I’m not even much of a fan of genderbends but goddamn am I even less of a fan of getting ordered around about what I should enjoy and how I should enjoy it and being lectured about how ‘problematic’ it is, when the real problem is that they’ve cast the thing in question in black and white and refuse to admit that there’s anything but their narrow framing.
Changing a character to the ‘opposite’ cis gender is a very different thing than making them trans or nonbinary. Insisting that people only change characters to trans is also really damn invalidating, because it implies that being trans is interchangable with being cis. Whoopsie doodle!
I think the real issue here is that a lot of people want to see more trans headcanons, but for some reason think that using sj words while being bossy and rude is the way to go about it. Dress it up in progressive language all you like; at the end of the day you’re still being bossy and rude to get what you want, regardless of anyone else’s valid feelings.
i get really irritated at kids who scream that genderbends are transphobic because they’re completely missing the context and history. they have no idea. it’s like to them, Cis People made up genderbends specifically to thumb their noses at trans people.
rule 63 was originally a guy thing, sexual objectification thing. it states ‘for every male character, there’s a female version of that character’, and not because the dudes who were into it cared about having more realistically rendered female heroes in their media. it was made popular on 4chan and porn boards and comics+gaming forums because you could reduce a manly male character into a sexy tits-and-ass pinup. there were related kinks of sissification, but mostly it was about getting to jerk it to a sexy female version of a previously unappealing, macho male character.
then women got hold of the rule and started going, okay. let’s look at the female version of this male character. let’s talk about being a woman in a man’s world. let’s talk about rorschach’s misogyny, tony stark’s womanizing, batman’s grimness, the fact there’s one girl ninja to every four or five guy ninjas, let’s talk about that in the hypothetical context of these male heroes being women instead. if there’s a girl version for every male character, what does that mean? what’s her story?
and it became this really amazing lens for female fans to interrogate stories through, to examine the effects of sexism and misogyny and masculinity, to introduce another woman into a story with very few, to identify with fully-rendered heroes of the fan’s own gender. and to interrogate the very nature of gender, which led into the development of genderbends where the character’s gender identity didn’t necessarily match their assigned sex, and from there an increasing interest in, and familiarity with, trans characters, trans people, and trans issues.
so like. people now reducing the issue to ‘cis people are gross and hate trans people’ is pretty ridiculous. it ignores basically twenty years of women questioning, confronting and then dismantling the de-facto heteronormative, exploitative male gaze in order to create the radically progressive fandom atmosphere as we know it today on tumblr.
I’d been trying to put into words my issue with the idea that genderbent versions of characters are somehow automatically, innately transphobic, and I think you pretty well nailed it.
Originally, it was called ‘genderswap’ or ‘genderswitch’, which was rightfully criticized for reinforcing a binary view of gender. Hence why it is now ‘genderbend‘. Things can bend in many directions.
Yeah basically.
Rule 63s can be transphobic and gender essentialist, no question, just as m/m slash can be misogynistic, but it’s not inherent to the genre.
The way I see it, rule 63 and trans/nb headcanons are two subsets of what I call “gender AUs”, and they’re not mutually exclusive. Girl!Sherlock Holmes is an example of one, trans!Holmes is the other, and trans woman Holmes is both. All those would be worthwhile explorations.
Yes! And all sorts have their place because all of them are exploring the experience of an under-represented group (or two) in a different way.
Thank you for writing this 🙂 I never want to tell people that their feelings are invalid, but sometimes I think those feelings come from gut negative reactions that deserve to be re-examined. Like in this case, trans people have every right to be wary of something that could – and admittedly, sometimes does – re-enforce difficult gender stereotypes, and they also have every right to say genderbent art/fic isn’t to their taste or ask people to tag it.
But there’s nothing inherently transphobic about art that explores gender – quite the opposite, I think – and that’s what genderbends are about. It can be hugelybeneficial to imagine male characters as female in order to explore roles that aren’t traditionally given to women (I would really love to see a genderbent take on, say, Stacker Pentecost for that exact reason).
It just kills me when writers create franchises where like 95% of the speaking roles are male, then get morally offended that all of the popular ships are gay. It’s like, what did they expect?
I feel this is something that does often get overlooked in slash shipping, especially in articles that try to ‘explain’ the phenomena. No matter the show, movie or book, people are going to ship. When everyone is a dude and the well written relationships are all dudes, of course we’re gonna go for romance among the dudes because we have no other options.
Totally.
A lot of analyses propose that the overwhelming predominance of male/male ships over female/female and female/male ships in fandom reflects an unhealthy fetishisation of male homosexuality and a deep-seated self-hatred on the part of women in fandom. While it’s true that many fandoms certainly have issues gender-wise, that sort of analysis willfully overlooks a rather more obvious culprit.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we have a hypothetical media franchise with twelve recurring speaking roles, nine of which are male and three of which are female.
(Note that this is actually a bit better than average representaton-wise – female representation in popular media franchises is typicaly well below the 25% contemplated here.)
Assuming that any character can be shipped with any other without regard for age, gender, social position or prior relationship – and for simplicity excluding cloning, time travel and other “selfcest”-enabling scenarios – this yields the following (non-polyamorous) possibilities:
Possible F/F ships: 3 Possible F/M ships: 27 Possible M/M ships: 36
TOTAL POSSIBLE SHIPS: 66
Thus, assuming – again, for the sake of simplicity – that every possible ship is about equally likely to appeal to any given fan, we’d reasonably expect about (36/66) = 55% of all shipping-related media to feature M/M pairings. No particular prejudice in favour of male characters and/or against female characters is necessary for us to get there.
The point is this: before we can conclude that representation in shipping is being skewed by fan prejudice, we have to ask how skewed it would be even in the absence of any particular prejudice on the part of the fans. Or, to put it another way, we have to ask ourselves: are we criticising women in fandom – and let’s be honest here, this type of criticism is almost exclusively directed at women – for creating a representation problem, or are we merely criticising them for failing to correct an existing one?
YES YES YES HOLY SHIT YES FUCKING THANK YOU!
