the ds9 fandom, also known collectively as “people who will reblog photographs of lizards at twice the rate of almost any other sample population”
Tag: fandom
are there any writers who you refuse to read/reblog?
I was very tempted to delete this, because I think this sort of thing tends to make people sad, and if there’s one thing fandom shouldn’t do, it’s make people personally sad. But I realized it gave me chance to say a few important things.
1. No, I don’t read writing by everyone in every fandom I read. There are people whose kinks are not my kinks, and I’m not going to read their writing because it isn’t interesting to me. That says nothing about them as a writer or a person. We just have different tastes, and I’m sure they aren’t reading my writing either.
2. There are sometimes ways that people write my kinks that don’t appeal to me. If I know an author does that, I tend not to read their work. Again, no shade on them. Just different strokes for different folks.
3. If a writer consistently writes the few tropes that are hard no’s for me, I don’t read them. Alcohol abuse is a good example. I don’t read stories centered around it, period. Full stop. So if that makes up the bulk of a writers work, I probably won’t read them.
4. There are some writers whose writing I simply don’t like. Again, that’s a personal preference. Since fandom is, fundamentally, about having fun, I’m not going to read things I don’t like in my spare time unless I’m specifically asked to. (In which case, I’m happy to do so).
5. I don’t think we have a moral obligation to read stuff we don’t like in fandom. I don’t think you “owe” it to your fellow writers or to people who’ve read your stuff. Obviously, if someone’s beta’d for you multiple times, you do have a bit of an obligation to help them out. But outside of that, we interact with fandom through our own choosing. I don’t feel obligated to read people just to leave kudos or comments. If it’s not a kink or a story I like, I’m not going to read it in my spare time.
This all being said: I’m confused about this ask. Are you trying to get me to be mean to fellow writers in this fandom? This is on anon, so I can’t answer privately, and even if it was a private ask, I wouldn’t name names. I don’t think we get anything out of putting down other individuals in our fandoms.
Listen. Do not let anyone tell you what to write or what not to write.
Do not let prevailing fandom interpretations keep you from writing something different, do not let the personal opinions/perspectives of Big Name Fans™ keep you from presenting your own interpretation of characterizations/ship dynamics. Do not be afraid to write for unpopular ships (people will read it and be forever grateful that you created content for their rarepair).
Fandom is a communal experience, yes, but it is made up of individuals. Do not be afraid to stray from the norm. People may disagree with your choices/your interpretations/your writing; that doesn’t make them objectively right.
Do not be ashamed to deviate from fandom narrative.
I wish people understood that there’s a huge difference between woobifying a character and humanizing them.
Woobification looks to erase or excuse the shitty aspects of a character– prejudice, cruelty, shitty life choices, whatever.
Humanization doesn’t deny those aspects exist, and doesn’t deny that they’re bad or excuse them, even if it sometimes finds REASONS for them– there’s a difference between a reason and an excuse– but really humanization looks at other aspects aside from the bad things.
Like, okay just because I decided this character is a nerd who loves their so and really likes animals but pretends not to to upkeep their image doesn’t mean I’m denying that they’re prejudiced, short sighted, and destructive. Like, the two things are not mutually exclusive. Most people who are shitty in some ways are also great in others. It’s why we’re so shocked when someone who is REALLY FUN and great and we really like spouts out some awful bigoted opinion and completely ruins our idea of them. You have that Prince of Egypt moment where you slowly back away. But all the things that made you like that person are still there, even if the one bad thing is a relationship/opinion killer. The good things are not erased, even if they stop mattering to you, and you’re still sad about it because there were those good things.
IDK, people are complicated. Very few humans are all good with no bad points or all bad with no good points. Sometimes the good points stick out really well, and sometimes the bad points do, but there’s always the other part.
Like you can humanize good guys too– by finding their bad aspects. Maybe that person who is really altruistic and kind for the most part is elitist or classist or something. Maybe they seem nice, but they’re only nice to the “right” people– the right type of poor person, or the right type of addict– but not the wrong type. There’s a certain narrative that’s acceptable to them, and one that isn’t. Maybe they litter. Maybe they’re negligent pet owners, maybe they play favorites with their kids. There’s all kinds of reasons someone who seems like a nice good person might have really shitty aspects.
In both cases, you’re fleshing a character out rather than erasing their original personality by either “woobifying” them, or demonizing them.
you can love villains and anti-heroes and antagonists without justifying their behaviour, You don’t have to make up excuses for the horrible shit they do. It’s totally fine to love these characters as they are, to accept the ugly parts of them- that doesn’t mean that you agree with the choices they make, it just means that you happen to love complex and three dimensional individuals.
every time I see more of the ‘ao3 is evil’ crap circulating I think, ‘well, tumblr is evil too and I don’t see you stop using it’
You know, the more I think about this, the more I think the real complaint isn’t that AO3 hosts “evil” content, it’s that it doesn’t allow harassment/dogpiling of “evil” creators as easily as Tumblr. Abuse won’t remove or even re-tag a work except in a handful of very specific cases, but they will suspend or ban users for harassment, including filing repeated unfounded Abuse reports. Authors also have at least some ability to screen/block comments on works, and there’s no direct messaging system outside of commenting on works through which to pursue harassment. You can follow a creator but you can’t block them (much less encourage others to do the same).
