ve watched fandom rip itself apart AT LEAST 3 times and are determined not to let it happen again. DW and AO3: We haven’t cared about the filthy shit you’re into since 2008.
That’s it, folks. Fandom mom wrote almost 2k words on early fandom and now she needs a nap.
AO3 was created to be a safe space – for writers
Kids read your fandom history research goddamit. Here are just a few, and these are not hard to find. We’re the internet generation – use a search field and read multi-source history checks, okay?
(almost all of these are linked from my personal reblogs, because i know i won’t change my username meaning the links will always work)
fandom history:
Yes, fic writers were harassed, sued, sent C&D letters – we published underground
Here is Some Fandom ‘Oral History’ for You Guys @copperbadge
The Places Fandom Dwells: A Cautionary Tale @mizstorge – so many must read links – our whole LJ-and-on online history is here
‘Intellislash’ [or ‘Your Fandom Culture of Origin Matters’] @copperbadge
History of Ancient Fanfiction (no really)
We started on Geocities and del.i.cio.us – then Yahoo came…
a brief history of the LJ strikethrough and subsequent fan migration @stardust-rain
Very First Star Trek Fic Published – 1974
What JKR and SMeyer did for fanfic
some good fandom knowledgebase specifics:
bangpaths – when you see slutty!Snape, for example
Squicks and Triggers – not the same thing (multi-thread)
Fandom-wank (what is it)
AO3 says descriptive/story-telling tags are a-okay
all the crap about policing fanficition for any reason:
Fandom and fac can only be a healthy outlet if it stops policing shit – be it taboos, dark sides, gender, orientation, kink, etc. (multi-thread – @televisiontelepath )
“Ship means something you want to see happen.” Bitch, no it don’t. @pyrebomb
I’m Done Explaining Why Fanfic is Okay @bookshop & others + links
Why Do Fangirls Always Make Them Gay?
The Importance of Mary Sue unwinona
random fan history fun reads:
Fangirling after 30 (multi-thread)
Older fans run our Infrastructure (also, 90+ year old author who writes darkwing duck slashfic how awesome is that (multi-thread)
we built this kingdom, motherfuckers, with the trekkie zine housewives before us (multi-thread) older fans fun tories
STRAIGHT DUDES OF THE WORLD [in which @fozmeadows explains the best way to learn about female desire…is to read words written by actual females :D]
On Fanfic & Emotional Continuity (multi-thread)
my odds and ends cause i have actually been here a while
We made AO3 TO PROTECT WRITERS WHO WERE BEING SUED,AND HARASSED,AND ATTACKED.,you don’t wanna read something? check the tags and move on,that’s YOUR RESPONSIBILITY TO YOURSELF,not our responsibility as the writers, as the fanartists,as the vidders,as the content creators of all kinds,ARTISTS MAKE ART,YOU DON’T LIKE THAT PARTICULAR ART? MOVE ALONG. THERE’S PLENTY MORE WHERE THAT CAME FROM.,and for FUCK’S SAKE read the GOD DAMNED TAGS,we the writers TAG OUR SHIT TO HELP YOU KEEP YOURSELF SAFE.
So, I was reading this, and taking notes, and *boom* “Hey, that’s my article!” Thanks!
Why I will fight for AO3 and DW:
“Rising from the ashes of LJ, you also had Dreamwidth. I’m actually kind of surprised DW wasn’t mentioned in the OP, since it grew out of the same ideology as AO3. Run by fans, for fans, because LJ (which at this point had been sold to SUP Media) had no idea what it was doing. Also like AO3, DW went to extreme lengths to make a safe fan culture inherent to the structure the site. Stay within the law, and DW and AO3 will back you up.
It’s worth noting that Tumblr actually predates Strikethrough. But Tumblr, unlike DW and AO3, wasn’t designed for fans. It didn’t carry the legacy of Strikethrough with it the way AO3 and DW did. So I guess– I have no evidence, but I’m surmising – that’s how it fell into the role of Natural Successor to Fanfic.net and Livejournal. It’s kind of inevitable, actually, that since neither LJ nor Tumblr was made for fans, they ended up falling into the same black hole of fandom collision. Kinkshaming people off the internet for literally as long as there’s been an internet. And then, on the other hand, you’ve got DW and AO3, who’ve watched fandom rip itself apart AT LEAST 3 times and are determined not to let it happen again. DW and AO3: We haven’t cared about the filthy shit you’re into since 2008.” @rapacityinblue
All of this. So much. Don’t get me wrong, I love the aspect of tumblr that allows fans to be critical of source content and fan content alike. I think we should talk about the issues with things like incest ships and ships with large age gaps, and why white male villains often end up with massive fanbases while Black heroes end up with much smaller ones, or even with haters. And tons of other issues besides. I think the critical side of fandom is important and endlessly interesting. We should discuss and discourse and argue and meta the hell out of things.
