[tiktoks-for-dead-pope]

[fuckyeahchinesegarden]

laojun mountain, luoyang, henan province

[jjiminssi]

🌕🌙

[oncupid]

JUNGKOOK ☆ Life Goes On Gayo Daechukje 2020

[joestrummen]

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

[tomato-greens]

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.

[beatrice-otter]

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.

[wrangletangle]

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.

[nwcostumer]

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”.

[denaceleste]

^^^rebageling again for excellent commentary

[araceil]

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. 

[actuallyclintbarton]

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.

[shidgephobe]

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).

[sulphur-crested-cocktease]

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!!

[naamahdarling]

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.

[bonibaru]

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.

[singingwordwright]

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.

[olderthannetfic]

I like this last addition.

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.

So we did.

[centaurianthropology]

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.  

[naamahdarling]

This thread keeps getting better.

It galls me to think that those of us who went through all this shit might have to go through it again because people who were still in primary school at the time don’t see anything wrong with harassing us over

Like, I hate to pull this argument, but we are your fandom elders, we did what we did to preserve fandom for y'all, so y'all would have space to safely explore the sane things we did and still do. And in doing so we rightly realized that if we wanted to protect the comfortable, cuddly parts, we also needed to protect the dark parts.

You can hate non-con fic all you want, and I will always advocate for adequate tagging/warning (especially with franchises that are aimed at younger audiences, e.g. MLP:FIM and SU) so that you don’t have to see it because I sympathize, but I will never support people who want to make sure that it isn’t even there to be seen. I’ve been through that once. It didn’t help anyone. It didn’t fix anything.

Please, learn to curate your own online experience. You are responsible for not clicking, or clicking away. Don’t try to force others to do it for you. That’s not cool. You aren’t protecting children. You are asking fandom to treat everyone like a child. There is a massive difference.

[baratheon]

Also… maybe parents should do their job in monitoring kids’ content? When my parents found out I was looking at age inappropriate things when I was a minor, like they intervened.

[nanshe-of-nina]

Strikethrough 07 was such a well-conducted operation that communities dedicated to survivors of sexual abuse and fans of Lolita fashion were suspended, but the journal of the baby rapist, ohbutyouwillpet, stayed up. And it’s still up to this day, though it hasn’t been updated it over a decade as its owner is still in prison.

[sassbandit3000]

Whooo, I guess it’s my turn to take a shot at this.

I’m a nold. I’m in my 40s. When I came out as queer, in the early 90s, it was in the middle of what were called the “feminist sex wars”.  If you want a really good book to read about that period, which has a LOT of resonance with Strikethrought and with the current Tumblr discourse, I cannot recommend this highly enough:

Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights by Nadine Strossen

A preview is available on Google Books, or it should be readily available secondhand, or in academic libraries (though it’s not a very heavy academic read). I recommend Booko for finding cheap secondhand copies. Support independent bookstores!

I haven’t read “Defending Pornography” for a while – I actually last re-read it about a decade ago because of the impact that Warriors for Innocence were having on Dreamwidth’s payment providers at the time, subsequent to Strikethrough itself – but here’s a quick summary, as I remember it.

1. In the late 80s and early 90s there was a vocal group of radical feminists who believed that pornography inherently harms women, not just in its production but also in its consumption (i.e. watching/reading pornography caused people to develop attitudes that were harmful to women). All explicit content was considered to be harmful, from eg. girlie magazines to hardcore XXX videos to a book like “The Joy of Gay Sex”, no matter who made it, its purpose, its intended audience, or its context. (Yup, even m/m content was considered to be degrading to women for reasons that didn’t make a lot of sense tbh.)

2. These anti-pornography feminists teamed up with the religious right and managed to get anti-porn laws passed. In particular, a law was passed in Canada preventing the importation of “obscene” material. Canada, of course, imports a lot of material from the US. Stuff started getting seized at the border.

3. Guess what was seized first? “The Joy of Gay Sex” and the like. Guess what businesses started finding all their shipments seized or delayed – sexually explicit or not – to the point where they were being put out of business? Gay bookstores.  Guess what wasn’t seized at all? Mainstream porn made for straight men. 

Around this time, Little Sisters bookstore in Vancouver (a gay bookstore) found that huge amounts of merchandise was being seized at the border, regardless of the actual content. They were being discriminatorily targeted on the basis of their sexuality. The queerness of the material they were importing was seen as inherently obscene.

Remember that this is before there was much information available online for LGBTQ+ people, so if you were a young person maybe just coming out and trying to understand things, or wanting to learn about safe sex (and yes it was at the height of the AIDS crisis, too) you’d go to a bookstore like this. Which now had empty shelves. I remember endless fundraising and activism in the LGBTQ+ community to try and keep Little Sisters open. In the end they spent half a million dollars on court cases. Read more about their struggles.

(You know what businesses weren’t impacted and didn’t have to basically ask their friends and community for help to stay open or spend a decade in the courts to defend their right to run their businesses? The powerful companies making porn by and for straight men.)

The book goes into a large number of analogous situations. Time and time again, anti-pornography laws intended to protect women are disproportionately used against women themselves, against LGBTQ+ people, and against basically any marginalised or minority group, rather than against the mainstream male-oriented porn that would seem to be its primary target.

Here’s the key point: Strossen is a legal scholar who’s looked at a lot of attempts at censorship, and you know what she found happened every time? When you try to censor pornography, even in the interests of protecting vulnerable people, that censorship will be applied first, and hardest, against the people who are most vulnerable. They won’t come for actual abusers, they’ll come for the abused, and prevent them from accessing resources, education, talking to each other, creating art to express themselves, or organising against those who are actually causing harm.

Read the book. The stories it tells are from the early 90s but they perfectly mirror what happened a decade ago with Strikethrough and what’s happening now with all this Tumblr discourse.

