#wt original

[wrangletangle]

In July, 2019, over 500 users of AO3 decided individually to send in messages of support and love to the volunteers via the Technical Support & Feedback link on the site, thanks to a post by naryrising.

Far from being overwhelming or ignored, as some supporters feared, the messages were lovingly copied (without identifying details) and offered to the entire volunteer community as encouragement. Messages thanking volunteers for specific work they’d done. Messages about what AO3 means to users. Messages about the power AO3 has to lift people up.

It matters. Because AO3 can’t afford to pay its volunteers, everyone here works because they want the site to continue to exist. Not only for ourselves, but for everyone. I, personally, have never witnessed a direct outpouring of support like this.

Your kindness is appreciated beyond what you can imagine.

[wrangletangle]

I want a new fic genre

It’s like Queer Eye but instead of 5 fabulous guys showing up to fix a character’s style, Elizabeth Warren shows up to fix their life.

“This job doesn’t use your skills and the management doesn’t treat you well. I’ve found you fourteen better job advertisements with either a shorter commute or more pay. Let’s update your resume.”

“You keep dating people who don’t appreciate you. I’ve done an analysis of your dating history for the past ten years, and I think I’ve located the source of the problem, as well as half a dozen potential dates who I think would be better matches.”

“I’m so proud of you for deciding to publicly come out. I’ve made a spreadsheet of all the important people in your life, so you can decide the order and how you want to handle each one. If you decide to go with a party, I included the phone numbers of several caterers (ranked by customer satisfaction) and local venues with descriptions.”

“I heard you accidentally summoned a demon. Luckily, I used to teach contract law and have dealt with male senators. I read several ancient tomes last night and brought them along for reference. Let’s get this bad boy out of your cellar.” (Crowley, from the cellar: “Did you bring any alcohol?”)

[wrangletangle]

I just realized that when Crowley pretends to be Aziraphale, he’s not really lost at all.

Aziraphale-as-Crowley is lost. Confused. Disoriented by the ways in which Hell is worse than he expected in some ways and simply weirder in others.

Crowley in Heaven isn’t lost or confused. He’s only quietly furious. Maybe he didn’t mean to defy Heaven the first time, but this time he definitely means it. Maybe this is for him. Maybe this is for Aziraphale. Maybe this is for humanity. Maybe it’s a little bit of all of those.

Crowley’s anger surprised me at first, until I realized this was his return. The Prodigal Son is back, and Heaven is exactly like he left it.

[wrangletangle]

I’m so tired of class conflict in the US being reframed as generational conflict. Baby boomers were one of the most radical generations in history. 1968 was mostly Boomers. It was their Occupy movement. Many of the anti-war, Civil Rights, and gay rights protesters in the US were Boomers. Sure, a lot of those radicals died young, but plenty are still alive today. That’s not even to mention that (the usually forgotten) Gen X literally defined themselves in opposition to authority in the 80s and 90s. “Question Authority” so mainstream it was all over bumper stickers; I still have one.

People in the US like to pretend that class doesn’t exist here, and the result is an endless parade of thinkpieces about Millennials vs. Boomers as a poor proxy for class conflict. Because of the 2008 banking crisis, increasing income and wealth inequality, and amount of years spent working, Millennials on average have less wealth and disposable income than Boomers on average, but there’s a very large spread, with Boomers in deep poverty and Millennial millionaires. Those articles about Millennials killing industries are ridiculous, and so are blog essays about Boomers as a generation deliberately destroying the planet.

Generational conflict in the US has long been used as a distraction to prevent solidarity among the 99%, and it really shows.

(Side note: If anyone is curious why some fraction of Boomers in the US have trouble seeing, e.g., climate change as an incoming apocalypse in the same way that those under 30 might, it might be useful to ask those particular Boomers if they ever spent any time hiding under a desk at school during bomb drills. Because if they grew up in the US, the answer is probably yes. Having lived for decades and since birth under the threat of nuclear annihilation may make some people struggle to weigh risks and understand the impacts of things other than photos from the aftermaths of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Sustained panic was impossible, so a lot of people just went numb, learned to ignore major threats, or mentally transported themselves to a fantasy land where it was possible to win such a war, or at least survive it. See also bunker-type survivalists today.)

[wrangletangle]

You are allowed to like and love flawed people. You are allowed to like and love yourself.

[wrangletangle]

Critical thinking and criticizing something are not the same thing.

Critical thinking can actually end in a very positive view of something, though usually it’s a nuanced one.

Blithely flinging generic stock phrases at a person or piece of media or social phenomenon is not critical thinking. It’s not really thinking at all.

[wrangletangle]

In Kind

I volunteer for the OTW, the parent nonprofit organization that runs AO3. So do, as of the last monthly newsletter, 678 other people. The OTW has no paid employees; everyone there is a volunteer.

The average weekly work expectations for OTW volunteers run around 5 hours per week for most committees. Of course, in reality, people are all over the place. Some do 1-2 hours a week, some 30 or 40 or even more - a full work week without pay.

Let’s say that, hypothetically, a volunteer works only 1-2 hours per week, and their work is only worth $10 per hour. (It’s probably worth more - the opportunity costs of most skilled labor is worth more than that - but let’s low-ball it.) That means that every single week, that volunteer is donating $10-20 dollars of their time to the OTW. Some people are donating hundreds of dollars of their time each week, for months or years on end to help keep all its projects running.

Because of course there are multiple projects. There’s TWC, the freely available, peer-reviewed academic journal that just celebrated its 10th anniversary. There’s Fanlore, our fannish history wiki that has over 46,000 articles. There’s Open Doors, which rescues at-risk archives from disappearing. There’s Legal Advocacy, which donates legal expertise to help fans address copyright and other issues. And then there’s the AO3, which is currently listed as the 264th most popular website in the world (#98 in the US). Any one of those projects could easily encompass an entire nonprofit organization by itself. None of them has even a single paid employee. No OTW website shows any ads.

