unpopularfanopinion

[unpopularfanopinion]

I have some things to say about the situation in fandom the last few days // an open letter to the morally outraged.

I didn't read the fic that started this, purely because I didn't see it in my feed. But I have trusted friends who were able to give me enough of an idea on what it contained that I feel comfortable commenting.

I am both a parent, and was a victim of abuse when I was a child. I would kill or die to prevent my children or any children from becoming a victim of csa. I support a non profit organisation dedicated to keeping children safe from csa and csam.

This fic, from all accounts, did not contain or glorify csa. Also, when it comes to literature, csam laws do not apply. Fictional written works containing csa are actually researched and studied by experts in the psychology field. Well researched. They are not illegal, and the subject matter is in a lot of professionally published works.

Dark themes in fiction and erotica can also be a coping mechanism for victims, to help them reframe their experience. It can be used as a safe means of exposure therapy where they retain control and power in the situation as they read.

Pedro himself has said one of his favourite books is Lolita. Does that say anything about his character or morals? Are you going to go around telling everybody vile things about him now?

Just because something is not to your tastes doesn't mean it should be banned, or that you should be naming and shaming people who interact with it. We are on a slippery political slope with the right wing pushing censorship and banning and othering. Do not make it easier for them to do this.

If you draw the line at uncomfortable subject matter for *you* and then try and draw that line for everyone else, too, where does it end? Do we stop at what makes you feel uncomfortable, or do we stop at what makes the next person, or the next person uncomfortable until we're well and truly censored and it's illegal to do or write anything other than under the covers missionary with your spouse?

If you're not actually out there doing the work to help victims, then what you're doing by naming and shaming is purely performative. If you were out there doing the work to help real victims, you'd be putting your energy there instead of into this stunt.

You might think you're a real hero, out there fighting the "good fight" against "those disgusting people who read that stuff", but what you need to realise is that fandom spaces are not built for you specifically. They are a community, one you need to know the rules and etiquette for.

I've been in fandom spaces for a good twenty something years at this point, so take it from a fandom old.

1. Don't like, don't read. Curate your own experience. We didn't have tags and summaries and descriptions like we have now twenty years ago. We have tags now. Use them liberally, both to seek out what you want to see, and to block what you don't.

2. We're all a community here. If you're new, you're a guest. Don't come into our community and tell us how to do things. You didn't build this fandom, and you most certainly do not get to dictate it.

3. Fanfiction is full of adult content. If you can't be an adult about said content, fandom is not the place for you. If you can't scroll on or block tags, you aren't mature enough to be here.

You don't have to like everything you see. You don't have to see everything the fandom posts. But you sure as hell can't come in here and tell everybody what goes and what doesn't, and use fear and naming and shaming to try and control the fandom. It's awfully dictator of you.

Take a look at this post if you've gotten this far in. Fandom has had these rules long before you joined and they will be the rules long after you leave. It's the only way fandom works.

[unpopularfanopinion]

No it’s not the artist’s fault but Elon Musk did a Nazi Salute twice during the inauguration. Supporting Twitter(posting, linking, giving it any traffic) means helping Elon make money and supporting his fascist agenda. Hence why people are banning such links from their forums, in an effort to boycott the platform.

This the unfortunate effect of bad people doing bad things. There will be consequences and chances are people who were totally innocent will be impacted. Like all the other actors and writers who lost income from the Cosby Show getting pulled from syndication due to Bill Cosby’s multiple sexual assaults.

I've been seeing a lot of servers and such banning people linking to Twitter at all, even the most innocuous stuff, and am I crazy for finding it to just be...stupid? Controlling? Censoring? And again, It's just like, blanket bans, because nevermind the artists and individuals who rely on the userbase they've amassed over years to make a living, this forced push to drive people to another site and this guilt by association thing. Like I really feel for artists and such so it's kind of weird to me to see this massive collective banning seemingly from links at all, even if lost Twitter links I ever see are memes or art. It's not their fault.

.

[unpopularfanopinion]

I want every single person who wastes their time promoting and encouraging the shut down of AO3 to just explode. Please, explode. Please. You are the kind of person who would have set the Library of Alexandria on fire because it had books that went against your religious/moral values. You would have been the kind of nazi that took books from libraries and threw them in the fucking bonfire because it went against your ideology.

If you are against AO3, I am afraid you are a fascist. And I mean the word afraid literally, because there is nothing more scary than people, young people at that, falling for far right propaganda.

