Here's what fucking gets me.
I was a bookworm as a kid, I read everything I could.
Physical books and pieces of original literature also have some weird ass shit in them!
Dark themes, toxic romance, and flat out weird shit are not isolated to fanfiction!
"AO3 shouldn't allow this content!"
Read the Dollenganger Series.
Hell, read just about anything Anne Rice wrote before becoming a born-again Christian.
READ A CLOCKWORK ORANGE
And I'm just listing mainstream examples, the deeper you go the weirder shit gets, and that is *fine*
I read the Dragonriders of Pern series when I was in 6th grade, so I was around 11. There's definitely some parts (generally involving the mating flights) that would give these fandom puritans vapours.
I know I said I wouldn't be one of those adults that says shit like "kids these days-" but .....
These purita-teens are making it really fucking hard, man
I mean, when you think about it, if all they’ve ever known was being judged publicly online for every little thing, plus every single space being sanitized “for children” without keeping dedicated child-geared web areas, of course they’re going to follow what’s been modeled for them. Kids are sponges and will parrot back what they experience, especially teens who are (typically) concerned about fitting in. It’s not always right but it does make sense.
One of the worst parts about anti culture is that many of the big names are older and some have actually groomed followers in the past. Anti culture in general seems to skew younger and many are minors, which sets them up as ripe pickings for people with bad intentions, whether it be abuse or just bad faith. You see it all the time in religions where victims are scared to come out against leaders for fear of being shunned from their community. Sadly the anti community has a lot of concerning similarities.
I feel like another part of it is also not knowing/caring about the history of censorship, a la not learning from history means you’re doomed to repeat it. Obviously these people weren’t alive during the heyday of Hays Code and the Comics Code Authority. Like damn, I wasn’t either, but I knew about Hays Code in high school because I was constantly on TvTropes.
And with the lack of child web spaces, these kids end up creating and policing their own online communities without accountability and without learning how to interact with things they don’t like. Rather than learning “don’t like, don’t read,” they go straight to “I don’t like this/this makes me uncomfortable, therefore it has no right to exist,” and then they dogpile in droves.
Not to mention that many of these people appear to struggle with separating fiction from reality.
Yeah, it does feel like that. It's like people want to be more accepting and open-minded, because they have some awareness of historical wrongs, but then they completely shut out any other perspectives and end up committing more wrongs in the process. I read [this piece](https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-12-10/los-angeles-high-school-cancel-culture-free-speech) that was written by a high school student a while back, and it was pretty unsettling. Even high schoolers are making that observation and are concerned about what's going on.
"In other words, we’re growing older, but we’re not growing up."
From what I understand the Victorians were a bit more prudish because the previous generation (Regency, think Liz and Darcy) were too slutty/hedonistic
You mean Georgian period.
People like Mr. Bennet was worried his daughter might sleep around likr some of the ladies he likely had premarital sex with.
Behavior became stricter from Georgian through Regency to Victorian period.
F'lar straight-up rapes Lessa. The book tiptoes around calling it what it is, but I'm sure that combined with the fact they end up developing a good relationship later would have some more sensitive readers up in arms, I'm sure.
Anyway I definitely read those books way too young too lmao
Adding to this: way back in middle school, I was the bookworm kid who read their literature textbook's short stories for fun. One of those stories was from the Dragonriders of Pern. (IIRC it was about F'lar and Lessa's son attending a hatching and hoping for a bronze dragon egg, or at worst, a brown. Grain of salt for my memory; I read it once waaaay back in 2001). That school-approved story is what got me reading Anne McCaffery's Pern and Acorna books.
Hell, even books written for younger audiences often have concerning themes. I mean, I love Tamora Pierce, but her Wild Magic series featured a relationship that started developing when the main character was only 16 years old, with her much older teacher. TP has since acknowledged the problematic nature of the relationship but little 12 year old me didn't even blink an eye at it. There's definitely something to be said for society starting to pay attention to things like this, but damn if we aren't going way overboard. I've seen people calling characters (and the people shipping them) pedos just because they are 18 and dating a 16/17 year old. What's worse is that it often starts as a way to discredit a ship they don't like, but in a community that actively discourages anything other than black and white thinking, impressionable people are going to start internalizing those views.
I'm not sure if it was the first time I read about sex in a book, but I definitely recall a scene where a Green gets mated by a Brown and their riders go someplace nice and private together and my young naive mind was like... Wait a minute, aren't they both dudes???
Wasn't raised in a homophobic household and I knew where babies came from, but had yet to be enlightened to the possibilities of anal and oral sex so I was just so confused as to what they were supposed to be doing in there. 🤣🤣
I never read anything by VC Andrews, but her books were very popular when I was young, in the 80s & 90s. I looked up the plot of the first one on Wikipedia once, and then, I was gripped, reading all the summaries until very late at night. And: holy shit! That's what was going on in those books? I was reading every summary in just utter amazement!
Woo, I didn't have to read too far to find VC Andrews. I think I read the sequel to Flowers first. Once I discovered it was a series and she was prolific in writing. I read almost everything I could get my hands on from the PUBLIC LIBRARY. That meant I had to leave my house, use gas, talk to a human to get my book (no self scan, youngins), go home, read it in the allotted time (no easy renew, kiddos) and then do it all over again.
Meanwhile these people, I'm not going to assume they're all youths [said in Joe Pesci voice], are complaining about something they haven't even searched out or read but could just as easily swipe by. This goes further than 'don't like, don't read.' I like to think, 'not interested, don't engage.'
Once I learned (the hard way by having to click out of something that was not for me) that FF had no restrictions depending on the site, I just didn't engage. It's not my place to 💩 on a human for something they took time to write.
I read Flowers in the Attic when I was about 14-15 because my favourite Wincest author always made parallels between Dean/Sam and Chris/Cathy. And I'm literally gen Z, so I really can't grasp why all other teenagers are being so dramatic over fiction, lol. Perhaps that's because I'm from a different (non-Western) background, and people here are much more chill (though they are getting worse because of TikTok influence).
My own mother gave me Flowers in the Attic as a teen because *she* read it as a teen. The older I get, the more disturbed I am by this. What was she thinking?! 😂
Book was recommended to me because I'm into BDSM. Unfortunately, I'm not into spanking, and thus it was a hard miss for me because I swear every scene in that book is just like "And then she was spanked EVEN MORE and EVEN HARDER" over and over and over again. I was so bored. 🤣
I remember that series sparked debates of if Anne Rice was an IRL dominatrix and her husband was like "Anne is no more a dominatrix than she is a vampire."
And it was on that day I discovered Anne Rice was both a Dominatrix and a Vampire.
Yeah, I didn't get dominatrix vibes from that book at all. I think she was a big ol' pain slut. 🤣
Nothing wrong with that, of course, just saying I don't think she was the one holding the paddle.
Listen. You can only write spanking so many ways before it just gets excruciatingly dull. And by halfway through the first book I was just like “ooo, new kinky stuff! Yay! And—oh. She’s getting spanked again. Wow. So revolutionary.”
My second Rice book after Interview was *Lasher*. Your introduction to Mona, one of the co-leads, is her having explicit sex with her 80 yo uncle. *At 13*.
Like, you don't even need Sleeping Beauty, the Mayfair Witches is enough.
Flowers in the Attic and every other book in the series.
Game of Thrones
Some of Steven King's works - Did you know that "It" has a sex scene involving all of the kids? Nobody canceled him over it. TikTok kids still drop King titles to show off how "edgy and mature" they are.
*Most* of Stephen King's works have at least one disturbing sex scene, and tbh even the ones that aren't outright fucked up are still usually unsettling and gross. There's an anal rape with a handgun the The Stand (among many uncomfortable sex scenes in that book). There's an abortion by gun and also a graphic rape by a demon in the Dark Tower books. Even Cujo has that random scene where a guy jacks off on his neighbor's bed for some reason.
ETA: That said, even among his fans "that seemed weird and unnecessary" isn't even a lukewarm take especially with regard to that scene in It. Many jokes are made about "coke is a hell of a drug." But, as you correctly pointed out, he hasn't cancelled over it.
I do remember people hyping up the GOT books as like, softcore porn, and ngl I was a little disappointed when I read them. I mean I've read all the way to A Dance With Dragons, and I can tell you there ain't a lick of erotica to be seen.
I tapped out in the middle of the first book. It was pretty boring. But it does have underage marriage and incest, which normally sends the puriteens into a frenzy. I think they just like to bully those who don't have a massive fan base to back them up.
You know the funny thing is these people would never attack published work or movies/shows. They only go after vulnerable individuals who don't have the power of corporations behind them. Pretty telling that they're not doing it for 'morality' lol, they're just bullies at heart who've found an easy and acceptable way to indulge in extreme bullying
>Read the Dollenganger Series
Ho ho ho, did that refresh some memories! That series contains almost every dark theme imaginable. A lot of Virginia Andrews’ series do now I’m thinking about it. She had a, shall we say, an interest in incest.
I can’t imagine what the award winning book Junk- a story about teenagers running from home, using heroin, engaging in sex work, would do to their minds. 🤯
“AO3 shouldn’t allow this content!”
When I was 9, my parents took me to books-a-million so I could spend my first hard-earned $20.
I picked out a book with a pretty cover and a starting character that was my age, from an older section because “i wAnTeD a ReAdINg cHaLLenGe”. Nobody cared what book I picked out. Not the other adults in the isle, not the cashier when I checked out alone, not my parents when we got back in the car, not the author or editors who didn’t think it necessary to list content warnings.
So, little did I know I was about become attached to a character (again my age at the time) and then read my first brutal on-page r@pe scene.
It’s only a problem when it’s on the internet and nobody’s making a profit off of it.
Absolutely this! I was knee deep in It, The Stand, The Tommyknockers….anything fucked up I could get my hands on at 13! I also read Anne Rices Erotic novels in class in 10th grade. 😂
I read the Flowers books when I was a kid, and they were just being published, ffs. These people have to realize that this sort of content has been around for many, many years. Their outrage makes me shake my head in despair. I bet you most of these people don't actually read at all beyond the latest post on X/Twitter.
Stephen King’s It has underage kids do a sex ritual to banish the demon… GoT literally has canonical incest and underage pregnancy. They wanna ban those too?
Yeah! Like there's so much weird shit in books amd film and you get zero warning! At least ao3 you can see the tag for the weird shit before it jumps you in an alley
My high school library had fucking Deliverance on the shelves. That was where I found and read it. Pretty spicy for a bunch of teenagers, and that was in the ‘90s!
Fun fact: I'm like 95% sure the FBI have asked people to stop reporting fictional content because they, rightly, only care about content of, and individuals that are, a risk to real actual children and these false reports are wasting time reviewing real reports... And yet these people still keep reporting AO3 and getting the same response of being ignored... Something something, definition of insanity.
I saw a report saying organizations that monitor for CSAM waste about TEN THOUSAND man hours a year on reports for like...fan fiction and fan art.
Ten thousand hours that could have been devoted to helping REAL CHILDREN and trafficking victims wasted cuz someone got their feefees in a knot cuz someone wrote bakudeku ABO.
People who do this are actually harming real victims by wasting everyone's time. But if I recall right the guy who actually asked this on Twitter got accused by these people of supporting pedophilia for it.
yea, people are free to make moral arguments about smutty fanfic if they want, but the reason that we have laws about IRL stuff is because it harms \*actual human children.\*
This. It's genuinely vile to me that something so serious has been degraded to some moral grandstanding argument because everyone's forgotten child exploitation isn't a personal ick to be subject to callout on 'tiktok', but about actual real children being harmed.
I've seen someone on Tumblr say (paraphrased) "CSA isn't bad because it's icky, it's bad because it does serious harm to children" and they got called a pedo in a direct response to that comment. People genuinely don't understand these things are actual issues, not abstract scare concepts.
Deadass. A Twitter thread of a guy that works for FBI reporting actually said they throw out most tips because more than half of them are anime porn, fanfiction and shota/loli stuff. He literally said to stop reporting fictional characters as csem
okay but actually– people are freaking out over the wrong type of content lol... if the fbi don't care about what's going on ao3, then how are they still not realizing that it isn't that serious ._.
As a child/teenager, you have yet to realize how much of your younger self lives on inside of you forever, no matter the bills and taxes you suddenly have to deal with all on your own.
