diabolical

Casey / 21 / He/Him / multishipper|| for fandom thoughts, sketchbook/journal stuff, and whatever else i decide to throw on here || blog is 18+ because I am an adult and might post suggestive content icon credit: pridewishes ||

[bluebirdsofparadise]

Fuck it this is a fandom blog now I guess. Anyways, hi! This blog is 18+! Minors please don't follow!

I follow back from @foxbooth

Stuff I'm into that I might post about:

Half life

TF2

Dragon Age

Skyrim

Stardew valley

[kirkwallguy]

it's definitely uncomfortable that dav's only nonbinary character is portrayed in a way that leans into negative stereotypes about young trans people. like imagine if there was a game where the only gay man was a sassy princess and the only bisexual man's romance was focused on bdsm and the only lesbian was written by a misogynist and the only trans man is voiced by a cis woman. that would suck right. luckily there are no games like that.

[scwambledeggs]

*gives paw*

[angels-heap]

Not tacking this onto my last reblog out of respect for OP and their notifications, but their excellent post (and my own recent visit with a "family friend" uncle) helped me put my finger on my specific issue with 95% of “Uncle Barney” headcanons.

Like, I am guilty of Uncle Barney crimes. To this day, I am continuing to perpetrate Uncle Barney crimes. I don’t hate the idea of Barney and Alyx having been close for much of her life. To be clear, there is zero canon evidence suggesting that this is the case, but I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with this headcanon. What I don’t like, though, is the way so many people who aggressively headcanon this relationship also conceptualize Alyx as some sort of naive forever-child, trapped in a state of arrested development where she still relates to Barney (and/or Dr. Kleiner, her canonical pseudo-uncle) like she would have at age 12. I am begging y'all to please stop infantilizing this poor woman.

A lot of the appeal of Uncle Barney (to me) is the opportunity to explore the ways Alyx’s relationship with an adult family friend would change over the course of her life. What was it like for her to come of age as one of the youngest people on Earth and slowly become peers with people she used to see as authority figures? What can she learn about herself, the people around her, and the situation they’re in when the older generation finally stops censoring themselves around her? How many of her childhood experiences might be suddenly re-contextualized by new information from her older friends? In a pre-HLA timeline, how does the untimely death of her father, her last living biological relative, affect her relationships with other "family" members?

I would love to see more people explore these kinds of questions in fanworks, instead of just having Alyx around to squeal “eew! gross!” when the male characters make out, act like they are her dads when she is canonically very close to her actual literal dad, or ask them questions about things that any reasonably intelligent 24-year-old could figure out on her own.

C'mon, folks. We can do better than this.

[bdsmgeek-deactivated20141001]

[subnancy-blog]

This clever rope-cuff allows her to grasp the rope when she struggles so it doesn’t injure her wrists.

[milkymissy-deactivated20160113]

this is actually quite wonderful and I don’t really wish to delve far into the art of this but someone took the time to come up with this and it’s nice

[necropolitan-fairy]

@blubushie any word on the accuracy and safety of this gif set?

[blubushie]

I’ve never seen this one used but I’d imagine it functions similar to ball grips for restraints. I’d imagine it works well.

My only concern would be how rope has the ability to tighten, but the double-layering of the rope should prevent it from cutting off circulation to any meaningful degree. Looks safe to me.

[spicyraeman]

it really is a tits out kinda look

[naariel]

"What am I to you?"

"A few moonrises back, I thought the answer was complicated. But it's quite simple, really. You are my yesterday, my today, and my tomorrow."

EXPLICIT VERSION

Hey handsome

[oneofthosecrazycatladies]

So I’m on AO3 and I see a lot of people who put “I do not own [insert fandom here]” before their story.

Like, I came on this site to read FAN fiction. This is a FAN fiction site. I’m fully aware that you don’t own the fandom or the characters. That’s why it’s called FAN FICTION.

[adiwriting]

Oh you youngins… How quickly they forget.

