naryrising:

solivar:

quinfirefrorefiddle:

medie:

allthemarvelousrage:

ubertumbleweed:

allthemarvelousrage:

jinxedwood:

kittykatknits:

lordhellebore:

indecento:

avocadoshypothesis:

raincityruckus:

bob-morley:

raincityruckus:

bob-morley:

First of all what year is this that y’all still use the word squick (????) secondly this isn’t whatever that is this is going to a place that most of us go to (the Bellamy/Clarke tag on ao3!!) to get away, and that we treat as a safe space, only to see like incest fic (a personal trigger of mine!!) or rape fic or like whatever other bullshit y’all are circle jerking to like? Keep it on your kinkmeme page! Because unfortunately we can’t filter “nasty ass fanfiction written by middle aged women” on ao3, sure as fuck wish I could though!

nb: Sorry to shift this sideways to my personal blog but this really doesn’t need to be cluttering up the Kink Meme tumblr, you understand. 

To your tags “

#ANYWAY#I think I asked nicely the first time lmfao

”. You absolutely did ask nicely which I’m appreciative of. However, being thankful that someone chose not to accuse me of molesting a child I lived with (my inbox has been wild) is a surreal place to be in my life. 

I use squick for a couple of reasons, the first of which being that I’m nearly 30 and have been active in the fanfiction community since the 7th grade so I’ve always called it a squick. The other, more salient, reason is that a squick is not a trigger. I’m firmly of the mind that fandom in general uses trigger with little regard for the actual significance for people who are triggered by things. Not offended or grossed out but genuinely triggered. While I’m sure that there are absolutely fics which have genuinely triggered people and I of course can’t speak to anyone’s personal experience, the vast majority of people who say fic is triggering them are not, in fact, suffering from a resurgence of deeply harmful psychological trauma which significantly affects their ability to lead “normal” lives. They just don’t like it. Being upset by something isn’t the same as being triggered by it. 

To that end if you are making AO3 your “safe space” and expect that you will not be confronted by content that you find offensive you are acting in error. As was pointed out the last time I tried to run a Kink Meme for this fandom, AO3′s mission statement from conception has been to host fanfiction without morality policing or censorship with some very few exceptions (personal attacks and plagiarism being two such exceptions). AO3 and quite frankly fanfiction in general shouldn’t be where you look to find a safe space; There are too many people looking for too many disparate things. 

If you want safe space within the Bellarke shipdom or fandom in general I heartily encourage you to create that. Back in the day (#fandomgrandma) personally run fanfiction archives were all the rage. I’m sure that the (free) source code for those, complete with forums, is still floating around on the internet. If my experience in the Bellarke shipdom has taught me anything it’s that you will absolutely get a bite if you decide to host a The 100 or even just Bellarke archive with morality rules. If you’d like to see what those kinds of private archives can look like: Pomme De Sang was my stomping grounds for a while. Yeah, I made some questionable choices in high school but the PdS archive and forum are a pretty standard example. 

It’s gonna be a long day isn’t it?

omg i’m deadass so fucking tired of old people 

This just in: 30 is now Old. No one tell the Bellamy stans how old Bob Morley is.

edit to add: 

Actually, fuck you. I’m really over this fandom being so moralizing and self important. I worked really hard on being clear and articulate and non-confrontational about something which is a really sensitive subject for me. In case you were wondering, yeah I’m still raw about last time and the things people have been saying to and about me in my inbox or on GG run the gambit from exhausting to legitimately terrible.  

I treated your concern with respect and actually addressed it because I know that it’s important to you and it’s shared by other people. I don’t want to blow off your experience and the parts of it which are troubling that I play a role in just because I disagree with where you’re coming from. So I tried to be helpful, I gave resources and a good fucking idea. It’s this off hand dismissal of anything that might complicate a narrow, clinical world view which makes me so sick of this fandom. 

You try to run something nice and you get shit.

You know what the worst part is? I’m very annoyed and yet still sitting here being genuinely and notably grateful that a) you’re not a former friend who has decided to go for the throat and b) you’re not accusing me of being a rapist. I honestly can’t even tell if fandom’s gotten worse of if I’m just a lot more tired. 

Fuck it, I’m going to the beach. 

All of this 100%

Also: @bob-morley I don’t think that this is so much a matter of who’s “old” and who isn’t, as opposed to who has experience in fandom.

