So I’m on AO3 and I see a lot of people who put “I do not own [insert fandom here]” before their story.
Like, I came on this site to read FAN fiction. This is a FAN fiction site. I’m fully aware that you don’t own the fandom or the characters. That’s why it’s called FAN FICTION.
Oh you youngins… How quickly they forget.
Back in the day, before fan fiction was mainstream and even encouraged by creators… This was your “please don’t sue me, I’m poor and just here for a good time” plea.
Cause guess what? That shit used to happen.
how soon they forget ann rice’s lawyers.
What happened with her lawyers.
History became legend. Legend became myth…. And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost.
I worked with one of the women that got contacted by Rice’s lawyers. Scared the hell out of her and she never touched fandom again. The first time I saw a commission post on tumblr for fanart, I was shocked.
One of the reasons I fell out of love with her writing was her treatment of the fans… (that and the opening chapter of Lasher gave me such heebie-jeebies with the whole underage sex thing I felt unclean just reading it.)
I have zero problem with fanart/fic so long as the creators aren’t making money off of it. It is someone else’s intellectual property and people who create fan related works need to respect that (and a solid 98% of them do.)
The remaining 2% are either easily swayed by being gently prompted to not cash in on someone else’s IP. Or they DGAF… and they are the ones who will eventually land themselves in hot water. Either way: this isn’t much of an excuse to persecute your entire fanbase.
But Anne Rice went off the deep end with this stuff by actively attacking people who were expressing their love for her work and were not profiteering from it.
The Vampire Chronicles was a dangerous fandom to be in back in the day. Most of the works I read/saw were hidden away in the dark recesses of the internet and covered by disclaimers (a lot of them reading like thoroughly researched legal documents.)
And woe betide anyone who was into shipping anyone with ANYONE in that fandom. You were most at risk, it seemed, if your vision of the characters deviated from the creators ‘original intentions.’ (Hypocritical of a woman who made most of her living writing erotica.)
Imagine getting sued over a headcanon…
Put simply: we all lived in fear of her team of highly paid lawyers descending from the heavens and taking us to court over a slashfic less than 500 words long.
all
of
this
Reblogging because I can’t believe there are people out there who don’t know the story behind fan fiction disclaimers.
Yep I used to have disclaimers on all my Buffy fic back in the day. The Buffy creators were mostly pretty chill about fandom but it’s not like it is now. You did NOT talk about fandom with anyone except other fandom people and bringing it up at cons was a massive no no because of stuff like this.
I think Supernatural (and Misha Collins specifically) was when that wall between fandom and creators started to break down. It’s a relatively new thing.
I remember going to a Merlin panel down in London and a girl sitting next to me asked the cast about slash and I thought she was going to get kicked out!
Fandom history is important.
Oh, this brings back some not so-awesome ‘90s fandom memories!
Oh man, let me tell you about the X-Files fandom. Lawyers for FOX sued, threatened, and generally terrified the owners of fan websites on a regular basis. God help you if you wrote or created original art set in their (expansive) universe or worse – dared to write about their characters. Even people who weren’t creating fanworks, just hosting Geocities pages about how much people liked the show would be sent C&D orders or actually fined. When I was first discovering the concept, the first rule of fandom was you do not talk about fandom because the consequences could be devastating.
It was such a strange and uncomfortable experience for me when fans in LOTR and Potter fandoms suddenly started shoving their work in people’s faces speaking publicly about fandom and wanting to engage in dialogue with the creators and actors of the Thing they were into. Fan stuff was supposed to stay online, in archives and list-serves and zines we passed around because it just wasn’t cool to talk about it and it could get you in a boatload of trouble. The freedom we have to create and gather together in a shared space, or actually be acknowledged in any way by people outside the fandom was inconceivable to my fannish, teenaged self. I want fans these days to understand how amazing modern fandom really is, cherish the community, and appreciate what it took to get us here.
“if you found this by googling yourself, hit back now. this means you, pete wentz”
Oh hey, even more blasts from the past.
I was one of the ones who got a love letter from Anne Rice’s lawyers. Bear in mind that up until that point her publisher had encouraged fanfic and worked with the archive keeper (one of my roommates at the time) to drum up publicity for upcoming books and so on.
