move in slow motion for me

Fanfiction
Title:	move in slow motion for me
Author(s):	Anonymous
Date(s):	August 26/27, 2014
Length:	401 words
Genre(s):	slash
Fandom(s):	Hockey RPF
Relationship(s):
External Links:	AO3 link
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move in slow motion for me, by an anonymous AO3 user, is a Sidney Crosby/P. K. Subban slash fanfic written to fill a prompt at the dreamwidth hockey RPF kinkmeme The Sin Bin. It has been criticized for being a racist trollfic and used as an example of the OTW's failure to handle racist comments, racist tagging, and/or racist fanfic on AO3.

The author's use of racial slurs in replies to comments may have left a greater impression in the long term than the fic itself.

The Fic

On August 26, 2014, the following prompt was posted at The Sin Bin:

sid/pk, interracial kink something where sid's really into black guys. maybe he's hooked up with cabbie in the past as well? idk just something where he gets off on, like, the aesthetics of it all.

Less than an hour later, someone responded to the prompt with "super quick and dirty fill!" and a link to an AO3 fic. The AO3 fic is rated Explicit and tagged with "interracial kink" and "No Archive Warnings Apply". (This fic appears to be the first use of the interracial kink tag, which as of 2023 has 24 uses and has never been filterable.) The fic was posted to an anonymous collection, so the author is unknown. The fic summary reads as follows:

He has thought about this so much. He has watched so much porn about guys that look like PK doing this to guys that look like him.

2014 Fan Reactions

Fans reacted to and discussed the fic on several platforms: in the comments on the AO3 fic itself, on dreamwidth and livejournal anonmemes (hockeyrpfanon, dekedangle_rpfanon, fail_fandomanon), and on fans' personal accounts on tumblr, twitter, and dreamwidth. Topics mentioned during these discussions included: Your Kink Is Not My Kink, whether "interracial kink" was racist, whether it's ok to like a racist kink, whether the fic itself is racist or just the author's comments, whether the author was a troll, comparisons with other "problematic" kinks, comparing racial fetishization to fetishizing hockey players by writing fic about them, the "interracial kink" tag itself.

Discussion also took place on the dreamwidth community for the kinkmeme, but was limited due to the kinkmeme's rules against policing kinks:

I appreciate that this comment is a measured response, but there are other fandom spaces, such as the fandom anon memes, which are better places for this type of reaction and discussion. In this particular case, AO3 comments are an option that is directed at the author of the fill. That said, since this kink meme is not open to shaming or extreme negative reactions to prompts and fills, it was also not a good idea for the supportive anons to bring up the negative AO3 comments here, since those who have a negative reaction are not free to discuss their viewpoint or defend themselves in this space. Again, fandom anon memes or AO3 comments are a better venue.

The Sin Bin Comments

Comments on thesinbin dreamwidth community are required to be anonymous.

i thought this was really sweet and hot. it's a kink meme. you wrote a kinky story. the people whining on ao3 are out of place.

I love how you unabashedly filled this kink. It is a kink meme, at it was nice to read something that isn't "politically correct". (btw, I'm a POC in an interracial relationship, and I didn't find anything wrong with the fic. they're consenting and PK is aware of Sid's kink.)

The prompt and the fill are both racist and hurtful, and that's true here as well as on AO3. The AO3 commenters have given you detailed explanations and links to more resources to help you understand why this is offensive. You should read them and educate yourself.

It's not all my kink and honestly makes me kind of uncomfortable, but I'm pretty sure that the entire point of interracial kink is that it's racist and that's what people are kinking on in the first place. Saying "educate yourself" in this case just seems ridiculous, because duh. No shit.

It's not my kink, so I'm not speaking from personal experience, but I assume someone kinking on racism knows it's there, just like someone kinking on non-con knows there's rape and someone kinking on misogyny knows what's misogynistic in their feminization + humiliation fic.

no, the author actually does not see it as racism.

AO3 Comments

Several fans left comments on the fic criticizing it for being racist:

Clearly you don't see how this is an incredibly gross fetishisation of black people and super racist so I just thought I'd point that out.

I'm in an interracial relationship and would be super grossed out if my partner thought of me like this. It's not like we're blind--we know we look different and sometimes we sit and point out our physical differences. But it's not the basis of the attraction. In this fic, the entire basis of Sid's attraction to PK is the color of his skin. He doesn't seem to care about his humor, his good-heartedness, his cockiness, his devotion to his team, hometown, and family, his hockey skills...anything other than him being a big black cock. PK isn't a person to him, he's a thing, and object to fill a need.