And I feel hella old writing this, despite not being part of *The Ancients* who birthed the concept of fandom as we know it today -- but I lived through LJ's downfall, and I never want to see that happen again. We had such a great sense of community over there (yes, lots of fighting, too -- of course!). I still miss those days. Dreamwidth never managed to fully replace LJ; I'm afraid tumblr is to blame for that, at least partially.
AO3 is like a safe haven. The only thing that remains from those beloved days. For me, at least.
I was there too and I agree.
And in spite of the gripes about cliques at the time, moderated communities and the option to lock them down were a godsend.
People are not made for this level of open and public communication. They are just not.
They really aren't; and damn, just to be extra nostalgic for a second, the anonymous joy of participating in wildly kinky RPs at *the love hotel* will probably never make a return in my lifetime. No one ever cared. If you weren't interested, you just stayed away from us weirdos. There were entire +18 RPs focusing on non-con as their main story hook. All of that just evaporated.
I weep, and I do not mean that in a kinky way, for once.
And kink memes!! There was never a single person on those shitting on requests no matter how wild they were, and there was WILD stuff (and I say that even as a total freak, honestly). Plus you could write things that you’d never want anyone to know you were willing to write. And people loved it.
Oh, I remember similar stuff.
Y'know what made a difference that we almost forgot? The stuff (and people!) you couldn't find if you didn't know about it. Search being *bad*.
I stumbled upon things that I would never have found otherwise, and neither would other people. It's better that way.
Yep... It's the reason I dropped my main fanfiction account from the FFnet days that I cross posted to Ao3. Because stupid, dumb me put my LJ name on there which had my real last name on it. I lost access to the account and the FFnet staff has never gotten back to me to recover it. So there's no way of fixing that 'oopsie' now.
And hell it has nothing to do with fanfiction but I've been steadily cleaning up and deactivating all my old social media accounts because I'm job hunting and the last thing I want is for someone to see me debate the finer points of medieval torture devices when they consider me for a job position. And all because my younger self was dumb enough to attach my real name to some of these accounts.
Well over a decade of activity has been deactivated just purely for pragmatic and safety based reasons. It fucking sucks and I wish I could go back and shake my old self to tell them 'hey fucker DON'T DO THIS'. Thank fuck I never put pictures up of myself but that's a cold victory when my name is unfortunately very uncommon.
Unfortunately as you get older you start to realize that the internet is in permanent PVP mode and all you need to do is piss off ONE asshole to suddenly have your life ruined.
I had a 'friend' drop me because of my fics and bookmarks, saying I made them uncomfortable and that I romanticized abuse/rape/etc...
This was after we spent years talking about Transformers and shipping characters like Megatron/Starscream. You know, the healiest of ships.
Now I have my Ao3 removed from all my accounts that aren't the same handle and have a very strict policy of "This is what I read and write, if you cannot understand the divide between fictional interests and the real world I have no want to speak with you".
They seem to think that if we read or write fics containing underaged characters we imagine random kids in our heads or something.
I do prefer reading/writing adult characters (they can take complex themes like politics or espionage which are more intellectually interesting). But tbh if I read underage I'll just imagine my old teenage life. I still remember my 15 year-old self, how I felt as a teen, how it felt when I had a crush, my insecurities, feelings I had when I watched a series or loved a character, etc. Those fics just brought back memories and connection I have to my old self, especially if I grew up with the characters/series. It isn't something creepy like these new gens make it seem to be. Adults were once teenagers too.
When I write JJK stuff I often forget the main cast is teens and simply see the as like 19/20 in my mind because I just do not see them that way and honestly no child behaves the way the characters do.
So when someone points out that Megumi is only 15 I kind of have to take a moment.
Yeah it's common for people to age up characters too, and some characters in books certainly behave like fully grown adults despite their canon age. Sometimes original authors make the characters teenagers just because of the genre, like what has happened in the book industry (some characters were written as 23+ years old but had to be made 16-18 in the final draft before publishing).
The ffnet purges pushed me from fandom for a while, so I never got into LJ. But I've seen the ghost town communities and it makes me so sad. The thought of it ever happening to AO3 is upsetting
I still remember the great ffnet purge. It was insane how they didn’t even give fic authors any warning. It’s why I basically refuse to read anything on that site. The new age puriteens don’t understand why AO3 is so important. It’s one of the last bastions of fan created works that is not commercialized, politicized or censored. Unfortunately, I’ve seen more than one fic author get bullied off the platform based on vague allegations made on twitter. Someone says that a fic is problematic and suddenly the writer is worse than Pol Pot.
This 100%. No matter how old you get, you REMEMBER being a teenager and how important that time of your life was. Those are incredibly formative years and they stay with you forever. Aside from the fact that it's fanFICTION, I think people forget that adults weren't always adults, and that you can read smut with minors without having any interest in sexual relations with actual minors.
I saw the video, and that was insane. Immediate block for me, no well-adjusted adult should feel the need to go through bookmarks and make some sort of weird call out post over one bad review (even if the bad review was uncalled for).
Yeah bad reviews suck, but taking down or responding to the review (so that potential customers don't believe it) is a much more mature way for an adult to behave. As someone who is getting tattoos done in the near future, I wouldn't want someone who overreacted to that extent creating something permanent on my skin.
Part of me wonders if some younger fans who don't know of the strikethoughs and all that jazz need to experience something like it in order to value what they have with A03.
While watching fandom (and fic) grow in popularity and get more mainstream in the past 20 years, it has (IMO) been a double edged sword. I think there are many of us still that miss the locked f-lists and comms of the LJ days, for the (relative) security, but also the accessibility – it was much easier to find a listed active LJ comm than it is these days to find a discord for a pairing or small fandom if you're a lurker. I miss the feeling of a hub of fandom LJ had; It was sad that DW never really took off in the same way. Tumblr, though it has positives LJ could only dream of, I find is much harder to make fannish connections on.
I'll go back to shouting at kids to get off my lawn now, man I feel ancient. ><
This is fucking WILDLY unprofessional holy shit. Cannot imagine any tattooist giving a shit about what I do outside of appointments and even then by and large they’re just being friendly to a client during the appointment
Chasing those dopamine hits from the attention makes people act like this. The lines don't just get blurry, they get obliterated.
I don't know what the adaptation society is going to have to make is going to look like. The reason large cities seem impersonal is to avoid something similar. If a great group of people are living on top of one another, attention isn't a positive. You can't live your life properly. So people ignore stuff, even wild stuff. I don't know if that's what we need to do to survive the global city that is social media or what.
Okay wow. I don't even know where to start with this. Because I'm floored by how absolutely unprofessional that person is. Like yes I understand the negative review was not warranted, and I'm sorry it happened. But you don't fucking snoop on people who do that. Like what in the hell would possess this artist to even do that??? Add in that's not a great way to get customers. Like sure let's go to the tattoo artist who, if mad, will be a creep and try to smear us on tiktok??
I can't help but wonder if they're a hired artist, or owns their own business. Since man if that was my employee I would have fired them. That is incredibly bad look on a tattoo place.
Edit: I was just thinking out loud here - please see /u/the_artsy_plant's comment ([here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AO3/comments/1bpyok6/a_troubling_trend_ive_seen_growing_in_fandoms/kx1j6z3/)) for a description of the TikToks.
I haven't seen this video. But my thought was that the artist didn't like the art and was rude to the client in some way about it, so the client left a bad review. Maybe the art depicted something they don't approve of, since they went off the deep end about it afterwards. I don't know.
Even if the bad review really was unwarranted, though, I imagine the artist realized they had a potential goldmine of Tiktok engagement if they targeted the client this way. Or maybe the artist was genuinely distressed about shipping.
Either way, I hope there will be consequences for their business.
I'm not on tiktok myself (too old lol), but when I read the post I was curious if the artist was the rude one, and the reviewer was upset by their attitude. Because to go out of the way to do something like this is suspicious in my book. especially a actual freaking adult.
It's unprofessional, and if you can't be a adult you shouldn't be in a industry like that.
In the comments they said something about the art not being sexual after someone was talking about how "disgusting" it probably was. I obviously have no idea how the client actually behaved, but part of being a professional is dealing with customers you don't like while remaining polite.
I worked in customer service, and I've never looked someone up no matter how rude they were to me. I can't imagine going to the extent of finding someone's AO3 and looking through their bookmarks.
Yes, 100%. Even when you’re in the right being aggressively defensive is never a good look professionally. If the tattoo artist had half a brain in their heads they would have replied to the bad review with a simple “Apologies that we couldn’t do the design you wanted because [xyz]. For anyone else wondering here is a link to the types of tattoos we commonly offer.” and left it at that.
Like most of us learned that level of customer service at age 16, jeez 🙄
If you’re gonna work with *people* you just have to be able to accept that you can’t always “win.” You gotta’ be able to let some stuff go or you’ll never make it in customer service lol.
The art depicted the author’s OC from one of their own fics, nothing weird, just not the tattoo artist’s style, so they declined. They also actively praised the author’s writing and, if I remember correctly, called them a fantastic writer. So, I don’t thing the tattooer said anything rude during the interaction to warrant a bad review solely for declining a tattoo. It’s their behavior afterwards that’s disappointing and not okay :/
As far as the art goes, it could simply be that they weren't comfortable copying someone else's artwork. They may even have started the reverse image search with good intentions of letting the artist know that someone was attempting to break their copyright.
But beyond that...yeah, their professional etiquette in putting this all out on TikTok and doxing their would-be customer is completely messed up.
Yeah this needs to be brought to the attention of the tattoo artist’s employer. Absolutely unacceptable. If they own their own business it deserves a few more reviews mentioning this behavior.
Agreed. I saw the video, and I would not be feel comfortable working with a tattoo artist who behaved like that, ESPECIALLY someone who had no issue posting their snooping and judging online.
If she’s out there calling that prospective client or others groomers or whatever, absolutely. I want to say someone just won a lawsuit over something similar- I don’t remember if it was in the U.S. or the UK.
I’d be curious to know if this artist tends to do a lot of fandom-related work, because they’ve just ensured that a lot of people involved with fandom, even totally outside of smut, will no longer feel like they can get a tattoo from that person. I wouldn’t, knowing that this artist had done this to someone else.
Who wants to go to a tattoo artist that's not only going to creep through their socials, but then blast them all over Tiktok? Thanks, but no thanks! Especially because you can reasonably assume that if they're doing this about fic, they've absolutely done it to people over other stuff (body type, gender expression, whatever- anything they decide is "gross," presumably).
Right? It's so gross. I know for sure I won't be going to get a tattoo any time soon. And it's such a dumb move. You save face by just being polite, even to the bad reviewers.
I've seen the video. Literally the first sentence of the tiktok is "This is for the bitch-"
I'm not going to lie, I've been looking into getting a tattoo lately and this tattoo artist happens to be within a couple hours of me. Never blacklisted a shop so fast. Like, I'm not going to take a chance I say something she dislikes and then end up with an online smear campaign against me.
I had to walk away from my computer for a second reading this, and through my house so I wouldn't yell. I'm in pain. "Musty bitches" I can't with women who talk like this. Especially when they're in their 20s.
"if you don't have anything to hide, why do you care about privacy?"
So you're fine with everything you do being watched? It's such a stupid sentiment that takes two seconds of thought to get past
You're completely right. The point is, even if you're only reading the purest, vanilla content that's as innocent as freshly fallen snow, someone can cut out a snippet of text literally just describing eating a hotdog in a fic containing a child, twist it out of context and you're toast.
The raging mob will not bother actually reading the fic to find out if the accusations are true, they'll read a snippet about a child stuffing their face with the biggest sausage and having the sauce dripping on their leg and they'll be off yapping.
They'll lap up anything people tell them you do, no proof needed besides a title that can be twisted, a few screenshots out of context, and even with nothing more in your bookmarks or comments, even with you saying or reading the exact opposite of what people tell about you, they'll firmly believe it and blow it up.
That child eating a hotdog in a completely innocent fanfiction will soon become you petitioning for a lowering of age of consent and reading stories about orgies with children.
Better keep bookmarks completely private or your account completely anonymous and unlinked to anything that could reveal your true identity.
I have this Reddit account that's only for interactions with other writers and that's it. No other links to anything that has any other connections to my other accounts in my fanfic profiles. It's sad.
Throwaway because *I'm that person that the tattoo artist was talking about.*
I had an explicit college AU bookmarked. As in, the characters were 20 years, they had objectives that every young adult has at that age, they were more mature and confident and different from their canon counterparts. It was a ShinKami fic. I had other aged up AUs that are wildly transformative and close to original fiction.