This is old, old business, we’ve seen it more than once before, and it never goes the way the antis think it will. Censorship is a tool that gives power to abusers and lets them inflict more harm on those who are abused, vulnerable and discriminated against. Don’t fall for it.

[whetstonefires]

History they should have known: The Comstock laws in New York were this one dude (Comstock) who managed to get a mail regulation re-written to categorize anything related to contraceptives as pornography, which was already illegal to mail.

(Which is one reason for the pornographic playing cards etc, because the 19th century was almost as big on mail-order goods as the 21st, because getting to shops in person was hard for a huge subsection of Americans.)

Comstock built a non-profit with the support of the YMCA and oh shoot, some millionaire whose brand is still going strong, to enforce this law because the postal system didn’t have the personnel. They were granted the right to do so.

He and his posse of honorary mail inspectors with police powers (I kid you not) spent years engaging in endless skullduggery to prosecute people for selling contraceptives by mail. Which was how everyone got them in the 19th century, you couldn’t walk into a shop for a pack of condoms but mail-order packages were nicely anonymous. They dragged Margaret Sanger into court repeatedly. There was a huge cottage industry of contraceptives in NYC at the time, most of the manufacturers being female, Jewish, immigrants, or some combination of the above.

There was one woman whose name escapes me they kept trying to prosecute for selling contraceptive devices and the juries kept nullifying it because the average New Yorker in the 1890s were like ‘yeah no condoms are not a crime,’ but not everybody had her stage presence and resources.

You know who they never even tried to touch? The big rubber companies were were getting into mass production of condoms. Their big funder owned the company that produced Vaseline, and was claiming in ads at the time that it worked as a spermicide.

Only the poor and vulnerable felt the impact of the Honorary Postal Inspectors of righteousness.

[moon6shadow-main]

It’s been touched on a little before but really it’s hard to explain just how confusing and scary the crackdowns were. I was only a reader on FanFiction when the crackdown came but it felt like I was standing in a coal mine full of canaries. Canaries that were either silent or /screaming/.

Every where you looked, authors where posting warnings about how x stories were getting deleted. All of the warnings feeling rushing, panicked, most of them including notes about how they didn’t know how long they had before their warnings were taken down or they were deleted. It felt a bit like all the stars going out, everything just dying around you. Like a stampede of people had fled from some oncoming unnamed horror leaving silence in their wake. Finding AO3 later on was like finding a safe haven in a world gone mad.

Also FanFiction doesn’t really encourage socialisation aside from authors notes to readers on their chapters or homepage. Meanwhile all the warnings of the crackdown were really rushed and vague. So, as a not very sociable reader, I really didn’t have a clue what was going on at the time of the crack down and the confusion and uncertainty was almost the scariest part of the whole thing. (Not knowing if the authors should come back and if fanfics were gone for good was scarier.) It’s only years later, reading fanfic history posts that I’ve started to piece together what happened.

Also an interesting point was that during the crack down all I ever heard about was /gay/ stories being deleted. Perhaps this was just because I was reading gay stories but I didn’t even realise it was mature stories in general that was supposedly the aim of the crack down until much later.

[olderthannetfic]

Hot damn, this post just keeps going!

I very much second the rec about the feminist sex wars. Understand those, and you’ll understand why those of us over about 30 are so opposed to tumblr’s purity crusade.

[fierceawakening]

If you haven’t been TOSsed you really don’t get it, imo.

If you haven’t spent your time wondering if the thing that will get your content deleted is the dark stuff or the nipples, you really don’t get it, imo.

Hell, way way back in the day, I had moderator types private message me going “I really like your writing, but you need to be less obvious about it, or I will have no choice but to tos you.”

[prospectkiss]

A long reblog, but a worthy read. So much history and experience recounted here. If we don’t remember our past, remember why AO3 and many fandom spaces work the way they do now, we will be condemned to repeat it.

Please do not let us return to the dark ages of fear, censorship, and oppression in fandom.

[skjc-writes]

I’m another ‘fandom old’ who came up from Usenet and IRC in the early 90s. I was here for the rise of webrings of Geocities sites, and the births of Livejournal and FFN. I was old enough that I had a full time job when the infamous LJ Strikethrough occurred, and I had already pulled most of my content from FFN when they decided to ban smut the first time, even though at the time I hardly wrote any yet.

Fandom culture has changed in the last decade or so, and not for the better. This black-and-white, moralizing, pro-censorship attitude.. It’s worrying, because it’s mostly queer-identified kids who seem to be perpetuating it without realizing that attitudes like this are the same ones that have been responsible for restricting the freedom of expression of women and LGBT people, except now it’s all being swathed in pseudo-liberal sociopolitical language.

There is and always has been content in fandom that I personally dislike. There’s content that makes me uncomfortable. There’s content I find objectionable and even utterly abhorrent. There’s content that I, as a rape survivor, find legitimately triggering.  But: There is no content involving fictional characters that I think should have no right, and no space, to exist. 

Creators create “objectionable” content for a variety of reasons. It is not up to me to decide if those reasons are valid; it’s only up to me to decide what content I want to consume.

[sunpdfs]

Jiang Cheng centric FIC REC

okay so after binge reading mdzs novel, donghua, manhua, audio drama, & the untamed jiang cheng has become my favorite character. and so here’s a list of my favorite fics that focus on jiang cheng I HIGHLY RECOMMEND YOU READ THEM ALL THEY ARE AMAZING; honestly the writers in this fandom are all so talented

JC and WWX's Get Along Sweater by newamsterdam, 30k series (post canon yunmeng brothers reconciliation)

Attempt the Impossible by acernor, 7k (jc & wwx body swap au)

Jiang Cheng and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Wedding by hyunbyun, 19k (jc’s perspective on modern wangxian wedding)

What married people do by Shamelesscooper, ongoing currently 83k (liucheng arranged marriage slow burn au + DEMISEXUAL JIANG CHENG)

except for when i'm missing you by t_why, ongoing currently 94k (post canon slow burn xicheng)

