Oh wait I gotta introduce myself, okay hey hi hello
Name: Coral
Age: 16 yrs old
Religion: HelPol, worshipping currently Aphrodite, Athena and Apollo
Likes: My boyfriend, drawing, my friends, praying, offering to the gods, my doggy, music, Ninjago, Harry Potter (No I dont support the creator), Riordanverse, Epic the Musical, Six the Musical, Hadestown, Heathers the Musical, Hazbin Hotel, Helluva Boss, Mean Girls, Murder Drones and The Amazing Digital Circus (dont ask me how to pronounce that)
Dislikes: disappointments, losing my stuff, some exes, my father
If you haven't heard, the em dash has been getting a lot of attention lately…
Because it was trained on pirated work—including freely accessible online writing (like fanfic, academic texts)—ChatGPT picked up patterns and quirks native to human writing.
Including (sigh) the em dash.
There are other victims here (RIP tapestry and delve 🫠), but the appropriation of the em dash—a punctuation mark beloved by writers everywhere—feels especially personal.
A kind of low-grade panic is ensuing. Writers who once memed their own em dash overuse—the greatest punctuation mark ever to grace the control-freak’s lexicon, frankly—are suddenly backing away to avoid accusations.
No. More. We have centuries of dash-abusing writers behind us. We will not sit quietly while AI repurposes our beloved stilted aside—or the just-one-more clarification the sentence demands—or the dramatic pause your comma could never—etc.
You don’t write like AI—AI writes like you.
Defend the em dash.
(Feel free to download/share/stick it where it matters!)
When the fanfiction site Archive of Our Own was conceived of and founded in 2007, its creators had one goal in mind. Yes, they wanted to give creators ownership over their own work and freedom of expression, but, most importantly, they wanted to create a space independent from corporate oversight.
I strongly encourage you to read the whole thing!
But if you cannot, here are some highlights (emphases all mine):
In simpler terms: AO3 is a fanfiction hosting site run and operated by over 700 volunteers. The site exists solely on the backs of those volunteers — board members, organizers, coders, public relations professionals, lawyers — and the money raised through two yearly fundraisers. It boasts 225 million page views a week, according to OTW Communications staffer Claudia Rebaza, on a library of over 4.5 million works written in languages that range from English to J.R.R. Tolkien’s fictional Sindarin. With a tagging system advanced enough to filter works based on what a reader doesn’t want to look at and over 1.8 million registered users, AO3 is a sort of safe haven for every kind of fic-loving fan.
Fanfiction existed long before the internet, but when websites capable of hosting fic — social media and blogging sites, mainly — realized they could turn its users’ original fanfiction into profitable user-generated content in the early and mid-2000s, the outcry was immediate. Suddenly there were rules. Perhaps most significantly, explicit content in all its forms was banned to make fanfiction something advertisers might want to sponsor. Even long-beloved fanfiction-hosting sites began self-censoring, including FanFiction.net, which was first launched in 1998 and banned NC-17-rated content in 2002.
Dismayed by the situation, Coppa and her co-founders, sci-fi and fantasy author Naomi Novik and Rebecca Tushnet, a First Amendment rights professor at Harvard University, decided to do something about it. They worked together with the other members of the founding board, a group of seven passionate, “incredibly collaborative” fans and creators, to make a new kind of archive. That they had the wherewithal and resources to do so speaks to the wide demographic drawn to fanfiction.
“If it was a for-profit organization, we would have been bought in 2011. The bad news is… for me, I’d be totally rich,” Coppa says, laughing. “Tumblr came out at the same time as us and if we had just been like, ‘yeah, we’re just making a company,’ somebody would have offered us millions and millions.” Tumblr, the fandom-oriented blogging site, was acquired by Yahoo! Inc. in 2013 for $1.1 billion, a figure that only makes Coppa laugh harder. “If we were not feminists and we were not committed to a nonprofit experience, we would have been bought by Yahoo! or Verizon or somebody like that. But we were [feminists], so we built a nonprofit so that it could not be sold.”
Id like to thank my mother for birthing me to get to this moment, id like to thank my father for the trauma he gave me to be able to post on tumblr, id like to thank my dog for being my dog
its me again. tried coming out to my dear sweet grandmama, and her opinion was literally 'every trans person i know knew from a very young age so you knowing at 15 is wrong you arent in the wrong body' and i think im going to explode
