Strikethrough, Boldthrough, Nipplegate, and Russian Censorship: The LiveJournal Saga

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Title: Strikethrough, Boldthrough, Nipplegate, and Russian Censorship: The LiveJournal Saga
Creator: iwasonceafangirl
Date(s): 2021
Medium: Reddit
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External Links: Strikethrough, Boldthrough, Nipplegate, and Russian Censorship: The LiveJournal Saga; archive link (2021)
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Strikethrough, Boldthrough, Nipplegate, and Russian Censorship: The LiveJournal Saga is a 2021 post by iwasonceafangirl at r/HobbyDrama.

Some Topics Discussed

From the Essay

Writing fanfiction is and always has been a risky business. Between the lawsuit-happy authors who won’t hesitate to slap writers with copyright claims, the underage fans who see nothing wrong with “my EVIL mom SOLD ME to One Direction!!” stories, the creeps who always run amok in anonymous online spaces, and the genre’s overall reputation as a haven for childish weirdos, it can be difficult to read, write, or talk about fic without running head-first into a mess of drama and potential legal trouble. Today, websites like Archive of our Own (Ao3) mitigate this somewhat, but this wasn’t always the case. Back in the early days of online fandom, there were no fan-owned nonprofits to protect writers, and no rules or precedents for how websites should handle fandom content. As you can imagine, this led to quite a few scandals involving censorship, fair use, and “purity wank,” of which LiveJournal’s Strikethrough was probably the most famous.

Rumors Begin

It all begin in 2007, two years after Brad Fitzpatrick sold LiveJournal to a company called SixApart. People were, naturally, unhappy about this — while I can’t find much evidence suggesting that they disliked SixApart specifically, user bases tend to get nervous when their favorite social networks change hands (and oftentimes for good reason.) Fitzpatrick was named chief architect of SixApart, so he was still involved with LiveJournal, but this did little to quell the users’ anxiety. Near the end of May, rumors started popping up—according to the gossip, SixApart planned to remove LiveJournals that mentioned various sensitive topics, most related to sex and sexual abuse. Since the rumors were completely unverified, many dismissed them, but at the same time, it wasn’t totally out of the question that a purge like that would happen. Five years earlier, fanfiction.net banned NC-17 stories, “chat room” style stories, and RPF (real-person fanfiction—controversial, but I’m not getting into that here) with very little warning. To add insult to injury, they did that very quietly after a planned outage, and they shut the guestbooks down a few months beforehand, presumably in anticipation of backlash. So, while many users mocked those who spread the rumors, others started to take precautions, removing NSFW search terms from their work and restricting edgier stories to friends only.

One Strike, You’re Out

On Tuesday, May 29, 2007, it began. Overnight and without warning, LiveJournal started removing journals and communities, leaving them as stricken-through names on users’ friend lists. There had been no official announcement about a policy change, and LiveJournal completely failed to communicate with its user base about what was going on; people left comments under official posts and sent messages to the staff, but all queries went unanswered. Meanwhile, journals continued to disappear, seemingly at random. Most of the affected communities and people had discussed sex crimes and sexually explicit content, but there was no differentiation between, say, people who mentioned rape and people who promoted rape, so rape survivors’ journals were deleted right alongside the rape apologists’. Child pornography and incest were also likely to get users banned, no matter the context, so people who shipped fictional incestuous ships were just as likely to get deleted as people who actually promoted real-world incest. Inexplicably, BDSM between consenting adults also seemed to trigger bans, as did a variety of other sexual search terms. And communities centered on RPGs, books, and fanfiction were also fair game. In the end, around 500 journals were banned, many of them unjustly.

What is WFI, you may ask?