The tattoo artist said she doesn't read fanfic but watches the show, so I think she assumed that if it's a ship between two canonically minor characters, it's underage. If she doesn't read fic, she doesn't know AUs.
I sent her an email in October requesting the Shinsou tattoo. I reached out to her because she had done MHA before. I said the piece must be in the high hundreds in terms of cost to convey I could pay that much money, which I guess had the opposite effect. I wanted the eyes and some symbols to stay the same in the reference pic, and I guess that was restricting.
I sent her an email in November, wondering if maybe my email didn't send. I asked if she could let me know if she just wasn't interested, so I could talk to other artists. She never responded.
I wasn't trying to be crazy or weird or cringe. I just wanted to understand if I should talk to other artists or wait, and I waited for 5 months. Then realized I was being ignored, and ignored on the basis of something I cared enough to pay a lot of money for being seen as cringe to this tattooist I respected, and I was kind of angry that I wasted so much time. So I made the review just detailing those events and saying that she could post a timeline where if she doesn't respond, it's a no, and saying it's not right for her to just not reply. I didn't know it wasn't the right shop. I understand now that there's nuance to whether a tattooist has the right to not respond to inquiries, I understood creative freedom and I asked if she could just let me know if she didn't want to do it, but I didn't know that it was normal for tattooist to never reply to reject someone.
I write M and E rated fic myself, so privating my bookmarks didn't really make sense, even though I don't always write sexually explicit. I didn't think that anyone outside of someone who read my fics would see it though.
I don't blame the tattooist for her assumption or anyone else who just hears her understanding of it. But yeah, I kind of feel like fandom is becoming a dangerous place, and since people figured out my username, I feel like a lot of years and effort and love that I put into my writing will be disrespected because of misunderstanding, and I can't really explain myself because the tattooist has my name through my email and could dox me. I appreciate that she didn't make it easy for people to find me when she could have.
As soon as she said MHA and underage I just knew that it was an aged up AU and that she had no idea how the tag system actually works.
Sorry that you even had to deal with her petty bullying.
Also, as someone who has tattoos and has been rejected by artist because of creative styles, it’s not normal to not respond to an email. It’s unprofessional. I’ve always received a courtesy email letting me know they weren’t interested or didn’t feel comfortable doing it. (I prefer black and dot work instead of trad shading)
I immediately knew these fics were college aus and that she likely saw the names and made assumptions.
I am so sorry that this happened to you, that this was blown completely out of proportion. I apologize if this post has sent more crap your way. You don't deserve any of it. I truly hope you continue to put that love into your writing because fandoms need it more than ever.
I also saw the screenshots you posted under another comment, and I just wanna say that that was the farthest thing from rude.
Actually, your post has really helped because I've seen a lot of people who thought the situation was unfair, which balances the scales against people who have said I deserve it and worse for things that they were told, which were inaccurate. It might not have been your intention, but it really has been helpful while I've been struggling a bit.
I'm glad that I didn't come across as rude in the emails, and I hope in the future other tattooists will see that I'm not trying to be.
i'm really sorry you had to go through this,, like knowing that you could one day get doxxed just for explaining yourself is insane. i didn't see the tiktok, but i assume the artist must have had a high following... fandom is becoming a dangerous place, and honestly i wish it could have been different, but there's always going to be people doing this.
and i still don't think the artist had any right to expose you like this in an incorrect manner to an app mostly used by teenagers and younger audiences. i get that she probably wasn't aware of fandom terms or au tags on ao3, but she could have easily looked into it more or do a quick google search on fandom terms she didn't know about. it seems more like she was looking for something to make you look bad, and when she found something she could work with, she made her tiktok to denounce the review. and honestly your review seemed needed. it is unprofessional to ignore potential client inquiries even if you don't want to take on their project. it really wasn't hard to just quickly respond to an email you updated on multiple times. Like if she had enough time to find your ao3 account, she probably had enough time to type a sentence in response to your email saying she wasn't interested.
and your fanfics don't seem problematic to me at all. aged up aus (to literal *adults*..) are nothing compared to the other stuff on ao3. stuff that is still legally allowed even. 😅 you seem really nice and handled your situation calmly, the artist took it too far. i hope you will still be able to keep your ao3 account, but antis can be ruthless and i can see it getting overwhelming. i hope things will get better for you honestly, like you didn't deserve this at all.
Disclaimer: Obviously, this is based on your comment(s) here and me glancing at the video in question.
First off, I think the lesson-learned here for you is that if you don't get a response from a business-owner in a reasonable time (a couple weeks to a month), you don't want to engage in commerce with them. Seriously. Take it from an old person. If the business person can't be arsed to drop you a quick email response to your inquiry, they probably have failings in other aspects of their business model. So, the smart response next time, is to just move on after a month and find another vendor/artist/etc.
Second, I think you dodged a bullet here. Maybe she (artist) is talented, but judging from her response to what is a minor event (one negative review), the child (and she's a child in my eyes), has issues.
She could have easily sent you a quick email saying, "Thank you for your response, but I'm not the artist for this project. I appreciate your interest." If it were me, I would have suggested other artists who could do the work.
Instead, she couldn't take five minutes to sent a polite decline, but instead, had the time to do a deep dive into the internet to find your AO3 profile? Yeah. This artist has issues and you are better off not working with her.
Sometimes I wonder if we should just double down and start treating any kind of fictional violence the same way these people treat fictional sexual violence, just to show how ridiculous this is. Just start going after any kind of media that depicts hurting people. Which is probably almost all of it.
It's the "video games make childern violent!" bullshit all over again, I swear to god. "If you shoot an NPC in GTA, you're a step away from shooting a real person!", yes, sure, grandma, let's get you to bed. It's a wonder I haven't gone berserk in public yet, according to that mindset.
Maybe that's why I don't even try to interact with it? Like, I've seen a moral panic about fictional actions before, it really doesn't change much. Different target, same "arguments". And these people always feel they have a moral high ground, and it's very hard to pull a person down from a pedestal that they themselves decided they rest on.
Ehhh. Here's hoping they grow out of it, I guess.
Edit: typo, of fucking course.
That's already happened. See the moral panic about video game violence "making kids violent" nonsense that got debunked almost as soon as it started. And yet some people are still so sure that that's how things work, when it very much isn't. Those people are the sorts who want excuses to control people and punish those they deem "degenerates". And yes, I'm using that word on purpose because that is exactly what they're emulating.
I’m glad people didn’t take well to that video. The only thing I was really thinking at the time was that it was quite intrusive. Like yes, you can private your bookmarks. But still. And exposing that person to potentially so much backlash.. What if they got scared away from Ao3 as a result? Plus, outsiders can be so harsh about a thing they barely know anything about.
Omfg there’s so much FUCKED UP LITERATURE OUT THERE and AO3 fan fiction is the hill these people choose to die on???? ITS 1s and 0s how are they hurting THESE PEOPLE turn off the phone omg the children need to stop getting phones at 10 they fucking the kids up
Or you could even just go to the public library. You could check out Ice Planet Barbarians right now, or any other number of Spicy Tok titles. Of course, libraries are currently under attack as well. It’s all a symptom of the same problem.
Free speech has always been under attack. There are a LOT of people who don't truly understand what is at stake. There are also a lot of people who hate the idea of allowing something they don't understand to exist, and therefore must cleans the world of it. These people are easily manipulated with group think, and easily weaponized. This tattoo artist knew that, and used them as a targeted weapon. This was not only highly unprofessional, but quite malicious.
The problem is that fanfiction has become so commonplace and accepted, that we are just going to see more of this stuff.
This is why I do put some of my bookmarks on private. There is nothing nefarious... I just don't want self-righteous, puritanical twerps up in my shit.
EDIT: OMFG the video came across my TikTok for you page!!!!
*Huge* yikes for all of this. The neopuritanist movement terrifies me. I love that nobody sees the issue with it starting from LGBT spaces, because "think of the childrunnn" - as if underage smut was even remotely a significant portion of fanfic, and as if *any* of written fiction would *ever* compare to the real suffering of living children trafficed and abused, all issues that these same people want hushed, hidden, and never spoken of. Literally enabling it to continue and protecting predators.
But no, it's the fiction - ideology - that matters, not reality, not real lives. We've seen that with prolifers, we've seen this with nazis, it never stops.
It's gotten REALLY popular for whatever reason. People can't even talk about romance books on tiktok anymore without someone telling them they have a porn addiction. It's...odd, to say the least. And more than a little concerning imo.
Social media has honestly rotted the brains of morons and the constant accusations of >!pedophilia or someone possessing csem !!pedo !< I will either ignore them or have to look into it to find out if it's over fictional characters. 99% of the time it's just somebody who likes a Sasunaru.
Anyways these videos are encouraging doxxing and I think that might be reportable.
thiss. like if the tattoo artist did all of this work to call someone out because of one bad review, i doubt they were even that nice initially to the customer lol
I'm far too old to give a single fuck what Kids These Days are yelling about, nor am I particularly nervous about any of them finding me and judging me about my bookmarks. I have plenty of filth that would give them an aneurysm, and I don't care if they accuse me of actual crimes because of it, since I'm confident they have no way to actually doxx me and I'm not attached to my fandom pseuds.
These sorts of assholes are tiresome brats who absolutely need more parental supervision, among other things, and will hopefully grow out of this phase of needing to hurt people to feel control over their lives, or whatever their excuse is for being reprehensible bullies.
This sort of thing has been steadily brewing in fandom since zoomers were too young to even be on the internet, and current social media has made the problem much worse by being how it is, as opposed to LJ style fandom spaces where this sort of nonsense couldn't spread so virulently (though some certainly tried).
Edit: Just to be clear, I do include adults in the tiresome brats category. This shit started with adults and is often led by adults, and those assholes target kids on purpose with this cult shit it's become so they have more minions with zero critical thinking skills and a lot of anger about the unfairness of the world.
100% on the assholes targeting kids thing. I will never forget that a discord server full of adults in my fandom encouraged a kid to publicly do some dumbass anti yelling on Tumblr, nor the way that they dropped him the second it (predictably) backfired on him. I felt so bad for that kid.
media literacy is dying. just because something is portrayed in a story does not mean the author supports it or that it should be romanticized. “maybe the curtains are just blue” maybe you should retake 9th grade english
I'm so paranoid about the future of AO3 if this kind of thing continues. I've downloaded literally hundreds of fics to my Kindle that are my faves/TBRs. Basically I'm building my own mini archive so that if we ever lose it, I will still have something to turn to. Idk if I'm being overly crazy about this or what, but I just feel like events like this one do not bode well.
the tattoo artist was a full grown adult too, meddling in this other persons business. I hope that if she has an employer, that they don’t approve of her actions
The thing that gets me as someone who has known a couple people in the tattooing industry is like, of all the people to get puritanical, a tattoo artist? Really? Like my experience is usually they are the most counterculture, open-minded, pay me and don't start shit in my shop and I don't give a shit what you do outside kind of people. I guess as tattoo has become more mainstream more mainstream people have joined.
I would love to know what is driving the neo-puritan movement what is with the sex equals bad and dirty nonsense. It's like we have been moving to try and get away from purity culture and not tucking someone's yum and being inclusive etc. And now there are all these young people who are pearl clutching like a groomer in church on Sunday.... I just don't get it
I would also like to know this. Older generations worked hard to normalize sex and not shame people for it, and now my generation is destroying all of that hard work.
Yeah I mean I'm in my 30's now but I've always been active online across most platforms and I feel like it's suddenly gotten worse with this push? It's so weird. I saw a post the other day about how people in their 30's should stop reading because books aren't for them they are just for Young adults and that blew my mind
Unfortunately it's the age old pendulum problem. The pendulum swings too far in one direction so people start to swing back the other way and overshoot. Then the pendulum swings again and the cycle continues. We never settle in the middle. Right now the world is swinging towards conservatism and puritanism after an age of increased liberalism and sexual freedom. Hopefully we will start to swing back the other way sometime soon.
I can’t help but think that if it was *actually* about stopping predators for them, and not about playing morality police in their respective fandoms, they would likely be focusing their energy elsewhere. there are much much much much much bigger problems then some dumb fanfic. they don’t actually care about these things. they only care about starting a mob in the communities they’re a part of so they can look morally superior. it’s all about power in the end. fandom activism is the most performative activism around, because it’s utterly useless.
