i didn't realise ao3 was started in response to lj deleting account relating to pedophilia and they explicitly support the posting of such works yikes

NOTE: the original title of the post used "p//edophi | ia" but since that messes up the coding on Fanlore when used in a title, "pedophilia" is substituted.

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Title:	i didn't realise ao3 was started in response to lj deleting account relating to pedophilia and they explicitly support the posting of such works yikes (see article about actual spelling of the post)
Creator:	joestrummin and commenters
Date(s):	roughly August 11, 2016
Medium:	Tumblr post
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External Links:	"joestrummin.tumblr". Archived from the original on 2016-11-10.
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i didn't realise ao3 was started in response to lj deleting account relating to p//edophi|ia and they explicitly support the posting of such works yikes is a 2016 post by joestrummin.

This post was deleted, and then reposted after it had gotten a long response. The original poster then wrote a much longer post with this excerpt: "The post was me starting to think about whether I want to post my own work on a website which also allows pedophiles to be present on it. That could lead to me being associated with them, or some way indirectly supporting such a community (by supporting the archive). Some moderator said, ‘If you want to kick certain kinds of content off of AO3, you do not belong on AO3 in the first place,’ so this was me thinking maybe I do not belong on AO3. And maybe I think other people should consider this also. But really I lack the personal investment or moral integrity to stop posting there, because I like getting weekly kudos emails."

Overview of Responses

As of April 2018, the original post had accrued 28,750 notes: 15,117 likes and 13,592 reblogs. (With the rest being replies, presumably.)

More on this Topic

• AO3 Content Discussion (2016)
• List of Content Banned by Archives

Some Comments to the Post

[tomatoe-greens responded to jostrummin]:

it wasn’t, like, we luv pedophilia, it was way more complicated than that!

although it’s true AO3 does allow all fannish content provided it’s properly warned for, there’s a long history there - of spaces being used by fans until the host decided whatever we were doing was too weird and distasteful and either kicking us off, banning certain content, or changing the nature of the site until it was no longer viable as a host.

you’re referring to the LJ Strikethrough of 2007, which, being an ancient crone, I lived through, and since I was hanging out in the last vestiges of SGA and in bandom, I saw some of the fallout. this was before LJ was sold to the Russians (which is a whole ‘nother story), when it was still owned by Six Apart; in an effort to clean up LJ’s act, Six Apart decided to delete all accounts using tags like underage, incest, rape, etc.

this was supposed to get rid of actual child porn on the site, and I hope it did, but it also targeted fan communities. this was a problem for a couple reasons; for one thing, not every story tagged with these words is in favor of them; for another, these things happen to real people and these personal posts were also potentially in danger of being attacked; for the last one, look, I ain’t into this kind of fic but people write about what people write about, and if it’s fictional and not explicitly banned in the TOS (correct me if I’m wrong; I don’t think written content about this stuff was banned?) then it’s not cool for a content host to just start deleting communities without warning.

but that’s what happened! these deletions were also primarily targeting slash communities, which smacked of some serious homophobia since things were deleted that had nothing to do with any of this kind of content.

eventually someone found out it was this super conservative religious group who’d sent a list of journal names to Six Apart, and who if I remember correctly targeted slash fic on purpose, even after it became clear that the fic was, well, totally fictional. after a while, Six Apart admitted they’d made a mistake and started to reinstate journals, but all of fandom was pretty shaken up.

THEN Boldthrough happened, which was essentially the same debacle several months later, at which point fandom began its long slow migration from LJ to GJ, IJ, and eventually AO3, Twitter, and tumblr.

AO3 was opened in 2008 in response to several incidents, of which Strikethrough was a really intense one. remember, also, that back in 2008 the stigma surrounding fandom was significantly greater and more shameful than it is today, so finding hosts willing to archive fic was difficult unless someone had the dough to pay for server space - often not an option. this was also back when fanfic.net’s HTML restrictions were so great that users couldn’t use any special characters or bold or italicize anything, and it didn’t allow R-rated content, so it was clearly not ideal. in addition, although cease & desist letters were much less common than they were in the early 2000s and before, DMCA takedowns were still a phantom on the horizon.