Back in the day, before fan fiction was mainstream and even encouraged by creators… This was your “please don’t sue me, I’m poor and just here for a good time” plea.

Cause guess what? That shit used to happen.

[ohbeckoh]

how soon they forget ann rice’s lawyers.

[emma-regina4ever]

What happened with her lawyers.

[racethewind10]

History became legend. Legend became myth….  And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost.

[tiger-in-the-flightdeck]

I worked with one of the women that got contacted by Rice’s lawyers. Scared the hell out of her and she never touched fandom again. The first time I saw a commission post on tumblr for fanart, I was shocked.

[demonicae]

One of the reasons I fell out of love with her writing was her treatment of the fans… (that and the opening chapter of Lasher gave me such heebie-jeebies with the whole underage sex thing I felt unclean just reading it.)

I have zero problem with fanart/fic so long as the creators aren’t making money off of it. It is someone else’s intellectual property and people who create fan related works need to respect that (and a solid 98% of them do.)

The remaining 2% are either easily swayed by being gently prompted to not cash in on someone else’s IP. Or they DGAF… and they are the ones who will eventually land themselves in hot water. Either way: this isn’t much of an excuse to persecute your entire fanbase.

But Anne Rice went off the deep end with this stuff by actively attacking people who were expressing their love for her work and were not profiteering from it.

The Vampire Chronicles was a dangerous fandom to be in back in the day. Most of the works I read/saw were hidden away in the dark recesses of the internet and covered by disclaimers (a lot of them reading like thoroughly researched legal documents.)

And woe betide anyone who was into shipping anyone with ANYONE in that fandom. You were most at risk, it seemed, if your vision of the characters deviated from the creators ‘original intentions.’ (Hypocritical of a woman who made most of her living writing erotica.)

Imagine getting sued over a headcanon…

Put simply: we all lived in fear of her team of highly paid lawyers descending from the heavens and taking us to court over a slashfic less than 500 words long.

[pagerunner-j]

all of this

[fanfichasruinedmylife-deactivat]

Reblogging because I can’t believe there are people out there who don’t know the story behind fan fiction disclaimers. 

[hils79]

Yep I used to have disclaimers on all my Buffy fic back in the day. The Buffy creators were mostly pretty chill about fandom but it’s not like it is now. You did NOT talk about fandom with anyone except other fandom people and bringing it up at cons was a massive no no because of stuff like this.

I think Supernatural (and Misha Collins specifically) was when that wall between fandom and creators started to break down. It’s a relatively new thing.

I remember going to a Merlin panel down in London and a girl sitting next to me asked the cast about slash and I thought she was going to get kicked out!

Fandom history is important.

[cracktheglasses]

Oh, this brings back some not so-awesome ‘90s fandom memories! 

[griesly]

Oh man, let me tell you about the X-Files fandom. Lawyers for FOX sued, threatened, and generally terrified the owners of fan websites on a regular basis. God help you if you wrote or created original art set in their (expansive) universe or worse - dared to write about their characters. Even people who weren’t creating fanworks, just hosting Geocities pages about how much people liked the show would be sent C&D orders or actually fined. When I was first discovering the concept, the first rule of fandom was you do not talk about fandom because the consequences could be devastating.

It was such a strange and uncomfortable experience for me when fans in LOTR and Potter fandoms suddenly started shoving their work in people’s faces speaking publicly about fandom and wanting to engage in dialogue with the creators and actors of the Thing they were into. Fan stuff was supposed to stay online, in archives and list-serves and zines we passed around because it just wasn’t cool to talk about it and it could get you in a boatload of trouble. The freedom we have to create and gather together in a shared space, or actually be acknowledged in any way by people outside the fandom was inconceivable to my fannish, teenaged self. I want fans these days to understand how amazing modern fandom really is, cherish the community, and appreciate what it took to get us here. 