I could tell such tales of how much Anne screwed over her fans back then. The tl;dr version is that she and her peeps would use fan projects as free market research and then bring in the lawyers once it was felt Anne could make money off of it herself. (Talismanic Tours being one of the most offensive examples of this.)
But where fanfic is concerned not only did we get nastygrams but one of my friends had Anne’s lawyer trying to fuck up her own privately owned business which had NOTHING TO DO WITH ANYTHING ANNE RELATED. Said friend was a small business owner with health issues who wasn’t exactly rolling in money, so guess how well that went?
On top of that when yours truly tried to speak out about it I discovered that someone in Anne’s camp had been cyber stalking me to the point where they took all the tiny crumbs of personal information I had posted over the course of five years or so and used it to doxx me (before that was even a term and in early enough days of the WWW that this wasn’t an easy task) and post VERY personal information about me on the main fandom message board of the time. Luckily for me the mod was my friend and she took that down post haste, but it was still oodles of fun feeling that violated and why to this day I am very strict about keeping my fandom and personal lives separate online.
Hence why those of us in the fandom at the time who still gave enough of a shit to want to keep writing fic DID keep writing fic, but shoved it so far underground and slapped it with so many disclaimers they could’ve outweighed the word count of War & Peace. It wasn’t just for the purpose of protecting fic but for trying to protect our personal lives as well.
Lucasfilm also sent cease-and-desist letters to Star Wars fanzines publishing slash.
My favourite bit I read from one included the idea that you weren’t allowed to have any explicit content, of which anything queer, no matter how tame, was included, to “preserve that innocence even Imperial crew members must be imagined to have”.
Yeah. The same Imperial crew members who helped build the Death Star to commit planetary genocide.
(It’s one reason Sinjir Velus, while I still have some issues with him, feels like such a delicious ‘f*** you’.)
Later on, they were apparently persuaded to ‘allow’ fans to write slash, provided in ‘remained within the nebulous bounds of good taste’.
(On a related note, if I wasn’t quite so attached to my URL, I would 100% change it to ‘Nebulous Bounds’, because that’s just downright catchy)
Anne McCaffrey had this huge long set of rules about how exactly you were allowed to play in her sandbox. Dragonriders of Pern was my first online fandom, and I was big into the Pern RP scene – and just about every fan-Weyr had a copy of these lists of rules McCaffrey wanted enforced. One of which was ‘no porn’ and another was basically ‘it can’t be gay’ (and for a while ‘no fanfiction posted online’? which??? anyway.)
She relaxed a little as time went on, but still.
Let’s not forget: the reason AO3 is called ‘Archive of our own’ is because it was created in response to some bullshit that assholes were trying to play with fan creators. Basically (if I remember the fiasco correctly) trying to mine fandom creators for content which they could then use to generate ad profit on their shitty websites. When the series creators objected, the fans tried to pull their content, only to find that the website hoster resisted, claiming their content was all his now.
That wasn’t even all that long ago…
fandom history class
Interesting! wow
I remember back in the days having to put a disclaimer on EVERY. SINGLE. ONE of my Twilight fanfic chapters. That’s what everyone did. Even though sometimes it was simply a: I don’t own these characters. I play with them.
It was so strange not doing it on AO3 at the beginning.
I still disclaim. Fandom may be more mainstream, but you never know who might get lawyer happy. You can bet I’ll cover my arse best I can at all times.
A vague disclaimer is nobody’s friend, but they can get pretty amusing…
I was one of those who disclaimed on my XF fic, and got wildly creative with some of it, because I knew it wasn’t actually going to stop them if they decided to sue so yeah, all of the above, and the “confusion of product” idea got a lot of writers really worried, since copyright law was still… iffy on that (it’s since been clarified considerably.
As a creator, my feeling is “go forth and have non-commercial fun, but for god’s sake don’t show me.” That’s for everyone’s protection: if dog forbid we come up with the same idea, knowing that neither of us saw the others’ work allows us to both write in peace.
Yeah, I did the disclaimers back in the late 80s and early 90s. Besides worrying about a show’s overzealous lawyers, occasionally other fans would threaten to turn you in for whatever reason. Even the ones who weren’t doing it maliciously were hard to deal with. There was one person who emailed me to tell me she liked our stories so much she was going to copy them off the web site and send them to one of the actors in the show, and I had to try to convince her that she could get us in a shitload of trouble. It took several long emails and a lot of begging to get her to understand. That was not a good time for my anxiety problem.