LONG STORY SHORT, even though pedophilia is reprehensible and I personally cannot stomach fanfic that involves that kind of content, AO3 was founded specially as a safe space for fandom communities that could not find homes elsewhere. it requires warnings precisely for that reason, and if you find a story that is not properly warned, you can alert the admins and get the story labeled appropriately.

IDK, maybe it’s just because I am, again, ancient, but I was in and around fandom before homosexuality was legal in all 50 states. so were most of the people who started AO3. for most of my formative life, being gay was associated with pedophilia, and so was writing about gay characters. just - it’s a lot more complicated than you might expect, and there’s a reason many older fans who have been involved in several generations of fandom were so grateful to have AO3 as an option.

[beatriceotter]:

I don’t read, for example, Hydra Trash Party fics. They squick me, and I generally feel they are pretty gross. But writing noncon body-horror is not the same as saying “yeah, I totally want to go out and rape and torture people for years while brainwashing them!” or even “yeah, I wouldn’t do it myself, but it would be totally okay if someone did!” Nobody is hurt by it, and nobody is going to be hurt by it. So should I have the right to go, that is gross, you don’t get to write or read that? No.

In the same way, writing about underage teens getting it on – sometimes with each other, sometimes with adults, sometimes consensually, sometimes not – is not the same as child pornography, nor does reading a fic about Hermione and Snape getting it on while she was his student mean someone thinks that would be a good and/or healthy thing in real life.

Fiction affects reality, but fiction is not reality. And writing about something does not mean you want to do it in real life, or believe that anyone should.

Let’s take a closer look at that “Ao3 supports pedophilia!” shall we?

1) The only fics I have ever come across that had actual pedophilia (i.e. someone having sex with a child), it was clearly and explicitly abuse. It was not meant to titillate or arouse. It was meant to horrify. It was seldom explicit.

2) There’s a lot more incest, but it is usually portrayed either as explicitly mutually consensual (i.e. Sam/Dean) or as abusive.

3) I’ve been in fandom for a decade and a half. When people start getting upset at “omg pedophilia, think of the children!” the fics they are usually objecting to aren’t actually pedophilia. Usually, it is teenagers having sex, especially queer sex. And people don’t like that, and use pedophilia as an excuse to shame people for writing/reading sex they don’t like.

Let’s look closer at Strikethrough, shall we? I hope that, if there were any communities of actual pedophiles on LJ, they got taken down, too. But here are some of the communities that got taken down that were not in any way supporting pedophilia and/or rape and/or incest that got taken down:

1) at least one support community for survivors of sexual abuse.

2) a literary book discussion group that was reading Lolita.

3) lots of slash fanfic communities, for things like Draco/Malfoy fic set in their fourth year (when both boys would have been 15).

Basically, this very conservative “family values” group hated porn, and they hated queer stuff even more, and used “but think of the children, it’s pedophilia!” to pressure LJ to get rid of huge swathes of things they didn’t like. And one time taking down the worst of it wasn’t good enough for them. No, this was step one on a moral crusade. If you acceded to their demands, all that did was whet their appetite, and soon they would be back with a new list of demands. This is why the 2007 strikethrough was not an isolated event, but rather one of a series of events, nor was LJ the only website thus targeted. It starts with anything that can get labelled “pedophilia” or “incest” because that’s low-hanging fruit. But they use that to go after anything relating to queer teen sexuality. Then anything with teen sexuality. Then once the community is already divided and diminished, they go after anything with non-con. Then whatever is next on their list. It doesn’t stop until they’ve won the point and nothing but suitably “family-friendly” fics that match their purity test are allowed.

Which is why AO3 has no morality content in their terms of service. You can’t break copyright beyond fair use (and AO3 has an expansive view of “fair use” and a team of lawyers on call). You can’t use AO3 for commercial advertising. And you can’t post ACTUAL child pornography, i.e. the things that are legally prohibited, i.e. actual photographs or videos of actual children (not teens) in sexually explicit positions–you know, the stuff that actually hurts kids. Other than that? It’s fair game. You can post anything you want, and the archive will not judge. There is no handle for the Moral Majority Family-Friendly Thought Police to latch onto, no cracks they can exploit to divide and conquer.

We’ve been down that road. It doesn’t lead anywhere good.

