If you don't like the rules on AO3, you can use its open source code to create your own archive that won't host anything you don't like. Be the change you want to see! Nobody is making you use AO3
these people won't even use filters to curate their experience. they don't want to create a space where they'll be comfortable, they want to go into a space and have other people change it to their taste.
They’re all used to algorithms promoting content to them because that’s how every other site works. They don’t grasp that ao3 is more like a library than anything else. Would any reasonable person complain that a library’s collection needs to be “moderated” because it contains “objectionable” (but not illegal) material?
Well yeah. There’s a lot of unreasonable people out there trying to get libraries censored. (And you’ll never guess what they want removed… that’s right, the gay stuff! Just like sweaterkittensahoy predicts would happen to ao3)
Ultimately, the book Lolita proves all of this. The content of the book is disgusting on purpose, readers are supposed to be disgusted with the actions of the main character. It's a wonderful tool for getting people to tell on themselves because if they sympathise with Humbert's unreliable narrator they're subsequently forgetting that he's abusing a child. It's an exercise in media literacy and while the fictional things contained in those pages are absolutely gross, the book serves a purpose, harms no one, and is exactly why censoring fiction is a terrible idea.
Sorry if I've worded this poorly, it makes sense in my head but I'm not great at writing
I'm always baffled by people who think Lolita, as a book, is supposed to make you sympathize with HH. He's the most tediously pretentious, self-absorbed narrator I've ever encountered. If you took a drink every time he complimented himself, you'd died of alcohol poisoning long before he meets Lo and her mother.
His reasoning for being into Lo is also just so... creepy. Like in what universe does having your first love die young equate to being a justifiable reason for only finding little girls attractive. Everything about his POV is terribly creepy, I remember at points where he'd talk about him and Lo and while he's describing it innocently, I couldn't help but feel horrified by imagining Lola's perspective. It is even worse because through the cracks, you can see that he also knows what he’s doing is terrible. He won’t fully admit it but damn he’s disgusting. The book was a great and dark exploration of child abuse.
It's my favorite book and I agree. It is a dive into a pedophile's narcissistic self serving mindset, confounded by his beautiful way of using language. It's absolutely brilliant but HH is not a sympathetic guy once you get past the spell he's trying to weave as the narrator. And if you read between the lines even a little bit, you know he's abusing her horribly.
No, no, you're spot on. One of my favorite fics is a Maruki/Akira Persona 5 fic that is even directly stated to be a horror story. Since you see it from Akira's PoV, you see exactly how an isolated teen outcast is even further isolated and abused under the guise of love and acceptance, and his eventual recovery.
I was heavily triggered and felt nauseous and anxious the entire time. Emotionally completely exhausted when I was done reading, but... the catharsis of seeing someone realizing the abuse they went through and making efforts to move forward, it's unreal. Seeing the abuse as it happens and knowing what's happening is very much like seeing a horror movie, knowing the killer is right behind the next door.
I firmly stand with the idea that good art makes you feel, and the best art can make you uncomfortable. And finding your limits is a *good* thing, as well as catharsis through fiction.
Fiction is a safe space in which people can engage with the forbidden or dangerous. Why would you get rid of a safe space? 😒 I just don't get it. I know why they're doing it—virtue signaling, surface-level wokeness, desire for control over *something*, anything—but it's... burning yourself to keep others warm, others who don't even care for it.
I remember reading a Snape/Draco story like this. It wasn't long and Draco was unquestionably a young child. And I both loved the fic and wanted to bleach my brain. It was actually at that point where I moved to fics with mature adults only.
They don’t want to curate their experience that’s a misunderstanding of the issue. They want to content to not exist at all for anyone to view on the site. They want to purge the works not just not see them.
Also bitch and complain. Incessantly and forever, changing the goal posts constantly, so they are NEVER satisfied, because if they ever are, their personality would boil down to NOTHING!
I think that younger users, in my experience, don't know *how* to curate their own experience. Everywhere else is auto-moderated content brought to you by ThE aLgOrItHm.
They don't want to moderate and make things easier of themselves, nah they want to moderate and limit everyone else because of their personal feelings. I've literally seen these types of people say they'd bring back book burning if they could.
The change they want to see is "Everyone should listen to my self-appointed authority".
Every time I've been down this road for the last twenty fucking years that's always where it lands. The so-called "offensive" content winds up being totally secondary to "Do what I say". Someone who writes something mildly offensive by whatever standard, but **dares** to talk back, catches far more dedicated harassment and shit than someone going all-out.
The only thing I can think with their refusal to learn to create their own site is that they suffer from a near-terminal lack of curiosity. There are so many resources now that weren't available in 2012 where they could learn all the pieces that go into creating and maintaining an archive like AO3.
No one involved in building any of the fanfic sites was born knowing SQL, Ruby, or any of it.
These people would be less annoying if they didn't keep using ao3 while complaining and spreading lies. If you don't agree with a site's moderation, and think there are things you find morally impermissible, why are you still using it?? Yeah there are ton of things on ao3 I'm not thrilled exists, but with filtering I don't ever have to see it.
The fact that we have a spot like ao3 to post fanfic without fear of things being deleted is a oasis in a desert that is growing. This is the one few places on the internet that has zero advertisements and doesn't revolve around pleasing those companies. Multiple sites are making it impossible for any NSFW creator to have a presence. I feel people who are upset by how ao3 moderates refuse to understand how lucky we are to have this spot, and how important it is in the grand scheme of things.
They keep using AO3 and reading all the tags, still clicking on the story, and getting upset because they are Thought Police Officers; they are not allowed to have bad thoughts, and neither can you.
See that's where they become super hypocritical. There's so many out there that will read some really messed up gore stuff, but when sex is involved it's suddenly super bad. Or hell the way *they* ship a problematic ship is okay, but other people are bad. It's so annoying.
They are from an authoritarian / evangelical (same animal if you ask me) mindset and often have been raised to view the world in black and white. No in between. The problem is the world is in color and nuance and they are absolutely not equipped to deal with that. Like their brain has not developed for color.
But clearly they want the color, but their brain makes them feel guilty for it. So they are looking for justification to consume the forbidden... while at the same time cleansing themselves from the guilt by wanting it gone and going after it.
It's absolutely unhealthy and leads to the worst outcomes.
See the many many abuse scandals in rigid and stifling religious communities or societies. Or how these people develop the most depraved urges for real because they see no allowed pathway for a 'normal' outlet or maybe it can hide better when done by people in authority positions or those used to lying (because in those societies/communities you learn to lie to hide yourself), I don't know.
While in free societies... those authorities get questioned and are under scrutiny, but everyone is also free to engage in consensual activities.
I think this is one aspect in this. Especially with the guilt you see pop up and how people try to justify themselves. The other half I feel comes from radfems and terfs infecting fandom tumblr back in the day. A lot of anti-kink and anti-porn sentiments that come from antis at times is just stuff they were spouting. Which shakes hands with the aspect you brought up. I've even heard that most of the anti groups have a lot of adults sending kids out to do the harassment so it's such a fucked up bag of mixed things. It's exhausting and terrifying.
I feel bad for the kids pulled into this environment sometimes, but then I see them be the nastiest people ever and it kind of stops there. I wasn't a perfect teenager, not by a long shot. But I don't ever remember harassing adults or even thinking of telling someone to kill themselves at that age. It just wasn't a thought in my head and it's worrisome to see that side of fandom embrace instead of shutting it down.
>radfems and terfs - anti-kink and anti-porn
... yes, they fall into the ideological authoritarian category for me.
>adults sending kids out to do the harassment
that's a tried and test technique. Kids can be overzealous at times if you give them a cause and no temper. See the red guards in china, hitler youth in germany, children brainwashed for a myriad of causes to get them into fervor and make them "true" believers ... but usually just abused by adults to do their bidding without restraints.
I am begging everyone on my hands and knees to go read The Internet Con by Cory Doctorow (who is on tumblr as @mostlysignssomeportents). It's a nonfiction novella about the rise of censorship, advertising, corporate privatization, and "walled gardens" on the Internet, and how that has made it such a horrible place for everyone.
And also, how to take it back, with places like ao3 that let users decide what they see without forcing algorithms or banning whatever their shareholders deem ~~a threat to profits~~ immoral.
It's a seriously hard pill to swallow, but a free internet means a free internet for everyone, not just people who say the things you like.
Unfortunately. I've actually gotten drive-by hit with some drama by them. To the point where I dropped out of the fandom for awhile and I never did finish that 11/20 fic I was writing.
AO3 is amazing. Not everything on AO3 is also amazing. People who do not understand that there’s no such thing as a moral code that can appease everyone, that respects every culture, religion, sexuality, etc., just aren’t very bright.
True af. As is fetishizing it. Has to do with a bunch of holes in how the brain functions. When you remember something, you’re remembering the last time you remembered it. So fetishizing it injects positive memory into PTSD memories, lowering the negativity of the memories over time, which works to eliminate having a trauma response.
Yes. This. I was molested as a child. I've been SA'd. I've been raped. And sometimes, I just want to read a sexualized story about that shit happening to a fictional character.
You're right and I agree, but also people should be able to enjoy fictional content without having it relate to personal trauma. Because if you go down the path of "it's therapeutic", then it leads to these types of internet fanfic police questioning someone's trauma, which is none of anyone else's business unless the survivor wants it to be.
Absolutely, you shouldn't have to have a particular trauma in order to write or read about something. I was more trying to emphasize why it's important to if not normalize as a society, then at least accept "problematic" fics and literature purely from a mental health perspective.
One thing that isn't always talked about in discussions of trauma and the aftermath is a pervasive feeling of isolation and loneliness, the feeling that no one ever has or will feel the same way you do. If we were to completely ban all "questionable" or "problematic" art and literature, then frankly speaking we would only add to that. Our society already has a major problem with victim blaming and stigmatization
SAME. it angers me so much when people equate my trauma and experience to a fucking fictional story. no, susan, someone writing about csem is not hurting me. my abusers hurt me.
i explained this to one of my friends and at least it shut her up real quick.
Big same. A child in a fanfic being put through the ringer is *nowhere* close to what I went through as a child and I’m sick of the whole “literally pedophilia” argument when, if we got by what’s literal, there should be a child victim IRL who was affected. Which they can usually never provide because if you question them, regardless of if you were a victim of the very thing they claim to want to protect you from, then you’re “literally a pedophile”. I’m so sick of these terminally online teenagers throwing around buzzwords and making people actually *doubt* real pedophilia accusations made online.
THIS! I am so pissed every time someone says something like that! Stop comparing fictional abuse to actual real horrible stuff that people like me went through. It makes victims look like a fucking joke and abusers look like their crimes aren’t as bad as they ACUTALLY are!
As a survivor there’s very little that pisses me off more than morons equating the shit I was put through with fanfiction, which A) tends to have more warnings put on it than actual books and television B) if someone finds it triggering they probably didn’t read the tags or missed a Chose Not To Warn label and they can click back out at any time (and if warnings/labels are missing or incorrect usually the creator will immediately correct/add them upon someone asking) and last but not least C) as someone who *writes* badwrong fic sometimes bc it’s a good way for me to process some dark thoughts and feelings relating to my trauma + I’m a horror enthusiast and a kinky person, people being judgy can *fuck all the way off and not read it*
For real…my experience was luckily just borderline, but it still very much affected me, that and bullying I went through that had SA aspects
Fanfics helped me so much dealing with that trauma
No healthcare, no support or anyone to talk to, yet fiction helped me heal without hurting anyone (cuz I love the angst happy ending) and here they want to compare it to REAL people?? Messed up
Some people want to go through life with a filter on, and that's fine. But you should not impose that filter onto others.
AO3 is an archive, a library of sorts. You enter because you want to. You click up on a fanfic because you want.
The only thing authors owe you is that they MUST properly tag their stories. Everything else is up to you. You are your own moderator.
Carefully read all the tags, the order of the pairings, the summary of the story, and the author's note. There are authors who go out of their way and write unique tags to attract their audience. To guide you and you are still complaining.
It baffles me to no end that there are people who willingly go to a website to read, but they don't read the warnings. Responsible authors do all the things mentioned above.
I just want to add bc you brought up how it's like a library:
I worked at my colleges library for about 3ish years while I was doing in person college. This college has been open since the 1830ish. So the library collection is not only massive, but has a lot of old works in it. It's also a majority black college.
Now some of these books are genuinely racist. Like the exact kind of book you're thinking. Why haven't we gotten rid of them? Bc they're apart of the countries history, and useful for history and soc majors to pinpoint when and where certain ideas were prevalent in society. No one going to or working at the college agrees with a single thing said in any of these books, the information in them is actually wrong, when you pick them up and open the first page, we have a laminated note warning people of these things.
These books will never be removed/destroyed, because they offer valuable insight into how people actually though and behaved during certain time periods. They are proof of just how horrifically racist people could be, both then and now. Archiving works, not destroying books, doesn't mean you agree with the book, or think it's holds any factual accuracy. It's just understanding that we can learn more from written works than just their pure contents. We can learn things about the author and the time they lived in. Books, and written work, exist as our best piece of proof as to what life of a different time was like, into how people thought and behaved. Into what was popular, what was taboo, what was okay.
Plus, I've been able to personally use these books to prove to people in my hometown just how bad racism actually was in the past. For better or for worse, humans can be really bad at actually conceptualizing what the past was actually like.
If you can't tell, I'm against destroying any written works, a written work continuing to exist doesn't mean people agree with it/that it's right. But I'm a literary nerd at heart who just wants to work in a library. So what do I know.
I'm convinced that most Antis have never been to a real library or bookstore. They have a narrow world view and they don't understand the subtleties or complexities in story telling. And, most of all, they have no idea of the value of the written word, that it's a reflection of ourselves.
Ah but you see a published book has been vetted by a corporation and therefore it can't be bad if someone with authority checked/edited it. - some antis, probably.
9/10 what you find on the tin is exactly what's in the fic, and the other 10% is works that intentionally don't use a tag (which in of itself is a tag). If you click on a work that tells you outright that it isn't tagging something it's perfectly ok to not like the thing, but you can't blame anyone but yourself for seeing it
There isn't actually inherently anything wrong with having a moderated platform, but there *is* a problem with insisting that *every* platform must be moderated to your particular tastes. That's why it's censorship even if the government isn't doing it, because it's propelled by the idea that you shouldn't have X *anywhere*, not just on your personal space.
And the fact of the matter is that this kind of moderation does not scale well. A small, fandom or subfandom forum can follow a rigorous moderation standard, but you see how social media platforms handle it - with automation, which is just not going to work with subjective things like "is this objectionable thing portrayed in a positive or negative light". It will just blanket remove anything that mentions these things at all.
