i can say i’m not that invested in homestuck anymore all i want but the truth is, you either have never been a homestuck or are a homestuck, there is no undoing what has been done.
you think you’re a free man but then you play deltarune and suddenly your homestuck brain awakes from its fake slumber and as it points out to you that toby fox just made a spades bucket joke, you know from the very depths of your soul that you can never be free.
Ok, this is going to be a controversial one, but her me out: do you think it’s a bit weird that so many women in the fandom (most of them straight or bi) only show interest in mlm ships? I know on a personal level everybody has their reasons and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with liking mlm in any sense, but for so many women to only relate to relationships where they aren’t represented is a bit… weird. Not to mention knee-jerk reactions to any mlf pairing 🤔
This is far from a controversial question. People have been mystified that transformative fandom – primarily made up of women* – is ‘only’ interested in mlm for as long as transformative fandom has been a recognized phenomenon.
A caveat for the terminology in this post: as society at large tends to forget/ignore/reject the gender spectrum and transgender people, ‘male/men’ = characters referred to with male pronouns in canon and ‘female/women’ = characters referred to with female pronouns. (NB/agender/genderqueer people don’t come up, unfortunately.)
In other words,Fanworks are NOT mostly mlm; it’s just likely that we tend to notice m/m more than m/f because m/f is the ‘default’ – unmarked, and thus overlooked.
secondly, while you’ve lumped straight and bisexual women together in your ask, if you separate straight and bisexual fandom participants you get an interesting picture in regards to the typical ‘straight women are the biggest m/m fans’ common wisdom:
Now with those caveats out of the way … why is mlm popular in a space that is primarily dominated by women**? I honestly don’t think this can be truly quantified. the reasons vary from person to person too greatly. But there’s a lot of theories and a lot of anecdotal evidence for those theories. Here’s some of them, in no particular order:
it’s male privilege (sexism/misogyny).
Male privilege: Male societal privilege and and bias feeds into media bias. media is heavily male-dominated (more male characters, usually played by cis men where actors are called for, with more central/leading roles and more screentime). Even conversations between female characters tend to focus on the male characters. The media bias then itself contributes back to societal bias – and fandom bias – towards seeing men/male characters as more interesting, more dynamic, and more varied than women/female characters.
Flip side: societal bias towards men leads directly to a relative lack of interest in women/female characters. they have less screentime, less interaction with one another, and are less centralized by the plot. Their stories are more likely to revolve around a male character in the cast. And when they do get the same treatment as male characters, audiences are very hard on them.
it’s simply a function of statistics. the overrepresentation of male characters compared to female characters has a natural consequence. If you do the math, that exponentially increases the odds of a mlm ship being fanned over compared to an m/f or wlw ship.
in addition to having more roles, relationships between masc characters are often where the emotional heart of a story lies. people tend to ping on that in and create fan content for it.
it’s because fanworks are a function of wish fulfillment, taking various forms:
straight women, being sexually attracted to men, consume mlm (nsfw) fanworks for the same reason straight men might consume wlw porn: double the eye candy. (the fact that straight women are actually less likely to consume or create mlm fanfic than non-straight women suggests this may not be as prevalent as often assumed.)
non-straight characters are still incredibly uncommon in mass media; transformative fandom, which is mostly non-straight, creates their own representation (perhaps with bias towards the characters with more emotional connection in canon.)
non-straight relationships are even less common than non-straight characters, and are unlikely to get much canon focus if they do exist. fandom fills this gap. (conversely, m/f pairings are far more likely to receive canon fulfillment and canon focus, so there’s less need to create fan content for it.)
(white cis) male bodies are both more common in (western) mass media and ‘unmarked’. like m/f pairings, white cis males are perceived as ‘default’ due to white/cis/male privilege. If racism, transphobia, and sexism weren’t enough on their own to increase content about pairings between characters of that description, that privilege also means that fictional characters of this description are the least likely to be seen as needing protection by policing elements in fandom, increasing the free rein on content creation. thus: fandom produces more mlm fanworks despite being fannish over m/f and f/f ships as well, which increases content obscurity, which increases free rein, which increases content creation, etc.
relatedly: women’s stories/sexuality is too fraught. male privilege/internalized misogyny leads directly to women’s stories and afab bodies being politicized. some afab people have hangups about fictional representations of themselves in nsfw content, being uncomfortable with portrayals of people like themselves in fiction, and even sickened by depictions of pleasure experienced by bodies with vaginas (particularly in f/f works). mlm stories create enough distance for women to enjoy it without distraction by concerns of misogyny or fear of something hitting too close to home in the experience (and cis mlm nsfw content in particular provides a safe space for afab people who are bothered by depictions of afab pleasure for whatever reason).