[oyveyzqueer]

“if you found this by googling yourself, hit back now. this means you, pete wentz”

[tbqtalks]

Oh hey, even more blasts from the past.

I was one of the ones who got a love letter from Anne Rice’s lawyers. Bear in mind that up until that point her publisher had encouraged fanfic and worked with the archive keeper (one of my roommates at the time) to drum up publicity for upcoming books and so on.

I could tell such tales of how much Anne screwed over her fans back then. The tl;dr version is that she and her peeps would use fan projects as free market research and then bring in the lawyers once it was felt Anne could make money off of it herself. (Talismanic Tours being one of the most offensive examples of this.)

But where fanfic is concerned not only did we get nastygrams but one of my friends had Anne’s lawyer trying to fuck up her own privately owned business which had NOTHING TO DO WITH ANYTHING ANNE RELATED. Said friend was a small business owner with health issues who wasn’t exactly rolling in money, so guess how well that went?

On top of that when yours truly tried to speak out about it I discovered that someone in Anne’s camp had been cyber stalking me to the point where they took all the tiny crumbs of personal information I had posted over the course of five years or so and used it to doxx me (before that was even a term and in early enough days of the WWW that this wasn’t an easy task) and post VERY personal information about me on the main fandom message board of the time. Luckily for me the mod was my friend and she took that down post haste, but it was still oodles of fun feeling that violated and why to this day I am very strict about keeping my fandom and personal lives separate online.

Hence why those of us in the fandom at the time who still gave enough of a shit to want to keep writing fic DID keep writing fic, but shoved it so far underground and slapped it with so many disclaimers they could’ve outweighed the word count of War & Peace. It wasn’t just for the purpose of protecting fic but for trying to protect our personal lives as well.

(Also would love to know who @tiger-in-the-flightdeck knew. Life paths crossing after so many years….)

[dubiousculturalartifact]

Lucasfilm also sent cease-and-desist letters to Star Wars fanzines publishing slash.

My favourite bit I read from one included the idea that you weren’t allowed to have any explicit content, of which anything queer, no matter how tame, was included, to “preserve that innocence even Imperial crew members must be imagined to have”.

Yeah. The same Imperial crew members who helped build the Death Star to commit planetary genocide.

(It’s one reason Sinjir Velus, while I still have some issues with him, feels like such a delicious ‘f*** you’.)

Later on, they were apparently persuaded to ‘allow’ fans to write slash, provided in ‘remained within the nebulous bounds of good taste’.

(On a related note, if I wasn’t quite so attached to my URL, I would 100% change it to ‘Nebulous Bounds’, because that’s just downright catchy)

[thepioden]

Anne McCaffrey had this huge long set of rules about how exactly you were allowed to play in her sandbox. Dragonriders of Pern was my first online fandom, and I was big into the Pern RP scene - and just about every fan-Weyr had a copy of these lists of rules McCaffrey wanted enforced. One of which was ‘no porn’ and another was basically ‘it can’t be gay’ (and for a while ‘no fanfiction posted online’? which??? anyway.)

She relaxed a little as time went on, but still. 

[mikkeneko]

Let’s not forget: the reason AO3 is called ‘Archive of our own’  is because it was created in response to some bullshit that assholes were trying to play with fan creators. Basically (if I remember the fiasco correctly) trying to mine fandom creators for content which they could then use to generate ad profit on their shitty websites. When the series creators objected, the fans tried to pull their content, only to find that the website hoster resisted, claiming their content was all his now.

That wasn’t even all that long ago…

[bebopsisyphus]

fandom history class

[lazaefair]

To this day, *talking* about writing or reading fanfiction - just acknowledging that it exists - to anyone other than people I know are in fandom as well, feels like a dangerous act. The strict separation I maintained between my real life identity, my online identity, and my fandom identity (yes, they were separate, because some of the most vicious and mocking people were fellow nerds) has broken down a bit these days, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to integrate them as freely as some younger fans do.

