Okay, so, I get it. Its a great site! You can post things there without worry that someone who claims that media seeing it and sending lawsuits on your ass.
You can write all sorts of things, and you can have it be taggable and organizable on this neat website.
It runs donations every now and again so that they can keep the site's servers (and therefore the stories) up. It also keeps a team of lawyers so that any person who takes issue will have to deal with actual law know how.
Thats great, and I love the site for the neat, organizable system it is. It sucks that people write shitty stuff, but fiction can help you run through situations you never want happening irl, and if you dont like it, don't read it!
But. Uh. Enough about ao3, the twitter post is made by a Thorki shipper. They emphasize the part of no censorship of adult content. Hm.
Okay look, you made a very rational post for the most part, and I am not trying to pick on you or start a fight (unlike my recent replies to anon where I let my cranky out full-steam). You appear to be generally getting the drift, and I appreciate your moderate tone.
I am not bitching at you, here. I am kind of laughing at you, though. In a gentle and non-aggressive way.
I, uh, I have some news for you... about the people who, y’know, founded AO3:
Oh this is... *chef's kiss* I haven't seen such delicious dramatic irony in the wild since the days when first-time New Who viewers would plaster their Doomsday liveblogs and distraught Tenth Doctor Feels reaction posts with that one "I'm in a glass case of emotion" gif.
ASTOLAT STARTED AO3?!?!?!?!?!?!
I should be used to these posts by now, but they never fail to crack me up.
AO3 was proposed in astolat’s 2007 post An Archive of One’s Own (making the Virginia Woolf reference even more obvious).
Always hilarious. A little sad, in that it shows how much people don’t look into the “About” pages or histories of popular websites, but also, delightful that AO3 is being used by people who have no idea why it was made; it’s just useful to them. (Which was absolutely the plan.)
But yeah. AO3 is never going to get rid of the underage sex, the incest, the sex-pollen orgies, the forced marriage fics, the mpreg, the underage incestuous forced-marriage sex pollen orgies resulting in mpreg fics... because those were the reason it was created.
@elfwreck AO3 was created in response to a series of actions being taken by several authors who didn't like fans writing content in the authors sandbox for themselves, for free, and sharing it with other fans. Entire archives of fan fiction were taken down and purged. LiveJournals were particularly affected by this, as well as many other sites I can't remember the names of right now (it's almost 6am and I haven't slept yet, forgive me).
That's why it's called Archive of Our Own. It's a fan-created, fan-run, fan-moderated archive of fan fiction that is well protected by lawyers so that the authors who just want to have fun and be creative don't have formal legal action taken against them again.
Yes, that happened. It was terrifying.
In case you ever run across a fic with a disclaimer on it that says something to the effect of: "don't own, not making money, please don't come after me" that's why. I remember putting those on my cringey af fics myself on ff.net, or fanfiction.net.
That site is another large reason why AO3 is what it is, too. FF.net decided one day that adult/mature content was no longer allowed, and they promptly removed all of it. Didn't inform the authors, nothing. Just... Whoosh. Gone. Mind you, they had a rating system, so if you didn't want to find explicit fics, it was easy not to. AFF.net, or adultfanfiction.net, was put in place rather quickly and it was alright for awhile, but ultimately a bandaid.
Then, AO3 came along, and the game changed. Things could be tagged, collated, and organised like never before, and part of that was because AO3 decided not to censor content. They decided not to because of the damage that had been done to the fanfiction community due to all the recent bans and purges. All of the tropes you mentioned have been around for way, waaaaay longer than AO3.
The site wasn't created to cater to ships, tropes, or kinky stuff; it was created to house fan fiction, no matter the type, and to keep the fans who wrote it from being legally attacked by angry authors. Anne Rice was one of the big names in this, btw. AO3 is a virtual library, essentially; they expect the reader to have responsibility about the media they consume.
Btw, I'm not trying to start a fight or anything; I only wanted to educate you if you didn't know. I think it's very important to preserve our own history, because it's so unique and also because things have changed so much and so rapidly. If you did already know all this background, then please just disregard 💚
AO3 was created for a lot of reasons; protection from authors who got upset at fanfic involving their characters was one of them.
Mainly - it was created for fic that was at risk of being thrown off other platforms. It was created after Strikethrough and Fanlib, with several of the founders still coping with the sudden closing of Detention.
“Fics that might be challenged by authors” was a large category AO3 was built to welcome. AO3′s founders looked into the legalities of Rice’s claims, and the history of things like Yarbro’s legal action against a fanzine, and decided: No more. We’re done with fanworks being squished by the mere threat of lawyers, without fans having any idea how copyright law actually works.
