#(tastefully executed but the implications speak volumes)

[x-i-l-verify]

Go check the fic out here if you wanna, it is VERY good.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/32895622/chapters/81634912

I’ve been reading this fic by @spookynatasha called There’s Blood in your Web, Theseus (wipe it out) and I’m completely obsessed so I had to draw huntsman Tommy doing some cool ballet pose covered In blood

[kuromichad]

the main thing that bugs me about ao3 discourse is i just. i never see anyone lay out what they actually Want from ao3 besides 'delete everything i think is bad' like theres no. sense of practicality? what exactly do you want added to the tos. what is the exact expected process for reporting fics and evaluating those reports. disclaimer before anyones like 'Oh so youre unilaterally defending them' i do extremely think they should at the least not allow rpf of irl minors. but when it comes to enforcing policies that aren't related to like, laws, i just wonder how you expect it to work... should they just delete anything/anyone who gets reported a lot, like plenty of sites do? then people are gonna exploit that system and get people mass reported over petty shit, just like on twitter. should there be a moderation team instead? who picks that team? who's on that team? what if the team makes decisions you don't like?

especially when you're talking about creating some kind of policy for 'eliminating racist content,' like-- what counts? i'm guessing that like, troll works that are just a wall of slurs already get deleted (if they don't then they should be because that's pretty simple) but like. who decides what's 'bad enough' to merit outright deletion? if it's done by volume of reports, wouldn't that essentially be arbitrary moderation because it depends on a random group of people who potentially all have different problems with a fic and those problems can vary wildly in severity? like, what about when it comes down to nuances of how a character is treated? dramas like we had with finnpoe discourse, where either character topping might invoke different racist tropes, so how does one walk the line and how do you cope with how not everyone who attempts to walk it will be successful?

i saw one post giving the example of a fic that just like, rewrote the events of last year's protests to be set in the transformers universe, and yeah that's tasteless, there's been offensive 'current events' fic happening for a long time and it sucks. but should there be an explicit ban on that genre? how would that clause be worded? does Everyone agree that it's something that's impossible to do tastefully? if a black person does want to work through their feelings on current events through fanfiction, is that still banned because it's presumably impossible to do well, or should it be allowed because they have the right perspective? do they have to meet a certain standard of 'doing it right', and who evaluates that? and how are ao3 moderators supposed to know or believe they have that perspective? (we've already seen people racefaking to get 'permission' to write tacky racist fic just due to social pressures. imagine the lengths people will go to if their work or account is on the line.)

like-- sorry if this is a gauche comparison but since it's something i'm familiar with and able to speak on. what if the next wave of criticism is 'ao3 needs to crack down on transphobic content'? how will you define that, beyond 'delete fake fics that are just slurs'? would entire tags like omegaverse, or 'boypussy' and 'girl!penis', or even 'genderbend' get deleted? what about trans authors using those tags? do we become the only ones allowed because we can do it 'correctly'? how do we deal with the fact that not all trans people agree on what's 'correct'. like i don't think genderbending is inherently transphobic, it's down to individual choices and portrayals. same with omegaverse, same even with 'boypussy/girl!penis', since like. people might take issue with the entire premise of 'characters have this type of body and it just doesn't like, mean anything' as being fetishizing of trans bodies/erasure of trans experience and i sympathize with that. i'm not certain where i fall on the matter either, it's very much a case by case thing.

so then, how do you moderate that? do we get rid of those tags because someone decided nobody can use them responsibly or should like the premise at all? again, do we appoint moderators to decide when an idea is handled 'correctly' and again, who are the moderators? what happens when they make a decision you don't like? how do you distinguish between fic with a 'wrong' premise and fic with an 'okay' premise that is executed imperfectly and leads to interpretations or implications that upset people, especially when many fic writers are young and amateurs? should someone who made mistakes be punished with deletion just as much as someone who, like, intentionally wrote character-bashing/abuse fic for racist/transphobic/etc reasons?

like, none of what i'm asking here is supposed to be applied to general discussion of these subjects, it's not like i think offensive content should never be taken down, i'm not pulling some kind of 'everything Could be offensive so actually nothing is' or 'if they didn't mean to then it doesn't count' or anything like that. but we aren't talking about interpersonal discussions, or the handling of mass media, or anything like that. we're specifically talking about the concept of 'just delete everything that's offensive and exploitative' and how that would potentially be implemented. because ao3 is not a person who said something tasteless on twitch and can be reasoned with and led to make an apology. ao3 is a website hosting all sorts of ideas from millions of users, specifically in the form of fiction, and the way fiction conveys biases and shapes people's thinking is itself a really fucking complicated subject, and people are trying to demand that they try to tame that massive volume of content from different people in very specific ways, with no suggestion of how to actually go about doing that.

i know you think 'delete the stuff thats obviously bad' is a simple principle but it's literally not because no two people will ever 100% agree on what's 'obviously bad', particularly in this case because people don't consistently agree on whether depiction always equals endorsement AND it's so difficult to reliably tell whether depiction that seems to be endorsed was intended to be endorsed. so again, the primary, most practical options for 'delete things that are bad' are to either delete everything that anyone reports for any reason or to have moderators that make flawed human choices. i just want to feel like any of the people making 'ao3 bad' posts have actually like, considered that, and have some sort of opinion on which one it should be, if theyre gonna fight about this.

and, yknow, if they did have to hire a massive team of additional moderators to actually read every fic and take the time to make subjective decisions about whether it's offensive... they would need to pay those people... and they would still need donations. so lmao.

im not saying like 'youre not allowed to want things to change' like there's definitely room for improvement but. please god. start explaining what you want those changes to be because 'delete everything i personally think is bad' is not a moral imperative or a coherent category or a helpful suggestion in the least, if you think with your brain and not your gut instinct of disgust.