HatedLove6

Welcome to my tumblr, filled with basically whatever I feel like typing and showing! This is the main blog that will act as an archive for all of my additional blogs listed under Tumblr Links.

[elumish]

This is probably a mistake to ask, but...

Based on responses I get, it feels as though my experience with fandom and the sorts of responses I get on my fanfics are very different than many other's.

I don't kid myself in thinking that I have never written anything "problematic", but across the almost 10k comments I've gotten on fics in both popular and super niche fandoms, I've never faced anything I would consider even approaching harassment, and I have virtually never received "how dare you write this"-esque comments. I have received negative comments, including some really wild ones, but none that resemble the sort of thing people keep telling me is ubiquitous.

I believe that people do receive those, but I've never been sure what leads to their experiences being so different from mine.

Is it that specific ships and specific fandoms bear the bulk of this? Is it that it's happening more in fandom spaces outside of AO3 where there is a lot more direct back and forth? Is it that somehow the negative comments I receive are different because the people harassing fanfic authors have decided I am a poor delicate fawn and/or so terrifying they don't want to cross me?

I'd appreciate if people can not respond with just "evil people harass people because of purity culture" because that's not what I'm asking. I am specifically trying to figure out why there are apparently such disparate experiences of being a fanfic author on AO3.

[hatedlove6]

I don't know if this will help, but I was harassed in 2007 on FFNet by a mob of "Mary-Sue killers" for--you guessed it--writing a Mary-Sue OC.

After being told my character was a Mary-Sue, I asked for clarification, definitions, examples, but I still didn't understand because it didn't seem to fit what they were saying. The story was a work in progress and I had plans that I hadn't gotten around to writing yet. After a while, I just decided to ignore it and continue my story. So not everyone would like my story. Oh well.

They wouldn't get the hint that I just wanted to complete my story in peace after I hadn't gotten any sort of satisfactory answers on what the heck Mary-Sues were, or give me any decent advice to make my story better, and they kept coming back chapter after chapter, not just to tell me my story sucks, but telling me to delete it, to give up writing, and to kill myself.

My story was added to a community collection for "Mary-Sue" stories.

Later, I discovered my username on someone's profile page in a "Wall of Shame" list, encouraging other people to harass me.

Then someone copied and pasted my story on their live journal with their own snippets of commentary intertwined throughout MST3000 style, mostly calling my OC a whore that they gloated about in my reviews, linking back to it. The funniest thing was my female OC had a male OC twin brother, and he wasn't being called any derogatory names or really even referred to as much (as far as I can remember).

After months of this, and 19 chapters in, I called it quits and deleted the story.

Yeah, it was a bad story, and, yes, it was a bit of escapism fantasy that may have been tailored to only me, but say you don't like it and move on. Don't gather a mob or keep coming back. I'm completely supportive of constructive criticism, but no one deserves to be told to delete their work, to quit, or worse. Seriously.

(Sorry; I ranted.)

I didn't quit writing for any amount of time because I had another fan fiction going in another fandom and wasn't getting harassed on that story. And I'm sure it was just as horrendous as the first story.

But, no, I wouldn't call this a normal occurrence. I've never had this happen again, even after more than fifteen years anywhere, even on FFNet.

If you want my two-cents, at least as to why FFNet is vastly different than AO3, I think it's mostly due to vague rules as to what is considered "constructive criticism" and "harassment" along with there being not enough people to moderate a large site, so when harassment isn't being handled in a timely manner, it can encourage others to hop on, not because they think they aren't breaking any rules, but because the rules don't seem to be enforced. Kind of like the Broken Window theory. I'd also like to add that while FFNet users can now delete guest reviews (I couldn't do that fifteen years ago), they still can't delete signed-in reviews, unlike AO3, Wattpad, QuoteV, and just about any other writing platform I've ever been on, which would have curbed the harassment I had received.

Despite what had happened, I still enjoy being on FFNet, and with it's PM system, I had very pleasant conversations with people beyond the initial reviews, even with those who didn't necessarily enjoy my stories.

But harassment on AO3? I'm sure it happens, but unless users aren't using the options available to them, such as blocking users, limiting their story's viewability to registered users, moderating their comment section, and filing detailed reports of their harassment, I can't seem to understand how things blow up on AO3, except if it started on another site, which the AO3 PAC team can't do anything about--you'd have to go to that other site and file reports if it breaks the TOS.

