this website is really uniquely terrible in nearly every way but where else am i gonna put my posts about batman being named after bruce springsteen. do i post that on facebook? do i email my mom
The best explanation of Tumblr’s appeal that I’ve seen
everywhere else you speak TO people, specific people, one at a time or in small groups
here you can scream into the void, and if a passing weirdo likes it they can give you a thumbs up or pass it along to their weirdo friends who might like it too
That thing you wrote that isn’t “good enough” to put up on the AO3. You can put it up there! The AO3 isn’t meant to be The World’s Classiest Showcase. It’s an archive. It exists because most other forms of hosting fannish work eventually degrade or disappear. Accounts get deleted. Websites shut down. The AO3 preserves those things. Ten years from now you’ll be like, “Shit, there was this really great tag essay, but the person changed their Tumblr URL and then Tumblr closed up shop…” (look, even Tumblr will die eventually) and your only hope of finding it will be if the page was cached, or if somebody uploaded it to the AO3.
The AO3 exists to preserve ephemera as much as substantial works. You know how valuable it is for archaeologists to be able to read the graffiti on the walls of Pompeii? The little things, the notes, the headcanons, the notfics, the meta, the back-and-forths, are all important too.
YES YES YES THIS.
Tumblr’s likely to die sooner than you expect, and suddenly – it’s owned by Yahoo. (Anyone remember
del.icio.us, later delicious.com?) Yahoo’s trying really really hard to squeeze money out of tumblr and it’s not working, for all the reasons discussed in synec’s post and because a huge portion of its userbase is 13-18 years old and HAVE NO DIGITAL MONEY so can’t buy things online even if they wanted to.
There is no “worthy to be on AO3.” None. The early fics were often really well-written; it was a high-standards archive – not because “it strove for high standards” but because the only people who knew it existed, who cared about a new multifandom archive, were the ones who’d been around watching archives disappear for years; they were veteran fic writers who wanted a permanent place to share their stories. It took a long time for AO3 to have enough server capacity to allow open invites; in the early days, it was friend-of-a-friend for invite codes. (They wanted more people; they couldn’t handle a flood. So they handed out a few codes at a time)
We even talked about it while setting up the original terms of service – knowing that by saying, our standards are less restrictive than ff.net, less restrictive than LJ, we were going to eventually have HUGE amounts of really bad fic. FF.net got the nickname “pit of voles,” and AO3 was going to outdo that… eventually.
And. We wanted it ALL. All the reader-insert Mary Sue “date with hot dude” fic; all the “quiz to find out which power ranger you would be” fic; all the “band came to my home town and their bus broke down in front of my house and they needed a coffee and…” fic. And later, all the meta: the thinky character analyses; the “who’d be best on a first date” discussions; the “why the new movie sucked rocks and should never have been made because they ruined my favorite sidekick” rants.
ALL. WE WANT IT ALL.
AO3 is not about “the best of fandom;” it’s about “the truth of fandom.” And the truth is, fandom is not comprised of 90% well-written tightly-plotted carefully proofread fic. Fandom is comprised of people who love their favorite shows and books and characters and want to share that love with others.
AO3 are not the fanfic standards police. We’re the ones cheering for the “GLOWING BLUE SKELETON DICKS” tags.
Someday, some fandom archaeologist (and yes, there will be fandom archaeologists, isn’t that awesome?) will sift through the badfic, the quick drabbles, the Mary Sues, and write articles for peer-reviewed journals chronicling the complete collected works of some of the 21st century’s greatest authors and how you can see in THIS self-indulgent Protagonist/OC clusterfuck the origin of those characterization tactics and flow of prose that make your subsequent masterworks truly shine as beloved classics, and THIS short character drabble gives THAT story arc in your well-known later story an exceptional poignancy and depth if one considers it backstory.
Also that fandom archaeologist’s teenage daughter will think the self-indulgent Protagonist/OC clusterfuck is the best thing she’s ever read.
I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to have been in the queer movement for 20+ years, to have studied queer theory, to have contributed to you potentially enjoying the rights you have today because I was part of a groundswell of lobbying and direct action in the 1990s….
…to have a 15 year old who’s spent maybe 8 months being political and has never inquired about queer history anonymously message me, “EXCUSE ME QU**R IS A SLUR LMAO OMG EMBARRASSSING AN aCTUAL ADULT WHO THINKS IT’S OKAY TO USE QU**R!~!!!!”