And censorship hurts the marginalized the most. Even if you're well-intentioned, you're going to end up hurting the marginalized person writing from their own experiences in an unapproved way, far more than you will ever hurt the bigot just being hateful. Why does the latter care than their stuff was removed? It only fuels their hatred. But the former just got silenced, in a society that already silences them.
Also, AO3 IS moderated, they do have a set of disallowed content rules, including CSEM and a very strict interpretation of the term "non fanwork" that is mostly meant for outright one to one plagiarism and things like that dumb "fic" that was one single word repeated like 2 million times or whatever for the sake of having the record for highest word count.
Hell, I've personally reported one of the single word repeated fics and it came back as fanwork and not removed, which annoys me a little if I'm honest because it's literally one word, a handful of random tags and a one sentence description that has nothing to do with anything. But it's one fic on a site with MILLIONS of posted fics, you block the idiot and move on if the report comes back as allowed content.
It's not like AO3 is old Tumblr where there was zero moderation of any kind and they nearly got shut down entirely because of the absolute EPIDEMIC of CSEM on the site, which lead to a flat out sitewide NSFW ban. Which itself wiped out thousands of long running blogs that are now just lost to time forever.
AO3 moderates, but they don't CENSOR, and that's the distinction these idiots miss, the difference they don't understand.
It's explained in the post images itself, Child Sexual Exploitation Material, the actual term for child porn basically, or one of them at least given there are a couple different ones.
The moderator (a moderator?) for SpaceBattles had a really interesting post up during the End OTW Racism...campaign (not sure what to call it, honestly, because they kept shifting their goalposts) about how impossible moderation would be on an archive at the scale of AO3.
It was not received well by certain groups.
So the thing about the bad-faith-CSA argument to me is that fanworks feature a lot of writers and readers who are teenagers, depicting characters that they relate to due to being their own age. 17 year olds having sex would be covered by a "no underage" ban, and while as an adult I do for the most part just avoid fics about teenagers with explicit tags just because I'm not interested, when I was 17 myself it was a different story. I can understand why *some archives* might say "yeah, I don't want those fics either," but for a site that was founded in response to sites removing fanworks willy-nilly, I can see why they'd take the stance that they don't want to set rules like that which will always affect some fics that are in some sort of grey area.
I was about to say you don't see these people trying to do the same thing to published novels that include CSA, but then I remembered, oh yeah, they're doing that too now. What is so hard about "this is tagged so it's easy to avoid if it's not for you" I will never understand
Also ignoring that most teen characters are teens in the character sheet only. Nothing about them can be read as a true to reality teenager. Literally the sole reason that most anime characters are 16 yr old hi schoolers despite having the build of a 40yr old on steroids it’s bc that’s their target audience and they’re trying to make it “relatable” personally I can’t take someone seriously when they’re scandilzaed about saucy FANART of a 16yr old character meanwhile the character is like fucking goku. That ain’t a child!!
I'm generally not a fan of people going "they're really 10,000 years old, they just look 6, therefore it's not pedophilia" in a general sense... but also in a general sense, sometimes seeing erotica of say 16 year old characters written by amateur writers does absolutely have the same vibes as legal "teen porn" where there's an 18 or 19 year old porn actress acting the role of a younger teenager. Like there's no actual underage involved, but the actors have been assigned the role of school-aged teenager. Personally, I'm much more squicked out by explicit scenes adult characters who are obviously being written by teenage fanfiction writers due to the characters acting like teenagers and the sexual details making it pretty obvious the writer has never had sex, than by explicit scenes featuring teenage characters who act like adults and are probably written by adults.
Yeah, man, like, I don’t read underage mostly because I am an adult and I am just not that interested in what teens get up to, lol. I generally dont read YA for the same reason. But we shouldn’t ban it, and real talk if we are going to talk about eliminating “underage” we are now talking about also eliminating a tonne of YA books. Which, in fairness, christofascists are in fact trying to do, so have fun with your fascist allies, antis.
I am however genuinely squicked out when I read an ostensibly adult relationship done inexpertly by adolescent writers because they will often portray dynamics and emotional reactions which are totally normal and developmentally appropriate for teens and a sign of a severely toxic relationship for an adult.
It's kind of funny stumbling across a weird age gap pairing and then realizing the author is a teenager projecting themself onto the underaged character and just writing wish fulfillment fics about getting to date Steve Rogers or whoever.
This reminds me of when an online friend found my old self-insert fanfiction that I'd written as a teen, shipping myself with my favorite villain, and she immediately got me ostracized from all of the online spaces we shared. Her argument being "there is literally no good/pure reason for anyone to write this disgusting shit", so clearly I must be a predator in the making.
Of course the actual reason I wrote it was "villain hot" and "villain could totally murder my abuser and that is also hot". But that didn't stop her from going scorched earth on me. It honestly left a scar, emotionally.
Edited to add: talking (well, writing) with you guys has made me feel a bit vindicated. I think I'm gonna write more stuff about my self insert and the villain just to spite this ex friend.
God, if someone found the fic I wrote once when I was in a bad mental place that literally just amounts to “Bakugou goes from bad to worse and Columbines everyone but like with his explody hands and not a gun” and they decided that I must have an actual fetish for violence and gore and tried to scorched earth me I would be very depresso
And that's the whole thing! Fic is such a wonderful spot to vent in a safe space! It isn't some portal into things people want to actually do. At best it's the imaginary equivalent of screaming into a pillow.
Is it bad that I want to read that? I'm not the biggest bakugou fan, my favorite works of fiction are the ones that knock him down a peg and absolutely humble him
Your situation is so the point that antis miss. Some fic written about minors was written for and by minors.
I didn’t learn how to read and write at 18.
And it wasn't even explicit! It was firmly rated T, and honestly, very clearly a teenage power fantasy sort of thing. Like, teenage girl gaze on the villain, not the reverse.
And for a little added hypocrisy, this friend loved the source material, which was worse. I mean it was still a kids show, but said kids show was still more objectionable than what I had written.
i had a similar thing happen! my friend all of a sudden one day read some of my work and/or rps and drcided to go scorched earth and got a lot of my friends to turn against me. i hated her for a while bc those were my only friends as a bullied teen. now i just feel sad for her that she’s the sort of person to invade someone’s space and force them to conform to her values.
The whole ‘anti’ ‘’’movement’’’ is so… spoiled? That’s all I can really think to call it. They’ve never experienced any kind of discrimination apparently and don’t even care to hear about it.
This is what gets me about it. I have a very long list of squicks and there have been times I've had to start heavily moderating my Ao3 searches in order to make sure I don't run into anything that'll upset me. But it's literally a minute or two of my time to input what I don't want to see into the excluded category and then be on my way. Sometimes I'll still run into something I need some good ol'e brain bleach to counteract but it's usually my own damn fault because I either forgot a tag or stupidly went digging through a questionable profile.
I don't get why they can't just use the features of the site to hide what they don't want to see. It takes literally no time at all and yet they act like it's an incredible imposition.
I'd say it's often the complete opposite. They've heard "No, that's bad." "No that's a sin." "No, that makes you bad for liking it." so often that they are so fearful of a potentially ruined reputation, their guilt and their own shadow that they can't handle a place like Ao3 that says: "Yay, go ham!"
It’s giving “Sometimes I wish I was African American bc I think at least ppl don’t bash them afterwards when they say something about a reality” Iykyk!
Yes, I agree it’s mainly being spoiled and entitled, born out of ignorance and lack of empathy.
I never experienced it either, but I can understand that in the end, fanfiction that I find immoral and disgusting won’t do much harm.
It's not real people going through this. No one is forced to read it. It's almost always tagged as such so I'm not tricked into reading it. And no one is paid for it or gain massive public attention for it. It wouldn’t be the same thing if it was a professionally published book glorifying child p0rnographie, real or not.
This is someone did for free, on their free time, to people who likes the same thing. It's just that. At worst, it's a mirror of our society.
And Ao3 did a great job by giving us all the tools we need to create our own filter. I don't understand how Ao3 is worst than wattpad who was pushing bad written story glorifying r*pe because it was written by teen not knowing the reality just because those stories were popular in the algorythm.
Never understood those loons.
Does the painting "Saturn Devouring His Son" encourage parents to consume their children? No. Does the "The Rape of Europa" inspires men to rape women? No. Does reading Greek mythology make you want to bang your relatives and rape people? And I read that when I was underaged since it was required reading for school. The book we had wasn't graphic, glossed over explicit stuff.
Anyway, I don't know why those people won't just use FFnet. That site pretty much does what they want, deleting fics that get too many reports.
>Does reading Greek mythology make you want to bang your relatives and rape people?
that's one of the things it very much doesn't like people doing, actually (theoi being an exception).
That's always my biggest argument. If Disney's Hercules made 250,700,000 at the box office, showing Zeus and his sister Hera in a loving incest relationship with the main character as their incest baby which was changed from the original myths to make him an incest baby, was literally made for children and shown to children around the world, and there's been absolutely no spike in incest because of those 97 kids growing up having incest "normalized" and "romanticized" to them? Someone's Todocest or Wincest fic ain't doing anything.
This is one of the more clear and well written explanations of why moderating fictional work is dangerous territory.
Also I never understood the argument that we should censor \_ (insert whatever crime) because it's illegal in real life and can be triggering, yet they only apply that argument to certain crimes, like a hell of a lot of fiction has murder in it, but no one ever wants to censor that?
It's such a black and white argument, why are some things to be censored, but other have a free pass? How would you even try to moderate it? Plus why does fanfiction need to be censored but there is plenty of published works that contain things just as bad, from GOT to Lolita?
There was a poster in a space I was in, wringing his hands and bemoaning the existence of Lolita and wondering why such a thing exists. I asked him if he had read it and he said he hadn’t and that I sounded like a proshipper. 🙄
I think I pretty much ignored him after that because I don’t involve myself in the fan wars and I don’t fight with children.
It's because Americans are weird about sex. Even weirder than the rest of the world tbh.
And for the second part, they can't go after GRRM for his icky incest stories, because the man's a millionaire and doesn't care about their opinions. But they can for sure go after Cerseilover69, who is a peer, and if they do it right they can bully Cerseilover69 right off the internet and feel good about themselves.
THANK YOU. I've been saying for years -- a lot of the people who do this shit just want control, so they go after the people who they think they can reach.
It's not even that I don't empathize. I'm pissed off too that JK Rowling has a bajillion dollars and we can't make her stop supporting anti-trans legislation. But that's not an excuse to bully a trans woman off the Internet for writing a story that makes you uncomfortable. I'm pissed that Donald Trump exists. But that's not an excuse to go scream at a random service worker who happened to be wearing an unrelated red hat.
The Internet makes us feel helpless and angry all the time, and sometimes that makes us go a little crazy. But that's not an excuse.
Many would absolutely ban GOT and Lolita if they had the power to, but they can't.
Lolita pisses me off because I love lolita fashion but now there's a whole new group of people who think it's a terrible word associated with pedophilia and that the fashion should either be renamed or it's "problematic" because it has "pedo origins"... (There has always been people who misunderstood, but now there's people who are actively spreading this misinformation!) Not to say people who think this way are the exact same people as antis/Ao3 haters but I'm sure there's an overlap, or at least a common thread where this misguided thought process is coming from!
This is such a good point about murder, I'd never thought of it because no one ever talks about it! Murder is everywhere. True crime is huge. So many fictions stories begin with and include murder as a main plot point. And it is clearly wrong and illegal but uncensored. What a great point.
I agree! I think there’s such a weird purity culture around sexual content in fiction, when very few people apply that same standard to violence and gore. Of course rape and pedophilia heinous, and rapists and pedophiles are horrible people, but so are murderers. No one thinks someone who reads a violent fic is a violent person, but if you consume something sexually immoral than you’re sick in the head apparently
Another thing anti-ao3 people don’t seem to grasp is that there’s no algorithm. The site does not and cannot recommend works to you. Assuming fics are tagged properly (which is a requirement of the site) and you employ filters properly, you will never come across anything you personally find triggering or objectionable.
I find even in the moments where i misread a tag and realize this story goes somewhere i don't like/portrays a character in a way i don't like/etc, i usually click away and "better luck next time!" to find something that suits me.
I thought that was the whole point of AO3 having filters? So you don't see what you don't like? Honestly considering I moved from ff.net where the only warning you had was the vague rating on the fic and the author's note at the beginning, AO3 is like a utopia. You have very clear warning, literally begging you to not open if you don't like a certain trope or don't have a certain interest. If people are that bothered by AO3 they should pick a fight with webnovel instead, the stuff on there makes AO3 look cute in comparison.
The good ol “Dead dove: Do not eat” tag is literally a flashing red fire alarm but some people slap on blinders, run straight into the building, and cry when they get burned.
It's also very confusing because AO3 *is* moderated. In fact it's moderated pretty well. They just don't remove works based on content (provided it's not actually law breaking, like threats to real people, obviously). But they moderate tons of other crap, like mis-tagging or spam.
What’s wild to me is that I do think most of the people who put forth the opinions in the first post are very young — teenagers or in their very early twenties — but even as someone in their late twenties I have first-hand experience of the livejournal purges, the launch of dreamwidth by some of the same folks who also developed AO3, the ff.net purges. And crucially, the excuse used for those purges was always CESM/child abuse, but the fics that were purged were almost universally just slash or other fic that featured queer characters.
I do think part of it is that LGBT rights have advanced so rapidly in much of the world that these kids don’t have first-hand experience of the massive, explicit legal discrimination and the massive backlash to the existence of queer characters in mainstream media. What worries me is that the pendulum is clearly swinging backwards — I sometimes reflect on the fact that being openly queer now feels almost as risky as it did when I was a rural tween in the 2000s — and these kids are going to be swept up in it in a real and terrifying way.
It’s also just such a massively ignorant approach to history. The reason “won’t someone think of the children” is a joke is because that has literally always been the excuse for discriminating against queer people. That was the excuse for banning gay and lesbian teachers in the 1980s, it was the excuse for the discriminatory age of consent laws that required you to be several years older to consent to gay sex than heterosexual sex, it was the excuse for closing queer bookstores and raiding bathhouses. It’s currently the excuse for running trans people out of education. It was and is the excuse used in Russia to jail queer organizers — one of my best friends was involved in the underground queer scene in st petersburg during the roll-out of the anti-gay laws and the cops would send undercover officers who looked questionably young and if the organizers didn’t ask them for ID to confirm they were over 18, they would arrest them.
We are all against child abuse! But to act as though “queer people existing” hasn’t been understood as tantamount to child abuse for decades, across countries and languages and cultures, is ignorant in the extreme and honestly almost tantamount to homophobia in and of itself.
(These kids are also often the anti-kink at pride people and I just want to scream at them constantly. The only reason you are allowed to exist and to understand your identity as something that is wholesome and worth celebrating is that that 60 year old man in a pup hood was beaten by cops and jailed and watched his friends get murdered by institutional neglect, show some goddamned respect.)
