Walking the Line (Transformers fanfic)

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Fanfiction
Title: Walking the Line
Author(s): Anonymous
Date(s): July 14, 2020
Length: 763 words
Genre(s): slash
Fandom(s): Transformers
Relationship(s):
External Links:

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Walking the Line by Anonymous is a Transformers fanfic that was briefly posted on AO3 in July 2020. It is known for being an example of racist fanfic. The fic was written in response to the 2020 George Floyd protests that began in Minneapolis in the United States.

According to a now-deleted AO3 bookmark linking to screencap evidence on Imgur, this fic was written by a troll who had "an extensive and upsetting history of writing racist fanfics that depict Black people as thugs and crooks and monsters."[1][2]

Publication History

The fic was posted to an anonymous collection on July 14, 2020, and was gone by July 16.[3] In screencaps shared on Twitter and Tumblr, the fic had 0 hits, so it was unclear if anyone read the story itself, which was 763 words long and marked incomplete.[4] A screenshot stored on Imgur, which was not circulated as widely, shows the fic itself, with 22 comments, 10 kudos, and 184 hits.[1][5]

Walking the Line was tagged with the slash ship Jazz/Prowl and the archive warnings Graphic Depictions Of Violence and Major Character Death.

The summary, visible in the screencaps, was as follows:

Jazz's death at the hands of Iaconian Police Department sets off riots in the city, lead by Megatron and his extremist group Cybertronian Lives Matter. Prowl, a police officer, is torn between two worlds. Jazz was his conjux, but he has a duty to protect his city from terrorism. Can he save Iacon or will their already tense society be thrown into civil war?

However, according to a post on Imgur with 83 views, Walking the Line was not actually deleted, but rewritten and retitled as a different and completely innocuous Jazz/Prowl fic, Hitting the Slopes.[6] Hitting the Slopes has the same publication date, but unfortunately the first Wayback Machine capture was on July 16, after Walking the Line disappeared.[7] The Imgur post provides evidence that the URL was the same, that the username attached to the fic after it changed was the same user who had written other racist fics.[6] (Unfortunately, AO3 did not display user IDs until March 2021, so a user could change their name and no one would know it was the same account unless their work URL had been saved in the Wayback Machine with the previous username.) The screencaps from Imgur were linked in a now-deleted bookmark.[1]

Fan Reactions

The bookmark exposing the fic writer as a troll was posted on July 16 after the story's contents were switched out.[1] The evidence for trolling does not appear to have been shared or discussed as often as the story's racist content.

Comments on the fic itself were almost universally negative, with the exception of one person who expressed pro-police and anti-BLM views. Others described it as "tone deaf", "disgusting", or "racist and sick". One person called out the author as a troll: "well youre obviously trying to bait people into raging by posting a vapid cess-pit of a fic in the most insensitive way."[5]

The day after the fic was posted, screencaps of it were circulating on Twitter and Tumblr as part of ongoing fan discussions about racism and the AO3 in the wake of the George Floyd protests. It's unclear who found it first; stitch tweeted that they had seen the story mentioned on tumblr, and stitch's tweets were then screencapped and shared on another tumblr post by nerdlingwrites that had 10.5K notes as of June 2023.[4]

[stitch[8][4]]

this is racist fan fiction. Like plainly and deeply antiblack.

And it does NOT go against the Archive of Our Own terms of service… If reported, folks will just get that smug "everything offends someone" response.

[ikran]

wtf 0 hits tho... hope it stays that way

[nerdlingwrites[4]]

Hey remember what I said about making changes to the OTW and AO3 from the inside? Fuck that shit, I was completely wrong. Stop giving them money, stop wasting time voting in their rigged elections, and start giving them noisy, angry hell on every single fucking platform you can find. Especially white people.

[gayelectro [9]]

Jazz is one of the few Cybertronians (that's what a Transformer is called by other Transformers) that is consistently and deliberately coded as black in all the continuities he shows up in. While some character's coding varies depending on the show or comic (like Bumblebee), Jazz always carries this coding.

The whole "Megatron Leads 'Cybertronian Lives Matter'" thing seems really confused, because the name sounds more like the racist All Lives Matter movement. But obviously this is supposed to be analogous to the Black Lives Matter movement, given that one of the only consistently black coded character's being murdered is the spark of this movement. Naming confusion aside, the author is deliberately depicting this as an extremist terrorist organization... Lead by the de facto bad guys of the series... Yeah, you can draw your own conclusions there.

nerdlingwrites's post was noticed by the anonymous forum fail_fandomanon, where one anon commented, "The summary sounds awful but at one chapter and less than 800 words the outrage nerdling is throwing at it seems oversized."[10] fail_fandomanon had previously discussed nerdlingwrites as a Dragon Age wanker to block.[11][12] One of nerdlingwrites' other comments suggests that they were sympathetic to anti-shipper views.[13]