Warriors for Innocence

Warriors for Innocence was the name of an online pedophile-hunting group hosted on Blogger, not unlike Perverted Justice and other anti-child-sex-abuse organizations. I can’t find much information on it now (that’s the issue with old drama; half of the links lead nowhere and most of the people involved are impossible to contact) but WFI in particular seems to have had a decidedly Christian bent, and may have been homophobic or simply anti-porn. (There were also accusations that the WFI website contained spyware, although I can’t find any evidence proving this.) In any case, though, WFI was not law enforcement, and many people found it baffling that LiveJournal decided to take their word for it that the journals on their list harbored pedophiles without actually investigating the issue themselves. Anil Dash casually admitting that they’d accidentally suspended hundreds of communities based on baseless accusations from a random Blogger group put a very bad taste in people’s mouths, and people began to jump ship from LiveJournal in droves.

Eventual Restoration

In an early interview, SixApart chairman and chief executive Barak Berkowitz stated that the number of unjustified bans was very low, and he doubted that more than a dozen deleted communities would ever be reinstated. However, by May 31, he evidently changed his mind, and made a statement declaring that around half of the ≈500 banned journals would be restored. Among those banned journals was pornish_pixies, a Harry Potter smut fic community that had been extremely popular before its deletion, as well as several other fandom-adjacent, literary, and RPG blogs.

The restoration of these communities placated fans a little, but for many, the damage had already been done. LiveJournal established itself as a ban-happy, alarmist website that couldn’t be trusted with fanfiction, and users flooded to other sites, including LJ clones and code forks like Dreamwidth and JournalFen. However, not everyone was convinced to migrate elsewhere just yet; surely LiveJournal had learned its lesson and wouldn’t do it again, right?

Hahahahahahaha, nope.

How many times do we have to teach you this lesson, old man? Or: Boldthrough

On August 3rd of that same year, LiveJournal more or less did the same thing all over again, suspending fans and fan artists for violations of nebulous and poorly-defined policies. Notably, user ponderosa121, a popular Supernatural Wincest artist (i.e. someone who draws images of the Winchester brothers in sexual situations), was deleted suddenly. Her ban also apparently had something to do with a piece of Snape/Harry fan art she’d posted in the aforementioned pornish_pixies, which… okay, that ship is kind of weird, but it’s not incestuous, and from what I could find on Google Images, she clearly drew Harry as an adult (also, aaaararrggghhh my eyes, why do I do this to myself?) A different fan was banned for drawing the Weasley twins in a similar sexualized manner—again, for those of you unfamiliar with Harry Potter, the Weasley twins were several years older than Harry and definitely adults at this point. Fans asked again for clarification on what was and wasn’t allowed, but LiveJournal still hadn’t worked out its policies when it came to NSFW content, so they received non-answers. It quickly became apparent that most of the people being banned were fan artists that specialized specifically in gay erotica, prompting questions about why heterosexual content wasn’t being targeted the same way, but those questions also went unanswered. By the end of the debacle, several users were banned again, and the company really seemed like it had no idea what it was doing. At this point, deleted accounts started showing up bolded instead of struck-through, and the scandal was christened Boldthrough.

Meanwhile, a wave of resignations hit SixApart all at once. The aforementioned Anil Dash and Brad Fitzpatrick both left, as well as staffer Abe Hasan. In his goodbye, Fitzpatrick did not address the drama, instead claiming that he was simply “bored” and looking to take his life in a new direction. People were pretty certain that the PR disaster Strikethrough had created had a little something to do with it, though, prompting this exchange:

Brad: I didn't follow the latest child porn debacle, but as far as I heard: child porn. Even cartoons (even those based on underage characters) are incredibly illegal, and LJ's TOS can't permit it (or conveniently ignore it). Maybe communication sucked, but I haven't been following. I heard about it for about 30 seconds just earlier today. In any case, LiveJournal's in good technical hands, even if communication about child porn suspensions is bad, if indeed that's what you're referring to.
Anonymous: They weren't child porn! That's the whole issue. [SixApart] is suspending users who write/draw gay erotica that is in no way child porn. And yet, they aren't touching some of the seriously disturbing, sick, misogynistic hetero porn communities. Discrimination -- it's the new black!
Brad: I hear two things: "It's child porn!” and: "It's not child porn!” I just don't have time (or inclination) to figure out which is the truth. But "seriously disturbing, sick, misogynistic hetero porn communities" isn't illegal, so we're not suspending it. Child porn, however, is actually illegal. Very illegal. So it gets suspended.