After typing all this up and rereading your original post, I may have deviated from the answer you were hoping for. If you want more details from my experience, or if you want to talk about this more, I'll more than welcome a private discussion.

[hatedlove6]

Hello!

This is going to sound so insane, but I sent you an ask back in 2014 about your Puppet Skin story that you probably haven’t thought about in years.

Call me crazy, but though I haven’t been involved in the fandom in forever, I still think on that story from time to time as I felt that I never read any good quality Nekozawa fanfiction except yours.

While I know it’s been abandoned (unless you’re still working on the 18th chapter lol), I wanted to just ask where you planned on going with it if you remember? The cliffhanger is still killing me haha and now that I read it again for funsies knowing that it was incomplete, I felt like I had to ask.

Hope that life has treated you well in the past 10 years since then. I was in 8th grade sending you that ask and now I graduated college since then.

I'm going to hazard a guess, and if I'm wrong, feel free to ignore . . . Wizard? Cyan?

Anyway, congratulations on graduating college!

It's funny because, for some reason, 2024 seems to be the year people have been revisiting my stories and asking me when the next installment will be . . . because I haven't updated any fan fiction in, like, a decade. . . or more. Oops. Living in a World of Strangers, Sequestered Mind, and Puppet Skin, in particular.

So while I don't want to get anyone's hopes up, none of these stories (as well as others) have been abandoned. I have never stopped thinking about them, or stopped coming up with new ideas for them; what stopped was just writing them. A lot of things have happened in the past ten years ranging from moving out of state, switching jobs, death, and living with my boyfriend. That said none of these things were preventing me from writing (per se. My job is physically demanding, and my boyfriend has single-child syndrome, lol). If that were the case, I wouldn't have been writing articles on and off for these ten years.

What has changed is, while I wasn't stuck on ideas, and while I generally had a plan of where the story would go in my head, and I could have written and posted Chapter 18, I just felt pantsing my stories weren't working, so I've been buckling down to outline my stories and OCs--kicking myself in the rear for not doing that from the very beginning--and plan to completely overhaul them.

I've been juggling outlining multiple tens of stories, and that's why it's taking so long for anything, any step, to be completed.

What I can tell you about Puppet Skin, so far, is it will be one book with four parts, covering the first year of Ouran, to a year after graduation. And if you want to know more about Iyo, and any clues you can gather about the story, you can find her character outline on my NeoCities: https://hatedlove6.neocities.org/Fan_Fiction/Characters/Iyo_Fukuda

(Yes, I changed the spelling of her name. ^-^)

I'm sorry.

[greater-than-the-sword]

"Credit to the original artist" is not credit to the original artist

[greater-than-the-sword]

"Payment to the cashier", I say, as I haul a TV out the door of the Walmart

[enchantedbook]

Τhe Horror of Living by Tyra Kleen , 1907

[elumish]

What’s the limit to how much you can base your original character off an already established character in media before it’s plagiarism?

I want to start this off by saying that I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV. This is not legal advice.

That said: the answer to your question, as I understand it, is "it depends."

Unless you are using uncited text or content that is very close to the original, it's most likely not plagiarism. What it is is (potentially) copyright infringement.

From my understanding, what tips it over into copyright infringement is based on what you're using and how you're using it.

Stuff in the public domain (e.g., Dracula, Frankenstein, the Bible) you can do whatever you want with. Want to put your smutty Dracula/Judas mystery novel on Amazon? There shouldn't be any legal issues with that as far as I know.

Stuff that's not in the public domain is where you run into issues. You can't legally sell Harry Potter fanfiction for money because someone else owns the copyright to Harry Potter. And the "for money" part of that is key--there are provisions specifically for transformative work that are the reason that we can post things on AO3 without being sued.

You can be very strongly inspired by existing works--Rainbow Rowell's Carry On is very clearly Harry Potter-inspired, and Fifty Shades is notoriously repackaged Twilight fanfiction. But the repackaging part is key there: it has to be distinct enough to not be considered copyright infringement.

How distinct is distinct enough? This is where you need to get someone with more legal knowledge than me. If you have something that you plan to publish for money, I recommend finding a copyright/intellectual property lawyer. If your concerns are about a transformative work, I recommend checking out resources that the Organization for Transformative Works has. They're the organization that runs AO3 as well as Tranformative Works and Culture.

Consider also that what may seem like a very obvious inspiration for you may not be so obvious to other people. You may want to ask someone who is familiar with what inspired it to read it and then ask if they can spot the connections--if they can't, or if the connections seem loose, you may be in the clear.

