Farewell
To all our loyal and lovely followers on FFnet
Draco grabbed Harry’s hand as they watched the woman approach. It’d been years since they’d seen her toady face, but they remembered what she was capable of.
“Don’t attack. She’s not worth it,” Draco muttered in Harry’s ear.
“I must not tell lies,” Harry growled, pulling his hand from his husband’s and blocking the woman’s path. “You’re not wanted here.”
She sniffed as she looked up at him. “You’re breaking the rules. You and your kind shouldn’t be here.”
“My kind? What? Creative people? People who enjoy and love others? People who want to share their art with the world? What kind of people are you referring to?”
“You know what you are,” she said, her voice prim. “I know what you do. I read all about it, and it’s against the rules. Go away.”
Harry closed his eyes, praying to whoever might be listening that he didn’t completely lose his temper. “What’s the point in making us leave? It doesn’t eliminate who we are and what we share. It just makes us take it somewhere else. It only makes it so people have to go elsewhere to see it.”
“Good. As long as it’s not here,” Umbridge said, her face triumphant. “You will follow my rules or you’ll have to leave.”
“Fine,” Harry said, picking up all the beautiful art he’d shared and packing it away. “I don’t hate rules, you know. I love rules when they make sense. Don’t hurt other people. Be a good person. Love one another. But this? This arbitrary rule that someone made so they can make more money off of other people’s art? This rule that they put in place simply so their advertisers don’t wet their pants? This rule that the people who make this place can’t even be arsed to enforce until some Karen like you goes around and tattles on them? This isn’t a good rule, and it’s bullshit.”
Draco stepped forward and took Harry’s hand again. “Come on. Let’s go.”
“We’re going. But when you’re obsolete because your rules have washed out all the colour from this world, when the entire world looks like you with your little pink sweaters and kitten dishware, then I want you to remember what it used to look like. It used to be vibrant and beautiful.”
Umbridge only stared, her eyes narrowed, her mouth tight.
Harry felt all his fight leave him and picked up his things. “All right, Draco. I’m ready. Where are we going again?”
“It’s called Archive of our Own, darling. And it’s lovely.”
Harry smiled and didn’t look back.
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We want to thank everyone who has read our stories on FFnet over the previous year and a half. We've grown a decent-sized following, and though we don't see a ton of reviews, those we see are loyal and consistently lovely. We don't want to discontinue posting on FFnet, but we've had a story removed due to inappropriate content and it's caused us to reconsider how we want to post our stories. The story reported was far from the most risqué we've posted, and the sexual content was minimal and relevant to the story.
Here's the thing. FFnet has certain limitations. It doesn't allow us to post the artwork that we create for our stories. Yes, there's been artwork that you've missed because it's FFNet. It doesn't allow us to post links to the music playlists we create to accompany our anthologies. And, most of all, it has limitations that do not allow explicit sexual content.
That last one isn't something that FFnet polices on its own. No, there are groups and users out there that pretty much solely exist on the platform to find stories that violate the Terms of Service (ToS) and report them. FFnet then gives the author no warning and simply removes the story. The user that reported us did warn us that we had seven days to fix the story or they'd report. This story wasn't harmful. It wasn't over the top. It didn't even have any penetrative sex or multiple partners or any of the other stuff several of our other stories have. It was just there, they saw it and decided it was up to them to report.
Our anthologies are labours of love. We work on them for weeks, sometimes months, and as a group of seven, we polish and edit and turn it into a cohesive collection. To remove one, or several, of our stories and leave the others doesn't feel right. We have decided to remove the entire library of our content from FFnet so we don't have to worry about Terms of Service, trolls (ugh, they're everywhere on FFnet), and random people reporting our works.
We encourage you to follow us on Archive of Our Own where we will continue posting several times a year. You can also find each of the individual authors there and follow your favourites directly, especially as AO3 doesn't require us to create a separate joint account to create these anthologies! You can read/comment there as a guest, and if you need an invitation to an account there, please don't hesitate to ask (you can DM us here).
Thank you for all your support. We'll leave our stories up on FFnet for 7 more days, but they will be officially removed from FFnet on 1 September, 2021. We hope to see you on the other side.