In Season 2 of a show I watch, the lead female was revealed to be bisexual, and the showrunner has confirmed she’ll have a girlfriend in Season 3. I’m all for this, but I worry about fans treating it as her sole defining trait.
@staff literally only turned my screen off for one minute to get up and hit the lights and then came back to tumblr to continue reading the interesting post I had been in the middle of.
Somehow it feels like tumblr is accidentally the perfect social media site, because none of the things that I love about it make sense as features the way we use them. Tags are for organization, but we also use them to have our little thoughts in without raising them to the status of main text. The queue makes sense for keeping a steady stream of Content going if you’re trying to Build a Social Media Presence, but really we use it just to bank posts we want to reblog without flooding everyone else’s dash. You can’t see how many followers anyone else has, which I just have to assume was an oversight because it flies in the face of everything about social media, and it’s great because you can never quantify anyone’s Influence so everyone’s essentially on the same level. There’s no way they planned for giffing to become such a Thing, because before tumblr, gifs were practically relics of the early internet days, a novelty, usually kind of tacky, and now they’ve become a sort of folk art form. You can reblog an entire conversation, not just a single post, so there’s a whole genre of humor that exists here that can’t really propagate like that on any other social platform. Honestly this website is just a little freak of nature that cannot possibly have been intended, and that’s why no media company has been able to figure out what to do with it, because it makes no sense within the larger social media ecosystem. I love it.
it was a mistake to convince everyone that using social media is the same as having a platform and that their “platform” comes with a moral obligation to issue a public statement every time anything significant happens regardless of their level of understanding of said situation …
the way media and platforms work now there’s basically three options of monetization:
1) ads. companies and people buying ads from the platform, the platform sharing ad revenue with creators, and ALL the problems that has brought on every platform you can think of
2) creator subscription model
3) the discord nitro model, freemium upgrades
given that this website has always been broken as hell and people use it anyway, #3 was never gonna be a viable option. #1, if you’ve been paying attention, is a literal garbage trash fire that has ruined every platform it has been on (and tumblr is notorious for it not working here either). now tumblr is saying let’s try #2 and people are like “absolutely not. this is the most terrible thing imaginable”. truly this is one of the BETTER choices they could have made and people are with their heads up their asses
am i saying that it’ll be done well? or that it won’t have problems? or that it’ll work? who tf knows. probably not. but as somebody who has literally lost their job MULTIPLE times because of #1, frankly, im glad another platform isnt going down that fucking trash fire route, especially the one with a community that has sustained itself for years, and that deserves to thrive
frankly, the issue with tumblr+ isn’t all the dumbass crap people have been bringing up so far, it’s that tumblr has to recreate its creator culture and attract people back to the platform basically from scratch bc while many people never left, making it attractive for creators to actually invest their time in building a following and posting content here for people to subscribe to is gonna take some convincing. i mean, substack and all the newsletter platforms built their rise on writers/journalists/twitter people who had already built followings there, on platforms that people hadn’t mass migrated off of. patreon created a product where basically none existed before that was platform agnostic, and major podcasters, artists, and more that weren’t looking for crowdfunding didn’t have many options.
especially for people who used to have followings here or use it a lot but don’t anymore, they left because they either 1) weren’t just having fun using it for themselves anymore 2) couldn’t use it for anything else like other platforms. people have spent time and energy building platforms for themselves in other places. the real test will be to see if people will want to cultivate that here.
in all honesty, i hope they do. it’s nice having people make things for a platform because they care about their audience and the community on it, and not just trying to make as much as possible on every platform. the difference does show, and communities are richer for it. its nice when those people get paid for their work. it’s not nice when people feel they must feed an algorithm and cater to advertisers. i know thats why people have turned to these direct support models before.
The next chapter of Blood Ain’t Love will be out in about 12 hours!
Second!
With the last update I was alerted that the 2nd chapter was not accessible in the MasterList. Now, I tested it out and for some reason I could access it through my computer with no problems, but in my phone it would send you to chapter 1. So, I deleted my links and redid them, so I hope to Chuck that it’s better now. If not, just send me a message and I’ll send you the link personally when I get the chance.
Third!
While I was setting up Chapter 4 I was having trouble linking all my tags. So if you are on my tag list I just want to give you a heads-up that they may not work. I tried fixing it a few times but it was testing my patience and I don’t have time to mess with it any more. Lovely Tumblr and her problems.
So other than the problems coming up, I hope you guys are ready for the next chapter! As always, love you all! Hope you’re having a good week!
For those who have no idea at all, for each of these “pics” there is a person who spent at least from 10 to 30 HOURS of head on a monitor to create all of this. {and not only me, but for EVERY fan art you see on the WEB.}
And, you see all of this?? All the time I spent on this piece of - art, time of that my ONE life, spent on something that I tried hard to enjoy? (Because yeah, I could have trash it everything and instead of spent my time on “drawing” painfully and frustrating like all the other artist I hope can understands, I could have play some videogame instead. Or read.) But no, I choosed to draw cause they say to us to keep trying, to keep fighting for what we love and?…
Well, time that somehow has been shadowbanned :D until today :D when finally I’ve got a real answer from Tumblr :D finally resolving a “glitch” that hided all my recently posts from the research.
And what can I say… I’m sorry very sorry but I’m just a little bit frustrated. Yeah. But I don’t want to speak about me, I want to talk about who likes me is in the same situation:
Artist all around the web are really, really trying hard to shows the world that they exist but biggest social media are keeps cutting off any chance of visibility and in other ways, emotionally human speaking, this lead to a lot of people dropping off every hopes. Then what you say? “It’s their fault that they’re not trying hard” Well, I’m gonna tell you what this mean: sh1t.
The kind of SH*T you say when you heard that they company X want to make a remake of “that series X” and the only thing you can think of is "theres no more original ideas today. Cinema is becoming trash because they don’t know what to invent anymore. Bleah, there’s nothing new nowadays".