Also food for thought: the obvious correction to a lack of non-male representation in a story is to add more non-males. Female Original Characters are often decried as self-insertion or Mary Sues, particular if romance or sex is a primary focus.
I really appreciate when tumblr commentary is of the quality I might see at an academic conference. No joke.
This doesn’t even account for the disparity in the amount of screen time/dialogue male characters to get in comparison to female characters, and how much time other characters spend talking about male characters even when they aren’t onscreen. This all leads to male characters ending up more fully developed, and more nuanced than female characters. The more an audience feels like they know a character, the more likely an audience is to care about a character. More network television writers are men. Male writers tend to understand men better than women, statistically speaking. Female characters are more likely to be written by men who don’t understand women vary well.
But it’s easier to blame the collateral damage than solve the root problem.
Yay, mathy arguments. 🙂
This is certainly one large factor in the amount of M/M slash out there, and the first reason that occurred to me when I first got into fandom (I don’t think it’s the sole reason, but I think it’s a bigger one than some people in the Why So Much Slash debate give our credit for). And nice point about adding female OCs.
In some of my shipping-related stats, I found that shows with more major female characters lead to more femslash (also more het). (e.g. femslash in female-heavy media; femslash deep dive) I’ve never actually tried to do an analysis to pin down how much of fandom’s M/M preference is explained by the predominance of male characters in the source media, but I’m periodically tempted to try to do so.
All great points. Another thing I notice is that many shows are built around the idea that the team or the partner is the most important thing in the universe. Watch any buddy cop show, and half of the episodes have a character on a date that is inevitably interrupted because The Job comes first… except “The Job” actually means “My Partner”.
When it’s a male-female buddy show, all of the failed relationships are usually, canonically, because the leads belong together. (Look at early Bones: she dates that guy who is his old friend and clearly a stand-in for him. They break up because *coughcoughhandwave*. That stuff happens constantly.) Male-male buddy shows write the central relationship the exact same way except that they expect us to read it as platonic.
Long before it becomes canon, the potential ship of Mulder/Scully or Booth/Bones or whatever lead male/female couple consumes the fandom. It’s not about the genders involved. Rizzoli/Isles was like this too.
If canon tells us that no other relationship has ever measured up to this one, why should we keep them apart? Don’t like slash of your shows, prissy writers? Then stop writing all of your leads locked in epic One True Love romance novel relationships with their same-sex coworkers. Give them warm, funny, interesting love interests, not cardboard cutouts…
And then we will ship an OT3.
I would like to add a probably problematic addendum to this. In that in certain pieces of media that are pretty much all centered around families–where everyone interesting is related to each other in some way–that makes the probability that incest ships will get somewhat popular fairly high. Simply because there aren’t any real OPTIONS for ships that aren’t in some way incestuous or otherwise weird and taboo, like huge age gaps or really noticeably unbalanced power dynamics.
I’m not CONDONING shipping those things. I am simply saying that when you decry the horrific depravity of fandom for daring to ship two people who are related, maybe consider the statistics involved, and consider HOW those ships are commonly shipped over the fact that they are at all. Like if you find that fans are going out of their way to write characters who are siblings as not related to each other in AU for fic or whatever then like?? Yeah. That’s probably a factor.
I’ve been in different fandoms for ten years so far, and in that time, I also happen to have gotten a Sociology degree. And these are the “rules” I’ve picked up on.
1) Shipping will happen. Accept it and plan for it.
2)The most popular ship will be amongst whoever character’s inner life, relationships, and screen time are delved into the most–as long as…
Addendum to 2: they’re marginally attractive. If that important main character happens to be, say, a talking dog, then most of the fandom will resist and ship other things because of the “marginally attractive” rule. Others will come up with elaborate body switch/humanization/whatever plots to handwave it away and imagine the dog looking like their favorite actor. There will be a small group who straight up ships the dog as is anyway, but waaaaaay smaller than if it was a normal attractive male human. But still–you’ve put a talking dog in center stage, so prepare for fanfic to be written about it in some way. It will just be significantly less if it breaks the “marginally attractive” rule.
3)There will always be outliers in fandom. Just because a fanfic exists of Roy Orbison in clingfilm, doesn’t mean much. That just tells us about the proclivities of that particular dude who write it. When we notice overall TRENDS and popular ships of broad swaths of people, then we can start seeing actual patterns. So there WILL be people who break these rules in disturbing ways, but those people are exceptions to the rule that don’t discount the overall trend.
Now, WHAT fandom and people as a whole considers acceptable for the “generally attractive” rule, that’s when we can notice some interesting things. The majority of fandoms where I’ve seen lots and lots and LOTS of ships around what are technically underage teenagers are from media that are a)Films with characters played by much older actors, and b)written narratives where we can imagine the characters as said much older actors. Our idea of what certain ages “look like” is warped pretty heavily from Hollywood casting much older people in the roles. Fanart of teenage characters from written works usually bear this out–they will usually be drawn older than an actual person that age tends to look.
Now, let’s apply this rule to one of the mysteries of Tumblr: The goddamn Onceler. Now WHY of all goddamn things the completely mediocre Lorax movie got so much fanart and fanfiction attention, I don’t know. I’m still picking apart what creates MORE fanfic of one media property over another(its not just popularity–lots of book series can be popular but have bupkis for fic), but I have a feeling, even if I did, the goddamn Lorax would probably still end up as a paradox. But when you look at the characters with ACTUAL SCREEN TIME in the movie, it becomes easy to apply this rule. The only people with significant lines and screen time are characters who are VERY clearly children, a strange little creature voiced by Danny Devito, and the Onceler. The only marginally attractive one is the Onceler, so the only possible option fandom could come up with is to pair him with HIMSELF from the FUTURE.
When you frame it in terms of how fandom makes decisions on who gets shipped, it makes perfect sense. Weird Onceler time shipping was bound to happen just from how the movie is written. If your only alternatives are straight-up pedophilia and imagining this strange orange creature with DeVito voice having sex, then yes, I’d choose shipping the Onceler with a future version of himself too.
