oh no

a little disturbed by the way the spn fandom reacts to the scene of dean being turned into a vampire though. like it's some sort of lighthearted fun rainbow colored evidence of spn being gay or proof of bi dean but like.... ma'am that was a violent assault with extremely disturbing sexual undertones that left him traumatized and fighting for his life. that ain't the win you think it is.

spn stans are so terrified of women existing within the world of the show that they will literally rewrite canon to say "dean never truly loved any woman" or they will say absolutely absurd shit like "jensen ackles just doesn't have chemistry with women." and yet they still insist that they're not at all misogynistic or biphobic.

I think when Sam kept Dean from flirting back with a waitress who was flirting with him it was a violation of Dean’s bodily autonomy.

Sam did this because he clingy and can’t stand Dean having a relationship that might take attention away from him of course.

Also all of this is an uncomfortable metaphor for abuse

Sam disrespecting Dean’s homemade EMF meter is an uncomfortable metaphor for abuse.

When Sam wouldn’t let Dean eat snacks any time they were out it was because Sam has control issues. Also a violation of Dean’s autonomy. Dean can’t even eat something without Sam having something to say about it.

I think when Sam told Dean how to breathe in the plane it was an uncomfortable metaphor for abuse. Also.

s8 sam: [gets so angry about his brother having a boyfriend that he sends a hunter out to stalk and later attempt to kill said boyfriend]

his stans: dean sending a fake text so sam can’t participate in benny’s murder is a violation of sam’s bodily autonomy

i know i sound like a broken record but like. fandom will come to false conclusions about dean’s interiority and capacity for self-reflection based purely on crude class signifiers and it’s inescapable. it’s in every other fic. every other text post. 10+ years of insulting fanon about perpetually alexythimic dean and his put-upon stanford-educated brother. i hate it!!!

It's excellent commentary that bears repeating bc so much of fandom seems to be completely oblivious to how self-aware and in-touch with his emotions Dean is. As early as in season 1 he's verbalizing to Sam that he feels trapped in the hunting life and is proud of Sam for doing what he feels is not in the cards for him. He is constantly talking about his feelings in ways that display a rich understanding of his internal state, and when he refuses to talk about them to other people it's usually because he's in fight-or-flight mode and literally doesn't feel like there's time for that or simply bc they're his feelings and he doesn't have to talk about them if he doesn't want to!!!! Especially to people who he doesn't trust at that moment or has been recently hurt by!!!

It makes me think of the truly infuriating way people joke about the "single man tear" as though Dean doesn't cry probably more than any other character on the show, and that 90% of the time it's more than a single tear, and that even when it is just one tear that's still a tear that's still crying!!! Sometimes people only cry one tear!! He's still openly displaying his emotions. Crying but only shedding a few tears is actually not toxic masculinity or repression lol it's literally still crying and being emotionally expressive

(ps also anger is an emotion and sometimes a valid one actually especially when you've been repeatedly objectified parentified and traumatized so when Dean lets himself be angry sometimes it can be a good thing actually)

Coming out as a "Don't give a shit that Sam got locked in the panic room" truther.

Oh. No. Sam got locked in a room and had some really fucking cool hallucinations that were really fun to watch. Should I call the police?

Oh no he might have died. This is the dying show, where people die, and where people get killed, and where people get locked in rooms to keep them from doing things they wanted to do because everyone else decided it was a bad idea, which is, at worst, lame of them.

how exactly did the samgirls delude themselves into thinking that violation of bodily autonomy is somehow a theme that belongs SOLELY to sam to the extent where the very idea of it occurring to any other characters is considered Stolen Sam Valour. who came up with this shit and are we allowed to jail them

Yeah, that too.

Literally the only downside is making too much work for the Abuse team. (Cry me a river, guys. In my day, we had like 2 active people, and even at the much smaller size, that was a problem.)

If you want, you can let authors know it’s not allowed and then report their asses if they’re rude about it. Or you can just report them in the first place.

But this bullshit should be stamped out.

Wait can someone explain what I'm missing here because it sounds like a bunch of whiny babies being upset that people are monetizing their own work. I get its a site policy but 1. Why are you being a cop you losers and 2. Who cares? Why is it a rule?

If I'm missing something here I'm genuinely curious. Who is it hurting to drop a ko-fi on your page? Or do y'all just love being cops?

I did not donate seven years of free labor to build AO3 so that some other dipshit could monetize my work.

And yes, it is monetizing AO3 itself because the whole reason people want to put kofi links there is that it’s easy to find fics on AO3. AO3 also lacks constant competition from other ads.

AO3 is as awesome as it is because we built it to not be monetized.

People who don’t get that are shitting on the people who made and still make AO3 possible with their work and their donations.

