The Ghost In The Bookshelf

Cosplay/Warhammer 40k/whatever blog. She. Born in USA/'96.

[yeehawpim]

a comic about fix-it fanfics

[catpocalyptic-world]

I just love it! ❤️

[olderthannetfic]

*cackling*

If OTW weren’t around, this wouldn’t be “scaremongering”: It would be the inescapable status quo.

[lanninglurksnomore]

The people who believe this crap are the anti-vaxxers of fandom.

[olderthannetfic]

Oh god. They kind of are, aren’t they?

[athingofvikings]

I’d go bigger and just say that they’re the conservatives/reactionaries of fandom–or, to frame it differently, this is how conservative and authoritarian ideologies express themselves in the context of Fandom.

[kimberlyeab]

my opinion on AO3 is that it’s an important asset but i still find it scummy that they’ll ask for money but when their users try to ask for money they slam them with their non-monetization rules. Like Anne Rice is dead and this isn’t the 90s anymore, people are making money from fandom please catch up with the times.

[olderthannetfic]

I think you’ve misunderstood:

AO3 was built by a bunch of us with our free donated labor for the purpose of being a space free from commercial spam.

It’s not a public service. It was built by us to house the type of fandom culture we liked.

People who want to do fandom differently, including making money, are welcome to go build their own site with their own money or their own donated labor.

[elfwreck]

AO3 does not forbid commercial links because they think fans making money from fanworks is immoral but them making money (to run the damn site) is fine.

AO3 forbids commercial links because they are making a very specific claim about the legality of fanworks, and that claim is about noncommercial fanworks.

They’re not saying that commercialized fanworks are against the law. They’re just not prepared to host them–nor defend them in court.

In case people missed it: The OTW will not honor DMCA takedown orders that are basically, “I own X work and that’s a fanfic of it, and that’s copyright infringement so make it go away.”

The OTW says, lolnope, we don’t think that’s copyright infringement. If you disagree, sue us.

The OTW says: Disney - we will not remove explicit Mandalorian fanfic. Rowling, Warner Bros - we will not remove trans Harry Potter fanfic. Gabaldon - we are not removing Outlander fanfic no matter how much you think it’s illegal or a personal violation. Yarbro, if someone puts “The Adventure of the Gentleman in Black” on AO3, you will need to actually take it to trial to (try to) get it removed; none of this C&D order followed by fans caving because they can’t afford a lawyer.

…So far, nobody has sued them. (This is, in my mind, the strongest proof we have that fanfic is not copyright infringement. In 13 years, not a single person or company has scrounged up a lawyer and filed a lawsuit against AO3/the OTW for hosting fanworks.)

But they’re not willing to put themselves on the line for commercial works. Those get considered differently in copyright law. They’re not always infringing - there’s a whole history of parody books & songs to prove that - but the OTW is not dealing with them.

The OTW does not care if fans are making money. The OTW cares if fans making money interfere with its legal defense of its archive.

If you are not a copyright lawyer, your opinion about the situation is not going to be considered.

[thebibliosphere]

Also, it wasn’t just Anne Rice coming after fandom in the 90s as though this is some relic holdover terror from ancient history.

Events like Strikethrough and Boldthrough happened in the early to mid-2000s. It felt like you’d wake up every day in 2007 and find another fandom group on LJ gone. (And not just fandom groups either, important community groups for education and trauma survival were also wiped out in those purges as well.)

And while not exactly the same, Yahoo Groups–and yes Yahoo Groups was a major online fandom hub at one point–were deleted as late as 2019 with very little warning, leaving a lot of older fandom groups scrambling to back up decades worth of content.

I might be projecting, but Fanfic.net seems to be wobbling too. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out they go under in the next few years despite performing similar purges of adult content in 2012 and allowing for obnoxious ads, which made the site unusable on mobile unless you wanted to see an ad what felt like every couple of paragraphs. (It might be better now, I haven’t checked in a while.)

It has only been in very recent memory that fandom has gained any sort of foothold that isn’t poised directly over a precarious faultline that could at any moment open up and swallow entire communities whole, and a huge part of that is the volunteers at Ao3 who decided to play chicken with the likes of Anne Rice and won.

Ao3 at its core was and is built by fandom. Some people don’t like it and that’s fine, but to even suggest that the volunteers are lounging around eating peeled grapes and lighting cigars with hundred dollar bills making bank through fraud while fanfic authors are left out in the cold is beyond the scope of laughable.

[magsgotswags]

It’s cute how people think that Anne Rice was the only one who did this. Look at what Disney does to people who they think are making money off fanworks (lightning Mcqueen dude on tiktok, for example). (now what really would be fun is if they found a way to claim that people who make money from their 50 minute long youtube vids about their Marvel predicitons (which IS FANFIC it’s just that it’s mostly dudes) are making money from thier IP. Because they are.)

[ambular-d]

IIRC, Anne McCaffrey,  J. Michael Straczynski, George R.R. Martin and Marion Zimmer Bradley, among others, have also thrown hissy fits over fanworks (MZB possibly with some rational grounds for it, since I seem to recall she actually did get caught up in a legal snafu involving a fan who claimed she’d stolen their ideas.)