Let apply it to another fandom: Supernatural. Now, any fan of that show can tell you that for a looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong time, everyone but the two main characters–who are brothers–dies around them. ESPECIALLY if you’re presented as a love interest in any way. The two attractive brothers have absolutely no one to depend on but each other, only about once a season visiting a long-time associate holed up in a bunker, who provides pretty much only resources and infodumps(spoiler alert! They also inevitably die, it just takes longer). Think of the rules: the Supernatural writers basically wrote their fandom into either writing incest, or sitting on their hands and shipping nothing at all. I will certainly not deny that incest is a kink some people have, but statistically there are no doubt lots of shippers in Supernatural who never thought of doing such a thing–and for which the kink has no particular thrill–who have nevertheless been roped into doing so just because the need to write SOMETHING to comfort those beleaguered characters.
After Supernatural had an episode or two lampooning fan culture and generally letting the audience know they were aware of their fandom, they finally wised up that they’d put their fans in this weird position and gave the brothers the consistent angel associate, Castiel. But this was seasons and seasons late in the game, so for some, that damage has already been done, so to speak.
You’ve made a show where most of the characters are robots, like Transformers? Well, prepare for written robot sex. You’ve written a show about humanized animals and their adventures? Congratulations, you’ve made furries. You can apply this to basically anything.
I think this also ties in with fandom’s accepted problem with racial minority characters as well. If the show just shoves a character in there for diversity’s sake and the writers seem unwilling/afraid to actually use a character, then the fandom won’t either. The characters fandom will write the most about will statistically be white males, because those are statistically the most common heroes and characters with the most development and screen time. Now, does the usual unconscious bias of fans also hurt matters? Ab-so-fucking-lutely. But fans also aren’t writing in a vacuum. They’re building off the original work, and some of the flaws of the original are going to come through.
It’s amazing to see how this post has grown and the amazing additions to it.
Regarding race: yes, when (white) writers are lazy and biased and write POC poorly, those characters are gonna get passed over/ignored in favor of better-developed white characters.
But it also happens even when the character of color is well-written. Fuck, it even happens when the POC is the protagonist. For example, Finn from The Force Awakens. He’s young, attractive, has an angsty backstory, plenty of heroics, has interesting relationships of various kinds with basically everyone in the movie. Given that there’s also a female protag (one praised by loads of (white) people for being good female representation) who is, at the very least, Finn’s canonical BFF and more likely his love interest, then you’d expect the mega-ship to be FinnRey.
But it’s not. Of the 23,000+ Force Awakens fics on AO3, there are well over six times as many Kylo Ren/Hux stories, and three times as many Rey/Kylo stories, than Finn/Rey. There are about twice as many Kylux stories as FinnPoe stories. And there are 50 times as many Kylux as Finn/Kylo Ren, despite all the ways in which that ship resembles Harry/Draco and other popular enemy ships. And that’s just looking at pure numbers, not even touching on problematic fanon.
So to the addendum we have to add that racism plays a part in which characters are considered attractive. We see the protagonist of color being passed over for less prominent white characters in the Teen Wolf fandom too. Given the fandom numbers for that, I had no idea Scott was the protagonist until I read @lj-writes, @luminousfinn, and @diversehighfantasy all discuss this phenomenon.
This very good point about racism can also be pointed back at the original gender argument. It’s not just that there are more white and male characters than POC and female characters, it’s that many fans go out of their way to center narratives about white male characters over all others.
I’m not disagreeing with the point about the disparities between the number and importance of female/POC characters vs. white male ones; that’s a definite failing on the part of scriptwriters. But how many times have you seen someone write fic about some absurdly minor white male character–I’m talking about someone who was in one ep of a show or one scene of a movie–passing over a more prominent female or POC character? I admit that I’ve done it myself in the past.
I’ve often heard people say, about minor or poorly written white male characters, “This character is so great! They’re like an acceptable OC: totally canon, but really a blank slate because we don’t know anything about them uwu” or, “lol yeah they’re bad in canon but that’s what fanfic is for” But bring up minor or poorly written female characters or characters of color and it’s, “They’re not interesting because we don’t know anything about them/they’re badly written.”
if you can write complex emotions and shit for Kent and fucking FRY GUY then u sure as hell can write about nursey a biracial black possibly Muslim boy in a white dominated sport
I’m not giving a pass to the writers and creators of our favorite shows and movies. I’m saying that crying, “Fan artists aren’t racist/sexist; we can only work with what we’re given!” is a huge honkin’ cop-out when we’re being so blatantly selective in what we count as “what we’re given.” We need to do better.
like, i’m not saying that adults don’t have a place in fandom. they can and they do, and many are perfectly great people.
but if you’re an adult, say, in your mid to late 20s or older, especially if you’re in a fandom that’s filled mostly with teenagers, you do need to be careful about how you interact with young people in fandom.
you need to be careful about the content you produce or share, and if you do something that people take issue with, you need to be prepared to address that in an honest and meaningful way, instead of blocking the young people who are telling you you’ve done something wrong and going on a rant about how “it’s just fiction” and “ship and let ship” and “do whatever you want” and “i’m too old for this.”
if you’re an adult in fandom, you need to be able to recognize how the content you produce might affect young people, and honestly, you should be able to show maturity when dealing with it, because you are still an adult talking to many people who are literal children.
many of those young people will, by default, view you as a sort of authority figure based on your age alone, as that’s what they’re used to. be careful of the lessons you teach them.
Hm. Okay. Here’s the thing.
We all know who you’re talking about and which situations you’re talking about. What you really have an issue with isn’t anything to do with anyone’s age, it’s about people producing things that other people find hurtful, then not responding the way the hurt people would like them to when called out on it. That can and does happen anywhere, regardless of the ages of the people involved. It’s a separate issue that should be discussed and dealt with.
And yes, in some of those recent situations, the ages of the offenders or the offended were brought into the discussion, by both sides at different times. The age difference does complicate things, but that doesn’t mean that it’s the main issue.
You may be thinking “why do you care if I focus on age, it was a salient part of the argument for me, you’re trying to defend adults who don’t care how their words hurt children!” But here’s the thing.
You may not realize this, but in other fandoms adults have been doxxed, have been threatened, have been outed because they were creating things that someone, somewhere deemed “dangerous for minors.”