Other fans spoke in defense of the fic:

As an anonymous (due to pretty obvious reasons) fan of this kink I'll say that you've hit the curiosity and aesthetic enjoyment factor head on author.

I knew when I read this that you were going to get a lot of flack for it and that the PC police were going to come running. I enjoyed it, though, and considering that we are talking two consenting individuals who both seem to realize what's going on, I personally don't see why there's so much commotion.

I'm kind of shocked at how upset people are. Not because this fic ISN'T racist, it is, but because there are so many kinks on this website that a lot of people view as "disgusting" and this fic is just getting alllllll the hate. There are fics fetishizing trans* individuals, children, animals, dead people, basically anything you can think of and the golden rule is that if you don't like the kink, don't read it. This is fiction and is not meant to be taken seriously, just as all the other fetish stories I listed shouldn't be taken seriously. AO3 is a place for fetishes to remain purely fantasies instead of going out and someone getting hurt in an attempt to fulfill a fantasy.

The fic has over 100 comments, including arguments between commenters and a fair amount of what looks like anonymous trolling.

Author's Response

The author made several statements about their motivation in writing the fic. They also went on to write two more fics tagged "interracial kink". From the author's notes:

This series isn't intended to be offensive. I would hope it's clear that PK is as into this as Sid is. I would also like to say that PK is one of my favorite players. If what I've written isn't to your taste, please feel free to add to their tag. I would love to read more about them and it would make me happy to know I helped bring about fic focusing on them. But I will continue adding to this story if/when I feel like it.

I tagged for "interracial kink". When you clicked the link, what did you think you were going to be reading? Yes, PK's skin color is the source of his attractiveness to Sid. But that's the point of the kink. To me, that's not racist because it's positive. The POV character thinks PK's hot…. But let's forget that I tag-warned and that there are more problematic stories in every fandom that no one bats an eyelid at. Let's talk about this fandom. Some of you act like you have so much SJ cred because you've publicly declared you won't write about Doughty or Varlamov. But fandom didn't care about them to begin with so what have you really given up? Patrick "yolo punched a taxi driver in the head wore blackface could have choked a bitch" Kane is the most written-about character in hockey RPF. You guys write Mario as the greatest surrogate dad in the world despite the horrible opinions he has about rape. Patrick Roy probably beat his wife but lol he's so funny when he gets angry on the bench. What about Alex Ovechkin's anti-gay position and the creepy way he publicly hit on women before Kirilenko? And oh let's not forget Tyler Seguin, his homophobic tweets and the fact that he publicly outed someone. That happened and yet y'all still wet your seats over how he's so gay for Jamie Benn. Why are those things okay?

The author also replied to some AO3 comments. These comments have since been deleted, but according to other fans included racial slurs, causing many other fans to decide that the author was not simply ignorant but had intended to troll the fandom all along. This comment by the author was quoted and discussed on anonmemes:

I don't know if you've heard of this thing called "liking something but not having it define your entire worldview" but it's real, I can assure you. I'm not a racist. If I was, I would be telling you that this fandom is never going to fall in love with a wetback and a mulatto, that there's no way they are going to become a juggernaut. And then I would ask you if English is your first language. Because your writing should be the issue here tbh. It's awful.

Troll?

Both The Sin Bin and hockey rpf fandom at large had a troll infestation in 2014. Some anon memes discussed whether or not the author was another troll (or one of the known trolls).

Fail_fandomanon:

That whole thing was a clusterfuck. I still can't decide if it was a troll trying to rile everyone up or not. The initial fic didn't seem that bad, but some of the later defenses made me wonder.

The slurs are I think mostly in the comments on the works in the series. The author is possibly a (familiar) troll, going by their comments - the approach they're taking is very similar to an OAA who's sometimes shown up on the looser-moderated anon meme and also on the kink meme (the kink meme comments were screened, if not deleted).

dekedangle_rpfanon:

I read cuckold porn, and it's a minefield of stomach churning dehumanizing racism. Coming at that fic with that awareness of context, my view of what the author is doing is radically different from that of the commenters on the fic or the other meme.

I definitely do not think it's trolling, and I don't think the author having the common sense to post anon says anything about their intent.

No you're right, that either the prompt, the fic, or both is an attempt at trolling the fandom, since it's currently a very troll-happy place. I'm not interested in reading the fic, but I've seen this kink in a lot of types of porn, and it's clear that many people don't understand anything about it besides knee-jerking about racism and fetishization.

hockeyrpfanon:

I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that okay, they have racist kinks but they're not a total troll up until the "you have something bad to say, let me repeat the same thing I told the *last* five people and then customize it for you by researching who you write and trashing them and you for liking/writing them" debacle.