[theglintoftherail]

Everybody should know that AO3 is just one project of the Organization for Transformative Works. Their mission is much broader than just hosting a (very good) fanfic site. They do all kinds of fandom history archiving and publish an academic journal, but most importantly, they perform legal advocacy to protect the fair use rights of people who make fanfic or fanart.

The OTW Legal Committee’s mission includes education, assistance, and advocacy.

We create and post educational materials about developments in fandom-related law on transformativeworks.org and on archiveofourown.org.

We assist individual fans when their fanworks are challenged, we answer fans’ questions about law relevant to fanworks, and we help fans find legal representation.

We partner with other advocacy organizations and coalitions in the U.S. and around the world.

We advocate for laws and policies that promote balance and protect fanworks and fandom.

And much more!

I haven’t been involved in fandom stuff all that long, but I find this stuff so fascinating!

[hoenursey]

whew, i feel old, but that’s mostly bc i was on forums way way waaaaay too young. but this? yes. all the way. people had password protected forums on the weirdest, most unconventional websites. before you could even be approved by the mods they would search your blog, your other accounts, question you, everything, all because we were broke teens and preteens trying to do something for fun and if someone got in who could doxx you or send your work over to a lawyer? that was it, you were OVER. that’s also part of where fandom wars and the defense of fandom came from: quote unquote “enemy” fandoms would infiltrate just to hurt you. @theglintoftherail makes a very good point: ao3 is a goddamn haven. and they’re a great team of lawyers and people dedicated to protecting fanworks! part of the reason it’s so great is because they know there’s no one like them out there. they also go to the ends of the damned earth to protect you and to be inclusive, which is why there’s shit like tentacle porn and underage and dubcon. because they’re dedicated to protecting readers and creators to the death. they don’t advocate for it and they have the extensive rating and tagging system because of that (legit the best tagging system i’ve ever seen) but they don’t know if you’re dealing with trauma or if you need to get something out. do not forget your fandom, kids. jesus

[readingrenditions]

Who else knew nothing about this? A show of hands

[yamaccino]

I’m just the right age to remember the disclaimers and to have HEARD about the Anne Rice, Anne McCaffrey, and X-Files fiascos, but I was never in any of those fandoms and I was more or less on the tail end of that. I can’t imagine having to be scared to tell people I write fanfic. So glad we’ve come so far.

[thefriendlypigeon]

Every time I start reading fanfics, I thank all of you people whose neverending resilience and the drive to be creative made it possible for me to consume content freely and without worry 🖤

[threshie]

My older fics have the disclaimers. Heck, my older fanart has disclaimers in the descriptions. FFN and DeviantArt were those times, AO3 and Tumblr era I stopped finally.

[northstarfan]

In case folks still don’t get why losing AO3 would be so devastating…

[amuseoffyre]

Since it’s happening again now, let’s not forget the purity brigades of the late-90s and early-2000s who took it as their duty to roam fan fic sites in their fandoms and report anything they deemed unsuitable. And if they couldn’t get them removed, that’s when the flame comments would start, where they would screech abuse at you in the comments boxes.

Back then, this could include anything from the ship they didn’t like (look up the ship wars from Potter fandom. The feuds were horrendous and hateful) to something as simple as a g-rated slash fic because “this of the children”. Hell, when strikethrough happened on livejournal, it was everything/anything which - sadly - also included a lot of fantastic support communities for queer kids and SA survivors and the like. All because the site decided to crack down on ‘lewd’/‘deviant’ content and didn’t pause to think what else might be tagged under queer and SA content.

A lot of the writers in a lot of the fandoms I was in included content warnings for slash because if people felt spiteful or hostile when they stumbled on it, they could report it to fic hosting sites and have it taken down for any number of excuses. I lost fics on fanfiction.net because some big weirdo deemed them as inappropriate and had their friends all report it at the same time.

