The Nine

Zine
Title:	The Nine
Publisher:
Editor(s):	Tayden (project admin), Stance (design), Ollie (production), N (advising)
Type:	fanart and fanfic
Date(s):	Winter 2021
Medium:	print and digital
Fandom:	The Locked Tomb
Language:	English
External Links:	twitter; carrd
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The Nine was a planned charity zine for The Locked Tomb fandom. It was primarily an art zine, with some fic, and a variety of artists and writers submitted their work for inclusion. Potential contributors applied in April 2021, were accepted in May, final submissions were due August 31, and the zine was slated to be published in Winter 2021. However, the zine was cancelled in August following controversy.

The charities were The Auckland Foundation Women's Fund and The Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice.

Content Rules

Both gen and ship-related fanworks were allowed, with some restrictions. "Minor adult themes may be present. Violence, partial nudity and moderate gore are permitted. Explicit sexual content is not permitted."

Ship restrictions:

• No Ianthe/Coronabeth or Cam/Pal due to the characters being related.
• "Suggestive/sexual depictions of Jeannemary or Isaac are not permitted."
• "Any pairings featuring Harrow or Gideon romantically/sexually involved with men will not be allowed, as these characters are lesbians."

Contributors must be 18+.

On their curiouscat account, mods answered the question "If I have previously written romantic and/or sexual content between Camilla and Palamedes, but do not intend to do so for this zine, would I be allowed to participate?" with

Unless we find that a creator's past content or social media activity are intensely problematic to an unacceptable degree, we're okay. We can't guarantee acceptance to anyone, but feel free to apply!

Controversy

On August 8 a fanwriter whose work had been accepted into the zine revealed on twitter that the admin team contacted her to ask her to withdraw because other contributors objected to some of the fanworks on her AO3 account. The fanwriter noted, "The zine team claims not to support harassment or alienation, but considering the harassment I was subjected to on Twitter two weeks ago and the timing of this 'request', I think it's safe to say that the two are related." She also said she no longer felt safe participating in or supporting the zine.

The incident was discussed in various fanspaces. The admin team posted a response to twitter on August 10:

Last week, several working professionals and survivors of SA reached out to the mod team in an expression of discomfort towards sharing a space and being featured alongside a writer who partakes in content said professionals and survivors found personally triggering or did not wish to be associated with publicly--especially writing featuring incest, lack of or dubious consent and, in particular, the recent ‘Sex Pest Sex Fest’ hosted by the writer who was removed. They all offered to quietly leave the project, as they did not wish to single the writer out or cause them any distress. As the number of uncomfortable individuals at the time was low, the mod team aimed to prioritize the writer's largely finished contribution out of fairness, and elected to allow a handful of other creators to leave. However, as the volume of contributors expressing discomfort increased, we had to consider what was best for the majority and do our best to respect legitimate triggers and boundaries. If these people came forth, how many others might have felt similarly but were not comfortable speaking up? As a team, we could not have predicted peoples’ reactions or triggers, nor expected them to check each profile when a contributor was introduced. We accepted the writer with one thing in mind: the kind of fic you write now and then does not define the whole of your person. Our correspondence with the writer was respectful and professional in its entirety. We as a privately run charity fan project reserve the right to manage our roster--in this case, we utilized this authority to respect the valid concerns and triggers of individuals who trusted us enough to reach out. None of the individuals who came forth were in any way involved in any social media events that might have taken place in weeks prior regarding difficult subjects in fan content, and acted entirely out of valid personal discomfort and boundary-setting related directly to trauma and professionalism. It was not in any way coordinated and was entirely private.

Tumblr user hotbonegrunge (giseletheweaver on twitter) also made a post explaining that they were one of the people who complained. hotbonegrunge said:

My concern was professional discomfort having my art placed alongside work done by someone who had just recently lead an event called "Sex Pest Sex Fest," and I offered to leave the zine of my own volition.... Very recently a lot of allegations came to bare on Blizzard and Activision regarding sexual abuse and harassment that had cost the life of an employee, and since I am a professional artist who has some loose ties to the games industry, I did not want to be associated with someone who would make a joke about sexual assault and turn it into the title for an open invite fandom event.... What followed though were other artists on the zine realizing who they were working alongside and also asking to leave as they did not want their work associated by proxy with darlingofdots. Again, no one asked that Jo be kicked, just that they would like to pull their pieces because of professional or personal reasons for not wanting to have their work associated with someone who showed this kind of behaviour. The mods made the decision that rather than lose the artists, they would remove Jo instead; that was their freedom of choice as mods of a private zine for charity. This wasn’t some "anti-shipping political stance" this was literally people making personal and professional choices and taking responsibility for them.... [darlingofdots] has launched a harassment campaign against queer creators and against a zine that is headed by a wonderful and accommodating mod team of queer people. I cannot abide this behaviour and so I have decided to speak out about it.

Twitter user ahabthepredator later reported that in the ensuing debate giseletheweaver replied to a tweet using the wrong account, accidentally revealing that they had created moreoverisay apparently "to attack people supporting Jo and criticizing the mods". In screencaps, the moreoverisay account called people "hogs", "weirdos", and gendered slurs while accusing them of wanting to commit incest for supporting Cam/Pal, who are second cousins. ahabthepredator and others concluded that this incident was indeed motivated by anti-shipping.

On August 11, the zine team announced that the zine had been cancelled "Due to a doxxing incident and escalating harassment towards charity project members". According to twitter user NonaTheNinth and fail_fandomanon, the "doxxing" was a list of antishippers' twitter handles:

Gonna say this once and be done: sharing a list of publicly available twitter names of the alleged toxic and pro-harassment members of an art project is NOT doxxing. Once again, the zine is misappropriating actual harmful terminology and incidents to make themselves the victim.

Anons at fail_fandomanon speculated that too many contributors had pulled out of the project in response to the writer getting removed for the zine to be viable, though this is unconfirmed.

Some fans commented on the similarities between this incident and Tamsyn Muir, the author of the canon, getting bullied off twitter for writing problematic fanfiction.

Further Reading

• Re: Anti containment thread, fail_fandomanon discussion thread, 9 August 2021
• Re: Anti (-anti) containment thread - Locked Tomb zine continued, fail_fandomanon discussion thread, 11 August 2021
• THE NINE Zine: How Gideon the Ninth's fans bullied its author off the internet, and split the fandom trying to do the same to a fanfiction writer, ^{Archived version}, post in HobbyDrama subreddit, 31 August 2021