and the most absurd part is that AO3 was literally founded as a response to those taboo topics being censored on other websites. it's very much an example of how "go create your own space" isn't a solution, because then people will come into that space and demand it cater to them.
They don’t read the tags (AO3 has a wonderful tagging system) then complain about what they read.
As someone who started reading and writing fic back in Ye Olde Days before search engines, AO3 is such an amazing platform. Those who get used to other platforms then want to inflict the censorship and hype on AO3 rather than curating their own experience need to spend more time in the real world.
The most wonderful tagging system in the world is only as good as its users. Don’t think it needs elaboration the average user isn‘t able to use it to its capabilities
"I will apply my morality onto consenting adults harming no one if I feel like it"
If you actually cared about children welfare you should go volunteer at a nonprofit or if you're American campaign against the current pedophile in power. Stop whining online.
I couldn’t care less about what consenting adults do. I’m specifically talking about people creating or using child abuse content. Those people can all get fucked
Look, your argument is entirely founded in morality and allegations. Do you have any evidence to support your argument or is it just "kids who write about having sex with kids are paedophiles"?
There're actually a lot of things you can do in your own power to make society concretely a better place. My recent favorite has been https://makesunsets.com for global warming, but also consider donating to eff.org.
I don't doubt your heart is in the right place, but there're so many more productive things to help society with than name calling online
Some of these are actually people processing their own CSA trauma too.
If I wrote about the things I did when I was 10 in the days of the Wild West internet, that’s your choice to read it or not. It still happened and I should have a space to write about it if I feel like it.
CSAM is defined by US law (which is what is relevant here as the Ao3 servers are located in the US) as referring only to visual depictions. Writing is not considered CSAM and thus the FBI cannot persecute someone for it.
They cannot prosecute for it (in America at least) but I hope they would be watching these individuals closely as they probably have CSAM on their hard drives
I don't think either should be banned for the record
But there is a big difference between Lolita, which was intentionally written with a message the protag is bad and not meant to be titillating or pornographic despite pushing boundaries, and a fanfic with a child designed to titillate.
Obviously not all fanfics, but an uncomfortable amount of ones with children do.
Oh yeah I get that side too. At the end of the day I don't think banning it will realistically help anyone, and given just how many fanfic writers are teens to begin with, unless that's changed in recent years, it better to just tag and suck it up.
I just think there's a big difference between literature like Lolita and actual titillating material.
This. There’s a difference between literature and erotica. I’m fine with a story that talks about bad people doing bad things. My problem is with erotica that feeds the fantasies of bad people who want to do bad things to children
Absolutely. Being a "hardass" about tag discipline is completely valid. Being pissed off at people not appropriating tagging is totally valid but if the tags are all properly done then you have full aware of triggers etc before so just.. don't read it if it contains those
There are few mandatory tags. People convince themselves that all sorts of content needs to be tagged, but, nope. Just the explicit depiction of major character death, rape and underaged sex.
“creator chose not to use archive warnings” means that a work could contain many different things and if you’re sensitive to something maybe don’t read it. that is in itself a warning
If you decide to read a minimally tagged fic, you don’t know if it got ported from another website or just posted by someone who doesn’t know that they’re expected to tag for a vast array of triggers. Proceed with caution.
you are exactly the same as people calling libraries and demanding they take books off the shelf for "poisoning the minds of the youth". you are an adult capable of distinguishing fantasy from reality. you can think something is awful without acting as if writing about something is the same as doing it in real life.
"romanticizing" and "normalizing" are very subjective things. who gets to decide what is and isn't "romanticizing" something? for some people, depicting something at all is "romanticizing" it. should we cater to those people?
i've seen people argue, completely seriously, that Lolita was written by Nabokov as a self-insert fantasy and that he wanted to actually rape children. should we let those people decide what should and shouldn't be censored?
also, bringing up having been sexually assaulted before as a "gotcha" is ridiculous considering a lot of the people writing the things you are so upset about have also been sexually assaulted before. why do you act as if your trauma response is the only valid one?
anyway, if you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen. if you can't handle having a discussion about this then you never should have commented in the first place.
Oh for sure, the discourse got big. Yes, I do in fact use and read on AO3 both fanfics and original works, and man, the pro-ship anti-ship drama exists, and I can't believe people actually don't read the tags or filter out what they don't like. I always use exclude filter for stuff I don't want to see.
yeah, I use the blacklist function in this extension, which is great because you can pause/unpause the blacklist, filter to specific languages, exclude certain words in titles/summaries (for me, “drabble”), exclude works by having more than a certain number of fandoms tagged, etc.
it’s also got a feature that lets you save how far you scrolled in a chapter so you can pick up where you left off. super helpful for works that are like 80k words all in 1 chapter.