People who are experienced in fandom already know what squicks are and triggers are, and they already know that it’s perfectly fine to have either and to not want to read/see things because of them. Seriously! Not everything is for everyone! And that’s fine!

They also know that Ao3 is a website that is literally founded on the principles of allowing any and all types of fiction to be posted and respected. They have actual real life lawyers to protect said fanfictions and the people who post them. So by all means, send them an angry letter, sign a petition, become a lawyer and boycott the website all together: do what you want, I don’t care. They’ll laugh in your face, and that’s assuming that you even get a response in the first place.

(I do want to add: there’s no shame in not being experienced in fandom!!
We all start somewhere. The real problem is when we pretend that we know
everything about the culture that we’re immersing ourselves in. It’s a
problem when we bust in here like we own the place, then start telling
people who have been doing this for years and literally built the
culture that we now get to enjoy and share: “you’re doing this wrong and
you’re a piece of shit person because I said so.”)

You are far from the first person to decide that “my own personal ideals are the highest of the high, and everyone else needs to leave so that way I can enforce my safe space” and you will absolutely not be the last.

However, if you were experienced in fandom, you would know just how dangerous this mentality is. You would know that all it takes is for one thing to be compromised (ei: no rape/incest fics) and then everything comes tumbling down.

“But Avocado! Aren’t you jumping to conclusions?? Surely we can just take out the bad things without getting rid of the good things like LGBT+ rep and freedom of expression??”

Unfortunately, my sweet little sugar plum, people have tried this time and time again. And guess what? It’s failed. Time. And. Time. Again. One thing gives and before you know it you have a website where you’re only allowed to post PG fanfics with M/F pairings and no premarital sex or violence or drugs or literally anything like that and no I’m not exaggerating. It has happened. Time. And. Time. Again.

“So what are we to do?? There are so many horrible horrible things out there and by golly, I shouldn’t have to read them!!”

Well, here’s the real kicker: you totally don’t have to read anything you don’t want to! I KNOW. SHOCKING. BRAND NEW INFORMATION. I highly suggest that you make use of Ao3′s extensive tagging system, which is fully decked out with Rape/Non-Con warnings, Explicit Warnings, Violence Warnings, and honest to god so so many tags that it’s almost like you could tag absolutely anything and everything on that damn website.

Oh wait– YOU TOTALLY CAN.

“But Avocado!! What if there’s a fanfic that isn’t tagged properly???”

Well, my precious baby dew drop, you could always politely ask the author to properly tag their content. But after that? You’re just going to have to close the fic and stop reading it. I know. It’s an impossible task, but when you’re left unsupervised on the internet you’re going to have to be your own advocate. Don’t read what you’re not comfortable reading. It’s that easy. You’re allowed to stop reading at any time too! I promise. It’s totally allowed.

“BUT AVOCADO!!! WHAT IF THEY’RE WRITING EXPLICIT INFORMATION IN THE DESCRIPTION???? WHAT IF THEY USED BAD WORDS AND THE VERY SHORT DESCRIPTION WAS ENOUGH TO MAKE ME EXTREMELY UNCOMFORTABLE TO THE POINT THAT I FELT COMPELLED TO SEND ANGRY MESSAGES TO PEOPLE ONLINE?????”

You may not like this, darling sweet pea honey pie, but if you are that easily affected by content (and there’s no shame in that!! Genuinely, having squicks/triggers is nothing to be ashamed of and you do not have to live your life as if you don’t have them) then Ao3 probably isn’t the website for you. And I know that sucks to hear, considering that it’s arguably the biggest and best website for fanfiction, but it is not created to be a safe space. It’s just not. So if that’s what you need, then you might need to look in other places.

oh my god what the hell did I just read I need brain bleach. blergh.

also: everyone has addressed the basic points here ie ao3 being a safe space for WRITERS and squick vs trigger and the likes and y’all have been very polite and lovely, so since I’m on a sideblog and I can be as blunt as I want, I’d really like to point out that the concept of

100kinkmeme:

I hate to break it to you, but I’m not actually the boss of anyone. Similarly, you are not actually the boss of anyone. What adults choose to post on AO3 is at their own discretion. But don’t worry, the beautiful thing about AO3 is that everything is neatly labeled and clearly tagged so you needn’t worry about accidentally stumbling into a fic which squicks you.

