i didnt realise ao3 was started in response to lj deleting account relating to p//edophi|ia and they explicitly support the posting of such works yikes
it wasn’t, like, ~~~we luv pedophilia, it was way more complicated than that!
although it’s true AO3 does allow all fannish content provided it’s properly warned for, there’s a long history there - of spaces being used by fans until the host decided whatever we were doing was too weird and distasteful and either kicking us off, banning certain content, or changing the nature of the site until it was no longer viable as a host.
you’re referring to the LJ Strikethrough of 2007, which, being an ancient crone, I lived through, and since I was hanging out in the last vestiges of SGA and in bandom, I saw some of the fallout. this was before LJ was sold to the Russians (which is a whole ‘nother story), when it was still owned by Six Apart; in an effort to clean up LJ’s act, Six Apart decided to delete all accounts using tags like underage, incest, rape, etc.
this was supposed to get rid of actual child porn on the site, and I hope it did, but it also targeted fan communities. this was a problem for a couple reasons; for one thing, not every story tagged with these words is in favor of them; for another, these things happen to real people and these personal posts were also potentially in danger of being attacked; for the last one, look, I ain’t into this kind of fic but people write about what people write about, and if it’s fictional and not explicitly banned in the TOS (correct me if I’m wrong; I don’t think written content about this stuff was banned?) then it’s not cool for a content host to just start deleting communities without warning.
but that’s what happened! these deletions were also primarily targeting slash communities, which smacked of some serious homophobia since things were deleted that had nothing to do with any of this kind of content.
eventually someone found out it was this super conservative religious group who’d sent a list of journal names to Six Apart, and who if I remember correctly targeted slash fic on purpose, even after it became clear that the fic was, well, totally fictional. after a while, Six Apart admitted they’d made a mistake and started to reinstate journals, but all of fandom was pretty shaken up.
THEN Boldthrough happened, which was essentially the same debacle several months later, at which point fandom began its long slow migration from LJ to GJ, IJ, and eventually AO3, Twitter, and tumblr.
AO3 was opened in 2008 in response to several incidents, of which Strikethrough was a really intense one. remember, also, that back in 2008 the stigma surrounding fandom was significantly greater and more shameful than it is today, so finding hosts willing to archive fic was difficult unless someone had the dough to pay for server space - often not an option. this was also back when fanfic.net’s HTML restrictions were so great that users couldn’t use any special characters or bold or italicize anything, and it didn’t allow R-rated content, so it was clearly not ideal. in addition, although cease & desist letters were much less common than they were in the early 2000s and before, DMCA takedowns were still a phantom on the horizon.
LONG STORY SHORT, even though pedophilia is reprehensible and I personally cannot stomach fanfic that involves that kind of content, AO3 was founded specially as a safe space for fandom communities that could not find homes elsewhere. it requires warnings precisely for that reason, and if you find a story that is not properly warned, you can alert the admins and get the story labeled appropriately.
IDK, maybe it’s just because I am, again, ancient, but I was in and around fandom before homosexuality was legal in all 50 states. so were most of the people who started AO3. for most of my formative life, being gay was associated with pedophilia, and so was writing about gay characters. just - it’s a lot more complicated than you might expect, and there’s a reason many older fans who have been involved in several generations of fandom were so grateful to have AO3 as an option.
I don’t read, for example, Hydra Trash Party fics. They squick me, and I generally feel they are pretty gross. But writing noncon body-horror is not the same as saying “yeah, I totally want to go out and rape and torture people for years while brainwashing them!” or even “yeah, I wouldn’t do it myself, but it would be totally okay if someone did!” Nobody is hurt by it, and nobody is going to be hurt by it. So should I have the right to go, that is gross, you don’t get to write or read that? No.
In the same way, writing about underage teens getting it on–sometimes with each other, sometimes with adults, sometimes consensually, sometimes not–is not the same as child pornography, nor does reading a fic about Hermione and Snape getting it on while she was his student mean someone thinks that would be a good and/or healthy thing in real life.
Fiction affects reality, but fiction is not reality. And writing about something does not mean you want to do it in real life, or believe that anyone should.
Let’s take a closer look at that “Ao3 supports pedophilia!” shall we?
1) The only fics I have ever come across that had actual pedophilia (i.e. someone having sex with a child), it was clearly and explicitly abuse. It was not meant to titillate or arouse. It was meant to horrify. It was seldom explicit.
2) There’s a lot more incest, but it is usually portrayed either as explicitly mutually consensual (i.e. Sam/Dean) or as abusive.
3) I’ve been in fandom for a decade and a half. When people start getting upset at “omg pedophilia, think of the children!” the fics they are usually objecting to aren’t actually pedophilia. Usually, it is teenagers having sex, especially queer sex. And people don’t like that, and use pedophilia as an excuse to shame people for writing/reading sex they don’t like.