Don’t like don’t read used to be common sense. Nowadays people like to act morally superior and puritan judging others for reading certain topics. Nothing stops you from clicking out of the story and moving on if you discover you don’t like it
Wasn’t AO3 initially started because the most popular fanfic site in the 2000s and 2010s, FF.Net, didn’t allow a lot of those subjects?
So many younger people don’t know how recent AO3’s rise was. It only started to take off in 2016-2017, only got to FF.Net’s level in 2018-2019, and only firmly overtook it during the pandemic. Also it wasn’t identical between fandoms. Newer series created after 2015 picked up AO3 first, then ongoing series from the early 2010s who used both sites equally for a while(Steven Universe was pretty much 50/50 on both sites from 2018-2020), and then in the early 2020s older fandoms heavily entrenched started to switch like Evangelion or Daria.
As far as I understand this is the definition of pro-ship. There's a lot of stuff on the Internet I wouldn't read, and as long as it's fiction and not like an instruction manual (and tagged correctly!) I don't see why anyone should care.
Yeah that's probably true. It was nice though, for a while there public perception seemed to be against that sort of BS. Unfortunately I think it comes and goes.
I mean a lot of research suggests access to porn, and particularly the increasingly violent/aggressive pornography has led to the massive increase in (largely/presumably consensual) violent forms of sex (choking, spanking, etc).
Obviously it's not perfectly clear whether it's causal or a third factor.
Whether fanfic has a similar effect to visual content is unclear from what i recall though.
Tbh, while I do think the hate is very overblown it is unlikely that it doesn't have an impact in normalising or implicitly condoning problematic behaviours.
One could accurately say that the porn and sexualized content that we as a culture generate and choose most often reflects some kind of violence or hatred, that is if we presume the problem lies not with porn necessarily, but with the desires of the consuming population at hand who create it as you suggested.
I agree it's not very clear whether it's self selection or causal or another thing entirely.
But the proliferation of porn has resulted in an increase in violent porn, rough sexual activity (choking etc), and injuries from sex. It's more common than when marital rape and domestic abuse were effectively legal. While it's not as simple as just ban it all, I just personally think it very likely does play a role.
Yeah unfortunately I don't really see a clear solution. Banning porn will work as well as prohibition. But simply saying to educate the youth is easier said than done. Especially when a lot seems to suggest porn is guiding/influencing a lot of sexual behaviours. If you could ban it underage without dystopian surveillance that would be ideal, but not really possible unfortunately.
Not that either is inherently good, but distasteful fanfic also provides a much less exploitative alternative to visual media. As scary as the societal impacts of internet porn are, probably as large if not larger of a concern is how insanely coercive and shady the porn industry is.
In a world where a visual media industry still exists, removing written media is probably net harmful.
I don't think measuring the effects of various orgasm-generating content on people is a good use of society's resources. That's probably it hasn't actually been appreciably measured. And then how would one even start measuring the "ripple" effects?
The whole concept you've presented here shows why the anti-shipper movement, such as it is, really is quite toxic and aligns with repressive tendencies in society.
"anti-anti" was actually the original term, before people decided it was clunky and changed to "proshipping"
Kind of wish we'd stuck with it. I'm sick to my back teeth of people going "pro is short for problematic" (it is not, it is pro- as a prefix and the opposite of anti-)
I find things like RPF rather disturbing and will absolutely judge someone for it, but that’s an extension of considering parasocial relationships in general disturbing, and doesn’t mean I think it should be banned.
When you’re part of this culture and is active in different language cycles, you will see the culture difference actually do play part in people’s writing, and it’s honestly fascinating to see.
But most people only complain about westerners being too puritan on one thing but completely degenerate on another thing, and vice versa.
Personally I feel like this is a prove of stupidity among humans may not be the same but it rhymes.
I looked at their history and it looks like a person mostly minding their own business and not commenting judgmentally about others and what they like to enjoy in their free time. Unlike some people.
(with rare exceptions like the comment we're replying to, obviously)
Not sure, desperate for some type of in I guess. (Additionally, them making their profile private is the ultimate rock and glass house situation, Wikipedia is about transparency after all.)
