Drownout2020

Event
Event:	Drownout 2020, Layton Drownout
Participants:
Date(s):	2020
Type:	Fanfiction writing
Fandom:	Professor Layton
URL:
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

Drownout2020 was an movement in the Professor Layton fandom that involved writing a mass number of fanfictions in the AO3 tag to 'drown' out Layton/Luke fanfics.

Layton/Luke, also known as Layluke, is a controversial ship due to it's significant age difference, being that Luke is a child for most of the series (at around 10-13 years), while Layton is an adult (at 34-37), hence viewed as pedophilic.

The movement raised issues with AO3's content policy and the safety of minors in fandom, with many minors having left the fandom due to this. The movement was organised through a Discord that became the subject of criticism due to acephobic and transphobic comments, harassment towards AO3 authors and more.

History

A screenshot from the carrd for the event

In 2020, Drownout was arranged by a Discord server, known as the "Professor Layton Fans Against Paedos".

Fans across Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, AO3, Amino and WattPad joined the movement to write fanfiction.

A post was made advertising the event on the various platforms:

What is Layton drownout?

The Layton drownout movement is a movement of Layton fanfiction creators who try and write Layton fanfiction over on Twitter and AO3 in order to drown out the LaytonxLuke fanfictions.

Why?

The issue with the Layton community is that there is a very small sub community... the LayLuke community. They ship Layton and Luke, and when you go to AO3 to search for Layton fics, it's sometimes impossible to escape those fics. But we're not afraid to call them by what they actually are - pedophilia. Many Layton fans have silently left the community entirely simply because of the amount of pedophiles. But we won't let this stand.

How can I join?

Just write Layton fanfiction on AO3. Preferably stuff that's not... LayLuke. Or Luke x anyone, really, (unless we're talking adult Luke from the anime). We also have a Discord right here. You can join that if you want and talk to us.

Example of a trollfic posted to AO3 to 'drown' the other fics

There was an associated Twitter for the movement.

In response to the movement, some of the fic writers for Luke/Layton and Luke/Clive continued to write even more fics, turning into a battle.

Some of the participants of Drownout2020 wrote trollfics (such as "Storm Sente Stops A Pedophile") and other spam in an attempt to 'drown' out the ships. Some of these were removed by AO3 with some fans being restricted.

The movement lasted for 'almost half a year', before being called off for mental health reasons.

Fan Reaction

There was much discussion and reaction from the fandom.

General Comments

The movement was supported by a large number of fan, including groups such as Team Top Hat:

Team Top Hat officially endorses the #drownout2020 movement, to drown out the predatory and disgusting LayLuke fanfictions by writing their own. We urge any Layton fans who are interested in fanfiction to join the movement and help make the Layton community a safer place.

You’re right as well, it’s amazing that a bunch of virtual strangers have banded together to take down an ongoing problem in their community, it restores your faith in humanity a bit haha

And a shout-out to the #drownout2020 movement that's been going on on ao3 and other platforms! It makes me happy to see a positive, creative response to this unfortunately still very prevalent issue in the fandom

Criticism against AO3

There was criticism towards AO3 allowing problematic content and lack of reporting features:

Gross fics have been popping up like acne in the Layton tag on Ao3 and this wouldn't be a problem if AO3 didn't show everything by default. That means that any person looking for, say, an innocent story about the Professor taking Luke to get ice cream will have to scroll past a bunch of stories about... not that, to put it lightly. It's generally the same few authors perpetrating this filth, but as far as I know, Ao3 doesn't have a system for reporting an author.

Yes, you can just filter them out by tag or use a browser extension to hide them, but that doesn't change the fact that they're there and normalising CSA and pedophilia. To make things worse, most of them involve Luke, easily the most innocent and sexless character in the entire franchise. How can anybody who's mentally sound look at that boy and think about how fuckable he is?!

They can't, is my point.

As a result, a bunch of writers have come together and organised what we're calling a drownout. We're writing wholesome, non-sexual, non-pedophilic content with the aim of preventing that garbage from being people's first impression of the fandom, as well as helping minors feel more comfortable expressing themselves.

One of the biggest problems of AO3 was that it was founded after fanfiction.net decided it didn't want certain types of shit on its platform. Thus creating a safe haven for perferts.

OA3 has become popular with the non-fringe public due to its easier navigable platform when it comes to stuff like larger summaries, its use of warnings for certain content and the use of the tags which can help users to filter out stuff they don't like.

So I guess that the main problem overall is the shift to a platform that allows this kind of material by a larger public.

There was an effort by Layton fanfic writers in the Summer of 2020 called the Drownout during which these writers tried to drown this kind of content out, but it unfortunately failed due to some people making clear that this was the kind of message we wanted and due to internal conflict over moral perspectives outside of the thing we were trying to fight.

The antagonistic attitude expressed by some of the participants instead of just giving the signal that we didn't like what these nonces were doing led to them increasing the amount of pervy material. As the pervs also started to come together to write stuff.Honestly, I personally don't understand overall why people are so open and proud of their kinks online. No one cares what happens in your bedroom as long as it is consentual and between two adults.

While the Drownout2020 movement is currently more focussed on drowning out the awful content with other fanfictions, my issue is with the websites that allow this content. Writing sexually explicit content about children and minors is wrong. Just because the characters aren't real people, does not make it fine - in fact, Archive of Our Own even allows fictitious depictions of real people in a sexual nature. The site's Terms of Service (Section IV.i) states that "Unless it violates some other policy, we will not remove Content for offensiveness, no matter how awful, repugnant, or badly spelled we may personally find that Content to be." The sharing of sexually explicit images of children *is* prohibited on the site, though under the site's current ToS, writing pornographic content about children is perfectly acceptable. It even offers the option to filter out any "Underage" tagged works, proving that the site is fully aware of the content that is being shared on there, and embraces it as just another part of the website.