[hatedlove6]

I am also not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV, or voice one on the radio, I would also like to make a small addition to that, aside from the risk of copyright infringement, it could also land on trademark infringement depending on if the character the OC is going to be based on is trademarked.

Let's take Harry Potter as an example. His name is the series' title, his name is in the title of every book in the series, he's described so thoroughly that his dark hair, green eyes, glasses, and a lightning bolt-shaped scar are instantly recognizable as being Harry Potter, and due to being the main character of a series of books, his life and personality is also recognizable. Harry Potter as a character (name or otherwise) is trademarked.

However, aside from a name and a single important event of being cursed, we know next to nothing about Katie Bell. Katie Bell is not trademarked.

[commodorecliche]

concept: a facemask that says “Vaccinated But I Don’t Trust Y'all”

[degenerate-perturbation]

This is puzzling the living hell out of me. If you’re vaccinated you literally don’t need to trust anyone. That’s the whole point.

[commodorecliche]

you know, i was just gunna ignore this, and let you be a ignorant on this, but since I’m a frontline healthcare worker, it’s going to bug me if i don’t tell you exactly how incorrect this statement is.

1. Yes, being vaccinated adds a great layer of protection against covid. The vaccines, overall, are extremely effective, in that they allow for 90-95% protection against some of the primary covid strains. Meaning that for many people who are vaccinated, they don’t have to necessarily put their full trust in others to also be vaccinated.

HOWEVER:

2. I cannot emphasize this enough, but BEING VACCINATED IS NOT THE SAME AS BEING 100% FULLY PROTECTED, ESPECIALLY NOT FROM COVID VARIANTS. Being vaccinated is not a bullet-proof shield against covid. You CAN still catch the virus, even if you’re fully vaccinated, and while for many people, vaccination will prevent them from experiencing severe symptoms if they catch, you can absolutely still get infected (even without symptoms) and still spread the illness to others.

NOT TO MENTION:

3. The covid vaccines, while effective, do not protect against many of the variant covid strains we are currently dealing with, and while the vaccine does offer protection against some of those variant strains, it doesn’t protect you as efficiently from them. My coordinator is a prime example. She is fully vaccinated, and has been since they first became available to frontline healthcare workers like us. However, she caught a variant strain of covid and experienced a horrific, month-long illness that she is still trying to recover from (months later) and that she will likely suffer with for years to come. Every classic covid symptom, she had it. Every symptom that persists past covid’s resolution (like brain fog, shortness of breath, etc…) she’s still experiencing. Upon antibody testing, they found she did develop full antibodies to the vaccine like she was supposed to; but they also found that after she caught the strain, she developed antibodies from that particular strain that were different than the vaccine antibodies she’d already developed. 

Just because you are vaccinated, even fully, does not mean you are 100% safe, especially if other people around you aren’t fully vaccinated, or if they’re jackasses and are lying about their vaccination status just to take their masks off. You can absolutely still catch covid and its variants if you’re vaccinated; you can absolutely suffer the full extent of that illness even if the chances are reduced; and you can absolutely still asymptomatically carry the virus and/or its variants, and transmit it to others.

The vaccine is extra protection, and I’m so happy we have it. I’m thrilled to be vaccinated. I do feel safer; but I’m not letting that feeling of safety lure me into being careless. Being vaccinated is not a green light to ignore proper safety or to trust that others have your safety in mind. Despite what y’all want to think, this pandemic is still happening. People are still catching covid and its variants, and they’re dying from it. I’ve seen it in my hospital to this day.

Think of the vaccine like the seat belt in your car. That seat belt is critical and it has saved countless lives. But it’s not a guaranteed safety measure, and it doesn’t give you the freedom to drive like a maniac just cause you’re wearing it. Your seat belt also doesn’t guarantee that others aren’t going to hit your car in a way that’s so damaging your seat belt can’t help you. Having the seat belt on will absolutely make you safer!!! But it doesn’t mean you’re 100% protected from the dangers of a crash.

So no, even if you’re vaccinated, if you want to take your mask off, you’re still having to place your trust in others that they are vaccinated too. If you’re vaccinated and don’t want to wear a mask, you still have to trust that other people aren’t just being lying assholes and potentially still exposing you to covid and/or its variants, and thus enabling you to potentially carry and/or transmit it.