[kittenn1011 responds to beatrice-otter]:

Just posting to address: “The only fics with actual paedophilia…” because I /have/ run into paedophilia meant to titillate in fandom before: don’t pretend it doesn’t exist. Maybe you’re not in any fandoms trashy enough, but I am certain there are fandoms where it’s much more common. In the Conan fandom in particular, there’s a lot of borderline paedophilia which I’ve witnessed cross into actual paedophilia (borderline meaning that it’s def kiddy pron because it’s children’s bodies involved, but there are certain children who have minds of adults who can consent so it’s not noncon kiddy pron) which I’ve witnessed cross the line into the adult instigating character not being aware that the kid is actually an older teenager, so while the teen-turned-kid can actually consent, the instigating character was definitely being a paedophile… and the writer just wouldn’t hear it. Insisted it wasn’t kiddy porn because of it even though it was meant to be titillating with a kid’s body involved and the adult character doesn’t even know they’re not raping the kid involved, and who cares that the kid can consent– I’d be much less upset at implied sex with the kid, but at the end of the day, the problem isn’t the fictional character’s ability to consent, it’s the fact you’re writing a sex scene with a child’s body involved that’s meant to titillate the audience. Head to any fandom with “adult mind child body” circumstances (for whatever justification) and you’ll find the same type of crap.

Also, the problem with adult/teen relationships isn’t so much that it’s pedophilia as it can harmfully normalise that type of relationship for the largely teen readership. Whether that’s technically paedophilia or not, it’s still problematic…

[wrangletangle]:

Reblogging this for the excellent explanation of what exactly the moral crusaders did last time. They had an explicit agenda of anti-queerness, and they specifically targeted slash and femslash communities in particular, such that many ship communities became (or started as) deliberately members-only. You had to apply, and your personal blog had to look like a real person and a fan. You were vetted, a la 1990s private servers.

During this period, Dreamwidth was also targeted by attacking its payment processor. They had to get a new one. These “Warriors” (literally called themselves that!) were totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom they didn’t like.

If you’re carrying out harassment of people right now because they’re posting works with sexual elements you don’t agree with? (And it’s always sex, never non-sexual violence, how strange….) If you’re doing that, you’re also totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom you don’t like. Because your tactics are fandom-destroying, and so is your agenda.

[nwcostumer]:

reblogging because this is important: strikethru and boldthru and all the various “purges” that fandom went thru about 10 years ago: this had to do with OUTSIDERS deciding that fandom in general and fanfiction in specific were evil and needed to be destroyed; unless we were writing and shipping good vanilla M/F married people. These were outsiders, going after fictional writing about fictional characters.

AO3 and OTW are HUGE, because now we have an organization, with very smart women and a lot of lawyers, that have our back. Fannish history is important, people! It has not always been this way.

This is so, so important: there’s that other post about AO3 and fanfiction floating around, about our history. People decry violent video games but no one is trying to force companies out of business. But people can and do attack fanfiction: an activity primarily written by women for women, about fictional characters. And often about sex. We have to constantly defend ourselves, protect ourselves, support each other against charges like “paeodophilia”.

[araceil]:

Throwing this in because I was also present: This was during the American Government’s attempts to pass censorship laws on the internet. As MOST of those domains had their serves in America, they were beholden to those censorship laws. A great deal of fanfiction.net was removed because they happened to lose a goddamn courtcase. I’ve been on the site since 2002. They may not have ‘officially’ allowed NC-17 rated content (what it used to be listed as in the filters), it never did a damn thing to remove it. Ever. They had it listed as a rating option during ‘New Story’ uploading after all. It was in the search filters. After they lost the courtcase however, they legally had to start doing things about the mature content reports they got. The admins and mods were not actively looking for fic to remove, they were just responding to reports they had already received.