Let’s look closer at Strikethrough, shall we? I hope that, if there were any communities of actual pedophiles on LJ, they got taken down, too. But here are some of the communities that got taken down that were not in any way supporting pedophilia and/or rape and/or incest that got taken down:
1) at least one support community for survivors of sexual abuse.
2) a literary book discussion group that was reading Lolita.
3) lots of slash fanfic communities, for things like Draco/Harry fic set in their fourth year (when both boys would have been 15).
Basically, this very conservative “family values” group hated porn, and they hated queer stuff even more, and used “but think of the children, it’s pedophilia!” to pressure LJ to get rid of huge swathes of things they didn’t like. And one time taking down the worst of it wasn’t good enough for them. No, this was step one on a moral crusade. If you acceded to their demands, all that did was whet their appetite, and soon they would be back with a new list of demands. This is why the 2007 strikethrough was not an isolated event, but rather one of a series of events, nor was LJ the only website thus targeted. It starts with anything that can get labelled “pedophilia” or “incest” because that’s low-hanging fruit. But they use that to go after anything relating to queer teen sexuality. Then anything with teen sexuality. Then once the community is already divided and diminished, they go after anything with non-con. Then whatever is next on their list. It doesn’t stop until they’ve won the point and nothing but suitably “family-friendly” fics that match their purity test are allowed.
Which is why AO3 has no morality content in their terms of service. You can’t break copyright beyond fair use (and AO3 has an expansive view of “fair use” and a team of lawyers on call). You can’t use AO3 for commercial advertising. And you can’t post ACTUAL child pornography, i.e. the things that are legally prohibited, i.e. actual photographs or videos of actual children (not teens) in sexually explicit positions–you know, the stuff that actually hurts kids. Other than that? It’s fair game. You can post anything you want, and the archive will not judge. There is no handle for the Moral Majority Family-Friendly Thought Police to latch onto, no cracks they can exploit to divide and conquer.
We’ve been down that road. It doesn’t lead anywhere good.
Reblogging this for the excellent explanation of what exactly the moral crusaders did last time. They had an explicit agenda of anti-queerness, and they specifically targeted slash and femslash communities in particular, such that many ship communities became (or started as) deliberately members-only. You had to apply, and your personal blog had to look like a real person and a fan. You were vetted, a la 1990s private servers.
During this period, Dreamwidth was also targeted by attacking its payment processor. They had to get a new one. These “Warriors” (literally called themselves that!) were totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom they didn’t like.
If you’re carrying out harassment of people right now because they’re posting works with sexual elements you don’t agree with? (And it’s always sex, never non-sexual violence, how strange….) If you’re doing that, you’re also totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom you don’t like. Because your tactics are fandom-destroying, and so is your agenda.
reblogging because this is important: strikethru and boldthru and all the various “purges” that fandom went thru about 10 years ago: this had to do with OUTSIDERS deciding that fandom in general and fanfiction in specific were evil and needed to be destroyed; unless we were writing and shipping good vanilla M/F married people. These were outsiders, going after fictional writing about fictional characters.
AO3 and OTW are HUGE, because now we have an organization, with very smart women and a lot of lawyers, that have our back. Fannish history is important, people! It has not always been this way.
This is so, so important: there’s that other post about AO3 and fanfiction floating around, about our history. People decry violent video games but no one is trying to force companies out of business. But people can and do attack fanfiction: an activity primarily written by women for women, about fictional characters. And often about sex. We have to constantly defend ourselves, protect ourselves, support each other against charges like “paeodophilia”.
Throwing this in because I was also present: This was during the American Government’s attempts to pass censorship laws on the internet. As MOST of those domains had their serves in America, they were beholden to those censorship laws. A great deal of fanfiction.net was removed because they happened to lose a goddamn courtcase. I’ve been on the site since 2002. They may not have ‘officially’ allowed NC-17 rated content (what it used to be listed as in the filters), it never did a damn thing to remove it. Ever. They had it listed as a rating option during ‘New Story’ uploading after all. It was i nthe search filters. After they lost the courtcase however, they legally had to start doing things about the mature content reports they got. The admins and mods were not actively looking for fic to remove, they were just responding to reports they had already received.
tl;dr - I know tumblr is all about black and white “you’re either all right or all wrong” thinking, but it’s important to understand what actually happened before going “ew ao3 was made to give pedophiles a safe place to post” because that is 110% not what happened.
This is why so, so many of the comparatively older fannish folks on tumblr like me are so vehemently against stuff like the anti movement and “all ships are valid UNLESS”. It smacks of censorship and content policing - and we’ve been there. We got our shit deleted and our accounts banned because someone else thought what we were reading or writing or talking about needed to just… not exist. No warning. Literally overnight. We just woke up and stuff was gone.
And yeah, the group was legit called Warriors for Innocence (or maybe of). I knew several people that were members of survivor/support groups that lost their groups - and their main support network - when Strikethrough happened (ten years ago holy shit).