I should probably mention again that the Winchester brothers and the Weasley twins were canonically adults in their respective canons at this point, so, while weird, shipping them sexually was not at all child porn.

Around this time, a former PR disaster dubbed “Nipplegate” began to creep into the limelight again. Nipplegate was an incident in 2006 wherein several members of a breastfeeding and motherhood group were told that images of infants breastfeeding violated LiveJournal’s nudity rules (I should clarify that this was a parenting group, not a fetish thing, and the images in question were completely innocent.) LiveJournal allowed NSFW content, but not in default icons, which were shown on various places throughout the site and thus had to be kept semi-safe for work. Officially, graphic sex and violence were not allowed in default icons, prompting people to ask “how is breastfeeding a baby graphic sex?” The Strikethrough and Boldthrough incidents reignited debates about this, and Nipplegate was used as another example of LiveJournal’s frankly nonsensical policies regarding sexual content.

So what happened to LiveJournal?

So, fun fact about SixApart: while Strikethrough was happening, they had already licensed the LiveJournal brand to a Russian company called SUP Media a year prior. LiveJournal was then officially sold to SUP Media in late 2007, a few months after the whole disaster. Did I mention that SUP’s CEO at the time was Alexander Mamut, a Russian banker with alleged ties to the Kremlin? Yeah. Currently, LiveJournal is hosted by Russian servers, operating under Russian jurisdiction, and subject to Russian laws regarding censorship. Any blog that gets over 3,000 viewers a day is classified as a “media outlet,” and regulated as such. In 2017, they banned users from posting “political solicitation materials,” which likely includes political dissent and pro-LGBT+ content.

Anyway, I wonder why SixApart decided in 2007 to randomly crack down on sexually explicit material, particularly gay erotica, right before they sold the website to a Russian company. Guess it’s a mystery for the ages.

From the Comments

[mynonymouse]:

Excellent writeup. I remember this vividly.

One important detail I'd add is that multiple of the banned accounts were "lifetime" accounts. They'd purchased lifetime paid memberships, with special features, in Livejournal's founding days -- the lifetime accounts were a fundraising thing in the site's beginning. The site was advertised as being uncensored at the time they paid, and welcoming to porn -- it was one of the selling points.

Then their paid lifetime account got banned for creating the very content that was the original selling points.

[damegrace]:

Boy, 2007 was so long ago... I just now realize I wasn't ever aware of the time LiveJournal wasn't Russia-owned.

All of these fanfiction-drama posts also made me realize I somehow always sleep through all the drama. I mean, I was on ff.net while the second purge was happening and somehow didn't notice; the kink meme communities on LJ somehow survived this and were active for years after (only migrating to dreamwidth several years ago). I feel like a sloth, life passing me by without me noticing.

[Noviness]:

Fandom Wank was the proper name. With the subtitle "mock mock mockity mock mock" (and "fandom is fucking funny"), so the tone was quite different: lots of schadenfreude and mockery. Also many hate-trolls, which spawned even more wank. It did try to get people to not go to the original wank, but... well, you can imagine that was never perfect. There were a lot of people who passionately hated on F_W, and now that I'm old I understand them better (I was an avid F_W reader, but not much of a participator)

F_W was actually originally on LJ, but ended up getting banned for TOS violation, after a lot of people who hated it complained.

[Hardvice]:

So, I, uh… started Nipplegate.

As with most things, it begins with Bea Arthur, in particular, my spiffy new user icon of Bea Arthur Naked by John Currin, a painting that has since then sold for more than $2M.