Adults who were creating things that were not meant for minors, that were openly and blatantly tagged as being NSFW, explicit, as containing triggering material. I’ve even seen people who weren’t even creating the offending material being harassed, bullied, and threatened, for daring to stand up for the people who were. Not even just online, but in person. I’ve been a victim of it myself, though not to the extent that I’ve seen many others go through.
All because a segment of the fandom decided that because certain content could be dangerous for minors, it should never, ever be posted anywhere a minor might possibly read it. Adults who do post it are responsible for every bad effect it could possibly have on anyone who reads it and are horrible people for not willingly taking on that responsibility.
I know the situations you’re talking about are different. In many of those situations, adults chose to interact with the minors who were complaining about them, and yeah, when you’re choosing to directly interact with a minor you need to tread carefully.
But once you go down the “adults in fandom are responsible for the minors in fandom” road, if lots of people start clinging to that mindset, that is where it can lead. And that is an extremely serious issue. It can literally destroy careers and ruin lives.
I am not in this or any other fandom to produce content for minors. I have asked many times for minors not to follow me; I don’t block them, but I know quite a few people who block any minor who follows them. I produce enough SFW content that I don’t mind minors being able to, say, reblog it from others on their dash, but I do not want them following me and getting explicit content directly from me, full stop. If it becomes an issue, I will start blocking people.
If you’re a minor, I’m old enough to be your mother. But I’ve got my own kid, and I’m not in fandom to babysit anyone else. When I create or reblog content, I do not and will not take the presence of minors into account when doing so. Because that is not my job.
Now, right now I’m choosing to get involved in this discussion, which will involve people much younger than me, including minors. So yeah, I’m being careful about what I say and how I say it. And I agree that any adult who willingly engages in conversation with minors needs to do the same.
But I simply can’t agree with your last two paragraphs. Those “literal children” already have parents. If their own parents aren’t monitoring what media they consume, aren’t having conversations with them about problematic messages in media, it certainly isn’t my job to do so. Period.
This is an excellent time for teens in fandom (and in general) to stop seeing every adult they come in contact with as an “authority figure” and start viewing us as human beings who are living our own lives with our own motivations, problems, desires, and inclinations that have nothing to do with them. That’s something that will serve them well in life.
How people interact with oppressed groups they aren’t a part of who complain about their representation of those oppressed groups is an entirely separate issue that is not about the age of the people on either side. Age can complicate it, especially in that it can be difficult to communicate across a generation gap when people on either side have such enormously different experiences. I think that that has caused some problems.
But any adult who is not willingly choosing to interact with a minor is not responsible for minors who consume their content, and conflating the two issues is downright dangerous.
@porcupine-girl nailed it 100% but this especially bears repeating:
This is an excellent time for teens in fandom (and in general) to stopseeing every adult they come in contact with as an “authority figure” and start viewing us as human beings who are living our own lives with our own motivations, problems, desires, and inclinations that have nothing to do with them. That’s something that will serve them well in life.
Fandom is a good way for teenagers to learn how to interact with people in different age groups as peers. Because that’s what we are, we are fandom peers posting on the same web sites and obsessing over the same shows and no one in fandom has any authority over anyone else (no matter how much some people might try to claim it). I am not your teacher, your parent, your babysitter, or anyone in any position of authority over you or anyone with a responsibility for taking care of you. Nor am I willing to take on that role. The vast majority of the billions of adults in the world fit that description. Only a very few, ones you know in real life, are responsible for you personally – and soon that number will be none as you become an adult yourself.
I block anyone with an age under 18 listed in their profile if they try to follow me – not with any animosity, I’m just not interested in interacting with kids on a fandom level. This is a completely valid option and I think it’s a wise one.
Plus the original post here is predicated on the assumption that fandom belongs to people in their early 20s and younger and the rest of us are just hangers on. Sorry baby, look at the demographics; you’re the minority. We’re not in your house. I, for one, am happy to interact with anyone I have interests in common with and bond over those interests; I think people of all ages have exciting perspectives and interesting minds. But I don’t want to be treated like a second class citizen by anyone, and as said above, I am interested in interacting AS PEERS ONLY. I ain’t your mommy and I have enough people IRL trying to leech emotional labor off me, I got none for strangers on the internet.
I have watched my friends raise their kids in fandom. Literally. Raise. Their. Kids. I’ve watched young things I met carried in arms toddle, walk, run, be 8, 18, 28, marry, come to a convention carrying young things in their arms.
It was assumed that everyone who knew the parent would keep a vague eye on the child because friends don’t let friends’ little ones run into traffic. But at NO POINT was it ever assumed or expressed that the adult fans had to stop being adult fans talking about adult things. If a minor walked into the “How to write explicit bondage” panel, then someone gently suggested that this was not the place for the kid to be. If the kid found the dick pics in the art show, they were told “go ask Mommy what ‘slash’ means.”
I get that the OP wants to protect children, but while it’s my job to make sure someone too little to take care of themselves doesn’t get hurt, it has NEVER, through three generations of fandom, been my job to be anyone’s actual parent or to stop adulting around adults.
Oh, and the line “I’m not saying adults don’t have a place in fandom; they can and they do” – that line? Child, ADULTS BUILT FANDOM. We created the cons and the fanzines and the webrings and the clubs and the fan sites and the VCR tape swaps and the letter writing campaigns and the podcasts. We maintain the fan sites and the fic repositories and the conventions and the rest. Did you think those things just spontaneously evolved? Fuckin’ A we have a place in the culture that we built!
If you’re old enough to be online unsupervised you’re also old enough to police your own fandom experience. Head the tags and warnings, that’s what they are there for.