The Heart's Reasoning by flowercity (FaoriE), 11k (canon divergence au where jc saves wwx at the seige)

jiang cheng gets mcfucked by Chewing, ongoing currently 16k (jc turns into a cat and is forced to third wheel wangxian)

2 AM by Menuridae, 6k (modern au on jc, wwx, & jl being hilarous af)

story of a scar by Misila, 3k (yunmeng brothers canon compliant ANGST)

Golden by jusrecht, ongoing currently 7k (happy au where everyone lives)

Even A Shallow Heart Can Still Beat by JemTheKingOfSass, 4k (jiang cheng & his role as the youngest of the family)

[sunpdfs]

more excellent fic have been written for jiang cheng and i feel guilty not recommending them too because they are just that GOOD

The Jiang Family Guide On Parenthood by Quixiote, 10k (modern au single parent/uncle jc raising jin ling)

Talent Hunt Crew Finds Angry Guy Shouting On College Campus, Recruits Him For Vocal Projection Abilities by oh_fudgecakes, 80k (modern au slow burn xicheng + LOTS OF YUNMENG SIBLINGS CONTENT)

all that's dead and gone and passed tonight by wolframvonbielefeld (maknaeline), 4k (post burial mound siege)

How to Escape Your Problems and Live Your Life in Denial – the Jiang Cheng Edition by Bgtea, ongoing currently 64k (xicheng cat cafe au)

andromeda by iskendaris, 18k series (xicheng + xichengyao porn with politics + platonic family content in the last part)

《梦忽还乡》· the song of river city by Anzul, ongoing currently 5k (time travel with a twist; jc accidentally time travels into modern day)

we're better this way queen_gee, 36k (sangcheng exes to lovers modern au)

break the scouter by victortor, ongoing currently 16k (wangchengxian ot3)

traversing by baekhyun (baruna), 3k (time travel fix-it)

What Makes Gods Tremble by Gotcocomilk, ongoing currently 35k (3zun/jc ot4)

[gffa]