In conclusion: at first glance it might seem weird that fandom seems to spend a lot of time on mlm, but this is both not entirely true and (where it is true) there are many, many reasons for it.
I’ve spent 8 hours compiling links and piecing together this post now so that you can have a comprehensive guide to the reasons that parts of fandom seem to be dominated by mlm stories, so I’m going to wrap up now. For more fanwork statistics, try these links:
One final note: the comparative prevalence of mlm to wlw would suggest that male privilege and bias is primary motivation for its popularity, but wlw was not always so scarce as it seems to be now. Just as you might expect, shows with a mostly-female cast had massive amounts of wlw content: sailor moon, utena, etc. Butthere’s reason to believe that purity culture has stifled wlw popularity, and that’s a damn shame.
*The largest fandom demographic survey from a reputable source (that I am aware of) was based on AO3 users, advertised primarily via Tumblr, and analyzed by @centrumlumina in 2013. I’m pulling my stats from this survey, but be aware it has significant limitations.
**in my personal experience, many of those in fandom who identify as women are cis women, but also many of those in fandom who do not identify as women are afab/were socialized as a woman before identifying differently. However, I don’t currently have survey data to back this up.
One small note regarding making inferences from AO3 as opposed to ff.net: don’t forget that ff.net has in the past engaged in wholesale deletion of homosexual content. This suggests that it, at least, represents a selected sample and thus cannot be used for inferences without some transformation.
I don’t know enough about the data to be able to say anything definitive about how to fix it, but I will suggest that a small, random sample is more representative than a large, selected sample. That’s just statistics.
this was never official policy, but there was a bit of that kind of effect.
I was there for the NC-17 fic purge in 2002 (the announcement can be read here). This was meant to ban any kind of explicit sexual content from the site, but it disproportionately affected m/m fic because LG content of any kind was just considered to be not-kid-friendly, and thus tended to be higher-rated by default (this person’s experience of feeling that any m/m content had to be rated NC-17 was not my experience, but it illustrates my point). m/f kisses were G-rated; m/m kisses were PG-13-rated. and after the NC-17 purge, people who dodged by just dropping the rating on their explicit fic were were more likely to get reported if their work was LG.
Apparently this sexual nsfw ban was reiterated in 2012 and pushed a whole new group of authors to nsfw-friendly sites likes AO3.
Even though fandom often obsesses over the question of why we like mlm so much, the truth is that fandom mlm content has been under fire from outsiders and also from insiders for many, many years. if you go back into the depths of ff.net, you’ll see a plethora of fics with warnings like MM CONTENT! YAOI! DON’T LIKE DON’T READ! taking up precious character-counter space in the tiny summary line. If you didn’t do that, you’d get ‘flamed’ (nasty reviews with personal attacks in them). It’s only been in the last 5-8 years or so that fandom has come to be considered slash/femslash-friendly and people who are bothered by LG content are the weirdos – which is why it’s so bizarre to me to see this flip happening, where LG content is bad again because the wrong people are writing it.
(*’MM’ instead of ‘M/M’ because ff.net took ‘special’ characters- including slashes! – out of summaries a while back and most people never edited in response :v )
Oh man, wow, okay, I have two answers for you Anon, short and long.
Short: OMG, no, I don’t mind at all if you read me! I don’t like anti-Steve content either!
Also, before we get to the long answer, I need you to understand that everything I’m about to say is yelling at fandom, and not at you. In fact, I am gently hugging you while yelling at fandom over your shoulder. Just hold that in your mind.
Long Answer:
So, what you said crams an incredible amount of information about present-day fandom into two sentences. I’d like to break it down a little because I want to dispel some of the toxic myths that are flying around in fandom culture.