But. The side of tumblr that bullies, doxxes, and harasses anyone who doesn’t fall in line with a person or group’s parameters of acceptable content is disgusting to me. And the calls for some kind of oversight or regulation beyond stuff that’s already illegal are concerning, because as others have said…no one calling for it seems to be able to articulate who decides this shit, and where lines are drawn. It’s one thing to talk in terms of what you personally will accept, condone, or do. It’s another thing all together to talk about setting overarching policies that large groups of people are held to.
(Under the cut because it’s long)
I want to especially agree with the parallels between FFN anon culture and Tumblr anon culture. Eerily similar response, though for different reasons (FFN anons tend to skew right and Tumblr anons left).
Women have more power and agency in Shakespeare’s comedies than in his tragedies, and usually there are more of them with more speaking time, so I’m pretty sure what Shakespeare’s saying is “men ruin everything” because everyone fucking dies when men are in charge but when women are in charge you get married and live happily ever after
I think you’re reading too far into things, kiddo.
Take a break from your women’s studies major and get some fresh air.Right. Well, I’m a historian, so allow me to elaborate.
One of the most important aspects of the Puritan/Protestant revolution (in the 1590’s in particular) was the foregrounding of marriage as the most appropriate way of life. It often comes as a surprise when people learn this, but Puritans took an absolutely positive view of sexuality within the context of marriage. Clergy were encouraged to lead by example and marry and have children, as opposed to Catholic clergy who prized virginity above all else. Through his comedies, Shakespeare was promoting this new way of life which had never been promoted before. The dogma, thanks to the church, had always been “durr hburr women are evil sex is bad celibacy is your ticket to salvation.” All that changed in Shakespeare’s time, and thanks to him we get a view of the world where marriage, women, and sexuality are in fact the key to salvation.
The difference between the structure of a comedy and a tragedy is that the former is cyclical, and the latter a downward curve. Comedies weren’t stupid fun about the lighter side of life. The definition of a comedy was not a funny play. They were plays that began in turmoil and ended in reconciliation and renewal. They showed the audience the path to salvation, with the comic ending of a happy marriage leaving the promise of societal regeneration intact. Meanwhile, in the tragedies, there is no such promise of regeneration or salvation. The characters destroy themselves. The world in which they live is not sustainable. It leads to a dead end, with no promise of new life.
And so, in comedies, the women are the movers and shakers. They get things done. They move the machinery of the plot along. In tragedies, though women have an important part to play, they are often morally bankrupt as compared to the women of comedies, or if they are morally sound, they are disenfranchised and ignored, and refused the chance to contribute to the society in which they live. Let’s look at some examples.
In Romeo and Juliet, the play ends in tragedy because no-one listens to Juliet. Her father and Paris both insist they know what’s right for her, and they refuse to listen to her pleas for clemency. Juliet begs them – screams, cries, manipulates, tells them outright I cannot marry, just wait a week before you make me marry Paris, just a week, please and they ignore her, and force her into increasingly desperate straits, until at last the two young lovers kill themselves. The message? This violent, hate-filled patriarchal world is unsustainable. The promise of regeneration is cut down with the deaths of these children. Compare to Othello. This is the most horrifying and intimate tragedy of all, with the climax taking place in a bedroom as a husband smothers his young wife. The tragedy here could easily have been averted if Othello had listened to Desdemona and Emilia instead of Iago. The message? This society, built on racism and misogyny and martial, masculine honour, is unsustainable, and cannot regenerate itself. The very horror of it lies in the murder of two wives.
How about Hamlet? Ophelia is a disempowered character, but if Hamlet had listened to her, and not mistreated her, and if her father hadn’t controlled every aspect of her life, then perhaps she wouldn’t have committed suicide. The final scene of carnage is prompted by Laertes and Hamlet furiously grappling over her corpse. When Ophelia dies, any chance of reconciliation dies with her. The world collapses in on itself. This society is unsustainable. King Lear – we all know that this is prompted by Cordelia’s silence, her unwillingness to bend the knee and flatter in the face of tyranny. It is Lear’s disproportionate response to this that sets off the tragedy, and we get a play that is about entropy, aging and the destruction of the social order.