With the first story I could sort of buy that the author was just writing the kink and got caught in the wank, but with this I just she was trolling the whole time. Either that or doing it out of spite. Not how wanted my dirtywrong interracial fix.

Same. My guess would be that the third fic wasn't getting wank, so they had to go paste their vent in reply to every comment and accuse other people of being in the wrong for writing certain players. They want to keep the fight going.

i don't buy the troll thing because it's easy to be a troll. use the n word in a fic about pk, say they don't care if they are racist. this person is defensive, sounds like a child, sounds upset, etc.

i think they've just reached the point where they feel attacked by the SJWs and want to get back at them.

The wank had died down -- all the comments on the new fic were positive, afaik -- and that's when the author wrote that screed and used it as a reply to every unhappy commenter. Now they're saying things they know are going to cause upset, like racial slurs, and they're apparently taking the time to check out author's profiles and tell them how their fave is problematic and their writing sucks. I'm going back and forth between "upset person who has completely lost their shit" and "troll," but they're being nasty enough and incendiary enough for me to doubt they had good intentions.

Fail_fandomanon again, in 2016:

I finally read the fic. Well, I skimmed it. It's creepy and fetishistic in that way that live-action "interracial" porn is by definition, and it's always a little disturbing to see people in 2016 (or, I guess, 2014) getting off on that Mandingo crap, but--yeah, nothing about the story says "deliberate racist trolling." "Clueless white person who needs to get out more," "person with unfortunate kinks who was probably right to post anonymously," etc., sure. If Impertinence et al. took it as deliberate trolling/baiting, they need to get out more, but I think it's more likely they just saw an opportunity to deploy OTT outrage for moral purity points. So what else is new.

The reason they took it as trolling, and I agree with them, is that at that time there were a lot of anonymous works being posted in the Hockey RPF tag specifically to harass. For example, one was a story gifted to madelyn that was an extremely sloppy (copypasting scenes) remix of an epic mpreg story she wrote so that the character had a miscarriage. (This is the troll that means we now have a "refuse gift" button.) Trolling was deliberate enough that the hockey anonmeme banned discussion of the world trolling, because the mod felt that even to discuss it was to invite and encourage it. From the outside, yes, it can seem and feel like a random clueless person, and it's possible that's what it was, but I think the escalation in the comments is actually pretty good evidence that that's *not* what it was.

Kinks, Tagging, and Racism

[AO3 comment]
There's a lot of subjectively horrible stuff around here, so for some people this is going to be horrible. You knew that and tagged for it. People who can't read tags need to learn to do so -- I'm sure there's a Rosetta Stone for it. The rest of us will continue to make our own decisions about what to read (and write), or not read. Further, just because you can write Plot A, doesn't mean you're into Plot A in real life.

[dekedangle_rpfanon]
Well, I think the author's dead wrong on interracial kink not being racist because it's ~~positive~~. The fact that it's racist shouldn't even be up for debate. There is of course a difference between sexualizing something and performing/perpetuating it, and writing something -ist as part of a kink does not necessarily mean one is -ist, which is where YKINMK comes in. But the kink itself is all about racism. Are we going to say it's not sexist or misogynistic to objectify women if the objectifier finds them attractive? That would be a big no.

As to what they're saying about hypocrisy, I think it's definitely there with incest, underage (even extreme underage), non-con, abuse, etc. being acceptable but interracial kink bringing down the fandom rage hammer. And I think part of the reason this fic generated anger is that it was helpfully labeled so that people knew it was racist before they read it -- fandom isn't as good at detecting problematic things as it likes to think it is.

[fail_fandomanon]

The author is being a shithead in the comments but I don't see the point of people giving negative reviews on the content. I don't agree with using the basis of 'if it's bad in real life it's bad in fiction' to determine what is or isn't acceptable in fic. The author tagged it 'interracial kink' and the summary was pretty clear that there was going to be some fetishizing in the fic; so don't read it and then get upset about something you had warning for.

[sophiahelix on twitter]

Fuck you, "interracial kink" anon. Your intent, perception of this kink as "positive," and other people leaving kudos means jack shit.

It is an offensive, hurtful, and systemically dangerous kink, people have explained this at length, and your jollies don't trump that.

[stopthatimp on tumblr]
And if you try and use pedophilia as an argument-winning strawman, fuck you. FUCK YOU. If your only argument is “pedophilia fic is on this site so my racist shit should be too!”, you’re a fucking asshole.

