Exactly the point, isn’t it? Antis would tag everything as ‘child porn’ and ‘pedophilia’. They’d mass-tag particular authors as ‘pedophile’ out of nothing more than spite. They’d tag a fic as ‘racist’ when it ought to be ‘depiction of racism’. They’d tag things as ‘homophobia’ if a character identifies as queer.
And it’s not like we’d take that lying down, tagging back with ‘anti’, and ‘underage user’, ‘doesn’t know what words mean’. The tags would devolve in sense even as they increase in number, till we all look like the true trolls who were among us from the start, firing ‘dickbutt’ and ‘fappity fap’ at both sides from the trenches. Perhaps we’ll learn we were all trolls all along.
The Tag Wars would take their toll in the hundreds of thousands, leaving our once-green fandom fields littered with tag-bloated fanfic corpses and the odd solitary fluffy coffee shop AU that is the only thing left to grow out of the remains of our golden dream.
i know this isn’t gonna reach any of the people actually doing this, but I really need to stress to people making “”””joking”””” threats online, especially targeted at creators, that we don’t know who the fuck you are.
just because you seem harmless to yourself, just because you know there’s no way you could or would carry out those threats, does not mean the person you’re threatening knows that. Credible threats to even moderately popular public figures happen. There’s no fucking way of knowing whether this threat from you, a hostile stranger, is credible or not.
“My age is in my profile!!!!” You do know that people lie about that shit, right.
Like, all else aside – artists and panelists at cons are now warned not to accept food or drink. They’re sharing strategies on how to prevent their merch being destroyed or stolen by people who object to their ships. They’re limiting meet and greets and increasing security, because maybe you’re personally harmless, and maybe your friend is too, but there’s thousands of you, and it only takes one person taking things too far.
Dont fucking threaten strangers. Don’t make somebody dig through your profile to figure out if you might want to actually hurt or kill them, or if you’re just angry about fictional ships. It’s a monstrous thing to do.
today I learned that there’s a town in Quebec where a bunch of people grow giant pumpkins, and on one very special day a year, cut them up, empty them, and use them as a canoe. then have a race. a pumpkin race. it’s even called ‘the potirothon’, from potiron (pumpkin) and marathon.
this applies to our own call out culture in fanfiction as well
This is such a good article, definitely worth reading.
The line that stood out to me the most was this:
But a growing number of critics say the draggings, well-intended though they may be, are evidence of a growing dysfunction in the world of YA publishing. One author and former diversity advocate described why she no longer takes part: “I have never seen social interaction this fucked up,” she wrote in an email. “And I’ve been in prison.”
because if that doesn’t tell you how yikes this shit in fandom/media spaces has gotten, idk what will.
Lordhammercy I don’t get why English insults are so limited, always some kind of sex act and a body part, maybe a relative thrown in for good measure, when we’ve got a whole historical world’s worth of stolen grammar, and a whole modern world’s worth of zoology. We could be mixing it up like cocktails, ya foxy giraffe spots! It would be entertaining!
It’s one thing if they wanted to start a dialogue about why such and such is racist etc, but to allow reader tagging? Good lord. My first response there very clearly said too many people don’t make a distinction between depicting a thing and actually being a thing. It’s why Huckleberry Finn keeps getting banned. And from the looks of it, doodlebug there would be heading the committee.
The only place I’ve seen that lets other posters add tags is pixiv, which is a visual art site, and it only has 10 tags max, the OP can always delete the tags, OP tags can’t be deleted by anyone else, and the OP can always choose to lock tags on a post. Also, most tags are in Japanese. The only reason this works at all is because it’s visual art, the tag limit and OP control, and because everyone expects porn anyway. There’s no room for anything beyond a fandom, a ship, the rating tag, and a few basic categories.
That sounds reasonable given the nature of the site, and I’m absolutely certain those restrictions are not at all in keeping with what antis have in mind for AO3.
@justforthebs Hey flyshit, don’t go trying to reframe the argument as being about critique and social dialogue and trying to look responsible after the fact.
It is and always was about you thinking reader-assigned tagging is a good idea even after its been explained to you at length why it’s anything but. Please do attempt to grow enough of a central nervous system to put your raw little feefees aside when you read, and figure out the difference between character viewpoint and author. And stop calling people niggas when they’re not. Racist cunt.
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