Tumblr, by contrast, generally ignores any abuse report that doesn’t involve the DMCA, and aggressive anons can and have driven bloggers off the site entirely. The fact that the same tactics are used by social justice bloggers and neo-Nazis (for instance) doesn’t matter – they’re the affordances of the site, by accident or design, and an entire fannish generation have gotten very used to performing their fannish (and moral) identity in this fashion.
(I thinks it’s relevant that AO3 was designed by fandom’s LJ generation and in some respect mirrors the affordances of LJ circa 2010. Tumblr is a very different site and that, moreso than age differences, seems to be at the root of this – though of course age intersect with site experience in a non-trivial way.)
Ao3 was also designed by veterans of mailing list fandom – they’re perfectly aware of how some fans will use tactics such as behind-the-scenes harassment to “defend” fandom from so-called morally offensive fics. There was very much an awareness of how a platform can shape fandom, and it’s a lot easier to develop that awareness if you’ve experienced fandom on more than one platform.
(I’ve decided to donate more money to otw/ao3 every time the “ao3 is evil” discourse crosses my dash.)
the ao3 discourse is interesting to me bc i feel like theres a big disconnect between ppl who Were There For Strikethrough of course but also in a more general way, people for whom Strikethrough was not a Weird Anomaly – people who grew up in the late 80s/early-mid 90s climate of BANNING JUDY BLUME BOOKS FROM LIBRARIES BC AN ADULT WROTE TEENS DOING SEX ! and stuff… like… ppl for whom “disingenuous right-wing ~for the family~ morality org claims to wanna protect vulnerable people but SOMEHOW MIRACULOUSLY ends up just banning kids from reading about sex or gay shit or talking about having been raped” is really… just… the norm. like. thats the baseline of this discourse… that’s… you know. i dont know. i dont mean this in a YOU GOTTA UNDERSTAND WHERE WE WISE OLD PPL ARE COMING FROM thing i mean it in a … i genuinely think that there are two paradigms here and that it is probably hard to grok aspects of them if you grew up in a cultural atmosphere which can lead you to claim ~Strikethrough was an anomaly~ rather than the system working as intended. Strikethrough wasnt a Good Protective Thing which ON THE EDGES also ACCIDENTALLY took out a FEW “innocent” comms and journals… Strikethrough did what it was intended to do, and it was only one incident in a long, looooong history of organizations like that one doing, or trying to do, the same damn thing,
Yeah, fandom was weird thing to be into (and not the kind other people find endearing), and definitely UNDERGROUND. You had to definitely go looking. And while not everybody elses weird stuff in fandom was your weird stuff, you were all the target of “normal” people together. AO3 was revolutionary!! I remeber when it was first posed as an idea. Also, I still remeber the women, who had a physical zine shipped to Germany and had to go to customs where they told her they check magazines so people don’t order porn, not that she (women) would!!! (Yeah, that K/S zine had some explicit gay art in it, she was lucky they didn’t actually look inside.) So that’s also were people are coming from. When I got into fandom, there was still a BIG Het/Slash divide, and Slash was a warning! (and slasher and identity). Not to say that everything was better, or something. But there was always the feeling that you were transgressing in some way by being there. And you knew you weren’t wanted on platforms made for “normal” people. The constant warnings people put on stuff, where “please don’t sue me!” was a real thing, and that adult stuff couldn’t be on many of the pages/archives, and sites that didn’t allow gay content, etc.. We remeber all the things that weren’t allowed to be posted on certain sites, that is why the AO3 even came into being.
Yeah, I got into fandom around the same time. I can remember getting banned off a Sentinel mailing list because I spoke up in defense of a person who’d accidentally forwarded a slash email to the wrong list. (It was an accident and yes they got hardcore yelled at).
I can remember having to mail proof of my legal age to a adult mailing list before I could get in. (Yes they were legit, no it wasn’t an identity scam)
We developed pseudonyms to protect ourselves online because people got fired for being fannish and for writing slash. People got harassed in their offline lives (yep, fandom doxxed long before the word got coined). I can remember some fans having it impact custody battles.
The OTW and the Ao3 rose out of fans basically swearing ‘never again’ because we got so damn tired of being attacked. The Ao3 gave us a place to post, bu the OTW’s advocacy work has done a lot to legitimize fandom.
Sometimes I think we did the job too well, because while it’s gotten better, all that stuff really hasn’t gone away and I worry so much about the kids coming up in fandom now. Throwing around personal details like it’s nbd, pics, whatever.
It can come back to haunt you.
Tag your shit so people don’t have to see it, but lay off the censorship talk. That’s a road you don’t want to go down.