A lot of us are stuck at home and potentially bored out of our minds and/or stir crazy about all the shit that’s going on and could really use some novella & novel-length fics to distract us.  So, here, have a bunch of stellar long fic I’ve read and loved in STAR WARS fandom to help you pass the time. It should keep any SW fan busy for at least awhile!  And even if you’re not usually that into WIPs, the longer ones tend to have covered enough ground that they’re still very worth reading, but if you absolutely hate them, there’s plenty of complete works here as well!  Also, you know, this is the fandom where we go, “SOBS, THAT’S SO CRUEL TO END IT LIKE THAT, I’M GONNA WRITE A TIME TRAVEL FIC AND EITHER FIX IT OR MAKE IT WORSE, I DUNNO YET.” which is pretty fantastic! TIME TRAVEL RECS: ✦ Reprise by Elfpen, obi-wan & qui-gon & mace & yoda & vokara che & cast, time travel, 473.9k wip ✦ Atlas of Our Ruin by Ripki, obi-wan/anakin, time travel, 82k wip ✦ for those who stand long by wreckageofstars, leia & han & luke & obi-wan & anakin & ahsoka & cast, time travel, 56.2k wip ✦ The Dark Path Lit by Sun and Stars by A_Delicate_Fury, obi-wan & luke & leia & han & cast, time travel, 34.3k wip ✦ A Future in Crisis by WolfMarauder, obi-wan & anakin & ahsoka & cast, time travel, 49.9k wip ✦ Let’s Try This Again by Nny11, obi-wan & ahsoka & anakin & cast, time travel, 43.8k wip ✦ Soldier, Poet, King by Glare, obi-wan/anakin & qui-gon & cast, NSFW, time travel, 104.6k wip ✦ Home by little_tales, obi-wan/anakin & shmi & mace & qui-gon & cast, NSFW, time travel, 48.5k ✦ Threads of the Past by Magier74, obi-wan & anakin & qui-gon & xanatos, 37.8k ✦ Shadows of the Future by stormqueen873, obi-wan & anakin & qui-gon & cast, 129.3k ✦ one door closes, another opens by isabilightwood, obi-wan & ahsoka & satine & kanan & depa & padme & rex & cast, time travel, 41k ✦ The Desert Storm by Blue_Sunshine, obi-wan & jedi & cast (too many to tag), time travel, 622.5k wip ✦ All That I Have Seen by Felilla, ocs & ahsoka & anakin & obi-wan & yoda & cast, time travel, 36.5k ✦ Legacy by myrlendi (thehistorygeek), luke & leia & obi-wan & anakin & ahsoka & cast, time travel, 160.2k wip ✦ A New History by Annie Walker, obi-wan & anakin & qui-gon & dooku & cast, time travel, 533.4k wip ✦ Palimpsest by PorgParty, ben & obi-wan & anakin & ahsoka & cast, time travel, 21.5k wip ✦ Old Man Luke by scarletjedi, obi-wan & anakin & luke & leia & ahsoka & asajj & cast, time travel, 62.5k wip ✦ All Over Again by tricksterity, obi-wan/anakin & qui-gon & shmi & cast, time travel, 32.8k wip ✦ Balance on the knife edge by liv_k, obi-wan & anakin & ahsoka & cast, time travel, 136.5k wip ✦ One Day More by CalaisKenobi, obi-wan & qui-gon & anakin & cast, 31.2k ✦ Wake the Storm by bedlamsbard, obi-wan & anakin (pre-slash) & cast, 75.4k ✦ White Rabbits by Butterfly, obi-wan/anakin & background anakin/padme & luke & leia & han & cast, NSFW, time travel, 102.5k wip ✦ Rewind, Repeat by tulomne, obi-wan/satine & qui-gon & cast, time travel, 23k ✦ Lost Reflections by esama, obi-wan & ben, 30.k wip ✦ Worldwalker by rainglazed, ezra & kanan & cast, time travel, 25.5k wip ✦ Return to the Point of No Return by cthene, obi-wan/anakin, time travel, touch starved, 26.7k ✦ The Exchange by MissLearn, obi-wan & anakin & some anakin/padme & ahsoka & qui-gon & rex & cast, time travel, 77k wip BIG ACTION, ADVENTURE AND PLOT RECS: ✦ Fire and Ice by Yesac, obi-wan & anakin & some anakin/padme & cast, 111.9k ✦ Knight-Errant by zinjadu,  obi-wan & anakin & ahsoka & rex & asajj & cast, some dark themes, 315.8k ✦ hunting toward heartstill by blackkat, mace/cody & obi-wan/rex & shaak/colt & plo/wolffe & anakin & tup & fives & luminara & agen & depa & cast, 140.8k wip ✦ When Darkness Seems to Hide This Place by IllyanaA, obi-wan & anakin & ahsoka & kanan & ocs & cast, 110.1k CANON DIVERGENCE RECS: ✦ Supreme Chancellor Obi-Wan Kenobi by stonefreak, obi-wan & anakin & padme & ahsoka & palpatine & cody & cast, ~70k wip  [AO3 link] ✦ Into the Archives by skygawker, obi-wan & anakin/padme & mace & palpatine & cast, 105.3k wip ✦ The Hand Dealt by not paranoid enough, obi-wan & anakin & cast, 75.9k ✦ Cataclasm by dendral, obi-wan & anakin & ahsoka & waxer & cast, 63.1k wip ✦ Balance Point by Vinyarie, anakin & ahsoka, 34.3k ✦ The Finer Shades of Why by Yesac, obi-wan & anakin & dooku, 212.9k ✦ Knightrise by Deviant_Accumulation, obi-wan & ahsoka & satine & rex & cast, 30.1k wip ✦ Precipice by shadowsong26, obi-wan & anakin & padme & palpatine & bail & rex & cast, 214.5k wip ✦ Echoes of Mortis by orphan_account, obi-wan & anakin/padme & ahsoka & cast, 67.3k ✦ One touch and I ignite by Paper_cut, obi-wan/anakin & ahsoka & padme & cast, nsfw, 59k ✦ Lucida by markwatnae, obi-wan & oc & anakin & ahsoka & bant & feemor & satine & garen & caleb & mace & cast, 63.1k wip ✦ dead and the gold by Icarus_is_flying, obi-wan & anakin & dooku & jenza & depa & shmi & cast, 45.2k wip ✦ This time we’ll fall together by liv_k, obi-wan/anakin & padme & yoda & cast, 27.6k wip ✦ Drifting Starlight by Pandora151, obi-wan & anakin & ahsoka & qui-gon & cast, time travel, 60.3k ✦ A Walking Shadow by lilyconrad, obi-wan & anakin/padme & luke & leia & palpatine & ahsoka & cast, 74.6k ✦ Ensuring The Future by Shouting_at_God_in_Latin, obi-wan & anakin & mace & cody & yoda & dooku & cast, 79.1k ✦ Mutual Acquaintances by Ghost_Owl, obi-wan/anakin & obi-wan/satine & anakin/padme & padme/satine & cast, 53.9k wip ✦ Edges of the World by glompcat, leia & luke & anakin & padme & han & ahsoka & ventress & sana & bail & breha & obi-wan & cast, 228.4k wip ✦ Lineage + Legacy by ruth baulding, obi-wan & qui-gon, 927.1k       Lineage:  One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven       Legacy:  One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six ✦ Brothers (working title) by Charity_Angel, obi-wan & anakin & qui-gon & padme & shmi & yoda & cast, 22.7k wip ✦ Force’s Tempest by