u know what’s wrong with tumblr now?? too many kids who weren’t here for glee. y'all have no idea. none of u understand the suffering we went through. the hell. the endless war. u come in here and u try to start The Discourse but u dont get that we already made these mistakes. we already had the discourse and its done now. its over. its all over and u should let it stay dead but u wont and that’s why we all hate u

I was not here for the days of glee but please relay that fandom history

its not history, its blood. i still see it all over this website. the vague posts. the deactivated urls. where do u think the word problematic became popular. where do u think the representational anger started. glee was the hungry gaping void that consumed us all. it said watch us and find yourself. there is someone for everyone. santana is a lesbian and kurt is gay and brittany is bisexual and quinn, god knows what quinn is, she’s straight but we have her say things like “you were singing to finn and only finn, right?” and artie is disabled. mercedes is black and our outlet for body positivity. we are all oppressed by something and we are different and we are outcasts and we are you. 

and we fell for it. we watched glee and we related to its characters and we fought its wars until it was too late. until it was nothing but a distorted picture of a parody of reality, a cracked mirror in which our souls were sucked and encased in glass. finn outed santana but it’s fine because he had good intentions. sam was supposed to be gay but we’re bringing blaine anderson in for that instead. the q in quinn is for queerbait. brittany was maybe raped but it was a one liner so who really knows. will schuester was a horrible fucking adult and should never have been allowed to care for children. finn, the white straight boy, did everything wrong but it was narratively presented as right. we turned on each other. klaine vs kum and finchel vs faberry. santana fought everyone so brittana stans fought everyone. character vs character, ship vs ship, blogger against blogger. we fucking hated each other. there was no glee fandom. there were character fandoms and ship fandoms and that is it and our mottos were all fuck glee.

we won every popularity contest, every online poll. we voted our fingers to the bone. we created art and wrote fanfic and made such excellent photo manips they were published in newspapers. we were prolific. we were consumers of the hell we created and we just kept producing more in a fucked up dystopian fandom chain of supply and demand. don’t get me started on the rpf. dianna wore a likes girls shirt on tour and made a statement an hour later revoking it. some people still say heya is real but it’s like a breath of the wind, a sound so bare i can’t quite make out the words. 

u asked for history. theres no history, only rage and pain and regret, the image of anonymous with a grey face and sunglasses telling u to kill urself because u thought artie was a dick for calling brittany stupid that one time. this website is a reflection of the hole glee left when it finished taking all it could from us, when the void could not consume anything more, and the posts on it now, the social justice “discourse” that is just giant piles of steaming, unsifted, unrefined shit is from those who refused to learn from us. the history is here and it followed us and we can never ever escape it.

what the fuck happens in glee

Headcanon: I can muster a cogent argument for why it would make more sense or make for a better story if this were the case

Heartcanon: I don’t have a particular rationale for why this ought to be the case, I just like to imagine it’s true because it gives me the warm fuzzies

Gutcanon: it’s not that I actively want this to be the case – it just unaccountably feels like it should be

Junkcanon: I like to imagine it’s true because it gives me the other kind of warm fuzzies

Spleencanon: I insist that this is the case specifically to spite the author, because, like, fuck you, sir or madam

On Fanfiction

I was cruising through the net, following the cold trail of one of the periodic “Is or is not Fanfic the Ultimate Literary Evil?” arguments that crop up regularly, and I’m now bursting to make a point that I never see made by fic defenders.

We’re all familiar with the normal defenses of fic: it’s done out of love, it’s training, it’s for fun. Those are all good and valid defenses!

But they miss something. They damn with faint praise. Because the thing is, when you commit this particular Ultimate Literary Evil you’ve now told a story. And stories are powerful. The fact that it wasn’t in an original world or with original characters doesn’t necessarily make it less powerful to any given reader.