The truth is: THERE IS BUT ALL THE CREATORS ARE BEING DROWN DOWN BY THINGS LIKE THIS KEEPS HAPPENING. And not only shadowbanned accindetally by bots, (that ok can be understandable, moderators bots are not humans but still they should be fixed a little more.) but by also people that see things and just hit “like” and nothing else. ((((Click “Like” it’s ok, but it’s a wrong, WRONG system to support the artist you like. It’s just like say “hi” and turn your shoulders to them. From the principle, click a like is a single one-way “support” that works mostly as a save for later than anything else. And PLEASE, don’t get it wrong, I’m asking you sorry if this sounds rude to you, but with the recently visibilities issues all around the major social media, the best you can shows to support youjr favorite artist is sharing their art, share share and share.
Out there, there ARE people with very, very beautiful ideas!!! Very lovely art, very brilliant stories that are praying for that little chance to be known, but how do you thinks they can be noticed if nobody knows them? And saying “knows them”, I’m meaning: have chance to visibility on web. That’s how basically “get informed” works, sponsor works, and all possible supporters get to know the next fandom they would love. By: sharing. But if social media keeps cutting off artist that can have a lot of potentials and good materials to offer, it’s inevitable that time passing they lost hopes and will to create.
Every kind of artists are still humans, not “money” machines.
I don’t care for me, but please, support your favourite artist! SHARE!
Now, said this, and sorry for my little rant, I’m grateful that Tumblr supports helped me with this issue but I still not able to see my lasts posts on researches, so since I am not neither in mood neither have enough phisically forces to re-post all of my art from last year, I made a big one post with some of all the major pieces that receveid less attentions. I just hope you like it, and if even not please, give it a chance to be seen by someone who would, share this to spread an artist cry!
Here’s all the single posts, and if you have Xkit with timestamp you can even check yourself the dates of each post.
Thanks for reading this, sorry for all the english errors, and please stay safe out there!
I actually didn’t mean to post this here, and I didn’t know I had until late last night. But thank you for appreciating it!
-
in that moment you fancied that you could hear her heart, each beat enough to shake the ground beneath you both. you imagined that the bass-hum of music was the slow labor of her muscles, rhythm and rhyme. you wondered if it would go on beating forever—if she were somehow keeping the time of the universe. slow. slow. slow.
half-light threw the topography of her bones into relief, and for long moments you watched the pulse at her throat. slow. slow. slow. it made no leaps, no bounds, nothing but the measured march. slow. slow. slow.
you thought about touching her, wanted to discover if you could make that heartbeat race. your fingers reached into the space between. slow. slow. slow.
she shifted, and sighed, and slept on, and the shadows tumbled into the hollows and stayed. the thread of her pulse murmured, and was lost.
the bass rumbled and the grass around you answered, whispering in the breeze. you let your hand fall. slow. slow. slow.
Reblog this post if you are a Simblr who WILL NOT DELETE THEIR ACCOUNT
If you are found to be deactivated later on (Simblrs are going missing!), we will raise the alarm to Support that your account was deleted without your consent. This is a major issue right now and we need to protect and help each other.
Trust: if my account is deleted (again), it wasn’t by me–and if it ever was, it was purely accidental.
This is not a drill, repeat, this is not a drill—we are rolling out reblog controls across web and iOS, starting today.
How does it work?
When drafting a post, select the settings cog in the top right corner of your post editor. From here, you can choose one of two options.
“Anyone (on Tumblr)” means just that.
“No one” means that your post cannot be reblogged by anyone, ever.
ALT
Why?
Your wish is our command. Many of you have told us this feature would give you a welcome sense of safety. If you block someone after the post was made, don’t worry—they still can’t reblog it. This change gives you control over your own posts, and so will improve your posting experience. Ultimately, better posting means a better Tumblr. And finally, don’t worry, Android users. The feature will follow on your platform soon.
That’s all, folks. Happy reblogging!
Any questions? Drop us a line on @wiporSupport, and keep an eye out for the mobile rollout on@changes.
Why the fuck tags don’t work on posts which doesn’t even hint at nsfw? Does anybody have the same problem and maybe you have an idea how to solve this shit?
My god am I in tumblr’s personal black list or what I don’t know
I know I know… I keep redoing this LOLOLOL …. but - I just keep not liking how it turn out?? And now that I feel like I have a bit more consistent way of drawing these little tiny tonys…..
My really BS-ed quick drawing of this still runs around everywhere (oof gotta love the internet. You do something in 5 min thinking it’s not anything important but it’s the thing that gets the most shares & will haunt you till the end of time ) If you can please share this one instead? :’) not the old one?
Not end of the world but… would help my sanity & I’d appreciate it;;;;
I know people who are using stuff I draw as banner or icons etc. without asking or credit. I’ve seen it around…
And honestly… that part I can let it go. (But I definitely don’t speak for all artist - generally you really should ask and credit that’s the decent thing to do btw)
…But at the very least use new versions of things to help with my sanity LOLOLOL
NOTE: This is a version of the response I made to that post going around that is kicked off by someone claiming that AO3 was started “in response to lj deleting account relating to p//edophi|ia and they explicitly support the posting of such works…”
There’s a long list of responses from fandom crones like me, but some of the memory of that whole time is a bit muddied.
Since I was one of the main people in fandom (BtVS fandom at the time) chronicling in real time, I thought it might be interesting to add my .02 and my perspective on what the future holds for Tumblr.
Just to add my voice to the historical context about the foundation of AO3, the Livejournal strikethrough, and mess that Tumblr has started…
I was one of the main people blogging about the LJ strikethrough back in the day while it was all happening. I weirdly ended up being a centralized hub for information about what was happening. Hell, my LJ is even cited as a source on Fanlore, if you can believe it.