Elenothar, obi-wan & anakin + anakin/padme + han + cast, 78.1k ✦ Beloved Enemy part 1 / part 2 / part 3 / part 4 / part 5 / part 6 / part 7 / part 8 by generale-kenobi, obi-wan/anakin, NSFW, sith!obi-wan, dark themes, 19.1k ✦ all spaces are liminal by Kierkegarden, obi-wan/anakin & sidious, & cast, nsfw, sith!obi-wan, 35.9k ✦ Time To Go by light_mantled_albatross, obi-wan & anakin & ahsoka & cast, 35.2k wip ✦ Caleb the Fool by ambiguously, kanan & ahsoka & luke & leia & hera & depa & cast, 37.6k ✦ Divergences by flute25, obi-wan & anakin & ahsoka & dooku & qui gon, 125.6k wip ✦ Flip by Snootiegirl, obi-wan/anakin, NSFW, 22.7k ✦ The Nature of Fire by Phosphorescent, padme/anakin & obi-wan, 19k wip PADME LIVES RECS: ✦ Keep Breathing by Yesac, obi-wan/padme + some anakin/padme + luke & leia & oc, 45.8k ✦ Queen of Peace by Sassaphrass, obi-wan & padme & cast (background anakin/padme), 20.2k ✦ Far More Than Rubies by frodogenic, padme & luke & obi-wan & vader & cast, 71.7k PREQUELS RECS - GEN: ✦ In All The World by Fjallsarlon, obi-wan & anakin & cast, 144.4k wip ✦ Remedial Jedi Theology by MarbleGlove, obi-wan & anakin & mace & palpatine & cast, 51.3k ✦ House of Cards by Smitty, obi-wan & anakin & oc, 23.8k ✦ Coalesced Matter by Mirror and Image, obi-wan & anakin & dooku, 48.4k ✦ Life And What Comes After by Ibelin, obi-wan & anakin & cast, amnesia, 115.8k ✦ The Apprenticeship by Nny11, ahsoka & yoda & anakin & cast, 31.4k wip ✦ Master by CJinn, obi-wan & anakin, 27.5k ✦ Starrunner by rinzukodas, obi-wan & jedi & oc, 80.2k wip ✦ Rainfall on Geonosis by ealcynn, obi-wan & anakin & ahsoka & cody & cast, 33.9k ✦ Villain of a Different Story by HiNerdsItsCat (HiLarpItsCat), obi-wan/satine & anakin & cast, 73.2k wip ✦ All But Name by Mirror and Image, obi-wan & anakin + padme & dooku & qui-gon & yoda & ocs & cast, 107.9k ✦ Collapse by Susan Zell, obi-wan & anakin/padme, 27.8k ✦ Youngling by LostintheTARDIS, obi-wan & anakin & cast, de-aged!anakin, 65.5k wip ✦ A Good Place to Die by Valairy Scot, obi-wan & anakin (pre-slash?) + some anakin/padme & yoda & bant & cast, some violence/injury, 115k ✦ What the Heart Hides by Valairy Scot, obi-wan/siri & anakin & cast, nsfw for descriptions of violence/torture, 269k ✦ Through a Mirror Darkly by dogmatix, norcumi, obi-wan & qui-gon, sith!qui-gon + sith!obi-wan, 44.9k wip ✦ Whispers of the Future by cywsaphyre, obi-wan & qui-gon & bant & garen & reeft & cast, 40.6k wip ✦ When the world gets too heavy put it on my back by nematoda, qui-gon & obi-wan + obi-wan & anakin + references to to obi-wan/anakin, 29.8k ✦ hurricane on the edge of oblivion (with nowhere to go) by Cross_d_a, obi-wan & xanatos & qui-gon & feemor & bruck & cast, 159.2k wip ✦ Don’t Look Back by Valairy Scot, obi-wan & anakin, 26.7k ✦ They Who Stay Behind by Valairy Scot, obi-wan & anakin, 20.4k ✦ Masters and Padawans: Three Generations by GirlwithCurls98, qui-gon & obi-wan + obi-wan & anakin + anakin & ahsoka, 24.6k ✦ And The Truth Shall Set Us Free by Nicole1, obi-wan & anakin, 23k ✦ From Master to Monster by LazarusII, Pandora151, obi-wan & anakin & ahsoka & cast, 93.4k wip ✦ Live To Fight Another Day by raemanzu, spica_tea, rex & cody & jesse & obi-wan & anakin & cast, 387.1k wip ✦ The Weeds in the Wilderness by ealcynn, obi-wan & anakin & cast, whump, 173.5k wip ✦ Survival by MirrorandImage, obi-wan & anakin & ahsoka, 30.9k ✦ Death’s Shade by Susan Zell, obi-wan & anakin & cast, 30.9k ✦ Rainy by Charmisjess, dooku & qui-gon, 26.8k wip PREQUELS RECS - SHIPPY: ✦ Split the Night by Zinga763, obi-wan/satine & anakin/padme & ahsoka & maul & cast, 43.8k wip ✦ Anamorphosis by saltyavocado, obi-wan/padme & anakin & cast, 33.5k ✦ Distaff by shadowsong26, obi-wan & anakin/padme & palpatine & cast, fem!anakin, 19.9k wip ✦ whatever a moon has always meant by glorious_clio, bail/breha & cast, nsfw, 56.6k ✦ Anamorphosis by saltyavocado, obi-wan/padme & anakin & cast, 33.5k ✦ The Light You Leave Behind by laventadorn, obi-wan/anakin & anakin/padme & ahsoka & bail & asajj & cast, 28.6k wip ✦ the kids aren’t all right by QueenWithABeeThrone, obi-wan/anakin & anakin/padme & ahsoka & cast, 33.1k OBIKIN RECS: ✦ Alignment (Equinox + Solistice) by lilyconrad, obi-wan/anakin & ahsoka & cast, NSFW, sith!obi-wan (sort of), 116.5k wip ✦ wicked thing by imaginarykat, obi-wan/anakin & asajj & dooku & ahsoka & cast, nsfw, sith!obi-wan, 109.1k wip ✦ Anakin Skywalker and the Stray Droid by protos_metazu_ison (larkspyt), obi-wan/anakin & anakin/padme & cast, 28.4k ✦ Golden Sunshine by dirkygoodness, obi-wan/anakin, NSFW, 19.5k ✦ Invictus by MI5WWII, obi-wan/anakin, NSFW, 22.7k wip ✦ On Whose Authority by Mithrigil, obi-wan/anakin, NSFW, 33.1k ✦ Shaak Herding for the Troubled and Lonely by protos_metazu_ison (larkspyt), obi-wan/anakin & anakin/padme & ahsoka & plo & cast, au, 38.4k wip ✦ Seed by bell (belldreams), obi-wan/anakin + anakin/padme, NSFW, 44k ✦ The Devil’s Own by lilyconrad, obi-wan/anakin & cast, regency au, 21.2k wip ✦ Upfall by bell (belldreams), belldreams, usomitai (belldreams), obi-wan/anakin & obi-wan/satine & ahsoka & cast, NSFW, 83k wip ✦ After the Pillars Come Down by Virgo827, obi-wan/anakin & ahsoka & cast, 19.7k ✦ Across the Darkness by xpityx, obi-wan/anakin & anakin/padme & cast, NSFW, 20.6k ✦ Ashes of the Republic by mewgirl1995, obi-wan/anakin & obi-wan/padme (& some anakin/padme) & luke & leia & ahsoka & cast, nsfw, 96.7k ✦ Miasma by lilyconrad, obi-wan/anakin & cody & rex & & kix & cast, dark themes, 20.6k ✦ My Moon After the Tide by LemonTwister, obi-wan/anakin & cast, NSFW, some d/s, 38.8k ✦ The World Undone by lilyconrad, obi-wan/anakin & ahsoka & maul, nsfw, sith!obi-wan, 143.3k ✦ Just To Sleep Underneath Your Bed by LemonTwister, obi-wan/anakin & cast, NSFW, mild d/s undercurrents, some darker themes off-page, attempt at non-con, 46k ✦ Times, Measures by cthene, obi-wan/anakin + anakin/padme + obi-wan/anakin/padme + cast, 42.6k wip ✦ Come Down From Your Holy Mountain