You antis need to listen when us older fans tell you that the censorship you’re advocating for, when put into practice, is NOT a positive thing; it’s an extremely scary thing!
I can guarantee that you would be very, very upset if another event like LJ Strikethrough were to happen today because *you* are just as vulnerable as the rest of us! If you support the rights of marginalized groups of people, if you’re a slash or fem slash shipper, if you support gender identities that aren’t defined by biological sex, if you care about representation, if you support women, if you have any kind of kink, if you care about fandom in any capacity beyond its eradication, YOU DO NOT ACTUALLY WANT THE SORT OF CENSORSHIP YOU’RE ADVOCATING!!
People were terrified during Strikethrough. I was there. Communities were being shut down, individual users were being shut down. People were losing access to their own fics, their feedback, their comments – a LOT went on in comments on LJ. Think more coherent reblogs, much more personal, very widespread. Comments were also very important, and in terms of networking/communicating, were absolutely critical.
LJ was, for many people, central.
It was a fundamental part of the infrastructure of fandom at the time.
Having it attacked, having parts of your fandom’s territory just deleted like that, was very very scary. People didn’t know who was next. Every day, the list of stricken journals grew. And not all of them came back, not all of them recovered their content. Some people even voluntarily deleted their content as a form of protest. It was a bad time.
You do not have to interact with fic that grosses you out or makes you uncomfortable. Tagging is a thing. And even outside of tags, you are responsible for curating your own fandom experience. It is not right to expect it to be curated for you. And it is not right to lash out when someone refuses to do so and expects you to walk away from things that do not concern you.
I was gonna say “things that don’t harm anyone” but I realize you can argue that. If you get triggered, that’s upsetting. That could be considered harm. And I have sympathy for that. I do.
I have run across fic that triggered me. I have pretty specific triggers, and people don’t always think to warn for them because they aren’t that big a deal for a lot of people. Or it’s sort of bundled into kink and is presumed, that if you’re okay with certain kinds of kink, you’re okay with this. So I’ve been blindsided by it before. And it sucks for a couple of days while I get over it.
That was not the fault of the authors! You could argue that tagging should have been used, and maybe it should, but ultimately that’s not an ironclad obligation. It’s a tool people provide out of courtesy.
That was not the fault of the site! The site is there to give authors a way to make fiction available, not to judge each work and interrogate its validity and make sure everything is tagged so that nobody has to see anything bad, ever.
That was not even my fault! It was my responsibility to try to curate my experience, and I tried, but it wasn’t my fault because I didn’t deliberately set out to trigger myself.
When I get triggered, unless it is by a deliberate act, it is actually the fault of the people who hurt me in the first place! And I refuse to let them off the hook and blame perfectly innocent people who just wanna write their fanfiction! I may hate that fanfiction, but that is irrelevant to the question of whether or not people should be allowed to post whatever they want.
Also, some people cope by writing about fucked-up shit. My best friend in the whole wide world has shared her fic with me, and HOO BOY it is messed up. She wrote it during a time in her life when she was in and just coming out of a horrifically abusive relationship. I mean, it was exactly the kind of relationship all of us here on Tumblr love to hate. She was married to a shitty, abusive man who preyed on someone younger than he was and used his influence over her to treat her in a way that would be right at home in that Lundy Bancroft book Why Does He Do That? He was a real rapist, a verified grade-A bad fuckin’ guy. (She was lucky to escape. I have immense respect for her.) And she wrote some fucked up fic to deal with it, and she shared it, and people were invested in it. And because this was early 2000′s, she had to host it on a foreign server and cover her tracks, because at that time no-place was safe to post it.
“Yeah, but if she’s writing it for therapy, she doesn’t have to post it where other people might have to see it!” I hear you say.
But like … what the hell??? “Shut up, don’t talk about it, it’s bad to talk about these things, because these things are bad!” is something used against folks with trauma.
“This isn’t good for me, I can’t talk about this, I can’t be your audience for this,” that’s fine, those are boundaries that people with trauma use to defend themselves. You should learn to say those things! It will help you!
But expecting other people to never create and share art about trauma is just so thunderously oppressive I lack the ability to fully articulate it.
And nobody should have to disclose their history of trauma to prove their motives are pure or virtuous enough for their speech to be protected. I’ve only really been able to openly say “I was assaulted, it was traumatic, I am a little fucked up from it” for the past couple of years, tops. I couldn’t talk about it before that. Couldn’t! And it was over 20 years ago!
I also believe, very firmly, that you don’t need a history of abuse to find writing really messed-up shit satisfying, or to find reading it cathartic. I believe 100% in the freedom of creative expression, and the freedom to read whatever fucked up shit you want to read.
All y’all fandom youngsters can spit nails all you want over gross rape fic, incest fic, whatever.