I would never have made this argument a few years ago. A few years ago I hadn’t received messages from people who were deeply touched by something I wrote in fanfic. So what if it’s only two or three or four people, and I used someone else’s world and characters? For those two or three or four people, I wrote something fucking important. You cannot tell me that isn’t a valid use of my time and expect me to feel chastened. I don’t buy it. I won’t feel ashamed. I will laugh when you call something that touches other people ‘literary masturbation.’ Apparently you’re not too up on your sex terminology.

Someone could argue that if I’d managed the same thing with original characters in an original world, it could’ve touched more people. They might be right! On the other hand, it might never have been accepted for publication, or found a market if self published, and more importantly I would never have written it because I didn’t realize I could write. The story wouldn’t have happened. Instead, thanks to fanfic being a thing, it did. And for two or three or four people it mattered. When we talk about defending fanfic, can we occasionally talk about that?

I once had an active serviceman who told me that my FF7 and FF8 fic helped get him through the war. That’ll humble you. People have told me my fanfic helped get them through long nights, through grief, through hard times. It was a solace to people who needed solace. And because it was fanfic, it was easier to reach the people who needed it. They knew those people already. That world was dear to them already. They were being comforted by friends, not strangers.

Stories are like swords. Even if you’ve borrowed the sword, even if you didn’t forge it yourself from ore and fire, it’s still your body and your skill that makes use of it. It can still draw blood, it can strike down things that attack you, it can still defend something you hold dear. Don’t get me wrong, a sword you’ve made yourself is powerful. You know it down to its very molecules, are intimate with its heft and its reach. It is part of your own arm. But that can make you hesitate to use it sometimes, if you’re afraid that swinging it too recklessly will notch the blade. Is it strong enough, you think. Will it stand this? I worked so hard to make it. A blade you snatched up because you needed a weapon in your hand is not prey to such fears. You will use it to beat against your foes until it either saves you or it shatters.

But whether you made that sword yourself or picked it up from someone who fell on the field, the fight you fight with it is always yours.

Literary critics who sneer at fanfic are so infuriatingly shortsighted, because they all totally ignore how their precious literature, as in individual stories that are created, disseminated, and protected as commercial products, are a totally modern industrial capitalist thing and honestly not how humans have ever done it before like a couple centuries ago. Plus like, who benefits most from literature? Same dudes who benefit most from capitalism: the people in power, the people with privilege. There’s a reason literary canon is composed of fucking white straight dudes who write about white straight dudes fucking. 

Fanfiction is a modern expression of the oral tradition—for the rest of us, by the rest of us, about the rest of us—and I think that’s fucking wonderful and speaks to a need that absolutely isn’t being met by the publishing industry. The need to come together as a close community, I think, and take the characters of our mythology and tell them getting drunk and married and tricked and left behind and sent to war and comforted and found again and learning the lessons that every generation learns over and over. It’s wonderful. I love it. I’m always going to love it. 

Stories are fractal by nature. Even when there’s just one version in print, you have it multiplied by every reader’s experience of it in light of who they are, what they like, what they want. And then many people will put themselves in the place of the protagonist, or another character, and spend a lot of time thinking about what they’d do in that character’s place. Or adjusting happenings so they like the results better.

That’s not fic yet, but it is a story.

But the best stories grow. This can happen in the language of capitalism—a remake of a classic movie, a series of books focusing on what happened afterwards or before—or it can happen in the language of humanity. Children playing with sticks as lightsabers, Jedi Princess Leia saving Alderaan by dueling Vader; a father reading his kids The Hobbit as a bedtime story as an interactive, “what would you like to happen next?” way so that the dwarves win the wargs over with doggie biscuits that they had in their pockets and ride to Erebor on giant wolves, people writing and sharing their ideas for deleted outtake scenes from Star Trek and slow-build fierce and tender romance with startling bursts of hot sex between Hawkeye and Agent Coulson.