One, it is truly mind-blowing to me that in the span of about five years, fandom has gone from Tony/Steve being the massively dominant ship to a person believing that if they like Steve Rogers they can’t like Tony Stark or vice versa. For decades, they were the best of friends in comics, and fandom loved both their friendship and the super gay subtext it contained. Even after the comic book Civil War, where Steve and Tony basically argued the exact same thing as the movie, they were a heavily dominant ship. I don’t think the movie changed that, necessarily – I think fandom culture did, more on that below.
And I’m okay with the ship losing people. There’s still tons of fanfic out there, it’s not that I’m mad I get less content now, I consume less content now anyway. It’s this bizarre idea that if you like one character you cannot like a character who is in opposition to them, even if those two characters still have a relationship. Or if they don’t!
It is okay for two characters to fight with each other and even spend time hating each other and for them to both be protagonists, and for you to still like them both. This isn’t a dysfunctional divorce, you don’t have to choose, whatever Marvel and the more toxic side of fandom is telling you. One of the reasons my old Stealing Harry fic is so popular (aside from being kidfic) is that I wrote Sirius Black and Severus Snape as two thoroughly damaged war veterans who hated each other not because one was good and one was bad but because they were very different people who had a long history of being assholes. They could both still be likable characters. And because of that, they could both experience growth into Non Assholes in my story.
You can like Steve Rogers and still like Tony Stark. Or like Steve Rogers and just not give a shit about Tony Stark. I love them both deeply, separately and as a partnership. And so I don’t allow haters on my dash. Of either of them.
And that leads us to point two. Not allowing haters on my dash isn’t some kind of purity thing. It’s not a form of CASTING OUT ALL WHO DISAGREE, there’s no ideology behind it. Not that I could stop them reading me anyway – even if you ban someone, they can still read your tumblr unless you password-lock it, and we’ll come back to banning in a minute.
Not allowing haters on my dash is about the active curation of my fandom experience and no one else’s. I like Tony Stark so I don’t want to see people hating on him. I do have friends who don’t care about him one way or the other, and some who don’t like him, but the difference is that when they don’t like something…they ignore it and talk about the stuff they do like. I do the same with them. We aren’t haters. We’re just people with disparate interests.
When there is a culture of hating on any character, which is apparently what the tonky stank thing is about (according to reports; I haven’t seen it for myself), it tends to be less about that character and more about an excuse to indulge in a kind of mob-based negativity. If it’s interesting to examine canon critically, that’s one thing, I could and often do engage in critical discussion of canon. If it’s fun to hate a character so you do a lot of it as a pastime, or all your critical focus is on one specific pinpoint of canon that you just hate so much, then, well, you are enjoying hating something, and that’s…not a great mental place to be, tbh. (We saw this in Torchwood with the antigwenallies, so it’s not new, it’s just in a new fandom.) It’s essentially schoolyard bullying where you feel okay about it because the victim is fictional.
And I’m not here to say “Stop, you are hurting Tony Stark’s feelings.” He doesn’t exist, he has no feelings to hurt. But bullying is like an addiction – it’s an unhealthy outlet for people who haven’t got healthy ones.
So, here’s part three: you can’t stop haters reading what you say, but I don’t even bother trying. I don’t care who reads me because I only care about what I consume and where my work goes, and someone else’s reading involves neither of those. Besides, you can tell people not to read you, but someone who hates something you love is still probably going to do it.
If they make a nasty comment, then you can ban them, but that goes back to curating your own experience. Banning is best when used to shield you from hearing their voice or to stop them putting your work on their blog. Like unfollowing someone, it’s not meant to indicate a difference of opinion, it’s meant to remove that harmful influence from your life. Because even if someone you TRULY HATE is reading your blog passively and not commenting, you pretty much have no way to tell. So why worry? Maybe they’ll learn something.
So that’s pretty much my ban policy: I don’t ban people unless a) they’re motivated solely by a desire to ruin someone’s fun or b) I don’t like the content of their blog and don’t want my name appearing on it (porn bots, Nazis, misogynists, etc). There’s a significant overlap, for sure.