Also, to be blunt, I am not responsible for anyone’s children. Full stop.
yeeeeah i’m gonna put it even plainer:
kid, if you don’t like what i write, get the fuck off my works list.
i didnt realise ao3 was started in response to lj deleting account relating to p//edophi|ia and they explicitly support the posting of such works yikes
it wasn’t, like, ~~~we luv pedophilia, it was way more complicated than that!
although it’s true AO3 does allow all fannish content provided it’s properly warned for, there’s a long history there – of spaces being used by fans until the host decided whatever we were doing was too weird and distasteful and either kicking us off, banning certain content, or changing the nature of the site until it was no longer viable as a host.
you’re referring to the LJ Strikethrough of 2007, which, being an ancient crone, I lived through, and since I was hanging out in the last vestiges of SGA and in bandom, I saw some of the fallout. this was before LJ was sold to the Russians (which is a whole ‘nother story), when it was still owned by Six Apart; in an effort to clean up LJ’s act, Six Apart decided to delete all accounts using tags like underage, incest, rape, etc.
this was supposed to get rid of actual child porn on the site, and I hope it did, but it also targeted fan communities. this was a problem for a couple reasons; for one thing, not every story tagged with these words is in favor of them; for another, these things happen to real people and these personal posts were also potentially in danger of being attacked; for the last one, look, I ain’t into this kind of fic but people write about what people write about, and if it’s fictional and not explicitly banned in the TOS (correct me if I’m wrong; I don’t think written content about this stuff was banned?) then it’s not cool for a content host to just start deleting communities without warning.
but that’s what happened! these deletions were also primarily targeting slash communities, which smacked of some serious homophobia since things were deleted that had nothing to do with any of this kind of content.
eventually someone found out it was this super conservative religious group who’d sent a list of journal names to Six Apart, and who if I remember correctly targeted slash fic on purpose, even after it became clear that the fic was, well, totally fictional. after a while, Six Apart admitted they’d made a mistake and started to reinstate journals, but all of fandom was pretty shaken up.
THEN Boldthrough happened, which was essentially the same debacle several months later, at which point fandom began its long slow migration from LJ to GJ, IJ, and eventually AO3, Twitter, and tumblr.
AO3 was opened in 2008 in response to several incidents, of which Strikethrough was a really intense one. remember, also, that back in 2008 the stigma surrounding fandom was significantly greater and more shameful than it is today, so finding hosts willing to archive fic was difficult unless someone had the dough to pay for server space – often not an option. this was also back when fanfic.net’s HTML restrictions were so great that users couldn’t use any special characters or bold or italicize anything, and it didn’t allow R-rated content, so it was clearly not ideal. in addition, although cease & desist letters were much less common than they were in the early 2000s and before, DMCA takedowns were still a phantom on the horizon.
LONG STORY SHORT, even though pedophilia is reprehensible and I personally cannot stomach fanfic that involves that kind of content, AO3 was founded specially as a safe space for fandom communities that could not find homes elsewhere. it requires warnings precisely for that reason, and if you find a story that is not properly warned, you can alert the admins and get the story labeled appropriately.
IDK, maybe it’s just because I am, again, ancient, but I was in and around fandom before homosexuality was legal in all 50 states. so were most of the people who started AO3. for most of my formative life, being gay was associated with pedophilia, and so was writing about gay characters. just – it’s a lot more complicated than you might expect, and there’s a reason many older fans who have been involved in several generations of fandom were so grateful to have AO3 as an option.
I don’t read, for example, Hydra Trash Party fics. They squick me, and I generally feel they are pretty gross. But writing noncon body-horror is not the same as saying “yeah, I totally want to go out and rape and torture people for years while brainwashing them!” or even “yeah, I wouldn’t do it myself, but it would be totally okay if someone did!” Nobody is hurt by it, and nobody is going to be hurt by it. So should I have the right to go, that is gross, you don’t get to write or read that? No.
In the same way, writing about underage teens getting it on–sometimes with each other, sometimes with adults, sometimes consensually, sometimes not–is not the same as child pornography, nor does reading a fic about Hermione and Snape getting it on while she was his student mean someone thinks that would be a good and/or healthy thing in real life.
Fiction affects reality, but fiction is not reality. And writing about something does not mean you want to do it in real life, or believe that anyone should.
Let’s take a closer look at that “Ao3 supports pedophilia!” shall we?
1) The only fics I have ever come across that had actual pedophilia (i.e. someone having sex with a child), it was clearly and explicitly abuse. It was not meant to titillate or arouse. It was meant to horrify. It was seldom explicit.
2) There’s a lot more incest, but it is usually portrayed either as explicitly mutually consensual (i.e. Sam/Dean) or as abusive.
3) I’ve been in fandom for a decade and a half. When people start getting upset at “omg pedophilia, think of the children!” the fics they are usually objecting to aren’t actually pedophilia. Usually, it is teenagers having sex, especially queer sex. And people don’t like that, and use pedophilia as an excuse to shame people for writing/reading sex they don’t like.
Let’s look closer at Strikethrough, shall we? I hope that, if there were any communities of actual pedophiles on LJ, they got taken down, too. But here are some of the communities that got taken down that were not in any way supporting pedophilia and/or rape and/or incest that got taken down:
1) at least one support community for survivors of sexual abuse.
2) a literary book discussion group that was reading Lolita.
3) lots of slash fanfic communities, for things like Draco/Harry fic set in their fourth year (when both boys would have been 15).
Basically, this very conservative “family values” group hated porn, and they hated queer stuff even more, and used “but think of the children, it’s pedophilia!” to pressure LJ to get rid of huge swathes of things they didn’t like. And one time taking down the worst of it wasn’t good enough for them. No, this was step one on a moral crusade. If you acceded to their demands, all that did was whet their appetite, and soon they would be back with a new list of demands. This is why the 2007 strikethrough was not an isolated event, but rather one of a series of events, nor was LJ the only website thus targeted. It starts with anything that can get labelled “pedophilia” or “incest” because that’s low-hanging fruit. But they use that to go after anything relating to queer teen sexuality. Then anything with teen sexuality. Then once the community is already divided and diminished, they go after anything with non-con. Then whatever is next on their list. It doesn’t stop until they’ve won the point and nothing but suitably “family-friendly” fics that match their purity test are allowed.