A story at its most successful is a fully developed fractal, retold a million times and a million ways, with stories based on stories based on stories. Fanfic of fanfic of fanfic. Stories based on headcanons, stories based on prompts, stories that put the Guardians of the Galaxy in a coffee-shop AU and stories where the Transformers are planet-wandering nomads and stories where characters from one story are placed into a world from another. Stories that could be canon, stories that are the farthest thing from canon, stories that are plausible, stories that would never happen, stories that give depth to a character or explore the consequences of one different plot event or rewrite the whole thing from scratch.

This is what stories are supposed to be.

This is what stories are.

Fandom and fan creations are a communal act. They do not disguise how they are influenced by each other. They revel in it.

Literature was once a communal act, too. Film as well. It’s only once we decided to extend and expand the idea of copyright and turn stories into primarily vehicles for profit that we rejected this communal structure. The literary canon shouldn’t be all dead white men. They didn’t build the novel. They didn’t build theater. They took what was already there and said “This is mine now,” and we believed them.

Creativity is communal. There is no such thing as the lone genius on a mountaintop. Ideas are passed around, handed back and forth, growing all the time. Fandom is what human creativity looks like in its normal form. Fandom is like this because humans are like this.

We didn’t just borrow the sword. We remade it because we saw in it the potential for something better. And we did that together, all of us.

So I’m on AO3 and I see a lot of people who put “I do not own [insert fandom here]” before their story.

Like, I came on this site to read FAN fiction. This is a FAN fiction site. I’m fully aware that you don’t own the fandom or the characters. That’s why it’s called FAN FICTION.

Oh you youngins… How quickly they forget.

Back in the day, before fan fiction was mainstream and even encouraged by creators… This was your “please don’t sue me, I’m poor and just here for a good time” plea.

Cause guess what? That shit used to happen.

how soon they forget ann rice’s lawyers.

What happened with her lawyers.

History became legend. Legend became myth….  And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost.

I worked with one of the women that got contacted by Rice’s lawyers. Scared the hell out of her and she never touched fandom again. The first time I saw a commission post on tumblr for fanart, I was shocked.

One of the reasons I fell out of love with her writing was her treatment of the fans… (that and the opening chapter of Lasher gave me such heebie-jeebies with the whole underage sex thing I felt unclean just reading it.)

I have zero problem with fanart/fic so long as the creators aren’t making money off of it. It is someone else’s intellectual property and people who create fan related works need to respect that (and a solid 98% of them do.)

The remaining 2% are either easily swayed by being gently prompted to not cash in on someone else’s IP. Or they DGAF… and they are the ones who will eventually land themselves in hot water. Either way: this isn’t much of an excuse to persecute your entire fanbase.

But Anne Rice went off the deep end with this stuff by actively attacking people who were expressing their love for her work and were not profiteering from it.

The Vampire Chronicles was a dangerous fandom to be in back in the day. Most of the works I read/saw were hidden away in the dark recesses of the internet and covered by disclaimers (a lot of them reading like thoroughly researched legal documents.)

And woe betide anyone who was into shipping anyone with ANYONE in that fandom. You were most at risk, it seemed, if your vision of the characters deviated from the creators ‘original intentions.’ (Hypocritical of a woman who made most of her living writing erotica.)

Imagine getting sued over a headcanon…

Put simply: we all lived in fear of her team of highly paid lawyers descending from the heavens and taking us to court over a slashfic less than 500 words long.

all of this

Reblogging because I can’t believe there are people out there who don’t know the story behind fan fiction disclaimers. 

Yep I used to have disclaimers on all my Buffy fic back in the day. The Buffy creators were mostly pretty chill about fandom but it’s not like it is now. You did NOT talk about fandom with anyone except other fandom people and bringing it up at cons was a massive no no because of stuff like this.

I think Supernatural (and Misha Collins specifically) was when that wall between fandom and creators started to break down. It’s a relatively new thing.

I remember going to a Merlin panel down in London and a girl sitting next to me asked the cast about slash and I thought she was going to get kicked out!

Fandom history is important.

Oh, this brings back some not so-awesome ‘90s fandom memories! 