I was embroiled in ship discourse as an 18-year-old during the pandemic, and I can say it’s probably taken five years off my life.
Being an anti-shipper appeals to teens and young adults, and most anti-shippers I came across were either minors or fresh 18-year-olds. Teens and young adults are just starting to figure themselves out and solidify their own morals, so it naturally makes sense that they’d gravitate towards something like this. It’s also an easy form of “activism” that doesn’t require any actual effort, and it relates to fandoms.
I eventually realized that nothing I did would make the “problematic fanfics” go away, and that’s okay because I could just… not look at the things I don’t want to look at. And I never went back.
I really don’t give a shit about pro and anti ship discourse. Stop shoving fiction into a box of “pro ship” and “anti ship”. I feel like it dampens media literacy, because instead of using your brain to actually analyze the media and understand what’s being portrayed and why, you just instantly shove it into a box of “pro ship” or “anti ship” based on feeling and not logic. Tastefully and respectfully portraying abusive relationships is possible but “antis” in particular see anything portraying abuse and immediately label it as “pro ship”.
Tensions over pairings between various characters within the television series Voltron: Legendary Defender led to a large-scale expansion of shipping discourse in fandom spaces.\40]) Opponents of the romantic pairing of the characters Keith) and Shiro) (although both characters were adults within the source material, Shiro was several years older than Keith) characterized that relationship as pedophilic in nature.\27])
On the face of it, this sounds dumb as shit. I suspect it sounds dumb as shit in the depth of it too.
Now, I don't read fanfiction and I don't really ship characters, but c'mon guys. The internet is getting so damn censored and sanitized every day. "Unalive" "Sewer Slide" "Grape" - and we all seem to agree we hate that direction of things rather unanimously. This seems like a simple extension of what seems rather common sense to me.
I don't expect all, or even most, of the works of fanfiction hosted on AO3 to be good. Amateur writing often has large flaws. I've dabbled in it myself, and my works include those I'd label "not good". But what I imagine I could appreciate about AO3 if I was so inclined to go there is that if this article is current and correct, I could read about someone dying, not "unaliving", or check a box saying I'm over 18 and read some adult content, and essentially exist in a space that hasn't been forcibly power-washed to appeal only to advertisers and puritan religious fundamentalist soccer mums.
We need more spaces like that. Spaces people and things can just fucking exist. If I'm understanding the terminology right, that would make me a 'pro shipper' or whatever the term is, anti-anti maybe. This wave of censorship and absurd sanitization infuriates me and frankly the concerns of the "antis" seem petty and irrelevant. I can't bring myself to truly care about their argument. I read Warhammer 40K books, and yet I do not long to sacrifice people to dark gods or burn people at the stake for wrongthink. Clearly, you can enjoy dark elements in fiction without feeling compelled to act them out in the real world. It's the "video games cause violence" thing all over again I think.
And it's just fucking words. Don't read it if you don't want to. It's not autoplaying a video in your face. You have to put in effort to engage with it. So, "antis" must simply put their grown up pants on and get over it. Pointless, irritating whining.
This is similar to the outrage at Twilight and 50 Shades of Gray, that women's fantasies are bad for them and going to teach them to join abusive relationships. This was analyzed well by Contrapoints.
As someone who first encountered fictional media like that when I was young due to being a horny bastard and an early bloomer, I am so grateful that I was taught the difference between fiction and reality early on, and that I was raised by my parents moreso than the internet.
This is a theory from some guy with absolutely no credibility on any studies relating to brains, I just feel as though recently, like a bit before Covid, a perfect storm brewed of kids being on the internet AND being raised by it. Obviously a lot of early internet was kids fucking around, but they were for the most part still raised by parents paying attention to them, or at least toughened up the internet being a wild west and learning that they must tailor their own experiences and ignore shit they don't like.
As people's experience becomes more comfortable as well as companies striving to make it comfortable so people stay online more, people become more picky and angsty about seeing content they don't like.
A really odd and honestly alarming side effect is that masses of people have started hoping or even PUSHING that those they don't like do bad things in real life. It's almost like they're trying to conjure their puritanical worldview/general opinions into reality so that they'll have a valid reason to hate innocent people who aren't harming anyone. Biggest example I see is loli content, where they're compared to genuine real life soulless child abusers, whilst having done LITERALLY nothing.