[marina]
Being respectful of people's kinks is important, but it's even more important to consider which forms of systemic violence you're helping to perpetuate by indulging in your sexual desires. There's no easy, uniform answer to this. There's no one way to do kinks that are based on real life violence "right". You have to be mindful, and to listen to the people who are affected by the thing you're fetishizing. Vocabularies change, standards change, atmospheres change, attitudes change.

I just want people to stop feeling like they can't judge the porn someone's writing because "kink shaming is not OK" and that trumps everything else. I agree that kink shaming is never OK. Perpetuating racism and misogyny and other forms of oppression is also never OK, though. We can ask for better from ourselves and from the media we're consuming.

marina also explained in the comment section of her post that the term "interracial kink" itself "has mostly been used in racist contexts". stewardess compared the current situation to a 2007 incident where a Harry Potter community ran a challenge with the prompt "miscegenation".

Abuse Reports and AO3's Response

Fans reported the AO3 fic and/or the tag and/or the author's comments to the AO3 Abuse team, but were told that what they reported did not violate AO3's terms of service. It is not clear how many people reported something or what each of them reported. Famously, AO3's terms of service states that the archive's goal is maximum inclusiveness of content and that "[u]nless 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." However, the terms of service also prohibits harassment.

stopthatimp shared the Abuse team's reply email to their report on August 31. The email explained why no action would be taken:

We would therefore only take action in this case if the content posted by the creator could be considered harassing. Our Terms of Service, section IV.G, define harassment as “any behavior that produces a generally hostile environment for its target.” While it could be argued that the work produces a hostile environment for black people who may come across it, we take several other factors into consideration before determining whether certain behaviour constitutes harassment: “such as whether the behavior was repeated, whether it was repeated after the offender was asked to stop, whether the behavior was targeted at a specific person, whether that target could have easily avoided encountering the behavior, whether the behavior would be considered unacceptable according to normal community standards, etc.” In further detail, “while these complaints will be reviewed on a case by case basis, in general, threatening content will be considered harassment, while content that is merely annoying will be allowed” and “content that is harder to avoid (such as comments on the target’s fanworks) will be judged more strictly than content that is easily avoidable (such as stories).”

We do not believe that the author’s behaviour was harassing by the definition in our Terms of Service, even though they used racist terminology in some of their responses. Our general attitude when it comes to comments is that they are the author’s domain. Unless the author at any point actively sought out people who had commented to insult them, it is difficult to consider any comments they made in response to other insults harassment. We feel that both parties (the commenters and the author) are equally responsible for the conduct reported to us.

bossymarmalade wrote a dreamwidth post saying they wouldn't donate to the OTW anymore due to the AO3's response to the abuse reports, implying but not stating outright that they believed that taking down the fic would have been the right thing to do. "the least AO3 could do is get rid of that fucking awful tag, since it's not technically 'content'! I'm really aggravated with how they've been handling this."

In 2023, fans on fail_fandomanon discussed whether the Policy & Abuse Committee (PAC) would still respond to the 2014 reports in the same way:

I don't think the committee of 2023 would rule the same way. I don't believe the committee of 2018 would have ruled the same way, even. Franzeska was gone, there was a new and active chair and a lot of new blood on the committee. The OTW's crummy messaging and opacity however means users have no way to know such a change has happened, and the org has no coherent way to apologize for past mistakes or demonstrate new good faith efforts.

The point about when it happened is pretty relevant though. That was 9 years ago now, and while AO3 is incredibly slow, I do think it has changed somewhat in this respect. I was fairly surprised reading that post when I thought it was something that happened recently because I've seen AO3 react more harshly to slurs in comments but it makes sense now knowing that it was from 2014.

This is the transparency issue IMO. If you fucked up and you know you fucked up on the scale of "it's fine to say Blorbo would never fuck a slur, actually", say something about how you're addressing your fuckup.

A comment by an anonymous former PAC volunteer a month later broadly confirms this view:

The harassment rule was applied much less vigorously when I started than when I left. That was the result of several PAC members wanting to crack down on harassment, and slowly pushing the committee in the direction we wanted to go, building up a trail of precedents behind us. It wasn't really possible to say, "This is obviously harassment and we've dealt with it wrong til now, let's do X instead;" it had to be incremental in most cases.

Later Discussions

AO3's handling of abuse reports on "move in slow motion for me" has been mentioned in several later discussions about fandom racism, institutional racism at the OTW, and AO3 content policy. Some fans disagreed with AO3's goal of maximum inclusiveness of content and wanted some racist content to be restricted. Others were concerned with AO3's inability to address harassment. Some argued that racist content was itself harassment. Others felt that it was important to uphold AO3's content policy with respect to the fic itself, but that the author's comments should have been handled differently.