by jotunblood, obi-wan/anakin & ocs, 34.5k wip ✦ 36 Questions by kenobiapologist, obi-wan/anakin + background anakin/padme + implied obi-wan/anakin/padme, 30.7k ✦ Strange Developments part 1 / part 2 / part 3 / part 4 / part 5 / part 6 / part 7 / part 8 / part 9 / part 10 by generale-kenobi, obi-wan/anakin, NSFW, pregnant!anakin, 22.2k ✦ WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE by anecdotalist, obi-wan/anakin & bail & ahsoka & cast, 40.9k ✦ Titles, Traditions, and Other Forms of Attachment by MarchofBirds, obi-wan/anakin & cast, NSFW, 25.5k ✦ Open Circle by Calyss, obi-wan/anakin & cast, sith!obi-wan, 52.3k wip ✦ Finding Balance by moonstone (amythestice), obi-wan/anakin & luke & leia & han & yoda & qui-gon & cast, sith!obi-wan, 29.1k wip ✦ Broken by lilyconrad, obi-wan/anakin & rex & padme & cast, NSFW,  sith!obi-wan (sort of), dark themes, 38.6k ✦ the kids aren’t all right by QueenWithABeeThrone, obi-wan/anakin & anakin/padme & ahsoka & cast, 35.5k wip ✦ space dementia by wellwhiskey, eventual obi-wan/anakin/padme & dooku, sith!obi-wan, 30.7k wip ✦ The Consequences of a Crash happygiraffe, obi-wan/anakin (pre-?), injuries, 31.9k ✦ Second Chances by Driverpicksthemooseic (Ratkinzluver33), obi-wan/anakin & han/luke & leia + cast, de-aged fic, 106.3k wip ✦ Sun Kissed by Vee017, obi-wan/anakin & cast, nsfw, past sexual assault issues, 96.4k wip ✦ Within Limits by sacrilegist, obi-wan/anakin, NSFW, 22k ✦ Capture and Release by Rocket_Sith, obi-wan/anakin, mild bondage, 19k wip ✦ He Watched by temple_mistress, obi-wan/anakin, NSFW, 22.1k OBIANIDALA RECS: ✦ The Devoted by shadowsong26, obi-wan/anakin/padme & ahsoka, 35.5k ✦ Sometimes a family is a cultural anthropologist, a PoliSci PhD, a snippy sophomore, a golden cat, a Snorkie, and a guy who just wants to build a really smart robot by bessyboo, cantarina, exmanhater, forzandopod, heartequals (savvygambols), Opalsong, reena_jenkins, sophinisba, theleanansidhe, obi-wan/anakin/padme & ahsoka & quinlan & asajj, modern au, 19.4k ✦ These Three Remain by shadowsong26, obi-wan/anakin/padme, 27.5k ✦ I’ll Be There For You by SinkingLikeASunset, obi-wan/anakin/padme (eventual) & qui-gon & clones & cast, 40.7k wip ✦ Futurus (-a -um) by cadesama, anakin/padme + obi-wan/anakin/padme + luke & leia & mon mathma & ahsoka, mildly nsfw, 53.2k wip ✦ Sigh No More by edenwolfie, obi-wan/anakin/padme & luke & leia & ahsoka & qui-gon & clones & jedi & sidious & cast, NSFW, 292.2k ✦ The Reality of Change by midnight_vision, obi-wan/anakin/padme & ahsoka & cast, time travel, 182.4k ✦ who cares about your lonely heart by Elenothar, anakin/padme + obi-wan/anakin/padme + cast, wingfic, ace!obi-wan, 28.2k ✦ you knock me out, i fall apart by pdotschuy, obi-wan/anakin/padme & luke & leia & ahsoka & han + some background pairings & cast, 64.8k wip ✦ Burnt Edges by cadesama, obi-wan/anakin + anakin/padme + obi-wan/anakin/padme & ahsoka, NSFW, sex pollen, 33.3k ✦ Lights Will Guide You Home by darlingargents, obi-wan/anakin/padme & ahsoka & luke & leia & cast, 32.8k wip ✦ build a heart made of armour by darthrevaan (Burning_Nightingale), obi-wan/anakin/padme, soulmate au, 29.5k wip ALTERNATE UNIVERSES: ✦ Coda by lilyconrad, obi-wan/anakin & padme/sabe & cast, nsfw, modern au, ballet au, 65.3k ✦ Young Lust by Writer_Markilyn, obi-wan/anakin & ahsoka, NSFW, modern au, 19.1k ✦ Bedroom Hymns by orphan_account, obi-wan/anakin & ahsoka & padme & cast, NSFW, modern au, bdsm, spanking, 26.6k wip ✦ Negotation by Glare, obi-wan/anakin & ahsoka & cast, NSFW, modern au, serial killer au, 86.7k ✦ Rebel with a Cause by planetary_retrograde, obi-wan/anakin & ahsoka & cast, NSFW, rebellion au, 37.7k wip ✦ Empire’s Shadow by Guybrarian (drjanetwatson), luke & ahsoka & mara & winter & cast, 44.9k wip REBELS RECS: ✦ The Starry Crown by bedlamsbard, ezra & kanan & sabine & zeb & chopper & cast, 34.7k wip ✦ On the Edge of the Devil’s Backbone by bedlamsbard, kanan/hera & sabine & ezra & zeb & cham & cast, alternate universe, 361.5k ✦ The Undeserving by LessAttitudeMoreAltitude, kanan/hera & ezra & cast, alternate universe, read the warnings, 226.6k wip ✦ From One Fulcrum to Another by MirrorandImage, kallus & cast, 47.5k ✦ Collapse(s) by stardustgirl, ezra & kanan/hera & sabine & cast, alternate universe, 119.2k ✦ Abduction by Mishael, thrawn & eli, 26k ✦ Soul of the Ghost by MirrorandImage, kanan/hera & ezra & zeb & sabine, 33.7k ✦ Like Holding Broken Glass by Avali, kanan/hera & ezra & sabine & zeb & cast, 22.7k ✦ Places No One Knows by yellowcottondresses, kanan/hera & cast, 20.4k ✦ Playing Against Type by MirrorandImage, kanan/hera & cast, 30.6k ✦ Chase the Sun by Syphrosine, kanan/hera & rex & ocs, 25.4k wip ✦ Talking to Strangers by Miri1984, kana/hera & ezra & luke & han & obi-wan, 21.2k wip OTHER RECS: ✦ Whatever I Do (I Do It To Protect You) by Callioope, jyn/cassian & galen/lyra & bodhi & baze & chirrut & kes/shara & cast, 84.2k ✦ A Real Backwater Skug Hole by Thalius, din/omera & baby yoda & winta, 90.3k wip ORIGINAL TRILOGY RECS: ✦ The Tyranny of Kinship by amarielah, anakin & leia & ahsoka & cast, 33.9k wip ✦ Father’s Heart by FernWithy, anakin & leia & ocs, 38.8k ✦ In Which Vader Discovers He is a Father by glompcat, anakin & luke & leia & cast, 27.7k ✦ Limpet AU by frodogenic, anakin & luke & mara & piett & cast, 69.8k ✦ In Loco Pirates by izzythehutt, anakin & luke & cast, 34.9k ✦ The Belonging You Seek by WiliQueen, luke & leia & ahsoka & cast, 30.9k wip ✦ Island in a Sea of Sand by mybluerose, obi-wan & luke, 42.5k ✦ To Live Among Wolves by FireflyFish, obi-wan & luke & cast, 33.1k wip ✦ Identity by madame_alexandra, han/leia & cast, 353.9k ✦ A journey of a thousand miles by greyathena, han/leia & luke & cast, 149k SEQUELS RECS: ✦ And the Void Answered Back by Ghost_Owl, obi-wan & anakin & rey & finn & poe & ben & yoda & maz & han & cast, force ghosts, 110.6k ✦ Celestial Navigation by victoria_p (musesfool), anakin & finn/rey & cast, 23.3k

