labelleizzy:

naamahdarling:

zetsubonna:

prismatic-bell:

zetsubonna:

I think what probably gets me deeply into my feelings about this “JKR should have just made her students Of Color to start with, she can’t ret-con and pretend she did it right the first time” is that I grew up with Anne Rice and Anne McCaffery, two female fantasy writers who hated headcanons and fandom and sued people for deviating from their original vision or doing any kinds of derivative works without their express contractual permission.

I feel like people who get irritated with her about defending black!Hermione don’t appreciate how much healthier JKR’s attitude toward the inclusivity movement in her fandom is than theirs was. Or Moffat’s is. Or Gatiss’s. Or Whedon’s. Or Green’s. Or even, until very recently, Lucas’s.

She’s not a PCR, but goddamn, at least she’s passing us the milk rather than pissing in our cornflakes.

Jo is actually almost entirely responsible for fanfiction being what it is today.

BUT WAIT, I hear older fandomers cry. X-Files, Star Trek, Xena, how dare you. And yes, I say to those fandomers, you held those banners first! Be proud of the paths you forged. But Jo–

Jo did something no author or creator had ever done before.

She was a household name who encouraged fanfiction.

When I first began writing fanfiction in 1998, it was common practice to preface your fic with this massive disclaimer about how you weren’t selling it, and it was for fun, sometimes quoting the Fair Use part of the Creative Commons act, and even begging authors not to sue. Because in those days, that was a very real danger. Eleven-year-old me had reams of fanfiction on floppy disks I didn’t dare send to archives because I might get arrested and taken to Plagiarism Jail.

And then there was Jo. And no, Jo said, this is not a private amusement park at which you may stare longingly from the other side of wrought-iron gates. It is a giant sandbox. Here are my pails, here are my toys. Come sit and play with me. Eventually you may decide you like some other sandbox better, and all I ask is that you leave my toys here for others to play with, and not try to take them with you. But why should I lock you out of my sandbox? It is, after all, far more fun to play in a sandbox with many people than by yourself.

People were boggled. They didn’t get it. They thought she was crazy. And the fans? They kept loving, and writing, and drawing, and creating, and Jo kept loving them back. Potter Puppet Pals, A Very Potter Musical, Potter!, Remus and the Lupins, all stuff Jo just kind of went “whatever, they’re having fun.”

And attitudes began to change. And then someone else threw her lot in with Jo, someone who doesn’t get a lot of credit for contributing something massive to fandom culture and should:

Stephenie Meyer.

Yeah, you read that right. The goddamn author of Twilight, who refused to sue teenage girls who just wanted Bella to end up with Jacob. (And who is way more gracious than I would be about Fifty Shades.) She actually has a fanfiction archive right on her website! I’m serious: Smeyer has links to a personally-curated list of Twilight fanfiction she personally enjoyed or found interesting. Whatever you may think of her writing, that loving attitude of “we’re all here to have fun, I love that you love my world and my characters, please enjoy” was such a departure from the days of C&D letters and page-long disclaimers.

These two women changed the face of how fandom works forever. Yes, their work is flawed. They are products of their time and upbringing. But just the fact that they embrace the concepts of “my world as I see it and my world as you see it are not the same, and that’s not just okay, that’s good” is something to be celebrated.

I have a lot of issues with Meyer, but her treatment of fans is not one of them.

I did NOT know that about Meyer. That is VERY cool.

And yes, I remember those days, and they were not good days. They were days in which people were frightened of things that, in retrospect, seem and ARE ridiculous, but were quite threatening at the time.

fandom history. This is cool.

Yeah, you can be upset with JKR about things, but the tweets about canon sidebits aren’t Jo waking up one morning going “I’m going to spit out something today on Twitter to stay relevant!”

She’s answering people who @ her or ask her things via DM.

They’re engagements with fans.

underage ship makes you a bad person”) only a fairly recent thing, appearing bc of the voltron fandom, or did it happened in the past, like ten years ago or more ?

freedom-of-fanfic:

Kinda
depends.

In
regards to the moralist stance of fandom anti-shippers – the stance that
anything smut-related, kink-related, or addressing sex in any way, with
particular objection and/or attention paid to LGBT+/queer sex, will ‘harm the
children’ and must be eradicated and/or hidden from sight – it’s at least as
old as Christianity as an organized religion.

Such
moralists have gone after transformative fandom in the past, particularly
targeting sexually explicit content and especially
LGBT+/queer content. MLM-friendly
(slash-friendly) transformative fandom’s run-in with such a group, calling
themselves the Warriors for Innocence (you can’t make this stuff up), led to
Strikethrough and Boldthrough on LJ, which helped galvanize the creation of the Archive of Our Own.

In
regards to intracommunity violence with words, threats, and more over what
people choose to ship: that’s definitely as old as fandom itself. Shipping wank
(as we called it back then; now we would say ‘discourse’) forms the backdrop of
the wild and entertaining story of con artist Miss Scribe, who expertly played each faction of the Harry/Ginny, Harry/Draco, and
Harry/Hermione ship war off each other to push herself to fandom fame. HP
fandom was wild: fandom is wild, and has been for a long, long time. being
truly cruel and nasty to one another in personally devastating ways over fandom
is not an anti-exclusive phenomenon in any way.