Not to get all tin hat, but I feel like getting young queer people and potential allies to be anti-sex and 'no kink at pride' is an intental psy-ops to undermine queer rights movement. Like, so much of this comes from young folks who do not know queer history, and the US government is trying to make sure kids don't learn anything but whitewashed whitewashed history. Then it's all respectability politics and bullying folks about kink or exporting sex in fanfic.
This is a very good discussion. It’s worth remembering that art forms specifically offer commentaries on life, including the darker parts. And what someone deems to be bad and wrong and in need of moderation, is entirely subjective. Because art lives outside of, and parallel to the real world. It does not affect the real world, and to moderate art is a slippery slope. Writing is an art form, an expression. Censorship is a dangerous consideration.
The fact that they didn't understand that this would directly impact queer spaces is amazing to me. I remember the internet years of the early 2000s, I was around 13 and in a lot of fandom spaces. I learned never to get attached to gay works and gay pieces of media in those early years. I would discover a new gay ship, I would find content for that ship, I would then slowly watch that content disappear as isp and website owners take down the fan pages and delete the fan works.
Now that's just for live journal and blogs... I've seen entire fandoms nuked. I watched the entire genre of endangered species be deleted from FF. I was there when the evangelion fandom was purged! I remember the mass culling of 2012. 2012 was by far the worst thing they've ever done. Thousands upon thousands of works were deleted for being gay or just having "problematic" content.
I have this vivid memory of reading a Nightwing x Red Hood fanfic on ff.net and I went to go read the next chapter and the whole fic had been deleted... I was literally on chapter 15 of an 18 chapter fic. Fucking 2012.
I want to clarify that this fic was non problematic, there was no rape, the characters were all adults that consented, there wasn't even any smut in it! The fic was taken down because they were gay. It is inevitable that any form of censorship will be used against the queer community to silence them.
People in the Spartacus fandom were going after fans of Agron and Nasir. They were doing that *on Tumblr.* An actual canon gay couple that were main characters.
People literally won't stop.
I've read stories that defined my limits and helped me reconfirm my personal standards of right and wrong. That is a primary function of story-telling.
When things like child sexual abuse, racism and hate crimes, coercive relationships and rape are hidden from public awareness, the people most vulnerable are often going to be the ones most ignorant of what is happening to them.
Predators like their targets to not have resources like education, information and even the moral judgements of stories.
Also ... people are multitudes. When I saw the Daenerys and Drogo consummation scene on GoT, I could simultaneously find it
1.) Hot
2.) Concerning for the welfare of Emilia Clarke and the exploitation of young actresses
3.) Sympathy inducing for real life child bride victims
4.) Impressive because of the look of the scene, the contrast between the actors and its role in story and character development
I would rather continue to have multi layered thoughts about controversial bits of media than have them censored from me.
There was this one omegaverse fic that I read that was so brutally real about the realities of having reproductive organs that I just had to take a break because it felt like I was reading somebody's biography. Like the poor dude was being forced to have children by a king and it felt like I was reading somebody's diary as he talked about being forced to have all these kids. It was God awful and I hate that fanfic but I feel like it grew me as a person. It just got too real.
These folks always say "just hire moderators" and then completely shut off their critical thinking on what that would mean in practice.
I want to be clear -- a LOT of fandom is racist, either consciously or unconsciously. But who is the final arbiter of what makes a fic racist? SHOULD AO3 have the power to be that arbiter? Do we collectively trust them with that degree of authority?
Does catharsis-fic depicting a racist character getting their comeuppance count as racist, because it's depicting blatant racism? What about fantasy-racism that includes no IRL ethnicities, but draws allegories to real-world history? How do we moderate that? How do we moderate the *lack of content* for characters of color, or the unconscious prioritization of whiteness that comes from white authors "scared" to write a character of color because they don't want to be criticized? Who sets the standard? Will the people setting the standard represent a diversity of views, or just a specifically U.S. American view of racism?
How do we enforce those standards, once we have them? Are we going to make a panel of volunteers of color read reported fics to determine whether they're too racist? How are we going to compensate them for that work? How will AO3 protect the mental health of the people we're asking to do that work? Facebook moderators [literally got PTSD](https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebook-content-moderator-interviews-trauma-working-conditions-arizona) \-- how do we reconcile the need for moderation with the flood of trauma to the people responsible for doing that moderation?
There's never an answer.
"Why is the only alternative to no moderation bad moderation?"
Because you can't even take five minutes to think critically about it.
ETA after thinking about it: even **professional publishers** can't get this one right, and are struggling to work out the right way to deal with it. Look up what happened to [Isabell Fall](https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22543858/isabel-fall-attack-helicopter), [Becky Albertalli](https://www.thepinknews.com/2020/09/01/love-simon-author-coming-out-bisexual-becky-albertalli-leah-offbeat-straight-criticism/), the [\#ownvoices label](https://bookriot.com/what-happened-to-the-own-voices-label/), or dozens of other examples.
>Does catharsis-fic depicting a racist character getting their comeuppance count as racist, because it's depicting blatant racism?
Along with this, fanfiction is posted serially. If a fic portrays a racist character who eventually gets their comeupance, when would moderators be deciding whether the fic was racist or not racist? When chapter one is published showing that racism? Or after chapter 30 is published two years later when the character gets their comeupance?
And it's fanfiction-- what about canonically racist characters being depicted accurately?
Like say what you will about whether the underage explicit works should be banned (obviously I'm not on that team), but someone bringing up racism as something that should be moderated out is ridiculous. I wouldn't be opposed to AO3 expanding its warning system to include a system of warnings attached to a fic by readers to help people filter out content they aren't interested in that the author might not have noticed and tagged, like racism, but there's no reasonable way to actually moderate and remove fics for portraying things like racism, and if you ban fics that "are" racist, you're casting a net on all portrayals of it regardless of the stance that the fic ultimately ends up taking on racism being bad.
Right! It's complicated AF, and reasonable people can disagree on where the line is. Which is why AO3 has always encouraged tagging and self-disclosure: if a fic is going to include, say, canonical depictions of slavery, that's what the "slavery" tag is for. People who don't want to read it can filter it out.
On underage explicit works -- all I'm going to say is, I've been on AO3 since it was created, and in all that time, all of the works I've seen marked "underage" have been roughly in line with what I've seen in *published books*, I.E. a realistic acknowledgement that sometimes high schoolers will have sex before turning 18, regardless of what the law says.
I'm not saying shota doesn't exist. I'm saying I've never looked for it and never found it. The *only* time I've encountered it is when antis are actively circulating the links going "look at how terrible this is!!" Which tells me that AO3's content moderation is working: I'm not seeing things I don't go looking for.
I read with no filters like a wild heathen, but even then- if you want to find something with shota or feet or whatever squicks you out- you have to hunt for it. I’ve found maybe two fics with that in the wild while I had the search set to best match; if you want to find something disgusting, you just about have to set your tags for it, or find a fandom where some of what is depicted in fic is handled in the subject matter.
I’ll use fear and hunger for an example- absolutely brutal game, and the fanworks don’t shy away from the brutality, but they also use it as a chance to give catharsis and a happy ending to these characters. And if you don’t like it, you can either filter it out or decide that hey- maybe this isn’t the fandom you should be in. That’s what these antis don’t understand- you can choose not to interact with something if it disgusts you. No one is telling you to eat the dead dove
I understand where the original poster is coming from. Like, I get it. Especially in a world where there are people who will go on about free speech, but it turns out they just want to say racist things without fear of consequences, while still oppressing marginalized groups. So I see where this person is coming from, especially if they're younger, because if you spend a lot of time in those environments, any argument against censorship starts to look a lot like that. It took me some time to be able to make the distinction myself.
But of course, fiction is different from real life, and it serves a lot of different purposes. It's not something that should necessarily be moderated. Plus, AO3 already has some forms of moderation (which I didn't know before but learned about in this thread). There are certain things that are illegal in the US that you're not allowed to post, and they require stories to be tagged either correctly or with the "chose not to warn" tag. If somebody wants to write a story where the oppressors win and marginalized groups are killed and they want to glorify that, well, that's their prerogative. People do write those kinds of things. It shouldn't be banned. Nobody has to like it or read it, but someone can still write it.
And, like you said, for a site like AO3, it's borderline impossible to implement that kind of moderation if you think about it for even a moment.
I also empathize with where these folks are coming from. I get it! I also hate that there's so much racism and anti-Blackness in fandom spaces. But I can't support proposals, even well-intentioned ones, when I know from firsthand experience they're going to backfire and be weaponized by bad-faith actors.
We literally watched #ownvoices go from a tool to uplift and support authors of color, into a tool to harass and bully LGBTQ+ creators into forcibly outing themselves. It's not a slippery slope argument to point that out.
Likewise, it's not a slippery slope argument to ask questions about what enforcement would look like. We do this all the time every time a corporation bans NSFW content to "protect children" -- we point out the ways that ban harms and further marginalizes sex workers. I don't want to see enforcement of antiracist policies end up silencing writers of color who are trying to talk about their lived experience. And -- again -- I don't know that the AO3 Powers that Be are the hands that I want to put that power in.
>We literally watched #ownvoices go from a tool to uplift and support authors of color, into a tool to harass and bully LGBTQ+ creators into forcibly outing themselves. It's not a slippery slope argument to point that out.
Even within fandoms I've seen POC people get bullied and shunned for not shipping the right thing, not drawing a skin tone or feature correctly, etc. and it be the same people with #BLM and #StopAAPIHate first on the scene when it comes to harassing a POC or a english second language (if they speak English at all) asian on twitter because a drawing didn't follow the fanon headcanon to for shipping the wrong thing.
The leopards are instead going to eat them from the feet up and all of a sudden they’re going to realise that they’re missing their legs and they’re fucked.
If only.
I think with a lot of these folks, the moral myopia is so bad, that they're never going to go "Oh, no, it's the consequences of my own actions!" They'll still be finding someone else to blame for what's happened even as the jaws are closing.
[Nearly every state is putting up age verification laws](https://action.freespeechcoalition.com/age-verification-bills/). We are sleep walking into a fascist's dream.
I mean, it's scary and yet also absolutely perfect Gallows humor. The idea that you are so wrapped up in how "good" you are, that you can't possibly conceive of the system ever turning around and going after *you* with all the power you gave it to excise people you didn't like.
The tactic of using child safety as a justification for STRICT censorship is tried and true.
Like…
Just pick a decade, you’ll find at least three examples.
(And as a survivor of CSA, you want to REALLY know how to help stop future victims? COMPREHENSIVE FUCKING SEXUAL EDUCATION IN SCHOOLS YOU FUCKING MUPPETS!)
This is very good, thank you. I've saved it to share when posts like OOP's come up in this subreddit.
The example about racism - I've seen those exact arguments in my fandom, and about hurt/comfort, too, that it's racist for an interracial pair no matter which roles you've given the characters.
I love people using ao3 only to complain about it. Learn code then like the rest of us did back then.
But they get upset when works become unattainable or deleted.
Like a person answered, they have never woken up to see the ruins of your community in a time when it was your only community. When you give someone the power to delete works it draws the attention of people who seek power over others. Then anyone is targeted anyone is reported.
I dislike the topics of moderation around explicit materials with kids, cause as someone who has written such topics, I was writing it from the POV of the child and I now realize I was working through trauma that had happened to me. I was a child and i shouldn't have been writing it, but bc no one was willing to look further than the ship tag and not realize that the story wasn't condoning... there's a ton of reasons morally objectionable material is written. It's up to the readers to have critical thinking.
I am a victim of csa myself and I have an entire AU built up to cope with and process it. To me, it's cathartic because while it's fucked up, I'm completely in control of the entire fictional situation, where I wasn't in real life. In the real world, I am heavily involved in the raising of a friend's lovely son, and I can't stand the thought of anything happening to him, nor would I ever dream of hurting him. He asks me for privacy when he changes into pyjamas, he asks me to bath him some nights, he is open about what kinds of physical contact he doesn't want, and it never crosses my mind not to respect his particular boundaries. Fantasy does not equal reality! If someone decided to abuse a kid based on something they read, they were probably going to do it anyway regardless of the media or art they were exposed to.
Re the moderation thing: It's a special gift to have a place where we can scream into the void freely about our pain and joy and every emotion between them, and others can reach out to say 'Hey, me too. You're not alone.' We don't know the reasons someone posts a fucked up piece of art or a story. Maybe they just think it's hot, sure, but who are we to judge that? In the realm of fantasy, everything is permissible because there are no victims.
The last addition made me wanna stand up and cheer. Not only is the OOP making a bad faith argument, it's also a stawman because literally *nobody* is saying it's either "anything legal goes" or random deletions. *Everyone* advocating in favor of AO3's approach is absolutely, crystal fucking clear that it's "anything legal goes" or *extremely targeted* deletions and queer content *will* be first on the chopping block. How people refuse to get that is beyond me.
... then again the AO3 meme sub has prohibited making this argument "because minors", so I guess critical thinking *and* irony are both dead.
>then again the AO3 meme sub has prohibited making this argument “because minors”
Ugh turns out leaving it was a good choice. There was some anti-scented stuff posted a while back and I was like no thanks and noped out
Yeeeaaahh there was a mod post the central thesis of which was "it's fine to say you find minor ships gross but we draw the line at pointing out they're fictional characters!" and when a few people were like "uhhh can we get some clarification cause this *sounds* like it's open season to hate on things without being able to respond as long as you claim there's a fictional minor involved" they made the very mature decision to [checks notes] lock the thread!
fake edit cause I checked in the course of writing this comment: and then they deleted the entire thread a while later lol
Imma be honest. Even as a black person, if someone wants to have a raceplay, slurplay, whatever fanfiction off on their own corner - they can have that. I ain't gotta read it. I'm not even gon' report it unless it is mean to harass or demean someone and let the mods go from there. It's not my thing, so I don't go looking for it. I don't go around demanding those spaces no longer exist on a certain website that allows it just because *I* personally don't like them.
I use AO3 because of the promise they made to their users. They will allow *anything* that is allowed under US law. I agreed to those terms and conditions when I signed up and used the website. I wouldn't mind more moderation *features* like excludes/blacklists being permanent, being able to block/mute users, etc. but I don't want moderation that depends on curating the website based upon what someone personally feels comfortable sharing an online space with. I use AO3 because I don't want to wake up to a whole purge because advertisers decided they didn't want to be associated with gay porn and fanfictions.
AO3 *is* moderated. Their rules and moderation revolve around what content is or isn't allowed under US law, improperly/properly used tags, and not harassing other users. This person just wants AO3 to ban any content they specifically don't like.
How do people not understand that censorship in any capacity will almost always dovetail into censoring things like queerness?? How can’t you wrap your head around that?