Extreme kink was another big category: Fic and art with content that regularly got thrown off of hosting sites, regardless of the legality, because it squicked someone who couldn’t be bothered to pay attention to the “don’t like? don’t click” warnings.The definition of “extreme kink” shifted around a lot; in some places, any slash pairing was considered “adult rated” and “too kinky.” In others, slash was fine; explicit sex was not. In others, sex was fine, but any hint of BDSM would get a work removed. And so on. Lots of shifting goalposts.
AO3 wasn’t specifically focused around “extreme kinky smut,” but it was made with that content specifically in mind; the terms of service and acceptable content policies were shaped by “how do we allow for stuff that’s going to disturb or offend a lot of people?” Content that would bother fans was just as important as allowing content that would bother outsiders, authors and media companies and moralistic crusaders trying to purge the world of whatever fictional tropes were most hated this year.
(@lesdeuxcygnes I don’t think we’re in disagreement, just focused on different parts of the history.)
"You can write all sorts of things, and you can have it be taggable and organizable on this neat website. "
"It sucks that people write shitty stuff, but fiction can help you run through situations you never want happening irl, and if you dont like it, don't read it!"
"But. Uh. Enough about ao3, the twitter post is made by a Thorki shipper."
All of this. AO3 was created to be permissive of any type of content that isn't actually illegal, explicitly because there was a well-documented history--which its founders lived through personally--showing that any other kind of censorship of the material posted would inevitably open the site up to bad actors who would weaponize the TOS to go after whatever type of content they didn't like. And no, not just the three or four types people who give AO3 flak always cite. Never just that. Often not even starting with that.
The conclusion this incredibly dedicated group of fans with legal knowledge and years of fandom experience came to after great deliberation was that obviously, censoring illegal content is necessary for the protection of fanworks and the archive. But the second you try to start censoring works beyond what's actually illegal, the TOS is open to abuse and the archive is no longer protected. Because no matter how specific or careful you think you're being, it will never be specific or careful enough not to open the door to third parties who want to exploit the TOS to censor content they don't personally like.
Want an example? Fics containing sexual content involving underage characters. Seems straightforward, right? Should be super easy to ban that at least!
Underage according to which state or country? And what counts as sexual content? Does this change if the characters are queer? Can you guarantee any possible person interpreting the TOS will have all the same answers to those questions as you?
If two 17-year-old boys kiss or hold hands, does that scene logically get lumped in with a graphically described sex scene between a man and woman in their 30s, and banned accordingly since the characters are underage? I would say no, you might say no...but there are a TON of people in the world that would say yes, absolutely. And that isn't some edge case. That is a very real and prominent pillar of the arguments homophobes make against ANY queer content especially in traditional children's and young adult's media. And it all starts with saying "just ban underage sexual content" as if the whole world understands and agrees on the definition of all those words.
I am a licensor/content creator and I approve the core of the above message.
(And I’ve had a long day, so if you feel the need to fight me over this, please wait till tomorrow. Otherwise, just tag your fic here “not you DD” and get on with it, secure in the knowledge that I don’t read fanfics set in my universes on AO3.)
it’s still hilarious to me that thor/loki is like the de facto knee jerk incest ship to condemn when thor and loki are not only not blood relations, they’re not even the same fucking species, and loki’s legal status as odin’s adopted son is incredibly questionable considering odin basically just found him on the ground and took him home like ‘hey, free baby!’
like. some people are so far into their puritanical little bubble that they just assume that everyone knows to hate these ships and hate anyone who likes these ships, but like the underlying reason for that is just ‘someone thought it was kind of gross’.
Like ... last time I looked that was a huge fuckin plot point ...
Like ... them NOT being sibling was the linchpin the whole fucking first movies plot was based on ...
Like if they actually had been siblings the first movie would have gone very very differet ...
*looks left* *looks right* You don't say.
Well, antishippers will joyfully move the goal posts just to argue. In fact, they're moving goal posts everywhere and it's really really irritating, they need to stop. They keep stepping in logic holes that they dug themselves into-
[The original post is a tweet that reads, "AO3 is literally a dream fanfic site. It offers comprehensive tagging, zero censorship of adult content, no ads, no corporate overlords to arbitrarily pull the plug, and A TEAM OF LAWYERS TO PROTECT AUTHORS. If you complain about it having fundraisers, you're being ridiculous."
The second screenshot is of astolat's Ao3 works page. There are two Loki/Thor stories at the top.
The third is a screenshot of a bio and a reblog under it. The bio reads, "astolat I write fanfic and make vids. Started the AO3. You can also find me on AO3, youtube (as astolatvids), dreamwidth, and twitter (as intimations). she/her" The post reads, "Do you think Naomi Novik ever looks at AO3 sees some incest mpreg and whispers to herself "I never wanted this" She reblogged, "No. :)"]
