fandom palace

Foot-boop 🐾❤️

im totally normal about them

Shit like the Great Purges and the Strikethrough of Livejournal eventually led to fans banding together to create A03, which I would have absolutely KILLED for when I was 15.

Back up ao3 was created by fans?

It’s…right on the main page. 

I love this because I will bet you that persefv has read that bit we are all so inundated with hyperbole and advertising that says that the consumer is somehow in charge of whatever product they are shilling that we all just assumed this was another sales tactic.

But we’re not even… selling anything…  *quiet sobs*

No ads. No subscriptions. No data selling.

We are the definition of “what it says on the tin.”

Is there any way to spread this info? 

THE OTW WAS CREATED BY FANS SO WE’D HAVE AN ARCHIVE THAT WASN’T SUBJECT TO CORPORATE REVIEW. 

Nonprofit, so that nobody could ever say, “this isn’t making enough money; it’s getting shut down.” (See: Geocities, Quizilla, Figment, G+.) With lawyers involved and a firm awareness of the legalities of fanfic, so nobody would decide “we’ve gotten a nasty letter from a megacorporation with lawyers, so we’re hiding because we can’t afford to face a lawsuit. (Jedi Hurtaholics, Trevizo’s Millennium site.) With teams, so that an argument between co-mods didn’t result in the destruction of a whole archive. (Gryffindor Tower, Detention.)

AO3 IS OUR SITE.

It is by fans, for fans. Fans do all the coding. All the legal paperwork. All the abuse/tos violation complaints. Fans make all the choices about policies. Fans decide how to run the fundraisers. Fans write the blog posts. All the volunteer staff are fans; all the people who train them are fans. Fans wrangle all the tags. 

(And the other OTW projects, too. Fans manage the entries at Fanlore. Fans run the Open Doors project. Fans publish Transformative Works and Cultures.)

EVERYONE WORKING FOR THE OTW LOVES FANDOM. Wants it to survive. Wants it to be awesome for everyone.

(Knows that it can’t be awesome for everyone; some approaches to fandom just clash hard. But they strive to minimize those clashes as much as possible, because they love fandom.) 

AO3 is not some company that decided, “we’ll make a site for fanfic and then…” I don’t know what people are thinking is the reason. Money? Data harvesting? Tax shelter? Amusement and pity?

Nope; AO3 was fans saying, “Livejournal sucks; we’re tired of this fucked-up ‘rebuild every three years’ garbage; WE NEED TO OWN THE DAMN SERVERS.”

That’s the “of our own” part of the name. OTW isn’t a “them” running the site “for us.” It’s “us” making places for “us” to share what we love with others of “us.” 

The absolutely unmatched best friends energy on and off screen

LOTR & HOBBIT TEXT POSTS

I wish lesbians were as easy to find in real life as they are on tumblr

11 FUCKING THOUSAND NOTES ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME WHERE ARE YOU ALL COME DATE ME

ok

update: we are dating

update: we are married

update: we knocked up

This is the cutest story on the entirety of Tumblr, I swear to god!!!!!

Update: had a baby together

Update: he’s 1 year old today

Update: he’s 2 today

Update: baby number two, electric boogaloo

Update: guess who became a big brother yesterday?

on-screen lovers and off-screen besties is literally the best dynamic ever

Same roach, same

HE LOVES LOVE!!!!!!!!!!

when 14 wears his slutty little glasses 🫶

The Importance of Good Omens to an Old Queer

There are so many things about the whole Good Omens experience that make an old queer very happy:

In the story:

- It’s about a couple who love each other, who are by social standards definitely not supposed to love each other.

We exist.

- They have loved each other since before history/time began.

We have always existed.

- They needed to hide their love, even from themselves, for millennia, or risk death.

We hid.

- They come to a safe spot where they can acknowledge their love without fearing for their lives. They can expect to be treated like any other couple.

We don’t always need to hide now.

In the story of the story:

- The book was written in the’80’s, when Aziraphale’s and Crowley’s relationship simply could not be told as a love story if the goal was to have any real chance of popular success.

- It took almost 30 years for it to be adapted for the screen and in that time things had changed so much that it is unequivocably a love story, with huge popular success.

In reality:

- The author and the actors are outspoken supporters of LGBTQ+ rights.

- Michael and David clearly utterly adore each other, and freely show it. Just decades ago such open affection between two men would have caused rumors that could have ended their careers.

Finally, and this one kills me and makes me so, so happy:

- There are MANY younger fans for whom a lot of the above will absolutely not hit as hard.

They grew up in a different world than I did.

i remember. let's not go back there, mkay? no gatekeeping. only kindness.

do any other gomens fans end up in a situation where you have to explain gomens to someone who doesn't know jack shit about it and are faced with the reality that you have no fucking clue how to explain the shitshow that your brain has become