I don't like saying this because I sound like a "back in my day" kinda person, but I really believe that the removal of ALL friction/difficulties is as bad for the mind as removing physical difficulties/exercises for the body. At the very least, a general vibe of "If you don't like it, look away and turn off your computer" should be employed. If they're unable to do something as simple and necessary as separating reality from fiction, they should not be catered to, it is upon them to be taught/learn that simple skill.
Thank you for coming to the TED talk of absolutely no credentials and just experience lol
The major issue was racism and CSAM on the archive. But people were horrifically vile in response to the mere discussion of “well, maybe we should have standards that don’t include Nazi propaganda on what’s supposed to be an inclusive archive.”
The point of the creation of the archive was that there would be 0 censorship as long as it was a fanwork. The point of an archive is not to pass judgement, but to collect and hold information, even if that is information you disagree with.
When it came to actual CSAM content (as in, actual writing that was about real abuse, imagery of real life abuse) the archive has taken that down. They still follow the law on it. Yet people continue to muddy the waters by reporting to police fictional depictions of abuse that dont connect to real people at all. Which is far more harmful than the site simply allowing these works of fiction, given that reporting fiction actively takes away resources from real life cases of CSAM
And there's queers and SA victims and people of all colors, creeds, and backgrounds also on ao3 still
Do you know why ao3 was created? Why it has the 0 censorship policy? Because other sites saw fit to ban works created by and for queer people, SA victims, and even nonchristians and nonwhites. Their censorship didn't extend to pedos and nazis, half the time it reinforced their beliefs. And when sites do try to ban those groups, look who actually winds up banned. Its queer folks and victims, not perpetrators
You're gonna have nazis and pedos everywhere, its the fuckin internet, thats the risk you take having any sort of site. But once you start going down the road of censorship, its never those guys that get kicked.
And who defines who's a pedo on ao3 deserving to be kicked? Is it the person that writes an innocent story about 2 kids? Is it the person that writes an exploration of teenage sexuality? Is it the trans person? Is it the SA victim exploring their own abuse through graphic writing? Because even if you say no to all of those, that they're not pedos, guess what? History has shown time and time again that they'll be the ones banned under that justification anyway.
What do you believe causes more harm at the end of the day? A few bad folks writing fiction that harms no one? Or the further silencing of marginalized groups under the guise of "protection"?
and the most absurd part is that AO3 was literally founded as a response to those taboo topics being censored on other websites. it's very much an example of how "go create your own space" isn't a solution, because then people will come into that space and demand it cater to them.
They don’t read the tags (AO3 has a wonderful tagging system) then complain about what they read.
As someone who started reading and writing fic back in Ye Olde Days before search engines, AO3 is such an amazing platform. Those who get used to other platforms then want to inflict the censorship and hype on AO3 rather than curating their own experience need to spend more time in the real world.
The most wonderful tagging system in the world is only as good as its users. Don’t think it needs elaboration the average user isn‘t able to use it to its capabilities
[deleted]
"This is a space where consenting adults can safely explore their fantasies about something"
"Because I'm uncomfortable I want you to stop doing that"
Sounds an awful lot like demanding a space caters to you, mate.
If the content is pedophilia then yes, I do have a problem with it
"I will apply my morality onto consenting adults harming no one if I feel like it"
If you actually cared about children welfare you should go volunteer at a nonprofit or if you're American campaign against the current pedophile in power. Stop whining online.
I couldn’t care less about what consenting adults do. I’m specifically talking about people creating or using child abuse content. Those people can all get fucked
Go use your time on something that actually makes society better lol, instead of losing your shit online against fanfiction writers
Lots of nonces in this subreddit I see
"Everyone who disagrees with me is a nonce"
Look, your argument is entirely founded in morality and allegations. Do you have any evidence to support your argument or is it just "kids who write about having sex with kids are paedophiles"?
There're actually a lot of things you can do in your own power to make society concretely a better place. My recent favorite has been https://makesunsets.com for global warming, but also consider donating to eff.org.
I don't doubt your heart is in the right place, but there're so many more productive things to help society with than name calling online
Fantastic.
Is someone writing about fictional characters something you have to read?
Some of these are actually people processing their own CSA trauma too.
If I wrote about the things I did when I was 10 in the days of the Wild West internet, that’s your choice to read it or not. It still happened and I should have a space to write about it if I feel like it.
Yup.
Does ir make me uncomfortable? Yes.
Should it exist? In a perfect world, no
But should people have a space to express it safely, without actually harming anyone? Fucking absolutely.