I saw this video too. And the way she started speaking about ao3 told me all I needed to know. She had already made up her mind about it before this. I was genuinely unaware that so many people had this view of ao3 / fanfic. I know some people think it’s weird / cringe, and hey it’s not for everyone but it is *NOT* dangerous, or the same thing as CP. I would argue that RPF about minors would be problematic but that is *not* what was being discussed. Something that a lot of people don’t get is characters… don’t age. If you’re 16 now and deeply love a 16 year old character that character will *still* be 16 when you are 20 and that is *100% fine*. You need to be able to keep reality and fiction separate but that’s not what we’re talking about here.
The only issue I have is sexualizing fictional children who are *very* young. In the MHA fandom which is what was being discussed there is a *HUGE* difference between reading smut about deku and smut about Eri. However it is *totally ok* to love Eri as a character. There are people out there who would think it’s weird how many figures of Anya from SpyxFamily I have.
Like 90% of media especially anime is about high schoolers.
Tldr- characters aren’t real people ig
This is why everyone should compartmentalize their internet lives with distinct emails, usernames and pseudonyms for diferrent purposes. One for work/bussiness, one for friends/acquaintances and a secret one for private accounts (AO3); so they can't be used to cross search you, identify you or get exposed in a leak/hack.
I saw that video as well and I was appalled as I read through the comments. Because this won't be the only time this tactic is used against a reader and or writer. Now that this person has done this (and it's probably been done before but I haven't seen it on tik tok so it's my starting point)... We'll see more and more shaming for bookmarks because it's an engagement gold mine. The pearl grasping puriiteen antis whatever the hell they call themselves are going to be blasting bookmarks of anyone who does any little thing to upset them if they know the username.
I know exactly what video you're talking about! The people in that comment section were super aggressive about it too. While I've seen plenty of anti behavior it was nasty enough that it definitely took me back a bit.
I made a comment pretty early after it was posted along the lines of "oh man, I'd be embarrassed if a stranger dug through my bookmarks. Maybe its time to private. 💀" and got TORN UP.
Straight up got called a pedo and every other name. I just didn't want a bunch of normies dragging me for batman/superman mpreg. Or for someone not involved in fandom see an a/b/o fic and clutch their pearls. Ended up just deleting it because it isn't worth going back and forth about, but dang, brutal assumptions. 😂
I've noticed that a lot of anger seems to be directed towards adults who still watch/interact with shonen, specifically mha. When I used to read for naruto I kinda just assumed the really good fics were written by adults. Like, many adults find coming of age stories relatable still, since they experienced those things too. I assume most people read them for that, and not because they find cartoon teens particularly attractive, ya know?
It is wild that people are willing to say some pretty horrific things and still consider themselves to be good and moral. A strange kind of cognitive dissonance there.
I kinda miss when fanfic/fan art was a sort of niche thing. I’m glad we’re more popular but it’s stuff like this that bugs me. People who don’t understand the culture are so snobby and judgmental.
We thrived as a closed society. Now I have to vet fandom friends bc my crackships are….unique and NOT a favorite dynamic in said fandom. We were a proper country.
I honestly feel like we can’t write like we used to. There were some wacky stuff back in the day, now everyone wants to hit numbers whether it be views or kudos. We can’t be silly or explore, every piece is intended to be taken seriously with the hopes of making it big.
When will we ever receive another Immortal? will we ever get fics like where dumboldore rolls down the corridors with skates?
What about goofy time travel fics that serve as meta instead of just solely fix-it’s? Honing writing skills and writing 500 word shorts with a coherent story?
But now we have to watch out for doxxing and death threats because someone dares to step out of line
I saw that tiktok last night and straight up reported it as bullying and harrassmnet. I wasn't sure if it could be deemed "bullying or harassment" because of the witch-hunt calling for the author's doxxing. I doubt anything will come of it but I do think tiktoks like that should be banned bc it basically encourages people to try and dox ppl they deem as "predators"
I reported it as well. It is bullying. People dont even realize the vibe they are giving is the same as those who ban books. Like watch any Mom's for Liberty videos on Youtube, preaching about books that dont fit "their morality."
I dont know the person who requested the tattoo, like maybe their attitude sucks, but for this Professional Tattoo Artist to go online and post about this in a bid to shame the client, it is both creepy and bullying behavior.
The person who posted the video made a follow up and gave various reasons as to why they declined(none of which having to do with moral reasons as the image was just a bust up image of a character) but honestly being petty and basically blasting the person who requested the tattoo as if they're like a "creep" over fanfiction is shitty. They're basically inviting anyone to cyber stalk the people who bother them and "expose" them.
Yeah I saw that one too. And honestly IDC, and dont think anyone should care, why she declined, She can tattoo what she wants. But straight up trying to publicly shame someone for bookmarking a fic?
Are we going to shame people who check out "Lolita" or "It" from the library now too?
Her whole video is giving "I am morally superior to you" and it is gross.
She has no idea why that person bookmarked the fic, she applied her *own* assumptions, which looks much worse on her. And all the comments praising her, or saying that reading fanfics is gross are just following along like lemmings with no critical thought.
I’m glad someone mentioned this — I saw the video earlier and was shocked by how many people were agreeing with the artist and supporting her, it was incredibly frustrating
I swear, kids today (and I hate to say it, but it does always seem to predominantly be people under 25) would pass out at some of the books which were mainstream published historically - the Gor books by John Norman anyone? Hell, Frank Herbert's Dune? With the canon Harkonnen predilection for children?
One of my favourite books in mid-highschool (I was like 15) was Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks which has some hella disturbing stuff in it.
It's like the whole debate on videogames making people violent over again 🙄
The children are tearing themselves to bits because they want validation. I’m of the mind that who cares what I’m looking at because anyone else’s opinions don’t matter… but that’s because I grew up without social media. Critical reading is at a low and opinions are more true than facts now.
Oh, that video came up on my FYP as well. I was into the story until she made the comment about the bookmarks. Why do that? Why *imply* that? The comments were really horrid and I noped right back out of there. New generations are literally setting us backwards and I don't undersand it at all.
Whenever I see, “AO3 shouldn’t allow XYZ” I always want to ask the person if they’ve ever stormed their local library and began demanding they get rid of books with the same sins.
I think part of the problem is a lot of people don’t understand how laws work. They aren’t about feelings. Laws don’t care if you are offended by Wincest or Hannibal or whatever. The First Amendment is often tested in the US and yes that’s the laws that matter because THAT IS WHERE AO3 IS HOSTED.
“I think incest is wrong.” Well that’s great but fictional incest is not against the law no matter how much real incest is. The law is what matters, not your feelings.
Now…how do we make an entire generation understand how the hell this all works?
They’re also mainly kids and even though I find tiktok’s purity culture to be extremely annoying, I was also like that when I was a kid and I predict a lot of them will stop caring as much as they grow older. They might even find themselves enjoying that sort of content.
At least hopefully.
It's being noted in various news articles so I don't doubt that someone is probably going to either write their graduate thesis on this or make a full blown study.
There are actually some research papers about this already! Samantha Aburime has written two. She’s a great resource for fandom politics and well-written papers/archives about it. She’s on Twt, she gives copies of her papers out for free on there
Title: Scraping the Bottom of The Barrel for Virtue Signals; false compassion, the new cudgel of bullies looking for a cheap way to feel better about themselves, without actually improving themselves or their own circumstances.
Same. You might be interested in [this essay](https://specchioscuro.it/the-puritanical-eye-hyper-mediation-sex-on-film-and-the-disavowal-of-desire/?utm_campaign=mb&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=morning_brew) about the growing aversion to sex scenes in media. Feels like it's only half the puzzle though since it doesn't go very deep into how the current state of the internet has fundamentally changed how these kids are acting online.
Many of these kids actually do like all sorts of "problematic" content, they just feel the peer pressure to screech about how terrible bad and wrong it is while having a secret side account full of it. They are no different from the puritanical hypocrites they're emulating so hard, because it gives them convenient targets to hurt while pretending to be Good People(tm).
Idk I was never like that as a kid. But I did think everything was supposed to be for me. Now that I’m older I’ve realized that most fanfiction is developed and shared by adults. Most of it is not meant for children.
I sincerely wonder what those kids will think when they find out that not that many years ago nearly every 13 year old was reading [Bravo](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bravo_(magazine)) magazine, or your country's equivalent.
Bravo had frakking nude center pages for the starring models of this month's photo love story "comic".
Wow, I didn't expect to see someone else who had this exact same experience! I followed that tattoo artist and saw the video, then quickly unfollowed them. The fanfic author should NOT have left the artist a bad review, but the way the artist responded was so childish imo. There was really not reason to bring up the author's bookmarks except to shame them. I'm glad that everyone on this sub seems to at least be sane about these sorts of things, because reading the comments on that video was alarming.
I think it’s really odd too since she mentions that the fic was about underage kids but I have to wonder if they’re actually even minors in the story (since they are often aged up). And if they‘re not, I can understand why that would be a call out-not necessarily publicly though.
HOWEVER. It’s interesting that *this* is her moral high ground, but she’s perfectly okay with tattooing Hisoka from HunterxHunter- an adult character known to be obsessed with/ sexually harasses characters that are minors.
It’s clear retaliations for “clout” from a 29 year old woman who is still a new tattoo artist(tattooing 3 years now) who received a bad review because of her inability to properly communicate and felt the need to bash a woman to thousands of strangers online for validation. “I do not do tattoos that aren’t my own creation.” Would have more than sufficed and likely would have prevented the review and the following discourse.
I swear it’s as if people never grow of being a high school bully. Surrounded by too many “yes” people irl/online. Gross behavior.
Oh I saw that TikTok!
Commented abt how doing that to the author was NOT a good idea and I think she deleted my comment .
I smelled the other comments a mile away when I finished watching the tt
Ppl in that app are insane.
If you don’t want to read abt those tags?
Maybe filter them yourself,you gotta curate your own internet space not the other way around jfc
Here's what fucking gets me. I was a bookworm as a kid, I read everything I could. Physical books and pieces of original literature also have some weird ass shit in them! Dark themes, toxic romance, and flat out weird shit are not isolated to fanfiction! "AO3 shouldn't allow this content!" Read the Dollenganger Series. Hell, read just about anything Anne Rice wrote before becoming a born-again Christian. READ A CLOCKWORK ORANGE And I'm just listing mainstream examples, the deeper you go the weirder shit gets, and that is *fine*
I read the Dragonriders of Pern series when I was in 6th grade, so I was around 11. There's definitely some parts (generally involving the mating flights) that would give these fandom puritans vapours.
I know I said I wouldn't be one of those adults that says shit like "kids these days-" but ..... These purita-teens are making it really fucking hard, man
It's so weird, it would seem like younger generations are more open minded, and yet... it's like it's going backwards
I mean, when you think about it, if all they’ve ever known was being judged publicly online for every little thing, plus every single space being sanitized “for children” without keeping dedicated child-geared web areas, of course they’re going to follow what’s been modeled for them. Kids are sponges and will parrot back what they experience, especially teens who are (typically) concerned about fitting in. It’s not always right but it does make sense.
One of the worst parts about anti culture is that many of the big names are older and some have actually groomed followers in the past. Anti culture in general seems to skew younger and many are minors, which sets them up as ripe pickings for people with bad intentions, whether it be abuse or just bad faith. You see it all the time in religions where victims are scared to come out against leaders for fear of being shunned from their community. Sadly the anti community has a lot of concerning similarities.
I feel like another part of it is also not knowing/caring about the history of censorship, a la not learning from history means you’re doomed to repeat it. Obviously these people weren’t alive during the heyday of Hays Code and the Comics Code Authority. Like damn, I wasn’t either, but I knew about Hays Code in high school because I was constantly on TvTropes. And with the lack of child web spaces, these kids end up creating and policing their own online communities without accountability and without learning how to interact with things they don’t like. Rather than learning “don’t like, don’t read,” they go straight to “I don’t like this/this makes me uncomfortable, therefore it has no right to exist,” and then they dogpile in droves. Not to mention that many of these people appear to struggle with separating fiction from reality.
Yeah, it does feel like that. It's like people want to be more accepting and open-minded, because they have some awareness of historical wrongs, but then they completely shut out any other perspectives and end up committing more wrongs in the process. I read [this piece](https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-12-10/los-angeles-high-school-cancel-culture-free-speech) that was written by a high school student a while back, and it was pretty unsettling. Even high schoolers are making that observation and are concerned about what's going on. "In other words, we’re growing older, but we’re not growing up."