As emails from the Drownout2020 group have proved that the site is unwilling to remove works that exhibit this disgusting material, I encourage you to publicly express your frustration with this matter on any social media, or write to your MP. If you're interested in joining the Drownout2020 movement, please start to flood the Layton tags on Archive of Our Own with your own fanfiction, though do keep in mind that the site is quick to delete spam - funny, that. Additionally, I want to make it very clear that this behaviour will NOT be tolerated in my community and anyone who feels the need to share paedophilic content - fictitious or not - will be immediately reported and blocked. End of.

Thinking back of this post and the Drownout of Summer 2020, why don't we all just mass report these nonces?

Apparently that website removed some accounts after they were reported by the paedos for spamming (admittendly) very bad fanfictions as part of the drownout effort.

Criticism against Fandom Policing

Not all fans were supportive, some criticised the policing of fandom, issues of purity culture and the ongoing harassment towards AO3 authors:

Indulgent Fanfiction is neither a social authority, nor an inherent force of normalization, even if it contains subject matter that would be taboo/immoral IRL.

I don’t care about the ships myself, but fanfic has no place as a social authority.

In the latest of Fandom Frollo BS, they've resorted to organizing a "campaign" to "drown out" Problematic Fics on ao3.

They tell people to refrain from harassment, but they're still reporting fics that are allowed to exist on ao3. And still acting like they're such activists for "speaking out" against people who create problematic *fictional* content

The ship IS problematic, it's between a 13 year old and his 37 legal guardian but... my gosh, just stfu and block shippers. The fics that are romantic surely use tags that indicate such also, so use your eyes to read the warnings/summary and scroll past those fics.

It's really truly not that hard. Someone also told me this about the carrd: "Ironically their carrd they set up gives filtering instructions for how to filter out their spam but doesn't consider filtering out our ships."

So they're more than capable of filtering out ships- they just chose not too.

Also it's so childish that they're framing the campaign as "drowning out the Nasty Fics."

I don't understand why people focus on bringing down other ships instead of just raising up fics and content for their own fics-

If this was framed as a "Ship week" for the opposing or "wholesome" ships, that'd be different. That'd be a positive event contributing to the fandom.

But the fact that their whole campaign is just "let's drown out the Icky Ship" is so childish and petty.

Organizing a ship/theme week because you genuinely enjoy your ship and want to bring shippers together? 👍🏾✅That's great! That's being positive.

Organizing a "drownout" event where your sole motivation is to bury fics of icky ships you dislike?🙅🏾‍♀️❌ That's immature and negative.

tl;dr why can't y'all just organize a regular normal ship week like everyone else lmao. y'all are unnecessarily extra and it's embarrassing.

The fact that their main motivations and fandom identities are tied to "I'm against Nasty Bad Problematic Ships" sounds exhausting.

Basically do what you're doing now, minus the "we're speaking out against the nasty pedo fics" part.

If you want to organize a "wholesome/sfw only content" week, that's valid! That's perfectly fine and lovely, do it, I encourage it!

But-

Just stop bringing down Problematic content creators. That's it. Like my goodness, learn to live and let live.

That ship's age gap squicks me out too, but they're just fictional characters at the end of the day. No one's forcing you to read those fics.

As usual, please don't harass any of the clowns in the screenshots, thank you.

If you're into problematic stuff, go find your favorite problematic fic/fanart and give that person a like or some kudos. They deal with a lot and would appreciate it I'm sure

Discord

There was an associated Discord server for the movement (nicknamed "Professor Layton Fans Against Paedos"):

Alright, drownout2020. At the time, I was 15 and deeply into Professor Layton. I found a server dedicated to Professor Layton. Around this time, adult authors started posting pornographic fanfictions regarding Hershel Layton x Luke Triton and Luke Triton x Clive Dove. Because of this, the adults in the server decided to make a movement to "combat" these fanfictions and get them off the front page of the website.

A server entitled "Professor Layton Fans Against Paedos" (paedos is British spelling of pedos) was created to separate the movement from the main server. A majority of the server was adults with some minors being invited. As far as I am aware, there were two 15 year olds (me and someone else). The moderation team were also adults. The server was also formatted to have separate categories of discussion, one area was dedicated to the movement while the other was where you could discuss the games freely. There were somewhere a hundred or so members but I don't think a lot of them ever spoke outside of some reoccurring people. As for the environment, absolutely terrible. Some members would leave due to it affecting their mental health, others for different reasons.

Controversy

The server was criticised for being unsafe for minors. It consisted of mostly adults, but did not have any rules against minors joining. Therefore, it was criticised for going against the very movement it was created for, by exposing minors to explicit and underage fanworks and creating a unsafe environment centered on harassment of different AO3 authors.

I was a part of a server they made dedicated to this. There's a lot (most of which I do want to get into because of trauma) and looking back on it, they really endangered minors and it was a general harmful environment.

All I have to say to the adults during the drownout2020 movement is, what the hell were you doing? Why did you allow minors to get involved with this shit? It should have been an adult only server. If you were centered around combating sexual fiction, keep children out of it.

Minors were allowed in the server. The server while not discussing straight up sexual topics, was very clearly not child friendly considering the movement's basic reference. However, people would send the AO3 authors' 18+ Twitter profiles in channels. One person even sent a whole document listing sexual fanfictions to report to AO3. Children were able to easily access the adult creators' content without being hidden behind roles or an adult label.

Further Reading

• about drownout2020, my experience (Archived) on r/ProfessorLayton
• drownout2020 tag on AO3