Anyway, in closing, it is possible to like multiple characters even if fandom is telling you otherwise, your fannish experience is your own to control and not a stick to hit people with, and I don’t care who reads me because they will anyway and also I want to model good, healthy fannish behavior for those who do, especially for those who maybe haven’t learned that healthy behavior yet. I do my best, anyway.
PHEW. We got through it. I’ll stop hugging now.
this is a really good takedown of some toxic aspects of fandom culture, and a building up of some healthy ones. i really feel that people who took ‘civil war’ to mean you had to hate either tony or steve really missed the point of the work. the tragedy and power of that story came from the fact that the heroes were divided and fighting over a real issue, but still loved each other. not just tony and steve, but all the avengers. they’re still family even when they’re fighting.
and whether you ship stony or see them as friends or what, it hurts to see them fighting, and it hurt THEM to be fighting, and that’s what makes it a powerful story.
all the ‘team cap vs team iron man’ merchandizing was playing on that, and simultaneously leaning on the tension and lessening it by treating it kind of like a pickup football game. like, shirts vs skins, kinda thing.
you see it lampshaded a bit in the actual movie when natasha and clint are fighting, because they’re reassuring each other they’re still best friends even while they kick the crap out of each other.
anyhow, i feel like fandom infighting is fading back a little now that there are so many obvious and undeniable enemies in the real world. but i’m hoping maybe we can all remember this perspective and not go back to biting holes in each other over fiction once the nazis are beaten.
Also Tumblr: *adds a gay romance plot to every story*
Tumblr: It’s okay when we do it, because it appeals to our fetishes, even if we say it’s “because progressiveness!”
to be fair a lot of hetero romance feels forced as fuck, and if it wasnt literally everywhere i wouldnt have an issue with it. dont really watch movies but seeing actually healthy gay relationships is rare the times i do watch tv
a lot of women: we’re really tired of constantly seeing trite heteronormative bullshit romances shoehorned in to every piece of media, no matter how flat the female character or unappealing the male character, that never lets us forget our place as sexual accessories to men. also, a whole bunch of us are queer. also queer men are here too.
a lot of women: so we’re going to write our own romances that are actually hot and appealing as well as useful for exploring— or escaping— the various traumas and kinks we’ve picked up around living in a world that sees us as sexual accessories. relationships based on equality and friendship, or relationships that specifically foreground inequality and exploitation, are really hot and fun to examine in the context of a couple hundred thousand words of hardcore gay smut—
inevitable dudes: but this makes us uncomfortable! because you’re sexual accessories, your involvement with sex should be as a passive receiver, a subject, not an active agent, let alone a creator or an instigator. we’re going to make fun of you now until you stop.
a lot of women: it turns out that once you read a couple hundred thousand words of hardcore gay smut you get a lot harder to shame.
i remember reading naruto as a 13-year-old and being so confused that kakashi was willing to read porn in public but today it occurred to me that the number of times i’ve straight-facedly read porn on ao3 in public is honestly kind of worrying. i’ve become kakashi. we’ve all become kakashi
Except for those of us who grew up to be Jiraiya and straight-facedly write porn in public.
A wonderful piece about fandom history, friendships, and legacies.
Dee called AO3 a “candy store,” and said the fan art she has seen, in particular, has been overwhelming. “I cannot get over the art,” she said. “We would have jumped at this. I would’ve given my right tit for all this art when I was in my twenties. Because you couldn’t reproduce it, you couldn’t send it out, but [now] there’s this fabulous art coming out every single day.”
Yes. Yes. Yes. This is how it happened. Excellent article.
Thanks to the author for permission to share this here, and for being
just a really nice human being, and big thanks to the artist who did my
mom’s portrait, above. -Zachary
hey ao3 can you like give the extra $38k you made from this month’s funds drive to charity
You know it legally is a charity, right?
If x charity aims for £10, but gets £15, would you expect then to give back the extra five or give it then to another charity? No. Any extra costs go into the “rainy day” fund; sometimes servers crash or break, sometimes false reports are made that require the legal team, sometimes you need to hire coders or what not to implement new features or fix bugs or deal with broken code …
The money they aimed for is the bare minimum, which goes towards things like basic server costs and domain names and legal advice and so forth, but they don’t just “pocket” the rest (as people claim). It’s not a business. It has no advertisements. It needs some “rainy day” cash to function.