And to my writers, I do urge you to respect people’s desire to easily avoid fic they know would upset them by clearly labeling and properly tagging your fic if you choose to post it; our fandom will fucking self destruct if we start having high (potential) squick factor fics cropping up all willy nilly, unlabeled and tricksy. And I’d care some what less about that except I’m the one at whose blame is going to be laid.

And I would like to say, to those of you have decided that the Kink Meme is little more than a breeding ground for sexual deviants. Yes, hello, thank you for forcing me to turn off anon. On an (admittedly rushed) search of the ~100 filled prompts (way to go, perverts) only ~15 of them rate trigger warnings and that includes the 6 consensual, of age Daddy! or Mommy!kink fics because I know for some twee and precious flowers people that is squicky. But frankly I shouldn’t really have included them because even if they were real people (which they aren’t) everyone in them is a consenting adult. Is there stuff on the Kink Meme which might upset people? Yeah there is, but a great deal more of it is Abby getting lucky with everyone like the mega space babe she is, and one time Clarke and Harper took a bath (personal favorite).

Why yes I am sensitive and defensive about this, how could you tell?

Because unfortunately we can’t filter “nasty ass fanfiction written by middle aged women” on ao3, sure as fuck wish I could though!

is like…. the most fucking hilarious thing conceived in the history of hilarity never mind that it 100% reeks of self-entitled in a way that’s… almost cute if we assume y’all are young and weren’t around when fandom wasn’t involved in purity wank wars. or better, if purity wank wars happened usually they were against fandom by external people. but never mind.

first thing: sorry to break it but ‘nasty-ass fanfiction’ can be written by anyone and I’m 90% sure that most bad fanfic I read wasn’t from OLD PEOPLE, whatever you mean by it.

second thing: when I started writing fanfic at the ripe age of fourteen it was shit. like. 100% shit. I can self-testify that. I started getting better at it after… reading… fanfic… written by older people. some of the best fic I ever read was from fucking older people. some of the best smut I ever read was from people over the age of forty. I learned more from the ***MIDDLE AGED WOMEN*** than I learned from my peers.

also: middle-aged women are not your enemy, middle aged women are not your fucking mother, middle-aged women have rights to sexual fantasies same as y’all, middle-aged women don’t write particularly nasty shit or nastier than average and it frankly disgusts me that someone would just go like ‘EW OLD PEOPLE’ on this, because wow then y’all complain about ageism? fuck that. middle-aged and old women and young women and in between can write whatever fanfic they want and they can post it wherever they hell they want and they aren’t your babysitter nor they have some duty to keep you safe from shit you don’t like.

also: when I was sixteen I started meeting people in fandom/the internet outside of my immediate friends who were my age. a few of them were over forty and had been in fandom for years. you know what happened? we got along perfectly well and no one thought it was weird that we talked to each other. wow. amazing, right? I’ve been friends with nasty middle aged women when I was younger than most people fighting puritan wank wars on this hell of a website and I’ve kept on befriending them since and I’ve been friends with people much younger than I was and none of us died for it. wow. amazing, innit? anyway, if all fanfiction around was written just by teenagers the quality would drop for fucking sure.

also: guys, were you born yesterday or what, because kink memes have always existed and always will and the one hereby mentioned is actually pretty tame by the standards of the good old days of my fandom experience. like. blacklist what you don’t like on ao3 or tumblr, don’t go on the kinkmeme and leave people alone. also, if y’all are twenty and according to you 30 is old: hate to break it to you but you’ll be there in no time and I hope for you you’ll have reconsidered your stance because by then we’re all going to be fucking damn ancient then.

learn some fandom history, learn some basic respect because you wouldn’t talk to your mother’s friends like that, learn to use your fucking tools to have a safe experience on the internet (spoilers: I once was in a KM where at some point all the prompts turned noncon and I just stopped going there because I hate noncon but I didn’t tell them to stop prompting noncon how amazing) and stop sounding like self-entitled little brats if you want to look even halfway mature. spoilers: if you’re eighteen or so you’re an adult and if you’re older than sixteen you’re on the way there. learn some maturity or good luck handling real life when it hits you in the face.

christ, I can’t be reading this pseudo-calvinism purity rhetoric in the year of the lord 2017.

Thank you!