There are exceptions to the rule. I’m sure a lot of you are crying out “but Lady Macbeth!” and it’s a good point. However, in terms of raw power, neither Lady Macbeth nor the witches are as powerful as they appear. The only power they possess is the ability to influence Macbeth; but ultimately it is Macbeth’s own ambition that prompts him to murder Duncan, and it is he who escalates the situation while Lady Macbeth suffers a breakdown. In this case you have women who are allowed to influence the play, but do so for the worse; they fail to be the good moral compasses needed. Goneril, Regan and Gertrude are similarly comparable; they possess a measure of power, but do not use it for good, and again society cannot renew itself.
Now we come to the comedies, where women do have the most control over the plot. The most powerful example is Rosalind in As You Like It. She pulls the strings in every avenue of the plot, and it is thanks to her control that reconciliation is achieved at the end, and all end up happily married. Much Ado About Nothing pivots around a woman’s anger over the abuse of her innocent cousin. If the men were left in charge in this play, no-one would be married at the end, and it would certainly end in tragedy. But Beatrice stands up and rails against men for their cruel conduct towards women and says that famous, spine-tingling line – oh God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the marketplace. And Benedick, her suitor, listens to her. He realises that his misogynistic view of the world is wrong and he takes steps to change it. He challenges his male friends for their conduct, parts company with the prince, and by doing this he wins his lady’s hand. The entire happy ending is dependent on the men realising that they must trust, love and respect women. Now it is a society that is worthy of being perpetuated. Regeneration and salvation lies in equality between the sexes and the love husbands and wives cherish for each other. The Merry Wives of Windsor – here we have men learning to trust and respect their wives, Flastaff learning his lesson for trying to seduce married women, and a daughter tricking everyone so she can marry the man she truly loves. A Midsummer Night’s Dream? The turmoil begins because three men are trying to force Hermia to marry someone she does not love, and Helena has been cruelly mistreated. At the end, happiness and harmony comes when the women are allowed to marry the men of their choosing, and it is these marriages that are blessed by the fairies.
What of the romances? In The Tempest, Prospero holds the power, but it is Miranda who is the key to salvation and a happy ending. Without his daughter, it is likely Prospero would have turned into a murderous revenger. The Winter’s Tale sees Leontes destroy himself through his own jealousy. The king becomes a vicious tyrant because he is cruel to his own wife and children, and this breach of faith in suspecting his wife of adultery almost brings ruin to his entire kingdom. Only by obeying the sensible Emilia does Leontes have a chance of achieving redemption, and the pure trust and love that exists between Perdita and Florizel redeems the mistakes of the old generation and leads to a happy ending. Cymbeline? Imogen is wronged, and it is through her love and forgiveness that redemption is achieved at the end. In all of these plays, without the influence of the women there is no happy ending.
The message is clear. Without a woman’s consent and co-operation in living together and bringing up a family, there is turmoil. Equality between the sexes and trust between husbands and wives alone will bring happiness and harmony, not only to the family unit, but to society as a whole. The Taming of the Shrew rears its ugly head as a counter-example, for here a happy ending is dependent on a woman’s absolute subservience and obedience even in the face of abuse. But this is one of Shakespeare’s early plays (and a rip-off of an older comedy called The Taming of a Shrew) and it is interesting to look at how the reception of this play changed as values evolved in this society.
As early as 1611 The Shrew was adapted by the writer John Fletcher in a play called The Woman’s Prize, or The Tamer Tamed. It is both a sequel and an imitation, and it chronicles Petruchio’s search for a second wife after his disastrous marriage with Katherine (whose taming had been temporary) ended with her death. In Fletcher’s version, the men are outfoxed by the women and Petruchio is ‘tamed’ by his new wife. It ends with a rather uplifting epilogue that claims the play aimed:
To teach both sexes due equality
And as they stand bound, to love mutually.
The Taming of the Shrew and The Tamer Tamed were staged back to back in 1633, and it was recorded that although Shakespeare’s Shrew was “liked”, Fletcher’s Tamer Tamed was “very well liked.” You heard it here folks; as early as 1633 audiences found Shakespeare’s message of total female submission uncomfortable, and they preferred John Fletcher’s interpretation and his message of equality between the sexes.
So yes. The message we can take away from Shakespeare is that a world in which women are powerless and cannot or do not contribute positively to society and family is unsustainable. Men, given the power and left to their own devices, will destroy themselves. But if men and women can work together and live in harmony, then the whole community has a chance at salvation, renewal and happiness.