Fine, I don’t like it either!
But that fucked up shit? That fucked up shit helped carve out the spaces we have today. You don’t have to like it, but campaigning to get it deleted, harassing content creators, calling people rapists and pedophiles who have never done and would never ever do such a thing, that is not the way to improve the world, it doesn’t keep actual kids or teens or assault/rape victims safe. It wouldn’t have made me feel safe when I was 16 and did’t want what was going on. It doesn’t make me feel safe now. I can say with the perspective of someone 24 years away from that event, it doesn’t make the world safer for people like I was. It actually makes it worse.
Learn to steer clear of the messed-up stuff you don’t like. It’s a skill, you get better with practice. Have someone else vet stuff for you if you need help doing it now.
Everything that is sketchy and gross is not criminal, and writing about a thing is not morally the same as doing it. Please stop acting like writing about an adult and a teenager having really questionable, gross sex is as bad as the actual registered sex offender they caught hanging around an actual elementary school two neighborhoods over from mine, just trying to talk to the kids. The former is, at most, in poor taste, and potentially triggering to abuse victims. The second makes me want to vomit because even though he was just talking, that guy was gearing up to try something and create another abuse victim. A g a i n.
The first can be avoided because it is imaginary and you, an adult, have power over your back button so that you don’t have to witness harm to imaginary people. The second, those very real kids had to rely on real adults and real law enforcement to keep them safe from very real assault. (It worked! The neighborhood rallied! He was arrested for violating parole!)
Pretty sure Sleazebag McDongface didn’t read some gross NC-17 Draco/Lucius fic before deciding to harm an actual human being. Pretty sure not having read it didn’t keep him from doing it. ‘Cause he fuckin’ did it. And he would have done worse. But actual people stopped him.
I get wanting to protect victims when so many of us are victims ourselves, but man, going after fiction is not the way to do it.
An author is not a perpetrator. Stop trying to make those things synonymous in the minds of other fans, and in the minds of other recovering victims.
I’m a crone who also lived through strikethrough, and all y'all young fans need to read this and understand it if you don’t want history to repeat itself someday.
Here’s the thing, also: it doesn’t stop with fic about objectionable stuff.
If you have a website with TOS that includes any kind of “objectionable content” rules, there will be parties who will use those rules to try to silence other people whom they want silenced.
Let’s look at the alt-right and MRA movements today, or GamerGate a few years ago. What is one of their primary weapons? They report black or feminist or really any leftist YouTube channels (or Twitter accounts, or whatever) whose message they don’t like and claim those channels are are violating TOS by posting hate speech or incitations to violence or whatever bullshit they can come up with, in an attempt to silence those channels.
When Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequence came under fire for starting a crowdfunding endeavor to fund the production of her Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series of videos, male gamers tried to get her KickStarter and various social media accounts shut down by reporting her for for hate speech and promoting terrorism.
Luckily, that became a big enough story that the dudes failed and their efforts backfired. But a lot of times, these tactics work.
How do I know this? Because it happened to me. Not over major shit like the examples above, but over something completely petty.
Back in the mid-to-late 90s, before LiveJournal really became the place for fandom, before FF.net was really a thing, you had to create your own personal website on whatever free webhost you could find (GeoCities was popular, but there were others) if you wanted to host your fic somewhere.
And back then, TV studios and book authors were still sending their lawyers after people who wrote fanfic, issuing cease and desist letters to not only the authors, but also to their webhosts.
At the time, I was writing perfectly het Mulder/Scully fanfic. No rape, no pedophilia, no slash. Maybe a little BDSM. But largely it was unobjectionable.
Then the 8th season of X-Files started, David Duchovny decided he only wanted to be involved part-time, and the show decided to bring in another male character. The fandom lost their shit–as fandoms do–over the idea of “replacing” Mulder blah blah blah.
One of the most popular fanfic mailing lists–one that had previously had no restrictions on what characters or pairings could be posted–decided that if you wrote fanfic involving this character, you were no longer welcome. Well, this was the mailing list with all the readers. Sure, authors could go to other mailing lists, but they wouldn’t have exposure to the sort of readership this other list boasted.
I spoke out, saying that this change was unfair to fic authors and that the moderator of this list was behaving in a pretty vile way. The moderator and her friends took aim at me and began a campaign of harassment, and a few days later, suddenly my website with my XF fanfic was TOSed because someone had reported it. So was the next site I tried to create to host my fic, and the one after that.
Thanks to the way AO3s TOS are constructed, that sort of shit doesn’t happen now. I can speak up if I need to, and while I may receive harassment on my various social media accounts, there’s no chance they can have my fic taken down just because they have an agenda and don’t like me for reasons not relating to my fic.
So yeah, AO3′s rules protect fic a lot of us might find objectionable. But they also protect fic that is in no way objectionable from being targeted by unrelated harassment campaigns. And since any of us could find ourselves in the sights of those sort of campaigns at any time, we need to thank our lucky stars for that.