If you’re reading or writing about CSAM I hope the FBI takes a deeper look at your hard drive
So you think the FBI should investigate people who write about their own trauma?
CSAM is defined by US law (which is what is relevant here as the Ao3 servers are located in the US) as referring only to visual depictions. Writing is not considered CSAM and thus the FBI cannot persecute someone for it.
They cannot prosecute for it (in America at least) but I hope they would be watching these individuals closely as they probably have CSAM on their hard drives
Ah.
So, functionally, you don't believe in fiction?
Should "Lolita" be banned, and anyone who's read it or owned it prosecuted?
I don't think either should be banned for the record
But there is a big difference between Lolita, which was intentionally written with a message the protag is bad and not meant to be titillating or pornographic despite pushing boundaries, and a fanfic with a child designed to titillate.
Obviously not all fanfics, but an uncomfortable amount of ones with children do.
I mean, i get it. But I'd rather people have a place to vent those fantasies whilst being aware theyre fantasies.
Ultimately, I don't have tk go there. I don't want to go there. But insofar as they just write about it? Its none of my business
Oh yeah I get that side too. At the end of the day I don't think banning it will realistically help anyone, and given just how many fanfic writers are teens to begin with, unless that's changed in recent years, it better to just tag and suck it up.
I just think there's a big difference between literature like Lolita and actual titillating material.
I don’t think this sort of pedo lit is going to stop people from acting on them. If anything it will feed their sick proclivities.
This. There’s a difference between literature and erotica. I’m fine with a story that talks about bad people doing bad things. My problem is with erotica that feeds the fantasies of bad people who want to do bad things to children
The pedos have found my comment apparently. I’ll gladly take downvotes from nonces
Your demands may be very reasonable* but that doesn't mean you're not going into a space and demanding it cater to you.
*(Not when tags already exist. If you're just being a hard ass about tag discipline that's fine)
Absolutely. Being a "hardass" about tag discipline is completely valid. Being pissed off at people not appropriating tagging is totally valid but if the tags are all properly done then you have full aware of triggers etc before so just.. don't read it if it contains those
There are few mandatory tags. People convince themselves that all sorts of content needs to be tagged, but, nope. Just the explicit depiction of major character death, rape and underaged sex.
You really should tag much more than that. It may not be mandatory but it's good etiquette and also it's just generally good to look out for others.
“creator chose not to use archive warnings” means that a work could contain many different things and if you’re sensitive to something maybe don’t read it. that is in itself a warning
Nice to =/= need to tag
If you decide to read a minimally tagged fic, you don’t know if it got ported from another website or just posted by someone who doesn’t know that they’re expected to tag for a vast array of triggers. Proceed with caution.
you are exactly the same as people calling libraries and demanding they take books off the shelf for "poisoning the minds of the youth". you are an adult capable of distinguishing fantasy from reality. you can think something is awful without acting as if writing about something is the same as doing it in real life.
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And you can stay out of spaces you don't belong in lol
"romanticizing" and "normalizing" are very subjective things. who gets to decide what is and isn't "romanticizing" something? for some people, depicting something at all is "romanticizing" it. should we cater to those people?
i've seen people argue, completely seriously, that Lolita was written by Nabokov as a self-insert fantasy and that he wanted to actually rape children. should we let those people decide what should and shouldn't be censored?
also, bringing up having been sexually assaulted before as a "gotcha" is ridiculous considering a lot of the people writing the things you are so upset about have also been sexually assaulted before. why do you act as if your trauma response is the only valid one?
anyway, if you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen. if you can't handle having a discussion about this then you never should have commented in the first place.
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so we agree that you can think something is awful without calling for it to be banned? which was my original point to begin with?
Nobody has a monopoly on being assaulted.
Yikes
Oh for sure, the discourse got big. Yes, I do in fact use and read on AO3 both fanfics and original works, and man, the pro-ship anti-ship drama exists, and I can't believe people actually don't read the tags or filter out what they don't like. I always use exclude filter for stuff I don't want to see.
there are even extensions you can use to save filters so you don’t have to do it manually every time.
Really?! This is huge
yeah, I use the blacklist function in this extension, which is great because you can pause/unpause the blacklist, filter to specific languages, exclude certain words in titles/summaries (for me, “drabble”), exclude works by having more than a certain number of fandoms tagged, etc.
it’s also got a feature that lets you save how far you scrolled in a chapter so you can pick up where you left off. super helpful for works that are like 80k words all in 1 chapter.