Nice to know my journalism degree and my past as a newspaper reporter wasn’t entirely a waste. [j/k – sort of]
If you want a pretty good idea about the chaos and panic and how quickly it spun out of control, you can start with this post here, and then follow all of the links to subsequent posts as the bad news kept rolling in.
By the way, to this day, I was the only one in fandom who managed to get any kind of response out of the “Warriors for Justice,” a right-wing, Christian supremacist group who started the whole mess.
It should be noted that “Warriors for Justice,” while claiming to be an “organization of volunteers who work with law enforcement” was never anything more than a loose band of RWNJ who happened to frequent a chat board. For whatever reason, they got a bug up their collective asses about LJ and decided to target it.
Keep in mind, this wasn’t that long after LJ had recently been sold to 6 Apart (owners of Wordpress) and they were trying very hard to monetize what was a freewheeling frontier of blogspace.
To say it wasn’t going well was an understatement.
They had tried ads. Tiered pricing. Just about everything. To make matters worse, LJ really didn’t have a central identity. It had spheres (fandom spheres, support community spheres, slice-of-life spheres, professional spheres, and yes, some spheres of some really dank shit that would be right at home on 4chan), and there wasn’t much crossover between those spheres.
How badly did it go for 6 Apart? LJ is now owned by a Russian company. That pretty much tells you everything right there.
In any case, that’s the commercial background for strike through. 6 Apart was trying like hell to monetize LJ and not really getting anywhere. Along comes “Warriors for Justice” claiming that they are some big, bad group with big, bad connections in the media and that they were going to start making some noise about all the dank shit on LJ.
And 6 Apart pretty much panicked.
And that’s how we got strikethrough (and eventually bold through and eventually fandom moving off of LJ en masse).
I think I should make one thing clear, though. The main target for “Warriors for Justice” was never the pedos and the other really dank shit on LJ. That was just the handy excuse. Their real target was anything they deemed “unchristian.” Or to spell it out in letters you can understand, their real target was this:
LGBTQA
That’s it. That’s what really pissed them off.
And if you didn’t agree with them, you were branded a “pedo” or a pedo apologist.
(They came to really hate me through all this. I was, according to them, the worst of the worst. They tried to get me TOS’d. One small problem: They had nothing to get me on. There was nothing on my LJ that could be judged obscene under any law or TOS. By the way, the fact that I had to be that “good and nice” online to avoid a TOSing is, simply put, fucked the hell up.)
Read and learn from the posts and the comments on those old LJ posts, young ‘uns. The panic was palpable.People were losing years of their journaled lives, not just fanfic or fan discussions, but also personal entries where they just talked about their lives. And it could all be gone at the snap of a finger with no way to recover any of it. And if you had a paid journal? Too bad. You were out the money, too.
Not everything that squicks you out, not everything that makes you uncomfortable, is inherently bad. It’s your right to be squicked, it’s your right to be uncomfortable. But it’s also your responsibility to curate your own experience. Targeting people because you don’t like their fannish output puts you on the same side as the “Warriors for Justice.” You wind up hurting a lot of innocent people who never did anything to anyone outside of a fictional space.
And if that doesn’t convince you, do one thing for me. Look at the person to your virtual right. Look to the person on your virtual left. Then look in the mirror. Then realize this one simple fact: sooner or later when you get that perfectly sterile and safe online experience you crave, someone, somewhere, is going to decide that it’s not sterile or safe enough. And that means that one of you, either the person on your right or the person on your left or even the person looking at you from the mirror is going to find themselves out in the cold.
It happens every single time. Every. Single. Time.
Now I’m not saying that Tumblr wasn’t allowing some fucked up shit, but there were ways to handle it properly. THIS IS NOT HANDLING IT PROPERLY.
It’s the beginning of the end, my Chili Babies. I’ve been in this movie before (hell, I had a significant supporting role in the previous movie). Tumblr will tick-tock along for awhile, but I guarantee people are feverishly looking for the next fandom thing because Tumblr has now proven to be unsafe.
At least fanfic writers have AO3. Right now it’s the fanartists who are pretty much screwed until the next new thing comes along.
So I guess: Good night. Good luck. And I’ll meet you at the new fandom space when you find it.
Oh, I’m not going anywhere. But I suspect that I will be moving (again) when the time is right.
i didnt realise ao3 was started in response to lj deleting account relating to p//edophi|ia and they explicitly support the posting of such works yikes
it wasn’t, like, ~~~we luv pedophilia, it was way more complicated than that!
although it’s true AO3 does allow all fannish content provided it’s properly warned for, there’s a long history there - of spaces being used by fans until the host decided whatever we were doing was too weird and distasteful and either kicking us off, banning certain content, or changing the nature of the site until it was no longer viable as a host.
you’re referring to the LJ Strikethrough of 2007, which, being an ancient crone, I lived through, and since I was hanging out in the last vestiges of SGA and in bandom, I saw some of the fallout. this was before LJ was sold to the Russians (which is a whole ‘nother story), when it was still owned by Six Apart; in an effort to clean up LJ’s act, Six Apart decided to delete all accounts using tags like underage, incest, rape, etc.
this was supposed to get rid of actual child porn on the site, and I hope it did, but it also targeted fan communities. this was a problem for a couple reasons; for one thing, not every story tagged with these words is in favor of them; for another, these things happen to real people and these personal posts were also potentially in danger of being attacked; for the last one, look, I ain’t into this kind of fic but people write about what people write about, and if it’s fictional and not explicitly banned in the TOS (correct me if I’m wrong; I don’t think written content about this stuff was banned?) then it’s not cool for a content host to just start deleting communities without warning.
but that’s what happened! these deletions were also primarily targeting slash communities, which smacked of some serious homophobia since things were deleted that had nothing to do with any of this kind of content.
eventually someone found out it was this super conservative religious group who’d sent a list of journal names to Six Apart, and who if I remember correctly targeted slash fic on purpose, even after it became clear that the fic was, well, totally fictional. after a while, Six Apart admitted they’d made a mistake and started to reinstate journals, but all of fandom was pretty shaken up.