The real secret to the OTW’s success is not that it pulls in just enough money every year to cover its server expenses and overhead - though it does that, and every volunteer is grateful to our donors for keeping the lights on. It’s that the OTW somehow runs entirely on volunteer power. There’s no way we could pay for all the expertise and effort we receive. Other nonprofit websites like the Wayback Machine and Wikipedia pull in millions in funding every year to cover relatively small staffs. We survive without having to write grants or beg wealthy donors because of our volunteers’ unseen donations of their time, expertise, and effort.

Maybe this year you don’t have any money. Or maybe you do, but you’re saving for a rainy day, or you gave it somewhere else. No worries. People volunteer because we want you to enjoy this labor of love. We want you here, building the OTW with us by using our projects. If you did donate, much love to you. Your generosity is deeply appreciated, and we'll continue being the penny-pinching, wait-is-there-a-free-option, do-they-give-a-nonprofit-discount volunteers we’ve always been, to stretch your donation as far as it can go.

If you want to give something that isn’t money, consider this: How often is a volunteer thanked by someone who isn’t a fellow volunteer? People volunteer because they want to know they’re making a difference. They want to build up the world. Think of how a kudos or a comment makes you feel, then consider how rarely volunteers get one.

You can read about all our committees here, and you can send one of them a quick thank you via the contact form, if you like. Or you can leave a comment with thanks on a Drive post on AO3. Maybe tell Finance how much you love the budget being available, or thank Development & Membership for all their hard work organizing the donation drive to keep the servers running, or show some love to our Communications Committee that’s keeping all these posts updated, or to the Translation Committee that translated them. Maybe you noticed that AO3 Documentation just put out a Tag Set FAQ in time for the exchange season. Maybe you’re wondering who keeps 679 people organized - that would be our Volunteers & Recruiting Committee. Maybe you want to thank the Systems Committee for getting out of bed way too early in the morning to fix the mailer (or whatever else decides to mysteriously break this week). However the spirit moves you, feel free to show some love. It goes a long way.

Thanks for being part of the journey.

[wrangletangle]

Based on the evolution of a fandom in tumblrscape, Good Omens is on maybe 2.5 times speed, I think? Here’s my reasoning:

1. Posts involving still shots and generalized screaming. This stage normally seems to start immediately and last 1-2 weeks, after which such posts may continue to exist but are generally drowned out by other posts. For GO, this stage seems to have lasted about 2 days.

2. Meta. This normally kicks in after the squee has a couple weeks to percolate, though early meta may appear within a week. For GO, detailed meta began appearing within about 36 hours of the show dropping (possibly less - tumblr’s post structure makes dates hard, and GO’s tag is unnavigable right now).

3. Gifsets. This is a long phase that usually begins once files are generally available. For TV shows, we typically see an uptick for a new popular show after maybe 2-3 episodes, I think? It can take longer if a show doesn’t catch on immediately. For movies, of course, it takes longer to start, and there’s a longer tail as higher quality source becomes available. GO gifsets began hitting my dash at around 3-4 days post-canon, and they ramped up very quickly. This might have to do with available format and the early leakers.

4. Fanart and fanfiction. These typically start about 2 weeks out and often seem to ramp up about 6-8 weeks out, though you might get early sketches and short fic within a day or two of release. The GO situation is complicated by the existence of previous canon - in this case, the book.

4a. The Good Omens TV fandom tag on AO3 was first used on November 5, 2018, probably for this reason. The first work unequivocably based on the TV show and not tagged in anticipation or retroactively tagged with it after it came out was posted on May 31 and is 355 words of Nice and Accurate Headcanon involving the third episode of the show. That’s... a little fast for most fandoms. But we didn’t see the tag really get out of control until a little over a week later.

4b. Similarly, the fanart on tumblr didn’t start hitting my dash until about a week after the series dropped, and it didn’t become ubiquitous until about 2 weeks out.

That’s still awfully fast.

5. Wank. The visible backlash of “how dare all of you like something” hit about mid-June, though there were splashes before. Since Gaiman is on social media, particularly tumblr, most of the wank appears to be of the usual variety thrown at creators deemed reachable. It’s not the wank that’s surprising here - it’s that it came in so fast. We do know that the purity wank crowd has a solid system at this point, but this show is a bit outside their normal target range (as in, it’s aimed at adults). All I can speculate at this point is that this is the new flavor of the old normal pushback that happens whenever any fandom gets “too popular” and the people who aren’t interested forget that we have tag blocking now.

Keep in mind, we’re just at 5 weeks out as I write this. 5 weeks. What even?

Conclusion (or, Further Questions)

So by now it should be obvious that I pulled the 2.5 number out of some random place, because what’s happening here isn’t really quantifiable relative to traditional fandom dynamics. It’s not the way a TV show fandom with a regular release schedule operates, but it’s also not the way a movie fandom with its restricted access operates. We’ve had series drop all at once before - for example Sens8, the various Marvel Defenders series, and Stranger Things. Even Sherlock kind of did this, with its weird, periodic canon drops.

But GO is splashing harder across my dash and on tumblr in general than I saw the Game of Thrones finale do. It’s as if the heyday of Sherlock were compressed from a 6.5 year long thing into a... well, we don’t know yet, do we? Because that’s one the questions: how long will this last? (Another being: Is this just GO being weird, or is this the speed fandom is going to go at now?)

I don’t have the answers any more than anyone else does, but I’m very curious to see what happens from this point forward.