List of Wikipedia original illustrations that are just slightly too good:
Ayyyy Kemono mentioned!
Wikipedia is just the slowest, dryest shitposting forum ever created.
Don’t like don’t read used to be common sense. Nowadays people like to act morally superior and puritan judging others for reading certain topics. Nothing stops you from clicking out of the story and moving on if you discover you don’t like it
frrr
Wasn’t AO3 initially started because the most popular fanfic site in the 2000s and 2010s, FF.Net, didn’t allow a lot of those subjects?
So many younger people don’t know how recent AO3’s rise was. It only started to take off in 2016-2017, only got to FF.Net’s level in 2018-2019, and only firmly overtook it during the pandemic. Also it wasn’t identical between fandoms. Newer series created after 2015 picked up AO3 first, then ongoing series from the early 2010s who used both sites equally for a while(Steven Universe was pretty much 50/50 on both sites from 2018-2020), and then in the early 2020s older fandoms heavily entrenched started to switch like Evangelion or Daria.
Huh. I've posted on AO3 original work with extremely ethically dubious relationships. I figure that's the place to post that sort of thing
It is. Antis are just weird.
I'm not pro- or anti-ship but I am anti-anti-shipper.
As far as I understand this is the definition of pro-ship. There's a lot of stuff on the Internet I wouldn't read, and as long as it's fiction and not like an instruction manual (and tagged correctly!) I don't see why anyone should care.
I dunno, I think there are measurable impacts on people (which ripple into society at large) based on the content they are having an orgasm to.
It really feels like within 10 years we are going to be debating if video games cause violence again.
People never stopped doing it. It just hasn't been getting as much traction recently.
Yeah that's probably true. It was nice though, for a while there public perception seemed to be against that sort of BS. Unfortunately I think it comes and goes.
It's a VERY annoying pendulum born from the need for there to be a scapegoat to distract people from real problems.
You are free to think that! Doesn't is true mean ts true though.
I mean a lot of research suggests access to porn, and particularly the increasingly violent/aggressive pornography has led to the massive increase in (largely/presumably consensual) violent forms of sex (choking, spanking, etc).
Obviously it's not perfectly clear whether it's causal or a third factor.
Whether fanfic has a similar effect to visual content is unclear from what i recall though.
Tbh, while I do think the hate is very overblown it is unlikely that it doesn't have an impact in normalising or implicitly condoning problematic behaviours.
One could accurately say that the porn and sexualized content that we as a culture generate and choose most often reflects some kind of violence or hatred, that is if we presume the problem lies not with porn necessarily, but with the desires of the consuming population at hand who create it as you suggested.
I agree it's not very clear whether it's self selection or causal or another thing entirely.
But the proliferation of porn has resulted in an increase in violent porn, rough sexual activity (choking etc), and injuries from sex. It's more common than when marital rape and domestic abuse were effectively legal. While it's not as simple as just ban it all, I just personally think it very likely does play a role.
A ban isn't really something I want... But I want something to exist to combat it.
Yeah unfortunately I don't really see a clear solution. Banning porn will work as well as prohibition. But simply saying to educate the youth is easier said than done. Especially when a lot seems to suggest porn is guiding/influencing a lot of sexual behaviours. If you could ban it underage without dystopian surveillance that would be ideal, but not really possible unfortunately.
Not that either is inherently good, but distasteful fanfic also provides a much less exploitative alternative to visual media. As scary as the societal impacts of internet porn are, probably as large if not larger of a concern is how insanely coercive and shady the porn industry is.
In a world where a visual media industry still exists, removing written media is probably net harmful.
I don't think measuring the effects of various orgasm-generating content on people is a good use of society's resources. That's probably it hasn't actually been appreciably measured. And then how would one even start measuring the "ripple" effects?
The whole concept you've presented here shows why the anti-shipper movement, such as it is, really is quite toxic and aligns with repressive tendencies in society.
what impacts
"anti-anti" was actually the original term, before people decided it was clunky and changed to "proshipping"
Kind of wish we'd stuck with it. I'm sick to my back teeth of people going "pro is short for problematic" (it is not, it is pro- as a prefix and the opposite of anti-)
I find things like RPF rather disturbing and will absolutely judge someone for it, but that’s an extension of considering parasocial relationships in general disturbing, and doesn’t mean I think it should be banned.