Oh man, let me tell you about the X-Files fandom. Lawyers for FOX sued, threatened, and generally terrified the owners of fan websites on a regular basis. God help you if you wrote or created original art set in their (expansive) universe or worse - dared to write about their characters. Even people who weren’t creating fanworks, just hosting Geocities pages about how much people liked the show would be sent C&D orders or actually fined. When I was first discovering the concept, the first rule of fandom was you do not talk about fandom because the consequences could be devastating.

It was such a strange and uncomfortable experience for me when fans in LOTR and Potter fandoms suddenly started shoving their work in people’s faces speaking publicly about fandom and wanting to engage in dialogue with the creators and actors of the Thing they were into. Fan stuff was supposed to stay online, in archives and list-serves and zines we passed around because it just wasn’t cool to talk about it and it could get you in a boatload of trouble. The freedom we have to create and gather together in a shared space, or actually be acknowledged in any way by people outside the fandom was inconceivable to my fannish, teenaged self. I want fans these days to understand how amazing modern fandom really is, cherish the community, and appreciate what it took to get us here. 

“if you found this by googling yourself, hit back now. this means you, pete wentz”

Oh hey, even more blasts from the past.

I was one of the ones who got a love letter from Anne Rice’s lawyers. Bear in mind that up until that point her publisher had encouraged fanfic and worked with the archive keeper (one of my roommates at the time) to drum up publicity for upcoming books and so on.

I could tell such tales of how much Anne screwed over her fans back then. The tl;dr version is that she and her peeps would use fan projects as free market research and then bring in the lawyers once it was felt Anne could make money off of it herself. (Talismanic Tours being one of the most offensive examples of this.)

But where fanfic is concerned not only did we get nastygrams but one of my friends had Anne’s lawyer trying to fuck up her own privately owned business which had NOTHING TO DO WITH ANYTHING ANNE RELATED. Said friend was a small business owner with health issues who wasn’t exactly rolling in money, so guess how well that went?

On top of that when yours truly tried to speak out about it I discovered that someone in Anne’s camp had been cyber stalking me to the point where they took all the tiny crumbs of personal information I had posted over the course of five years or so and used it to doxx me (before that was even a term and in early enough days of the WWW that this wasn’t an easy task) and post VERY personal information about me on the main fandom message board of the time. Luckily for me the mod was my friend and she took that down post haste, but it was still oodles of fun feeling that violated and why to this day I am very strict about keeping my fandom and personal lives separate online.

Hence why those of us in the fandom at the time who still gave enough of a shit to want to keep writing fic DID keep writing fic, but shoved it so far underground and slapped it with so many disclaimers they could’ve outweighed the word count of War & Peace. It wasn’t just for the purpose of protecting fic but for trying to protect our personal lives as well.

(Also would love to know who @tiger-in-the-flightdeck knew. Life paths crossing after so many years….)

Lucasfilm also sent cease-and-desist letters to Star Wars fanzines publishing slash.

My favourite bit I read from one included the idea that you weren’t allowed to have any explicit content, of which anything queer, no matter how tame, was included, to “preserve that innocence even Imperial crew members must be imagined to have”.

Yeah. The same Imperial crew members who helped build the Death Star to commit planetary genocide.

(It’s one reason Sinjir Velus, while I still have some issues with him, feels like such a delicious ‘f*** you’.)

Later on, they were apparently persuaded to ‘allow’ fans to write slash, provided in ‘remained within the nebulous bounds of good taste’.

(On a related note, if I wasn’t quite so attached to my URL, I would 100% change it to ‘Nebulous Bounds’, because that’s just downright catchy)

Anne McCaffrey had this huge long set of rules about how exactly you were allowed to play in her sandbox. Dragonriders of Pern was my first online fandom, and I was big into the Pern RP scene - and just about every fan-Weyr had a copy of these lists of rules McCaffrey wanted enforced. One of which was ‘no porn’ and another was basically ‘it can’t be gay’ (and for a while ‘no fanfiction posted online’? which??? anyway.)