Really this “ew old people” thing is so annoying, and also the whole “MIDDLE AGED WOMEN” spiel is so fucking misogynistic it’s unbelievable. “Ewww, women who could be/are mothers shouldn’t have sexual desires/fantasies/express them.” Right, go tell yourself you’re a feminist instead of somebody walking in the footsteps of a long and ugly tradition of pathologising women’s (of ALL ages) sexuality and sexual expression.

That last comment though. So much.

If every fanfic written or by someone over the age of 29 was taken off the internet, the fandom content would be decimated. We make up a surprisingly large chunk of *your* (lmao) fandom.

Also, AO3? Conceived, created and run by older fans so you’ll get no joy there.

I always find it hilarious when a teen swaggers into fandom and declares that its ALL THEIRS – meanwhile, the Star Trek and Doctor Who grannies are in the corners swapping ezines and wondering if the young whippersnapper will ever figure out that nobody will will give a shit what she thinks until she stops whining and treating the fandom writers like a goddamn vending machine and actually starts CONTRIBUTING to the fandom instead.

I’m 36. I’m pretty sure my core readers would have a pitchfork-and-torch mob formed before the second fic came down. Thing about us “nasty ass middle age” writers is we come with Our People. Also, we’re not middle aged.

Cheers.

These people who are So Young They Cannot Handle Thinking Of 30 should use their youth to learn where the hyphen on their keyboard is and start filtering unwanted fics out, FFS.

Tangentially related: I once read a really good fic where the epilogue was “The years had been kind to her” and she was 34.

…fuck, I knew I was fandom old, but apparently 36 is fandom Methuselah. All I can say to these kids is we were you once and, kids, a little advice. Not all fandom grandmas are created equal, but find a good one

 I owe so much education to the ladies of the Magnificent Seven fandom. Sure, they taught me a lot about writing (bless that fandom. I’ve never had one work so well) but they did a hell of a lot more than that.

My dad died of a massive heart-attack just a few months before I graduated high school. I was gutted, but I had just seen the Magnificent Seven premiere so I went online looking for people to talk to about it.

I found fandom.

I met women who were probably about the age I am now and I am not kidding when I say they were a godsend. I got comforted and supported by women all over the world. No matter when I dialed in (yes, dialed) there was an email waiting or someone on a messenger I could talk to. 

I got through one of the darkest periods in my life because of fandom. Then

They lovingly knocked the stupid out of my sheltered, 17 year old head. I learned a lot about how to be unapologetically a woman, that the world was a lot bigger than my day to day said it was, how to come to the aid of the people around me whether or not I agreed with their philosophies or not, they taught me how not to be a shitty person, basically.

All the while encouraging me to create in a way nobody in my offline life was doing.

Basically, if you’re a kid in fandom these days, quit sassing your elders and listen to them.

Otherwise, quit poking the bear. Fandom grandmas have been through more shit than you can possibly imagine and they absolutely are going easy on your disrespectful ass.

I was in my mid teens when I discovered the Stephanie Plum fandom. Most of the fans in the Yahoo Group my dial up connection got me to (through AOL) were in their forties. And damn, their kindness and common sense and sense of perspective probably actually saved my life.

I’m 33 now. If I can give that gift to even one younger fan, then I think I will have paid forward what those women gave me. (And I bet they’re still in fandom, in their sixties, even if I might never find them again. Rock on ladies, and Ranger forever!)

I’m forty-four.

I discovered organized online fandom for the first time when I was in my twenties in college and never left, only expanded my interests, and turned some of the attention I gained from my fannish writing activities into a successful tabletop roleplaying game writing career.

My oldest fandom friends? Women in their sixties.

If you think “nasty ass fanfiction written by middle aged women” is the problem, kid, have I got some news for you. Creativity doesn’t end when you reach a certain age bracket. Interest in genre fandom doesn’t end when you reach a certain age bracket. Fandom doesn’t end when you reach a certain age bracket. And it’s adults that do most of the heavy lifting of fandom creation and maintenance.

My not so polite advice? Extract your heads from your asses, learn how to use content filters, and get over yourselves. You are not the first fandom generation nor will you be the last.

If you use AO3 you had best be thankful for those middle aged women fans because by and large (there are some wonderful middle aged men and nb folks too) they are the ones who built and have maintained the Archive for the past decade.  I am going to be 40 next month, I’ve been a volunteer in one capacity or another with AO3 since 2010, and I am not even close to the oldest person on the team.  Don’t come into the house we built and tell us we aren’t welcome there.  

@bob-morley Go back to fanfiction.net and stay there