Meanwhile, AO3 user Rambert mentioned the fic in a comment on the June 2020 newsletter post on AO3 News. The newsletter provided an update on plans for the AO3 blocking and muting functionality, and someone in the comments asked for an update on the feature to allow users to disable comments on their works. Rambert replied to the commenter with "You realize that if comments get disabled on anonymous works then there's absolutely no accountability on the writer side? I can't see you or your works so I'm not accusing you of anything BUT having just seen a disgustingly racist piece posted Anonymously I can't help but be curious why y'all are so eager to censor part of this 'uncensorable' archive"[14] and started a separate thread with, "Hi, has there been any discussion on possibly removing the capacity to post Anonymous works? Having just seen a new racist piece posted Anon yesterday [Title: Walking the Line, fandom: Transformers], it seems like this is protecting racism and other icky stuff rather than creative users."[15] Rambert then got into heated arguments with several other users in the comments section.[16][17] An anonymous commenter accused Rambert of harassing the fic writer, apparently having looked at the fic itself and found Rambert's comment calling the fic writer a coward and a creep.[18] Fail_fandomanon noticed Rambert's comments on AO3 News and was unimpressed.[19]

Later Comments

stitch mentioned the fic in a July 22, 2020, blog post (What Fandom Racism Looks Like: The Cult(ure) of Nice) and in another post on September 8, 2021 (Over A Year After the OTW/AO3’s Statement of Solidarity: Where Are We With That Anti Racism?).

During the April 2021 OTW membership drive, tumblr user clonehub posted a critique of fans who misuse the murder of George Floyd in their fanfic "as fodder for their stupid fantasies" and included screencaps of Walking the Line. [20]

And what’s crucial about this, what a lot of white fans want to ignore, is that the AO3 mods absolutely refuse to take these fics down. The creators, runners, and supporters of AO3 are largely white and largely apathetic to the various ways that Black people get dehumanized…. White fans see this, ignore it, and–like the reactionaries they are–donate dozens and dozens and dozens of times until Archive of Our Own quadruples it’s goal. They scroll past donation posts for Black people in need and in danger to donate to AO3, all for the mods there to keep doing what they’re doing, which is ignoring antiBlackness, supporting racism, and shouting down any dissenters by directly stating they must be procensorship.[20]

clonehub's post had over 22K notes as of June 2023.[20]

However, many fans were unaware of the incident until the May 2023 End OTW Racism campaign:

to be honest i still generally agree that ao3 should host most things but i really was not aware that when ppl were talking about racist fanworks that most of them were talking about shit like george floyd death parodies or actual hate speech just barely veiled as fanfiction.[21]

I literally didn't even hear about that until a few weeks ago because the "racist content on ao3" discourse was so vague and immediately co-opted by people who made it about their otp not being as popular as they wanted. And IF the people talking about it were all proship dni - you can hardly pin the blame on proshippers who had respected the dni and blocked those accounts. You can't have it both ways.[22]

End OTW Racism's tumblr call to action listed the fic as an example of how "people can use AO3 to harass others through fanworks, comments, and tags."[23]

See Also

References

  1. ^ a b c d bookmark on Hitting the Slopes by Anonymous (Wayback Machine copy, 20 March 2021)
  2. ^ Over A Year After the OTW/AO3’s Statement of Solidarity: Where Are We With That Anti Racism?, Archived version, blogpost by stitch, 8 September 2021.
  3. ^ Re: AO3 and OTW - June Newsletter, Archived version, fail_fandomanon, 2020-07-16.
  4. ^ a b c d posted by nerdlingwrites, reblogged with various comments added, Archived version, Jul 16, 2020.
  5. ^ a b Imgur screencap, accessed 17 June 2023.
  6. ^ a b imgur post, Archived version, 16 July 2020. Accessed 17 June 2023.
  7. ^ 16 July 2020 Wayback Machine capture of Hitting the Slopes
  8. ^ 15 Jul 2020 tweet by stitch (Wayback Machine copy)
  9. ^ reblog by gayelectro, Archived version, Jul 15, 2020.
  10. ^ Re: Twitter & Tumblr, Archived version, 2020-07-17.
  11. ^ Re: Dragon Age, Archived version, fail_fandomanon, 2020-02-10.
  12. ^ Re: Dragon Age, Archived version, fail_fandomanon, 2020-05-17.
  13. ^ "What I'm saying, what black people and other people of color and trans people and PEOPLE WHO HATE CHILD PORN, are all saying is that AO3 needs to put on their big person pants and start asking themselves hard questions." reblog by nerdlingwrites, Archived version, 21 July 2020.
  14. ^ comment by Rambert, Archived version, 15 Jul 2020.
  15. ^ Comment by Rambert, Archived version, 15 Jul 2020.
  16. ^ comment thread started by Rambert, Archived version, 15 Jul 2020.
  17. ^ comment thread started by Rambert, Archived version, 15 Jul 2020.
  18. ^ logged-out comment by "Reader", Archived version, 15 July 2020.
  19. ^ Re: AO3 and OTW - June Newsletter, Archived version, 2020-07-16.
  20. ^ a b c tumblr thread by clonehub, Archived version, 14 April 2021. Accessed 14 June 2023.
  21. ^ tweet by oknolisten, Archived version, May 4, 2023.
  22. ^ tweet by heartsalty, Archived version, 31 May 2023.
  23. ^ End OTW Racism: A Call To Action, Archived version, tumblr post by end-otw-racism, 10 May 2023.
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