honestly I don’t even care why ao3 was created, if you defend their policy of not deleting horrible works, or are otherwise completely uncritical/forgiving of their mistakes because “but they’re by fans for fans”, you’re a piece of shit
horrible tropes and abuse have always been a part of fandom and fanworks, but it’s super gross that a bunch of fandom elders (who are most likely at least in their thirties) continue the tradition of citing “don’t like don’t read” as a good enough excuse to write child porn, abuse, rape, sexual slavery, etc. AND they collect thousands of dollars each year to fund this through donations
like. they are literally putting money into abusive content being published on their site. where people of any age, even pre-teens, can access it. for example, I could never report people posting alec/women stuff despite it being homophobic, because it doesn’t violate their terms. I can’t report pretty much anything, because as long as you’re not plagiarizing, it’s all good
yeah, ao3 is great as a concept, but allowing abusive, homophobic, racist, etc. material to be published on your site because “fuck the pc police/moral crusaders” is appalling and fuck ao3 tbh. not to mention they’ve had really disgusting people as members on their board, so it’s pretty obvious what kind of people are in charge of this site
actually you know what i didn’t get to say what i was going to say before because i had to rush off but now i’m just gonna say this – this post is garbage. if little sally doesn’t understand how road signs work, the appropriate question to ask isn’t “how can we make the highway safer for 8-year-olds,” it’s “hOLY FUCK WHY IS LITTLE SALLY DRIVING A CAR?!” when work is tagged appropriately, marked nsfw/inappropriate for those under 18, and warned for everything that requires a warning, the creator’s side of the contract has been fulfilled. period. this is why parental controls and safe search exist. it’s not my job as a hobbyist purveyor of casual filth to prevent someone else’s child from accidentally reading what i’ve written. it’s not my job to parent anyone else’s children. it’s not ao3′s job to convert a twelve-lane highway into a go-kart track for those plastic fisher-price cars you pedal with your feet because hypothetical children might read something they shouldn’t have access to in the first place.
and for that matter, if the argument is “kids will lie about their age to look at that stuff anyway” – yeah, sure, of course they will. funnily enough, i got into harry potter fandom young – started reading fanfic when i was around 10 and 11. you know what i did when i saw things that were tagged in a manner that disturbed me? I DIDN’T READ THEM. I WAS CAPABLE, AS A CHILD, OF CONTROLLING MY OWN MEDIA CONSUMPTION EXPERIENCE. and then i got a little older and turned 13 and read wuthering heights and david sedaris and augusten burroughs and a confederacy of dunces, and then i turned 15 and read lolita and anais nin, and you know what? i. could. handle. it. by. then. yeah, i was a precocious kid (my favorite book at 13 was a fucking confederacy of dunces, for god’s sake), but i was not permanently damaged by anything i read. funnily enough, i was permanently damaged by my ABUSERS, not the literature i read, and sure as hell not by the fanfic.
despite all of my issues with moral wank and purity culture, historically, fandom is a remarkably safe space for younger people to read things that toe the boundaries of what they can find in the YA section at their library, and to try creating things that toe those boundaries as well. it’s not a perfect space by any means, but it served that purpose for me. i can’t say enough good things about what it did for me as a teen who was not allowed to date and whose school stressed abstinence-only sex ed which taught us that masturbation was immoral and condoms would give you cancer. if your argument is “ao3 and content creators have a responsibility to the community” – yes. and we fulfill it by TAGGING THINGS CORRECTLY. if the argument is “but kids will read tagged things anyway” – sure. some will. but as someone who did, i can tell you, kids aren’t fucking stupid. they can differentiate between fiction and reality, and for that matter, they can differentiate between things they want to read and things they don’t.
i am not anyone else’s parent. neither is OP.
s t o p.
“if little sally doesn’t understand how road signs work, the appropriate question to ask isn’t “how can we make the highway safer for 8-year-olds,” it’s “hOLY FUCK WHY IS LITTLE SALLY DRIVING A CAR?!”
I am the fanfic-writing parent of a fannish teenager. I feel really comfortable saying “if the work is appropriately tagged and @mistresskabooms reads it and it upsets or distresses her, well, that’ll learn her, won’t it?”
As for “omg these works contain these awful themes,” uh… have you … READ the books that are required reading in middle and high schools? Seriously.
“Won’t anybody think of the children” is never a good look for anyone.
we were assigned ‘slaughterhouse five’ in ninth grade, OP. go peddle your pearl-clutching agenda to the PRMC.
OP is so fucked up for many reasons, but what’s really been getting me lately with these fucks
is the concept of “abusive content”
like let’s just set the arguments about perpetuating heteropatriarchal norms to the side for a moment and talk about one of the more disturbing elements of anti culture
which is the notion that “abuse” can be taken from the context of an interpersonal relationship and just be…out there. Who…who is the victim of “abusive content?” Is it the consenting, informed readers? Is it society? Is it a hypothetical 11 year old who’s never met the fic’s author?
Anti culture doesn’t have an answer for that question, because it’s not about victims. It’s about “outing abusers” and punishing them, not for committing abuse against a victim, but for Being an Abuser
I…no. I am not going to take time out of my evening in the Year of Our Lord 2016 to articulate why it’s a Bad Fucking Idea to conceptualize crimes as states of being
yall can’t be bothered to put victims in a central position in your “anti-abuse activism” lol this is gonna be WAY too boring for you