✭ if you can't fight, wear a big hat ✭
"I'm not drunk, I'm just competitive."
AO3 / CW2013 Publications / Cities in Dust / MGS Fic / Insp Blog / Naruto Recap / 8tracks / "about" / twitter
home / profile / ASK⇒
AO3 / CW2013 Publications / Cities in Dust / MGS Fic / Insp Blog / Naruto Recap / 8tracks / "about" / twitter
home / profile / ASKI barely post here anymore, but since tumblr is apparently dying, here’s an open invitation to follow me on twitter!
Remember today when you see 100+ articles about how ‘civil’ and ‘noble’ H.W. Bush was that today is World AIDS Day. That 100,000 people, many LGBT+ individuals, especially gay men, died under his and Reagan’s watch. That he banned HIV+ people from entering the US, reduced research funding, and prevented educators from speaking about safe sex in favor of abstinence only education.
A look at the first 2 seasons of Sylvester McCoy with the Time Team. Daleks climbing stairs!
George Herbert Walker Bush died and it is really, really funny and awesome
What ‘Fiction Affects Reality’ Does Mean: Major movies, TV shows, comics and books have a large cultural impact and can alter how we perceive issues like race, lgbtqa+ rights and environmental change as a society, and while this does not mean that all media should be ideologically pure, we should be critical of the media we consume and support in an effort to be progressive, as well as ensure that media is flagged with appropriate warnings and age recommendations.
What It Does Not Mean: A group of less than 1,000 people on the internet writing and enjoying a ship that is morally questionable is going to shape society to accept things like pedophillia and abusive relationships, and therefore we should waste time and effort on harassing those people in a meaningless moral crusade because they clearly are monsters who cannot differentiate between media and reality or see issues as black and white.
here’s the 7th doctor for our thing
i’m burning out really fast on these haha 2.5 more to go..
(Source: daveydiscoballs)
This AO3/fandom anti-anti/purity culture whinging stuff is always so unnerving, and it’s always even more unnerving the next time it rolls around because people still haven’t learned, and I know it’s not a hundred percent related to this blog, but look.
This post is going to be long, and it’s going to touch on every sort of trigger, but here’s the thesis in the form of a misquote - especially for everyone out there unable to parse these concepts without a media reference:
“You’re going to go through life thinking that [people] don’t like you because you’re a nerd. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re [really fucking creepy].”
So once again the losers on the internet are rushing for first place in the freak grand prix. This post includes screencaps of pedophiles and apologists below the cut. I am not debating them. I am making an example of them.
I’m sorry, but you need to be extremely clear when you’re talking about an issue as serious as grooming:
The people you are (not) responding to here are talking about clearly denoting fanfic in ways that will prevent minors from interacting with it, because they do not want minors to interact with it. They are even suggesting tools that will make it easier for minors to avoid interacting with shit they don’t want to see.
Are you calling this behaviour - the act of posting an underage fic and then doing everything in your power to make sure that minors do not engage with that fic, but not feeling as if it’s your direct responsibility when teens choose to ignore those warnings - in itself grooming?
I mean, I’m sure you can sidestep this reading of what you literally said because you play a not-so-subtle sleight of hand in the middle of your post by refusing to respond to the various points you cherry-picked out of the comments and, instead, arguing against the straw man of a theoretical “Fandom Mom” who actively and enthusiastically elicits interaction and engagement from minors through their exploitative mature work, which I do agree is creepy behaviour, but it is by NO means behaviour limited to, or even unique to, adults who produce “dodgy” explicit fanwork. It’s also not what any of these people said.
You cannot groom without intent. You cannot groom someone you’ve never met. Grooming is a directed, active pattern of manipulation intentionally pursued by an abuser. No one in this post is telling kids they’re ~so mature and intelligent for reading inappropriate fic, or attempting to get teens to ~come and read their stories. They’re saying that they don’t have control over whether or not an underage person reads what they write, and they don’t really care, or think it’s their personal responsibility to hold that the hand of every underage person delving into the underbelly of AO3’s nastier tags. You can think whatever you want about the existence of those tags in the first place, but the act of simply posting in them is categorically NOT grooming, and it’s astoundingly manipulative and frankly irresponsible to say that it is.