THEN Boldthrough happened, which was essentially the same debacle several months later, at which point fandom began its long slow migration from LJ to GJ, IJ, and eventually AO3, Twitter, and tumblr.
AO3 was opened in 2008 in response to several incidents, of which Strikethrough was a really intense one. remember, also, that back in 2008 the stigma surrounding fandom was significantly greater and more shameful than it is today, so finding hosts willing to archive fic was difficult unless someone had the dough to pay for server space - often not an option. this was also back when fanfic.net’s HTML restrictions were so great that users couldn’t use any special characters or bold or italicize anything, and it didn’t allow R-rated content, so it was clearly not ideal. in addition, although cease & desist letters were much less common than they were in the early 2000s and before, DMCA takedowns were still a phantom on the horizon.
LONG STORY SHORT, even though pedophilia is reprehensible and I personally cannot stomach fanfic that involves that kind of content, AO3 was founded specially as a safe space for fandom communities that could not find homes elsewhere. it requires warnings precisely for that reason, and if you find a story that is not properly warned, you can alert the admins and get the story labeled appropriately.
IDK, maybe it’s just because I am, again, ancient, but I was in and around fandom before homosexuality was legal in all 50 states. so were most of the people who started AO3. for most of my formative life, being gay was associated with pedophilia, and so was writing about gay characters. just - it’s a lot more complicated than you might expect, and there’s a reason many older fans who have been involved in several generations of fandom were so grateful to have AO3 as an option.
I don’t read, for example, Hydra Trash Party fics. They squick me, and I generally feel they are pretty gross. But writing noncon body-horror is not the same as saying “yeah, I totally want to go out and rape and torture people for years while brainwashing them!” or even “yeah, I wouldn’t do it myself, but it would be totally okay if someone did!” Nobody is hurt by it, and nobody is going to be hurt by it. So should I have the right to go, that is gross, you don’t get to write or read that? No.
In the same way, writing about underage teens getting it on–sometimes with each other, sometimes with adults, sometimes consensually, sometimes not–is not the same as child pornography, nor does reading a fic about Hermione and Snape getting it on while she was his student mean someone thinks that would be a good and/or healthy thing in real life.
Fiction affects reality, but fiction is not reality. And writing about something does not mean you want to do it in real life, or believe that anyone should.
Let’s take a closer look at that “Ao3 supports pedophilia!” shall we?
1) The only fics I have ever come across that had actual pedophilia (i.e. someone having sex with a child), it was clearly and explicitly abuse. It was not meant to titillate or arouse. It was meant to horrify. It was seldom explicit.
2) There’s a lot more incest, but it is usually portrayed either as explicitly mutually consensual (i.e. Sam/Dean) or as abusive.
3) I’ve been in fandom for a decade and a half. When people start getting upset at “omg pedophilia, think of the children!” the fics they are usually objecting to aren’t actually pedophilia. Usually, it is teenagers having sex, especially queer sex. And people don’t like that, and use pedophilia as an excuse to shame people for writing/reading sex they don’t like.
Let’s look closer at Strikethrough, shall we? I hope that, if there were any communities of actual pedophiles on LJ, they got taken down, too. But here are some of the communities that got taken down that were not in any way supporting pedophilia and/or rape and/or incest that got taken down:
1) at least one support community for survivors of sexual abuse.
2) a literary book discussion group that was reading Lolita.
3) lots of slash fanfic communities, for things like Draco/Harry fic set in their fourth year (when both boys would have been 15).
Basically, this very conservative “family values” group hated porn, and they hated queer stuff even more, and used “but think of the children, it’s pedophilia!” to pressure LJ to get rid of huge swathes of things they didn’t like. And one time taking down the worst of it wasn’t good enough for them. No, this was step one on a moral crusade. If you acceded to their demands, all that did was whet their appetite, and soon they would be back with a new list of demands. This is why the 2007 strikethrough was not an isolated event, but rather one of a series of events, nor was LJ the only website thus targeted. It starts with anything that can get labelled “pedophilia” or “incest” because that’s low-hanging fruit. But they use that to go after anything relating to queer teen sexuality. Then anything with teen sexuality. Then once the community is already divided and diminished, they go after anything with non-con. Then whatever is next on their list. It doesn’t stop until they’ve won the point and nothing but suitably “family-friendly” fics that match their purity test are allowed.
Which is why AO3 has no morality content in their terms of service. You can’t break copyright beyond fair use (and AO3 has an expansive view of “fair use” and a team of lawyers on call). You can’t use AO3 for commercial advertising. And you can’t post ACTUAL child pornography, i.e. the things that are legally prohibited, i.e. actual photographs or videos of actual children (not teens) in sexually explicit positions–you know, the stuff that actually hurts kids. Other than that? It’s fair game. You can post anything you want, and the archive will not judge. There is no handle for the Moral Majority Family-Friendly Thought Police to latch onto, no cracks they can exploit to divide and conquer.
We’ve been down that road. It doesn’t lead anywhere good.
Reblogging this for the excellent explanation of what exactly the moral crusaders did last time. They had an explicit agenda of anti-queerness, and they specifically targeted slash and femslash communities in particular, such that many ship communities became (or started as) deliberately members-only. You had to apply, and your personal blog had to look like a real person and a fan. You were vetted, a la 1990s private servers.
During this period, Dreamwidth was also targeted by attacking its payment processor. They had to get a new one. These “Warriors” (literally called themselves that!) were totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom they didn’t like.
If you’re carrying out harassment of people right now because they’re posting works with sexual elements you don’t agree with? (And it’s always sex, never non-sexual violence, how strange….) If you’re doing that, you’re also totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom you don’t like. Because your tactics are fandom-destroying, and so is your agenda.
reblogging because this is important: strikethru and boldthru and all the various “purges” that fandom went thru about 10 years ago: this had to do with OUTSIDERS deciding that fandom in general and fanfiction in specific were evil and needed to be destroyed; unless we were writing and shipping good vanilla M/F married people. These were outsiders, going after fictional writing about fictional characters.