[unpopularfanopinion]

https://www.tumblr.com/stopao3csem/772557854569889792/petitioninterest-check-to-purge-underage-rpf-on?source=share

What do you think about this?

Whatever it was doesn't exist anymore but judging by what I can see of the account name and post content from the link, I think its a piece of shit that's not gonna get anywhere beyond ignorant moral flag waving and a complete misunderstanding of the intricacies of the U.S law.

"Stop AO3 CSEM!"

AO3 does not host CSEM, hope this helps, if it did it would no longer be running and people would be in prison. AO3 is a ridiculously well known website not some little 50 person forum lurking in a dark corner of the internet. If it was actively hosting real CSEM, you can bet people would Know About It.

AO3 also does not 'purge' content in the way that sites like Wattpad are renowned for doing. AO3 will only 'purge' if there is an influx of content which actually breaks the TOS. While you can alert AO3 staff of such an influx, you cannot simply stomp into the support section and demand they en masse remove every single piece of fiction you personally disagree with. They're going to tell you no and then they're going to laugh at you for as long as hat memory lives.

[unpopularfanopinion]

Lines of thought that seem Normal but are actually rooted in extreme puritanism:

-Seeing the nude human body is inherently traumatic -Sex scenes in art are pointless -Wearing kink-related clothing in public is the similar to performing a sex scene in front of unwilling participants -Depicting female characters expressing sexuality is always degrading -People's sexual fantasies are always an endorsement of the behavior they want to see in real life -Sex work is more traumatic and coercive than other types of work The goal is to treat sex as just another thing people do. That is a much healthier attitude than hiding it! It's not uniquely traumatic, it's not weird to talk about it or include it in society.

[unpopularfanopinion]

Can't watch the tiktok video because I'm not on tiktok. Any chance you can post the video directly?

Sorry I thought the link would work

[unpopularfanopinion]

Think before you freak out or dogpile on “problematic” fiction

[unpopularfanopinion]

So you cited a foreign's countries law which you knew had no bearing on Ao3's practices as an appeal to authority because you like that law better. You know this sounds like you have less interest in preventing CSA and the spread of CSAM and are more interested in projecting your personal preferences of what is acceptable content onto thousands of people and forcing them to conform to your taste. Nevermind that one of the founding principles of Ao3 was to using legality as their line in the sand on what they would do over personal preferences and personal feelings towards that content.

And you should probably actually read the articles I linked to in regards to Yvan Godbout. Because they actually did change the laws in response to his case because they determined that Canada’s CP laws were in fact too expansive and detrimental to individual rights to freedom of expression. Because as one of his defense attorney's pointed out, prior to the conclusion of this trial CSA victims writing about and describing their own abuse could be charged with producing child porn.

And now let's talk about your complete and utter lack of empathy to was Mr Godbout went through. He was charged with creating child porn, forced to carry that stigma where people's first thought when they looked him up and saw that, that he physically and sexually assaulted and abused children. Because when you heard someone created child porn your first thought isn't(or shouldn't be) what sort of story did they write, it's going to be "OMG this man is a monster who abused children" And let's not forget there was no guarantee that he would be found innocent, so he had to deal with that fear and uncertainty for over a year that he would be jailed and forever labeled a danger to children. All because Canada choose to treat fiction the same way as documented abuse of real live breathing children. And you think it's fine that he had to go through that because it happened to work out in the end? Wow! Completely and utterly heartless and selfish.

I literally showed you Republicans falsely labeling fictional content as child porn because it features LGBTQ content and you still don’t think there’s a connection or slippery slope between the two? Sorry I’m assuming you must be a fetus because not once has attacks on “porn” or even “child porn” not lead to a crack down on LGBTQ content. It’s a pattern and a problem. You have the action backwards. They go after porn first, under the claim of protecting children, and THEN they target LGBTQ content.

And yeah you're really not doing anything to break the impression that your position on how Ao3 runs things is more your preferences and your experience than actually helping anyone else. You're seriously throwing a temper tantrum over the existence of CNTW. Because heaven forbid your have to hit the exclude option on the filters for it? Nevermind that published books don't have any sort of standardized content warning system(and never have) making the vast majority of your local bookstore, or library an author chooses not to warn. And there is still an active debate about whether or not books should have content warnings.

Oh and the No Archive Warnings Apply is far more popular than the Author Chooses Not to Warn with 7.6 million works. meaning there are that many works which do not contain any Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage Sex, or Graphic Depictions of Violence(which are the 4 mandatory content warnings) literally any and everything else goes into the additional tags. I'm getting the impression who don't actually understand how tags are supposed to work on Ao3, and can't be bother to learn.