[olderthannetfic]

The MZB situation is… uh… complex, to say the least. Nobody agrees what happened, but it appears MZB’s people approached a fan about using her stuff in exchange for a thank you, and the fan wanted money and actual credit as a writer. (According to the fan, they then threatened her to shut her up, which makes some sense in the context of MZB being post stroke and hiding it at the time.) Basically, it was some kind of clusterfuck that probably involved covering up that MZB was no longer able to write.

[hellabutts]

Ngl the people who hate on AO3 *specifically* for the fact that they do fundraising and claim that they all must be rolling in money? They come off to me like the Fox News of Fandom.

Also we go through this *every year* and at this point it just feels like willful and malicious ignorance.

[yet-another-clown]

onwards, comrades

[byjove]

this is a controversial opinion and I’m not a gamer but I don’t need my graphics to be that good. I don’t need to see every individual feather on a bird. my poor computer doesn’t deserve to carry that weight either.

[is-this-fascism]

i don't care if it's nazis, mormons, or a bunch of misguided autistic people. if anyone ever tries to tell you your soul is from another planet and you're actually part of the class of impressive people that secretly did everything cool in the world but is now extinct and lives on through your broken genome, you RUN. YOU WILL RUN AWAY. YOU WILL SPRINT FULL SPEED AWAY FROM THAT.

[is-this-fascism]

grabs you by the shoulders listen. listen to my words. i understand the urge to make fanfiction about yourself and to find a reality in which you're super awesome and great and everyone who hates you is wrong and dumb. i get it. you're better than that. you can love yourself without putting other people down, dehumanizing and generalizing, and retaliating against your oppressors.

there's no NPCs. there's no aliens coming to save us. we're not the next step in human evolution. our hyperconnected nervous systems give us terrible sensory overwhelm more often than they make us geniuses. neurotypical people are sentient, conscious, aware people who are capable of understanding you. we're more the same than we are different. we're more the same than we are different. we're more the same than we are different.

[watcherinthesky225]

[tennysfavoriteskineater]

[chongoblog]

ITS APRIL 13 YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS

FETCH ME NEIL

[chongoblog]

[witchesversuspatriarchy]

[celinethefeline]

[moss-wizard]

What a year this week has been.

[we-dont-matteratall]

It’s Monday.

[jacuwi]

It sure as hell is.

[actualaster]

The earlier in the day Monday you reblog the funnier this gets

[papayajuan2019]

cruelty is so easy. youre not special for choosing it

[ourplague]

[chilewithcarnage]

"The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain."

-Ursula K. LeGuin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

[wizardnuke]

"Evil is boring. Right? I kinda believe in the banality and mundaneness of evil. Evil is just selfish impulses, which at the end of the day are really easy to understand. It’s easy to understand why people do bad things. It’s like “yeah, ok, you’re selfish and scared and cruel, I get it”. Being good is complex and beautiful and hard." - Brennan Lee Mulligan

[transchakotay]

“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.”

- Simone Weil

[veliseraptor]

“I am a simple person with simple wants,” I say, scrolling through AO3 and ignoring fics for a variety of petty reasons

[livrelady]

#my wants are simple#but my dislikes are many and complex#but I’ll begrudgingly read fics I ignored after getting through the tags#and whaddya know I was right I didnt like them  (x)

[the-apocrypha]

also related: the moment you run out of fics on your tag of choice, sigh, and then begrudgingly lower your standards and look again

[insanatee]

Best item in the game.

[queersona]

lolita fashion (NOT to be confused with loli/lolita cp) is so cute I just wish it were named something else

[queersona]

[madelinelime]

lmao then call it something else because there’s a reason it’s called lolita and they aren’t at all using it because of cute fashion.

[bogboyfriend]

The name Lolita has nothing to do with pedophillia. It was chosen by Japanese designers in the 70’s because it sounded old fashion and European so it fit the style. Due to a language barrier they did not know what connotations it had outside of Japan

The Lolita fashion community is very anti pedophillia, please do not try to say that we are fetishists for using the terminology our community has used since the 70s it is not our fault

[yay855]

Lolita fashion was intended to be intentionally childish, but not because it would be sexual to pedophiles. The original lolita fashion movement was a symbol of rebellion, of girls reclaiming their sexuality from a society that told them to dress formally at all times to find a husband.

These girls created fashion based around a little girl’s idea of fancy. It wasn’t good looking to men, but the women who wore it loved it, and that was the entire point.

Lolita fashion is basically the Flapper movement of Japan (which, for those who don’t know, was also a movement of young women defying traditional gender roles by dressing in ways they found fun instead of in ways that were deemed appropriate).

[kelocitta]

Tipherith having fun with her first abnormality fight

[ghostlyreader]

I symaphize with the tags of this extremely. QoH is a tough boss fight.

[stonetheskooks]

With all the events going on recently I think it’s time to post this image againbc i’m tired of this shit 

[ziggy-starstop]

Thanks, I really needed this today!

[jukeboxemcsa]

I would also add that some people are trying to tailor their blogs to folks who come to Tumblr for an escape from what is happening in the real life. It’s okay to switch off the news and read porn for an hour or two. It really is.