Which is why AO3 has no morality content in their terms of service. You can’t break copyright beyond fair use (and AO3 has an expansive view of “fair use” and a team of lawyers on call). You can’t use AO3 for commercial advertising. And you can’t post ACTUAL child pornography, i.e. the things that are legally prohibited, i.e. actual photographs or videos of actual children (not teens) in sexually explicit positions–you know, the stuff that actually hurts kids. Other than that? It’s fair game. You can post anything you want, and the archive will not judge. There is no handle for the Moral Majority Family-Friendly Thought Police to latch onto, no cracks they can exploit to divide and conquer.
We’ve been down that road. It doesn’t lead anywhere good.
Reblogging this for the excellent explanation of what exactly the moral crusaders did last time. They had an explicit agenda of anti-queerness, and they specifically targeted slash and femslash communities in particular, such that many ship communities became (or started as) deliberately members-only. You had to apply, and your personal blog had to look like a real person and a fan. You were vetted, a la 1990s private servers.
During this period, Dreamwidth was also targeted by attacking its payment processor. They had to get a new one. These “Warriors” (literally called themselves that!) were totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom they didn’t like.
If you’re carrying out harassment of people right now because they’re posting works with sexual elements you don’t agree with? (And it’s always sex, never non-sexual violence, how strange….) If you’re doing that, you’re also totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom you don’t like. Because your tactics are fandom-destroying, and so is your agenda.
reblogging because this is important: strikethru and boldthru and all the various “purges” that fandom went thru about 10 years ago: this had to do with OUTSIDERS deciding that fandom in general and fanfiction in specific were evil and needed to be destroyed; unless we were writing and shipping good vanilla M/F married people. These were outsiders, going after fictional writing about fictional characters.
AO3 and OTW are HUGE, because now we have an organization, with very smart women and a lot of lawyers, that have our back. Fannish history is important, people! It has not always been this way.
This is so, so important: there’s that other post about AO3 and fanfiction floating around, about our history. People decry violent video games but no one is trying to force companies out of business. But people can and do attack fanfiction: an activity primarily written by women for women, about fictional characters. And often about sex. We have to constantly defend ourselves, protect ourselves, support each other against charges like “paeodophilia”.
^^^rebageling again for excellent commentary
Throwing this in because I was also present: This was during the American Government’s attempts to pass censorship laws on the internet. As MOST of those domains had their serves in America, they were beholden to those censorship laws. A great deal of fanfiction.net was removed because they happened to lose a goddamn courtcase. I’ve been on the site since 2002. They may not have ‘officially’ allowed NC-17 rated content (what it used to be listed as in the filters), it never did a damn thing to remove it. Ever. They had it listed as a rating option during ‘New Story’ uploading after all. It was i nthe search filters. After they lost the courtcase however, they legally had to start doing things about the mature content reports they got. The admins and mods were not actively looking for fic to remove, they were just responding to reports they had already received.
tl;dr – I know tumblr is all about black and white “you’re either all right or all wrong” thinking, but it’s important to understand what actually happened before going “ew ao3 was made to give pedophiles a safe place to post” because that is 110% not what happened.
This is why so, so many of the comparatively older fannish folks on tumblr like me are so vehemently against stuff like the anti movement and “all ships are valid UNLESS”. It smacks of censorship and content policing – and we’ve been there. We got our shit deleted and our accounts banned because someone else thought what we were reading or writing or talking about needed to just… not exist. No warning. Literally overnight. We just woke up and stuff was gone.
And yeah, the group was legit called Warriors for Innocence (or maybe of). I knew several people that were members of survivor/support groups that lost their groups – and their main support network – when Strikethrough happened (ten years ago holy shit).
You antis need to listen when us older fans tell you that the censorship you’re advocating for, when put into practice, is NOT a positive thing; it’s an extremely scary thing!
I can guarantee that you would be very, very upset if another event like LJ Strikethrough were to happen today because *you* are just as vulnerable as the rest of us! If you support the rights of marginalized groups of people, if you’re a slash or fem slash shipper, if you support gender identities that aren’t defined by biological sex, if you care about representation, if you support women, if you have any kind of kink, if you care about fandom in any capacity beyond its eradication, YOU DO NOT ACTUALLY WANT THE SORT OF CENSORSHIP YOU’RE ADVOCATING!!
I remember word went around that personal journals of survivors were being deleted too, for talking about their experiences. I don’t know if it did go that far but I and several other friends deleted every mention of being assault survivors from our LJs in fear. This all happened around when I was toying with the idea of joining a support group for survivors, which would have REALLY helped me. Too bad survivor groups were being deleted left and right.
Reblogging for all the excellent commentary, but especially it strikes a bell where @beatrice-otter says:
“… they use that to go after anything related to queer teen sexuality.”
Because yeah, that is what I grew up with as the norm, and what makes this form of respectability politics as dangerous as it is. Teenagers are already getting harassed for writing or drawing characters of their own age; I’ve seen it happen. And the harassment of marginalized teens is *known* to have a body count.
I guess nobody remembered that I was on FictionPress, too.
So, hi. I’m the girl you all knew as Tara. My FF.net account really was hacked (twice!), once in 2006 and again in 2009. As of 2017, Support still doesn’t answer my requests to regain it, although I can’t say I blame them. They’re probably scared I’ll flood their site with poorly written sex scenes again.
I’m lucky the hackers never migrated to this account, considering it had the exact same login credentials. (They’ve since been changed, don’t worry.)
I’ll let the account’s creation date speak as to whether it’s legitimate or not.
Thank you all so, so much for keeping My Immortal alive over the years. You fill my heart with so much love. (Preppy moment, oops.)
That’s about all I have to say for now.