And yes I have seen grown adults claiming that Ao3 should not exist because of the content that is allowed there. I've been arguing with them for years. It's not just 12 year olds who shouldn't be on the internet without supervision(let alone AO3). And I find it funny that you claim I and others should just block and ignore those people, while you yourself claim you shouldn't have to exclude CNTW in your searches. That authors shouldn't have the freedom to decide for themselves how they will mark their fics that they wrote for themselves. But as you've demonstrated that all of your criticism of Ao3 this is about your personal preferences and feelings, your personal experience and the selfish entitlement that AO3 should change to cater to you and what you want I shouldn't been that surprised. You're just another unemphatic asshole who can't see past their own experience and thinks they are the only person who matters.

mfers will say "im against book banning in schools and libraries!" and then turn around and say ao3 needs to be censored

[unpopularfanopinion]

Periodic reminder that you are not immune to reactionary radicalization through fandom.

We all know the “jokes” about how old bronies either came out as queer or became fascists - except they’re not really jokes, and a lot of the queer ones admit to having been in the pipeline before they came out (some in a way that implies they never totally got out of said pipeline and don’t understand the gravity of it),

GamerGate was an entire right-wing reactionary movement that was - and this is not hyperbole - partially responsible for turning fascism into a “legitimate” position by the American Overton window, composed entirely of people who feared losing their fan spaces,

We’ve had terfs right here on tumblr dot com BRAGGING about how useful fandom is as a recruiting space,

TJLC was a big pipeline for acephobia on this hellsite in particular, when people argued that headcanoning Sherlock as ace was inherently homophobic because it was denying a TOTALLY GONNA BE CANON (while the creators were promising that it wasn’t going to be canon) gay pairing, and puritanical, and just HAVING that headcanon was saying that people COULDN’T ship Johnlock, all in the interest of a “fake” sexuality and “pretending to be oppressed” and oh whoops there you went,

We see people who all but center their fandom activity and identities around figuring out which people in predominantly queer fandom spaces are SECRETLY PEDOPHILES AND GROOMERS, acting consciously or otherwise under the assumption that predominantly queer fandom spaces are just massively infested with them in a way that other spaces are not for SOME reason, who twist the definition of “pedophilia” in these spaces until it covers shipping a 17-year old fictional character with an 18-year old fictional character, or a 30-year old with a 45-year old, or including an autistic character in a ship, and drawing two 17-year old characters kissing constitutes “child porn”, and who unironically say we should bring back the Hays Code and Censorship Is Good Actually And Our Problem Is We Don’t Do It Enough and this often becomes a pipeline to “sex ed is child abuse; people shouldn’t even know what sex is until they turn 18; you need my consent to wear certain outfits in public if I see them as sexually charged, and Pride SHOULD be an assimilationist sideshow for our corporate overlords family-friendly party with no sadness or anger or ESPECIALLY acknowledgement of sex allowed”,

We’ve seen otherwise progressive people defend literal hate symbols in fanart when pushback against the above brand of reactionaries gets corrupted into zero-nuance “it’s us vs. them so anything they don’t like is Good”,

Even outside of those examples some of the most vicious, unapologetic, blatant queerphobic abuse I’ve seen in recent years hasn’t come from right-wingers but from LGBT+ people, dressing their deep, violent, seething hatred for queer people who aren’t exactly like them in a thin veneer of progressive language, who have become so convinced that they’re the main character of the fucking universe that they think writing or enjoying a queer story that doesn’t resonate with them is more queerphobic than sending a queer person who writes or enjoys such a story countless rape and death threats and denying their identity,

We’ve seen these examples again and again and again, and we keep seeing it again and again and again, so I am once again on my knees BEGGING people to recognize that this is not Something That Happens To Other, BAD People, or Something That Happens To People In BAD Fandoms, or Something That Happens To People On The OTHER Side Of Perennial Drama; this is something that CAN happen to you.

These things are the result of the fact that fandom is, by nature, a place of heightened emotion and if you don’t know what to look out for that is very exploitable; you need to know the methods people use to do this, simply Being In The Right Fandoms or Liking The Right Ships is not enough.