When I helped write the ToS for AO3, I wasn’t primarily thinking about strikethrough. I was primarily thinking of FFN, where so many people post things that are technically against the ToS but that the community tolerates. Any time someone gets pissed off, they can go on a grudge-reporting spree and target their enemy’s work. Often, that means guys targeting slash or Twilight fic because it’s “for girls” and thus sucks. Sometimes, it’s one ship vs. another. I was also thinking of Miss Scribe and all of that other Harry Potter fandom drama. (And if you think fans are above destroying an entire archive just to strike at one enemy, think again!)
We can’t force people to like each other. We can’t force people to be nice to each other. But we could take away fandom bullies’ favorite tools.
Watching young (ostensibly liberal) bloggers and fans take up the deeply conservative rhetoric and moral crusading of the right wing and evangelical groups from the 90s has been both fascinating from an anthropological perspective, and fucking horrifying for someone who lived through this time period and the death of LJ.
Hello all, and Happy Holidays! The Room of Requirement Discord Server presents to you “A 2020 Holiday Collection”! Below the cut will be all the art our artists have made for this month-long event, including links to their AO3 works and profiles.
First up, we have "Create an art piece inspired by a Classic Christmas Bop of your choice!"
Let It Snow. by MagicianOfDabChaos
Harry saves the bunny by ZypherT
Next we have the art that accompanies the fic, A Christmas of Requirement, written by the writers of TRoR.
Chapter 1 by duplicity; Art by Sakuragane_San
Chapter 5 by TomarryHereWeWoahAgain; Art by kharmachaos
Chapter 6 by sonderwrites; Art by tomriddleswearjar
Chapter 11 by NeuroWriter14; Art by Merrenoloth
Thank you to everyone who participated in this event, it wouldn’t have been an event without you. Also, a big thank you to NeuroWriter14 for organizing the writers’ portion. We would like to invite you to join our Tomarrymort Discord Server, where events like this happen and everyone is friendly. You will be welcomed warmly.
Tom Marvolo Riddle | I am Lord Voldemort
A very very late birthday gift for the lovely @sakuraganesan!! (thank you for forgiving me for my wack lateness)
so this halloween i hosted a halloween big bang for members of my discord server! prompts were submitted, chaos ensued, stress was had. but here we have the lovely, lovely fruit of their labours, all compiled in one lovely place.
huge thank you to everyone who participated!! the full collection can be found here: https://archiveofourown.org/collections/Distractions_Halloween_2020
below the cut is a list of all the works published for the event. check them out!
i thought i’d make an faq filled with every excuse in the book about reposting, for those who still don’t understand why it’s bad…or for people who don’t know what to say in retaliation to these! so here we go.
first of all, an artist doesn’t even NEED to explain themselves. in the same way with someone who says “dude, make sure that soda is diet” or “please don’t tickle me”. they don’t want you to do it. you don’t need to test them by ignoring them. the reason doesn’t matter: it’s the person’s wish with THEIR things. if you had any respect for others, you’d just take it at that.
BUT for some people, they don’t want to respect others at face value, and want their reason. (which, i might add, is rude.) so let’s get into that:
but i’m giving you exposure! isn’t that good?
no.
you’re not giving artists exposure. for people like myself, freelance artists, you’re hurting us. about a year ago, i sent my portfolio off to an indie game. in it, i had a piece of work that had been reposted (that i didn’t even know about). i was told much later that they “looked into it” and saw that my work was posted by someone else, which means now they have no idea who the artist was, and THEREFORE can’t be sure my work was legit. i lost a potential job to a repost.
doesn’t matter if you say “i didn’t draw this”. sometimes, they don’t even look. they just look to see if it’s on any site other than your own. and that’s terrifying for artists. so don’t endanger our livelihood for instagram likes.
besides, you’re not even giving exposure if you didn’t credit, cropped out the signature, or somehow made the resolution so low to where you can’t even see the signature. which brings me to…
but i credited you!
some people still don’t want it reposted even with credit. the last answer should show you one of the many reasons why.
you’re dictating what i can/cannot put on my page! this is MY page!
and it’s MY art you posted. you can’t take something i did and do whatever you want with it. imagine if you took someones drawing, photocopied it, and spread it all around the town without their permission. they’d have every right to be angry, right?
but you posted it online, which means anyone can do anything with it. so if you don’t want it reposted, don’t post it online!
i have to post my art onto my websites to build a fanbase, something crucial to an artist. it shouldn’t be on ME to not post it in the first place, it should be on YOU to not repost it. you’re just echoing victim-blaming arguments.
you’re basically saying “if you don’t want to be bullied, don’t exist.” which is a terrible thing to teach people, rather than “be nice and respectful towards others.” yes, i know our world isn’t perfect. but that’s no excuse to contribute to vile things.
well i would be honored if someone reposted my art. and my friend doesn’t mind reposts, so why should you?
good for you! good for them! but did you know there’s more people in the world other than just you and your friend? we have wishes and feelings too, so you don’t get to project your own emotions onto what WE should be feeling as well. i love peaches. some people don’t like them. that doesn’t mean that now they have to eat peaches because i don’t mind them.
what an artist creates automatically belongs to society, though.
go steal the mona lisa and tell me how that works out.
everyone can VIEW it, yes. artists want others to view their work! we just don’t want you to do stuff with it we asked you not to do.