--

Go post your kofi links on a corporate site like tumblr/twitter/etc., not one built by your fellow fans. Disobeying the AO3 rules is just rude.

--

Look, when you do whatever on a big social media site, you're fucking with corporate overlords.

When you're doing stupid shit on AO3, you're coming to a dinner party I planned and hosted and then pissing into the flower arrangement in the middle of the table.

The only whiny babies here are the ones demanding other fans provide them with a storefront for free.

You don't sell your vegetables at a charitable food bank. You rent a booth at the farmer's market. You don't set up your book kiosk in the lobby of a public library. You go to a flea market, or somewhere else that allows you to set up a book kiosk. AO3 is fandom's food bank. It is fandom's public library. It is not your storefront. If you want to sell your work, don't do it on a nonprofit website volunteers built for the *explicit* purpose of creating an anti-capitalist fandom oasis.

There’s also the VERY REAL problem that the main defense of transformative work -- aka fanfiction -- to keep us from getting our asses sued into the stratosphere by Disney, Marvel, etc. is that we don’t profit from it. If you are writing someone else’s IP for money without their permission, they CAN sue you, and if it’s somebody as big as Fox, Disney, etc., they WILL sue you. The main way I can tell fandom has done a good job of making safe spaces for ourselves is that these young’uns coming up don’t remember getting Cease & Desist letters from very scary lawyers.

So that’s why you report people putting kofi links on AO3 - because by doing so, they’re painting a giant fucking target on fandom’s back.

I'm sorry but when fanart gets to be rightly monetized by artists of all kinds and fan writing is the only form of fan creative endeavor that gets this weird ass "noooo don't monetize this you're gonna make *me personally* receive a lawyer threat" double standard, I don't care that Ao3 is "your baby", I still think it's a shitty rule to enforce and y'all are being fandom cops. I want my Ao3 account to stay up so I'm playing by the rules, but I still v much think that one in particular needs stricken off.

I understand that the legal threats used to be very real but when's the last time someone actually got sued for writing fanfic? because my google-fu couldn't find anything that wasn't at least ten years old by now.

1. Fan artists get their for-pay stuff taken down all the time.

2. You have missed the entire point about monetizing other people’s work.

Monetize your fic on Patreon (where it’s banned but you’ll probably get away with it), not on a site built by your fellow fans’ unpaid labor they gave with the expectation of it not being monetized.

It is disgusting to expect other fans to build you a free storefront, which is what “boo hoo, you’re cops” is saying.

If you sold on Etsy, you’d expect to pay Etsy a share of your proceeds. Ditto Patreon. Ditto any storefront. Those have paid staff building the site. They’re there to be stores.

AO3 does not have that automatic mechanic, and even if you personally chose to donate a portion of what you earned, adding commerce changes the site culture, which is precisely why it’s banned.

It’s much less about lawsuits and much more about ruining your community while taking advantage of your neighbors.

Anyone who thinks that’s cool is an awful community member.

hey so uhhhhh just a heads up: ao3 may or may not be in deep legal trouble. specifically for mistreatment of volunteers and lax compliance with certain laws, afaict.

i highly recommend you back up any stories you have and any favorite stories/authors you'd miss.

here's how i'm doing it:

notes: it will skip any fics that are locked to archive users only (the ones with a blue padlock next to the author's name in the listing), and you'll have to go back and grab those yourself. if your whole account is under archive lock, i highly recommend unlocking it for the duration of the time it takes to grab and download them (a few minutes to a few hours, depending on whether you have <20 or multiple hundreds like i do lol) before locking them again.

back up everything you love!! back up everything you moderately like!! back up anything you wouldn't like to lose!! even if the ao3 mess pans out to nothing, it's always good to have a "just in case".

link to a twit thread with more details shared by op in the comments:

It's best if you read the thread and come to your own conclusions since there's a lot of information, and I hate that Twitter's character limit makes this obnoxious as fuck to read.

What I'm getting from this is basically AO3s legal team are Copyright Law lawyers, but they don't have any Website lawyers. These are two different branches of laws to know, and the Copyright lawyers are playing a role they're not suited for.

These Copyright lawyers who are not equipped to be Website lawyers are the people the Trust and Safety team have to run all their decisions through. This is why your harassment cases and legitimate complaint forms take forever to process and more often than not they do nothing about it.

OTW who runs AO3 is systemically fucked, and are taking no steps to unfuck the process that allows extremely illegal non-fictional CSAM and racist conduct to grow and be preserved under their watch. And this is with them working with a surplus of donation money they could use to get real Website lawyers.

There's more in the thread I can't/don't feel the need to summarize. All statements are for what's considered feasible legal conduct of the organization and the site and NOT about content policing.