So, if you see someone trying to convince you that you have the ONLY valid approach to any specific character, or ship, or show, or whatever, that your ship is activism and your fanfics are praxis, and liking something else or liking the same thing differently is Only For Bad People, that is the single biggest red flag that YOU NEED TO RUN, THEY’RE TRYING TO SELL YOU SOMETHING THAT YOU DO NOT WANT

[unpopularfanopinion]

Periodic rent-lowering-gunshots:

Fiction is not reality.

You can enjoy things in fiction that would be awful in the real world. Like playing a murderhobo in a game! In the real world, being or supporting a murderer-thief would be pretty damn awful, while in the game it's just good fun. Same with anything else you choose to do with the pixels on the screen, like kinks that don't affect anyone real, so they're okay in fiction, but would be pretty damn bad in real life.

No one else is responsible for your online experience. They are required not to harass you, but they are not and never will be obligated to not post about ships, kinks, or tropes you dislike just to avoid you seeing them. It's up to you to blacklist words or phrases, block tags, or even block users as needed to avoid seeing content that upsets you.

No one can force you to read anything against your consent. Any content you don't like seeing can be instantly avoided by closing out of the offending post/fic.

You are not owed an online experience free of discomfort.

Nothing that happens in your imagination can ever make you a bad person. Words you write or read about fictional characters will never make you a bad person.

The claim that media consumption influences real-life behavior is intellectually dishonest and serves only to excuse the behavior of real offenders.

Fiction is a safe way to explore horrifying or confusing concepts. Therapists agree that fiction, even (or especially) about taboo topics is a good coping mechanism, especially, but not exclusively, for trauma survivors. Fiction is to adults what play therapy is to children. This doesn't stop being true if the work in question is of a sexual nature.

Sex isn't an inherently worse or better motivation than anything else. A work written to create feelings of arousal isn't dirty, shameful, or in any way less pure than works written to entertain, provoke moral questions, or for other reasons. And worth noting is that multiple purposes can exist in the same story, especially fanfiction.

You aren't entitled to an explanation for why someone reads, writes, or otherwise enjoys certain works, kinks, tropes, ships, etc.

[unpopularfanopinion]

I see I once again have to provide the periodic reminder that AO3 is in the USA and thus uses the US definition of CSAM(colloquially child porn) which is far more limited than the laws used in Canada or other nations. In the US child porn is limited to visual(photos, videos) of real live children being sexually abused and exploited. Artificial images may fall into this category if they are realistic enough to be mistaken for images of real children being sexually abused and abused. Written word, whether in the realm of fiction or survivors recounting their lived experiences do not fall under this definition and at most might be considered obscenity if they fail certain tests. It really doesn't matter how other countries define it.

This is a good thing as it means the US is far less likely to deal with bullshit like when Canada decided to try and prosecute the author Yvan Godbout over a passage in his gothic horror retelling of Hansel and Gretel describing a father sexually assaulting his daughter. The passage was warned for and explicitly intended to be read as horrific not erotic. But someone apparently complained and Canada charged him with the creation of child porn over a single paragraph in a novel.

He was fortunately acquitted of the charges but the fact that Canada even tried to prosecute him is not a good thing and kinda challenges your claim about "Child pornography is not minors having sex, but minors having sex/being raped in such a way that this is portrayed as fun, titillating, good or pleasurable to the audience." It's more whatever makes someone uncomfortable enough to complain about. You can read a couple articles about the case in the following links

As to your second claim about the slippery slope not existing, I'm trying to decide if you are being ignorant or just willfully obtuse? I'm sorry but a favorite tactic and outright strategy of the republican party to manufacture consent for banning LGBTQ content is by deliberately mislabeling such content as child porn or pedophilia. They aren't even subtle about it.

This Republican lawmaker wanted to expand the legal definition of child porn from the current standard(documented visual evidence of sexual abuse of real live children) to include fiction and obvious drawings. specifically to make it easier to ban LGBTQ content

And yes Republicans do want to ban both porn and LGBTQ content but it would be far harder for them to do if we didn't have a bunch of sex negative, sex scared people clamoring to treat fictional depictions of abuse the same as real life abuse.

As for your bizarre non sequiter into the existence of the Author Chooses Not to Warn option. That is quite literally explained in AO3 TOS FaQ https://archiveofourown.org/tos_faq#warnings_list

""Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings" means that the creator has opted out of using the Archive Warnings system. A work with this warning may or may not contain content covered by any of the specific Archive Warnings. Users who access a work labeled "Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings" proceed entirely at their own risk, regardless of any other tags on the work."