WELL THEN SPEAKING OF THAT, since i can’t put your work on redbubble and sell it for myself, why do you have an umbrella of the starry night?? huh?? you STOLE van gogh’s work! (yes people have legit said this to me)
putting my work on items and selling it is totally illegal. van gogh’s work is owned by companies now, who have authorization to print it on things. and i’m just ONE freelance artist who is, you know, still alive and not giving permission to do that. you can’t compare a dead artist from the 1800s to a digital artist in 2017. apples to oranges, my dude.
well i SAID “credit to the artist” so i DID give you credit!
because saying “the artist” really tells people who i am and lets them visit my websites! thank you so much!
but all sarcasm aside, that doesn’t do anything other than show you were too lazy to find the artist. same thing with “source: the internet” and “who drew this xD” or misspelling my url on purpose or putting the credit under a cut. OR cropping the image to cut off my signature! you didn’t give me credit.
it wasn’t on the website i wanted it on! you should have more social media.
i’ll have the social media i want to have. not up to me to make more accounts on more things just so you won’t disrespect me.
but i don’t remember where i got it. besides, i reposted SOOO much work and saved it all a long time ago. how can i find it now?
reverse google image search is so great.
also, if you didn’t know the artist, that’s a HUGE reason not to repost it in the first place!! you didn’t even know if it was okay since you never got to see their position on that!!
take down your video with stolen fan art. take down your entire fan art twitter account. i don’t care “how hard it was to save those images” or “how many views you have now”. you got all that attention from someone else’s hard work. searching for art will never be as hard as making it. if it were that easy, you’d be drawing all the art yourself.
but i asked the artist and they didn’t say anything! i assumed it was okay.
yeah, i feel you. it’s the same thing as when you ask your mom if you can borrow some money, she doesn’t answer, so you just steal it from her purse. no answer means the answer you want to hear, right?
wrong. don’t take “unresponsive” as a yes. that’s disgusting.
well i honestly don’t care. artists are just selfish. i’ll repost their art if i want to, just to show them how much i hate their stance on reposting. and (insert another really edgy statement here from someone who only says things to get a rise out of people since their life is empty)
one day you’re gonna come across an artist who has no chill and wants to sue, and can actually do it, since some people put their work under HEAVY copyright. and i’m gonna kick back in my chair with a nice capri sun and watch it all happen, since you have that kind of attitude towards people.
yes, this whole thing seems a bit. well. “salty”, as some would put it. and i have every right to be irritated over this. all these questions are asking “WHY should i respect their wishes? give me a reason” or “but here is my excuse rather than just taking it down”. time after time, artists are villainized just for telling people not to repost.
like i said, the artist not wanting you to repost it SHOULD be reason enough! we’re so tired of having to fight people just to have respect for our art. we have to deal with tracing constantly, so can you please take reposting off our plates? i know bad things will always happen, but that’s no reason to make it worse by contributing.
artists are generously putting our art out there for free. if you want to keep seeing our art for free (btw we don’t HAVE to, all the big artists could just up and leave and go to patreon), maybe show us some respect? because we get pretty dejected when we see strangers getting attention from something we did, and it makes us want to remove everything we show you guys. you say “don’t post it then!” but would be mad if all fan art disappeared.
if you want to keep the art, respect the artist making it. there’s a real person behind that drawing.
Prompt: Tom and Harry's children end up in past, in Tom's school years. The next generation of marauders ofcourse realise who their father is and are set about annoying him all while a sour, teenage tom riddle tries to figure out who these little cretins are.
"Whose children are these?" Tom Riddle hisses. His voice is deathly quiet and yet it carries unnaturally through the common room.
No one answers him. The students look shocked. Behind him, Tom hears the rustling of a child. He steadfast ignores the noise.
"Someone better fess up or the brats're getting kicked out into the cold," Abraxas drawls.
Tom suppresses a roll of his eyes. He does not enjoy making empty threats; he personally could not threaten to throw out what was likely two pureblood snots. But Abraxas can, Heir that he is. Tom reminds himself to crucio the blond the next chance he gets.
"Daddy," one of the children says. It cannot possibly be more than six.
Tom half-turns, sending the pipsqueak a degrading look of disgust. The child is unaffected. It smiles up at him sunnily. Tom's dark glare is unusually ineffective; perhaps the little boy is half-basilisk, to be able to brush off such a death stare.