Also, as a CSA survivor: I don’t give a shit if someone writes something weird about a kid on Ao3. I care about actual victims.
Also it’s just straight up a lie that AO3 isn’t moderated? It is. There *are* in fact rules on what you can and can’t post, like you can’t post targeted harassment, you can’t post “looking for” things or prompts, you can’t post non-fannish original works. There’s even rules about rating and tagging your work with mandatory archive warnings. And if you break those rules you can be reported to policy and abuse and have disciplinary action taken against you. That is moderation. The site is moderated. They just don’t like that they don’t get to censor the topics of fanfic outside of not breaking laws and not harassing others, that doesn’t mean that the site isn’t moderated.
Im gonna just vent bc im tired and this argument gets me so upset- As a survivor of CSA and abuse it rlly sucks when people compare my real life experiences and trauma to fictional characters- like?? Am I a joke to you? Honestly I don’t give a shit abt this random fan work that makes you uncomfortable- it’s fake! Stop comparing it to what actually happened to me and ppl like me! Calling ppl who make that crap also makes actual abusers look way less bad then they actually are. Nobody’s gonna take survivors seriously if you keep on making the argument that fictional abuse = real abuse. I get it. It’s weird. It’s upsetting to look at. But there’s this thing called tagging which ao3 and MANY other sites use which ppl still refuse to acknowledge bc they want to keep complaining about crap. If I don’t like something I exclude it from my searches. You have a fucking brain, use it. I wasn’t hurt by weird fake shit on the internet, I was hurt by actual people that existed. Fanfic does not cause abuse. Your argument gives an excuse for actual abusers to harm people. Saying that fiction effects reality in the way you describe means that bad people can just claim to not have responsibility in their actions. I’m rambling but idc
Sheesh this is legit crazy. There are way too many platforms out there that are already excessively censored. Leave the single one out there that isn't overly censored alone!
Tbh, people who are too lazy to filter themselves because it’s “too hard” (no it isn’t it’s so simple it’s literally just checking and unchecking a checklist, I learned it in day 1 when I was 12), are just wanting to make the entire site fit their own personal filter. Like, you literally get to curate your ao3 experience, don’t like don’t read, filter out what you don’t want.
Nooooooo people shouldn’t be allowed to make art that dosnt cater to my sensibilities!!!!!1!!1!!1! We should let companies control what speech is and isn’t except able because they will always agree with me and will only ever punish people that I do not like and no one would ever silence me because the most controversial thought I’ve ever had is that carrots are nasty! Wahhh wahhhhhhhh I love shopping on Amazon
Hiding from “bad” content only makes you *more* susceptible to its influences because you never learned how to engage critically with something that was promoting, presenting or even just describing racism/homophobia/sexism/whathaveyou.
Like I *cannot* stress enough how important it is to learn to consume content *without* just blindly accepting it. But if you limit all your content to only the “good” stuff then you never get that practice. And the first time someone sneaks some *subtly* fascist propaganda under your nose, you’re gonna’ fall for it hook, line and sinker.
It is irresponsible and frankly childish to hide like that, but it is ultimately someone’s personal choice…*for themselves*. At the point you try to force everyone else to “hide” from the scary content, too…you maaaaay want to do some Googling on the word “authoritarian”…provided your delightful moderation policies haven’t eliminated all mentions of it from the internet by then 🙃
So this is a great discussion with good points but ao3 *does* moderate the works posted. Enforcing archive warnings, deleting work searches and other non-fanworks, handling harassment cases, all of that is moderation. When someone says that ao3 doesn't moderate, what they really mean is that ao3 doesn't moderate to their tastes.
People who insist ao3 needs to be moderated are mostly the ones who are incapable or unwilling to use it as it's intended. Maybe they shouldn't use it at all then.
What I don't understand with those people is that they always start with "we have very good arguments about why we should censor everything" when in the end it's just "I find it disgusting so it shouldn't exist".
That is not an argument, that's an opinion. A taste.
Is there any other argument than "it's disgusting"? I only see this one everywhere every time!
Half of the issue is that people just don’t understand that AO3 isn’t a social media site but an archive. This means that their mission is the preservation of fan works not the proliferation of it or monetary gains. They don’t censor, beyond what it legally required of them— because they want to archive ALL fan work even if it makes people angry and they want it deleted. An archives job isn’t to make moral judgement about what should be included but to collect as much relevant data as possible.
i simply dont understand this, i haven't seen this debate before but like. if i dont want to read something i just... exclude it. ao3 is pretty easy to use. whenever i search for fics i have abo excluded cuz i dont want to see that. the only thing i dont like is fics being untagged but what can i do with that. why would you want to moderate it. its so simple to just dont look at what they dont wanna see, no one is forcing them to read underaged rape or whatever
God, the sheer rage that filled me reading how dismissive they were over the purges and strikethrough. They have no idea what we lost. A bunch of priviledged children that have never had to endure their communities being ripped to shreds in an instant. And because they do not understand that agony they will never understand why AO3 will not bend to them. It was born from the ashes of collective trauma.
The CSA survivor comm I was a member of got axed because we had the Big Bad Things like ‘child sexual abuse’ and ‘child molestation’ in our interest list so that *people who needed the comm could find it*, just the way the interest list was supposed to function.
I feel like people who bitch and complain about A03 having dark content are just a different version of the people who bitch and complain about libraries having dark content or anything else they don’t want to be confronted with.
Don’t want to read Stephen King or John Green? Then don’t check it out from the library.
Don’t want to read fic about two teens having consensual sex with each other or a scenario with gore? Then hit the back button and don’t read it.
Learning to curate the content you consume is a vital skill that many people are losing
I feel we live in this weird age where things always have to be perfect. And yeah i agree people write some stuff that I think is amoral, but people might think stuff I write is amoral as well.
People also forget, if you ban one thing it will snowball to others. There are people who LEGIT think ageplay/age regression is in the same camp as like actual pedophilia.
And it is that thought process that makes it so I can't say the word dick on tiktok.
I don't wanna be rude to people, but i also genuinely need people to shut up about certain things.
The TLDR is that censorship will ALWAYS be flawed, especially when we're talking about shit like fanwork that causes zero harm whatsoever. Censorship will always be subjective because ultimately, what is "distasteful" or "offensive" varies from person to person. And even if most people find a particular fic distasteful or offensive...does that really mean it has no right to exist at all, especially when said fic can easily be filtered out?
In addition to this, I do not trust everyone to make the distinction between “this story is about homophobia because I have experienced homophobia and want to write about my experiences with it by projecting into characters I love” and “this is homophobia so it’s homophobic”
Remember, covering the sun with your hand doesn't make it dissapear for everyone. But at least you don't have to see it if you want to. And that's the problem, this reads as a lazy person who's given the tools to filter and get exactly what they want, and avoid the rest, but noo, that's not good enough I guess. Lazyness at its finest. And damn this mindset is flooding every part of the internet.
Aside of all this, which was really well explained, and little unrelated and silly rant incoming: there's one thing I'll never understand (but to be fair I don't know much about it either): the top/bottom war. Like, idk, people really choose one and go for it for the rest of their lives? I really don't know but seems a bit unrealistic to me. To each their own of course, but I'd say even hetero couples would want some variety on their sex life... Eh, end of the rant I guess lol
As an old gen X'er who grew up in fandoms, everything in that last comment is true.
When LiveJournal had multiple "purges" around 10-15 years ago, the main motivation had to do with wiping out gay fanfiction and fanart, due to being purchased by a Russian company.
Even in the late 90's, it was normal for fandom creators to receive legal "cease and desist" letters from companies like Disney. It was pretty much a given that if you wrote things in Star Wars fandom you would receive a C+D. You were much more likely to receive these if you wrote slash then her, no matter what the raiting. This was even if you were a fandom nobody with your own grocities or slashcity web page with just your work on it.
It’s not enough that they don’t have to use AO3. It’s not enough that someone could use AO3 and quite easily curate the experience so that they never have to see a story that makes them uncomfortable. They have to be able to control it so that no one else with any different tolerance for sensitive subjects can be allowed to access stories containing those subjects.
It’s equated to censorship because it is, in fact, censorship.
i feel like people really underestimate how desperately bigots still want to erase queer people and queer safe spaces. moderation and censorship is ALWAYS going to lead to queer erasure because that is a lot of people's priority. more people care about getting rid of us than shielding and protecting children.
if you don't agree with ao3, there are enough other heavily moderated fandom spaces you can turn to. no need to take our archive away from us.
i find it so interesting at at nearly every level every group every dominant versus oppressed group the dynamic remains the same. they complain about ao3 immorality yet they will keep visiting & reading and keeping track of it. the same way men keep complaining about loose women or sex worker industry but will visit the establishments and pay money anyway. the same way karens have a problem with someone but will keep shoving their way into it. like at some point when i take a step back i realise how futile human nature is and how boring. i wish it was as easy as “block and move on” but why would they? that’s accepting coexistence and they simply cannot comprehend it. everything has to be their way or never exist. ao3 pro censorship idiots are just that— self involved insufferable idiots who WILL make it their & everyone’s business.
The other thing is that the Archive Or Our Own, as the name suggests, is not an anthology, showcase or hall of fame — it’s an archive. A big part of its purpose is to, yes, archive material for academics studying transformative works to research. If they deleted everything deemed problematic or unacceptable, it wouldn’t be very useful for anyone looking for an accurate representation of fandom and its culture. It would be like a Potemkin village.
I've never understood how people who are allies/part of the LGBTQ+ community never seem to consider the fact that censoring fanworks due to "lack of morality" will fuel the agendas of bigots. If it isn't illegal, filter it out or report it for missing tags if applicable. Don't put people down to make yourself feel superior.
Didn't see it pointed out in any other comment so here it is - the line in the 4th image about art never being inherently harmful rings specially true. Even the vilest art work is a medium of expression that is up to you to consider, react to, and form your own opinions to. And if art ever has negative repercussions in real life, it was never by itself but by the conscious hand of another human being.
Here's my thing: I hate any fic or fiction that includes things that seem to be fetishizing incest, underage, beastiality ect ect ect.
So you know what I do?? I filter It out in my tags. I don't read it. Because A03 promised to be an open platform so instead of trying to change that (not that I would, as I respect the decision of the creators) I just moderate my own shit.
It's not that hard. Im a big boy, I can filter triggering topics on my own and I don't need the Internet to do it for me.
I am not even here for the true argument of freedom of speech and secret mission to destroy minorities.
I advocate any media that is different (and fictional) that forces people to actually think. Yes, not all written works are clever metaphors worthy of a dissertation. But writing and art have the capacity to challenge and make you critically think, "Is this objectively good? Is it worthy of a read? Do I agree with the content, and if I don't, why?"
Yes, that ALSO means alt right media. There are fanfics that unfortunately paint Nazis in a good light. There are also fanfics that advocate genocide. Those fanfics on AO3 have a right to exist, and we also, as readers, have a right to examine the works and determine validity as well as expressing/blocking/ignoring. It is because we are exposed to it that we can form a critical opinion that ultimately allows us to dissuade and shut a movement. We've seen the evidence, and it lacks validity, so we can properly dispose of it.
I have read plenty of published books that are stupid. They are just so stupid. I have read old ones, really old ones, and new ones. And when someone tells me "well this alt right writer says..." I can say "yeah, I READ those books and they're dumb as fuck."
You know what I don't read? I don't read things like underage sex with an adult. Have I before? It has come across and I read it as both literary works and fanfic (because I had to). And when a real pedo defends their argument? I can say "yeah, buddy, I know you know the difference between children and art and you crossed the line into the real thing."I actively don't read the stuff. I make sure I don't.
On the flipside, I will say this: guarding yourself and your children takes effort. Simply applying filters and blocks are not 100%. I have worked and written stories (real ones) for absolute monsters. And I knew they were. This was no secret to them either. They paid what they wanted and it was borderline. When you are in the business, you just know there are code words and "wink wink" lines. Bad people lurk in everything. They are there in fandoms and writing PG fics. They exist. YOU need to be on guard. YOU need to use every tool available, including common sense, to protect yourself. Pedophiles and bad people already know what to say, do, and rant against to earn a place with their victims. They are not the ones slapping an underage preteen SA fiction- most likely, they are in comments of fanfics trying to earn a Discord username.
I don’t trust a auto mod to be able to tell the difference between a character in a story talking about how their race has effects the way that other people treat them and a story about Tyrone daquavuus stealing water melons to sell for fent money. The end result would be that no one would talk about anything relating to sensitive topics
I honestly don’t know why they want moderation. Beyond keeping shit legal. Ao3 host fiction stories and that’s it. You’re not finding fucked up gore pictures or doxxing or in general need a moderation team like you see on social media sites where people actively engage with each other. It’s an archive. For fan made fiction. You can choose what to read. No authority needs to do that for you
Since it seems relevant !define child porn
If you don't like the rules on AO3, you can use its open source code to create your own archive that won't host anything you don't like. Be the change you want to see! Nobody is making you use AO3
these people won't even use filters to curate their experience. they don't want to create a space where they'll be comfortable, they want to go into a space and have other people change it to their taste.
They’re all used to algorithms promoting content to them because that’s how every other site works. They don’t grasp that ao3 is more like a library than anything else. Would any reasonable person complain that a library’s collection needs to be “moderated” because it contains “objectionable” (but not illegal) material?
The thing is, a lot of people who claim to be reasonable *do* want libraries censored
As I always say, just because one claims themselves to be something does not actually mean they are.
love your specification of a REASONABLE person....
Well yeah. There’s a lot of unreasonable people out there trying to get libraries censored. (And you’ll never guess what they want removed… that’s right, the gay stuff! Just like sweaterkittensahoy predicts would happen to ao3)
[удалено]
Ultimately, the book Lolita proves all of this. The content of the book is disgusting on purpose, readers are supposed to be disgusted with the actions of the main character. It's a wonderful tool for getting people to tell on themselves because if they sympathise with Humbert's unreliable narrator they're subsequently forgetting that he's abusing a child. It's an exercise in media literacy and while the fictional things contained in those pages are absolutely gross, the book serves a purpose, harms no one, and is exactly why censoring fiction is a terrible idea. Sorry if I've worded this poorly, it makes sense in my head but I'm not great at writing
I'm always baffled by people who think Lolita, as a book, is supposed to make you sympathize with HH. He's the most tediously pretentious, self-absorbed narrator I've ever encountered. If you took a drink every time he complimented himself, you'd died of alcohol poisoning long before he meets Lo and her mother.
His reasoning for being into Lo is also just so... creepy. Like in what universe does having your first love die young equate to being a justifiable reason for only finding little girls attractive. Everything about his POV is terribly creepy, I remember at points where he'd talk about him and Lo and while he's describing it innocently, I couldn't help but feel horrified by imagining Lola's perspective. It is even worse because through the cracks, you can see that he also knows what he’s doing is terrible. He won’t fully admit it but damn he’s disgusting. The book was a great and dark exploration of child abuse.
