medie:

feanna:

pipistrellus: the ao3 discourse is interesting to me bc i feel like theres a big disconnect between ppl who Were There For Strikethrough of course but also in a more general way, people for whom Strikethrough was not a Weird Anomaly – people who grew up in the late 80s/early-mid 90s climate of BANNING JUDY BLUME BOOKS FROM LIBRARIES BC AN ADULT WROTE TEENS DOING SEX ! and stuff… like… ppl for whom “disingenuous right-wing ~for the family~ morality org claims to wanna protect vulnerable people but SOMEHOW MIRACULOUSLY ends up just banning kids from reading about sex or gay shit or talking about having been raped” is really… just… the norm. like. thats the baseline of this discourse… that’s… you know. i dont know. i dont mean this in a YOU GOTTA UNDERSTAND WHERE WE WISE OLD PPL ARE COMING FROM thing i mean it in a … i genuinely think that there are two paradigms here and that it is probably hard to grok aspects of them if you grew up in a cultural atmosphere which can lead you to claim ~Strikethrough was an anomaly~ rather than the system working as intended. Strikethrough wasnt a Good Protective Thing which ON THE EDGES also ACCIDENTALLY took out a FEW “innocent” comms and journals… Strikethrough did what it was intended to do, and it was only one incident in a long, looooong history of organizations like that one doing, or trying to do, the same damn thing, Yeah, fandom was weird thing to be into (and not the kind other people find endearing), and definitely UNDERGROUND. You had to definitely go looking. And while not everybody elses weird stuff in fandom was your weird stuff, you were all the target of “normal” people together. AO3 was revolutionary!! I remeber when it was first posed as an idea. Also, I still remeber the women, who had a physical zine shipped to Germany and had to go to customs where they told her they check magazines so people don’t order porn, not that she (women) would!!! (Yeah, that K/S zine had some explicit gay art in it, she was lucky they didn’t actually look inside.) So that’s also were people are coming from. When I got into fandom, there was still a BIG Het/Slash divide, and Slash was a warning! (and slasher and identity). Not to say that everything was better, or something. But there was always the feeling that you were transgressing in some way by being there. And you knew you weren’t wanted on platforms made for “normal” people. The constant warnings people put on stuff, where “please don’t sue me!” was a real thing, and that adult stuff couldn’t be on many of the pages/archives, and sites that didn’t allow gay content, etc.. We remeber all the things that weren’t allowed to be posted on certain sites, that is why the AO3 even came into being.



Yeah, I got into fandom around the same time. I can remember getting banned off a Sentinel mailing list because I spoke up in defense of a person who’d accidentally forwarded a slash email to the wrong list. (It was an accident and yes they got hardcore yelled at).



I can remember having to mail proof of my legal age to a adult mailing list before I could get in. (Yes they were legit, no it wasn’t an identity scam)



We developed pseudonyms to protect ourselves online because people got fired for being fannish and for writing slash. People got harassed in their offline lives (yep, fandom doxxed long before the word got coined). I can remember some fans having it impact custody battles.



The OTW and the Ao3 rose out of fans basically swearing ‘never again’ because we got so damn tired of being attacked. The Ao3 gave us a place to post, bu the OTW’s advocacy work has done a lot to legitimize fandom.



Sometimes I think we did the job too well, because while it’s gotten better, all that stuff really hasn’t gone away and I worry so much about the kids coming up in fandom now. Throwing around personal details like it’s nbd, pics, whatever.

It can come back to haunt you.



Tag your shit so people don’t have to see it, but lay off the censorship talk. That’s a road you don’t want to go down.