I am super sorry to bother you, but I just read your RPF disclaimer, which was wonderful--- I left feeling less hesitant about my reading choices, but then I went to google “Sidney Crosby Evgeni Malkin” to see if there was an update on injuries and one of the first things that showed up was ao3…and just I have no idea how to take something like that. I mean that level of closeness makes me outright worried and uncomfortable. Again sorry to bother you, but I was wondering if you had any thoughts?
Thank you! A lot of people have written more intelligent and well-thought-out meta about it than I did, but I really wanted to have a statement of my own that I could link to on my header.
There are three answers to this. 1) Wanna know what’s even worse? Google ‘Jordy Staal Eric Staal’. The AO3 page for that incest ship is at the top of the second page of results. 2) I wonder sometimes if the presence of AO3 in Google searches is informed by those searching and maybe the links wouldn’t appear for everyone?
Most significantly, 3) I don’t like it at all and it makes me very uncomfortable too. I’m not really sure what can be done about it, though. It’s pretty common practice for people to lock their fics on AO3 - something I would certainly do with anything I myself post there - especially if they’re particularly dirty.
We know there’s been some breaking of the fourth wall, both in the past and recently - Seguin saw a Tyler/Tyler primer on LiveJournal, I think, and there was a screencap going around recently implying that people have been bringing the Bennguin ship up to him in chats, although I’m not convinced it was real.
I think, to a certain extent, we need to just rely on the fact that they’re celebrities and they know that if they go looking for weird shit about themselves on the internet, they’re going to find it. For the most part, I really doubt they’re going to come looking.
So I lock fics on AO3 and I avoid putting things in tumblr tags and I cross my fingers that no one sends them any links, and beyond that I just hope for the best.