AO3 and OTW are HUGE, because now we have an organization, with very smart women and a lot of lawyers, that have our back. Fannish history is important, people! It has not always been this way.
This is so, so important: there’s that other post about AO3 and fanfiction floating around, about our history. People decry violent video games but no one is trying to force companies out of business. But people can and do attack fanfiction: an activity primarily written by women for women, about fictional characters. And often about sex. We have to constantly defend ourselves, protect ourselves, support each other against charges like “paeodophilia”.
^^^rebageling again for excellent commentary
Throwing this in because I was also present: This was during the American Government’s attempts to pass censorship laws on the internet. As MOST of those domains had their serves in America, they were beholden to those censorship laws. A great deal of fanfiction.net was removed because they happened to lose a goddamn courtcase. I’ve been on the site since 2002. They may not have ‘officially’ allowed NC-17 rated content (what it used to be listed as in the filters), it never did a damn thing to remove it. Ever. They had it listed as a rating option during ‘New Story’ uploading after all. It was i nthe search filters. After they lost the courtcase however, they legally had to start doing things about the mature content reports they got. The admins and mods were not actively looking for fic to remove, they were just responding to reports they had already received.
tl;dr - I know tumblr is all about black and white “you’re either all right or all wrong” thinking, but it’s important to understand what actually happened before going “ew ao3 was made to give pedophiles a safe place to post” because that is 110% not what happened.
This is why so, so many of the comparatively older fannish folks on tumblr like me are so vehemently against stuff like the anti movement and “all ships are valid UNLESS”. It smacks of censorship and content policing - and we’ve been there. We got our shit deleted and our accounts banned because someone else thought what we were reading or writing or talking about needed to just… not exist. No warning. Literally overnight. We just woke up and stuff was gone.
And yeah, the group was legit called Warriors for Innocence (or maybe of). I knew several people that were members of survivor/support groups that lost their groups - and their main support network - when Strikethrough happened (ten years ago holy shit).
You antis need to listen when us older fans tell you that the censorship you’re advocating for, when put into practice, is NOT a positive thing; it’s an extremely scary thing!
I can guarantee that you would be very, very upset if another event like LJ Strikethrough were to happen today because *you* are just as vulnerable as the rest of us! If you support the rights of marginalized groups of people, if you’re a slash or fem slash shipper, if you support gender identities that aren’t defined by biological sex, if you care about representation, if you support women, if you have any kind of kink, if you care about fandom in any capacity beyond its eradication, YOU DO NOT ACTUALLY WANT THE SORT OF CENSORSHIP YOU’RE ADVOCATING!!
People were terrified during Strikethrough. I was there. Communities were being shut down, individual users were being shut down. People were losing access to their own fics, their feedback, their comments – a LOT went on in comments on LJ. Think more coherent reblogs, much more personal, very widespread. Comments were also very important, and in terms of networking/communicating, were absolutely critical.
LJ was, for many people, central.
It was a fundamental part of the infrastructure of fandom at the time.
Having it attacked, having parts of your fandom’s territory just deleted like that, was very very scary. People didn’t know who was next. Every day, the list of stricken journals grew. And not all of them came back, not all of them recovered their content. Some people even voluntarily deleted their content as a form of protest. It was a bad time.
Youdo not have to interact with fic that grosses you out or makes you uncomfortable. Tagging is a thing. And even outside of tags, you are responsible for curating your own fandom experience. It is not right to expect it to be curated for you. And it is not right to lash out when someone refuses to do so and expects you to walk away from things that do not concern you.
I was gonna say “things that don’t harm anyone” but I realize you can argue that. If you get triggered, that’s upsetting. That could be considered harm. And I have sympathy for that. I do.
I have run across fic that triggered me. I have pretty specific triggers, and people don’t always think to warn for them because they aren’t that big a deal for a lot of people. Or it’s sort of bundled into kink and is presumed, that if you’re okay with certain kinds of kink, you’re okay with this. So I’ve been blindsided by it before. And it sucks for a couple of days while I get over it.
That was not the fault of the authors! You could argue that tagging should have been used, and maybe it should, but ultimately that’s not an ironclad obligation. It’s a tool people provide out of courtesy.
That was not the fault of the site! The site is there to give authors a way to make fiction available, not to judge each work and interrogate its validity and make sure everything is tagged so that nobody has to see anything bad, ever.
That was not even my fault! It was my responsibilityto try to curate my experience, and I tried, but it wasn’t my fault because I didn’t deliberately set out to trigger myself.
When I get triggered, unless it is by a deliberate act, it is actually the fault of the people who hurt me in the first place! And I refuse to let them off the hook and blame perfectly innocent people who just wanna write their fanfiction! I may hate that fanfiction, but that is irrelevant to the question of whether or not people should be allowed to post whatever they want.
Also, some people cope by writing about fucked-up shit. My best friend in the whole wide world has shared her fic with me, and HOO BOY it is messed up. She wrote it during a time in her life when she was in and just coming out of a horrifically abusive relationship. I mean, it was exactly the kind of relationship all of us here on Tumblr love to hate. She was married to a shitty, abusive man who preyed on someone younger than he was and used his influence over her to treat her in a way that would be right at home in that Lundy Bancroft book Why Does He Do That? He was a real rapist, a verified grade-A bad fuckin’ guy. (She was lucky to escape. I have immense respect for her.) And she wrote some fucked up fic to deal with it, and she shared it, and people were invested in it. And because this was early 2000′s, she had to host it on a foreign server and cover her tracks, because at that time no-place was safe to post it.
“Yeah, but if she’s writing it for therapy, she doesn’t have to post it where other people might have to see it!” I hear you say.