(via hraap)

SEP. 9 2016VIA JOESTRUMMEN#I STILL HATE AO3 THOUGH #SORRY #WHEN FFNET HAD TO START THEIR PURGE #PEOPLE WERE LEAVING IN DROVES #PEOPLE WHO LIKED TO WRITE UNDERAGE PAIRINGS WITH OLDER PEOPLE #STUDENT/TEACHER PAIRINGS ARE NOT OKAY #NOT TO ME ANYWAY #WRITE WHAT YOU WANT TO WRITE #BUT I'M NOT GOING TO READ IT #OR JOIN A WEBSITE THAT I CONSIDER TO BE FILLED WITH A LARGE NUMBER OF PEOPLE WHO LEFT FFNET BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT THEY WANT TO WRITE #I HAVE FOUND A SMALL HANDFUL OF FICS IN AO3 THAT I LIKE#GIVEN THE SIZE OF IT #THAT ISN'T A RINGING ENDORSEMENT.

[wrotemyown]:

I know tumblr is all about black and white “you’re either all right or all wrong” thinking, but it’s important to understand what actually happened before going “ew ao3 was made to give pedophiles a safe place to post” because that is 110% not what happened.

[shidgephobe]:

This is why so, so many of the comparatively older fannish folks on tumblr like me are so vehemently against stuff like the anti movement and “all ships are valid UNLESS”. It smacks of censorship and content policing - and we’ve been there. We got our shit deleted and our accounts banned because someone else thought what we were reading or writing or talking about needed to just… not exist. No warning. Literally overnight. We just woke up and stuff was gone.

And yeah, the group was legit called Warriors for Innocence (or maybe of). I knew several people that were members of survivor/support groups that lost their groups - and their main support network - when Strikethrough happened (ten years ago holy shit).

[sulphur-crested-cocktease]:

You antis need to listen when us older fans tell you that the censorship you’re advocating for, when put into practice, is NOT a positive thing; it’s an extremely scary thing!

I can guarantee that you would be very, very upset if another event like LJ Strikethrough were to happen today because *you* are just as vulnerable as the rest of us! If you support the rights of marginalized groups of people, if you’re a slash or fem slash shipper, if you support gender identities that aren’t defined by biological sex, if you care about representation, if you support women, if you have any kind of kink, if you care about fandom in any capacity beyond its eradication, YOU DO NOT ACTUALLY WANT THE SORT OF CENSORSHIP YOU’RE ADVOCATING!! Source: joestrummen censorshipyou kids are fucking ignorant and it's going to come back to bite you in the ass one daysmarten up old and salty as the sea lj strikethrough fandom wankplease please please stop stop dishorse i want to get offlet people enjoy things content warnings exist for a reason anti antianti anti shipping antianti antianti shipping

[preoccupiedpepper]:

I lived through Strikethrough and at the time kept a journal where I talked in depth about my trauma. I had posts tagged with the sort of tags that were getting people’s blogs deleted. That whole blog was me just pouring my heart out and telling my story.

And then suddenly talking about my trauma was something that could get me banned.

I wasn’t even writing fanfiction, but Strikethrough and the moral crusade caused me to delete the blog that I used to cope with my trauma.

So antis can take their moral crusade and shove it.

[stabbyflower]: I’d also like to point out that during the Purge, as we called the removal of NC-17 fic from ffn, they would remove anything reported to them as pornography, without checking content. This, again, was used by people who felt themselves Morally Pure to systematically have deleted anything with queer content. This was not an accident, it was the goal. And its no surprise that some of us “older” fen aren’t interested in going through it all over again.

Source: joestrummen fandom wank discoursestop trying to destroy everything that makes you uncomfortable

[naamahdarling reblogged seananmcguire]:

People were terrified during Strikethrough. I was there. Communities were being shut down, individual users were being shut down. People were losing access to their own fics, their feedback, their comments – a LOT went on in comments on LJ. Think more coherent reblogs, much more personal, very widespread. Comments were also very important, and in terms of networking/communicating, were absolutely critical.

LJ was, for many people, central.

It was a fundamental part of the infrastructure of fandom at the time.

Having it attacked, having parts of your fandom’s territory just deleted like that, was very very scary. People didn’t know who was next. Every day, the list of stricken journals grew. And not all of them came back, not all of them recovered their content. Some people even voluntarily deleted their content as a form of protest. It was a bad time.

You do not have to interact with fic that grosses you out or makes you uncomfortable. Tagging is a thing. And even outside of tags, you are responsible for curating your own fandom experience. It is not right to expect it to be curated for you. And it is not right to lash out when someone refuses to do so and expects you to walk away from things that do not concern you.