[ardwynna]

I wonder where the break happened that such wide swaths of younger fans don’t grasp fandom things that used to be unspoken understandings. That fic readers are expected to know fiction from reality,  that views expressed in fic are not necessarily those of the author, that the labels, tags and warnings on various kinkfics are also the indication that they were created for titillation and not much more, please use responsibly as per all pornography. The ‘problem’ isn’t that so-called ‘problematic’ fic exists but that some of the audience is being stupid, irresponsible, at worst criminal, at best not old enough to be in the audience to begin with. And that’s on the consumer, not the author who told you via labels, tags, ratings, warnings and venues what their fic was about and what it was for.

[weconqueratdawn]

I can’t stress enough how important this post is

[zoi-no-miko]

Tumblr. Tumblr is what happened, with its never-ending scrolling, with its lack of nested contents (or ANY comments, when fandom sailed here from the old world), with its tags instead of membered communities.

Tumblr turned fandom content into mindless consumption instead of community. I’m no expert on human behaviour, but I’d put money on this.

When Authors stopped being friends and turned into content providers, new fandom members never learned to care.

[bea2me]

“When authors stopped being friends and turned into content providers”

Well that reframed my view of every fandom I’ve touched for the last five years, and it explains a lot.

[nyxelestia]

I really cannot emphasize how the lack of comments and nested comments impacted fandom. It turned fandom into a series of one-way relationships. Social media is extremely uninteractive compared to mediums like journals and forums.

Even “Tumblr conversations”, where you reblog each other’s posts back and forth and it turns into a dialogue, extremely limited. You can generally only do this a few times.

But there’s another, insidious layer to this, which is how reblogs work: it’s easy to create new “realities” or versions of post…without people realizing that other versions exist. If two differnent people reblog from the same person to add a comment, then other people reblog from them adding further comments, you’ll get something like this:

That is 14 different versions of the same post someone could see. Fourteen separate realities right there!

You might be seeing this:

While someone else will see this:

Now repeat things over several years and hundreds, if not thousands, of posts, and you can see how this can quickly lead to separate realities.

Even if people know each other, or are in the same fandom!

Something to note about how and why this happens. See those gray lines connecting the various dots? Those are profitable to the social media companies. That nebulous gray blog encompassing the two stars/fans, or the invisible hypothetical line connecting those two stars? That is not profitable. So companies are not only disincentivized to facilitate that connection in the first place, but actively try to prevent it too!

Compare this to how journals, forums, listservs, and other older fandom platforms operated:

Now, this is a very vague visual representation of multiple different platforms, but there are three main things I was trying to indicate.

tl;dr

Social media removed reciprocation, communication, and agency in content consumption. Fans react to either passive consumption because that’s the only way to stay sane in such an overwhelming platform, or to extremism because that’s the only form of agency they can truly have in their fandom experience. Fandom isn’t something you participate in, it’s something that happens to you.

And if this sounds familiar to any social science majors out there, you might’ve taken a course about group dynamics, ideological persistence, and/or had to study about the proliferation of social and/or political movements. Nicky Case has a lovely interactive webapp that lets you play around with these concepts and experience this in just half an hour of playing around:

The Wisdom and/or Madness of Crowds

Those three things in detail (put under a cut due to length):

Keep reading

[roboticonography]

This is an excellent read on Tumblr fandom, and encapsulates some of the things about the platform that give me pause before posting.

I think that what we’re experiencing now, as a reaction, is a resurgence of individual communities. More often than not these days, I see that individual fandoms or groups within fandoms have a Discord or other place to talk away from Tumblr.

I think that may also explain why some people tend to like more than they reblog. Reblogging means leaving yourself open to (often extremist/purity-motivated) criticism of your choices - or leaves the OP open to similar criticism from your followers, with you as the involuntary middleman whose reblog made that connection possible.