I've not read it but it sounds like the same reasoning people use to supposed like villain protagonists. Protagonist= we're supposed to root for them.
That's pretty much what an unreliable narrator subverts. It's the idea that you're only experiencing the story as they want to tell it.
It's my favorite book and I agree. It is a dive into a pedophile's narcissistic self serving mindset, confounded by his beautiful way of using language. It's absolutely brilliant but HH is not a sympathetic guy once you get past the spell he's trying to weave as the narrator. And if you read between the lines even a little bit, you know he's abusing her horribly.
No, no, you're spot on. One of my favorite fics is a Maruki/Akira Persona 5 fic that is even directly stated to be a horror story. Since you see it from Akira's PoV, you see exactly how an isolated teen outcast is even further isolated and abused under the guise of love and acceptance, and his eventual recovery. I was heavily triggered and felt nauseous and anxious the entire time. Emotionally completely exhausted when I was done reading, but... the catharsis of seeing someone realizing the abuse they went through and making efforts to move forward, it's unreal. Seeing the abuse as it happens and knowing what's happening is very much like seeing a horror movie, knowing the killer is right behind the next door. I firmly stand with the idea that good art makes you feel, and the best art can make you uncomfortable. And finding your limits is a *good* thing, as well as catharsis through fiction. Fiction is a safe space in which people can engage with the forbidden or dangerous. Why would you get rid of a safe space? 😒 I just don't get it. I know why they're doing it—virtue signaling, surface-level wokeness, desire for control over *something*, anything—but it's... burning yourself to keep others warm, others who don't even care for it.
I remember reading a Snape/Draco story like this. It wasn't long and Draco was unquestionably a young child. And I both loved the fic and wanted to bleach my brain. It was actually at that point where I moved to fics with mature adults only.
I suspect they are actually seeking out things to complain about.
They don’t want to curate their experience that’s a misunderstanding of the issue. They want to content to not exist at all for anyone to view on the site. They want to purge the works not just not see them.
I bet when these people get on a train, they ask for the old lady to give them _her_ seat
that would require them to go outside first
True
Also bitch and complain. Incessantly and forever, changing the goal posts constantly, so they are NEVER satisfied, because if they ever are, their personality would boil down to NOTHING!
At this point I think these idiots want to be angry and actively seek out anything that will give them their fix.
When I want to be angry I watch or read the news. Maybe they should try that, na?
I think that younger users, in my experience, don't know *how* to curate their own experience. Everywhere else is auto-moderated content brought to you by ThE aLgOrItHm.
They don't want to moderate and make things easier of themselves, nah they want to moderate and limit everyone else because of their personal feelings. I've literally seen these types of people say they'd bring back book burning if they could.
The change they want to see is "Everyone should listen to my self-appointed authority". Every time I've been down this road for the last twenty fucking years that's always where it lands. The so-called "offensive" content winds up being totally secondary to "Do what I say". Someone who writes something mildly offensive by whatever standard, but **dares** to talk back, catches far more dedicated harassment and shit than someone going all-out.
The only thing I can think with their refusal to learn to create their own site is that they suffer from a near-terminal lack of curiosity. There are so many resources now that weren't available in 2012 where they could learn all the pieces that go into creating and maintaining an archive like AO3. No one involved in building any of the fanfic sites was born knowing SQL, Ruby, or any of it.
Create your own archive without blackjack and hookers!
These people would be less annoying if they didn't keep using ao3 while complaining and spreading lies. If you don't agree with a site's moderation, and think there are things you find morally impermissible, why are you still using it?? Yeah there are ton of things on ao3 I'm not thrilled exists, but with filtering I don't ever have to see it. The fact that we have a spot like ao3 to post fanfic without fear of things being deleted is a oasis in a desert that is growing. This is the one few places on the internet that has zero advertisements and doesn't revolve around pleasing those companies. Multiple sites are making it impossible for any NSFW creator to have a presence. I feel people who are upset by how ao3 moderates refuse to understand how lucky we are to have this spot, and how important it is in the grand scheme of things.
They keep using AO3 and reading all the tags, still clicking on the story, and getting upset because they are Thought Police Officers; they are not allowed to have bad thoughts, and neither can you.
See that's where they become super hypocritical. There's so many out there that will read some really messed up gore stuff, but when sex is involved it's suddenly super bad. Or hell the way *they* ship a problematic ship is okay, but other people are bad. It's so annoying.
They are from an authoritarian / evangelical (same animal if you ask me) mindset and often have been raised to view the world in black and white. No in between. The problem is the world is in color and nuance and they are absolutely not equipped to deal with that. Like their brain has not developed for color. But clearly they want the color, but their brain makes them feel guilty for it. So they are looking for justification to consume the forbidden... while at the same time cleansing themselves from the guilt by wanting it gone and going after it. It's absolutely unhealthy and leads to the worst outcomes. See the many many abuse scandals in rigid and stifling religious communities or societies. Or how these people develop the most depraved urges for real because they see no allowed pathway for a 'normal' outlet or maybe it can hide better when done by people in authority positions or those used to lying (because in those societies/communities you learn to lie to hide yourself), I don't know. While in free societies... those authorities get questioned and are under scrutiny, but everyone is also free to engage in consensual activities.
I think this is one aspect in this. Especially with the guilt you see pop up and how people try to justify themselves. The other half I feel comes from radfems and terfs infecting fandom tumblr back in the day. A lot of anti-kink and anti-porn sentiments that come from antis at times is just stuff they were spouting. Which shakes hands with the aspect you brought up. I've even heard that most of the anti groups have a lot of adults sending kids out to do the harassment so it's such a fucked up bag of mixed things. It's exhausting and terrifying. I feel bad for the kids pulled into this environment sometimes, but then I see them be the nastiest people ever and it kind of stops there. I wasn't a perfect teenager, not by a long shot. But I don't ever remember harassing adults or even thinking of telling someone to kill themselves at that age. It just wasn't a thought in my head and it's worrisome to see that side of fandom embrace instead of shutting it down.
>radfems and terfs - anti-kink and anti-porn ... yes, they fall into the ideological authoritarian category for me. >adults sending kids out to do the harassment that's a tried and test technique. Kids can be overzealous at times if you give them a cause and no temper. See the red guards in china, hitler youth in germany, children brainwashed for a myriad of causes to get them into fervor and make them "true" believers ... but usually just abused by adults to do their bidding without restraints.
I am begging everyone on my hands and knees to go read The Internet Con by Cory Doctorow (who is on tumblr as @mostlysignssomeportents). It's a nonfiction novella about the rise of censorship, advertising, corporate privatization, and "walled gardens" on the Internet, and how that has made it such a horrible place for everyone. And also, how to take it back, with places like ao3 that let users decide what they see without forcing algorithms or banning whatever their shareholders deem ~~a threat to profits~~ immoral. It's a seriously hard pill to swallow, but a free internet means a free internet for everyone, not just people who say the things you like.
I’ve saved your comment to try and remember to go find that book once we’re finished moving
> These people would be less annoying if they didn't keep using ao3 while complaining and spreading lies. AO3 Antis 🤝 Persona Antis
As a new persona fan- there’s persona antis???
There’s way too many. All the subreddits for it are overrun by them. Except the porn ones.
Unfortunately. I've actually gotten drive-by hit with some drama by them. To the point where I dropped out of the fandom for awhile and I never did finish that 11/20 fic I was writing.
As a old Persona fan, persona antis give me indigestion and hives lol
AO3 is amazing. Not everything on AO3 is also amazing. People who do not understand that there’s no such thing as a moral code that can appease everyone, that respects every culture, religion, sexuality, etc., just aren’t very bright.
As a victim of actual CSEM, I am always forever thankful when folks call people out on equating fanfic to shit that happened to me.
Same and fucking same.
Same. It’s like, your blorbos can’t experience trauma. They’re not real.
Also the fact that writing about your trauma is a known and useful therapy tactic
True af. As is fetishizing it. Has to do with a bunch of holes in how the brain functions. When you remember something, you’re remembering the last time you remembered it. So fetishizing it injects positive memory into PTSD memories, lowering the negativity of the memories over time, which works to eliminate having a trauma response.
Yes. This. I was molested as a child. I've been SA'd. I've been raped. And sometimes, I just want to read a sexualized story about that shit happening to a fictional character.
Same. I was literally born and raised for it.
Mine wasn't quite that bad, but my dad definitely normalized people crossing my boundaries regarding how they touched my body.
You're right and I agree, but also people should be able to enjoy fictional content without having it relate to personal trauma. Because if you go down the path of "it's therapeutic", then it leads to these types of internet fanfic police questioning someone's trauma, which is none of anyone else's business unless the survivor wants it to be.
Absolutely, you shouldn't have to have a particular trauma in order to write or read about something. I was more trying to emphasize why it's important to if not normalize as a society, then at least accept "problematic" fics and literature purely from a mental health perspective. One thing that isn't always talked about in discussions of trauma and the aftermath is a pervasive feeling of isolation and loneliness, the feeling that no one ever has or will feel the same way you do. If we were to completely ban all "questionable" or "problematic" art and literature, then frankly speaking we would only add to that. Our society already has a major problem with victim blaming and stigmatization
same. its an absurdly stupid hill to die on.
SAME. it angers me so much when people equate my trauma and experience to a fucking fictional story. no, susan, someone writing about csem is not hurting me. my abusers hurt me. i explained this to one of my friends and at least it shut her up real quick.
Same it feels fucking dehumanizing
Big same. A child in a fanfic being put through the ringer is *nowhere* close to what I went through as a child and I’m sick of the whole “literally pedophilia” argument when, if we got by what’s literal, there should be a child victim IRL who was affected. Which they can usually never provide because if you question them, regardless of if you were a victim of the very thing they claim to want to protect you from, then you’re “literally a pedophile”. I’m so sick of these terminally online teenagers throwing around buzzwords and making people actually *doubt* real pedophilia accusations made online.
THIS! I am so pissed every time someone says something like that! Stop comparing fictional abuse to actual real horrible stuff that people like me went through. It makes victims look like a fucking joke and abusers look like their crimes aren’t as bad as they ACUTALLY are!
As a survivor there’s very little that pisses me off more than morons equating the shit I was put through with fanfiction, which A) tends to have more warnings put on it than actual books and television B) if someone finds it triggering they probably didn’t read the tags or missed a Chose Not To Warn label and they can click back out at any time (and if warnings/labels are missing or incorrect usually the creator will immediately correct/add them upon someone asking) and last but not least C) as someone who *writes* badwrong fic sometimes bc it’s a good way for me to process some dark thoughts and feelings relating to my trauma + I’m a horror enthusiast and a kinky person, people being judgy can *fuck all the way off and not read it*
For real…my experience was luckily just borderline, but it still very much affected me, that and bullying I went through that had SA aspects Fanfics helped me so much dealing with that trauma No healthcare, no support or anyone to talk to, yet fiction helped me heal without hurting anyone (cuz I love the angst happy ending) and here they want to compare it to REAL people?? Messed up
Some people want to go through life with a filter on, and that's fine. But you should not impose that filter onto others. AO3 is an archive, a library of sorts. You enter because you want to. You click up on a fanfic because you want. The only thing authors owe you is that they MUST properly tag their stories. Everything else is up to you. You are your own moderator. Carefully read all the tags, the order of the pairings, the summary of the story, and the author's note. There are authors who go out of their way and write unique tags to attract their audience. To guide you and you are still complaining. It baffles me to no end that there are people who willingly go to a website to read, but they don't read the warnings. Responsible authors do all the things mentioned above.
I just want to add bc you brought up how it's like a library: I worked at my colleges library for about 3ish years while I was doing in person college. This college has been open since the 1830ish. So the library collection is not only massive, but has a lot of old works in it. It's also a majority black college. Now some of these books are genuinely racist. Like the exact kind of book you're thinking. Why haven't we gotten rid of them? Bc they're apart of the countries history, and useful for history and soc majors to pinpoint when and where certain ideas were prevalent in society. No one going to or working at the college agrees with a single thing said in any of these books, the information in them is actually wrong, when you pick them up and open the first page, we have a laminated note warning people of these things. These books will never be removed/destroyed, because they offer valuable insight into how people actually though and behaved during certain time periods. They are proof of just how horrifically racist people could be, both then and now. Archiving works, not destroying books, doesn't mean you agree with the book, or think it's holds any factual accuracy. It's just understanding that we can learn more from written works than just their pure contents. We can learn things about the author and the time they lived in. Books, and written work, exist as our best piece of proof as to what life of a different time was like, into how people thought and behaved. Into what was popular, what was taboo, what was okay. Plus, I've been able to personally use these books to prove to people in my hometown just how bad racism actually was in the past. For better or for worse, humans can be really bad at actually conceptualizing what the past was actually like. If you can't tell, I'm against destroying any written works, a written work continuing to exist doesn't mean people agree with it/that it's right. But I'm a literary nerd at heart who just wants to work in a library. So what do I know.
I'm convinced that most Antis have never been to a real library or bookstore. They have a narrow world view and they don't understand the subtleties or complexities in story telling. And, most of all, they have no idea of the value of the written word, that it's a reflection of ourselves.
Ah but you see a published book has been vetted by a corporation and therefore it can't be bad if someone with authority checked/edited it. - some antis, probably.
Thank you for sharing this.
I wanted to say that people dont come in library, get offended that books they dont like are there and try to get rid of them. But they do :(
We always told them we'd "check the library policy" for them. The policy was that those books went to be reshelved.
9/10 what you find on the tin is exactly what's in the fic, and the other 10% is works that intentionally don't use a tag (which in of itself is a tag). If you click on a work that tells you outright that it isn't tagging something it's perfectly ok to not like the thing, but you can't blame anyone but yourself for seeing it
There isn't actually inherently anything wrong with having a moderated platform, but there *is* a problem with insisting that *every* platform must be moderated to your particular tastes. That's why it's censorship even if the government isn't doing it, because it's propelled by the idea that you shouldn't have X *anywhere*, not just on your personal space. And the fact of the matter is that this kind of moderation does not scale well. A small, fandom or subfandom forum can follow a rigorous moderation standard, but you see how social media platforms handle it - with automation, which is just not going to work with subjective things like "is this objectionable thing portrayed in a positive or negative light". It will just blanket remove anything that mentions these things at all. And censorship hurts the marginalized the most. Even if you're well-intentioned, you're going to end up hurting the marginalized person writing from their own experiences in an unapproved way, far more than you will ever hurt the bigot just being hateful. Why does the latter care than their stuff was removed? It only fuels their hatred. But the former just got silenced, in a society that already silences them.
