I was an extremely precocious young reader who regularly checked out books for people aged anywhere from 16 and upward. My parents encouraged this, and while they occasionally were curious as to what I read, they generally trusted me to choose appropriate books for myself. Spoiler alert: I didn’t. I read a whole lot that was way out of my league.
Around eleven or twelve, I checked out my first smutty book from the library. I had no idea it was smutty, and very little on the cover or inner fly indicated this. It was called The Book of Shadows by James Reese. I read it during my lunch breaks at school. Inside was the following (that I can remember):
A woman bleeding to death from her vagina
Underage lesbian sex between an intersex girl and a cis girl
Bondage rape of the underage intersex girl by an incubus
A threesome between a cis man, the underage intersex girl, and a succubus
Sex in a church between a priest and a woman, who later were turned into the incubus and succubus
Graphic descriptions of torture and death
Around thirteen, my grandfather gave me a book. He had no idea what was inside. He just knew it was a scary book, and that his little granddaughter loved scary books. It was called The Laughing Corpse by Laurel K. Hamilton. Inside was the following (that I can remember):
Graphic depictions of gruesome whole-family murders
Discussions of children being taken along to their father’s visits to the red light district
Discussions of handicap fetishes
Discussions of extreme BDSM practices such as extreme knifeplay
Human sacrifices
Around fourteen, I found a book at a bookstore while on a very boring vacation. I convinced my mother to buy it for me, and she did so without looking very closely at the cover. It was called Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs. Inside was the following (that I can remember):
A boy my age deepthroating a grown man, complete with descriptions of what his semen tasted like
A dog giving oral pleasure to a young boy
Massive, and I mean massive, amounts of emotional abuse
A teenage boy seeing his mother getting oral sex from another woman
The same teenage boy seeing his mother and another woman having sex in a bathtub full of glass
Multiple attempted rapes
I read all these and more. Much more. This was before even fanfiction.net existed. They were easily accessible at bookstores, libraries, anywhere you might find books. Literature has always been full of this kind of material – and it needs to be. It is a place for humans to purge themselves, to safely explore that which cannot be explored elsewhere, to deal with the strange animalistic impulses that make us so deeply human. That last book? It was a memoir. Those things actually happened to Augusten, and literature was the place he went to safely purge the horrors that he experienced and witnessed as a boy.
Fanfic is no different. Fanfic, in fact, is even safer than regular fiction, because it has a much smaller and more niche readership. Much of the bad stuff in fic you can’t find unless you specifically look for it. Not so with regular fiction. I had no idea what I’d picked up when I checked out The Book of Shadows. The sex scenes and violence blindsided me. There were no tags, no warnings, nothing. I had been a kid in search of spooky stories, and I got rape and death.
But here’s the kicker: I have no hard feelings against the writers of those books, or against the books themselves. They did nothing to me. My parents probably should’ve looked a bit closer at what I was reading, but they didn’t, and I have no hard feelings against them either. I was the one who, when at 11-14 I came across material I knew was too much for me, kept reading. I knew I should’ve closed those books and stopped reading. I didn’t. That was my choice, and mine alone.
That aside, back to my original point: all this happened well before even FFN existed, let alone AO3. And it’s always existed. It always will exist. It needs to exist. Those Purge movies have one thing right: humans need outlets, places to explore the animal darkness that still lingers inside us. Literature is one of the few places where that can be done safely.
In essence, fanfiction is no different from literature outside of the ways I’ve mentioned above. If you support purging sites like AO3, you need to ask yourself why you don’t support purging libraries. And then you need to ask yourself how you’re any different from the book-burners of the past, who started their pyres with pornographic “filth,” but in their desire for purity, expanded them to include even literary treasures like the Decameron.
Here’s the thing champ… Maybe you should have hard feelings toward a site that hosts child porn and incest.
You sure took a long time to defend this nonsense
Here’s the thing champ…AO3 literally doesn’t do that. It hosts stories about those things, but not those things themselves. Maybe learn the difference?
There literally is not one but yeah it does, in fact, host that stuff
Holy shit, antis are so fucking stupid. Is the word “chair” literally a chair? No. Words are not the thing-in-itself. They are words.
AO3 hosts words. It does not host actual pornography. Pornography is a visual medium, not a written one. By all legal and literal definitions, there is no child porn on AO3. This is because references literally cannot be the literal referent, you goddamned illiterate moron.
Learn to read before you call me illiterate.
“Pornography may be presented…” , “The term applies to the depiction..” Reading and looking at an image of a thing is not the same as doing the thing. In my latest video game I ate maggots off a corpse, in my latest fic someone starved. Those things did not happen in real life just because I read about them or did them in a virtual setting. So @bai-xue ’s point stands crystal clear:
By all legal and literal definitions, there is no child porn on Ao3.