Likes and drafts are private - you can collect posts in a place where no one sees them but you. It doesn’t have to be a public statement. It can just be a thing that caught your interest for whatever reason, that you wanted to be reminded of.

[mikkeneko]

I strongly encourage anyone who hasn’t already to read this essay on how web 2.0 has changed fandom

it’s not just tumblr, or twitter, it’s a fundamental shift in how people act online in the era of social media and algorithm-driven interaction towards advertising revenue

[fairycosmos]

i hate when rich people condescend with the whole 'money can't buy happiness' argument like listen. just because buying your fourth car didn't fill the void in your deluded disconnected-from-reality life doesn't mean not having to worry about food/ bills/medicine wouldn't greatly improve the mental health of literally everyone else on the planet

[destinationtoast]

TOASTYSTATS: GEEKGIRLCON 2017

The above are the first half of the slides I presented at GeekGirlCon (along with some annotations to explain things I only said out loud :) ) – for the second half, read more below the cut.  I’ll also be sharing the slides from the other presenters here, too, as they’re posted!

The gender representation work is part of a longer analysis that I will be posting in full soon!

Beneath the cut are also a few additional slides that I would have presented with a bit more time – several of which address things that came up in the question session.

…And the extra slides:

[cerusee]

Good moment to remember that AO3 exists to support fandom.  And fandom needs to support AO3.

[jungshiii]

❝ jungkook is me, i’m jungkook ❞ for ragidoll ♡

+ bonus

[thewritershandbook]

20 Basic Plots

1. QUEST - the plot involves the Protagonist’s search for a person, place or thing, tangible or intangible (but must be quantifiable, so think of this as a noun; i.e., immortality).

2. ADVENTURE - this plot involves the Protagonist going in search of their fortune, and since fortune is never found at home, the Protagonist goes to search for it somewhere over the rainbow.

3. PURSUIT - this plot literally involves hide-and-seek, one person chasing another.

4. RESCUE - this plot involves the Protagonist searching for someone or something, usually consisting of three main characters - the Protagonist, the Victim & the Antagonist.

5. ESCAPE - plot involves a Protagonist confined against their will who wants to escape (does not include some one trying to escape their personal demons).

6. REVENGE - retaliation by Protagonist or Antagonist against the other for real or imagined injury.

7. THE RIDDLE - plot involves the Protagonist’s search for clues to find the hidden meaning of something in question that is deliberately enigmatic or ambiguous.

8. RIVALRY - plot involves Protagonist competing for same object or goal as another person (their rival).

9. UNDERDOG - plot involves a Protagonist competing for an object or goal that is at a great disadvantage and is faced with overwhelming odds.

10. TEMPTATION - plot involves a Protagonist that for one reason or another is induced or persuaded to do something that is unwise, wrong or immoral.

11. METAMORPHOSIS - this plot involves the physical characteristics of the Protagonist actually changing from one form to another (reflecting their inner psychological identity).

12. TRANSFORMATION - plot involves the process of change in the Protagonist as they journey through a stage of life that moves them from one significant character state to another.

13. MATURATION - plot involves the Protagonist facing a problem that is part of growing up, and from dealing with it, emerging into a state of adulthood (going from innocence to experience).

14. LOVE - plot involves the Protagonist overcoming the obstacles to love that keeps them from consummating (engaging in) true love.

15. FORBIDDEN LOVE - plot involves Protagonist(s) overcoming obstacles created by social mores and taboos to consummate their relationship (and sometimes finding it at too high a price to live with).

16. SACRIFICE - plot involves the Protagonist taking action(s) that is motivated by a higher purpose (concept) such as love, honor, charity or for the sake of humanity.

17. DISCOVERY - plot that is the most character-centered of all, involves the Protagonist having to overcome an upheavel(s) in their life, and thereby discovering something important (and buried) within them a better understanding of life (i.e., better appreciation of their life, a clearer purpose in their life, etc.)

18. WRETCHED EXCESS - plot involves a Protagonist who, either by choice or by accident, pushes the limits of acceptable behavior to the extreme and is forced to deal with the consequences (generally deals with the psychological decline of the character).

19. ASCENSION - rags-to-riches plot deals with the rise (success) of Protagonist due to a dominating character trait that helps them to succeed.

20. DECISION - riches-to-rags plot deals with the fall (destruction) of Protagonist due to dominating character trait that eventually destroys their success.

by Pavel Simakov

[averagefairy]

working full time is terrible why do we just accept that having 8 days off a month is normal and okay........ being alive could be cool but we waste it at our JOBS.... sorry i’m just heated about capitalism again i’ll be fine

[averagefairy]

not to be dramatic but the amount of people commenting on this post that I should stop whining and be grateful for having two days off a week when they only get one or none is...... literally proving my point that we’re all brainwashed ghfjhddjfk... thats like if someone cut off your arms and then only cut off one of mine, you focus on how much worse you have it instead of the fact that we’re still both fucking bleeding out 

[ourladyoftheunder-ground]

Fuck capitalism.

[left-reminders]

Not only should we all be working less for the sake of our collective mental health, we should be working less for the sake of the planet. The overproduction/overconsumption aspects of capitalism are linked at the hip and we’re spending way too much time at work, all to churn out profits for rich assholes we’ll never meet, all to produce (and throw away) endless waves of junk that don’t make us happy anyway. There’s all kinds of ways we could reduce the workweek and expand the freedom of all — automation, labor-saving planning, the removal of “bullshit jobs” from an economic context where people need to work them or starve, etc. — but first we need to acknowledge that capitalism is really really bad at cultivating human freedom (and free time in general) for the vast majority of the population.

[orlyofhousesnark]

[kookhope]

junghope dance break @ 2019 mma

[thecollectibles]

Art by Pascal Campion

[joonie]

ok model!

[joonie]

ok model!