TL:DR- OTW is in a dangerous spot legally due to their own negligence and incompetence for how the site is systemically run. (Conduct, not content!) Nothing will happen until an official investigation is led by some department, and/or a group of volunteers go and lawyer up. If a process for this course of action has already begun or not is currently unknown. Don't panic, but feel free to preserve what you can as things develop and are revealed.

My own note, you can actually download stories locked to Archive Users Only in calibre, if you have an AO3 account, it just takes an extra step to log into AO3 through Calibre:

Go into Fanficfare > Configure Fanficfare > Select the personal.ini tab > edit personal.ini 

Scroll down to the password section (Probably don’t actually have to do this, but I am a neat freak) 

Paste this, replacing the generic with your login and password:

[www.archiveofourown.org]

username:youruserID

password:yourpassword

##default is false

is_adult:true

Click Okay, restart calibre, should be able to access now.

Having read the thread, along with a number of other connected threads, there is no reason the believe AO3 is going to go down

(that's not to say you shouldn't back up your own fics, or save copies of other people's fics for personal use, it's always a good idea to have backups)

the linked thread is discussing institutional problems with OTW's Legal and Policy & Abuse committees (although the latter primarily in the ways the thread's author believes they are being negatively impacted by legal)

It's primarily a conversation about the OTW having structural problems and being slow to react/change when needed, but three accusations of specific breaches of the law which could get the OTW into trouble are made:

None of these could get AO3 taken down, and 2 of them are provably untrue

Systems have confirmed the first point is not true. While works are not retained on the archive for the 90 days, the archive keeps complete back-ups for longer than that, so the work can be restored if needed by the authorities. This is, as rahaeli points out, a pretty inefficient way of handling things, but being inefficient is not a breach of the law

Rahaeli corrects themself in their own thread when they realise that COPPA does not apply to the specific type of non-profit AO3 is, so that's moot

The GDPR point is slightly more complicated. I'm not a lawyer, but I work in the finance industry in the UK handling massive quanities of personal data, so I am required by law to be trained on GDPR.

Email addresses are not automatically personal data under GDPR. They can be, but only if they contain other personal information. So if your email is brony47@gmail, that's not personal data. If it's john.smith@company it is, because it contains your wallet name and employer. So, while it's fairly unlikely when dealing with AO3 accounts belonging to under 13s, especially as school issued emails are basically never wallet names because they just deal with too many people for that to be sustainable, it is technically possible that retaining this info is a breach of GDPR.

However, even if AO3 was found to have breached GDPR, that would not result in the website being taken down with no warning or fics being purged. That's not how any of this works.

AO3 would face fines (I don't actually know how those fines work for non-profits, since they're usually a % of annual turnover - I assume donations would be treated as turnover for the ICO's purposes, but I may be wrong about that).

It's possible that fine could be steep enough that the archive couldn't meet server costs and would ultimately need to shut down, but the ICO do not possess the ability to shut the site down, and AO3 owns its own servers so if the worst happened and the archive shut down, they would have plenty of time to warn people. It would not just vanish, that's not what the ICO does.

(The specific affected account would be need to be deleted, but since it would already be suspended and invisible to users, that would not affect any end-users)

(Also the entire process of it going through the ICO and being debated to get to the point of the fine would probably take at least a year, this is a massive pan-european beauracratic body, it is not famous for its efficiency)

None of this is me saying rahaeli doesn't have valid points, or that reform isn't needed, generally I agree that it is, and I think rahaeli's suggestions about what to change sound reasonable, although I'm not an expert and not on either of the affect teams, so that's just some rando's opinion.

But the this post is not about that, this post is about people worrying about the archive being taken down, and again, that is not what is going on here!

TLDR; back up fics if you want, but AO3 is not in legal trouble, and even if it was, the type of legal trouble being discussed would not result in the entire archive just going down without prior warning

thank you for this! i'm unversed in the harder laws around csem/csam that it was highly worrying that they weren't doing their jobs with regards to it (destroying or ignoring what is essentially criminal evidence instead of complying with the law, because it seems like none of the volunteers had been informed of how or what to do with it), and i wasn't entirely sure what that meant, only that it was Very Bad.

they technically can comply with (most of) the law, but they haven't been because the people responsible of taking care of it, as far as i can tell, weren't told they were responsible, and i didn't know what that meant. i'm still not sure what that means, but iiuc bureaucracy takes ages regardless, and this was blatantly ignorance and negligence, not malice.

there is an added dimension of one of the ex-volunteers having grounds to sue for libel -- no idea if they actually will, they obviously care deeply about the archive, and i haven't looked for their statements on the matter -- and i'm not entirely sure what that would do to the archive either, though it would probably take several months at bare minimum, in hindsight.