You can’t ask a charity to give money to another charity.
They don’t “pocket” excess money. They have a
publicly accessible budget – waaaay more info than most charities, in
fact. In it, you can clearly see where each dollar goes. (Also, you are
vastly underestimating either how much traffic AO3 gets or how much
servers/hosting costs.)
In my experience, people who don’t work in web design and hosting just have no concept of how heavy a load something like AO3 would have. Not only is the traffic absolutely buck wild, but the quantity of data that archive needs to store is fuckoff crazy.
I’m talking “more than the library of congress” crazy. The only reason
it doesn’t require Netflix levels of data serving is that it’s text
based rather than video.
AO3 is in the top 300 websites in the world, and the top 100 in the US. It is the number 2 literature website.
Number 2 in the entire world. JSTOR is 20.
It sees about 6 million people a day.
About 250k an hour. Each of those people is loading multiple pages, many are running
searches that execute on literally hundreds of potential variables per
search. The demands involved are astronomical.
JSTOR, btw, makes 85 million dollars a year.
It’s 18 ranks below AO3′s traffic, and takes in 650 times the amount of money.
But let’s say you think that’s an unfair comparison. Would you say that the Project Gutenberg Literature Archival Group- another text based archive that handles literature operating outside traditional copyright requirements- is more similar?
Because it sees all of 4% of the traffic that AO3 handles.
Care to guess its budget?
Double that of AO3.
AO3 is doing shit on the kind of shoestring budget that I fully, 100% cannot comprehend. And that’s just the archival service.
The 130k also pays for the OTW’s legal team, which they use to defend the right of fandom to fucking exist.
It’s
absolutely batshit fucked up that people are fighting to have the OTW
defunded and AO3 shut down. They are the only organized group that
actually stands directly between fandom- all the art and the fics and
the vids and the music and the chats and the memes and everything we
love about interactive, transformative work- and an incalculable amount of lawsuits.
I am honestly reaching levels of “take the toys away from the children” irritation. I mean, obviously that would never happen, nor would I advocate for it, but jesus fucking christ on a rowboat.
Fandom in 1998, when I got started: Hey, the preview for this show I just saw sounds interesting. It’s already in its second season. I’ll see what information the internet (which has been available to me for about four years) has about this show. (I will later get copies of the show by paying for someone to send me VHS copies of the aired episodes.)
Oh, this site is interesting. I can read episode summaries for the episodes I’ve missed. Huh, there’s a webring thing at the bottom. I will click on some of these other links.
Oh, right, fanfiction. I’ve sort of seen that around. It gets posted on this message board, which wasn’t designed for fiction posting, so people who post here have developed a system for what they put in the subject line of a post, which is usually just a title, and maybe a rating. Meaning the kind of rating the U.S. movie system uses, which may or may not mean anything to non-U.S. posters.
Shit, I just read a romance story with the show’s big pairing, and at the end the hero DIES TRAGICALLY. I wasn’t prepared for this! Oh, man, an author I really like posted a story where two men have sex, but this fandom doesn’t even know what slash is and some homophobic posters are really upset that they “had” to read it, and now it’s a giant kerfuffle.
Oh, now the message board provider is putting ads on everything. Now they’re shutting down because the ads don’t make enough money. Some people didn’t save copies of things they wrote. But it’s okay, because one single fan has put in the work and the money to archive everything that was posted to an archive she set up. Including all 239 shitty stories by an author I hate, but who has tons of fans. And luckily, she didn’t refuse to archive deathfic or slash or torture or rape or anything else that might have bothered her.
Except, whoops, now she’s out of touch. The website stays running for a while, but eventually the hosting expires and the domain registration expires, and now links to that site take you to whoever is now squatting there.
So those roughly 2500 stories are gone. Poof. The only reason anything got saved is because I dug up a tool that would crawl the Wayback Machine and downloaded what was available. It’s most of everything. What’s missing? Hell if I know. And I can’t even get it into AO3 through Open Doors, because the original archivist is MIA.