But like … what the hell??? “Shut up, don’t talk about it, it’s bad to talk about these things, because these things are bad!” is something used against folks with trauma.
“This isn’t good for me, I can’t talk about this, I can’t be your audience for this,” that’s fine, those are boundaries that people with trauma use to defend themselves. You should learn to say those things! It will help you!
But expecting other people to never create and share art about trauma is just so thunderouslyoppressive I lack the ability to fully articulate it.
Andnobodyshould have to disclose their history of trauma to prove their motives are pure or virtuous enough for their speech to be protected. I’ve only really been able to openly say “I was assaulted, it was traumatic, I am a little fucked up from it” for the past couple of years, tops. I couldn’t talk about it before that. Couldn’t! And it was over 20 years ago!
I also believe, very firmly, that you don’t need a history of abuse to find writing really messed-up shit satisfying, or to find reading it cathartic. I believe 100% in the freedom of creative expression, and the freedom to read whatever fucked up shit you want to read.
All y’all fandom youngsters can spit nails all you want over gross rape fic, incest fic, whatever.
Fine, I don’t like it either!
But that fucked up shit? That fucked up shit helped carve out the spaces we have today. You don’t have to like it, but campaigning to get it deleted, harassing content creators, calling people rapists and pedophiles who have never done and would never ever do such a thing, that is not the way to improve the world, it doesn’t keep actual kids or teens or assault/rape victims safe. It wouldn’t have made me feel safe when I was 16 and did’t want what was going on. It doesn’t make me feel safe now. I can say with the perspective of someone 24 years away from that event, it doesn’t make the world safer for people like I was. It actually makes it worse.
Learn to steer clear of the messed-up stuff you don’t like. It’s a skill, you get better with practice. Have someone else vet stuff for you if you need help doing it now.
Everything that is sketchy and gross is not criminal, and writing about a thing is not morally the same as doing it. Pleasestop acting like writing about an adult and a teenager having really questionable, gross sex is as bad as theactual registered sex offender they caught hanging around an actualelementary school two neighborhoods over from mine, just trying to talk to the kids. The former is, at most, in poor taste, and potentially triggering to abuse victims. The second makes me want to vomit because even though he was just talking, that guy was gearing up to try something and create another abuse victim. A g a i n.
The first can be avoided because it is imaginaryand you, an adult, have power over your back button so that you don’t have to witness harm to imaginary people. The second, those very real kids had to rely on real adults and real law enforcement to keep them safe from very real assault. (It worked! The neighborhood rallied! He was arrested for violating parole!)
Pretty sure Sleazebag McDongface didn’t read some gross NC-17 Draco/Lucius fic before deciding to harm an actual human being. Pretty sure not having read it didn’t keep him from doing it. ‘Cause he fuckin’ did it. And he would have done worse. But actual people stopped him.
Iget wanting to protect victims when so many of us are victims ourselves, but man, going after fiction is not the way to do it.
An author is not a perpetrator. Stop trying to make those things synonymous in the minds of other fans, and in the minds of other recovering victims.
I’m a crone who also lived through strikethrough, and all y'all young fans need to read this and understand it if you don’t want history to repeat itself someday.
Here’s the thing, also: it doesn’t stop with fic about objectionable stuff.
If you have a website with TOS that includes any kind of “objectionable content” rules, there will be parties who will use those rules to try to silence other people whom they want silenced.
Let’s look at the alt-right and MRA movements today, or GamerGate a few years ago. What is one of their primary weapons? They report black or feminist or really any leftist YouTube channels (or Twitter accounts, or whatever) whose message they don’t like and claim those channels are are violating TOS by posting hate speech or incitations to violence or whatever bullshit they can come up with, in an attempt to silence those channels.
When Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequence came under fire for starting a crowdfunding endeavor to fund the production of her Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series of videos, male gamers tried to get her KickStarter and various social media accounts shut down by reporting her for for hate speech and promoting terrorism.
Luckily, that became a big enough story that the dudes failed and their efforts backfired. But a lot of times, these tactics work.
How do I know this? Because it happened to me. Not over major shit like the examples above, but over something completely petty.
Back in the mid-to-late 90s, before LiveJournal really became the place for fandom, before FF.net was really a thing, you had to create your own personal website on whatever free webhost you could find (GeoCities was popular, but there were others) if you wanted to host your fic somewhere.
And back then, TV studios and book authors were still sending their lawyers after people who wrote fanfic, issuing cease and desist letters to not only the authors, but also to their webhosts.
At the time, I was writing perfectly het Mulder/Scully fanfic. No rape, no pedophilia, no slash. Maybe a little BDSM. But largely it was unobjectionable.
Then the 8th season of X-Files started, David Duchovny decided he only wanted to be involved part-time, and the show decided to bring in another male character. The fandom lost their shit–as fandoms do–over the idea of “replacing” Mulder blah blah blah.
One of the most popular fanfic mailing lists–one that had previously had no restrictions on what characters or pairings could be posted–decided that if you wrote fanfic involving this character, you were no longer welcome. Well, this was the mailing list with all the readers. Sure, authors could go to other mailing lists, but they wouldn’t have exposure to the sort of readership this other list boasted.
I spoke out, saying that this change was unfair to fic authors and that the moderator of this list was behaving in a pretty vile way. The moderator and her friends took aim at me and began a campaign of harassment, and a few days later, suddenly my website with my XF fanfic was TOSed because someone had reported it. So was the next site I tried to create to host my fic, and the one after that.
Thanks to the way AO3s TOS are constructed, that sort of shit doesn’t happen now. I can speak up if I need to, and while I may receive harassment on my various social media accounts, there’s no chance they can have my fic taken down just because they have an agenda and don’t like me for reasons not relating to my fic.
So yeah, AO3′s rules protect fic a lot of us might find objectionable. But they also protect fic that is in no way objectionable from being targeted by unrelated harassment campaigns. And since any of us could find ourselves in the sights of those sort of campaigns at any time, we need to thank our lucky stars for that.