—
Because I’ve received several messages asking this, and predict I may receive more, I’ll answer it here. No, I am not Lani Sarem. Really bad fiction simply tends to read the same. No, I’m not on Facebook. Or Deviantart. Or MySpace. Or Youtube. (Etc.) I am on Tumblr. But I use my real name there, and it’s not Tara.
okay just got done typing up a Long Ass Comment for a fic that i love and bc writers Live™ for comments but a lot of ppl seem to find it difficult/scary to write them, here are some tips from me, who has been on both sides of the fence:
we will nut over literally any context for how u read our fics, nothing is too specific or embarrassing
i once received a long ass essay about the exact circumstances under which someone read the new chapter including action and dialogue and i still treasure that comment to this day
if u read the fic a few days ago and are still thinking about it, open that bitch up and tell the author “i read this fic a few days ago and i’m still thinking about it”
THAT SHIT KILLS US I SWEAR
do not worry about being annoying!!!!! oh my god i can’t overstate this enough you are NEVER being annoying by leaving comments. examples of situations in which comments are Not Annoying:
commenting on every chapter
this is honestly our fav thing, those regular commenters are the real MVPs and i’d die for them. it doesn’t seem thirsty or obnoxious to us it’s our lifeblood i pr omi s e u
also this is guaranteed the #1 best way to get senpai to notice u, if that’s what ur after
adding an extra comment w a thought/detail u missed
adding an extra comment w a thought/detail u remembered from 4 chapters ago
commenting during a reread (this is only ever flattering!!!)
commenting an 800-word essay that takes several solid minutes to read
this seriously never comes across as irritating, time-consuming, or trying too hard; the author is the one who wrote thousands upon thousands of words in the first place and we eat that shit up
(ok i lied, there is one exception to this. the one thing that is annoying is demanding updates, especially if u do it on the same day as an update was published. this makes us sad, avoid this :c)
but aside from that: comments, great, always!!!
acknowledge how hard writers work. every time someone tips their hat to me for the effort i put in, it’s like the 12 hour binges, inability to think about anything else even while sleeping, longggg inspiration walks, and constant self doubt become worth it!!!!
let us know u talk about our fics w ur friends…. this is like, the ultimate compliment……… i’m still lowkey waiting for the day someone pastes an excerpt from a chat log they’ve had about one of my fics because i Know it has happened and i wanna see it……………i wanna know what has been yelled……………..
just say thank u!!! a simple thank you means so much more bc it shows us we have actual readers and not just numbers on a screen sfjdgslksg
I wonder where the break happened that such wide swaths of younger fans don’t grasp fandom things that used to be unspoken understandings. That fic readers are expected to know fiction from reality, that views expressed in fic are not necessarily those of the author, that the labels, tags and warnings on various kinkfics are also the indication that they were created for titillation and not much more, please use responsibly as per all pornography. The ‘problem’ isn’t that so-called ‘problematic’ fic exists but that some of the audience is being stupid, irresponsible, at worst criminal, at best not old enough to be in the audience to begin with. And that’s on the consumer, not the author who told you via labels, tags, ratings, warnings and venues what their fic was about and what it was for.
I can’t stress enough how important this post is
This post troubles me because I feel like it misses a lot of the nuance of the situation.
No, not everyone who reads your rapefic or whatever is going to go out and rape someone, but your average joe isn’t the person to be worried about. Rapists, paedophiles, abusers, people who would coerce their family members into incest, etc etc etc use the internet. Their victims use the internet. Those who could be their victims use the internet. And they’ll see what you write. Or draw, or voice act, or whatever else. No, it’s not a guarantee, but it’s a very, very real possibility, and one you have to take into account when writing. If it wasn’t a real problem, I wouldn’t know three victims of it.
The issue is not that you should never explore dark subjects ever or you’re a nasty evil badman. The issue is how you explore them. You’re probably not a rapist for writing a rape fic – but how will a real rapist feel about how you wrote it? Will they feel like what they did is okay? Will they feel like it was sexy? How about a victim of rape? Will they feel like what happened to them didn’t matter? Will they feel like their trauma is nonsense, because they should’ve enjoyed it? Will they be able to use your fic to self harm? Do you really want people feeling this way about something you made?
The responsibility doesn’t entirely lie on you, no. But as a creator, you have a lot of influence, and you need to be careful and considerate of other people.
Fiction is not reality, but it certainly has an effect on it. Hasn’t a work of fiction ever made you feel something? Why would women and LGBT people and disabled people constantly be crying for representation in fiction if it was meaningless?
Fiction affects each individual’s reality.
I think it’s important to consider what effect yours will have.
The ‘nuance’ you think is there does not exist. Writers,
artists, creators of any sort, are NOT responsible for what other people choose
to do, period. People of a certain age and level of reason are expected to be
something other than ‘monkey see, monkey do’ about the arts and life in general.
Anybody else shouldn’t be allowed to consume certain media without supervision,
accompanying education and in some case, maybe not at all. That’s the job of
parents and guardians, not random strangers on the internet with their own row
to hoe.
You say you know three victims. The crimes are still the perp’s fault.
Writing didn’t make them do what they did any more than videogames cause school
shootings. To place blame on the media they consumed, to place blame on the
creators of that media, is a tired, old, long-disproven argument, and one that absolves
criminals of their culpability for their crimes. You’d let perps get away with
it, or get reduced sentences, because you’re claiming it’s actually the fic
that’s to blame.What do you want to do, lock the writers up too?
One of the purposes of fiction literally IS to explore all
angles of an issue safely, and that includes perspectives that are not
desirable in real life, or that can make some individuals personally
uncomfortable. It’s a societal release valve, and an acknowledgement of fears.
Sometimes those fears get processed in strange ways, there are people who get
turned on by balloons popping, for crying out loud. Creators have a
responsibility to create. As a courtesy in fandom, we tag, label and warn
almost to excess. That way your hypothetical victim can avoid things they don’t
want to see, things that by the way, may just as easily have been created by
another victim who is dealing with their issues by a different and equally
valid route.
Fan creators also don’t have anywhere near the influence of
mainstream media, where you don’t even get half the warnings fandom will give
you. Media aims to make you feel, but you are responsible for what you do, and
that includes clicking on fics that told you up front there were things inside that would make you uncomfortable. Learn yourself, know yourself, manage yourself. Writers and artists aren’t here to be your babysitter.
And finally, people are definitely not rapists for writing
rape fic, because what makes a person a rapist is actually committing rape. It’s
not rocket science.
Ah, sorry about that last statement, I must’ve been unclear. Of course you’re not a rapist just for writing rape fic. I was underexaggerating, because I have seen arguments against this on the sillier side of things that seem to assume writing things like rape is equatable to committing them.