Dude, we are a slur. Queer folks are a slur to conservative straight people. Everything we are will be used as a slur by everyone who hates us. Gay is a slur. Lesbian is a slur. People will try to use all of our words against us. Don’t fucking let them get into your head to the point at which you’re telling actual queer people not to use the words we’ve used to unite ourselves and empower ourselves for decades.
yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees
The notes on this post since I first reblogged it from @asynca are a wild fucking ride.
“It was never our word, do some research.” Child do your own damn research, it’s been our word.
“If you’ve been part of the community for 20 years get off of Tumblr and go take care of your grandkids.” Man I would not want to be you in 20 years, realizing that shit, you don’t stop existing when you become a grown-up and you keep having interests. How do you think your life’s going to be between age 20 and age 80? Is it gonna be that boring to be you? And holy shit my grandkids? If Asy is anything like me, who came out at 13, how you expect me to have grandkids at 33ish? 35? Y’all. Really. And these are the same people who wail ‘respect your elders, don’t call them queer, they don’t like it,’ but out the other side of their mouth say ‘you’re not relevant, grandma, go away.’
Mmkay. Just show your hypocrisy a bit more, I guess.
“Just don’t call people things they don’t wanna be called.”
Aight, so, yeah. First off, ain’t nobody calling anybody part of the queer community who ain’t identifying as queer. Queer is, and has been, a radical political and mostly blue-collar portion of the LGBTQIPA+ community. It is defined by its rejection of Corporate Gay (white, upper-middle-class, cis gay exclusionary ‘palatable for TV’ gayness) and inclusion of the entire community, and its political activism.
Guess what, if you ain’t queer, you ain’t part of the queer community. Believe me, we don’t want you if you ain’t queer, because queers ain’t afraid to get their hands dirty and actually fight. And I am so so so tired of people thinking that we’re trying to coerce people into calling themselves queer. If you wanna be part of this community, great. Otherwise, you ain’t part of it and no one is trying to force you.
That said, it’s important to recognize that attempting to censor people’s self-identity is and has been a tactic of TERFs, “purity” culture advocates, and people who have tried to shut out bi, trans, pan, questioning, ace, non-binary, genderfluid and other ‘non-conforming’ identities. It’s not a new problem. I grew up listening to Ani DiFranco (I know she has issues, that’s another post) and the song “In or Out,” which expressly, in part, is about belonging and standards in the community was released on Imperfectly in 1992. Like, really. Little Plastic Castle addresses it, too, and that came out exactly 20 years ago in 1998.
The kids on this site are not the first group to think that they can determine who is ‘In or Out.’ This site’s would-be censors are not the first ones thinking, ‘I can just demand that you not be who you are when it makes me uncomfortable.’
Demanding that we not use our identity words to describe ourselves because it makes you uncomfortable is not acceptable. No one is accepting of the idea that ‘gay’ is a word which should simply not be used. And yet, we are meant to simply write off queer and stop using that word, instead of helping people work through their issues and/or working further on reclaiming and/or simply be left alone to our identities without having to justify them. This thought process that we should just drop the word because it’s ‘bad’ is the perfect intersection of Tumblr’s TERF-sponsored exclusionists and Tumblr’s anti-recovery culture, and it needs to stop.
Kids need to stop hiding behind the idea that ‘older people in the community don’t like queer and have trauma with it,’ because we are the older people in the community, and I’m here to tell you, my trauma was around gay and dyke. Queer is the word that gave me back my life. Stop trying to use us as your Shields Against Being Called On Your Bigotry, because we’re not interested.
People need to stop saying ‘don’t call others that,’ because we’re not talking to you if you don’t identify as queer. The community who identifies as queer is who we are addressing.
People need to stop attempting to suppress the word queer. It’s not going away. We are not going away. Or, to bring back what I grew up saying:
hey guys can you help me find that old portrait of a girl holding a little painting of a naked dude and cracking up about it?? I want to say it’s by Rembrandt but that’s probably not right
It’s “Smiling Girl, a Courtesan, Holding an Obscene Image” by Gerard van Honthorst!!
I have a lot of thoughts about this but they’re all very speculative; be appropriately skeptical.