Even allowing the inclusion of written erotica as pornography, following the arbitrary inclusion our academic scholar here is trying to teach us, it would still not fall in the CP category that the US has legally defined. It’s not CP, it doesn’t count as CP, symbols are not the referenced, and functional illiteracy is a damn real problem.
Hey, Courtney. hey. if AO3 is full of CP, why hasn’t the FBI shut it down yet? why is the media not falling over themselves to report about this huge-ass website full of CP? do you think it’s a conspiracy?
Obviously, THAT is where all the money from the fundraisers is going. To pay off the FBI so they leave it up.
MYSTERY SOLVED, GUYS!!!
Hey Courtney, I’ve got a new diet for you to try. Write down the name of the food you want to eat, then eat the paper. Should taste great, words are the same as the real thing, according to you.
AO3 actually says this, in the TOS that every user agrees to:
it’s right there in the mission statement, y’all. This has been their policy since day one.
Most criticisms don’t say that’s their obligation, you all are really missing a lot of what the complaints are about. I feel like if you all actually read what people were saying instead of writing everything off as “oh they want ao3 to protect them and censor us” you wouldn’t see so much “discourse”. You have to admit that all of the moralizing and victimization being done in the name of this site is extremely obnoxious and winds up exaggerating what should be cut and dry.
@phoenix-ace “you must censor fics to protect people from upsettting and immoral content” describes 99% of every complaint I see about AO3, with the other 1% being “it shouldn’t take so much money to run the site”. Both of these have been extensively refuted, with tons of evidence to back them up. What are the other complaints you’re referring to, that are valid and being written off? If there are real concerns I’d like to hear them – I just haven’t seen a single one.
Rampant racism and homophobia in fics that people dont actually fucking tag so we cant just avoid it.
a part of me feels like this is like complaining about going on /b/ and seeing racism and homophobia. It says, in the guidelines, that they won’t remove offensive content, they don’t review for it, and you browse at your own risk of being exposed to it.
does that suck? Yes. Do some people probably need a safer browsing experience? Yes. It’s not going to be AO3. AO3 is a public, largely unmoderated, unscreened archive. They give you the tools to build moderated, screened archives with their software, but they aren’t one. They post all legal fanworks. That’s what they are. That’s what they have always been.
If you’ll reread what I said I’m not advocating for them to remove it. I want a way for readers to tag content so that the tag system is actually useful.
Most people arent gonna tag their racist and homophobic shit for racism and homophobia especially not in this community where casual racism and homophobia is rampant.
If they arent going to remove it (which I have feelings about by the way but is not the point of this conversation) the least that can be done is updating the tagging system.
And the whole they give you the tools bit… that does nothing for a bunch of us. I cant code and I dont have the time to learn to code.
Like the general sentiment is “dont like it dont read it” and “that’s what tags are for” both those sentiments are USELESS when people dont tag shit.
No system allows you to tag other people’s work, because that is a system that is so ripe for abuse and exploitation it’s ridiculous. Assholes would tear that feature apart within a week. Seriously, name another sites that lets you add a tag to the original post of someone’s post.
Ultimately, aside from the big four warnings, all tags on AO3 are discretionary and up for interpretation – if you’re just browsing the fandom direct on AO3. But there’s other options for curating content.
You can tag your bookmarks, recs, or collections that you add the fic to – so if, for example, you wanted to make a “RACIST BULLSHIT” list of fics and start adding them on there, that is within your power, and the author can’t stop you. Alternately, if you want to set up a shared collection with friends where you add and share fics that DONT contain those things, you can totally do that too and share it for others to use.
(I actually work on one of those, where there’s a very creepy character who’s often a fan favorite in fics, so myself and some other people who hate him set up a collection of fics which do not mention him at all, or only portray him as the slimeball he is.)
AO3 also has RSS feeds, so you could stream a certain kind of fic to somewhere else – say, a tumblr – and moderate from there, either by screening fics before they’re posted or by adding tags/warnings and deleting fics at your discretion or follower request. Streaming RSS feeds to tumblr blogs requires no code knowledge and can be set up in maybe half an hour.
So the current system where people dont tag racism and homophobia and all that other terrible stuff thus rendering filtering and avoiding that stuff useless and pretty hard to is fine but allowing people to tag something (which people can choose to ignore by the way) to make the tags more effective against racism and homophobia is a problem? Okay.
Also no one else does it so why should we is not a valid argument its actually pretty childish.
I’m glad there is all this extra and time consuming stuff that can be done but it is not to much to ask that avoiding racist homophobic etc content be as easy to avoid as it is for me to avoid a ship I dont like.