She relaxed a little as time went on, but still. 

Let’s not forget: the reason AO3 is called ‘Archive of our own’  is because it was created in response to some bullshit that assholes were trying to play with fan creators. Basically (if I remember the fiasco correctly) trying to mine fandom creators for content which they could then use to generate ad profit on their shitty websites. When the series creators objected, the fans tried to pull their content, only to find that the website hoster resisted, claiming their content was all his now.

That wasn’t even all that long ago…

fandom history class

To this day, *talking* about writing or reading fanfiction - just acknowledging that it exists - to anyone other than people I know are in fandom as well, feels like a dangerous act. The strict separation I maintained between my real life identity, my online identity, and my fandom identity (yes, they were separate, because some of the most vicious and mocking people were fellow nerds) has broken down a bit these days, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to integrate them as freely as some younger fans do.

Everybody should know that AO3 is just one project of the Organization for Transformative Works. Their mission is much broader than just hosting a (very good) fanfic site. They do all kinds of fandom history archiving and publish an academic journal, but most importantly, they perform legal advocacy to protect the fair use rights of people who make fanfic or fanart.

The OTW Legal Committee’s mission includes education, assistance, and advocacy.

I haven’t been involved in fandom stuff all that long, but I find this stuff so fascinating!

whew, i feel old, but that’s mostly bc i was on forums way way waaaaay too young. but this? yes. all the way. people had password protected forums on the weirdest, most unconventional websites. before you could even be approved by the mods they would search your blog, your other accounts, question you, everything, all because we were broke teens and preteens trying to do something for fun and if someone got in who could doxx you or send your work over to a lawyer? that was it, you were OVER. that’s also part of where fandom wars and the defense of fandom came from: quote unquote “enemy” fandoms would infiltrate just to hurt you. @theglintoftherail makes a very good point: ao3 is a goddamn haven. and they’re a great team of lawyers and people dedicated to protecting fanworks! part of the reason it’s so great is because they know there’s no one like them out there. they also go to the ends of the damned earth to protect you and to be inclusive, which is why there’s shit like tentacle porn and underage and dubcon. because they’re dedicated to protecting readers and creators to the death. they don’t advocate for it and they have the extensive rating and tagging system because of that (legit the best tagging system i’ve ever seen) but they don’t know if you’re dealing with trauma or if you need to get something out. do not forget your fandom, kids. jesus

Who else knew nothing about this? A show of hands

I’m just the right age to remember the disclaimers and to have HEARD about the Anne Rice, Anne McCaffrey, and X-Files fiascos, but I was never in any of those fandoms and I was more or less on the tail end of that. I can’t imagine having to be scared to tell people I write fanfic. So glad we’ve come so far.

20+ years ago, I used to be terrified someone would try to sue me for the fanfic I was writing. I covered my work in disclaimers and posted it from school PCs on the ‘guest’ account so no one could track me. I remember looking up at the school security camera as I posted my work, wondering if the school got a Cease & Desist letter if they’d trawl through the footage and discover it was me and know I was writing naughty gay fanfic. I imagined the entire school finding out what I’d written.

Conversely, last year, I featured in the ‘notable fans’ section of the Tomb Raider 20th Anniversary’ book - an official publication - as a fanfic writer. 

It’s fantastic how fandom is becoming a part of enjoying content and is slowly, slowly being normalized <3

This is a Very Important Fandom History Class - all newer/young fans should read this, and if you’re interested, check out more of the creators vs. fans history on Fanlore. I vividly recall the days when we were regularly threatened (and, in fairness, legally they were right) by cease-and-desist letters or calls from lawyers from Universal, Fox and other studios. I was in the X-Files fandom from its earliest days, and I know this happened to friends of mine. This was back in the days of actual paper zines - there was no FF.net or AO3, or really much of an Internet.