It still exists... this is not a relic of the past
When you’re part of this culture and is active in different language cycles, you will see the culture difference actually do play part in people’s writing, and it’s honestly fascinating to see.
But most people only complain about westerners being too puritan on one thing but completely degenerate on another thing, and vice versa.
Personally I feel like this is a prove of stupidity among humans may not be the same but it rhymes.
Shit people with too much free time care about
[deleted]
I looked at their history and it looks like a person mostly minding their own business and not commenting judgmentally about others and what they like to enjoy in their free time. Unlike some people.
(with rare exceptions like the comment we're replying to, obviously)
why did Rimworld have to catch a stray :(
it’s because they don’t actually have a point and scramble to try to find anything incriminating and end up looking like an idiot in the process
Not sure, desperate for some type of in I guess. (Additionally, them making their profile private is the ultimate rock and glass house situation, Wikipedia is about transparency after all.)
Judging someone’s post history while hiding your own
Omg yes that's crazy work
Well liking Rimworld presumably isn't everyone sending death threats because they're on the wrong side of the issue.
God forbid people have hobbies.
...there's 12k people active on the subreddit right now and a new dlc dropped a few months ago
yeah the other dude is kinda dumb but Rimworld has arguably one of the most persistently active playerbases so i'm not sure i get your point
[deleted]
Yeah so why you hating?
They have no other hobbies
oh you can’t actually read
How are you gonna criticise my post history while keeping your own hidden? Lol
Rimworld is dope go fuck yourself
Hell nah bruh
It's brave words for someone with hidden post history. Hypocrite.
DONT INSULT MY GOAT
RIMWORLD RAHHH
You didn't have to ship him to the morgue. Upvoted.
To me, this is totally ridiculous. How do people care this much about characters that don’t exist, and how other people see them?
I was embroiled in ship discourse as an 18-year-old during the pandemic, and I can say it’s probably taken five years off my life.
Being an anti-shipper appeals to teens and young adults, and most anti-shippers I came across were either minors or fresh 18-year-olds. Teens and young adults are just starting to figure themselves out and solidify their own morals, so it naturally makes sense that they’d gravitate towards something like this. It’s also an easy form of “activism” that doesn’t require any actual effort, and it relates to fandoms.
I eventually realized that nothing I did would make the “problematic fanfics” go away, and that’s okay because I could just… not look at the things I don’t want to look at. And I never went back.
What zero historical materialism does to a lumpen proletariat
I really don’t give a shit about pro and anti ship discourse. Stop shoving fiction into a box of “pro ship” and “anti ship”. I feel like it dampens media literacy, because instead of using your brain to actually analyze the media and understand what’s being portrayed and why, you just instantly shove it into a box of “pro ship” or “anti ship” based on feeling and not logic. Tastefully and respectfully portraying abusive relationships is possible but “antis” in particular see anything portraying abuse and immediately label it as “pro ship”.
On the face of it, this sounds dumb as shit. I suspect it sounds dumb as shit in the depth of it too.
Now, I don't read fanfiction and I don't really ship characters, but c'mon guys. The internet is getting so damn censored and sanitized every day. "Unalive" "Sewer Slide" "Grape" - and we all seem to agree we hate that direction of things rather unanimously. This seems like a simple extension of what seems rather common sense to me.
I don't expect all, or even most, of the works of fanfiction hosted on AO3 to be good. Amateur writing often has large flaws. I've dabbled in it myself, and my works include those I'd label "not good". But what I imagine I could appreciate about AO3 if I was so inclined to go there is that if this article is current and correct, I could read about someone dying, not "unaliving", or check a box saying I'm over 18 and read some adult content, and essentially exist in a space that hasn't been forcibly power-washed to appeal only to advertisers and puritan religious fundamentalist soccer mums.
We need more spaces like that. Spaces people and things can just fucking exist. If I'm understanding the terminology right, that would make me a 'pro shipper' or whatever the term is, anti-anti maybe. This wave of censorship and absurd sanitization infuriates me and frankly the concerns of the "antis" seem petty and irrelevant. I can't bring myself to truly care about their argument. I read Warhammer 40K books, and yet I do not long to sacrifice people to dark gods or burn people at the stake for wrongthink. Clearly, you can enjoy dark elements in fiction without feeling compelled to act them out in the real world. It's the "video games cause violence" thing all over again I think.
And it's just fucking words. Don't read it if you don't want to. It's not autoplaying a video in your face. You have to put in effort to engage with it. So, "antis" must simply put their grown up pants on and get over it. Pointless, irritating whining.