This is why Archive of Our Own is so special. If someone doesn’t like what you’ve written, they don’t have the power or right to remove it or erase it because it offends their specific sensibilities. Yes, they can still comment and be a dick, but now we can block and/or report them if they continue to do so.

[miabrown007]

i did this instead of writing

[willgrahamscock]

[willgrahamscock]

A hilarious rendition of: What you read has nothing to do with endorsing it or wanting it in real life, some people simply engage with the fantasy of it!

[sun-moon-talia]

i’m gay but i’m always gonna choose the well developed straight ship over the 2 bland and incompatible white dudes that have 500,000 fanfics written about them. you guys just hate women.

[sun-moon-talia]

[donnovien]

Do you block people in the same fandom as you just because you don't like their takes?

[dayslily]

UPDATED DISCORD FORMATTING ♡ updated reference sheet for those newer to discord (or those who aren't familiar with markdown in general) ! my last post didn't include links, headers, or lists. you can access the google doc version in the source link.

[wizardysseus]

the thing about CC is that she did plagiarize. she was found guilty of plagiarism and banned from fanfiction dot net! she plagiarized pamela dean, among others, and lied about it repeatedly! it happened! and regardless of whatever else she writes, regardless of whether the publishing industry and her fans trust her not to do it again, regardless of how many times her wikipedia page gets scrubbed clean, that will always have happened! so it is not in fact cruel gossip, but a factually true statement, to say that she plagiarized and i'm not interested in supporting her or giving her the benefit of the doubt because she plagiarized and lied about it repeatedly! fuck!

[wizardysseus]

what really incenses me about cassandra clare — and forgive me for bringing this up again, but i don't think i've articulated this point yet — is not that i believe she is currently plagiarizing. any accusations i've seen about recent work seem to me to be superficial. but even if one could prove that she never plagiarized again once she started publishing, it wouldn't matter to me, because she chose to capitalize on her fandom history. while trying to distance herself from what she did, she made a brand out of the fanfic pen name "cassandra clare" and continues to profit off the reputation and fanbase that she amassed while she was, provably, a plagiarist.

you don't get to do that and bury the things that made you famous. as an individual, as a human being, she is capable of change and any other good qualities you may want to ascribe. but she built her career on lies. professionally, i don't understand why she gets to move on.

[toppingilyarozanov]

the worst part for me--worse than building her career on plagiarism--is that her career was also built on a truly reprehensible level of harassment. she told her followers to help get her unbanned from FFN (as if that would ever happen) and they spent months harassing the site owner and several abuse team members. one of them, after enduring extensive abuse, ended up in the hospital.

this was just the beginning of the harassment, though. CC additionally used her friend heidi, a lawyer, to send cease & desist letters and other forms of legal harassment against ppl. none of it would hold up in court and these sort of things weren't even heidi's area of expertise as a lawyer, but it still happened.

CC was such a terrible serial harasser that people started to leave her alone about the plagiarism stuff after a while because it was just not worth her blowing up your entire spot. not just with her lawyer, but with her minions who harassed targets on her behalf. getting a deluge of harassment is a horrible experience that hurts people, so of course people tried to avoid it.

i hate CC because she hurt lots of people. she did it intentionally, repeatedly, and with singular focus on covering her own ass no matter who she hurt.

she has the career she has now because of her harassment of fandom as much as the plagiarism.

[kakecomics]

Kake: The Sexy Sunbather (1968) by Tom of Finland pen and ink with ink wash on paper

[prismatoxic]

if you guys remember the heatfic i was posting excerpts from months ago, here's a bit of what i added to it more recently

[prismatoxic]

this is admittedly still my fave part of it

[imperiuswrecked]

I call upon the fan fic writing gods to bless you with the perseverance to finish one of your unfinished drafts. 

May your fingers dance along the letters upon your device with ease, may the devil of distraction stay far from you, and may your work not need much editing.

I pass this blessing upon every fan fic writer out there.

[grumpygreenwitch]

As it came to me I give it to you.