During the 2016 AO3 content policy discussions, themardia wrote,

Inclusiveness of content. Not people. Not, say, the people of color who were talking and arguing with the author in the comments, who already had to deal with a fic that fetishized and dehumanized a popular character in a fandom they all were in, but now had to face the casual use of racial slurs in those comment threads, slurs that deliberately thrown in their faces–and then had to discover that by the AO3’s standards, none of this counted as harassment. On the contrary, they were “equally” at fault for what had occurred....

This is peak White Feminism at work here. The idea that one abuse policy will fit all, the idea that it’s more important to preserve the “free speech” of racist trolls rather than making a good faith effort to support the fans of color who are being attacked by said trolls is, frankly, privileged bullshit, and is a MAJOR reason I do not support the OTW/AO3 financially. Because I do not trust the AO3 to support me if needed, not when their stance on plagiarism is stronger and more nuanced than their stance on racist/bigoted abuse.

Comments at fail_fandomanon:

While I agree with the OP that the *way* the AO3 handled this abuse complaint was wrong (wtf "equally responsible" oh my god), I'm not sure that there's a way to handle this that would make everyone happy. I agree with "maximum inclusiveness of content" and that fandom is pretty fucking good at self-policing. I mean, ffs, you can barely write Finn/Poe anymore without someone hollering about how you're racist. Where do you draw the line? Do you say "obvious race-baiting and trolling"? How obvious is obvious?

Yeah, fandom has issues, and yes, fandom is generally kinda racist (because society is racist), but there's no way to make everyone happy when you start excluding content, so OTW has decided to exclude none. Not a perfect solution, but imo, the best option they have.

Yeah, those comments seem over the line to me, but a fic with interracial kink tagged interracial kink doesn't strike me as deliberate racist trolling. And even if it was, if you mark it as abuse then you're setting up authors writing the kink genuinely to get their works taken down.

(And interracial kink isn't for me, but based on my experiences with people in the kink I wouldn't just assume anyone writing it was white.)

During the 2020 AO3 racism discussions, pearwaldorf argued:

Why is it important to preserve an environment where a racially fetishistic fic that objectifies a black hockey player can stay up but a black fan basically has to go in like Viago checking for sunlight?

There is a balance between draconian content restrictions and letting racism, sexism, transphobia, etc run rampant on the site. I’m not saying it will be possible to find it immediately, or that it won’t change over time. But we have to try, if the AO3 is truly committed to making it a place that includes everybody, and not just the specific group of people who designed the site.

fail_fandomanon responded to pearwaldorf's post:

See, I keep seeing people saying things like "There is a balance between draconian content restrictions and letting racism, sexism, transphobia, etc run rampant on the site." but they never give examples. The only way that could possibly happen is by giving moderators the power to delete fic and how do you choose who gets to do that? Will someone be wiling to go on record and say "I'm going to delete racism but the baby gangrape is fine." Are people only allowed to delete things related to their own race? If people are fighting about Buzzfeed Unsolved are we going to have to get a Latino/Asian mixed race person on the line or will one of each do? How can you possibly turn the level of nuance that would be necessary into a set of rules that could be distributed and enforced fairly across thousands of different fandoms?

Particularly because an example fic they're holding ip was tagged and summarised appropriately and then they are so offended that the TOS is upheld.

In September 2021 stitch wrote a blog post critiquing the OTW's lack of progress since its 2020 promise to do anti-racism work. stitch referenced "That time in 2014 when a Hockey fandom writer used slurs at people in the fandom who called them out for their purposefully racist fic and how… that deliberately racist fic was not something that got any consequences from the Abuse Team."

In May 2023, the End OTW Racism campaign mentioned the fic in their call to action as an example of how AO3 lets users "harass others through fanworks, comments, and tags." They linked to themardia's post and highlighted the fact that the writer used "racial slurs against commenters who pointed out racism in their hockey fic".

Meta/Further Reading

• original prompt (and discussion thread) (August 26, 2014)
• hockeyrpfanon discussion (August 26, 2014)
• dekedangle-rpfanon discussion (August 27, 2014)
• another hockeyrpfanon discussion (August 29, 2014)
• fan discussion at fail_fandomanon (August 31, 2014)
• untitled post by stopthatimp (August 31, 2014)
• ao3's response to my abuse complaint re: the 'interracial kink' fic/comments by stopthatimp (August 31, 2014)
• AO3 & Censorship by stopthatimp (October 22, 2016)
• AO3 and Abuse: A Story About the AO3 Abuse Team by themardia (October 30, 2016)