Of course the crimes are the perpetrator’s fault, and not the author’s. Sorry if I was unclear, again, but I have to reiterate: your average person reading a dark fic will walk away unaffected. Nobody who reads about some guy murdering a bunch of people is going to go on a killing spree themself!
The problem lies in the fact that people who have already committed crimes, or dream of doing so, will read dark fics. They’ll see what they’ve done portrayed like it’s sexy. Like it’s good. And they’ll feel good about it. They’ll feel like it wasn’t a big deal, and everyone else is wrong, and they’re not a bad person. Or, if they were a victim, they might feel like it’s stupid to be so torn up about it. They’ll feel like what their sibling or parent or datemate or auncle or whatever else tries to do to them isn’t so bad. Of course that abuser is entirely to blame. It was their choice to use that writing for something so horrible. The writing is not the root cause of the problem. But it does enable it. Why would you want to risk someone like that feeling good because of something you wrote? Death of the author and all. Your intentions don’t matter. It’s how someone used what you wrote that makes people suffer.
I never asked the victims I know too much about what happened to them, but one pretty readily volunteered that their abuser, their older sister, coerced them into sex by normalising it with incest fics. They were traumatised by it. Real people are traumatised by these things. The fact remains that despite everything, these victims are far from hypothetical.
It’s not the authors’ fault that someone so evil would use their writing like that. I’d like to believe that the people who write this stuff do so with only the best of intentions. Who could guess that something they wrote would be used for something so awful? The trouble is that it happens. It happens, and people suffer, and we as writers can do something to protect them.
I don’t think writing about dark themes like these should be banned! I know plenty of victims use them to vent and process their own trauma. I just think that we should bear in mind that we as writers have an influence over people, whether they are victims or abusers. It might not be a lot. But it’s there. And there’s nothing stopping us from thinking very, very hard about how we make that influence as good as possible.
I think I’d disagree that writers of derivative fiction have less influence than the mainstream, too. How many people do you know who read pretty much nothing but fic nowadays because mainstream fiction doesn’t have what they want? We influence a different group, to be sure, but there’s still a lot of people in it.
Creators have a responsibility to create, to be sure! The trouble is in the distinction between what is reprehensible to someone personally, and what could actually hurt someone. Plenty of things gross me out. Plenty of those things I know better than to gripe about publically. “Don’t like, don’t read” has its place in fiction!
But that place is not everywhere. Fiction is a good way to explore pressing issues through different lenses. But some lenses – and I’m talking here about the glorification of these issues, nothing more! – have the capability to seriously hurt real people. Think how many cases of abusive relationships cropped up surrounding Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey!
All we need to do, I think, is carefully consider how we frame dark topics. Of course rapists and paedophiles and yada yada yada aren’t your intended audience. You don’t want to hurt anyone. But, on the off chance someone like that saw what you created, how would it make them feel? In the same way we carefully handle racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia and similar issues that could hurt people in fiction, we should be careful about how we portray things like paedophilia and all the other stuff I’ve been talking about.
Just that people are considerate is all I’m asking.
Tagging is the consideration you are asking for. Education is the preventative measure you want. We give or show people the tools to protect themselves. We are not obligated to stop creating, ever.
I don’t think tagging is gonna stop my friend’s big sister from trying to screw them. It’s just going to make incest fics easier for her to find.
Education’s not gonna reach everyone. Often it doesn’t until it’s too late. That same friend still shipped incest until recently, because the realisation that it had hurt them never reached them.
I’m still not saying that these things shouldn’t be written about ever! We are not obligated to stop creating! But we are obligated to ensure we don’t create in a way that hurts people.
The fact that I stick pins in my arms isn’t the root of my problems either. Does that mean taking the pins away will do nothing to help me? Take away one of the tools. Make the box a little safer.
All I’m saying is that we need to be careful about glorifying these issues. Nothing more, nothing less, nothing else.
Telling people they should only write about certain issues one way is advocating censorship. That has a long history of not ending well. Education may not reach everyone, but it should. That is the angle you should be pushing, not censorship. Start directing people to Scarleteen or Go ask Alice or the freaking cops if you think they have real world concerns.
You’re not in a box. You’re in a big wide world full of needles, pins, scissors, knives, any number of things you can hurt yourself with, or other people could try to hurt you with, and in that world are people who have learned how to handle sharp objects safely, or like you, are still learning. And they can be taught. Because we’re not going back to ripping bread apart with bare hands just because you don’t know how to handle a bread knife.
Who decides what’s “glorifying” an issue, rather than “bringing awareness of how it works?” Random strangers on the internet?
i think if you use your brain for a little bit you can figure out when you’re saying “bad things are good actually” and when you’re saying “this thing happens but it’s bad”
glorification: ooh look how sexy and kinky this bad thing is isn’t it great and titillating
respectful handling of a dark issue: get a load of this bad thing. isn’t it horrible? here’s how it traumatises people.
usually the distinction is graphic descriptions of your Bad Thing, but not always. you can still glorify something without them, and you’re probably able to handle it respectfully despite describing it in detail. not sure how you might do that though. i don’t really wanna know either eheheh, that’s for people who wanna write that to figure out.
The only reasonable reply to that patronizing if supposedly well intentioned tirade:
i’ve yet to see one of the people saying that dark fics “glorify” things produce a single actual example of a fic which “glorifies” things and not be wrong.
so, yes, put me down for “if you use your brain for a little bit” being the key missing step.
what you see happening here is an example of the contagion superstition.
a rapist might read your fic! then your fic would become Unclean! clearly you must either refrain from writing, or perform some kind of cleansing ritual.
the contagion superstition is the origin of far more terrible practices than this. the purity rules in leviticus, for instance, that are used to this day to justify bigotry. caste systems in various parts of the world that create an untouchable underclass who can never rise above their birth caste because they’ve been ‘polluted’ by interacting with the unclean. isolating women during menstruation. genital mutilation. ostracizing and abusing and murdering rape victims.
considering the worldwide, history-long death toll that has resulted from the contagion superstition, it’s ironic how its proponents are convinced they have the moral high ground because of their performative revulsion.
just moving along like everyone else 