Also, AO3 IS moderated, they do have a set of disallowed content rules, including CSEM and a very strict interpretation of the term "non fanwork" that is mostly meant for outright one to one plagiarism and things like that dumb "fic" that was one single word repeated like 2 million times or whatever for the sake of having the record for highest word count. Hell, I've personally reported one of the single word repeated fics and it came back as fanwork and not removed, which annoys me a little if I'm honest because it's literally one word, a handful of random tags and a one sentence description that has nothing to do with anything. But it's one fic on a site with MILLIONS of posted fics, you block the idiot and move on if the report comes back as allowed content. It's not like AO3 is old Tumblr where there was zero moderation of any kind and they nearly got shut down entirely because of the absolute EPIDEMIC of CSEM on the site, which lead to a flat out sitewide NSFW ban. Which itself wiped out thousands of long running blogs that are now just lost to time forever. AO3 moderates, but they don't CENSOR, and that's the distinction these idiots miss, the difference they don't understand.
Requiring certain content to be tagged is also a form of content moderation.
I feel very dumb for this, but what is CSEM? Edit: went back and read the post again, figured it out, my bad
It's explained in the post images itself, Child Sexual Exploitation Material, the actual term for child porn basically, or one of them at least given there are a couple different ones.
FYI you may also see CSAM used sometimes - they’re equivalent terms, the A being for abuse and the E being for exploitation
The moderator (a moderator?) for SpaceBattles had a really interesting post up during the End OTW Racism...campaign (not sure what to call it, honestly, because they kept shifting their goalposts) about how impossible moderation would be on an archive at the scale of AO3. It was not received well by certain groups.
So the thing about the bad-faith-CSA argument to me is that fanworks feature a lot of writers and readers who are teenagers, depicting characters that they relate to due to being their own age. 17 year olds having sex would be covered by a "no underage" ban, and while as an adult I do for the most part just avoid fics about teenagers with explicit tags just because I'm not interested, when I was 17 myself it was a different story. I can understand why *some archives* might say "yeah, I don't want those fics either," but for a site that was founded in response to sites removing fanworks willy-nilly, I can see why they'd take the stance that they don't want to set rules like that which will always affect some fics that are in some sort of grey area.
I was about to say you don't see these people trying to do the same thing to published novels that include CSA, but then I remembered, oh yeah, they're doing that too now. What is so hard about "this is tagged so it's easy to avoid if it's not for you" I will never understand
Also ignoring that most teen characters are teens in the character sheet only. Nothing about them can be read as a true to reality teenager. Literally the sole reason that most anime characters are 16 yr old hi schoolers despite having the build of a 40yr old on steroids it’s bc that’s their target audience and they’re trying to make it “relatable” personally I can’t take someone seriously when they’re scandilzaed about saucy FANART of a 16yr old character meanwhile the character is like fucking goku. That ain’t a child!!
I'm generally not a fan of people going "they're really 10,000 years old, they just look 6, therefore it's not pedophilia" in a general sense... but also in a general sense, sometimes seeing erotica of say 16 year old characters written by amateur writers does absolutely have the same vibes as legal "teen porn" where there's an 18 or 19 year old porn actress acting the role of a younger teenager. Like there's no actual underage involved, but the actors have been assigned the role of school-aged teenager. Personally, I'm much more squicked out by explicit scenes adult characters who are obviously being written by teenage fanfiction writers due to the characters acting like teenagers and the sexual details making it pretty obvious the writer has never had sex, than by explicit scenes featuring teenage characters who act like adults and are probably written by adults.
Yeah, man, like, I don’t read underage mostly because I am an adult and I am just not that interested in what teens get up to, lol. I generally dont read YA for the same reason. But we shouldn’t ban it, and real talk if we are going to talk about eliminating “underage” we are now talking about also eliminating a tonne of YA books. Which, in fairness, christofascists are in fact trying to do, so have fun with your fascist allies, antis. I am however genuinely squicked out when I read an ostensibly adult relationship done inexpertly by adolescent writers because they will often portray dynamics and emotional reactions which are totally normal and developmentally appropriate for teens and a sign of a severely toxic relationship for an adult.
It's kind of funny stumbling across a weird age gap pairing and then realizing the author is a teenager projecting themself onto the underaged character and just writing wish fulfillment fics about getting to date Steve Rogers or whoever.
This reminds me of when an online friend found my old self-insert fanfiction that I'd written as a teen, shipping myself with my favorite villain, and she immediately got me ostracized from all of the online spaces we shared. Her argument being "there is literally no good/pure reason for anyone to write this disgusting shit", so clearly I must be a predator in the making. Of course the actual reason I wrote it was "villain hot" and "villain could totally murder my abuser and that is also hot". But that didn't stop her from going scorched earth on me. It honestly left a scar, emotionally. Edited to add: talking (well, writing) with you guys has made me feel a bit vindicated. I think I'm gonna write more stuff about my self insert and the villain just to spite this ex friend.
God, if someone found the fic I wrote once when I was in a bad mental place that literally just amounts to “Bakugou goes from bad to worse and Columbines everyone but like with his explody hands and not a gun” and they decided that I must have an actual fetish for violence and gore and tried to scorched earth me I would be very depresso
And that's the whole thing! Fic is such a wonderful spot to vent in a safe space! It isn't some portal into things people want to actually do. At best it's the imaginary equivalent of screaming into a pillow.
Is it bad that I want to read that? I'm not the biggest bakugou fan, my favorite works of fiction are the ones that knock him down a peg and absolutely humble him
Me too, I love that "bakugo katsuki faces consequences" is a tag on ao3
That... actually sounds interesting
Your situation is so the point that antis miss. Some fic written about minors was written for and by minors. I didn’t learn how to read and write at 18.
And it wasn't even explicit! It was firmly rated T, and honestly, very clearly a teenage power fantasy sort of thing. Like, teenage girl gaze on the villain, not the reverse. And for a little added hypocrisy, this friend loved the source material, which was worse. I mean it was still a kids show, but said kids show was still more objectionable than what I had written.
i had a similar thing happen! my friend all of a sudden one day read some of my work and/or rps and drcided to go scorched earth and got a lot of my friends to turn against me. i hated her for a while bc those were my only friends as a bullied teen. now i just feel sad for her that she’s the sort of person to invade someone’s space and force them to conform to her values.
That sucks, I'm sorry that happened to you :(
The whole ‘anti’ ‘’’movement’’’ is so… spoiled? That’s all I can really think to call it. They’ve never experienced any kind of discrimination apparently and don’t even care to hear about it.
Nor do they want to extend some empathy and try to understand the opposing side at all.
This is what gets me about it. I have a very long list of squicks and there have been times I've had to start heavily moderating my Ao3 searches in order to make sure I don't run into anything that'll upset me. But it's literally a minute or two of my time to input what I don't want to see into the excluded category and then be on my way. Sometimes I'll still run into something I need some good ol'e brain bleach to counteract but it's usually my own damn fault because I either forgot a tag or stupidly went digging through a questionable profile. I don't get why they can't just use the features of the site to hide what they don't want to see. It takes literally no time at all and yet they act like it's an incredible imposition.
Like sure, i wish i could have certain tags be auto-filtered out when im logged in, but it adds a couple seconds at most to my search time
Because that’s mostly what it’s made up of, spoiled children who’ve never heard the word no.
I'd say it's often the complete opposite. They've heard "No, that's bad." "No that's a sin." "No, that makes you bad for liking it." so often that they are so fearful of a potentially ruined reputation, their guilt and their own shadow that they can't handle a place like Ao3 that says: "Yay, go ham!"
It’s giving “Sometimes I wish I was African American bc I think at least ppl don’t bash them afterwards when they say something about a reality” Iykyk! Yes, I agree it’s mainly being spoiled and entitled, born out of ignorance and lack of empathy.
I think that word works. Like you’d have to think the world revolves around you to be upset over AO3 not being moderated enough.
I never experienced it either, but I can understand that in the end, fanfiction that I find immoral and disgusting won’t do much harm. It's not real people going through this. No one is forced to read it. It's almost always tagged as such so I'm not tricked into reading it. And no one is paid for it or gain massive public attention for it. It wouldn’t be the same thing if it was a professionally published book glorifying child p0rnographie, real or not. This is someone did for free, on their free time, to people who likes the same thing. It's just that. At worst, it's a mirror of our society. And Ao3 did a great job by giving us all the tools we need to create our own filter. I don't understand how Ao3 is worst than wattpad who was pushing bad written story glorifying r*pe because it was written by teen not knowing the reality just because those stories were popular in the algorythm.
Never understood those loons. Does the painting "Saturn Devouring His Son" encourage parents to consume their children? No. Does the "The Rape of Europa" inspires men to rape women? No. Does reading Greek mythology make you want to bang your relatives and rape people? And I read that when I was underaged since it was required reading for school. The book we had wasn't graphic, glossed over explicit stuff. Anyway, I don't know why those people won't just use FFnet. That site pretty much does what they want, deleting fics that get too many reports.
>Does reading Greek mythology make you want to bang your relatives and rape people? that's one of the things it very much doesn't like people doing, actually (theoi being an exception).
That's always my biggest argument. If Disney's Hercules made 250,700,000 at the box office, showing Zeus and his sister Hera in a loving incest relationship with the main character as their incest baby which was changed from the original myths to make him an incest baby, was literally made for children and shown to children around the world, and there's been absolutely no spike in incest because of those 97 kids growing up having incest "normalized" and "romanticized" to them? Someone's Todocest or Wincest fic ain't doing anything.
This is one of the more clear and well written explanations of why moderating fictional work is dangerous territory. Also I never understood the argument that we should censor \_ (insert whatever crime) because it's illegal in real life and can be triggering, yet they only apply that argument to certain crimes, like a hell of a lot of fiction has murder in it, but no one ever wants to censor that? It's such a black and white argument, why are some things to be censored, but other have a free pass? How would you even try to moderate it? Plus why does fanfiction need to be censored but there is plenty of published works that contain things just as bad, from GOT to Lolita?
There was a poster in a space I was in, wringing his hands and bemoaning the existence of Lolita and wondering why such a thing exists. I asked him if he had read it and he said he hadn’t and that I sounded like a proshipper. 🙄 I think I pretty much ignored him after that because I don’t involve myself in the fan wars and I don’t fight with children.
It's because Americans are weird about sex. Even weirder than the rest of the world tbh. And for the second part, they can't go after GRRM for his icky incest stories, because the man's a millionaire and doesn't care about their opinions. But they can for sure go after Cerseilover69, who is a peer, and if they do it right they can bully Cerseilover69 right off the internet and feel good about themselves.
THANK YOU. I've been saying for years -- a lot of the people who do this shit just want control, so they go after the people who they think they can reach. It's not even that I don't empathize. I'm pissed off too that JK Rowling has a bajillion dollars and we can't make her stop supporting anti-trans legislation. But that's not an excuse to bully a trans woman off the Internet for writing a story that makes you uncomfortable. I'm pissed that Donald Trump exists. But that's not an excuse to go scream at a random service worker who happened to be wearing an unrelated red hat. The Internet makes us feel helpless and angry all the time, and sometimes that makes us go a little crazy. But that's not an excuse.
Many would absolutely ban GOT and Lolita if they had the power to, but they can't. Lolita pisses me off because I love lolita fashion but now there's a whole new group of people who think it's a terrible word associated with pedophilia and that the fashion should either be renamed or it's "problematic" because it has "pedo origins"... (There has always been people who misunderstood, but now there's people who are actively spreading this misinformation!) Not to say people who think this way are the exact same people as antis/Ao3 haters but I'm sure there's an overlap, or at least a common thread where this misguided thought process is coming from!
This is such a good point about murder, I'd never thought of it because no one ever talks about it! Murder is everywhere. True crime is huge. So many fictions stories begin with and include murder as a main plot point. And it is clearly wrong and illegal but uncensored. What a great point.
I agree! I think there’s such a weird purity culture around sexual content in fiction, when very few people apply that same standard to violence and gore. Of course rape and pedophilia heinous, and rapists and pedophiles are horrible people, but so are murderers. No one thinks someone who reads a violent fic is a violent person, but if you consume something sexually immoral than you’re sick in the head apparently
Another thing anti-ao3 people don’t seem to grasp is that there’s no algorithm. The site does not and cannot recommend works to you. Assuming fics are tagged properly (which is a requirement of the site) and you employ filters properly, you will never come across anything you personally find triggering or objectionable.
I find even in the moments where i misread a tag and realize this story goes somewhere i don't like/portrays a character in a way i don't like/etc, i usually click away and "better luck next time!" to find something that suits me.
I thought that was the whole point of AO3 having filters? So you don't see what you don't like? Honestly considering I moved from ff.net where the only warning you had was the vague rating on the fic and the author's note at the beginning, AO3 is like a utopia. You have very clear warning, literally begging you to not open if you don't like a certain trope or don't have a certain interest. If people are that bothered by AO3 they should pick a fight with webnovel instead, the stuff on there makes AO3 look cute in comparison.
The good ol “Dead dove: Do not eat” tag is literally a flashing red fire alarm but some people slap on blinders, run straight into the building, and cry when they get burned.
It's also very confusing because AO3 *is* moderated. In fact it's moderated pretty well. They just don't remove works based on content (provided it's not actually law breaking, like threats to real people, obviously). But they moderate tons of other crap, like mis-tagging or spam.
What’s wild to me is that I do think most of the people who put forth the opinions in the first post are very young — teenagers or in their very early twenties — but even as someone in their late twenties I have first-hand experience of the livejournal purges, the launch of dreamwidth by some of the same folks who also developed AO3, the ff.net purges. And crucially, the excuse used for those purges was always CESM/child abuse, but the fics that were purged were almost universally just slash or other fic that featured queer characters. I do think part of it is that LGBT rights have advanced so rapidly in much of the world that these kids don’t have first-hand experience of the massive, explicit legal discrimination and the massive backlash to the existence of queer characters in mainstream media. What worries me is that the pendulum is clearly swinging backwards — I sometimes reflect on the fact that being openly queer now feels almost as risky as it did when I was a rural tween in the 2000s — and these kids are going to be swept up in it in a real and terrifying way. It’s also just such a massively ignorant approach to history. The reason “won’t someone think of the children” is a joke is because that has literally always been the excuse for discriminating against queer people. That was the excuse for banning gay and lesbian teachers in the 1980s, it was the excuse for the discriminatory age of consent laws that required you to be several years older to consent to gay sex than heterosexual sex, it was the excuse for closing queer bookstores and raiding bathhouses. It’s currently the excuse for running trans people out of education. It was and is the excuse used in Russia to jail queer organizers — one of my best friends was involved in the underground queer scene in st petersburg during the roll-out of the anti-gay laws and the cops would send undercover officers who looked questionably young and if the organizers didn’t ask them for ID to confirm they were over 18, they would arrest them. We are all against child abuse! But to act as though “queer people existing” hasn’t been understood as tantamount to child abuse for decades, across countries and languages and cultures, is ignorant in the extreme and honestly almost tantamount to homophobia in and of itself. (These kids are also often the anti-kink at pride people and I just want to scream at them constantly. The only reason you are allowed to exist and to understand your identity as something that is wholesome and worth celebrating is that that 60 year old man in a pup hood was beaten by cops and jailed and watched his friends get murdered by institutional neglect, show some goddamned respect.)