Purity wank is one thing. One stupid thing, but still. But bitching about financials for a 501c3 with a budget and an annual report and federal reporting requirements? A site with over, what, four MILLION stories, ad-free, with the search and download features it’s got? Run by volunteers? And you’re bitching about $38k, which I’m pretty sure that AO3 didn’t compel anyone to donate? That extra twenty percent is going to help keep the fucking lights on.
(Of course this isn’t going to make a damn bit of difference, because we live in a world where facts don’t matter anymore, so thank fucking god I can download fic from AO3 to put on my Kindle and avoid engaging with reality.)
And lest the young folk think the bad old days are past, I used to post my Anita Blake fic to a site called Pomme de Sang for years starting in 2005. Then a couple years ago the entire site vanished. There was no warning and nobody I’ve spoken with knows what happened to it. One day it was just gone, and so was every single piece of fic published there, which was easily numbering in the thousands.
I was lucky; I had saved everything I posted on that site
(only because I have a paranoid streak tbh), including one fic that had over 80 chapters. But I’ll bet many of the other writers who posted their fic only or mainly on that site weren’t so paranoid lucky and lost some or all of what they had posted there, because after the site being online for well over a decade nobody expected it to just vanish. Until it did.
Guess where I’m now republishing all my old fic, where I can be confident it won’t vanish again like PdS did only a scant few years ago?
Nobody should be complaining about AO3. It’s a godsend to fandom.
Wow. I haven’t been in that fandom since obsidian butterfly. I had no idea there had been such a catastrophic archive closure. How awful.
One of the biggest Sailor Moon fic archives in the early aughts was A Sailor Moon Romance. Had a forum and automatic posting and a very basic search function. It was taken down by the people who ran it in the late aughts and I was never 100% sure why. Someone started a project to restore the old archives based on site backups done by paranoid fans who didn’t technically have access to the code but who made tools to do that. It didn’t save everything. and the restoration stalled out maybe a quarter of the way through.
While I cross-posted some of my work to ff.net, most of my sailor moon fic from my first days in fandom was lost when ASMR went down.
AO3 is amazing and an invaluable resource for fandom and anyone who says otherwise is either misled, lying, or a fucking idiot.
let’s be real, we all know who’s threatened by women and minorities having their own artistic spaces.
…is this supposed to be considered weird? I don’t get it.
I think it’s more that it was an unexpected feature. I’m glad it’s there.
Yeah I actually found it while prepping for brain surgery, and was incredibly relieved that it was a built-in feature and not something I’d have to leave convoluted instructions about or whatever. It’s a bit morbid, sure, but it’s a great feature.
…an unexpected but very appreciated feature.
This is a feature designed by women who’d been in fandom for decades, and who had faced the issue of, “X is dead, and we know she loved fandom, so… can we reprint her stories? Who can decide? Her family knows fuck-all about fandom. Who was her best friend? Do they know if she would’ve liked her story to be reprinted in the Best Of OTP Fic zine?”
Running across that once doesn’t make you think about a policy, but by the time it’s five to ten times, and then you’ve seen people vanish from the internet (might be dead; might just be not interested anymore) and nobody knows whether it’s okay to collect their fic in an archive or transfer it to a new one….
Yeah, the FNoK policy is one of the awesome things about AO3.
The tenth anniversary of the OTW and all the AO3 discussion going around this week inspired me to go look at astolat’s original post about creating an An Archive Of Our Own, and found my comment on it:
“I think this is needed and long past needed.
There are of course huge fanfic archives out there like ff.net, but the bigger and more public the site, the more restrictive it is, the more stuff around the edges gets cut off. I don’t WANT the public face of fanfic to be only the most easily palatable stuff, with the smut and the kink and the controversial subjects marginalized and hidden under the table.
And I particularly don’t want to see us all sitting around feeling frustrated while this fabulous community is commodified out from underneath us.
I’m not fit to be a project manager, but I’m great with details and general organizational work. If someone takes this and runs with it, I’d love to help.“
Eleven years and rather a lot of volunteer-hours later, I stand by every single word.