The Internet, though, had really just become a thing right about the time X-Files hit the airwaves in the early ‘90s (we had some of the first fan chats on the old Delphi forums – ah, the days of waiting for a line of text to slowlyyyyy unfold across the screen!), and so everything was already in the midst of a shift…it would be a little while before the studios realized that fans sharing and creating content was, bingo, FREE PROMOTION for their properties, and something to be encouraged, not shut down.

I never cease chuckling now when I read an issue of Entertainment Weekly that tries to analyze and parse fanfic or fan art, or see studios sending out content directly to Big Name Fans whom they know will blog and create buzz about it. Or see actors and talk show hosts sharing fan art and stories on the air, for good or for not-so-good. We would never have dreamed this would happen back in the old days, when we had to run scared of most of the studios in order to create fanworks.  We’re actually pretty mainstream now, and although that, too, has its good and bad points, it’s SO MUCH BETTER now for fan creations than it ever has been. 

Treasure that freedom – but know the past, too.

When I read Ngozi’s policy on fanworks for Check, Please, I nearly cried. The idea of a content creator encouraging fandom, LOVING fandom? That was revolutionary to me in 2016. IN 2016. But even there, she does ask that people acknowledge that the characters belong to her. 

I grew up in fandom as an X-phile, and was doing kind of a lot of fanart/t-shirts and was METICULOUSLY careful to make no profit of any kind on them because it probably WOULD have gotten me sued. I wasn’t out money, but it worked out to the dime covering costs and no more. 

I’ve been pondering fanwork-friendly fandoms as a concept for a while now, and have some ideas for ways of protecting both content creators and fans. Anyway.

Learn this history, young’uns. And then get off my lawn. *shakes cane*

Oh, you precious children. I’ve got 20 years in online fandom under my belt and I remeber, or was part of, *all of this*.

glitterarygetsit, in a discussion on fan responses to media on facebook

(via imorca)

A note to fanfic writers from an artist.

I’m gonna say something that’s been on my mind for a while now. I want to thank the fanfic winters out there who spend hours writing beautiful pieces of work to share with others, and I’m sorry that so many of you don’t get the recognition or thanks that you truly deserve.

 Coming from an artist, I truly believe that writers have it much harder compared to illustrators in terms of gaining fans and receiving recognition. For artists such as myself, it’s much easier to receive followers, likes, and reblogs because people only need a few seconds to decide whether or not they like the art style and if they want to share it or not. I also have a multitude of social media platforms to choose from: Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Patreon, Deviantart, heck even YouTube and AO3 if I wanted to. For writers, it’s much harder (not only because their platforms are more limited) but because most people either skip past the word of text, don’t have the time to read the fic, or ‘like’ the fic to read it at a later time. This makes it very difficult for fanfic writers to get their work circulated and to gain new fans. 

Additionally, unlike artists, it’s extremely hard to profit off writing (unless you get to publish a book in which case- YAY!!!! But the chances of being published is very very slim;;). Illustrators frequently sell merch, have Patreons, or fill commissions to make a little extra money on the side. With fanfic writers, that’s close to impossible to do. I saw a writer I follow try to open a Patreon and charge three bucks a chapter for a fic they spent hours writing. Three bucks for a 5,000+ word chapter. Thats like five double-spaced, five-paged essays. Do you know how long it takes to write that many words? Asking for three bucks was already extremely, EXTREMELY cheap. But of course, ‘paying for fanfic???? Noooo.’ The amount of hate and negativity that the author received just blew me away. Authors spend just as much time on their works as artists do, so why are some people willing to pay $25-$85 for a drawing, but not three bucks for a chapter? I’m not saying that artists don’t deserve the recognition or money they earn because I know that artists put a lot of time and effort into their art, and I applaud them for utilizing their talents to reach where they are today. I just wish that more people would also give some of their love to the amazing fanfic writers who are underappreciated and deserve so much more. It’s very discouraging when you spend hours on something and barely get recognition for it. So please, help support fanfic writers by sharing their work so they can gain new fans and allow other people to see their amazing talents as well.