"Don't be such an arse, dad," the slightly older one says, sending Tom a look of such arch superiority that he wouldn't be surprised if she actually were his spawn. She looks nearly old enough to stay Hogwarts - perhaps she is a first year.
"I'm getting Slughorn," Tom says slowly, suppressing the urge to simply begin casting dark magic. He does not enjoy requesting the help of his shirty Head of House, but little else than banishing the brats, he could not imagine what else to do with two strange children hanging out in the Slytherin common rooms, calling him dad.
"Ew, don't bother," the girl says, flicking a lock of raven black hair over her shoulder, slate grey eyes rolling in disgust. "We'll find our way out."
With that, the young girl picked up the smaller boy and hoisted him over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes, the young boy giggling as he was marched out of the common room. From over the girl's shoulder, the little green-eyed boy sent Tom a happy wave, grinning widely as he was unceremoniously carted away.
Tom stifled a scoff. No matter how improbable and ridiculous the thought of meeting his own children sounded, it was the silliness of the youngest child that drove the point home.
They certainly weren't Tom's kids, impossibilities of timelines not even being considered. After all, he'd never be able to raise a child that could grin like that.
--- --- ---
For six blissful months, the children were gone. It is a relief, as he'd only just been able to salvage his reputation. Two children at seventeen? It would have been a total scandal.
Naively, Tom thought he'd seen the last of them.
How very, very wrong he was.
"You are too heavy," Tom grunted, the small child on his back weighing him down.
"He's perfectly average for his age," the young girl snapped. She had yet to give Tom her or the little boy's name.
Small hands wove around Tom's neck, the little boy plastering himself to Tom's back and babbling excitedly as the Head Boy towed the strange children back to Hogwarts. The waning full moon cast just enough light to see where to go through the thick underbrush of the Forbidden Forest.
"What are you two doing out here on Samhain?" Tom snarled, pointedly ignoring the cheek of the little girl. If she weren't some rich pureblood girl, he would make her disappear - "You interrupted a powerful ritual."
"Mum gets really annoying on Halloween," the girl replied, stepping over a log daintily. "We thought we'd come hang out with you."
"I'm not your father," Tom growled.
"Sure," the young girl said breezily. Despite her being two steps ahead and looking away from him, Tom could practically hear her rolling her eyes.
Tom grit his teeth.
--- --- ---
After Samhain, the children appeared out of the woodwork like worm lice.
"Mum says I'm not allowed to join the Quidditch team yet," the young girl says out of the blue, interrupting Tom's studying. "Such a hypocrite."
Tom looks up, eyes sore from studying for hours. It must be near midnight, the eerie green light of the Slytherin common rooms bathing the young girl in a haunting verdant glow.
"Okay," Tom says, too tired to be articulate (or anything other than annoyed, really).
"Can I join the team?" The girl asks, rocking back on her heels.
"I genuinely don't give a flying fuck," Tom snaps, at his wit's end.
"Cool, thanks dad," the girl drawls, sending him a sly smirk, and she disapparates with a flourish.
Tom blinks. Rubs his eyes. Had he really just seen an eleven year old girl appear before him, ask for permission to play Quidditch, and then silently successfully disapparate?
I'm too tired, Tom thinks. It's simply exhaustion. I'm hallucinating.
Tom goes to bed.
--- --- ---
The final straw comes on his second to last day of school, just before graduation. The little boy, now seven, trips off a dock and falls into the Black Lake and Tom finds himself diving in after the child.
Tom tells himself it is because he'd ruin his distinguished social position if he let a pureblood boy drown. He pointedly doesn't think about the likely possibility that the child isn't a pureblood (no adult had ever come to claim him in the child's wild moments of appearance) and that Tom's heart had nearly lodged itself into his throat at the sight.
Sopping wet and carrying a delightfully squealing monster child up the shore, Tom darkly glares at the quietly laughing girl.
"You know he can swim, right?" She asks snarkily.
"Aquila Gaunt Potter," a voice states icily.
Tom watches 'Aquila' turn the shade of snow, her mouth dropping open as she turns sharply on her heel.
Tom follows the girl's line of sight and he is momentarily arrested. The most handsome man Tom had ever seen glares fiercely at the young girl, hands on his hips and looking the striking image of disappointed parent. His raven locks were wildly tousled, practically sticking up on end with sizzling magic, and his fathomlessly deep green eyes burn with fury. He is stunning.
"Mum!" The little boy in Tom's arms squeals and wiggles out Tom's grip in a flash, leaping into the suddenly tender stance of the young man. "Nyx," the young man breathes, cuddling the boy close, beckoning for Aquila to come to him as well for a hug.
"Mum?" Tom chokes.
Like lasers, those piercing green eyes suddenly affix on Tom and he straightens, vaguely aware that he's tensing his torso and arms so his slim, tall frame stands out sharply in his wet clothes.