And then there were the ones who were going to send your stories or vids or whatever to the producers or actors AND dox you, in order to prove the point that fans shouldn’t be afraid of being sued, or something, which I agreed they shouldn’t but but maybe they could do it with themselves instead of selecting an involuntary sacrificial victim?
There were a lot of things that eventually turned me off participating in fandom. (The doxxing was probably the most hurtful. There’s just something that hits you hard with the whole “I don’t like your head canon in your stories so I’m going to try to hurt or embarass you in real life” thing.) Someone said once that it isn’t going to be the lawyers who ruin your time in fandom, it’s going to be the fan sitting next to you, and I found that to be sadly true.
whatever happened to liking villains for being villains why do fans of villains have to constantly defend their behavior and excuse it why can’t people ever go “you know what he fucked up here and is evil and has done evil shit but you know what it makes for an interesting character” stop trying to make these villains be good if canonically they’re not shown to actually be good people let villains be villains
Didn’t have glowsticks after all, so there was no silly games with glowsticks. Shall make sure of them before Pennsic next year.
Said I’d post pictures of my tired and frazzled self at the end, so, below the cut is me, and is also the two strings worth of fandom themed cords, with a few gaps. Shall have better pictures with labels after Pennsic.
Meanwhile – G’night all, and I hope you sleep well when you get there.
Tired me backlit.
Star Wars themed braids plus bell and sign.
Avengers, Harry Potter, Star Trek, and a couple other themed braids.
artist/writer: LOOK I MADE A THING
fandom: i want to address the concern that u didnt take my personal feelings and beliefs into consideration when making this thing that has nothing to do with me
i ship a lot of otps, ot3s, brotps and foetps, but i will never ship anything as fiercely as i do ‘ragtag bunch of misfits turned found family’.
Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk.
Henry Jenkins, in Textual Poachers: Media Fans and Participatory Culture (via jaimelannister)
Does anybody else remember a time, long long ago, when you could just enjoy things?
You could watch a movie and just appreciate it instead of over analyzing every single scene to make sure there’s nothing remotely offensive about it.
You could have a favorite character and just like them and appreciate how great they were written and portrayed, without being told you’re terrible because they’re a villain. Even though they’re FICTIONAL and most likely were deliberately written to be likable. (Even if they were written as an evil character, I still think you have a right to like them, but maybe that’s just me)
You could love and be a fan of the actors without having to go full on FBI agent, looking into their backgrounds to make sure they are 100% perfect and had never made a mistake ever.
You could post about said actor without some busybody little fandom cop, slithering into your inbox to tell you(all too happily) that your fave is “problematic” (god, I fucking hate that word), and you’re disgusting if you still like them.
I’m in my 30’s so I remember those good ole days and it’s kind of sad to know, that most of you will never truly know how great that was. That’s a time long since forgotten. Bummer.
If you wish to take part in any fandom, you need to accept and respect these three laws.
If you aren’t able to do that, then you need to realise that your actions are making fandom unsafe for creators. That you are stifling creativity.
Like vaccination, fandom only works if everyone respects these rules. Creators need to be free to make their fanart, fanfics and all other content without fear of being harassed or concern-trolled for their creative choices, no matter whether you happen to like that content or not.
The First Law of Fandom
Don’t Like; Don’t Read (DL;DR)
It is up to you what you see online. It is not anyone else’s place to tell you what you should or should not consume in terms of content; it is not up to anyone else to police the internet so that you do not see things you do not like. At the same time, it is not up to YOU to police fandom to protect yourself or anyone else, real or hypothetical.
There are tools out there to help protect you if you have triggers or squicks. Learn to use them, and to take care of your own mental health. If you are consuming fan-made content and you find that you are disliking it – STOP.
The Second Law of Fandom
Your Kink Is Not My Kink (YKINMK)
Simply put, this means that everyone likes different things. It’s not up to you to determine what creators are allowed to create. It’s not up to you to police fandom.
If you don’t like something, you can post meta about it or create contrarian content yourself, seek to convert other fans to your way of thinking.
But you have no right to say to any creator “I do not like this, therefore you should not create it. Nobody should like this. It should not exist.”
It’s not up to you to decide what other people are allowed to like or not like, to create or not to create. That’s censorship. Don’t do it.