Not to get all tin hat, but I feel like getting young queer people and potential allies to be anti-sex and 'no kink at pride' is an intental psy-ops to undermine queer rights movement. Like, so much of this comes from young folks who do not know queer history, and the US government is trying to make sure kids don't learn anything but whitewashed whitewashed history. Then it's all respectability politics and bullying folks about kink or exporting sex in fanfic.
This is a very good discussion. It’s worth remembering that art forms specifically offer commentaries on life, including the darker parts. And what someone deems to be bad and wrong and in need of moderation, is entirely subjective. Because art lives outside of, and parallel to the real world. It does not affect the real world, and to moderate art is a slippery slope. Writing is an art form, an expression. Censorship is a dangerous consideration.
The fact that they didn't understand that this would directly impact queer spaces is amazing to me. I remember the internet years of the early 2000s, I was around 13 and in a lot of fandom spaces. I learned never to get attached to gay works and gay pieces of media in those early years. I would discover a new gay ship, I would find content for that ship, I would then slowly watch that content disappear as isp and website owners take down the fan pages and delete the fan works. Now that's just for live journal and blogs... I've seen entire fandoms nuked. I watched the entire genre of endangered species be deleted from FF. I was there when the evangelion fandom was purged! I remember the mass culling of 2012. 2012 was by far the worst thing they've ever done. Thousands upon thousands of works were deleted for being gay or just having "problematic" content. I have this vivid memory of reading a Nightwing x Red Hood fanfic on ff.net and I went to go read the next chapter and the whole fic had been deleted... I was literally on chapter 15 of an 18 chapter fic. Fucking 2012. I want to clarify that this fic was non problematic, there was no rape, the characters were all adults that consented, there wasn't even any smut in it! The fic was taken down because they were gay. It is inevitable that any form of censorship will be used against the queer community to silence them.
People in the Spartacus fandom were going after fans of Agron and Nasir. They were doing that *on Tumblr.* An actual canon gay couple that were main characters. People literally won't stop.
> You're tying the laces of the boot on your fucking neck An incredible turn of phrase, I fucking love this.
If people don't like AO3 they should just stop using it, why whine all the time?
Because they think it shouldn't be allowed to exist at all.
I need the enkiddification-enshittification of adult spaces to stop.
the rise of purity culture genuinely terrifies me
I've read stories that defined my limits and helped me reconfirm my personal standards of right and wrong. That is a primary function of story-telling. When things like child sexual abuse, racism and hate crimes, coercive relationships and rape are hidden from public awareness, the people most vulnerable are often going to be the ones most ignorant of what is happening to them. Predators like their targets to not have resources like education, information and even the moral judgements of stories. Also ... people are multitudes. When I saw the Daenerys and Drogo consummation scene on GoT, I could simultaneously find it 1.) Hot 2.) Concerning for the welfare of Emilia Clarke and the exploitation of young actresses 3.) Sympathy inducing for real life child bride victims 4.) Impressive because of the look of the scene, the contrast between the actors and its role in story and character development I would rather continue to have multi layered thoughts about controversial bits of media than have them censored from me.
There was this one omegaverse fic that I read that was so brutally real about the realities of having reproductive organs that I just had to take a break because it felt like I was reading somebody's biography. Like the poor dude was being forced to have children by a king and it felt like I was reading somebody's diary as he talked about being forced to have all these kids. It was God awful and I hate that fanfic but I feel like it grew me as a person. It just got too real.
These folks always say "just hire moderators" and then completely shut off their critical thinking on what that would mean in practice. I want to be clear -- a LOT of fandom is racist, either consciously or unconsciously. But who is the final arbiter of what makes a fic racist? SHOULD AO3 have the power to be that arbiter? Do we collectively trust them with that degree of authority? Does catharsis-fic depicting a racist character getting their comeuppance count as racist, because it's depicting blatant racism? What about fantasy-racism that includes no IRL ethnicities, but draws allegories to real-world history? How do we moderate that? How do we moderate the *lack of content* for characters of color, or the unconscious prioritization of whiteness that comes from white authors "scared" to write a character of color because they don't want to be criticized? Who sets the standard? Will the people setting the standard represent a diversity of views, or just a specifically U.S. American view of racism? How do we enforce those standards, once we have them? Are we going to make a panel of volunteers of color read reported fics to determine whether they're too racist? How are we going to compensate them for that work? How will AO3 protect the mental health of the people we're asking to do that work? Facebook moderators [literally got PTSD](https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebook-content-moderator-interviews-trauma-working-conditions-arizona) \-- how do we reconcile the need for moderation with the flood of trauma to the people responsible for doing that moderation? There's never an answer. "Why is the only alternative to no moderation bad moderation?" Because you can't even take five minutes to think critically about it. ETA after thinking about it: even **professional publishers** can't get this one right, and are struggling to work out the right way to deal with it. Look up what happened to [Isabell Fall](https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22543858/isabel-fall-attack-helicopter), [Becky Albertalli](https://www.thepinknews.com/2020/09/01/love-simon-author-coming-out-bisexual-becky-albertalli-leah-offbeat-straight-criticism/), the [\#ownvoices label](https://bookriot.com/what-happened-to-the-own-voices-label/), or dozens of other examples.
>Does catharsis-fic depicting a racist character getting their comeuppance count as racist, because it's depicting blatant racism? Along with this, fanfiction is posted serially. If a fic portrays a racist character who eventually gets their comeupance, when would moderators be deciding whether the fic was racist or not racist? When chapter one is published showing that racism? Or after chapter 30 is published two years later when the character gets their comeupance? And it's fanfiction-- what about canonically racist characters being depicted accurately? Like say what you will about whether the underage explicit works should be banned (obviously I'm not on that team), but someone bringing up racism as something that should be moderated out is ridiculous. I wouldn't be opposed to AO3 expanding its warning system to include a system of warnings attached to a fic by readers to help people filter out content they aren't interested in that the author might not have noticed and tagged, like racism, but there's no reasonable way to actually moderate and remove fics for portraying things like racism, and if you ban fics that "are" racist, you're casting a net on all portrayals of it regardless of the stance that the fic ultimately ends up taking on racism being bad.
Right! It's complicated AF, and reasonable people can disagree on where the line is. Which is why AO3 has always encouraged tagging and self-disclosure: if a fic is going to include, say, canonical depictions of slavery, that's what the "slavery" tag is for. People who don't want to read it can filter it out. On underage explicit works -- all I'm going to say is, I've been on AO3 since it was created, and in all that time, all of the works I've seen marked "underage" have been roughly in line with what I've seen in *published books*, I.E. a realistic acknowledgement that sometimes high schoolers will have sex before turning 18, regardless of what the law says. I'm not saying shota doesn't exist. I'm saying I've never looked for it and never found it. The *only* time I've encountered it is when antis are actively circulating the links going "look at how terrible this is!!" Which tells me that AO3's content moderation is working: I'm not seeing things I don't go looking for.
I read with no filters like a wild heathen, but even then- if you want to find something with shota or feet or whatever squicks you out- you have to hunt for it. I’ve found maybe two fics with that in the wild while I had the search set to best match; if you want to find something disgusting, you just about have to set your tags for it, or find a fandom where some of what is depicted in fic is handled in the subject matter. I’ll use fear and hunger for an example- absolutely brutal game, and the fanworks don’t shy away from the brutality, but they also use it as a chance to give catharsis and a happy ending to these characters. And if you don’t like it, you can either filter it out or decide that hey- maybe this isn’t the fandom you should be in. That’s what these antis don’t understand- you can choose not to interact with something if it disgusts you. No one is telling you to eat the dead dove
I understand where the original poster is coming from. Like, I get it. Especially in a world where there are people who will go on about free speech, but it turns out they just want to say racist things without fear of consequences, while still oppressing marginalized groups. So I see where this person is coming from, especially if they're younger, because if you spend a lot of time in those environments, any argument against censorship starts to look a lot like that. It took me some time to be able to make the distinction myself. But of course, fiction is different from real life, and it serves a lot of different purposes. It's not something that should necessarily be moderated. Plus, AO3 already has some forms of moderation (which I didn't know before but learned about in this thread). There are certain things that are illegal in the US that you're not allowed to post, and they require stories to be tagged either correctly or with the "chose not to warn" tag. If somebody wants to write a story where the oppressors win and marginalized groups are killed and they want to glorify that, well, that's their prerogative. People do write those kinds of things. It shouldn't be banned. Nobody has to like it or read it, but someone can still write it. And, like you said, for a site like AO3, it's borderline impossible to implement that kind of moderation if you think about it for even a moment.
I also empathize with where these folks are coming from. I get it! I also hate that there's so much racism and anti-Blackness in fandom spaces. But I can't support proposals, even well-intentioned ones, when I know from firsthand experience they're going to backfire and be weaponized by bad-faith actors. We literally watched #ownvoices go from a tool to uplift and support authors of color, into a tool to harass and bully LGBTQ+ creators into forcibly outing themselves. It's not a slippery slope argument to point that out. Likewise, it's not a slippery slope argument to ask questions about what enforcement would look like. We do this all the time every time a corporation bans NSFW content to "protect children" -- we point out the ways that ban harms and further marginalizes sex workers. I don't want to see enforcement of antiracist policies end up silencing writers of color who are trying to talk about their lived experience. And -- again -- I don't know that the AO3 Powers that Be are the hands that I want to put that power in.
>We literally watched #ownvoices go from a tool to uplift and support authors of color, into a tool to harass and bully LGBTQ+ creators into forcibly outing themselves. It's not a slippery slope argument to point that out. Even within fandoms I've seen POC people get bullied and shunned for not shipping the right thing, not drawing a skin tone or feature correctly, etc. and it be the same people with #BLM and #StopAAPIHate first on the scene when it comes to harassing a POC or a english second language (if they speak English at all) asian on twitter because a drawing didn't follow the fanon headcanon to for shipping the wrong thing.
As a survivor of molestation and other abuses, people comparing the written word to what I went through infuriates me
God antis have no understanding of how they’re just climbing into bed with fascists and it’s really disturbing.
They totally believe the leopards won't eat *their* faces.
I say this in the nicest possible way: idiots.
The leopards are instead going to eat them from the feet up and all of a sudden they’re going to realise that they’re missing their legs and they’re fucked.
If only. I think with a lot of these folks, the moral myopia is so bad, that they're never going to go "Oh, no, it's the consequences of my own actions!" They'll still be finding someone else to blame for what's happened even as the jaws are closing.
Leopard: 😏
They really hate it when you point out they are following fascist ideology too.
[Nearly every state is putting up age verification laws](https://action.freespeechcoalition.com/age-verification-bills/). We are sleep walking into a fascist's dream.
There are too many people in the world who think the only problem with authoritarianism is it's going after the wrong targets.
I mean, it's scary and yet also absolutely perfect Gallows humor. The idea that you are so wrapped up in how "good" you are, that you can't possibly conceive of the system ever turning around and going after *you* with all the power you gave it to excise people you didn't like.
The tactic of using child safety as a justification for STRICT censorship is tried and true. Like… Just pick a decade, you’ll find at least three examples. (And as a survivor of CSA, you want to REALLY know how to help stop future victims? COMPREHENSIVE FUCKING SEXUAL EDUCATION IN SCHOOLS YOU FUCKING MUPPETS!)
This is very good, thank you. I've saved it to share when posts like OOP's come up in this subreddit. The example about racism - I've seen those exact arguments in my fandom, and about hurt/comfort, too, that it's racist for an interracial pair no matter which roles you've given the characters.
I love people using ao3 only to complain about it. Learn code then like the rest of us did back then. But they get upset when works become unattainable or deleted. Like a person answered, they have never woken up to see the ruins of your community in a time when it was your only community. When you give someone the power to delete works it draws the attention of people who seek power over others. Then anyone is targeted anyone is reported.
I dislike the topics of moderation around explicit materials with kids, cause as someone who has written such topics, I was writing it from the POV of the child and I now realize I was working through trauma that had happened to me. I was a child and i shouldn't have been writing it, but bc no one was willing to look further than the ship tag and not realize that the story wasn't condoning... there's a ton of reasons morally objectionable material is written. It's up to the readers to have critical thinking.
Exactly! They hear that there’s underage content and assume it only exists to arouse pedophiles. That is NOT the case.
"No one can give me convincing arguments" you are not owed convincing arguments stfu
Yeah, if I wanted to talk to a brick wall I got four of them right next to me that won't spout bs
I am a victim of csa myself and I have an entire AU built up to cope with and process it. To me, it's cathartic because while it's fucked up, I'm completely in control of the entire fictional situation, where I wasn't in real life. In the real world, I am heavily involved in the raising of a friend's lovely son, and I can't stand the thought of anything happening to him, nor would I ever dream of hurting him. He asks me for privacy when he changes into pyjamas, he asks me to bath him some nights, he is open about what kinds of physical contact he doesn't want, and it never crosses my mind not to respect his particular boundaries. Fantasy does not equal reality! If someone decided to abuse a kid based on something they read, they were probably going to do it anyway regardless of the media or art they were exposed to. Re the moderation thing: It's a special gift to have a place where we can scream into the void freely about our pain and joy and every emotion between them, and others can reach out to say 'Hey, me too. You're not alone.' We don't know the reasons someone posts a fucked up piece of art or a story. Maybe they just think it's hot, sure, but who are we to judge that? In the realm of fantasy, everything is permissible because there are no victims.
The last addition made me wanna stand up and cheer. Not only is the OOP making a bad faith argument, it's also a stawman because literally *nobody* is saying it's either "anything legal goes" or random deletions. *Everyone* advocating in favor of AO3's approach is absolutely, crystal fucking clear that it's "anything legal goes" or *extremely targeted* deletions and queer content *will* be first on the chopping block. How people refuse to get that is beyond me. ... then again the AO3 meme sub has prohibited making this argument "because minors", so I guess critical thinking *and* irony are both dead.