I appreciate this, but. It seems like people just don’t realize this anymore..? But profiting off fanfiction is illegal, and you can get sued, depending on the copyright holder’s whims. It’s a legal grey area only if you’re not making money. For example, there’s a reason many fanvids get taken down from YouTube these days. Theoretically, if you distribute copyrighted content, you are potentially criminally liable, and proving ‘fair use’ would be on you, in terms of paying for that privilege (or organizations like the ACLU or the OTW Legal Committee). Fair use also doesn’t apply to stuff made for profit. They just don’t bother prosecuting ‘cause they’re busy going after torrent-based piracy and those guys who tried to make a whole fan-made Star Trek show… for now.

If and when the situation with fandom comes to a head, our only defense is being non-profit fair use. Essentially, to sell works directly based on a currently copyrighted entity, you would need a license from the copyright holder. As in, you’d need to pay them, and they could still deny you the license if they want. If you want to sell fanfic commercially anyway, you’d need to file off the identifying parts such as names, places and other obviously recognizable details. Selling things yourself is just being in business for yourself. It is still commercial. It is still business, basically.

I’m by no means an expert, but I am sure that fanfiction exists in a grey area, legally. Illustration and fanart exist in a different sphere, because usually the *look* or appearance of things in the media property aren’t trademarked or part of a copyright the same way names are. Art of a boy with glasses and black hair just isn’t generally considered as universally identifiable as a name like, say, Harry Potter (not to mention that plenty of people don’t even pay attention to canon descriptions in the art). This is why anyone can sell portraits of a celebrity, too. You can draw anything you want, although I think selling actual comics of commercial comic book characters for profit could land you in a lawsuit (because the original medium is equivalent).

I know this seems unfair, but this is the reality of playing with other people’s toys. They get to tell you what you can and cannot do with them.

That’s what I believe as well. I mean, why else would authors often write disclaimers on their fanfics?

Hi, I’m a lawyer and I wrote my substantial research paper in law school on fan works and copy right.

No, artists cannot ‘draw whatever they want’

Copyright does cover visual representations. Copyright covers all derivative work. Furthermore, people have a right to their image called right of publicity. That means celebrities are paid for the use of their image or agree to merchandizing rights in contracts for movies and shows. 

You can try to get around copyright by making Harry Potter merchandize by saying it’s not Harry Potter, but that wouldn’t stand up if it can be shown the only reason people are buying your ‘black haired boy with glasses shirt’ is as Harry Potter. 

Fanart is just as illegal as fanfiction. It’s all either infringement or fair use or in a gray zone.

Keep reading

“where did this weird trope even come from?”

well, statistically speaking, probably star trek

#fuck or die #time travel #gangsters? #evil twin #detectives #they’re all Star Trek #everything is Star Trek #I am Star Trek #even you are Star Trek #there is no escaping (via purringvulcan​)

Francesca Coppa, “Introduction to The Dwarf’s Tale,” The Fanfiction Reader (via francescacoppa)

It just kills me when writers create franchises where like 95% of the speaking roles are male, then get morally offended that all of the popular ships are gay. It’s like, what did they expect?

#friendly reminder that I once put my statistics degree to good use and did some calculations about ship ratios#and yes considering the gender ratios of characters#the prevalence of gay ships is completely predictable (via sarahtonin42)

I feel this is something that does often get overlooked in slash shipping, especially in articles that try to ‘explain’ the phenomena. No matter the show, movie or book, people are going to ship. When everyone is a dude and the well written relationships are all dudes, of course we’re gonna go for romance among the dudes because we have no other options.

Totally.

A lot of analyses propose that the overwhelming predominance of male/male ships over female/female and female/male ships in fandom reflects an unhealthy fetishisation of male homosexuality and a deep-seated self-hatred on the part of women in fandom. While it’s true that many fandoms certainly have issues gender-wise, that sort of analysis willfully overlooks a rather more obvious culprit.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we have a hypothetical media franchise with twelve recurring speaking roles, nine of which are male and three of which are female.