In the immortal words of the bard himself: fucking annihilated.
instead of reporting the murder, i would like to help you bury thE BODY CAUSE DAAMN
look. i don’t think my stretch marks are beautiful. i don’t think they’re tiger stripes or natural tattooos. i don’t think my acne is beautiful. i don’t think the bags under my eyes are beautiful. i just think they’re human. and i don’t think i have to be beautiful all of the time in order to be accepted and loved and sucessful. i don’t think every small detail of my outer appearence needs to be translated into prettiness.
tbh nothing is weirder to me than manly grimdark dudebro lord of the rings bc it’s just??? the epitome of light and love to me???? no narrative embodies hope and gentleness and healing like lotr does why must you insist on talking to me about badass aragorn vs. useless frodo. that’s not the point brad
I feel like this is also why so many of the post-LOTR Tolkien ripoffs are so terrible! It’s people pulling from Tolkien when they fundamentally don’t understand what makes Tolkien work. You get all these stories written by people who don’t think Frodo was worthy of his plotline and so they give it to their Aragorn expy instead, and it’s dull and boring and totally lacks the themes and the heart that make LOTR an important, enduring story.
#lord of the rings is about beauty and love and good and hope and gentleness in the face of overwhelming sadness and darkness#less about the battlefields and more about frodo and Sam holding hands through Shelob’s lair#and Galadriel’s star-glass in the darkness of mordor#overwhelmingly the point is beauty and love#even though those things are tinged in sadness#the reason I can never get into any other fantasy stories is because they focus on the battles and the hardship#and not about the beauty and the love and the sadness#‘I will not say do not weep for not all tears are an evil’ (tags from @greyacedipperpines)
when Aragorn shows up in Gondor no one cares who he is until he gets to the Houses of Healing, because the proof of true kingship is not being able to fight real good, it’s having “the hands of a healer”
so Aragorn calls his friends back from the darkness with little more than a gentle touch and a loving voice (and some plants, but it’s pretty clear that the plants alone aren’t enough) and that’s when the rumors spread through Gondor that the King has returned because the love of a king has this great power
like… that’s the big moment. washing his friends’ wounds and telling them they’re going to be okay. this is not macho! it’s not badass! I mean… in a way it’s actually really fucking badass that someone can get stabbed by a knife made of evil and Aragorn doesn’t even have to raise his voice when he says “not today,” but it’s not, like, standard fantasy badass.
Tolkien lived through a war. War is not entertaining and epic, it’s horrifying and terrible. That’s why all the climatic moments of LOTR aren’t battles, but decisions of love: Sam going back for Frodo, Bilbo giving Bard the Arkenstone, Aragorn healing Merry and Eowyn…
Where modern fantasy falls short is they think a war setting is the key to Tolkien’s success, so they describe warrior-man and the gorey, rapey, traumatizing things he does/sees (looking at u, SOIAF). But it’s not about fighting the war, it’s about living through it and loving despite it. Bilbo Baggins slept through his battles, Frodo and Sam (arguably, the main heroes) never fought or killed, a woman & hobbit defeated the witch-king out of love for their lord, not for power or fame. LOTR isn’t a story of war bc Tolkien had already seen that, it’s the story of hope.
The most telling and terrible moment for me in all of LotR is nowhere in the main quest. It’s the Scouring of the Shire. What must it have been like to come home from the war to blitzkrieg-ravaged cities, to continued rationing? What must it have been like to see the occupied territories while he fought and know this was someone else’s home?
The Hobbit and LotR were written by a veteran and incorporated his own experiences of what was possibly the war with the largest death toll in human history in its time. The violence is realistic, but it’s not the point. Like the rest of his generation, Tolkien was writing about what happens to the survivors.
Why do you think Aragorn forgives Boromir? Why does Boromir get a heroic death and funeral? Because he’s not an antagonist. His only guilt is to wish for an easy way out for his people, to spare them. Yeah, it wasn’t going to work, but it’s hard to blame him. It disturbs me how many characters in modern fantasy appear to be twisted homages to Boromir – traitors who only think of power for themselves.
Glorifying war and atrocities in Tolkien’s name is one of the grossest elements of modern fantasy. He would be appalled, I think.
One thing I was thinking about today was Alexander Pierce. I feel like one thing that’s been under-discussed in Cap 2 meta (at least, from what I’ve seen on my dash– maybe it’s been talked about elsewhere!) is the privilege of Alexander Pierce, a privilege that is very deliberately communicated onscreen.
Pierce, as a character, is visually distinctive: he’s not just an older white man, but a very specific genre of older white man. His three-piece suits and tortoiseshell glasses suggest a fondness for the styles, at least, of some happier past: the gentlemen’s era (to me located sort of vaguely pre-Philby) when men like him knew how to be graceful with power, because it was something that came naturally to them, something they would never have to demand. His charm, his generally pleasant demeanor are of a piece with this– after all, as he himself tells Steve, he’s the diplomat: the one who keeps his hands clean while Nick Fury does what needs to be done.
ealdor 