And the mid 2010s was when things really started going to shit. Coincidence? I think not.
This is similar to the outrage at Twilight and 50 Shades of Gray, that women's fantasies are bad for them and going to teach them to join abusive relationships. This was analyzed well by Contrapoints.
Defining yourself as “proship” or “anti-proship” are both unfathomably cringe imo
SHIPPING DISCOURSE HAS AN WIKIPEDIA PAGE??? oh god we are so cooked
As someone who first encountered fictional media like that when I was young due to being a horny bastard and an early bloomer, I am so grateful that I was taught the difference between fiction and reality early on, and that I was raised by my parents moreso than the internet.
This is a theory from some guy with absolutely no credibility on any studies relating to brains, I just feel as though recently, like a bit before Covid, a perfect storm brewed of kids being on the internet AND being raised by it. Obviously a lot of early internet was kids fucking around, but they were for the most part still raised by parents paying attention to them, or at least toughened up the internet being a wild west and learning that they must tailor their own experiences and ignore shit they don't like.
As people's experience becomes more comfortable as well as companies striving to make it comfortable so people stay online more, people become more picky and angsty about seeing content they don't like.
A really odd and honestly alarming side effect is that masses of people have started hoping or even PUSHING that those they don't like do bad things in real life. It's almost like they're trying to conjure their puritanical worldview/general opinions into reality so that they'll have a valid reason to hate innocent people who aren't harming anyone. Biggest example I see is loli content, where they're compared to genuine real life soulless child abusers, whilst having done LITERALLY nothing.
I don't like saying this because I sound like a "back in my day" kinda person, but I really believe that the removal of ALL friction/difficulties is as bad for the mind as removing physical difficulties/exercises for the body. At the very least, a general vibe of "If you don't like it, look away and turn off your computer" should be employed. If they're unable to do something as simple and necessary as separating reality from fiction, they should not be catered to, it is upon them to be taught/learn that simple skill.
Thank you for coming to the TED talk of absolutely no credentials and just experience lol
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Yeah, read the description.
Kinda cool ngl
The major issue was racism and CSAM on the archive. But people were horrifically vile in response to the mere discussion of “well, maybe we should have standards that don’t include Nazi propaganda on what’s supposed to be an inclusive archive.”
The point of the creation of the archive was that there would be 0 censorship as long as it was a fanwork. The point of an archive is not to pass judgement, but to collect and hold information, even if that is information you disagree with.
When it came to actual CSAM content (as in, actual writing that was about real abuse, imagery of real life abuse) the archive has taken that down. They still follow the law on it. Yet people continue to muddy the waters by reporting to police fictional depictions of abuse that dont connect to real people at all. Which is far more harmful than the site simply allowing these works of fiction, given that reporting fiction actively takes away resources from real life cases of CSAM
Well, now there’s ten Nazis and pedophiles at the table, so good job, AO3.
And there's queers and SA victims and people of all colors, creeds, and backgrounds also on ao3 still
Do you know why ao3 was created? Why it has the 0 censorship policy? Because other sites saw fit to ban works created by and for queer people, SA victims, and even nonchristians and nonwhites. Their censorship didn't extend to pedos and nazis, half the time it reinforced their beliefs. And when sites do try to ban those groups, look who actually winds up banned. Its queer folks and victims, not perpetrators
You're gonna have nazis and pedos everywhere, its the fuckin internet, thats the risk you take having any sort of site. But once you start going down the road of censorship, its never those guys that get kicked.
And who defines who's a pedo on ao3 deserving to be kicked? Is it the person that writes an innocent story about 2 kids? Is it the person that writes an exploration of teenage sexuality? Is it the trans person? Is it the SA victim exploring their own abuse through graphic writing? Because even if you say no to all of those, that they're not pedos, guess what? History has shown time and time again that they'll be the ones banned under that justification anyway.
What do you believe causes more harm at the end of the day? A few bad folks writing fiction that harms no one? Or the further silencing of marginalized groups under the guise of "protection"?
If you’re just here to support the racists, take a long winded hike.
"If you aren't with me, you're against me!"
Hitler breathed air, did you know that???
I just don’t like that there’s pedo porn there
Well it has to be somewhere, better for it to be on a public forum than on a sketchy website
It is also on the sketchy website. I don’t think any self respecting space should host that kind of shit
If youre writing fanfiction then your respect of the world we live in has already gone out the window a long time ago