Now, the thing you need to know is that the LJ Abuse team was… terrible. It’s not really their fault; they were (almost) all volunteer (fun fact: the exception, team leader Denise, went on to be a founder of Dreamwidth). They were so notorious for sticking by nonsensical decisions that Abuse_LJ_Abuse became a giant-ass community making fun of them.

Anyway, for all those reasons, they tended to favor bright-line rules that any moron could apply — like no nipples in default usericons.

Even, apparently, painted ones.

So I got reported and they insisted I remove or cover Bea’s milk duds. “Well that’s obviously ridiculous”, thinks I. “I wonder how far they’re willing to take this terrible policy?”

So after adding animated swinging tasseled pasties to Bea and renaming the usericon “LJ Abuse Marie is an Art-Hating Philistine”, I went on a quest to find out. I reported pretty much every nipple I could find until I got bored, about an hour later. In addition to tons of more classical artwork, including nipples made of paint, pencil, pixels, and marble (also including LJ Abuse Denise’s default icon, also an illustration, which definitely contained a sliver of nipple even though they said it didn’t), and maybe four or five breastfeeding pics. I assumed, even if they banned all the art ones, they’d never be stupid enough to ban the breastfeeding ones.

They were stupid enough.

The uproar started quietly but as the real power trolls picked up on it and started reporting more breastfeeding shots, and as the abuse team somehow just kept doubling down on it, the whole thing snowballed, and eventually Cory Doctorow and Teresa Nielsen Hayden called me “some troll”, which was my finest Charlotte’s Web moment, and there were thinkpieces and nurse-in protests and the whole thing was just a glorious, ridiculous clusterfuck that could have absolutely been avoided if the damned abuse team wasn’t staffed, to a person, by paste-eating imbeciles.

Good times.

[purplewigg]:

I'm not normally into RPF but if I was I would totally ship Warriors For Innocence and Critics United, they'd be perfect together. Y'know what, let's throw the Literate Union in there, make it a polycule

Thanks for the history lesson (and the shoutout!)

[darkeyes13]: Honestly whenever I see drama around that, it is a reality check for me in a "I'm so old now" and "These people don't even know how AO3 came about to begin with" way.

[PinkAxolotl85]:

Honestly I think write ups like these about all the fuckery and censorship of early fandom should be required reading. Because more and more I'm seeing new/mostly younger fans rehashing basically the exact same views and wants of past moral policing. Not realising why it's riling up everyone else so bad and turning people against them.

Slippery slope yadayada but also the fact it's very easy to say 'just ban this it's obviously gross,' it's impossible to do it in a way where only the fics that 'should' be deleted, do, for many reasons. In my view, sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and tolerate some of the bad so the good has room to flourish, and you can hardly deny that Ao3 has flourished.

[KickAgressiv4901]:

A good write-up, and I will add this, having lived through the Live Journal era: Many of us went to Dreamwidth when that opened in 2009, and a handful of us are still active there, though it has largely been supplanted by AO3.

I often heard about Journal Fen, but, every time I checked, it was never offering invites.

[sonnenshine]: Man, I remember striketheough vividly. Particularly, a glut of "hoist the colours high / ne'er shall we die" icons being passed around and used, as people equated journal deletion with, uh, fictional pirates on a fictional gallows? Good times, memories of my youth!

[UnsealedMTG]: I remember this one too! I wasn't really in the kind of fandom that it directly affected, but I was on LiveJournal at the time and had friends who were closer to the kinds of communities it affected. A little bit later I got into reading Fandom Wank stuff, but that was after they'd already jumped ship to JournalFen The fun part of the "sold to a Russian company" thing is that apparently that happened because LiveJournal had become a major hub for anti-Putin writers and the only way they could start censoring it was by bringing it into Russian control.

[sadpear]:

I lived through all of this. I have a lifetime LJ account, and I still have the Strikethrough icons loaded in there, haha. I actually got on the phone during my lunch break at work to have conversations with people at SixApart after Strikethrough. It was so clear in the course of talking to them that they just had no clue about the scope of what they were doing or the necessity of making an actual human call about so much of this. A program or a keyword list can't make a nuanced judgement call. But like so many companies, the idea of spending money/human power on a solution was not one they were willing to consider.