I was gonna say “things that don’t harm anyone” but I realize you can argue that. If you get triggered, that’s upsetting. That could be considered harm. And I have sympathy for that. I do.

I have run across fic that triggered me. I have pretty specific triggers, and people don’t always think to warn for them because they aren’t that big a deal for a lot of people. Or it’s sort of bundled into kink and is presumed, that if you’re okay with certain kinds of kink, you’re okay with this. So I’ve been blindsided by it before. And it sucks for a couple of days while I get over it.

That was not the fault of the authors! You could argue that tagging should have been used, and maybe it should, but ultimately that’s not an ironclad obligation. It’s a tool people provide out of courtesy.

That was not the fault of the site! The site is there to give authors a way to make fiction available, not to judge each work and interrogate its validity and make sure everything is tagged so that nobody has to see anything bad, ever.

That was not even my fault! It was my responsibility to try to curate my experience, and I tried, but it wasn’t my fault because I didn’t deliberately set out to trigger myself. When I get triggered, unless it is by a deliberate act, it is actually the fault of the people who hurt me in the first place! And I refuse to let them off the hook and blame perfectly innocent people who just wanna write their fanfiction! I may hate that fanfiction, but that is irrelevant to the question of whether or not people should be allowed to post whatever they want.

Also, some people cope by writing about fucked-up shit. My best friend in the whole wide world has shared her fic with me, and HOO BOY it is messed up. She wrote it during a time in her life when she was in and just coming out of a horrifically abusive relationship. I mean, it was exactly the kind of relationship all of us here on Tumblr love to hate. She was married to a shitty, abusive man who preyed on someone younger than he was and used his influence over her to treat her in a way that would be right at home in that Lundy Bancroft book Why Does He Do That? He was a real rapist, a verified grade-A bad fuckin’ guy. (She was lucky to escape. I have immense respect for her.) And she wrote some fucked up fic to deal with it, and she shared it, and people were invested in it. And because this was early 2000′s, she had to host it on a foreign server and cover her tracks, because at that time no-place was safe to post it.

“Yeah, but if she’s writing it for therapy, she doesn’t have to post it where other people might have to see it!” I hear you say.

But like … what the hell??? “Shut up, don’t talk about it, it’s bad to talk about these things, because these things are bad!” is something used against folks with trauma.

“This isn’t good for me, I can’t talk about this, I can’t be your audience for this,” that’s fine, those are boundaries that people with trauma use to defend themselves. You should learn to say those things! It will help you!

But expecting other people to never create and share art about trauma is just so thunderously oppressive I lack the ability to fully articulate it.

And nobody should have to disclose their history of trauma to prove their motives are pure or virtuous enough for their speech to be protected. I’ve only really been able to openly say “I was assaulted, it was traumatic, I am a little fucked up from it” for the past couple of years, tops. I couldn’t talk about it before that. Couldn’t! And it was over 20 years ago! I also believe, very firmly, that you don’t need a history of abuse to find writing really messed-up shit satisfying, or to find reading it cathartic. I believe 100% in the freedom of creative expression, and the freedom to read whatever fucked up shit you want to read.

All y’all fandom youngsters can spit nails all you want over gross rape fic, incest fic, whatever.

Fine, I don’t like it either!

But that fucked up shit? That fucked up shit helped carve out the spaces we have today. You don’t have to like it, but campaigning to get it deleted, harassing content creators, calling people rapists and pedophiles who have never done and would never ever do such a thing, that is not the way to improve the world, it doesn’t keep actual kids or teens or assault/rape victims safe. It wouldn’t have made me feel safe when I was 16 and did’t want what was going on. It doesn’t make me feel safe now. I can say with the perspective of someone 24 years away from that event, it doesn’t make the world safer for people like I was. It actually makes it worse.

Learn to steer clear of the messed-up stuff you don’t like. It’s a skill, you get better with practice. Have someone else vet stuff for you if you need help doing it now.