The Third Law of Fandom
Ship And Let Ship (SALS)
Much (though not all) fandom is about shipping. There are as many possible ships as there are fans, maybe more. You may have an OTP (One True Pairing), you may have a NOTP, that pairing that makes you want to barf at the very thought of its existence.
It’s not up to you to police ships or to determine what other people are allowed to ship. Just because you find that one particular ship problematic or disgusting, does not mean that other people are not allowed to explore its possibilities in their fanworks.
You are free to create contrarian content, to write meta about why a particular ship is repulsive, to discuss it endlessly on your private blog with like-minded persons.
It is not appropriate to harass creators about their ships, it is not appropriate to demand they do not create any more fanworks about those ships, or that they create fanwork only in a manner that you deem appropriate.
These three laws add up to the following:
You are not paying for fanworks content, and you have no rights to it other than to choose to consume it, or not consume it. If you do choose to consume it, do not then attack the creator if it wasn’t to your taste. That’s the height of bad manners.
Be courteous in fandom. It makes the whole experience better for all of us.
Things were so much simpler before women started stealing all of my favorite things from me. I don’t care what anyone says. Women aren’t and will never be true fans of Doctor Who, Star Trek or any of that. You jumped in because you wanted attention. You became “fans” because suddenly liking sci-fi shows and fantasy became popular. You only want guys to drool over you because you’re girls who “like” geeky stuff. Kindly go jump in a lake and die.
A woman organized the letter-writing campaign to NBC to save Star Trek when it was on the verge of being cancelled after the first season, and thus enabled the show to continue on for three seasons allowing it to go into syndication and gain the following it did in reruns.
A woman organized the first ever Star Trek convention, and convinced NASA to donate a truckload full of stuff for said convention thus starting the tradition of Star Trek conventions featuring space for modern science.
A woman greenlit Star Trek while acting at the head of a major studio, and consistently fought pressure to cancel the show. This same woman was the person who greenlit Mission Impossible and was the first woman to head a major studio.
A woman wrote many of the most famous TOS episodes, and went on to write on to write episodes of The Animated Series, The Next Generation, and Deep Space Nine.
Learn your history.
You think women stole your favorite things? If it weren’t for women, those things wouldn’t even exist, but you probably don’t even know the names of the women who made that possible.
So much for “infinite diversity in infinite combinations”…
Who is the fake now?
Also, a lot of the current fandom terminology we take for granted originated in the Star Trek fandom, specifically Star Trek fanfic. And who were the major driving force behind Star Trek fanfic? Women.
Earliest spec fic texts in the English-speaking Western world were written by Thomas More (Utopia), Lady Margaret Cavendish (the Blazing World), and Mary Shelley (Frankenstein). Note that there are two women among those names.
I am so sick of these Fake Geek Guys who don’t even understand the history of the fandom they claim to want to protect.
Are you fucking kidding me? So we can create your favorite things, but it’s impossible for us to be fans of them?
AHAHAHAHAHAHA YES
It would be lovely to see the names of all the women who were so important to the history of Star Trek and Doctor Who.
I’ll quickly add that Marcia Lucas won an Oscar for editing Star Wars: A New Hope and that The Empire Strikes Back was co-written by legendary science fiction author Leigh Brackett.
Bjo Trimble organized the letter writing campaign
Joanie Winston,
Eileen Becker, and Elyse Pines were members of the committee that ran that first convention
Lucille Ball (of I Love Lucy fame) greenlit Star Trek after it’s pilot was rejected by NBC
Dorothy Catherine “DC” Fontana was the writer of
“Tomorrow Is Yesterday”, “Friday’s Child”, “Journey to Babel”, “This Side of Paradise”, and “The Enterprise Incident” in the original series, along with several other episodes under the psuedonym Michael Richards. She continued writing for the series all the way into 1993.
It takes a special kind of misogyny in a man for him to believe that women are literally incapable of enjoying certain popular entertainment and only fake it for attention from men.
i’m just laughing so hard right now bc it’s hitting me that there are geek guys who think that women would actually pretend to like this stuff to cater to guys. like it never really occurred to me the depths of how absolutely fucking stupid that idea is. ”we appear to have common interests but you still don’t like me so that must mean we don’t actually have common interests and you are not a real fan”. oh my god i just can’t right now. i want to feel offended by the fact that there is an idiot out there trying to tell me what i can and cannot like but i’m just too busy laughing.