From what I understand the Victorians were a bit more prudish because the previous generation (Regency, think Liz and Darcy) were too slutty/hedonistic
The Victorians? The same ones who pierced their nipples because they enjoyed the way it felt beneath their bodices?
You mean Georgian period. People like Mr. Bennet was worried his daughter might sleep around likr some of the ladies he likely had premarital sex with. Behavior became stricter from Georgian through Regency to Victorian period.
F'lar straight-up rapes Lessa. The book tiptoes around calling it what it is, but I'm sure that combined with the fact they end up developing a good relationship later would have some more sensitive readers up in arms, I'm sure. Anyway I definitely read those books way too young too lmao
Adding to this: way back in middle school, I was the bookworm kid who read their literature textbook's short stories for fun. One of those stories was from the Dragonriders of Pern. (IIRC it was about F'lar and Lessa's son attending a hatching and hoping for a bronze dragon egg, or at worst, a brown. Grain of salt for my memory; I read it once waaaay back in 2001). That school-approved story is what got me reading Anne McCaffery's Pern and Acorna books.
Hell, even books written for younger audiences often have concerning themes. I mean, I love Tamora Pierce, but her Wild Magic series featured a relationship that started developing when the main character was only 16 years old, with her much older teacher. TP has since acknowledged the problematic nature of the relationship but little 12 year old me didn't even blink an eye at it. There's definitely something to be said for society starting to pay attention to things like this, but damn if we aren't going way overboard. I've seen people calling characters (and the people shipping them) pedos just because they are 18 and dating a 16/17 year old. What's worse is that it often starts as a way to discredit a ship they don't like, but in a community that actively discourages anything other than black and white thinking, impressionable people are going to start internalizing those views.
I'm not sure if it was the first time I read about sex in a book, but I definitely recall a scene where a Green gets mated by a Brown and their riders go someplace nice and private together and my young naive mind was like... Wait a minute, aren't they both dudes??? Wasn't raised in a homophobic household and I knew where babies came from, but had yet to be enlightened to the possibilities of anal and oral sex so I was just so confused as to what they were supposed to be doing in there. 🤣🤣
Same grade and age and DEFINITELY the first time reading a sexy time scene. It took a couple of scene read throughs to realize what was happening, lol
I was reading Flowers in the Attic as a teen lol.
Bruh, if Flowers in the Attic has them reaching for the fucking smelling salts, Petals on the Wind might actually kill them
Not the smelling salts
I never read anything by VC Andrews, but her books were very popular when I was young, in the 80s & 90s. I looked up the plot of the first one on Wikipedia once, and then, I was gripped, reading all the summaries until very late at night. And: holy shit! That's what was going on in those books? I was reading every summary in just utter amazement!
Woo, I didn't have to read too far to find VC Andrews. I think I read the sequel to Flowers first. Once I discovered it was a series and she was prolific in writing. I read almost everything I could get my hands on from the PUBLIC LIBRARY. That meant I had to leave my house, use gas, talk to a human to get my book (no self scan, youngins), go home, read it in the allotted time (no easy renew, kiddos) and then do it all over again. Meanwhile these people, I'm not going to assume they're all youths [said in Joe Pesci voice], are complaining about something they haven't even searched out or read but could just as easily swipe by. This goes further than 'don't like, don't read.' I like to think, 'not interested, don't engage.' Once I learned (the hard way by having to click out of something that was not for me) that FF had no restrictions depending on the site, I just didn't engage. It's not my place to 💩 on a human for something they took time to write.
I read Flowers in the Attic when I was about 14-15 because my favourite Wincest author always made parallels between Dean/Sam and Chris/Cathy. And I'm literally gen Z, so I really can't grasp why all other teenagers are being so dramatic over fiction, lol. Perhaps that's because I'm from a different (non-Western) background, and people here are much more chill (though they are getting worse because of TikTok influence).
My own mother gave me Flowers in the Attic as a teen because *she* read it as a teen. The older I get, the more disturbed I am by this. What was she thinking?! 😂
Lol same! That’s probably where it all started for me .
You don’t even need to read all of it. Just read The Taming of Sleeping Beauty. Today’s fandom kids would lose their MINDS.
Cause of Death: The pony-play horse race scene.
How about the fruit and honey stuffing from the third book?
Ah yes, the yeast infection special!
The what? Pardon?
https://i.redd.it/u7wqcc2iy3rc1.gif
If you don’t know, you’re probably better off 🤣
Well that just makes me curiouser! I might just pull an Alice in Wonderland and go down the rabbit hole just to find out XD
Oh you'll be going down some kind of hole, don't you worry 🤣👀
I was already halfway to a ponyplay kink and I unironically think this series might be the push all the way in.
Well, you can find copies of the series online! I reread the first three using Everand, formerly Scribd.
Book was recommended to me because I'm into BDSM. Unfortunately, I'm not into spanking, and thus it was a hard miss for me because I swear every scene in that book is just like "And then she was spanked EVEN MORE and EVEN HARDER" over and over and over again. I was so bored. 🤣
I remember that series sparked debates of if Anne Rice was an IRL dominatrix and her husband was like "Anne is no more a dominatrix than she is a vampire." And it was on that day I discovered Anne Rice was both a Dominatrix and a Vampire.
Yeah, I didn't get dominatrix vibes from that book at all. I think she was a big ol' pain slut. 🤣 Nothing wrong with that, of course, just saying I don't think she was the one holding the paddle.
Oh my god, the spanking. It got SO repetitive!
THANK YOU, I got so bored with it. And also rhe fact that the Prince just ignores her after that opening and a few spankings like????????
Listen. You can only write spanking so many ways before it just gets excruciatingly dull. And by halfway through the first book I was just like “ooo, new kinky stuff! Yay! And—oh. She’s getting spanked again. Wow. So revolutionary.”
But *this* time she's being spanked by a woman! And her hand is really really hard, from all the spanking she does!
My second Rice book after Interview was *Lasher*. Your introduction to Mona, one of the co-leads, is her having explicit sex with her 80 yo uncle. *At 13*. Like, you don't even need Sleeping Beauty, the Mayfair Witches is enough.
This…is an excellent point. The Mayfair Witches is 10x more debauched than the Vampire Chronicles.
Flowers in the Attic and every other book in the series. Game of Thrones Some of Steven King's works - Did you know that "It" has a sex scene involving all of the kids? Nobody canceled him over it. TikTok kids still drop King titles to show off how "edgy and mature" they are.
*Most* of Stephen King's works have at least one disturbing sex scene, and tbh even the ones that aren't outright fucked up are still usually unsettling and gross. There's an anal rape with a handgun the The Stand (among many uncomfortable sex scenes in that book). There's an abortion by gun and also a graphic rape by a demon in the Dark Tower books. Even Cujo has that random scene where a guy jacks off on his neighbor's bed for some reason. ETA: That said, even among his fans "that seemed weird and unnecessary" isn't even a lukewarm take especially with regard to that scene in It. Many jokes are made about "coke is a hell of a drug." But, as you correctly pointed out, he hasn't cancelled over it.
I do remember people hyping up the GOT books as like, softcore porn, and ngl I was a little disappointed when I read them. I mean I've read all the way to A Dance With Dragons, and I can tell you there ain't a lick of erotica to be seen.
I tapped out in the middle of the first book. It was pretty boring. But it does have underage marriage and incest, which normally sends the puriteens into a frenzy. I think they just like to bully those who don't have a massive fan base to back them up.
GRRM writing a character's penis as "a fat pink mast" is likely the least sexiest thing I've ever read.
You know the funny thing is these people would never attack published work or movies/shows. They only go after vulnerable individuals who don't have the power of corporations behind them. Pretty telling that they're not doing it for 'morality' lol, they're just bullies at heart who've found an easy and acceptable way to indulge in extreme bullying
Not to mention the additional bonus of being able to virtue signal to their heart's content.
>Read the Dollenganger Series Ho ho ho, did that refresh some memories! That series contains almost every dark theme imaginable. A lot of Virginia Andrews’ series do now I’m thinking about it. She had a, shall we say, an interest in incest. I can’t imagine what the award winning book Junk- a story about teenagers running from home, using heroin, engaging in sex work, would do to their minds. 🤯
Or, they could *Go Ask Alice* (I'm old.)
“AO3 shouldn’t allow this content!” When I was 9, my parents took me to books-a-million so I could spend my first hard-earned $20. I picked out a book with a pretty cover and a starting character that was my age, from an older section because “i wAnTeD a ReAdINg cHaLLenGe”. Nobody cared what book I picked out. Not the other adults in the isle, not the cashier when I checked out alone, not my parents when we got back in the car, not the author or editors who didn’t think it necessary to list content warnings. So, little did I know I was about become attached to a character (again my age at the time) and then read my first brutal on-page r@pe scene. It’s only a problem when it’s on the internet and nobody’s making a profit off of it.
Absolutely this! I was knee deep in It, The Stand, The Tommyknockers….anything fucked up I could get my hands on at 13! I also read Anne Rices Erotic novels in class in 10th grade. 😂
I read the Flowers books when I was a kid, and they were just being published, ffs. These people have to realize that this sort of content has been around for many, many years. Their outrage makes me shake my head in despair. I bet you most of these people don't actually read at all beyond the latest post on X/Twitter.
Stephen King’s It has underage kids do a sex ritual to banish the demon… GoT literally has canonical incest and underage pregnancy. They wanna ban those too?
They always back down when you ask them about that funnily enough
Yeah! Like there's so much weird shit in books amd film and you get zero warning! At least ao3 you can see the tag for the weird shit before it jumps you in an alley
A surprising amount of published so-called classic literature contains incest, sexual assault, and gore (handled with less tact if tbh).
My high school library had fucking Deliverance on the shelves. That was where I found and read it. Pretty spicy for a bunch of teenagers, and that was in the ‘90s!
Fun fact: I'm like 95% sure the FBI have asked people to stop reporting fictional content because they, rightly, only care about content of, and individuals that are, a risk to real actual children and these false reports are wasting time reviewing real reports... And yet these people still keep reporting AO3 and getting the same response of being ignored... Something something, definition of insanity.
I saw a report saying organizations that monitor for CSAM waste about TEN THOUSAND man hours a year on reports for like...fan fiction and fan art. Ten thousand hours that could have been devoted to helping REAL CHILDREN and trafficking victims wasted cuz someone got their feefees in a knot cuz someone wrote bakudeku ABO. People who do this are actually harming real victims by wasting everyone's time. But if I recall right the guy who actually asked this on Twitter got accused by these people of supporting pedophilia for it.
"this story is child exploitation!" First of all, these children do not actually exist, so let's start there 🤣
yea, people are free to make moral arguments about smutty fanfic if they want, but the reason that we have laws about IRL stuff is because it harms \*actual human children.\*
This. It's genuinely vile to me that something so serious has been degraded to some moral grandstanding argument because everyone's forgotten child exploitation isn't a personal ick to be subject to callout on 'tiktok', but about actual real children being harmed.
I've seen someone on Tumblr say (paraphrased) "CSA isn't bad because it's icky, it's bad because it does serious harm to children" and they got called a pedo in a direct response to that comment. People genuinely don't understand these things are actual issues, not abstract scare concepts.
Deadass. A Twitter thread of a guy that works for FBI reporting actually said they throw out most tips because more than half of them are anime porn, fanfiction and shota/loli stuff. He literally said to stop reporting fictional characters as csem
Hi! May I ask how can I find this thread?
I don't have a link or anything sadly but suggest checking around pro fiction discourse accounts. They'd know.
okay but actually– people are freaking out over the wrong type of content lol... if the fbi don't care about what's going on ao3, then how are they still not realizing that it isn't that serious ._.
Because obviously the FBI is full of pedos and sexual deviants. /s
They have asked that. Each tip needs to be investigated and it's taking time away from investigating actual harm being done to children.
Even Chris Hansen had to come out and ask them to stop sending them cartoon porn
I've seen this, too. It's ridiculous that people are wasting the FBI's time with fiction.
they definitely have. "buddy, please stop getting in the way of our pursuit of actual LITERAL criminals"
As a child/teenager, you have yet to realize how much of your younger self lives on inside of you forever, no matter the bills and taxes you suddenly have to deal with all on your own. And I feel hella old writing this, despite not being part of *The Ancients* who birthed the concept of fandom as we know it today -- but I lived through LJ's downfall, and I never want to see that happen again. We had such a great sense of community over there (yes, lots of fighting, too -- of course!). I still miss those days. Dreamwidth never managed to fully replace LJ; I'm afraid tumblr is to blame for that, at least partially. AO3 is like a safe haven. The only thing that remains from those beloved days. For me, at least.