Everything that is sketchy and gross is not criminal, and writing about a thing is not morally the same as doing it. Please stop acting like writing about an adult and a teenager having really questionable, gross sex is as bad as the actual registered sex offender they caught hanging around an actual elementary school two neighborhoods over from mine, just trying to talk to the kids. The former is, at most, in poor taste, and potentially triggering to abuse victims. The second makes me want to vomit because even though he was just talking, that guy was gearing up to try something and create another abuse victim. A g a i n. ...

[valtharr reblogged thederangedsolicitor]:

Reading this thread reminded me of something, that doesn’t have to do with fanworks, but is still relevant. And also even worse.

A couple of years ago, here in Germany, then-minister of family affairs Ursula von der Leyen proposed an idea that - in her mind - would help combat child pornography on the Internet. That idea? Literal stop signs. Like, literally, her idea was that, if you tried to access child pornography sites, you’d be redirected to a page showing a big stop sign and telling you the site is blocked. That’s it.

“Zensursula“, as she was quickly called (”Zensur” being the German word for censorship) obviously caught a lot of flak for this. People quickly pointed out that doing this didn’t actually do anything to help CSA victims or prevent child pornography from being made, and computer experts pointed out that, if you knew enough about computers, you could easily circumvent a system like that. It was compared to someone seeing a child getting violated on the street and instead of helping the child, that person builds a wall around the scene, so that nobody can see it. Except the ones who know how to use a ladder and climb over the wall.

Oh, and the kicker? The list of blocked websites would only be accessible to members of the government. In case you don’t get it yet: That could potentially mean that they could block any sites they didn’t like, say “it’s child pornography” and nobody could really prove them wrong.

That’s the big thing with child pornography and CSA: Even some of the most sick and twisted people still find it to be the most deplorable and inexcusable crime, and rightly so. But that also has the side effect of people who argue against things being done to supposedly stop pedophiles being immediately looked down upon and shunned because, hey, if they’re against this thing that must mean they’re pro-pedophilia, right? Except it’s not always that black and white. Preventing people from watching child porn doesn’t help the victims, and blocking stories about fictional characters that may or may not fall under the banner of child pornography even less so.

#pedophilia tw #ask to tag

[constancetruggle reblogged ridingcthulhudick]:

tl;dr past the first reply to the OP.

I was also around for the purges of fanfic. The thing about AO3 that is so much better than places like FFN and the like are the tags. Because you can actually blacklist a tag in your fic searches. Don’t want pedophilic fic to show up? -pedophilia and -chan and -underage and even -“extremely underage” in your search. You can do these things.

Pedophilia isn’t very big in some fandoms, and it’s explosive in others. Harry Potter, for instance, has a large repertoire of those fics, whereas Marvel really doesn’t. But you, too, can enjoy the kind of fics you like and avoid the ones you don’t simply by following this outline:

Use the exception in your search.

That’s it. It’s that easy. So instead of blowing your top over every perceived wrong done to you and instead of advocating to censor a small part of a larger community, ask. Just ask around if there are ways you can avoid that which you don’t like. I guarantee you, in fandom, anything is possible.

#this is long af#but interesting#i also think it's a good thing to make a distinction between fiction and reality#tumblr really should get over the 100% for or 100% against policy because things are rarely that black and white#fandometrics#fandom ethics#censorship is not the answer#period.

[mellaithwen cacchieressa]:

Reblogging because “…you are responsible for curating your own fandom experience…” is something a lot of this website’s users have never understood and it is a very important point of fandom and fandom’s survival.

I’m forever disappointed of what became of livejournal, and how strikethrough et al ruined the place over time, because that community feeling is something this site cannot replicate *sigh*

Source: joestrummen long post is longao3 is important stop trying to tarnish it ffs fandom history livejournal

[karadin reblogged leveragehunters]:

Not to mention, there were fandom sites that began free, and afterwhile kept trying to monetize fandom.

[buckbuckbuck reblogged leveragehunters]:

sometimes ao3 is the only thing that keeps me sane.

(Source: joestrummen, via leveragehunters)

Tags: fandom ao3 this is important

[meaninglessprose creepingsoul]:

I was there, it was not good.

[hushinghorizon]:

I was there. I was “safe” cause I shipped het cis people… but let me tell you it doesn’t stop at The Gay. It starts with the gay but all the sudden mutant powers in XMen are “unnatural” and “not god given” (You think I’m joking just read some of the focus on the family reviews of the early X-Men movies).