There are people who I really disagree with, but fundamentally respect. I understand where their understanding of the world diverges from mine, and I get what they’re trying to do, and I might hope that they never get political power but on a personal level I trust them and like them, and enjoy debating and discussing things with them, and I know that they feel the same way about me. And I want my communities to be ones in which they are welcome (and my friendships with them are not discouraged or treated as evidence against my commitment and trustworthiness).
This is sort of the Peak Liberal take on how to handle profound political disagreement, and by that I mean something more than “it’s something liberals say a lot and leftists think is really stupid”. Liberalism is a collection of social technologies which developed to try to sustain societies where people had deeply felt political, cultural and religious (mostly religious) disagreements. Lots and lots of the norms of liberalism are norms for maintaining societies in which these profound disagreements exist. “I don’t agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend your right to say it” is a core liberal norm; “we can respect each other without agreeing with each other” is liberalism; “we should treat each other compassionately and thoughtfully and lawfully even when we believe each others’ beliefs to be evil” is liberalism.
Leftists have a lot of critiques of this! Some of them are good critiques! For example:
In practice, no community is inclusive of everyone. Communities that are aiming for ‘inclusive of everyone’ end up being inclusive of the people with the most social power, because they’re most resilient to the inclusion of people who really hate them and like to hurt them. Norms that try to make everyone get along therefore end up being norms that make things comfortable for powerful people and Not For You at vulnerable people.
Divorcing peoples’ politics from their character like that isn’t very principled. If I think someone is a rapist, I shouldn’t ‘like them as a person but disagree with them about rape’. If I think someone supports mass murder in the form of foreign wars, I shouldn’t ‘like them as a person but disagree with them about mass murder’. Doing this requires some weird doublethink where you forget the actual consequences of peoples’ political behavior, which hurts real people, so you can relegate it to the realm where “they’re wrong about the best flavor of ice cream” and “they’re wrong about what temperature to keep their house” go.
But the core thing here is not a specific critique. Leftists, even when the specific critiques don’t apply, are deeply suspicious of “we disagree profoundly but we can respect each other”. They recognize it as the Core Liberal Thing and they are very much opposed to the core liberal thing. So leftists, when talking with people who they disagree with politically, tend to go out of their way not to do the Core Liberal Thing. They often take pride in not having respectful, positive relationships with people who they profoundly disagree with. They are often mean to people who they disagree with. They often ridicule the idea that we should be establishing common ground or agreeing to let some disagreements lie for the sake of common interests elsewhere.
And, yeah, they often are delighted about hurting liberals’ feelings. It’s an extension of the critique of collaborative-disagreement as a important core norm, and while I think some parts of the critique have merit, I’ve never seen anything productive come of a discussion between people who abandoned effort at kind and thoughtful disagreement in favor of trying to hurt their enemies’ feelings. And so I think you need it, at least a little bit sometimes on your own terms, even if you are opposed to it as a framework for how society should work.
oh shit, suddenly i understand why i’m seeing tumblr leftists talk about ‘liberals’ as The Enemy, when just last year ‘liberal’ was the opposite of ‘conservative’, and ‘conservative’ meant right-wing.
it’s because ‘conservative’ doesn’t actually mean right-wing, it just tends to coincide with it. conservative really means dogmatic and judgmental.
i never want tumblr to end. this website is like the internet equivalent of a huge mall where you can run around and do whatever you want and there are no laws
no laws? the fuck? i wanna be on the website you’re on. my experience of tumblr is that if you break even a minor law you get executed publicly
You don’t even have to break a law to be publicly executed. All you have to really do is like something someone else sees as “problematic” to trigger them into taking it upon themselves to act as Officer, Judge, Jury, and Executioner.
forgotten highlight of 2017: season 4 of sherlock was literally so bad that the fans that somehow still existed were completely convinced it was intentionally bad and there was gonna be a secret fourth episode that fixed everything
True highlight of 2017: Despite being on tumblr daily I was completely unaware of that there even was a season 4 of Sherlock.
we could shorten “big mood” to “bmood” but you all are not ready
bood
oh fuck. it was i who was not ready
So hey you know how the whole Bode meme came from somebody’s dream in which they saw a tumblr meme from the future with no context? And how they assumed it was short for ‘foreboding’ or something, but that doesn’t even make sense because there’s no bode in foreboding? This is the actual origin of that prophetic vision.
just moving along like everyone else 