I love when fake geek boys get slammed.
I’m reasonably certain I’ve been a sci-fi fan longer than most of these gibbering blowhard fake geek boys have been alive.
What makes me, a happily married woman in her thirties, so enraged about these little pukes is that I have been into this shit since before they were born. If you transported to my teenage bedroom, you would find that instead of wallpaper, I had hundreds of mint-in-box Star Wars figures lining the walls. I started watching Doctor Who in 1996. Sliders? VR 5? Quantum Leap? Highlander? ALL OF THAT GEEKY SHIT. All of it, before these petulant man-babies were born. EVEN GHOSTBUSTERS, ASSHOLES.
But yeah, I’ve got TIME LADY tattooed across my knuckles to impress some barely legal misogynists at a convention, because I’m the least ambitious cougar of all time.
On the Doctor Who thing I’m a fan at least in part because my parents are and were fans. And have been since the late 70s. My mom knitted Tom Baker’s scarf WAY before it was ‘cool’ (and I think had to design her own pattern). She also sold jellybabies when she owned a coffee and candy store because of Doctor Who and always donated some to the local PBS station for their pledge drives. They had boxes and boxes of classic who on VHS that I think they had to get rid of a move or two ago.
My mom’s also been a Sherlock Holmes fan since she was a kid.
Let’s please not forget all the times I have sat in my little circle of fandom friends which consists almost entirely of not-men and we are just having a good time when some dude comes around, sees what we’re up to and wants to chime in and I see the entire group sending a silent prayer to the heavens of “please let him not be a fuckboy”.
If I could have this fandom without men who come over and want to stare at my boobs or ask me out I WOULD VERY HAPPILY TAKE IT!
I CAME HERE TO TALK ABOUT IRON MAN, NOT TO FIND A DATE OR GET LAID, OK?!
I see idiots like “theoncomingcapaldi” and pat them on the head, since I’m usually old enough to be their mother.
I’d smack them upside the head and possibly be old enough to be their grandmother
Nerd guys say “Girls don’t like me because I’m a nerd.” Logic would imply then that nerds are undesirable.
So why would girls change their behavior and interests to court the attention of undesirable guys?
…??
Especially when said guys are often openly gatekeeping misogynists?
Also Doctor Puppet is a made up of mostly women. Can’t be more of a fan than pouring in 3 years of your free time into a stop motion production and be praised by Moffat himself and go to Vidcon WITH the BBC.
*mic drop*
Just for anyone who sees this post, I’d like to point out that OP’s Tumblr was hacked into by a former friend who made that post behind their back. They explained it and apparently are still receiving a lot of hate mail for something they didn’t even do, that was done by someone they no longer even associate with (for obvious reasons).
So while it’s really easy to assume that OP said this because usually that’s how it works, and while I love the positive response to the negative sentiment posted by their former friend (and hope it keeps coming), please stop attacking the presumed OP. They’re dealing with a lot right now, from what I can see.
…Someone sure knew what to say to piss off all the non-misogynists in fandom. A+ trolling, and I hope their hands spontaneous combust for it. -_-
There are a couple of things about current shipping culture that confuse me.
1. The focus on whether or not a pairing will become canon as a reason people should ship something or not. Do you not understand what the “transformative” part of “transformative works” means?”
2. This idea that saying “I ship that” means “I think that, as presented in canon,this is a perfect, healthy relationship that everyone should model their relationship after.”
Sometimes shipping something does mean that. Sometimes shipping something means “Person A is a trash bag who doesn’t deserve person B but I would love to explore how Person A might grow to deserve Person B.” Sometimes it means “I want these characters to live together forever in a conflict free domestic AU.” Sometimes it means “I want Person A to forever pine after Person B. Nothing is beautiful and everything hurts.” And sometimes it just means you like their faces and want to see Person A and Person B bone in various configurations and universes.
Listen to your parents, kids.
This really should be one of a handful of Public Service Announcements randomly and chronically inserted into one’s dash.
Yep.
Plus:
The idea that because you think these people could have a compelling sexual interaction, you also in some way think they should be/could be romantically involved.
The idea that there has to be an “endgame” pairing.
The idea that because you ship someone with A you cannot ship them with B.
The idea that someone’s affection/love for A subtracts from their love or the legitimacy of their love for B.
There's a Mirror on the Wall 