In
regards to using social justice language to bully other fandom members: the
first instance of widespread damage being inflicted on a creative online
community specifically by calling everything they hated ‘problematic’ (that I
am aware of) is the case of
RequiresHate/Winterfox/Benjanun Sriduangkaew. The devastating and chilling
effect WF singlehandedly inflicted on the SFF community – particularly on other
authors of color – was detailed by The Mixon Report ( http://laurajmixon.com/2014/11/a-report-on-damage-done-by-one-individual-under-several-names/
).

WF was –
is – the Fandom Anti precursor case, complete with terrifying threats of
violence and exposure towards people who dared to disagree with her cutting,
cruel ‘reviews’ of SFF works. She couched her cruelty in terms of social
justice to make it much harder for people to call her out and found it very
effective at protecting her for a long, long time. And in the years since her
reign of terror was partially checked by Mixon’s callout, social media has only
become more ripe for abusive bullying via progressive language.

Using
social justice language and moralist purity culture together – our own members torching
fandom creativity and freedom from the inside in order to win ship wars and
drive out social enemies – is the latest remix on all of the above.

The
landscape of the internet changed a lot between 2007, when Strikethrough happened,
and the mid-2010’s, when the Mixon Report was issued and fandom-as-activism
started to really get wings. Also, a lot of LGBT+/queer strides were made in
the US & across the western world in terms of improving visibility,
awareness, and legislative protection. (Not as much as one might hope, but still.)
shipping The Gay Ships in fandom is still relatively weird (believe it or not,
mlm shipping is still a minority of shipping activity), but not seen in such a
destructive, deviant light as it had been before. There’s a lot more open
acknowledgement of being not-straight or not-cis than there used to be, and
fandom spaces are no exception.

Nonetheless,
fandom antis picked up the torch that groups like Warriors of Innocence
dropped. While many antis ship mlm ships themselves, they take rival mlm ships
and scrutinize them under the scorching rays of purity culture, find them
wanting, and call everything touched by that ship tainted. They even echo the
WoI cry that everything they hate is secretly pedophilia and only loved by
pedophiles, perhaps unaware of how devastatingly dangerous this narrative is to
push in LGBT+/queer spaces.

Like
Winterfox, their only goal is self-advancement (or advancement of what they
like over what they hate), and they have no scruple about causing harm to
others in the name of getting what they want for themselves. In their
worldview, they are the protagonists in a story with protagonist-centric
morality. fandom antis are warriors for innocence! They are, of course, Always Right.
Everyone who is against them must be evil and dangerous and harmful; everyone
who slows their progress or questions their actions is against justice, fair
play, and protecting the marginalized. No attack on the character of a
dissenter can be too strong, because it’s impossible to be against antis and a
good person at the same time.

But in reality: it’s just a shipwar, and purity/sj language is just the newest ammunition.

Moral
panic isn’t new; people being cruel to each other with whatever tools they have
at their disposal isn’t new. transformative fandom being considered weird and
socially unacceptable isn’t new. Fandom policing fandom on a large scale is
somewhat new. But the only thing that I think is truly, completely ‘new’ about fandom
anti-shipping is that where we used to argue ship wars based on what was more
canon, now we argue ship wars based on what is ‘more pure’ or ‘more progressive’.

Incredibly,
this is even more subjective than interpreting canon! In fandom, no ship is more pure or moral than
another: the ‘rules’ of shipping are all artificial in an environment built for
infinite imagination. It’s literally arbitrary. Imaginary. Absurd.

Antis
impose these rules, loosely based on morality and progressiveness, because without
them, they have no power. And many of us ‘buy’ into anti-shipper ‘rules’
because if we don’t, anti-shippers will do whatever is necessary to traumatize
or intimidate us into submission or silence.

ardwynna:

I am disgusted by the insistence of some younger fans that AO3 be made child safe and fit to be an electronic babysitter. AO3 was dreamed up and built out of the ashes of the ff.net purge, Strikethrough, Boldthrough, and any number of smaller scale attempts at silencing us, isolating us or making us create less than we can. It was built by adults for adults from the ground up. It’s entire purpose was to give fandom a hub nobody else could drive us from.

And now these young folk, some of them well-meaning but misguided, but too many of them just thrilling on the ‘power’ they think comes from their pseudoactivism, are demanding that we abandon what we made and why we made it, and turn it over to their control, in the fine tradition of the lawsuit-happy lazy parents and homophobic fundamentalists before them.

They could go to ff.net, there’s still plenty of traffic there and the work of content limitation is half done. They could revive something tame as they like on LJ. They could even learn to code and build their own damn site if they really cared to. But no, they’d rather have AO3. Because it’s the cool place. The place with all the views. With no thought to how long it would stay the cool place if all the adults moved on like they think we should. Who’s paying for the servers and tweaking code? Not them. Who’s making that crowd they want to be viewing their works? Not them.

The censorship and fake activism was bad enough but this attitude of theirs, that they’re entitled to what we built and what we made, entitled to change it for their purposes and profit while we get fuck all, but that we should still stick around and do the heavy labor behind it for them of course, that needs to be driven the hell out of these little neo-colonizers before they start trying it on a bigger scale. Had quite enough of that already, children. Stop.