Here’s why: it re-positions the focus of determining abusive traits away from behaviour and onto the content of an individual’s fandom output. This is a useless method of determining who is actually an abuser, because plenty of actual abusers have come out of child-friendly fandoms like Pokemon and Sonic. Plenty of pedophiles have used their colourful, G-rated art as a smokescreen to actively solicit one-on-one, private interaction with children. Meanwhile, a popular trend in fandom rn for people who have blogs that depict extreme content such as shota/guro/rape etc. is to automatically block, without question or consideration, anyone who lists their age under 19 (or even 21 in some cases). Whatever you think of the content, this is the opposite of active solicitation.
Sure, some people who post creepy stuff turn out to be creeps. But a lot of the time the people who turn out to be creeps were posting Extremely Normal Shit this whole time. This is why it’s important to be clear about what grooming actually is, especially since it’s very easy for abusers to cloak themselves in the language of “antis” right now and become the kind of Fandom Authority you’re talking about in your post. The creepy behaviour flies under the radar as long as they’re posting “safe” content. The red flags start to blend in to the background and become invisible if you’re waving them over everyone who disagrees with the specifics of this particular fandom argument. I kind of worry that this will help create an atmosphere where young people can’t develop or trust their own instincts, because they think that grooming is something that can be done to them by people they’ve never interacted with, and who don’t want to interact with them, on the basis of what they read on AO3.
And I don’t want to sound callous because I know how dark and fucked fanfic can get; I was once the 12 year old beta-reading my adult friends’s porn because they all thought I was in college too, and I got into some dodgy, age-inappropriate situations based on that lie, and I read some shit that put images into my head that I was maybe too young to have wanted, but based on that same token of experience - and the experience of going through and seeing some heavy shit in real life - I feel pretty confident in saying that if a young teen is reading something absolutely abhorrent in a fic and thinking that it’s totally okay and justified in reality, you can probably bet that the last thing causing that thought is the fanfic. The fact that they are unable to draw clear lines between fiction and reality, to understand the context in which something is posted, to discern the intent of the writer, or that their threshold for acceptance of a thing is already so low that all it takes is an anime shipping story to justify it… these are problems that are usually brought to a work of fiction - or that require a pre-existing contextual framework to morph into acceptance - not taken directly from it. The person who posted that fic is 99% of the time NOT the person you need to look at to figure out why a minor thinks that what they’re reading is okay in real life. You need to look at the people who are actually interacting with them, because that’s where the potential grooming will be happening, not with the person saying that minors should use AO3 blocker to help them stay away from their fic.
*taps cobwebs off the mic* Is this thing still on?
I might have disappeared off the face of tumblr, but there’s been exciting shit going on in my professional life lately! I recently sold my first book to Tor.com Publishing, which is a branch of Tor Books, which is one of the Biggest Deals of Big Deal fantasy publishers. Like many aspiring fantasy authors, I spent a rather shameful number of hours in my youth staring longingly at the spines of my Wheel of Time collection, attempting to visualize my name in place of Robert Jordan’s beneath that Tor/Forge logo. I am now less than a year away from being able to do this in real life, which evokes a staggeringly powerful emotion I haven’t quite come to terms with yet. But, y’know - there it is! Never give up on your dreams, kids, even if your dreams are something as questionable as: “Gee, I sure would love to write the next Wheel of Time”.
I want to sincerely thank everyone who has ever read and enjoyed my fanfic, whether you left a one word review, recommended it to a friend, shared amazing fanart with me, crafted a whole-ass cosplay based on my AU character designs, or simply liked it, quietly, to yourself, enough to think about it from time to time. I never would have gotten where I am today without the constructive relationship I’ve had with my readers here. <3
So here’s the pitch:
Are you someone who follows me because you like my writing? Do you specifically like the way I write cyclical, toxic romance (with jokes)? Have you ever wished that you could own a cyclical, toxic romance (with jokes!) written by me in hardcover book format? Do you love reading about weather and corpses? Well, I’ve got good news for you! Next September, you can do exactly that! Check it out and get hype!
how morally corrupt is your 19th century love interest on a scale of “aloof rich guy who doesn’t know how to express his feelings” to “has a secret wife in the attic” and “tries to dig up your grave so he can embrace your dead body”
the thing I enjoy most about this post is that digging up a grave to embrace a dead body is only like. the eighth worst thing heathcliff ever did.