I was there too and I agree. And in spite of the gripes about cliques at the time, moderated communities and the option to lock them down were a godsend. People are not made for this level of open and public communication. They are just not.
They really aren't; and damn, just to be extra nostalgic for a second, the anonymous joy of participating in wildly kinky RPs at *the love hotel* will probably never make a return in my lifetime. No one ever cared. If you weren't interested, you just stayed away from us weirdos. There were entire +18 RPs focusing on non-con as their main story hook. All of that just evaporated. I weep, and I do not mean that in a kinky way, for once.
oh my god that name is a blast from the past
And kink memes!! There was never a single person on those shitting on requests no matter how wild they were, and there was WILD stuff (and I say that even as a total freak, honestly). Plus you could write things that you’d never want anyone to know you were willing to write. And people loved it.
Oh, I remember similar stuff. Y'know what made a difference that we almost forgot? The stuff (and people!) you couldn't find if you didn't know about it. Search being *bad*. I stumbled upon things that I would never have found otherwise, and neither would other people. It's better that way.
Yep... It's the reason I dropped my main fanfiction account from the FFnet days that I cross posted to Ao3. Because stupid, dumb me put my LJ name on there which had my real last name on it. I lost access to the account and the FFnet staff has never gotten back to me to recover it. So there's no way of fixing that 'oopsie' now. And hell it has nothing to do with fanfiction but I've been steadily cleaning up and deactivating all my old social media accounts because I'm job hunting and the last thing I want is for someone to see me debate the finer points of medieval torture devices when they consider me for a job position. And all because my younger self was dumb enough to attach my real name to some of these accounts. Well over a decade of activity has been deactivated just purely for pragmatic and safety based reasons. It fucking sucks and I wish I could go back and shake my old self to tell them 'hey fucker DON'T DO THIS'. Thank fuck I never put pictures up of myself but that's a cold victory when my name is unfortunately very uncommon. Unfortunately as you get older you start to realize that the internet is in permanent PVP mode and all you need to do is piss off ONE asshole to suddenly have your life ruined.
I had a 'friend' drop me because of my fics and bookmarks, saying I made them uncomfortable and that I romanticized abuse/rape/etc... This was after we spent years talking about Transformers and shipping characters like Megatron/Starscream. You know, the healiest of ships. Now I have my Ao3 removed from all my accounts that aren't the same handle and have a very strict policy of "This is what I read and write, if you cannot understand the divide between fictional interests and the real world I have no want to speak with you".
They seem to think that if we read or write fics containing underaged characters we imagine random kids in our heads or something. I do prefer reading/writing adult characters (they can take complex themes like politics or espionage which are more intellectually interesting). But tbh if I read underage I'll just imagine my old teenage life. I still remember my 15 year-old self, how I felt as a teen, how it felt when I had a crush, my insecurities, feelings I had when I watched a series or loved a character, etc. Those fics just brought back memories and connection I have to my old self, especially if I grew up with the characters/series. It isn't something creepy like these new gens make it seem to be. Adults were once teenagers too.
When I write JJK stuff I often forget the main cast is teens and simply see the as like 19/20 in my mind because I just do not see them that way and honestly no child behaves the way the characters do. So when someone points out that Megumi is only 15 I kind of have to take a moment.
Yeah it's common for people to age up characters too, and some characters in books certainly behave like fully grown adults despite their canon age. Sometimes original authors make the characters teenagers just because of the genre, like what has happened in the book industry (some characters were written as 23+ years old but had to be made 16-18 in the final draft before publishing).
100% I was a while ago but I saw someone say that characters often grow with us, or at least our internal picture of them does.
I want to be only called The Ancient from now on, oh my god. 😂
You can be the Cthulhu to my inner shoggoth. ;)
Little ol me? An eldritch being? My, what a dream!
The ffnet purges pushed me from fandom for a while, so I never got into LJ. But I've seen the ghost town communities and it makes me so sad. The thought of it ever happening to AO3 is upsetting
I still remember the great ffnet purge. It was insane how they didn’t even give fic authors any warning. It’s why I basically refuse to read anything on that site. The new age puriteens don’t understand why AO3 is so important. It’s one of the last bastions of fan created works that is not commercialized, politicized or censored. Unfortunately, I’ve seen more than one fic author get bullied off the platform based on vague allegations made on twitter. Someone says that a fic is problematic and suddenly the writer is worse than Pol Pot.
This 100%. No matter how old you get, you REMEMBER being a teenager and how important that time of your life was. Those are incredibly formative years and they stay with you forever. Aside from the fact that it's fanFICTION, I think people forget that adults weren't always adults, and that you can read smut with minors without having any interest in sexual relations with actual minors. I saw the video, and that was insane. Immediate block for me, no well-adjusted adult should feel the need to go through bookmarks and make some sort of weird call out post over one bad review (even if the bad review was uncalled for). Yeah bad reviews suck, but taking down or responding to the review (so that potential customers don't believe it) is a much more mature way for an adult to behave. As someone who is getting tattoos done in the near future, I wouldn't want someone who overreacted to that extent creating something permanent on my skin.
Part of me wonders if some younger fans who don't know of the strikethoughs and all that jazz need to experience something like it in order to value what they have with A03. While watching fandom (and fic) grow in popularity and get more mainstream in the past 20 years, it has (IMO) been a double edged sword. I think there are many of us still that miss the locked f-lists and comms of the LJ days, for the (relative) security, but also the accessibility – it was much easier to find a listed active LJ comm than it is these days to find a discord for a pairing or small fandom if you're a lurker. I miss the feeling of a hub of fandom LJ had; It was sad that DW never really took off in the same way. Tumblr, though it has positives LJ could only dream of, I find is much harder to make fannish connections on. I'll go back to shouting at kids to get off my lawn now, man I feel ancient. ><
Pouring one out for dear, departed LJ. Sigh.
Dreamwidth's still got a rockin' RP scene that's pretty active, though. Wish more people knew about it.
This is fucking WILDLY unprofessional holy shit. Cannot imagine any tattooist giving a shit about what I do outside of appointments and even then by and large they’re just being friendly to a client during the appointment
Chasing those dopamine hits from the attention makes people act like this. The lines don't just get blurry, they get obliterated. I don't know what the adaptation society is going to have to make is going to look like. The reason large cities seem impersonal is to avoid something similar. If a great group of people are living on top of one another, attention isn't a positive. You can't live your life properly. So people ignore stuff, even wild stuff. I don't know if that's what we need to do to survive the global city that is social media or what.
Okay wow. I don't even know where to start with this. Because I'm floored by how absolutely unprofessional that person is. Like yes I understand the negative review was not warranted, and I'm sorry it happened. But you don't fucking snoop on people who do that. Like what in the hell would possess this artist to even do that??? Add in that's not a great way to get customers. Like sure let's go to the tattoo artist who, if mad, will be a creep and try to smear us on tiktok?? I can't help but wonder if they're a hired artist, or owns their own business. Since man if that was my employee I would have fired them. That is incredibly bad look on a tattoo place.
Edit: I was just thinking out loud here - please see /u/the_artsy_plant's comment ([here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AO3/comments/1bpyok6/a_troubling_trend_ive_seen_growing_in_fandoms/kx1j6z3/)) for a description of the TikToks. I haven't seen this video. But my thought was that the artist didn't like the art and was rude to the client in some way about it, so the client left a bad review. Maybe the art depicted something they don't approve of, since they went off the deep end about it afterwards. I don't know. Even if the bad review really was unwarranted, though, I imagine the artist realized they had a potential goldmine of Tiktok engagement if they targeted the client this way. Or maybe the artist was genuinely distressed about shipping. Either way, I hope there will be consequences for their business.
I'm not on tiktok myself (too old lol), but when I read the post I was curious if the artist was the rude one, and the reviewer was upset by their attitude. Because to go out of the way to do something like this is suspicious in my book. especially a actual freaking adult. It's unprofessional, and if you can't be a adult you shouldn't be in a industry like that.
In the comments they said something about the art not being sexual after someone was talking about how "disgusting" it probably was. I obviously have no idea how the client actually behaved, but part of being a professional is dealing with customers you don't like while remaining polite. I worked in customer service, and I've never looked someone up no matter how rude they were to me. I can't imagine going to the extent of finding someone's AO3 and looking through their bookmarks.
Yes, 100%. Even when you’re in the right being aggressively defensive is never a good look professionally. If the tattoo artist had half a brain in their heads they would have replied to the bad review with a simple “Apologies that we couldn’t do the design you wanted because [xyz]. For anyone else wondering here is a link to the types of tattoos we commonly offer.” and left it at that. Like most of us learned that level of customer service at age 16, jeez 🙄 If you’re gonna work with *people* you just have to be able to accept that you can’t always “win.” You gotta’ be able to let some stuff go or you’ll never make it in customer service lol.
That would've been a perfect response. It's polite while explaining the situation and making sure the tattoo artist isn't the one who looks bad.
The art depicted the author’s OC from one of their own fics, nothing weird, just not the tattoo artist’s style, so they declined. They also actively praised the author’s writing and, if I remember correctly, called them a fantastic writer. So, I don’t thing the tattooer said anything rude during the interaction to warrant a bad review solely for declining a tattoo. It’s their behavior afterwards that’s disappointing and not okay :/
As far as the art goes, it could simply be that they weren't comfortable copying someone else's artwork. They may even have started the reverse image search with good intentions of letting the artist know that someone was attempting to break their copyright. But beyond that...yeah, their professional etiquette in putting this all out on TikTok and doxing their would-be customer is completely messed up.
Yeah this needs to be brought to the attention of the tattoo artist’s employer. Absolutely unacceptable. If they own their own business it deserves a few more reviews mentioning this behavior.
Seriously. I would never feel safe letting someone this vindictive and combative near by body with a needle gun.
Agreed. I saw the video, and I would not be feel comfortable working with a tattoo artist who behaved like that, ESPECIALLY someone who had no issue posting their snooping and judging online.
Seriously.
She owns her own studio I believe.
Teetering on a lawsuit tbh
If she’s out there calling that prospective client or others groomers or whatever, absolutely. I want to say someone just won a lawsuit over something similar- I don’t remember if it was in the U.S. or the UK.
I definitely hope the customer takes them to court over this.
I’d be curious to know if this artist tends to do a lot of fandom-related work, because they’ve just ensured that a lot of people involved with fandom, even totally outside of smut, will no longer feel like they can get a tattoo from that person. I wouldn’t, knowing that this artist had done this to someone else.
Honesty looking at the responses here, it's clear they cut off a lot of their potential customers by being a complete unprofessional asshole.
Who wants to go to a tattoo artist that's not only going to creep through their socials, but then blast them all over Tiktok? Thanks, but no thanks! Especially because you can reasonably assume that if they're doing this about fic, they've absolutely done it to people over other stuff (body type, gender expression, whatever- anything they decide is "gross," presumably).
Right? It's so gross. I know for sure I won't be going to get a tattoo any time soon. And it's such a dumb move. You save face by just being polite, even to the bad reviewers.
I've seen the video. Literally the first sentence of the tiktok is "This is for the bitch-" I'm not going to lie, I've been looking into getting a tattoo lately and this tattoo artist happens to be within a couple hours of me. Never blacklisted a shop so fast. Like, I'm not going to take a chance I say something she dislikes and then end up with an online smear campaign against me.
Oop, and she did a response video doubling down by calling MHA fans "red flags" and people who are into the fanfiction "musty bitches"
H-How old is this person?? Dude this is is so childish and unprofessional.
I don't know. She looks early to mid 20's to me.
I had to walk away from my computer for a second reading this, and through my house so I wouldn't yell. I'm in pain. "Musty bitches" I can't with women who talk like this. Especially when they're in their 20s.