So don’t be stupid. Don’t blindly trust that every fucker out there without a mask is following proper CDC guidelines and is fully vaccinated and that you’re totally safe. You’re safer, if you’re vaccinated, for sure. Just like you’re safer in your car if you wear a seat belt. But that doesn’t mean you get full reign to be careless. We are not yet to a point of effective herd immunity for covid. Wear your mask. Wear your seat belt.

[stay-human]

This is a non-exhaustive list of brands to boycott if you would like to participate in the Palestinian call for global Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) against the Israeli occupation. I've excluded security, construction, etc. firms that cannot be boycotted in an individual capacity. However, pressuring governments & other organisations to refuse contracts to those firms is an integral part of the BDS movement. Will also try to make seperate posts on how to add your voice to the academic and cultural boycott of Israel.

On another note, Coca-Cola and Nestle belong on every boycott list. Not just because they are complicit in the Israeli occupation but also because they have committed some of the worst human rights violations the world over. Coca-Cola has gone as far as having Union leaders murdered. Both Coca-Cola and Nestle steal water supplies and create water insecurity in already marginalised regions among many, many other crimes. I did not include them in the list because I am aware of how overwhelmed people become when they see those two companies and all their endless subsidiaries and I wanted to keep the list targeted on companies that have been the specific focus of the Palestinian BDS movement.

I have also excluded some brands that are often on older BDS lists, like McDonald's, because over the years they have stopped engaging in the activity that resulted in their boycott or have simply fallen to a lower priority because their relatively lower level of involvement compared to the brands that are our focus.

That being said, I hope this list will serve as a place to start. As always, do your own research to make informed decisions. For more information, you can also visit bdsmovement.net and bdslist.org

[napeedgesandhighcheekbonez1]

[westafricanbaby]

Awwwww😂😂😂

[blackwomenunited]

"Then how do you say aisle?" 😂😂🤣

[twitblr]

The dumb dumbs dragging us down

[moved-to-lilith-xxx-deactivated]

A group posing wearing face masks during the second wave of the Spanish Flu in California in 1918.

If they could do it, so can we.

Source: Twitter/History In Pics

[beautifulscreaminglady]

[whitepeopletwitter]

[ukulelekatie]

You’ve heard of one shots, now get ready for none shots! It’s when you think of an idea for a fic and then don’t write it

[psychicsmurf]

[astrodidact]

[ladyloveandjustice]

Mary Sue, what are you? or why the concept of Sue is sexist

Looks like this essay was needed, so I went ahead and did it. Not sure I said everything I wanted to say, but I tried.

So, there’s this girl. She’s tragically orphaned and richer than anyone on the planet. Every guy she meets falls in love with her, but in between torrid romances she rejects them all because she dedicated to what is Pure and Good. She has genius level intellect, Olympic-athelete level athletic ability and incredible good looks. She is consumed by terrible angst, but this only makes guys want her more. She has no superhuman abilities, yet she is more competent than her superhuman friends and defeats superhumans with ease. She has unshakably loyal friends and allies, despite the fact she treats them pretty badly.  They fear and respect her, and defer to her orders. Everyone is obsessed with her, even her enemies are attracted to her. She can plan ahead for anything and she’s generally right with any conclusion she makes. People who defy her are inevitably wrong.

 God, what a Mary Sue.

I just described Batman.

  Wish fulfillment characters have been around since the beginning of time. The good guys tend to win, get the girl and have everything fall into place for them. It’s only when women started doing it that it became a problem.

TV Tropes on the origin of Mary Sue:

The prototypical Mary Sue is an original female character in a fanfic who obviously serves as an idealized version of the author mainly for the purpose of Wish Fulfillment.

Notice the strange emphasis on female here. TV Tropes goes on to say that is took a long time for the male counterpart “Marty Stu” to be used. “Most fanfic writers are girls” is given as the reason. So when women dominate a genre, that means people are on close watch, ready to scorn any wish fulfillment they may engage in. This term could only originate if the default was female.

 In fact, one of the CONTROVERSIES listed on the TV Tropes page is if a male sue is even possible. That’s right, it’s impossible to have an idealized male character. Men are already the ideal.

 In our culture, male tends to be the default. Women take on the distaff parts. “Him” and “mankind” are what humanity are, “her” and “womankind” are secondary. Yet this isn’t true for Mary Sue as a term. That name was created first. It was a Star Trek fic that coined it and the female designation was likely a big reason it caught on. Thus, a female name is the default to use when describing idealized characters. Marty Stu and Gary Stu are only to be used if you’re discussing men specifically.  Heck, there isn’t even an agreed upon term for them. So the only time female can be default is when discussing a badly written character, someone who is more powerful or important or liked than they should be allowed to be, someone the plot focuses on more than you would like, someone you don’t want to read about. Hmmm.