The Ao3 can and will make decisions to protect things you don’t like,
sure, but trust me, that’s actually a reassuring thing because
ultimately?They’re also protecting you.
for real though, speaking as someone who was actually personally affected by Strikethrough – I did have fic that was posted only to a targeted community (pornish_pixies) deleted when Strikethrough happened and I had to repost to my own LJ (and later to AO3) to ensure I could archive them and they wouldn’t just disappear again – the WHOLE POINT OF OWNING THE SERVERS IS SO THAT YOUR WEIRD STUFF WON’T GET DELETED because of some homophobic crusade masquerading as ~protecting the children~.
And also, the whole point of tagging and warning is so that people who don’t want to see your weird stuff can scroll or filter, and people who do want to can find it.
Those people who constantly reblog your stuff but you never really talk:
I do notice my regulars. You guys are the best.
“Regulars” makes me feel like a bar-tender…
Wiping down my dash at the end of an evening, I see your read-more, over-hear your rant in the tags, so I pour you a drink.
“…what’s troubling you, kid?”
It’s nine o’clock on a Saturday
As the regular crowd tumbls by
There’s an old fandom queen blogging next to me
And her little gray tags catch my eyeShe says tumblr I’m feeling like shit today
can you send me some posts for a smile
can we talk about slash, can you fill up my dash
so I won’t have to think for a whileLaa dahdah didee dah
La dahdah didee dah dadumFill up my dash, you’re my followers
Fill it with pictures and fic
Yeah we’re all in the mood for some memery
And occasional pictures of dickNow Jill is a centaur novelist
And she writes of her girlfriend and wife
She reblogs from Toni, who’s in My Little Pony,
And probably will be for life.As the staff implements wretched changes
And we think of how aliens bone
We are writing a lot about loneliess:
It’s much better than writing alone.It’s a pretty good dash for a Saturday
And the sideblogs they all make me smile
‘Cause it’s cats and it’s trees, and many actors I see
and girls with a real sense of style.
And Tumblr might well be a carnival
And it’s filled with the squees and the jeers
As I stare at my phone, and think all alone,
“What the hell are you still doing here?”
Well, one positive thing
About the recent round of purity wank about AO3 is it’s actually been effective. It’s crystallised for me that fandom, while it has problems, is fucking amazing.
It’s taught me more about safe sex than my parents did. Sure, my parents taught me about condoms and birth control but they never talked to me about bacterial vaginosis or dental dams.
I’ve had older people (mostly women) to talk to about every life experience I’ve had. All of them have different experiences and viewpoints to contribute. I’ve talked to a lot of them about sex. Fandom were the people who taught me to own my desires. They modeled how to communicate and led to me finding my identity. They actually taught me more about enthusiastic consent than any single other community I’ve found anywhere: including my real life LGBT community.
(This doesn’t mean there are no abusers in fandom. I regularly warn people against some famous fandom missing stairs. As always, you let people in, you get all types, from the zenith to the nadir.)
Fandom were the people who when I said “He never actually hit me” said “that doesn’t mean he wasn’t abusing you.”
Kinky unrealistic BDSM AUs were a way for me to process actual physical abuse that happened to me. I don’t care if the writer was getting off or processing something of their own: the works were there for me and they helped. For every “THIS IS ABUSIVE!!!” person pointing fingers, I guarantee there are people who were helped by that. And don’t talk to me about “unhealthy coping mechanisms”, because reading about fictional characters who were not actually harmed is a fuckload better than going out and fucking random dudes who actually hurt me. Which I also did. That sex was bad and reading was more enjoyable.
Fandom taught me that free artistic expression and joyful play are important.
Fandom taught me that women are important. That the story doesn’t end when the heroine gets married, that women are complete people with complex inner lives and that a relationship can end and people can still be happy.
Fandom and especially fans of colour taught me more about racism and intersectionality than I ever learned in any university course. Than I ever learned in my (limited, white) real world. We’ve still got a long way to go, but where we are is so much better than where we were. I’m old enough to remember that.
The latest round of “The AO3 is disgusting” are appallingly naive at best, reductionist, purity-bullshit-peddling bullies at worst. It’s not enough for them to create their own community if ours doesn’t suit them. No, they want to come in and strike at one of the core principles of the AO3–no censorship. Instead of donating, working to become an influencer, voting, volunteering, trying to make things better, they’d rather blow up the entire thing.
Instead of getting mad and writing a fanwork which is a criticism of and magnitudes better than the problematic original (I may have mentioned my fannishness of Helenish’s Take Clothes Off As Directed before), these people would rather people not write anything.
The enemy of free speech is not criticism, it’s forced silence.
So let’s build and become better from what’s gone before. Go donate.
Thoughts thrown at the wall in semi-coherent order:
There are degrees of involvement in fandom. Everyone does it differently. BUT it’s literally social interactions via screens. After a certain point of involvement there’s very little “I sit back, keep my mouth open and food fall in with me having nothing to do for it” if you’ll allow the baby bird metaphor
you take and you give and you make contacts and you talk and DON’T BE AN ASSHOLE and it’s a lot of work! and it doesn’t happen overnight!
fandom’s not easy for fuck’s sake
There's a Mirror on the Wall 