Losing LJ was a real tragedy - my two best friends in this life were people I met initially through their journals. I miss the levels of privacy, the community, threaded comments... it's just not a format that is gonna make anyone money.

[kethryvis]:

Honestly, i think by this time 6A was pretty tired of LJ. There had been so much drama on 6A's watch, and they weren't getting the return on value they thought they'd get when they purchased this community (you saw this a lot in the early 00s when "online community" became a buzz term, and you still see it today where companies snap up other companies with communities to try and basically just monetize them... only to fail and get frustrated because these users are so passionate and don't want to be used in this fashion). So my guess is since they already had the licensing agreement with SUP, they just said "hey, you want the lot of this?" LJ was wildly popular in Russia at the time, the Russian name for LJ literally means "blogging."

Other fun facts about SUP's involvement:

When the licensing deal was first announced, it was stated that all accounts that post in some type of Cyrillic language would be managed by SUP. This freaked out a bunch of Russian users who stated they use LJ because it had no involvement with any Russian contacts. They felt free and safe to express themselves. 6A and SUP allowed users to opt-out of SUP management of their accounts... only for 6A to turn around and sell the entire enterprise to SUP a year later.

Shortly after SUP completed their purchase, they announced an "Advisory Board." This would be a group of academics in online spaces (chief among them dana boyd who was an avid LJ user), Brad himself, and two members elected from the LJ userbase. This board would meet to discuss LJ feature ideas, concerns from the community, etc. The two user seats though were interesting. One would represent all Cyrillic languages. One would represent literally everyone else. Cyrillic languages at the time made up 20% of LJ, which made that division... feel a little uneven. Then the election happened, allegations of ballot stuffing were all over, the non-Cyrillic representative basically went MIA and never responded to anyone, the board met only a few times and then disbanded.

Also, the move of servers to Russia was done literally in the dead of night and with no announcement or fanfare. One day, someone just noticed that the servers suddenly pointed at Russian IPs and that was that.

i wrote my Master's thesis about LJ, this write up feels like my thesis distilled down into something readable lol. Well done.

This feels so timely though... i have the LJ app on my phone, and my phone has been nagging me that the developer needs to update the app because it doesn't work anymore. i haven't let my phone delete it out of nostalgia even though i haven't logged into LJ in... forever basically.

[al28891]:

Great post, OP! I was an avid member of one of the biggest communities on LiveJournal (Fandom Secrets) where everyone posts secrets anonymously on their favorite series - mangas, animes, games, TV shows, etc. But the group's comments would have periodic mini-meltdowns as the site became more and more carbunkled. It was incredible to behold. And terrifying, too.

I think the straw that broke the camel's back was when LJ decided to screw around with the comments, making comment moderation a lot harder. As a result, Fandom Secrets and Fail-FandomAnon (another large community) jumped ship to Dreamwidth, causing perhaps the biggest userbase meltdown I've yet seen.

After that, I only went to the site for the kink meme communities, and even those dried up as LJ became more Russian and fandom spaces moved elsewhere. But despite it all, I kinda miss the cameraderie and silliness of those days.

bsidetracked]:

LiveJournal was my entire online life for the better part of the 00s. Ironically I started my first LJ account as a personal online diary as I was inspired by a college friend who was an early LJ adopter and used her LJ to talk about her life. I was into fandom at the time but on mailing lists and forums. As my fannish friends migrated to LJ my LJ became one of those accounts that blended fandom stuff and real life that pissed some folks off.

I am so grateful to LJ for so much. I met friends there that I'm still close with today and the community I built there got me through some incredibly rough times in my personal life.

The sale to SA really was the beginning of the end and I still miss it.