And then I found my original post on the idea that became the OTW/AO3, which says in part:
“However, as I was reading the comments over there, I noticed a frustrating, but not surprising number of comments along the lines of “well, it’s a good idea, but it’s way too ambitious”
I’m not talking about the really useful and practical comments bringing up pitfalls and difficulties to be aware of from the get go with something this massive and complex, I’m talking about all the comments that go something like this:
Taken separately, these comments don’t seem like much, but every time a new one showed up I couldn’t help but be reminded of
this post by commodorified, and her oh so brilliant and beautiful rant therein:
“WOMEN NEED TO LEARN TO ASK FOR EVERY DAMN THING THEY WANT.
And here are some notes:
Yes, you. Yes, everything. Yes, even that.
All of it. Because it’s true. We’re mostly raised to live on table scraps, to wait and see what’s going when everyone else has been served and then choose from what’s left. And that’s crap, and it’ll get you crap.
Forget the limited menu of things that you automatically assume is all that’s available given your (gender, looks, social class, education, financial position, reputation, family, damage level, etc etc etc), and start reading the whole menu instead.
Then figure out what you want. Then check what you’ve got and figure out how to get it. And then go after it baldheaded till either you make it happen or you decide that its real cost is more than it’s worth to you.”
And THAT is what Astolat’s post is about. It’s about saying “THIS is what we want, let’s make it happen.” It’s about aiming for the ideal, not for some artificially imposed, more “realistic” option.
And I think that’s fabulous. And I think we CAN do this, we CAN make this amazing, complicated idea happen. But in order to do so we’re going to have to be careful about those little voices inside our heads saying “well, it’s a nice idea, but” and “there’s no point in trying for that impossible thing, let’s aim for this ‘more realistic’ goal instead.”
Because, damn it, why shouldn’t we ask for every damn thing we want. And why shouldn’t we go out there and get it?”
I am so pleased to have been proved correct.
(And also, in the category of “women need to ask for every damn thing they want”? I took those words to heart, which is one of many reasons Marna/commodorified and I have been married for going on eight years.)
ETA: I know some of the links are broken, they copied over from my original post and I didn’t have the energy to either delete them or track them down elsewhere.
Asking for it and doing it!!!
So inspiring. And yes – at the time this seemed such a pipedream, but look at it now!
Yup. I remember saying I’d support it regardless, but it would only really be useful to me as a poster if it allowed every kind of content. Heh.
God this brings it back. People saying we couldn’t do it, that we would never be able to do it, etc. And then there was the sort of six months later moment where people were like, but where is it? (!) Dudes, we had to found a nonprofit company first! so we could be legal and raise money and pay taxes and have a bank account and enter contracts – and moreover, the archive was written from scratch: from a single blinking cursor on the screen, custom-designed from the ground up. I remember that I had the job of tracking wireframes in the early days as the real designers figured out how the flow of pages in the archive were going to go. Amazing.
Anyway, I want to say that the group that came together around the OTW /AO3 in those first years had a track record like WHOA: so many of those people had been archivists, web-admins, fannish fest-runners, newsletter compilers, community moderators, listmoms (kiddies, you won’t know what this is) or had other fannish roles that gave them enormous experience in working collaboratively in fandom and keeping something great going year after year. And OTW continues to attract great people–and so also, while I’m blathering, let me say that volunteering for the OTW also provides great, real world experience that you can put on your resume, because AO3 is one of the top sites in the world and TWC has been publishing on time for ten years and Fanlore is cited in books and journalism all the time and Open Doors has relationships with many meatspace university libraries and archives etc. so if you think you have something to bring to the table, please do think about volunteering somewhere. It’s work, believe me, but it’s also pretty g-d awesome.
And THAT is what Astolat’s post is about. It’s about saying “THIS is what we want, let’s make it happen.” It’s about aiming for the ideal, not for some artificially imposed, more “realistic” option.
I want to pull this out for a second because I have in fact generally spent much of my life aiming for big unrealistic goals, very few of which I’ve actually achieved, and many of which I didn’t actually want by the time I got close to them.
The thing about aiming for “unrealistic” goals is that the work you do to achieve those goals doesn’t disappear even if you don’t achieve the goal. We still haven’t accomplished everything on our giant AO3 wishlist. There remains plenty of work to be done (and the OTW and the amazing current team working on the AO3 can always use more help, as Cesperanza says!)
But because we collectively threw ourselves at this project, there is an archive, and it’s not just good, it’s better than anything else out there. ❤
just moving along like everyone else 