I like this last addition.
When I helped write the ToS for AO3, I wasn’t primarily thinking about strikethrough. I was primarily thinking of FFN, where so many people post things that are technically against the ToS but that the community tolerates. Any time someone gets pissed off, they can go on a grudge-reporting spree and target their enemy’s work. Often, that means guys targeting slash or Twilight fic because it’s “for girls” and thus sucks. Sometimes, it’s one ship vs. another. I was also thinking of Miss Scribe and all of that other Harry Potter fandom drama. (And if you think fans are above destroying an entire archive just to strike at one enemy, think again!)
We can’t force people to like each other. We can’t force people to be nice to each other. But we could take away fandom bullies’ favorite tools.
So we did.
Watching young (ostensibly liberal) bloggers and fans take up the deeply conservative rhetoric and moral crusading of the right wing and evangelical groups from the 90s has been both fascinating from an anthropological perspective, and fucking horrifying for someone who lived through this time period and the death of LJ.
This thread keeps getting better.
It galls me to think that those of us who went through all this shit might have to go through it again because people who were still in primary school at the time don’t see anything wrong with harassing us over
Like, I hate to pull this argument, but we are your fandom elders, we did what we did to preserve fandom for y'all, so y'all would have space to safely explore the sane things we did and still do. And in doing so we rightly realized that if we wanted to protect the comfortable, cuddly parts, we also needed to protect the dark parts.
You can hate non-con fic all you want, and I will always advocate for adequate tagging/warning (especially with franchises that are aimed at younger audiences, e.g. MLP:FIM and SU) so that you don’t have to see it because I sympathize, but I will never support people who want to make sure that it isn’t even there to be seen. I’ve been through that once. It didn’t help anyone. It didn’t fix anything.
Please, learn to curate your own online experience. You are responsible for not clicking, or clicking away. Don’t try to force others to do it for you. That’s not cool. You aren’t protecting children. You are asking fandom to treat everyone like a child. There is a massive difference.
Also… maybe parents should do their job in monitoring kids’ content? When my parents found out I was looking at age inappropriate things when I was a minor, like they intervened.
Strikethrough 07 was such a well-conducted operation that communities dedicated to survivors of sexual abuse and fans of Lolita fashion were suspended, but the journal of the baby rapist, ohbutyouwillpet, stayed up. And it’s still up to this day, though it hasn’t been updated it over a decade as its owner is still in prison.
Whooo, I guess it’s my turn to take a shot at this.
I’m a nold. I’m in my 40s. When I came out as queer, in the early 90s, it was in the middle of what were called the “feminist sex wars”. If you want a really good book to read about that period, which has a LOT of resonance with Strikethrought and with the current Tumblr discourse, I cannot recommend this highly enough:
Apreview is available on Google Books, or it should be readily available secondhand, or in academic libraries (though it’s not a very heavy academic read). I recommend Booko for finding cheap secondhand copies. Support independent bookstores!
I haven’t read “Defending Pornography” for a while – I actually last re-read it about a decade ago because of the impact that Warriors for Innocence were having on Dreamwidth’s payment providers at the time, subsequent to Strikethrough itself – but here’s a quick summary, as I remember it.
1. In the late 80s and early 90s there was a vocal group of radical feminists who believed that pornography inherently harms women, not just in its production but also in its consumption (i.e. watching/reading pornography caused people to develop attitudes that were harmful to women). All explicit content was considered to be harmful, from eg. girlie magazines to hardcore XXX videos to a book like “The Joy of Gay Sex”, no matter who made it, its purpose, its intended audience, or its context. (Yup, even m/m content was considered to be degrading to women for reasons that didn’t make a lot of sense tbh.)
2. These anti-pornography feminists teamed up with the religious right and managed to get anti-porn laws passed. In particular, a law was passed in Canada preventing the importation of “obscene” material. Canada, of course, imports a lot of material from the US. Stuff started getting seized at the border.
3. Guess what was seized first? “The Joy of Gay Sex” and the like. Guess what businesses started finding alltheir shipments seized or delayed – sexually explicit or not – to the point where they were being put out of business? Gay bookstores. Guess what wasn’t seized at all? Mainstream porn made for straight men.
Around this time, Little Sisters bookstore in Vancouver (a gay bookstore) found that huge amounts of merchandise was being seized at the border, regardless of the actual content. They were being discriminatorily targeted on the basis of their sexuality. The queerness of the material they were importing was seen as inherently obscene.
Remember that this is before there was much information available online for LGBTQ+ people, so if you were a young person maybe just coming out and trying to understand things, or wanting to learn about safe sex (and yes it was at the height of the AIDS crisis, too) you’d go to a bookstore like this. Which now had empty shelves. I remember endless fundraising and activism in the LGBTQ+ community to try and keep Little Sisters open. In the end they spent half a million dollars on court cases. Read more about their struggles.
(You know what businesses weren’t impacted and didn’t have to basically ask their friends and community for help to stay open or spend a decade in the courts to defend their right to run their businesses? The powerful companies making porn by and for straight men.)
The book goes into a large number of analogous situations. Time and time again, anti-pornography laws intended to protect women are disproportionately used against women themselves, against LGBTQ+ people, and against basically any marginalised or minority group, rather than against the mainstream male-oriented porn that would seem to be its primary target.
Here’s the key point: Strossen is a legal scholar who’s looked at a lot of attempts at censorship, and you know what she found happened every time? When you try to censor pornography, even in the interests of protecting vulnerable people, that censorship will be applied first, and hardest, against the people who are most vulnerable.They won’t come for actual abusers, they’ll come for the abused, and prevent them from accessing resources, education, talking to each other, creating art to express themselves, or organising against those who are actually causing harm.
Read the book. The stories it tells are from the early 90s but they perfectly mirror what happened a decade ago with Strikethrough and what’s happening now with all this Tumblr discourse.