i'm also not sure how UK laws differ from US laws, but i'll trust that GPDR is at least comparable across countries, and i'm pretty sure erroneously retaining easily-destroyed slightly illegal information wouldn't be anything to take down a whole website for.

you know what I don’t think I’ve expressed my rage about that ‘cas as the battered woman to dean’s abusive partner’ take enough. i fucking hate that post. i fucking hate that post, i hate that take, it’s one of my least favourite things any of you fuckers have ever said about dean, person who made that post you know who you are, people who liked and reblogged and agreed with that post you know who you are, this is not an invitation to come argue with me about vagueing or to defend your (incorrect) point of view, this is only to establish my burning dislike for the twistedness and awfulness of that post and it’s implications and my everlasting distrust in all of you for making or agreeing with it, everyone else if you’ve never seen that post and are not sure what I’m talking about I’m happy to hear that <3 wish that were me!

Sometimes a fanon interpretation shared by so many people will gaslight you into thinking YOU're not smart enough to understand it when, in reality, no, the collective of a fandom can indeed just be misinterpreting a character beyond parody. It's not you, it's them

Sorry but I am sick to death of analyzing late SPN as a show where all conflict is Dean's fault and only his behaviors need to change.

There is a very specific genre of posts that aren't meant to be deancrit, but are all about us patting Dean on the head for being a good boy and apologizing for being sooo mean. Poor Dean is just like this because x, y, and z internal issues (never any external issues with other characters he is having conflicts with—all those conflicts are entirely on Dean and in Dean's head but it's okay we can forgive him for being so irrational, because we all know Dean just can't manage like everyone else can). Everyone else got an A+ on their mental health report card after the decades of torture and lobotomies and everyone's behavior is perfect except Dean's. Dean is just more broken than everyone else that poor little guy, and well we are coddling him and wrapping him up in a blankie because we understand him he's our poor little meow meow, but also we want everyone to know that all conflict that happens IS Dean's fault and all the toxicity in TFW would go away if we fixed Dean. Nobody else actually needs to change. Everything is fixed by fixing Dean. And that is just not accurate, and I am not going to pretend it is.

For me: pure Dean apologism era ended acknowledging other characters have broken behaviors in the late seasons that they are not changing and are not getting meaningfully called out for when they SHOULD is my new best friend.

Sometimes a fanon interpretation shared by so many people will gaslight you into thinking YOU're not smart enough to understand it when, in reality, no, the collective of a fandom can indeed just be misinterpreting a character beyond parody. It's not you, it's them

(previous pinned post)

For those who don’t know what this is about, there’s a seller on mercari and ebay who is selling printed copies of scripts from the collection we built. Just... printing them, faking autographs on them, and selling them for profit.

To be clear, we posted all of these scripts for the entire fandom to enjoy (and mel has the numbers on just how much we spent collectively on them, but suffice to say we could’ve bought a relatively nice new car for what the collection cost to build). We WANT them to be freely available to anyone who wants to read them! Heck, print them out for yourselves so you can hug your favorite episode! This was our goal! Preserving a bit of fandom history.

The second part of our goal was to archive them, and then give them all back to the fandom and raise a bit of money for charity (see the previous pinned post link above). We’ve had nearly every script in the collection autographed through the generous donation of MANY fans who’ve walked them through con autograph lines for us, and raised thousands of dollars for various charities, with more giveaways coming up soon.

The thing is, all of these scripts are ALSO the property of Warner Brothers. If they know about our collection, they’ve allowed it to continue to exist because we haven’t profited from it. We SPENT a lot of money assembling it, and have raised a lot of money for charity because it exists. WE have not profited at all.

(heck, just what I’ve spent on shipping scripts back and forth for autographs over the last few years could’ve probably covered my mortgage payment this month... the usps employees know me well lolol)

But someone clearly profiting off scripts that can be tracked back to our collection? because they’re literally printouts which we can trace to the versions we uploaded? If WB does even a cursory amount of digging on where this person is getting their scripts from... poof, we’re gone forever. This... is incredibly Not Cool.

Not to mention the fact that they are charging, in some cases, hundreds of dollars for things anyone can have for free. You can even fake your own autographs from your favorite actors! Do not give this person money. We’ve been reporting them to mercari and ebay, but it’s had no effect. If you HAVE purchased anything from them and are concerned about the authenticity of what you bought, we’ll be happy to answer questions.

This is incredibly frustrating all around. Apologies to anyone who’s trying to access any of the scripts, but we’re trying to protect the entire collection and the years of work by dozens of people who helped to assemble it.