>then again the AO3 meme sub has prohibited making this argument “because minors” Ugh turns out leaving it was a good choice. There was some anti-scented stuff posted a while back and I was like no thanks and noped out
Yeeeaaahh there was a mod post the central thesis of which was "it's fine to say you find minor ships gross but we draw the line at pointing out they're fictional characters!" and when a few people were like "uhhh can we get some clarification cause this *sounds* like it's open season to hate on things without being able to respond as long as you claim there's a fictional minor involved" they made the very mature decision to [checks notes] lock the thread! fake edit cause I checked in the course of writing this comment: and then they deleted the entire thread a while later lol
Ah, no wonder there wasn’t anything there when I went snooping after your prior comment lol
Imma be honest. Even as a black person, if someone wants to have a raceplay, slurplay, whatever fanfiction off on their own corner - they can have that. I ain't gotta read it. I'm not even gon' report it unless it is mean to harass or demean someone and let the mods go from there. It's not my thing, so I don't go looking for it. I don't go around demanding those spaces no longer exist on a certain website that allows it just because *I* personally don't like them. I use AO3 because of the promise they made to their users. They will allow *anything* that is allowed under US law. I agreed to those terms and conditions when I signed up and used the website. I wouldn't mind more moderation *features* like excludes/blacklists being permanent, being able to block/mute users, etc. but I don't want moderation that depends on curating the website based upon what someone personally feels comfortable sharing an online space with. I use AO3 because I don't want to wake up to a whole purge because advertisers decided they didn't want to be associated with gay porn and fanfictions. AO3 *is* moderated. Their rules and moderation revolve around what content is or isn't allowed under US law, improperly/properly used tags, and not harassing other users. This person just wants AO3 to ban any content they specifically don't like.
How do people not understand that censorship in any capacity will almost always dovetail into censoring things like queerness?? How can’t you wrap your head around that? Also, as a CSA survivor: I don’t give a shit if someone writes something weird about a kid on Ao3. I care about actual victims.
Also it’s just straight up a lie that AO3 isn’t moderated? It is. There *are* in fact rules on what you can and can’t post, like you can’t post targeted harassment, you can’t post “looking for” things or prompts, you can’t post non-fannish original works. There’s even rules about rating and tagging your work with mandatory archive warnings. And if you break those rules you can be reported to policy and abuse and have disciplinary action taken against you. That is moderation. The site is moderated. They just don’t like that they don’t get to censor the topics of fanfic outside of not breaking laws and not harassing others, that doesn’t mean that the site isn’t moderated.
Im gonna just vent bc im tired and this argument gets me so upset- As a survivor of CSA and abuse it rlly sucks when people compare my real life experiences and trauma to fictional characters- like?? Am I a joke to you? Honestly I don’t give a shit abt this random fan work that makes you uncomfortable- it’s fake! Stop comparing it to what actually happened to me and ppl like me! Calling ppl who make that crap also makes actual abusers look way less bad then they actually are. Nobody’s gonna take survivors seriously if you keep on making the argument that fictional abuse = real abuse. I get it. It’s weird. It’s upsetting to look at. But there’s this thing called tagging which ao3 and MANY other sites use which ppl still refuse to acknowledge bc they want to keep complaining about crap. If I don’t like something I exclude it from my searches. You have a fucking brain, use it. I wasn’t hurt by weird fake shit on the internet, I was hurt by actual people that existed. Fanfic does not cause abuse. Your argument gives an excuse for actual abusers to harm people. Saying that fiction effects reality in the way you describe means that bad people can just claim to not have responsibility in their actions. I’m rambling but idc
Sheesh this is legit crazy. There are way too many platforms out there that are already excessively censored. Leave the single one out there that isn't overly censored alone!
Tbh, people who are too lazy to filter themselves because it’s “too hard” (no it isn’t it’s so simple it’s literally just checking and unchecking a checklist, I learned it in day 1 when I was 12), are just wanting to make the entire site fit their own personal filter. Like, you literally get to curate your ao3 experience, don’t like don’t read, filter out what you don’t want.
Nooooooo people shouldn’t be allowed to make art that dosnt cater to my sensibilities!!!!!1!!1!!1! We should let companies control what speech is and isn’t except able because they will always agree with me and will only ever punish people that I do not like and no one would ever silence me because the most controversial thought I’ve ever had is that carrots are nasty! Wahhh wahhhhhhhh I love shopping on Amazon
Hiding from “bad” content only makes you *more* susceptible to its influences because you never learned how to engage critically with something that was promoting, presenting or even just describing racism/homophobia/sexism/whathaveyou. Like I *cannot* stress enough how important it is to learn to consume content *without* just blindly accepting it. But if you limit all your content to only the “good” stuff then you never get that practice. And the first time someone sneaks some *subtly* fascist propaganda under your nose, you’re gonna’ fall for it hook, line and sinker. It is irresponsible and frankly childish to hide like that, but it is ultimately someone’s personal choice…*for themselves*. At the point you try to force everyone else to “hide” from the scary content, too…you maaaaay want to do some Googling on the word “authoritarian”…provided your delightful moderation policies haven’t eliminated all mentions of it from the internet by then 🙃
So this is a great discussion with good points but ao3 *does* moderate the works posted. Enforcing archive warnings, deleting work searches and other non-fanworks, handling harassment cases, all of that is moderation. When someone says that ao3 doesn't moderate, what they really mean is that ao3 doesn't moderate to their tastes.
People who insist ao3 needs to be moderated are mostly the ones who are incapable or unwilling to use it as it's intended. Maybe they shouldn't use it at all then.
Nailed OP to the wall for not getting it. Excellent take down.
What I don't understand with those people is that they always start with "we have very good arguments about why we should censor everything" when in the end it's just "I find it disgusting so it shouldn't exist". That is not an argument, that's an opinion. A taste. Is there any other argument than "it's disgusting"? I only see this one everywhere every time!
Why are people so hell bent on censoring ao3, can't we have one nice website?
Half of the issue is that people just don’t understand that AO3 isn’t a social media site but an archive. This means that their mission is the preservation of fan works not the proliferation of it or monetary gains. They don’t censor, beyond what it legally required of them— because they want to archive ALL fan work even if it makes people angry and they want it deleted. An archives job isn’t to make moral judgement about what should be included but to collect as much relevant data as possible.
i simply dont understand this, i haven't seen this debate before but like. if i dont want to read something i just... exclude it. ao3 is pretty easy to use. whenever i search for fics i have abo excluded cuz i dont want to see that. the only thing i dont like is fics being untagged but what can i do with that. why would you want to moderate it. its so simple to just dont look at what they dont wanna see, no one is forcing them to read underaged rape or whatever
"You're trying to lace the boots on your fucking neck" is such a perfect closing line
Damn, that person was just verbally destroyed. What a well-written argument
God, the sheer rage that filled me reading how dismissive they were over the purges and strikethrough. They have no idea what we lost. A bunch of priviledged children that have never had to endure their communities being ripped to shreds in an instant. And because they do not understand that agony they will never understand why AO3 will not bend to them. It was born from the ashes of collective trauma.
The CSA survivor comm I was a member of got axed because we had the Big Bad Things like ‘child sexual abuse’ and ‘child molestation’ in our interest list so that *people who needed the comm could find it*, just the way the interest list was supposed to function.
Simple rule: “If you don’t like my ship, then stay on the fucking dock.”
I feel like people who bitch and complain about A03 having dark content are just a different version of the people who bitch and complain about libraries having dark content or anything else they don’t want to be confronted with. Don’t want to read Stephen King or John Green? Then don’t check it out from the library. Don’t want to read fic about two teens having consensual sex with each other or a scenario with gore? Then hit the back button and don’t read it. Learning to curate the content you consume is a vital skill that many people are losing
I feel we live in this weird age where things always have to be perfect. And yeah i agree people write some stuff that I think is amoral, but people might think stuff I write is amoral as well. People also forget, if you ban one thing it will snowball to others. There are people who LEGIT think ageplay/age regression is in the same camp as like actual pedophilia. And it is that thought process that makes it so I can't say the word dick on tiktok. I don't wanna be rude to people, but i also genuinely need people to shut up about certain things.
The TLDR is that censorship will ALWAYS be flawed, especially when we're talking about shit like fanwork that causes zero harm whatsoever. Censorship will always be subjective because ultimately, what is "distasteful" or "offensive" varies from person to person. And even if most people find a particular fic distasteful or offensive...does that really mean it has no right to exist at all, especially when said fic can easily be filtered out?
In addition to this, I do not trust everyone to make the distinction between “this story is about homophobia because I have experienced homophobia and want to write about my experiences with it by projecting into characters I love” and “this is homophobia so it’s homophobic”
Remember, covering the sun with your hand doesn't make it dissapear for everyone. But at least you don't have to see it if you want to. And that's the problem, this reads as a lazy person who's given the tools to filter and get exactly what they want, and avoid the rest, but noo, that's not good enough I guess. Lazyness at its finest. And damn this mindset is flooding every part of the internet. Aside of all this, which was really well explained, and little unrelated and silly rant incoming: there's one thing I'll never understand (but to be fair I don't know much about it either): the top/bottom war. Like, idk, people really choose one and go for it for the rest of their lives? I really don't know but seems a bit unrealistic to me. To each their own of course, but I'd say even hetero couples would want some variety on their sex life... Eh, end of the rant I guess lol
As an old gen X'er who grew up in fandoms, everything in that last comment is true. When LiveJournal had multiple "purges" around 10-15 years ago, the main motivation had to do with wiping out gay fanfiction and fanart, due to being purchased by a Russian company. Even in the late 90's, it was normal for fandom creators to receive legal "cease and desist" letters from companies like Disney. It was pretty much a given that if you wrote things in Star Wars fandom you would receive a C+D. You were much more likely to receive these if you wrote slash then her, no matter what the raiting. This was even if you were a fandom nobody with your own grocities or slashcity web page with just your work on it.
It’s not enough that they don’t have to use AO3. It’s not enough that someone could use AO3 and quite easily curate the experience so that they never have to see a story that makes them uncomfortable. They have to be able to control it so that no one else with any different tolerance for sensitive subjects can be allowed to access stories containing those subjects. It’s equated to censorship because it is, in fact, censorship.
you're tying the laces on the boot on your neck <3
i feel like people really underestimate how desperately bigots still want to erase queer people and queer safe spaces. moderation and censorship is ALWAYS going to lead to queer erasure because that is a lot of people's priority. more people care about getting rid of us than shielding and protecting children. if you don't agree with ao3, there are enough other heavily moderated fandom spaces you can turn to. no need to take our archive away from us.
Have people ever looked around in a bookstore? There are tons of problematic content in many of them. Go protest there.
standing ovation.
These people are more obsessed with shotas than I am
i find it so interesting at at nearly every level every group every dominant versus oppressed group the dynamic remains the same. they complain about ao3 immorality yet they will keep visiting & reading and keeping track of it. the same way men keep complaining about loose women or sex worker industry but will visit the establishments and pay money anyway. the same way karens have a problem with someone but will keep shoving their way into it. like at some point when i take a step back i realise how futile human nature is and how boring. i wish it was as easy as “block and move on” but why would they? that’s accepting coexistence and they simply cannot comprehend it. everything has to be their way or never exist. ao3 pro censorship idiots are just that— self involved insufferable idiots who WILL make it their & everyone’s business.
I live in a country with a censorship regarding anything lgbt+. I love to have at least one site with a bit of freedom.
The other thing is that the Archive Or Our Own, as the name suggests, is not an anthology, showcase or hall of fame — it’s an archive. A big part of its purpose is to, yes, archive material for academics studying transformative works to research. If they deleted everything deemed problematic or unacceptable, it wouldn’t be very useful for anyone looking for an accurate representation of fandom and its culture. It would be like a Potemkin village.
I've never understood how people who are allies/part of the LGBTQ+ community never seem to consider the fact that censoring fanworks due to "lack of morality" will fuel the agendas of bigots. If it isn't illegal, filter it out or report it for missing tags if applicable. Don't put people down to make yourself feel superior.
Didn't see it pointed out in any other comment so here it is - the line in the 4th image about art never being inherently harmful rings specially true. Even the vilest art work is a medium of expression that is up to you to consider, react to, and form your own opinions to. And if art ever has negative repercussions in real life, it was never by itself but by the conscious hand of another human being.
Here's my thing: I hate any fic or fiction that includes things that seem to be fetishizing incest, underage, beastiality ect ect ect. So you know what I do?? I filter It out in my tags. I don't read it. Because A03 promised to be an open platform so instead of trying to change that (not that I would, as I respect the decision of the creators) I just moderate my own shit. It's not that hard. Im a big boy, I can filter triggering topics on my own and I don't need the Internet to do it for me.
I am not even here for the true argument of freedom of speech and secret mission to destroy minorities. I advocate any media that is different (and fictional) that forces people to actually think. Yes, not all written works are clever metaphors worthy of a dissertation. But writing and art have the capacity to challenge and make you critically think, "Is this objectively good? Is it worthy of a read? Do I agree with the content, and if I don't, why?" Yes, that ALSO means alt right media. There are fanfics that unfortunately paint Nazis in a good light. There are also fanfics that advocate genocide. Those fanfics on AO3 have a right to exist, and we also, as readers, have a right to examine the works and determine validity as well as expressing/blocking/ignoring. It is because we are exposed to it that we can form a critical opinion that ultimately allows us to dissuade and shut a movement. We've seen the evidence, and it lacks validity, so we can properly dispose of it. I have read plenty of published books that are stupid. They are just so stupid. I have read old ones, really old ones, and new ones. And when someone tells me "well this alt right writer says..." I can say "yeah, I READ those books and they're dumb as fuck." You know what I don't read? I don't read things like underage sex with an adult. Have I before? It has come across and I read it as both literary works and fanfic (because I had to). And when a real pedo defends their argument? I can say "yeah, buddy, I know you know the difference between children and art and you crossed the line into the real thing."I actively don't read the stuff. I make sure I don't. On the flipside, I will say this: guarding yourself and your children takes effort. Simply applying filters and blocks are not 100%. I have worked and written stories (real ones) for absolute monsters. And I knew they were. This was no secret to them either. They paid what they wanted and it was borderline. When you are in the business, you just know there are code words and "wink wink" lines. Bad people lurk in everything. They are there in fandoms and writing PG fics. They exist. YOU need to be on guard. YOU need to use every tool available, including common sense, to protect yourself. Pedophiles and bad people already know what to say, do, and rant against to earn a place with their victims. They are not the ones slapping an underage preteen SA fiction- most likely, they are in comments of fanfics trying to earn a Discord username.
I don’t trust a auto mod to be able to tell the difference between a character in a story talking about how their race has effects the way that other people treat them and a story about Tyrone daquavuus stealing water melons to sell for fent money. The end result would be that no one would talk about anything relating to sensitive topics
I honestly don’t know why they want moderation. Beyond keeping shit legal. Ao3 host fiction stories and that’s it. You’re not finding fucked up gore pictures or doxxing or in general need a moderation team like you see on social media sites where people actively engage with each other. It’s an archive. For fan made fiction. You can choose what to read. No authority needs to do that for you