This is old, old business, we’ve seen it more than once before, and it never goes the way the antis think it will. Censorship is a tool that gives power to abusers and lets them inflict more harm on those who are abused, vulnerable and discriminated against. Don’t fall for it.
History they should have known: The Comstock laws in New York were this one dude (Comstock) who managed to get a mail regulation re-written to categorize anything related to contraceptives as pornography, which was already illegal to mail.
(Which is one reason for the pornographic playing cards etc, because the 19th century was almost as big on mail-order goods as the 21st, because getting to shops in person was hard for a huge subsection of Americans.)
Comstock built a non-profit with the support of the YMCA and oh shoot, some millionaire whose brand is still going strong, to enforce this law because the postal system didn’t have the personnel. They were granted the right to do so.
He and his posse of honorary mail inspectors with police powers (I kid you not) spent years engaging in endless skullduggery to prosecute people for selling contraceptives by mail. Which was how everyonegot them in the 19th century, you couldn’t walk into a shop for a pack of condoms but mail-order packages were nicely anonymous. They dragged Margaret Sanger into court repeatedly. There was a huge cottage industry of contraceptives in NYC at the time, most of the manufacturers being female, Jewish, immigrants, or some combination of the above.
There was one woman whose name escapes me they kept trying to prosecute for selling contraceptive devices and the juries kept nullifying it because the average New Yorker in the 1890s were like ‘yeah no condoms are not a crime,’ but not everybody had her stage presence and resources.
You know who they never even tried to touch? The big rubber companies were were getting into mass production of condoms. Their big funder owned the company that produced Vaseline, and was claiming in ads at the time that it worked as a spermicide.
Only the poor and vulnerable felt the impact of the Honorary Postal Inspectors of righteousness.
It’s been touched on a little before but really it’s hard to explain just how confusing and scary the crackdowns were. I was only a reader on FanFiction when the crackdown came but it felt like I was standing in a coal mine full of canaries. Canaries that were either silent or /screaming/.
Every where you looked, authors where posting warnings about how x stories were getting deleted. All of the warnings feeling rushing, panicked, most of them including notes about how they didn’t know how long they had before their warnings were taken down or they were deleted. It felt a bit like all the stars going out, everything just dying around you. Like a stampede of people had fled from some oncoming unnamed horror leaving silence in their wake. Finding AO3 later on was like finding a safe haven in a world gone mad.
Also FanFiction doesn’t really encourage socialisation aside from authors notes to readers on their chapters or homepage. Meanwhile all the warnings of the crackdown were really rushed and vague. So, as a not very sociable reader, I really didn’t have a clue what was going on at the time of the crack down and the confusion and uncertainty was almost the scariest part of the whole thing. (Not knowing if the authors should come back and if fanfics were gone for good was scarier.) It’s only years later, reading fanfic history posts that I’ve started to piece together what happened.
Also an interesting point was that during the crack down all I ever heard about was /gay/ stories being deleted. Perhaps this was just because I was reading gay stories but I didn’t even realise it was mature stories in general that was supposedly the aim of the crack down until much later.
Hot damn, this post just keeps going!
I very much second the rec about the feminist sex wars. Understand those, and you’ll understand why those of us over about 30 are so opposed to tumblr’s purity crusade.
If you haven’t been TOSsed you really don’t get it, imo.
If you haven’t spent your time wondering if the thing that will get your content deleted is the dark stuff or the nipples, you really don’t get it, imo.
Hell, way way back in the day, I had moderator types private message me going “I really like your writing, but you need to be less obvious about it, or I will have no choice but to tos you.”
A long reblog, but a worthy read. So much history and experience recounted here. If we don’t remember our past, remember why AO3 and many fandom spaces work the way they do now, we will be condemned to repeat it.
Please do not let us return to the dark ages of fear, censorship, and oppression in fandom.
Just to add my voice to the historical context here, but I was one of the main people blogging about the LJ strike through back in the day while it was all happening. I weirdly ended up being a centralized hub (hell, my LJ is even cited as a source on Fanlore, if you can believe it).
If you want a pretty good idea about the chaos and panic and how quickly it spun out of control, you can start with my post here, and then follow all of the links.
By the way, to this day, I was the only one in fandom who managed to get any kind of response out of the “Warriors for Justice,” a right-wing, Christian supremacist group who basically called anyone they didn’t like “pedos.” Their real main targets were LGBTQA. Pedophilia was really just a handy excuse.
Read and learn, young ‘uns. Not everything that squicks you out, not everything that makes you uncomfortable, is inherently bad. It’s your right to be squicked, it’s your right to be uncomfortable. But it’s also your responsibility to curate your own experience. Targeting people because you don’t like their fannish output puts you on the same side as the “Warriors for Justice.” You wind up hurting a lot of innocent people who never did anything to anyone outside of a fictional space.
And if that doesn’t convince you, do one thing for me. Look at the person to your virtual right. Look to the person on your virtual left. Then look in the mirror. Then realize this one simple fact: sooner or later when you get that perfectly sterile and safe online experience you crave, someone, somewhere, is going to decide that it’s not sterile or safe enough. And that means that one of you, either the person on your right or the person on your left or even the person looking at you from the mirror is going to find themselves out in the cold.
It happens every single time. Every. Time.
Now I’m not saying that Tumblr wasn’t allowing some fucked up shit, but there were ways to handle it properly. THIS IS NOT HANDLING IT PROPERLY.
It’s the beginning of the end, my Chili Babies. I’ve been in this movie before (hell, I had a significant supporting role in the previous movie). Tumblr will tick-tock along for awhile,but I guarantee people are feverishly looking for the next fandom thing beacuse Tumblr has now proven to be unsafe.
At least fanfic writers have AO3 at least. Right now it’s the fanartists who are pretty much screwed until the next new thing comes along.
ALT