"Oh," the young man breathes, eyes going soft. He looks down at his children, his aura of dark fury dissipating. "I see why you used the time mirror."
"Dad's so busy campaigning," Aquila said uncomfortably, crossing her arms as if she were embarrassed by the reveal of some great humiliation.
Tom's eyebrows drew together, completely lost.
'Mum' dropped to his knees, setting Nyx down carefully and he hugged Aquila close, despite the girl's squirming protests. "I'll tell him to come home more often. You shouldn't need to go back into his past to get his attention. He loves you, baby, sometimes he just needs a reminder to show you."
Tom feels flat-footed, watching this tender interaction. He hates feeling lost; his confusion gives way to sudden righteous anger. It takes him six sharp steps and then he's up in this 'mum' person's personal space, teeth bared. The young man straightens, alarmed, and Tom growls as he shoves his face down until it's an inch away from the man's hardening expression.
"You let your children wander around a dangerous school without supervision multiple times. You are a terrible parent and should have your children removed from you," Tom hisses venomously.
Tom heard Aquila whisper a weak oh shit before the soft, slighter young man's expression flickered and then he was backing Tom up, the wand that miraculously materialised in his white knuckled grip sparking with uncast magic where it was shoved under Tom's ribs.
"Listen here, you ignominious fuckwit," the man hissed, "My children are the smartest fucking brats in the universe. They have enough of their father's blood to figure out how to repair a time mirror without me knowing for most likely months and enough of my blood to use it to raise hell. Only I'm able to tame them, you don't know shit, and if you ever threaten to take them away from me again I'll castrate you, fuck the consequences. I'll figure out how to have them on my own."
Tom blinked down at the spitfire snarling in his face.
Suddenly, it all clicked into understanding.
These were his children. From the future. This spitfire is his - his - well, simply that. His.
Tom surges forward and wraps his arms around the shorter man, crushing him in close.
"So you're telling me that I really am daddy?" Tom purrs, something feral and innate and instictive making him want to bend this beautiful creature over and shatter him.
Green eyes give Tom a wild, wide eyed stare.
"Uh - " He says weakly.
"I see who Nyx takes after," Tom drawls, leaning closer so his breath whispers across soft pink lips.
"Wow, you're such a fucking prat," the young man replies breathily, "and I am weirdly into it."
"Ew, mum," Aquila admonished as Nyx pulled on the young man's dress robes.
"Oh, right, the children," the man breathed, green eyes dilated to near black as he stared up at Tom.
Before Tom could protest, the young man was pulling away and gathering his- no, their children.
"What's your name?" Tom asked as the young man opened a portal dismissively. "I'll find you in the future."
The young man sends Tom a dark stare, lips twisted in amusement.
"Oh, don't you worry about that, daddy," he positively purred. "I'll find you first."
Happy Birthday @waitingondaisies !! And here is a bit of art from your fic How Like Home !! I joined your writing discord weeks ago and every day I am so thankful that I did! Your discord and the subsequent people that I’ve met there have dramatically changed the way I interact with the Harry Potter Fandom. It’s be been an absolutely wonderful time on your server! It makes me so happy that I have a great and loving place to interact with others online with. I may be biased because you’re there on your server.
You’ve shown me the beauty of gen fanfics and oh so much more.
You’re absolutely amazing Hannah and I am so so so thankful that I got the pleasure of meeting you all those weeks ago.
Today I get to gift you with this little How Like Home Terrarium! This piece is single-handedly the longest art piece I’ve ever worked on. There were so many different things that i wanted to fix or change. At one point, I redid the entire piece and just started over. I hope you like it! <3 I had other pieces planned but ended up spending a lot more time on this one.
As a little treat for us daisy lovers, I also did a speed paint of Best Girl Daisy !
Again, so much love to you and It makes me so happy that I get to (virtually) celebrate your birthday!
Summary: Things got stranger for Harry. He kept dreaming about the lake, the light he saw. Hands touching him. He would wake up every time, sweating and calling out for someone. Harry didn't know who to talk to about this without sounding insane.
The wound on his collarbone didn't heal. It left a huge bite mark—that wasn't from a grindylow. Harry told no one about it. And what made matters worse, everyone seemed to be aware of his obsession with the lake.
Rated M
Words: 6,3k
Tags: Triwizard Tournament, Merpeople, Alternate Universe - No Voldemort, Potions, Creature Fic, Obsession, and more
Read on AO3
Written for Tomarry Reverse Big Bang!! And the artwork for this lovely piece is here <3
Crash
Another one that I started with images first. ( I have to admit I had a lot of fun with the images!)
Feels like this one just ends at HALF the story.. there"might" be a part 2 to this one!
#pascalcampion
areudirty
turnnoffyourmind
gummygunk
germansingergirl
stormborns
kianamaiart