(Note that this is actually a bit better than average representaton-wise - female representation in popular media franchises is typicaly well below the 25% contemplated here.)

Assuming that any character can be shipped with any other without regard for age, gender, social position or prior relationship - and for simplicity excluding cloning, time travel and other “selfcest”-enabling scenarios - this yields the following (non-polyamorous) possibilities:

Possible F/F ships: 3 Possible F/M ships: 27 Possible M/M ships: 36

TOTAL POSSIBLE SHIPS: 66

Thus, assuming - again, for the sake of simplicity - that every possible ship is about equally likely to appeal to any given fan, we’d reasonably expect about (36/66) = 55% of all shipping-related media to feature M/M pairings. No particular prejudice in favour of male characters and/or against female characters is necessary for us to get there.

The point is this: before we can conclude that representation in shipping is being skewed by fan prejudice, we have to ask how skewed it would be even in the absence of any particular prejudice on the part of the fans. Or, to put it another way, we have to ask ourselves: are we criticising women in fandom - and let’s be honest here, this type of criticism is almost exclusively directed at women - for creating a representation problem, or are we merely criticising them for failing to correct an existing one?

YES YES YES HOLY SHIT YES FUCKING THANK YOU!

Also food for thought: the obvious correction to a lack of non-male representation in a story is to add more non-males. Female Original Characters are often decried as self-insertion or Mary Sues, particular if romance or sex is a primary focus.

I really appreciate when tumblr commentary is of the quality I might see at an academic conference. No joke.

This doesn’t even account  for the disparity in the amount of screen time/dialogue male characters to get in comparison to female characters, and how much time other characters spend talking about male characters even when they aren’t onscreen. This all leads to male characters ending up more fully developed, and more nuanced than female characters. The more an audience feels like they know a character, the more likely an audience is to care about a character. More network television writers are men. Male writers tend to understand men better than women, statistically speaking. Female characters are more likely to be written by men who don’t understand women vary well. 

But it’s easier to blame the collateral damage than solve the root problem.

Yay, mathy arguments. :)

This is certainly one large factor in the amount of M/M slash out there, and the first reason that occurred to me when I first got into fandom (I don’t think it’s the sole reason, but I think it’s a bigger one than some people in the Why So Much Slash debate give our credit for). And nice point about adding female OCs.

In some of my shipping-related stats, I found that shows with more major female characters lead to more femslash (also more het).  (e.g. femslash in female-heavy media; femslash deep dive) I’ve never actually tried to do an analysis to pin down how much of fandom’s M/M preference is explained by the predominance of male characters in the source media, but I’m periodically tempted to try to do so.

All great points. Another thing I notice is that many shows are built around the idea that the team or the partner is the most important thing in the universe. Watch any buddy cop show, and half of the episodes have a character on a date that is inevitably interrupted because The Job comes first… except “The Job” actually means “My Partner”.

When it’s a male-female buddy show, all of the failed relationships are usually, canonically, because the leads belong together. (Look at early Bones: she dates that guy who is his old friend and clearly a stand-in for him. They break up because *coughcoughhandwave*. That stuff happens constantly.) Male-male buddy shows write the central relationship the exact same way except that they expect us to read it as platonic.

Long before it becomes canon, the potential ship of Mulder/Scully or Booth/Bones or whatever lead male/female couple consumes the fandom. It’s not about the genders involved. Rizzoli/Isles was like this too.

If canon tells us that no other relationship has ever measured up to this one, why should we keep them apart? Don’t like slash of your shows, prissy writers? Then stop writing all of your leads locked in epic One True Love romance novel relationships with their same-sex coworkers. Give them warm, funny, interesting love interests, not cardboard cutouts…

And then we will ship an OT3.

The thrilling saga x