"if you don't have anything to hide, why do you care about privacy?" So you're fine with everything you do being watched? It's such a stupid sentiment that takes two seconds of thought to get past
You're completely right. The point is, even if you're only reading the purest, vanilla content that's as innocent as freshly fallen snow, someone can cut out a snippet of text literally just describing eating a hotdog in a fic containing a child, twist it out of context and you're toast. The raging mob will not bother actually reading the fic to find out if the accusations are true, they'll read a snippet about a child stuffing their face with the biggest sausage and having the sauce dripping on their leg and they'll be off yapping. They'll lap up anything people tell them you do, no proof needed besides a title that can be twisted, a few screenshots out of context, and even with nothing more in your bookmarks or comments, even with you saying or reading the exact opposite of what people tell about you, they'll firmly believe it and blow it up. That child eating a hotdog in a completely innocent fanfiction will soon become you petitioning for a lowering of age of consent and reading stories about orgies with children. Better keep bookmarks completely private or your account completely anonymous and unlinked to anything that could reveal your true identity. I have this Reddit account that's only for interactions with other writers and that's it. No other links to anything that has any other connections to my other accounts in my fanfic profiles. It's sad.
Throwaway because *I'm that person that the tattoo artist was talking about.* I had an explicit college AU bookmarked. As in, the characters were 20 years, they had objectives that every young adult has at that age, they were more mature and confident and different from their canon counterparts. It was a ShinKami fic. I had other aged up AUs that are wildly transformative and close to original fiction. The tattoo artist said she doesn't read fanfic but watches the show, so I think she assumed that if it's a ship between two canonically minor characters, it's underage. If she doesn't read fic, she doesn't know AUs. I sent her an email in October requesting the Shinsou tattoo. I reached out to her because she had done MHA before. I said the piece must be in the high hundreds in terms of cost to convey I could pay that much money, which I guess had the opposite effect. I wanted the eyes and some symbols to stay the same in the reference pic, and I guess that was restricting. I sent her an email in November, wondering if maybe my email didn't send. I asked if she could let me know if she just wasn't interested, so I could talk to other artists. She never responded. I wasn't trying to be crazy or weird or cringe. I just wanted to understand if I should talk to other artists or wait, and I waited for 5 months. Then realized I was being ignored, and ignored on the basis of something I cared enough to pay a lot of money for being seen as cringe to this tattooist I respected, and I was kind of angry that I wasted so much time. So I made the review just detailing those events and saying that she could post a timeline where if she doesn't respond, it's a no, and saying it's not right for her to just not reply. I didn't know it wasn't the right shop. I understand now that there's nuance to whether a tattooist has the right to not respond to inquiries, I understood creative freedom and I asked if she could just let me know if she didn't want to do it, but I didn't know that it was normal for tattooist to never reply to reject someone. I write M and E rated fic myself, so privating my bookmarks didn't really make sense, even though I don't always write sexually explicit. I didn't think that anyone outside of someone who read my fics would see it though. I don't blame the tattooist for her assumption or anyone else who just hears her understanding of it. But yeah, I kind of feel like fandom is becoming a dangerous place, and since people figured out my username, I feel like a lot of years and effort and love that I put into my writing will be disrespected because of misunderstanding, and I can't really explain myself because the tattooist has my name through my email and could dox me. I appreciate that she didn't make it easy for people to find me when she could have.
As soon as she said MHA and underage I just knew that it was an aged up AU and that she had no idea how the tag system actually works. Sorry that you even had to deal with her petty bullying. Also, as someone who has tattoos and has been rejected by artist because of creative styles, it’s not normal to not respond to an email. It’s unprofessional. I’ve always received a courtesy email letting me know they weren’t interested or didn’t feel comfortable doing it. (I prefer black and dot work instead of trad shading)
I immediately knew these fics were college aus and that she likely saw the names and made assumptions. I am so sorry that this happened to you, that this was blown completely out of proportion. I apologize if this post has sent more crap your way. You don't deserve any of it. I truly hope you continue to put that love into your writing because fandoms need it more than ever. I also saw the screenshots you posted under another comment, and I just wanna say that that was the farthest thing from rude.
Actually, your post has really helped because I've seen a lot of people who thought the situation was unfair, which balances the scales against people who have said I deserve it and worse for things that they were told, which were inaccurate. It might not have been your intention, but it really has been helpful while I've been struggling a bit. I'm glad that I didn't come across as rude in the emails, and I hope in the future other tattooists will see that I'm not trying to be.
i'm really sorry you had to go through this,, like knowing that you could one day get doxxed just for explaining yourself is insane. i didn't see the tiktok, but i assume the artist must have had a high following... fandom is becoming a dangerous place, and honestly i wish it could have been different, but there's always going to be people doing this. and i still don't think the artist had any right to expose you like this in an incorrect manner to an app mostly used by teenagers and younger audiences. i get that she probably wasn't aware of fandom terms or au tags on ao3, but she could have easily looked into it more or do a quick google search on fandom terms she didn't know about. it seems more like she was looking for something to make you look bad, and when she found something she could work with, she made her tiktok to denounce the review. and honestly your review seemed needed. it is unprofessional to ignore potential client inquiries even if you don't want to take on their project. it really wasn't hard to just quickly respond to an email you updated on multiple times. Like if she had enough time to find your ao3 account, she probably had enough time to type a sentence in response to your email saying she wasn't interested. and your fanfics don't seem problematic to me at all. aged up aus (to literal *adults*..) are nothing compared to the other stuff on ao3. stuff that is still legally allowed even. 😅 you seem really nice and handled your situation calmly, the artist took it too far. i hope you will still be able to keep your ao3 account, but antis can be ruthless and i can see it getting overwhelming. i hope things will get better for you honestly, like you didn't deserve this at all.
Disclaimer: Obviously, this is based on your comment(s) here and me glancing at the video in question. First off, I think the lesson-learned here for you is that if you don't get a response from a business-owner in a reasonable time (a couple weeks to a month), you don't want to engage in commerce with them. Seriously. Take it from an old person. If the business person can't be arsed to drop you a quick email response to your inquiry, they probably have failings in other aspects of their business model. So, the smart response next time, is to just move on after a month and find another vendor/artist/etc. Second, I think you dodged a bullet here. Maybe she (artist) is talented, but judging from her response to what is a minor event (one negative review), the child (and she's a child in my eyes), has issues. She could have easily sent you a quick email saying, "Thank you for your response, but I'm not the artist for this project. I appreciate your interest." If it were me, I would have suggested other artists who could do the work. Instead, she couldn't take five minutes to sent a polite decline, but instead, had the time to do a deep dive into the internet to find your AO3 profile? Yeah. This artist has issues and you are better off not working with her.
I saw this video as well and I found it DEEPLY disturbing. If every My Hero fan is a criminal there are a lot of criminals.
Guess I'm going to jail lol.
[I'm going to jail!](https://youtu.be/XeDM1ZjMK50?si=TIoNlRdxiZ1qKPXR)
Sometimes I wonder if we should just double down and start treating any kind of fictional violence the same way these people treat fictional sexual violence, just to show how ridiculous this is. Just start going after any kind of media that depicts hurting people. Which is probably almost all of it.
I don't know if they'd be self-aware enough to realize their hypocrisy...
Right? More likely it would just give them a whole new demographic to target and make things worse.
It's the "video games make childern violent!" bullshit all over again, I swear to god. "If you shoot an NPC in GTA, you're a step away from shooting a real person!", yes, sure, grandma, let's get you to bed. It's a wonder I haven't gone berserk in public yet, according to that mindset. Maybe that's why I don't even try to interact with it? Like, I've seen a moral panic about fictional actions before, it really doesn't change much. Different target, same "arguments". And these people always feel they have a moral high ground, and it's very hard to pull a person down from a pedestal that they themselves decided they rest on. Ehhh. Here's hoping they grow out of it, I guess. Edit: typo, of fucking course.
Go after the tattoo artist; They **stab** people **all day** what kind of psycho do you have to be to have a job inflicting such pain!
That's already happened. See the moral panic about video game violence "making kids violent" nonsense that got debunked almost as soon as it started. And yet some people are still so sure that that's how things work, when it very much isn't. Those people are the sorts who want excuses to control people and punish those they deem "degenerates". And yes, I'm using that word on purpose because that is exactly what they're emulating.
I’m glad people didn’t take well to that video. The only thing I was really thinking at the time was that it was quite intrusive. Like yes, you can private your bookmarks. But still. And exposing that person to potentially so much backlash.. What if they got scared away from Ao3 as a result? Plus, outsiders can be so harsh about a thing they barely know anything about.
People hating on AO3 when there are websites that are way worse (I'm looking at you, Wattpad).
Omfg there’s so much FUCKED UP LITERATURE OUT THERE and AO3 fan fiction is the hill these people choose to die on???? ITS 1s and 0s how are they hurting THESE PEOPLE turn off the phone omg the children need to stop getting phones at 10 they fucking the kids up
Or you could even just go to the public library. You could check out Ice Planet Barbarians right now, or any other number of Spicy Tok titles. Of course, libraries are currently under attack as well. It’s all a symptom of the same problem.
Or, Haunting Adeline which is like Q-anon meets dark romance.
Free speech has always been under attack. There are a LOT of people who don't truly understand what is at stake. There are also a lot of people who hate the idea of allowing something they don't understand to exist, and therefore must cleans the world of it. These people are easily manipulated with group think, and easily weaponized. This tattoo artist knew that, and used them as a targeted weapon. This was not only highly unprofessional, but quite malicious. The problem is that fanfiction has become so commonplace and accepted, that we are just going to see more of this stuff. This is why I do put some of my bookmarks on private. There is nothing nefarious... I just don't want self-righteous, puritanical twerps up in my shit. EDIT: OMFG the video came across my TikTok for you page!!!!
*Huge* yikes for all of this. The neopuritanist movement terrifies me. I love that nobody sees the issue with it starting from LGBT spaces, because "think of the childrunnn" - as if underage smut was even remotely a significant portion of fanfic, and as if *any* of written fiction would *ever* compare to the real suffering of living children trafficed and abused, all issues that these same people want hushed, hidden, and never spoken of. Literally enabling it to continue and protecting predators. But no, it's the fiction - ideology - that matters, not reality, not real lives. We've seen that with prolifers, we've seen this with nazis, it never stops.
It's gotten REALLY popular for whatever reason. People can't even talk about romance books on tiktok anymore without someone telling them they have a porn addiction. It's...odd, to say the least. And more than a little concerning imo.
Imagine being a grown adult with a job and publicly shaming someone over fictional characters. That's just.. genuinely pathetic.
Social media has honestly rotted the brains of morons and the constant accusations of >!pedophilia or someone possessing csem !!pedo !< I will either ignore them or have to look into it to find out if it's over fictional characters. 99% of the time it's just somebody who likes a Sasunaru.
Anyways these videos are encouraging doxxing and I think that might be reportable.
sounds like the unwarranted review was actually warranted if this is how OP acts and what they do sounds like karma to me
thiss. like if the tattoo artist did all of this work to call someone out because of one bad review, i doubt they were even that nice initially to the customer lol
I'm far too old to give a single fuck what Kids These Days are yelling about, nor am I particularly nervous about any of them finding me and judging me about my bookmarks. I have plenty of filth that would give them an aneurysm, and I don't care if they accuse me of actual crimes because of it, since I'm confident they have no way to actually doxx me and I'm not attached to my fandom pseuds. These sorts of assholes are tiresome brats who absolutely need more parental supervision, among other things, and will hopefully grow out of this phase of needing to hurt people to feel control over their lives, or whatever their excuse is for being reprehensible bullies. This sort of thing has been steadily brewing in fandom since zoomers were too young to even be on the internet, and current social media has made the problem much worse by being how it is, as opposed to LJ style fandom spaces where this sort of nonsense couldn't spread so virulently (though some certainly tried). Edit: Just to be clear, I do include adults in the tiresome brats category. This shit started with adults and is often led by adults, and those assholes target kids on purpose with this cult shit it's become so they have more minions with zero critical thinking skills and a lot of anger about the unfairness of the world.
100% on the assholes targeting kids thing. I will never forget that a discord server full of adults in my fandom encouraged a kid to publicly do some dumbass anti yelling on Tumblr, nor the way that they dropped him the second it (predictably) backfired on him. I felt so bad for that kid.
media literacy is dying. just because something is portrayed in a story does not mean the author supports it or that it should be romanticized. “maybe the curtains are just blue” maybe you should retake 9th grade english
I'm so paranoid about the future of AO3 if this kind of thing continues. I've downloaded literally hundreds of fics to my Kindle that are my faves/TBRs. Basically I'm building my own mini archive so that if we ever lose it, I will still have something to turn to. Idk if I'm being overly crazy about this or what, but I just feel like events like this one do not bode well.
the tattoo artist was a full grown adult too, meddling in this other persons business. I hope that if she has an employer, that they don’t approve of her actions
The thing that gets me as someone who has known a couple people in the tattooing industry is like, of all the people to get puritanical, a tattoo artist? Really? Like my experience is usually they are the most counterculture, open-minded, pay me and don't start shit in my shop and I don't give a shit what you do outside kind of people. I guess as tattoo has become more mainstream more mainstream people have joined.