[thatoneguyfromathing]:

You left out the funniest part:

Six Apart nicknamed their servers (IIRC) "Melody", after Brad Fitzpatrick's favorite album, L'Histoire de Melody Nelson by the French art rock singer Serge Gainsbourg.

L'Histoire de Melody Nelson is a concept album about Serge Gainsbourg's forbidden feelings for a teenage girl, and Gainsbourg would later record a duet called "Lemon Incest" with his underage daughter.

[frazzledsoul]:

I know AO3 is super popular, but in my experience a lot of the users and commenters are a lot more brazen than they were on FF.net (I wrote a lot for both sites between 2017 - 2020). Although I did have one popular fanfic writer stalk me in the comments of one story of FF.net over our disagreement on some basic moral points (whether cheating is in fact, bad: I argued that it was), that was nothing compared to the abuse I got on AO3. I was repeatedly called a c**t, told I was deranged, and had my blog on Tumblr stalked because someone was looking for "receipts" that I was not in fact a biological female...supposedly if she found proof I wasn't it would prove I had commented negatively on someone else's story and therefore was an evil male incel and...something would happen (it was implied to be doxxing, but who the hell knows). I got scared away from the site after that.

So anyway, it's not a cure-all and many people still do use FF.net for various reasons. Just putting that out there.

[opinionated sloth]: I don't think this sort of behavior is attributable do AO3 though, I think it's more an evolution of fandom and social media in general. 2017-2020 was the height of purity wars in fan spaces in general and on Tumblr and Twitter in particular. Fandom has always been a magnet for weirdos with petty grudges too, for some reason.
[pixeldust6]: Well, fandom is the domain of the passionate. The laid-back people who watched a show once and forgot about it and went on with their life aren't gonna be the ones obsessing over it online and getting overly emotional to the point of getting angry with other fans about it. You'd never hear from the first category of people, while the second category of people are posting rage at OVERNINETHOUSAAAAAND WPM and clogging up websites with their large volume of intense opinions to the point they drown out the less intense posters.
[Thennnarynak]: My experience has been the opposite, got more harassment when I was posting fic on FF.net than I ever have on Ao3.

[blueeyesredlipstick]: Oh mannn. This is a wild flashback to my college days. I remember being a moderator of a fannish community at the time and trying to figure out what the line was for content — what rules would we need to enforce, what would keep us from getting swept, etc. We never got a ban but it was a real concern. I do miss LJ and it’s ability to curate your experiences/interests (and I very much CANNOT WAIT for Twitter to no longer be the premiere fandom space online). I spend a decent amount of time on Dreamwidth but it’s not the same — the popularity isn’t there, and the culture has shifted away from that Wild Wild West feeling of the 2000s.

[twohourangrynap]: Okay, this wonderful writeup has inspired me to roll around and wallow in my old LJ entries about how much I haaated the changes being made to the site following SixApart’s acquisition, so thank you for the stroll down Memory Lane! In so doing, I ran across the origins of NippleGate: HARDVICE, a user with an icon of artist John Currin’s 1991 painting of Bea Arthur naked from the waist up, was asked to change his default userpic to something that didn't violate the TOS (or else face suspension), so he started reporting other default userpics showing naked breasts — many of which were icons of mothers breastfeeding their babies. This guaranteed him a large army of irate self-proclaimed "BOOB_NAZIS" to stand up to LJ Abuse, and thus the drama begins.

[Andorian Gray]:Man...I remember when FanFiction.net deleted me and my friend's chat-style Teen Titans fic :'(

It was like Robot Chicken in terms of structure, and written by two 12yo girls. We definitely had 2 chapters up; maybe we got to 4. Can't remember. Oh well! Whoever reported us was clearly jealous of our comedic genius ;P

But also relating to the post--stuff like this is why AO3 does what it does. Shame fans don't seem to get that :/

[IDreamOfSeashells]: I see so many minors in fandom wanting to push censorship on AO3. This whole post is a great example of why that's a bad idea.
[iwasonceafangirl, original poster]: It’s so odd to me that fanfiction.net banned chatroom-style stories and second-person stories. Like, that’s the hill you’re choosing to die on? I guess you could call the chatroom stuff “low effort,” but it’s a fanfiction website, half of the stories are written by bored teenagers!