 What’s really wrong with a thirteen year old girl having a power fantasy, even if it’s badly written?  Who is it hurting? Men have baldly admitted to writing power fantasies and self inserts since the beginning of time. How many nerdy, schlubby guys suddenly become badasses and have hot girls chasing after them in fiction? See: Spiderman- blatant everyman who happens to  stumble across amazing powers and catch the eye of a supermodel.  Mary Sue is considered the worst insult to throw at a character as it renders them worthless. But since when are idealized characters automatically worthless? Aren’t all heroes idealized in some way? Don’t all heroes represent the author in some way? Aren’t these characters supposed to be people we look up to, people who represent human potential, the goodness that we strive for? Fantasy by nature is idealized, even the tragic ones.

 If you look at the TV Tropes page for Mary Sue, it’s ridiculous. You can be a sue for having too many flaws, or not enough, for fixing things or messing things up, for being a hero or a villain. And of course, this is specifically pointed out as a trope related to the Princess and Magical Girl genres- genres aimed towards women are naturally full of Mary Sues.  Magical girls are powerful and heroic and actually flaunt femininity as a good thing. They are a power fantasy designed for girls. So of course, a girl using traditionally feminine traits to dominate and triumph means she’s a sickeningly pure Mary Sue who makes everything go their way. Feminine traits are disdained and look down on, so when the positive feminine traits are prominent, the reader has an aversive reaction. How can a character be so feminine and triumph? She must be unrealistic, she must be badly written, because everyone knows it is impossible to be feminine and powerful.

 Let’s look at what kinds of Mary Sues people will point to. People will claim a female character is a Mary Sue if she is a love interest. Put a female character within a foot of a male character, and people will scream “Mary Sue!” Why does someone falling in love with her make her a Mary Sue? Well, she hasn’t “earned” this awesome dude character’s love. What has she done to show she’s worthy of him? Fans miss the irony that this line of logic makes the male character seem more like the Sue in Question, as he’s apparently so perfect one has work for his coveted love and praise.

  The idea that woman has to “earn” any power, praise, love, or plot prominence is central to Mary Sue.  Men do not have to do this, they are naturally assumed to be powerful, central and loveable. That’s why it’s the first thing thrown at a female character- what has she done to be given the same consideration as a male character? Why is she suddenly usurping a male role? “Mary Sue” is the easiest way to dismiss a character. It sounds bad to say “I don’t like this female character. I don’t like that this woman is powerful. I don’t like it when the plot focuses on her. I don’t like that a character I like has affections for her.”  But “Mary Sue” is a way to say these things without really saying them. It gives you legitimacy.

 If a character is badly written, there’s generally something much more problematic than idealization going on. The plot will be dull and the character will perpetuate harmful stereotypes while other characters act oddly.  For instance, Bella Swan is one of the only characters I’d even begin to classify as a Mary Sue, yet it’s not really her supposed Mary Sue traits that bother me. I don’t mind that she gets what she wants and everyone loves her, that she’s Meyer’s power fantasy. What I actually mind is that Stephenie Meyer has her perpetuate harmful anti-woman stereotypes- women need to be protected, women are shallow, women’s worth rests in desirability. That’s what’s actually harmful about her and worth discussing. I would criticize that rather than even get to the fact Bella got to be “too perfect and powerful”- that’s just a tiny, insignificant thing not worth mentioning in a huge pile of problems.

 And that’s why I don’t call characters Mary Sue anymore. There’s really nothing bad about a power fantasy or wish fulfillment. It’s what’s fiction’s about.  If one of my characters is called a Sue, I’ll proudly say “yep”, because that must mean that she broke out of that box a female character is supposed to be in.  So I’ll go and say it: I love me some Mary Sues.

[tintaglia3]

👏👏👏

[ithelpstodream]

“it’s just a parking lot”

exactly. there’s nothing there. not a statue. not a plaque. nothing.

[irishfino]

[drives over hitler’s death site]

[nichtschwert]

Bloody amazing.

And you know what’s right next to it?

That’s right, the Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden, which translates to the Memorial for the murdered jews.

So if you wanna go have a look at the monument commemorating the victims of Hitler’s regime, you can park your car right on the spot he died and walk there.

Makes ya think, doesn’t it?