#like what can you do vs spirk. and i don't even know most of what's gonna happen with these two

[chaotictomtom]

hey also guess who just learned about t'hy'la [is a snotty and sniffling mess] [wails and cries have been heard for 5 minutes just before]

[onewomancitadel]

@anomalous-fox said:

God it's so dumb. It's always the people who have no exposure to fanfic or even actively turn up their nose at it that feel emboldened to speak the most on it, when it literally couldn't affect them less. Every single criticism of the donation drive is like, the op doesn't even have a functioning grasp of what ao3 exists to be. It's so tiresome.

I mean sometimes I wonder how close I am to the issue that I lose sight of the fact that this is bizarro weird nerdy shit and most of the social perception of fanfic is 'my anime crossover self-insert' or 'mafia boss abducts me and makes me his maid' or 'my mum sold me to One Direction' so, the idea of anybody having money in their pockets to donate (mothers often make the largest demographic for entertainment spending) and actually having real motivation for doing so (when they should be donating to uhhh ME!!!!! nevermind that from a charity perspective, I really think people need to be made aware of services and charities that can support them without having to solely rely on online donations) is laughably absurd. Like, why would anyone do that, AO3 is for freaks. Well, I don't use social media outside of Tumblr (which is a microblogging platform, kind of a hybrid leftover) and based off of how much time I spend on writing, and specifically fanfic writing, there's real incentive for me to try to 'give back' in the ways that I can when the rest of the Internet is fucked.

But the demographic bit is interesting because again, most people with an elastic budget are going to be adults (and I gather that a lot of people involved in this discourse don't have much of a conception of budgeting) and in this case I think it's also really gendered. Then you've got that age-tension where the silly women who should be in the kitchen are... doing things? They're reading weird fanfic where Hawkeye and Pierce make lovey eyes at each other? The Fandom OG's are the Spirk housewives. God bless.

Anyway, I have actually seen people in fandom mock the idea of donating to AO3, and I get it - being a little edgy is part of the fun of being online, staking territory in a silly little issue is part of the fun - but on the other hand I sort of don't, because it's bad faith to say that AO3's donation drive is the same as any other. What prompted this post was someone saying that it's hysterical to conflate supporting AO3 with ~supporting free speech and marginalised voices~ and whilst I think people can get a little heated with the rhetoric... Chinese women have been arrested for writing slashfic??? There was recently someone trying to get on the board of AO3 to moderate AO3's content (with vague language, mind you) which - to the consternation of pro-censorship Leftists - will always be used against Leftist interests (always. Always. Always always always). Like, yeah I think the pro vs. anti debate is absurd and deserved of nuance, but this is a genuine issue which affects people in the real world, and it's sooo weird that it's AO3 that people get weird about in particular. None of these people want to have a conversation about actually hard stuff (like do they want to talk about CSAM on pornography websites in broad daylight?)

I just don't know what it is about AO3 that gets people fired up. I honestly think it might come down to the social grossness of nerd shit. To circle back to the point of my reply, most peoples' perception of nerd shit is... sweaty gross nerd shit, not the sleek clean Funko pop collector or that guy who's a little too much into Marvel, I really mean in the general social dislike of nerdery and the antisocialness associated with it. When you strip away the Internet aesthetics of social justice ~discourse~ it comes back to the most simplistic stuff.

I have argued in the past that anti and proshipping is the new schoolyard bullying - there is almost very little real moral nuance to be had - but I think this is more of the same stuff. Literally schoolyard shit. This is why they speak with such derision of the website and yeah, I think the whole 'fanfic is real literature' thing has never taken up in the mainstream at all, ever. Most people are very quick to mock this idea, and as much as I think the 'Dante's Inferno is fanfic' opinion is completely fucking stupid, I don't think there's ever been a social shift in favour of fanfic. I think we are permanently in the 'fanfic is for nerds and weirdoes' zone, and I think we probably have to reckon with that - because that, maybe above all, is motivating this type of discourse.

Well I think I'm feeling a little bit better today than I was yesterday.

I love extremely bad faith takes on AO3 doing donation drives. It's my most used website and supports one of my major hobbies, it is not at all like not giving money out to people on my dashboard and there is absolutely no need to conspicuously advertise how much I do or don't donate to charity. It's like fucking asking for tithings sometimes with this website

Seriously, this is why I don't get people being weird about spending money on Tumblr. This is like the last decent website left anymore that has a mostly active userbase where I can post a lot of my writing and engage with people in my hobby; whilst I'm largely against the monetisation and corporatisation of the Internet, this is probably one of the very few ways to combat it against, you know, shareholder interest lol.