If AO3 is gonna be steadfast in not dealing with stuff that perpetuates racism and homophobia etc that’s the least that could be done.
Okay, cool, you use this hypothetical system to tag racism, and you always use it carefully, and people are better warned because of your tags, and everything is better. For….. oh, I’d give it 6 hours on the outside, after the update goes live.
Then somebody goes back and retaliates by tagging all of your posted fics with innacurate warnings or worse. Or tags all of your fics with racism back, regardless of how relevant it is. Somebody else goes through and tags every single fic with a certain ship with homophobia, or racism, or pedophilia, or incest, or abuse, because of a ship war. This renders your carefully curated tags irrelevant as somebody goes through and tags every fic that mentions or implies a ship as racist. Some troll tags a bunch of fics with slurs and nonsense tags. People start using tags to flame or discourage people from reading ships they don’t like. People start using tags to bash a specific author.
It would not just be you and yours who would get that power; it would be millions of people. It would be homophobes and racists having the power to post tags on the front page of your fics. It would be people who hate you having the power to affect how others see your work. This is a two way street; any power you gain over homophobes writing fic, they also gain over you and any fic you write.
You don’t trust people to tag their own racism, but you trust them to not exploit power that you give them? Why?
Does this person go to Barnes&Noble and throw tantrums about racist books there?
B&N sells Mein Kampf. It sells The Art of the Deal. It sells Ayn Rand’s entire bibliography. It sells books by misogynist “pick-up artists.” It also sells books on feminism, the civil rights movement, and novels by queer authors!
But, despite it having a variety of works by authors with greatly varying morals and politics, I’ve never seen anyone over the age of 4 get mad about bookstores existing.
^^^like i said before, if you are against sites like Ao3 existing, you are against libraries.
Given that so many of the people calling for these reader tags and other forms of archive ‘moderation’ ie censorship also equate plain old depiction with ‘romanticization’ and ‘fetishization’, I wouldn’t trust them the slightest with that kind of power. There’s a world of difference between ‘this fic portrays racism’ and ‘this fic is racist’. It’s a distinction they have proven themselves over and over unable to make.
AO3 actually says this, in the TOS that every user agrees to:
it’s right there in the mission statement, y’all. This has been their policy since day one.
Most criticisms don’t say that’s their obligation, you all are really missing a lot of what the complaints are about. I feel like if you all actually read what people were saying instead of writing everything off as “oh they want ao3 to protect them and censor us” you wouldn’t see so much “discourse”. You have to admit that all of the moralizing and victimization being done in the name of this site is extremely obnoxious and winds up exaggerating what should be cut and dry.
@phoenix-ace “you must censor fics to protect people from upsettting and immoral content” describes 99% of every complaint I see about AO3, with the other 1% being “it shouldn’t take so much money to run the site”. Both of these have been extensively refuted, with tons of evidence to back them up. What are the other complaints you’re referring to, that are valid and being written off? If there are real concerns I’d like to hear them – I just haven’t seen a single one.
Rampant racism and homophobia in fics that people dont actually fucking tag so we cant just avoid it.
a part of me feels like this is like complaining about going on /b/ and seeing racism and homophobia. It says, in the guidelines, that they won’t remove offensive content, they don’t review for it, and you browse at your own risk of being exposed to it.
does that suck? Yes. Do some people probably need a safer browsing experience? Yes. It’s not going to be AO3. AO3 is a public, largely unmoderated, unscreened archive. They give you the tools to build moderated, screened archives with their software, but they aren’t one. They post all legal fanworks. That’s what they are. That’s what they have always been.
If you’ll reread what I said I’m not advocating for them to remove it. I want a way for readers to tag content so that the tag system is actually useful.
Most people arent gonna tag their racist and homophobic shit for racism and homophobia especially not in this community where casual racism and homophobia is rampant.
If they arent going to remove it (which I have feelings about by the way but is not the point of this conversation) the least that can be done is updating the tagging system.
And the whole they give you the tools bit… that does nothing for a bunch of us. I cant code and I dont have the time to learn to code.
Like the general sentiment is “dont like it dont read it” and “that’s what tags are for” both those sentiments are USELESS when people dont tag shit.
No system allows you to tag other people’s work, because that is a system that is so ripe for abuse and exploitation it’s ridiculous. Assholes would tear that feature apart within a week. Seriously, name another sites that lets you add a tag to the original post of someone’s post.
Ultimately, aside from the big four warnings, all tags on AO3 are discretionary and up for interpretation – if you’re just browsing the fandom direct on AO3. But there’s other options for curating content.