[Vincent-Van-Ghoul]: Oh man, I wasn't aware of the banning in 2007, but I was aware of everyone fleeing to dreamwidth due to rumors that LiveJournal was going to start posting all content you ever wrote onto your Facebook page with no way to stop it. Wild times.

[ThennaryNak]: I still have an LJ account I keep to be able to access J-pop communities as the locked posts feature keeps us safe from the overzealous Japanese companies. I don’t think there was ever an alternative that would work so well for them.

[Majesdane]: As someone who first got a LJ account back in 2003 and didn't leave until around 2013/14, I remember all this drama well. The absolute fervor and rage from fans still far outweighs any other I've been a part of (e.g., Tumblr going on their extremely flawed NSFW bans). I can remember back in 2005 when Six Apart first bought it, people were already extremely wary of what new owners might do; I vaguely recall many worried comments on every LJ news post.

Interestingly, no one person or any community I was a part of actually got deleted during any of the famous purges, even though many "bannable" fics being written. But as a teenager I remember thinking no company would ever dare to do something so stupid again (lol). These purges, alongside the multiple horrible coding changes to the site, is what absolutely killed LJ being known as a fandom space.

It's a shame LJ killed their Western userbase so much, because as much as I love AO3, a lot of the fanfic community "culture" at LJ didn't translate over to AO3. LJ was a place that really encouraged readers to comment and engage with the fics, unlike with AO3. I made so many fandom friends (some of whom I still am friends with!) via LJ fandoms, especially via fanfiction. LJ was also special in that it essentially successfully combined forums/Twitter/Tumblr/AO3; it was really a one-stop-shop for practically every fandom around at the time.

[yanderapologist]: Oh wow, I lived through this one, albeit very much on the sidelines—while I was an active LJ user, most of my activity on the site was just me journaling about my life like the whiny 14-year-old I was at the time, and the fandoms I was in at the time were more concentrated on DeviantArt than LiveJournal, so I only really heard about it peripherally. But I remember everyone being righteously pissed, and having read up on it in the years since…yeah. Yeah, they were right to be pissed. Great writeup, OP—I knew about a lot of the basics of the situation, but I hadn’t heard most of the details!

[caecilliusinhorto]: And now old-time fans (by which I mean those of us old enough to remember strikethrough) have almost the same litany of complaints about newfen on tumblr. Plus ca change.

[themarquetsquare]: I found a delicious conspiracy theory in one of the fandom history channels on YouTube: that Warriors for Innocence was actually MsScribe. And from what I remember of the tone, and the focus on Harry Potter fandom, and what her trolls tended to do and say, and how completely unbelievable, in retrospect, her 'nutty Christians' were... There were similarities with Warriors for Innocence. If only in the fact that such an organization showed up and was targeting, of all things, communities like Pornish Pixies - in the grand scheme actually a niche part of fandom as a whole. Or the fact that what they all had in common was the type of Christian homophobia that was very much a topic of the day and tended to rile up LJ en masse. Doesn't seem to improbable, does it?
[hollyslowly]: I'm choosing to believe this, because it impacts nothing and it makes me happy. I still reread the MsScribe story annually.

[IzarkKiaTarj]: Oh, man, I've been hoping for a write-up from you about this, because I remember being terrified that an author I liked who wrote a lot of...controversial fanfic would be banned. I think she was actually friends with Ponderosa.

I also remember that this author started adding a disclaimer at the beginning along the lines of "All people mentioned in this story are fictional, and thus have no age."

I remember it was because the Ponderosa art was released when OotP was the most recent movie to be released, and while the fanart was (if I recall) based on a fanfic where Harry was 22, I heard LJ's stance was "Harry Potter is 15" because that's how old he was in the most recent movie.

References

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