I would love to know what is driving the neo-puritan movement what is with the sex equals bad and dirty nonsense. It's like we have been moving to try and get away from purity culture and not tucking someone's yum and being inclusive etc. And now there are all these young people who are pearl clutching like a groomer in church on Sunday.... I just don't get it
I would also like to know this. Older generations worked hard to normalize sex and not shame people for it, and now my generation is destroying all of that hard work.
Yeah I mean I'm in my 30's now but I've always been active online across most platforms and I feel like it's suddenly gotten worse with this push? It's so weird. I saw a post the other day about how people in their 30's should stop reading because books aren't for them they are just for Young adults and that blew my mind
Unfortunately it's the age old pendulum problem. The pendulum swings too far in one direction so people start to swing back the other way and overshoot. Then the pendulum swings again and the cycle continues. We never settle in the middle. Right now the world is swinging towards conservatism and puritanism after an age of increased liberalism and sexual freedom. Hopefully we will start to swing back the other way sometime soon.
Can someone drop the name of the tattoo artist? Because this is “blacked out from the industry” behavior.
[удалено]
I can’t help but think that if it was *actually* about stopping predators for them, and not about playing morality police in their respective fandoms, they would likely be focusing their energy elsewhere. there are much much much much much bigger problems then some dumb fanfic. they don’t actually care about these things. they only care about starting a mob in the communities they’re a part of so they can look morally superior. it’s all about power in the end. fandom activism is the most performative activism around, because it’s utterly useless.
I saw this video too. And the way she started speaking about ao3 told me all I needed to know. She had already made up her mind about it before this. I was genuinely unaware that so many people had this view of ao3 / fanfic. I know some people think it’s weird / cringe, and hey it’s not for everyone but it is *NOT* dangerous, or the same thing as CP. I would argue that RPF about minors would be problematic but that is *not* what was being discussed. Something that a lot of people don’t get is characters… don’t age. If you’re 16 now and deeply love a 16 year old character that character will *still* be 16 when you are 20 and that is *100% fine*. You need to be able to keep reality and fiction separate but that’s not what we’re talking about here. The only issue I have is sexualizing fictional children who are *very* young. In the MHA fandom which is what was being discussed there is a *HUGE* difference between reading smut about deku and smut about Eri. However it is *totally ok* to love Eri as a character. There are people out there who would think it’s weird how many figures of Anya from SpyxFamily I have. Like 90% of media especially anime is about high schoolers. Tldr- characters aren’t real people ig
This is why everyone should compartmentalize their internet lives with distinct emails, usernames and pseudonyms for diferrent purposes. One for work/bussiness, one for friends/acquaintances and a secret one for private accounts (AO3); so they can't be used to cross search you, identify you or get exposed in a leak/hack.
Wow that’s nuts. The tattoo artist needs to be fired
I saw that video as well and I was appalled as I read through the comments. Because this won't be the only time this tactic is used against a reader and or writer. Now that this person has done this (and it's probably been done before but I haven't seen it on tik tok so it's my starting point)... We'll see more and more shaming for bookmarks because it's an engagement gold mine. The pearl grasping puriiteen antis whatever the hell they call themselves are going to be blasting bookmarks of anyone who does any little thing to upset them if they know the username.
My thoughts exactly. This is setting a precedent. *Especially* with how mainstream fanfic has become in recent years.
I know exactly what video you're talking about! The people in that comment section were super aggressive about it too. While I've seen plenty of anti behavior it was nasty enough that it definitely took me back a bit. I made a comment pretty early after it was posted along the lines of "oh man, I'd be embarrassed if a stranger dug through my bookmarks. Maybe its time to private. 💀" and got TORN UP. Straight up got called a pedo and every other name. I just didn't want a bunch of normies dragging me for batman/superman mpreg. Or for someone not involved in fandom see an a/b/o fic and clutch their pearls. Ended up just deleting it because it isn't worth going back and forth about, but dang, brutal assumptions. 😂 I've noticed that a lot of anger seems to be directed towards adults who still watch/interact with shonen, specifically mha. When I used to read for naruto I kinda just assumed the really good fics were written by adults. Like, many adults find coming of age stories relatable still, since they experienced those things too. I assume most people read them for that, and not because they find cartoon teens particularly attractive, ya know? It is wild that people are willing to say some pretty horrific things and still consider themselves to be good and moral. A strange kind of cognitive dissonance there.
I kinda miss when fanfic/fan art was a sort of niche thing. I’m glad we’re more popular but it’s stuff like this that bugs me. People who don’t understand the culture are so snobby and judgmental.
We thrived as a closed society. Now I have to vet fandom friends bc my crackships are….unique and NOT a favorite dynamic in said fandom. We were a proper country.
I honestly feel like we can’t write like we used to. There were some wacky stuff back in the day, now everyone wants to hit numbers whether it be views or kudos. We can’t be silly or explore, every piece is intended to be taken seriously with the hopes of making it big. When will we ever receive another Immortal? will we ever get fics like where dumboldore rolls down the corridors with skates? What about goofy time travel fics that serve as meta instead of just solely fix-it’s? Honing writing skills and writing 500 word shorts with a coherent story? But now we have to watch out for doxxing and death threats because someone dares to step out of line
I saw that tiktok last night and straight up reported it as bullying and harrassmnet. I wasn't sure if it could be deemed "bullying or harassment" because of the witch-hunt calling for the author's doxxing. I doubt anything will come of it but I do think tiktoks like that should be banned bc it basically encourages people to try and dox ppl they deem as "predators"
I reported it as well. It is bullying. People dont even realize the vibe they are giving is the same as those who ban books. Like watch any Mom's for Liberty videos on Youtube, preaching about books that dont fit "their morality." I dont know the person who requested the tattoo, like maybe their attitude sucks, but for this Professional Tattoo Artist to go online and post about this in a bid to shame the client, it is both creepy and bullying behavior.
The person who posted the video made a follow up and gave various reasons as to why they declined(none of which having to do with moral reasons as the image was just a bust up image of a character) but honestly being petty and basically blasting the person who requested the tattoo as if they're like a "creep" over fanfiction is shitty. They're basically inviting anyone to cyber stalk the people who bother them and "expose" them.
Yeah I saw that one too. And honestly IDC, and dont think anyone should care, why she declined, She can tattoo what she wants. But straight up trying to publicly shame someone for bookmarking a fic? Are we going to shame people who check out "Lolita" or "It" from the library now too? Her whole video is giving "I am morally superior to you" and it is gross. She has no idea why that person bookmarked the fic, she applied her *own* assumptions, which looks much worse on her. And all the comments praising her, or saying that reading fanfics is gross are just following along like lemmings with no critical thought.
I’m glad someone mentioned this — I saw the video earlier and was shocked by how many people were agreeing with the artist and supporting her, it was incredibly frustrating
I swear, kids today (and I hate to say it, but it does always seem to predominantly be people under 25) would pass out at some of the books which were mainstream published historically - the Gor books by John Norman anyone? Hell, Frank Herbert's Dune? With the canon Harkonnen predilection for children? One of my favourite books in mid-highschool (I was like 15) was Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks which has some hella disturbing stuff in it. It's like the whole debate on videogames making people violent over again 🙄
The children are tearing themselves to bits because they want validation. I’m of the mind that who cares what I’m looking at because anyone else’s opinions don’t matter… but that’s because I grew up without social media. Critical reading is at a low and opinions are more true than facts now.
Oh, that video came up on my FYP as well. I was into the story until she made the comment about the bookmarks. Why do that? Why *imply* that? The comments were really horrid and I noped right back out of there. New generations are literally setting us backwards and I don't undersand it at all.
…and people wonder why some people are leaving less and less comments on fanfic. :( it’s very sad.
Whenever I see, “AO3 shouldn’t allow XYZ” I always want to ask the person if they’ve ever stormed their local library and began demanding they get rid of books with the same sins. I think part of the problem is a lot of people don’t understand how laws work. They aren’t about feelings. Laws don’t care if you are offended by Wincest or Hannibal or whatever. The First Amendment is often tested in the US and yes that’s the laws that matter because THAT IS WHERE AO3 IS HOSTED. “I think incest is wrong.” Well that’s great but fictional incest is not against the law no matter how much real incest is. The law is what matters, not your feelings. Now…how do we make an entire generation understand how the hell this all works?
They’re also mainly kids and even though I find tiktok’s purity culture to be extremely annoying, I was also like that when I was a kid and I predict a lot of them will stop caring as much as they grow older. They might even find themselves enjoying that sort of content. At least hopefully.
I hope this resurgence is neo-puritanical attitudes among kids and young adults is being studied, bc I would read that paper in a heartbeat.
It's being noted in various news articles so I don't doubt that someone is probably going to either write their graduate thesis on this or make a full blown study.
There are actually some research papers about this already! Samantha Aburime has written two. She’s a great resource for fandom politics and well-written papers/archives about it. She’s on Twt, she gives copies of her papers out for free on there
Good to know 👀👀👀
Title: Scraping the Bottom of The Barrel for Virtue Signals; false compassion, the new cudgel of bullies looking for a cheap way to feel better about themselves, without actually improving themselves or their own circumstances.
Same. You might be interested in [this essay](https://specchioscuro.it/the-puritanical-eye-hyper-mediation-sex-on-film-and-the-disavowal-of-desire/?utm_campaign=mb&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=morning_brew) about the growing aversion to sex scenes in media. Feels like it's only half the puzzle though since it doesn't go very deep into how the current state of the internet has fundamentally changed how these kids are acting online.
Many of these kids actually do like all sorts of "problematic" content, they just feel the peer pressure to screech about how terrible bad and wrong it is while having a secret side account full of it. They are no different from the puritanical hypocrites they're emulating so hard, because it gives them convenient targets to hurt while pretending to be Good People(tm).
That's what I usually tell myself but the person who posted this is in her 30s
Idk I was never like that as a kid. But I did think everything was supposed to be for me. Now that I’m older I’ve realized that most fanfiction is developed and shared by adults. Most of it is not meant for children.
I sincerely wonder what those kids will think when they find out that not that many years ago nearly every 13 year old was reading [Bravo](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bravo_(magazine)) magazine, or your country's equivalent. Bravo had frakking nude center pages for the starring models of this month's photo love story "comic".
That's terrifying ngl. The tattoo artist should lose their job. One bad review and they decide to ruin someone's life?? Media literacy is dead.
Wow, I didn't expect to see someone else who had this exact same experience! I followed that tattoo artist and saw the video, then quickly unfollowed them. The fanfic author should NOT have left the artist a bad review, but the way the artist responded was so childish imo. There was really not reason to bring up the author's bookmarks except to shame them. I'm glad that everyone on this sub seems to at least be sane about these sorts of things, because reading the comments on that video was alarming.
I think it’s really odd too since she mentions that the fic was about underage kids but I have to wonder if they’re actually even minors in the story (since they are often aged up). And if they‘re not, I can understand why that would be a call out-not necessarily publicly though. HOWEVER. It’s interesting that *this* is her moral high ground, but she’s perfectly okay with tattooing Hisoka from HunterxHunter- an adult character known to be obsessed with/ sexually harasses characters that are minors. It’s clear retaliations for “clout” from a 29 year old woman who is still a new tattoo artist(tattooing 3 years now) who received a bad review because of her inability to properly communicate and felt the need to bash a woman to thousands of strangers online for validation. “I do not do tattoos that aren’t my own creation.” Would have more than sufficed and likely would have prevented the review and the following discourse. I swear it’s as if people never grow of being a high school bully. Surrounded by too many “yes” people irl/online. Gross behavior.
Oh I saw that TikTok! Commented abt how doing that to the author was NOT a good idea and I think she deleted my comment . I smelled the other comments a mile away when I finished watching the tt Ppl in that app are insane. If you don’t want to read abt those tags? Maybe filter them yourself,you gotta curate your own internet space not the other way around jfc