You can tag your bookmarks, recs, or collections that you add the fic to – so if, for example, you wanted to make a “RACIST BULLSHIT” list of fics and start adding them on there, that is within your power, and the author can’t stop you. Alternately, if you want to set up a shared collection with friends where you add and share fics that DONT contain those things, you can totally do that too and share it for others to use.
(I actually work on one of those, where there’s a very creepy character who’s often a fan favorite in fics, so myself and some other people who hate him set up a collection of fics which do not mention him at all, or only portray him as the slimeball he is.)
AO3 also has RSS feeds, so you could stream a certain kind of fic to somewhere else – say, a tumblr – and moderate from there, either by screening fics before they’re posted or by adding tags/warnings and deleting fics at your discretion or follower request. Streaming RSS feeds to tumblr blogs requires no code knowledge and can be set up in maybe half an hour.
So the current system where people dont tag racism and homophobia and all that other terrible stuff thus rendering filtering and avoiding that stuff useless and pretty hard to is fine but allowing people to tag something (which people can choose to ignore by the way) to make the tags more effective against racism and homophobia is a problem? Okay.
Also no one else does it so why should we is not a valid argument its actually pretty childish.
I’m glad there is all this extra and time consuming stuff that can be done but it is not to much to ask that avoiding racist homophobic etc content be as easy to avoid as it is for me to avoid a ship I dont like.
If AO3 is gonna be steadfast in not dealing with stuff that perpetuates racism and homophobia etc that’s the least that could be done.
Okay, cool, you use this hypothetical system to tag racism, and you always use it carefully, and people are better warned because of your tags, and everything is better. For….. oh, I’d give it 6 hours on the outside, after the update goes live.
Then somebody goes back and retaliates by tagging all of your posted fics with innacurate warnings or worse. Or tags all of your fics with racism back, regardless of how relevant it is. Somebody else goes through and tags every single fic with a certain ship with homophobia, or racism, or pedophilia, or incest, or abuse, because of a ship war. This renders your carefully curated tags irrelevant as somebody goes through and tags every fic that mentions or implies a ship as racist. Some troll tags a bunch of fics with slurs and nonsense tags. People start using tags to flame or discourage people from reading ships they don’t like. People start using tags to bash a specific author.
It would not just be you and yours who would get that power; it would be millions of people. It would be homophobes and racists having the power to post tags on the front page of your fics. It would be people who hate you having the power to affect how others see your work. This is a two way street; any power you gain over homophobes writing fic, they also gain over you and any fic you write.
You don’t trust people to tag their own racism, but you trust them to not exploit power that you give them? Why?
Does this person go to Barnes&Noble and throw tantrums about racist books there?
B&N sells Mein Kampf. It sells The Art of the Deal. It sells Ayn Rand’s entire bibliography. It sells books by misogynist “pick-up artists.” It also sells books on feminism, the civil rights movement, and novels by queer authors!
But, despite it having a variety of works by authors with greatly varying morals and politics, I’ve never seen anyone over the age of 4 get mad about bookstores existing.
^^^like i said before, if you are against sites like Ao3 existing, you are against libraries.
“There are 21 million cubic feet of molten rock and metal directly below every square foot of Earth.
There is literally nothing hiding you from every star, galaxy, and sunless planet in the night sky.
Cosmically speaking, your back is against the wall.
Happy October, everybody.”
-QuietPineTrees
I hate to break it to you, but the flimsy little homes we’ve made for ourselves do nothing to impair the gaze of anything that stoops to notice our little planet. The only thing separating them from us is time, so you may as well have something to read! Pledge to support the Quiet Pine Trees book, and enjoy the hundreds of microfiction stories within!
To Tired Writers. To the people out there whose hearts very, very much want to write and work on WIPs, but who are just mentally and physically exhausted right now. It’s okay. It is okay to rest sometimes. Allow yourself time to rest.
Aaaand despite not putting a single ficcing word down in months I have this very morning solved the issue of reconciling Path Sephiroth and Tifa as much as they ever can be.
you people who want ao3 still up and complain that people want it shut down are missing the damn point its full of disgusting incest/pedo fics and the mods dont regulate it thats literally the only reason people want ao3 shut down literally if they just regulated the content this wouldnt be such a big fucking deal but they look the other way so they should face the consequences of being disgusting
No, it’s you who’s missing the point – the point of AO3, that is. The entire point of the archive is that they don’t regulate anything that’s not illegal under US law. The fics you’re against are not illegal.
What is illegal under US law and therefore on AO3:
And that’s that.
If you dislike that, then try and have the law in the US changed the way one does in a democracy.
Or, OP, build your own damn archive and stay the fuck away from ours.
Ardwynna's Place 