They pick off the weak amongst us, the ones on gray moral ground, and then they come for the rest of us.

“First they came for Hydra Trash Party…”

[juuls reblogged chrissihr]:

And just imagine how they felt about polyamory, fics or real people like me. That’s just… Ugh. They thjnk slash is bad? Try (fem)slash with a third person thrown in.

They would FLIP. They did.

AO3 is a blessing, and yes its origins are tied with the pedophelia ban… but it is so much more than that. Read every word of the above.

I was in fandom when strikethrough happened. I was also part of the Hermione|Snape/Hernione ship that got pushed out of main fandom spheres, to places like Ashwinder, not just by censorship groups, but also by the other fans themselves.

It’s not just outside groups. This is important. The anti movements are toxic to our community. I defend your right to ship and let ship, you defend mine.

I will never sublimate who you are.

#fandom#ao3 origins#what really happened at LJ#ao3#fanfiction#censorship#important

[windalchemist001 gummyboots]:

Real Christians aren’t dicks, just be kind and let people have there fun and stop nothing them for things they love so long as it’s on,y fiction then it’s ok.

[robotslenderman reblogged aloysbow]:

Yaaaaaay, reblogging this post got me accused of endorsing child sex abuse from someone who clearly didn’t read it! \o/

1. smh #fandom #long post

[paksarra reblogged robotslenderman]:

As someone *who was around for Strikethrough*…. basically all of this.

[tricksterarchetype reblogged this from finallyahero]:

#pedophilia mention#rape mention#abuse mention#fun fact#i also lived through the strikethrough on livejournal#at the time i was using it as an outlet to talk about the abuse i was going through at home#it was a way i could process without anyone i knew finding out what was happening to me#and because my lj contained content related to child abuse#my lj was one of the ones that was deleted#and i was DEVASTATED#i had no more safe space to process and it completely disrupted what sense i could make of the world#it fucked me up so bad that it took me 8 fucking years before i could start journaling again#so yeah kiddies#learn from the past#long post

[fourletterwordsstartingwithl ohfreckle]:

I don’t necessarily want to add to the commentary (amazing, smarter people than I have already made their case(s) above), but can all you antis please look at the actual definitions of Pedophilia, because (using an example from above) two 15 year old Wizards having sex is NOT Pedophilia.

Pedophilia is defined as an ongoing sexual attraction to pre-pubertal children (generally defined as 11 or younger).

Hebephilia is the sexual preference for early adolescent children (those roughly ages 11 to 14). Some evidence suggests that hebephilia is a distinct and discernable erotic age preference.

Ephebophilia is the primary or exclusive adult sexual interest in mid-to-late adolescents, generally ages 15 to 19. The term was originally used in the late 19th to mid 20th century. It is one of a number of sexual preferences across age groups subsumed under the technical term chronophilia.

Also note that the above listed paraphilias are defined by the afflicted being an ADULT - ie an Adult being sexually attracted to a 14 year old is a Hebephile. A 14 year old boy being attracted to another 14 year old boy is NOT a Hebephile, they’re a 14 year old boy.

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[centaurianthropology]: Watching young (ostensibly liberal) bloggers and fans take up the deeply conservative rhetoric and moral crusading of the right wing and evangelical groups from the 90s has been both fascinating from an anthropological perspective, and fucking horrifying for someone who lived through this time period and the death of LJ.

Octavia Butler’s books asked the reader to imagine a world where the worst, most morally repugnant thing they ever imagined anyone doing suddenly became the key to that person & their community’s future survival and/or future happiness.

Her books forced the reader to question where beliefs and morals come from, and how beliefs and morals might change given extreme enough circumstances or fundamental changes to the way society is run.

And that’s why I think her books are important. That’s why I think books, in general, are important. And that’s why I’m against censorship of any kind.

I don’t believe there’s any subject too taboo to think about, or talk about, or write about for an opt-in audience of reasonable adults. I don’t believe writers are morally obligated to take a firm moral stance on these subjects when they write about them either. Octavia Butler sure didn’t.

The point of stories is not to tell readers how to think, but rather to inspire readers to think for themselves.