It's not ignoring the tagging system as authors can still include additional tags and counts as a warning in and of itself regardless of any other tags the author chooses. You can filter it out the same way you do any other tag. It's not removing Dead Dove Do Not Eat(which isn't a mandatory tag but entirely optional) because Dead Dove Do Not Eat might not even apply in this case.

So far I haven't seen any demands for "moderation" all I've ever seen are demands to censorship based on people whining "This makes me feel disgust and so it's shouldn't be allowed on the site. Why should I have to put in any effort to avoid stuff I don't want to see!!" Basically people being too emotionally immature to mind their own business, and curate their own experience.

mfers will say "im against book banning in schools and libraries!" and then turn around and say ao3 needs to be censored

[unpopularfanopinion]

🇺🇸if you are planning on voting in person, and you sometimes use a mobility aid, BRING IT WITH YOU. the lines are historically long. if you do not have a mobility aid, consider bringing something like a folding stool.🇺🇸

[unpopularfanopinion]

Sometimes being the mum who exists in fandom spaces leads to awkward, even concerning, conversations. Such as the one which happened this morning. The mum of my daughter's best mate asked me if one of their mutual friends had sent her a specific message. This message was a link to a fic on ao3, if this had been a G rated fic this conversation would not have happened. It was not G rated. It was an E rated fic. Our kids aren't even 12 yet. As it happens, both of our kids have their internet access heavily locked down and monitored. They have phones because of how their school manages homework. The mutual friend, however, is not so monitored. Or she wasn't, given what her mum found she's about to be. This kid had found a fandom, joined it, and found it chock full of antis. The fic had been sent to her by one of them as an example of the sort of terrible people out there who need to be harassed and attacked because they wrote a smutty story.

Someone thought it was appropriate to send written porn to an 11 year old to encourage her to attack the author.

This resulted in a very awkward conversation where I had to explain to multiple horrified parents the anti culture that is becoming so prevalent. The fact that there are adults who use that purity message to groom kids. The way they escalate and how it bleeds into real life. One parent told me she'd wondered why her 14 year old was suddenly concerned about the two year age gap between her parents. The more I explained, the more absolutely ludicrous it sounded and the more baffled these poor mums looked. More than once I was told "but the characters aren't real, it's really weird but it isn't hurting anyone". Which is the point. The fictional situation isn't hurting anyone. The person who sent porn to an 11 year old is.

Was the person who sent it the author? Doubtful, that thing was tagged in the extreme. Was the person who sent it an adult? Almost certainly. The parent who's child received the original message has found more concerning stuff and gone to the police, but from the language the person doing the sending was in the US. We aren't. Did my daughter receive it? No, she isn't interested in that fandom and therefore wouldn't have bothered with it. Is this the fault of the author? No, they didn't send the link, they didn't ask to be harassed, they wrote a story and put it on ao3, the website created in response to rampant censorship and designed to allow for all kinds of fiction. Is this the fault of the parents? Partially, they should have been looking at their daughter's internet use and clocked what was happening sooner. Is this the fault of the child? No, she's 11, she didn't know better.

This has been a difficult day. Multiple parents have had their eyes opened to parts of fandom culture they had no idea existed. And the thing of it is, they aren't concerned about the why of anti rhetoric. They don't care about the adults writing about teens or rape or incest or torture or any of the rest, because they looked at the clearly tagged and rated fics and figured that it worked the same as a warning on any streaming service. They only cared because some utterly vile individual decided to expose their child to something this girl might not have looked at for years.

Proshippers did not cause what I have spent afternoon helping several sets of parents navigate. Antis did. Normally I'm fairly quiet about the whole debate because I just want to get on with my life and share my experiences. Today I got dragged into that mess in my every day life and the adults in the equation didn't react the way Antis like to think they would. They didn't condemn the author. They condemned the anti who shared the work with a preteen.

[unpopularfanopinion]

is shipping two minor/child/teen characters together weird?

yes

yes but only if you're making nsfw of it

no

no but only if the shipper is also a minor

depends

some other answer

[unpopularfanopinion]

Back during the worst of the VLD fandom and antis hating on Sheith Josh Keaton(Va for Shiro) told the fandom to chill and stop harassing Sheith shippers and learn what pedophilia actually was. The antis immediately turned on him, harassing him and threatening to report him to CPS as a danger to his children and have them taken away.

So not only would antis not listen to a creator saying “Don’t harass people” they would in fact turn on them.

How many antis do you think would still say "respect the creator's wishes" if the creator said "I don't want antis harassing me or my fans"?

None of them, I'm sure.