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warning: there's going to be talk of "problematic" things, smut, etc, but nothing graphic. this is fandom meta.
If you've been using AO3 for a while then, whether you realize it or not, there's a chance you've come across a user named astolat. With over 500 fics in dozens of fandoms, I'd be more surprised if you hadn't run across at least one of her fics.
Wait, wait, I'm getting ahead of myself! First, let me set the scene: It's 2007. In the past 7 years there have been a slew of authors and publishing companies suing fanfiction authors, suing fanfic archives, and demanding that fans stop "violating copyright" by posting fanfiction. Fanfiction.net is a common target, and in 2002 the site cedes to the demands in the hopes of saving their own ass, promptly banning and removing all NC-17 works from the site without notifying authors. There's a list of authors who request than any fics based on their works are permanently deleted. That list still exists on Fanfiction.net's guidelines page to this day.
This isn't the only form of censorship that's swept the fannish community. Fandom-specific fic communities (either with custom domains like the Harry Potter fansite FictionAlley, or hosted on sites like Livejournal, Dreamwidth, even Mibba) and multifandom fanfiction archive sites (Fanfiction.net, SlashFanfiction.com, FANlib, FanDomination) each have their own guidelines, with certain groups outright banning "slash," aka male/male works, or "femslash," aka female/female works. Some groups allow smut, and some groups take a vehement stance against the perversity. A few sites take a stand against RPF/Real Person Fiction; One site, FanDomination, even gets a cease & desist letter from a baseball player over a fic, which scares FanDomination and Fanfiction.net into banning RPF.
So the conversations arise: How do we create a space where people are free to post the fanfic that they want, and readers are free to enjoy it, without fear of harassment? A conversation starts brewing on Dreamwidth.
But first, enter: Chris Williams, Craig Singer, and David Williams, with a 3 million dollar investment in a writing site that would become FANlib— A commercial, multifandom fic-publishing platform where Intellectual Property holders could license their Property to the site, legally allowing fans to post fanfiction for the IP that FANlib has licensing deals with. On May 18th (barely one day after Astolat's "An Archive of One's Own") 2007, their site launches thanks to investment backing and a licensing deal with the show The L Word.
Right after the FANlib annoncement, Livejournal user Casperanza posts, "Dear Fandom: Can You Stop Saying that?" A rant about about the long-winded fandom discourse on the legality of fanfic, a direct response to FANlib's concept of 'legal fanfiction.'
"I keep hearing fans say that they themselves think fanfiction is an illegal/infringing activity, and I don't think that it is. There's been no legal ruling that says that it is (and in fact, quite the opposite: whenever unauthorized literary rewrites or retellings have gone to court, they've been declared transformative, and these were for-profit works, not even our not-for-profit pleasure zone.) I think when/if fanfiction goes to court--if it ever does, which I don't think it will--it will be declared to be transformative."
One comment on that post, from user Lamardeuse, reads:
"I'm so glad to have you on my flist to keep me up to date with the latest trends in fandom, because I totally missed the memo on this FanLib thing. And my god, ‶The launch of FanLib.com represents the coming of age of fan fiction, or "fanfic."″ Give me an effing break - wow, now we can finally achieve puberty because male-dominated corporate America has figured out a way to line their pockets through fanfic! I can feel myself finally becoming a woman."
Fans aren't happy with the commercialization of fic— they firmly believe that fic is not a job to earn money off of, and that the non-profit status of fic is what keeps it legal. They don't like that these corporate tech bros are attempting to rebrand fanfic as appealing to IP Holders, the people that were suing fanfic authors not even 5 years ago.
FANlib launches, and a year later it closes after being purchased by Disney and shut down. Many people shared their commentary on the closure, including Laura Hale/Partly_bouncy (who worked for FANlib briefly, and wrote an expose a year after the site opened) and Stewardess, who said,
""FanLib does not think of itself as a fanfiction archive."
Then what is FanLib? A naked advertising agency wearing a fanfiction archive suit? Yes."
It's clear by this point (March 2008) that fans, even the ones who have been involved in the conversations about the Archive of Our Own, are skeptical of fanfiction archives at best, and utterly vicious towards them at worst. So why did they embrace AO3?
May 17th, 2007, Astolat posts a blog to Dreamwidth and Livejournal, titled "An Archive of One's Own."
She lays the terms out clear: Fans need an archive that doesn't exploit their work, doesn't censor them, and has a clear legal standing.
"I think the necessary features would include:
- run BY fanfic readers FOR fanfic readers
- with no ads and solely donation-supported
- with a simple and highly searchable interface and browsable quicksearch pages
- allowing ANYTHING -- het, slash, RPF, chan, kink, highly adult -- with a registration process for reading adult-rated stories where once you register, you don't have to keep clicking through warnings every time you want to read
- allowing the poster to control her stories (ie, upload, delete, edit, tagging)
- allowing users to leave comments with the poster able to delete and ban particular users/IPs but not edit comment content (ie, lj style)
- code-wise able to support a huge archive of possibly millions of stories
- giving explicit credit to the original creators while clearly disclaiming any official status"
The fans quickly assembled. Experienced coders began giving advice on how to build the site, ideas for features to implement, discussions on whether the site should host ads, how the tagging and warnings system should function. People were quick to bring up Fanfiction.net as an example of how multifandom archives tend to be crushed under the weight of their own "success." In that comment, user Caitie expresses the need for some kind of broad content warning to stand between minors and adult fics, which would grow to become the iconic consent dialogue that the Archive is known for today.
This blog by Xenacryst compiles those conversations and a few others.
When asked how she intended to find a userbase, Astolat responded,
"if we build it we will come
Like I said to harriet_spy above talking about ff.net -- I do think in this case, if *WE* build it, *WE* will come. FF.net was bad in a whole host of ways even before they banned adult material (great way to BAN ADULTS, and drive the quality downward) -- bad searching, overwhelming signal to noise ratio, no real philosophy or connection to the community. (ff.net is ALSO run for advertising -- I suspect by now they are absolutely making a profit, although I find them less obnoxious than the fanlib people because they didn't deliberately start out that way.)
They don't know how to make it a place where most of us want to be, and so of course they end up with the people who can't find something better."
"Definitely a cool idea. I'm not much of a feminist, but seeing a group of men try to take over what has been a comfort zone for women to express themselves is really disgusting. I don't know any coding, but would love to have a Paypal subscription!"
When user Tienriu asked how Astolat intended to broach the concept of "chan," a term describing writings of underage sex, and the different laws in each country, Astolat responded,
"I don't like chan myself. But in a way, that makes me more rather than less leery of tossing it -- because a lot of times we are happy to find excuses to block out the stuff we don't like, even when there is not all that compelling a legal argument. I don't know the law even in the US on it, and so can't really talk about that specifically in the absence of good concrete data (no offense -- but I am by default always skeptical about being cited fragments of horror-story test cases. I would want to see the text of the law and the actual decision, and ideally have it explained to me by a knowledgable lawyer).
Hypothetically, it is certainly possible that investigation (which I am all for having done) would show that this one particular category added so much additional legal jeopardy that it was not worth the risk of hosting it. However, we have to keep in mind that there are also many legality arguments to be made against many other categories (RPF, nc-17, etc), if we consider all the countries where readers may be located. Also we would have to figure out just what the legal boundaries of the disproportionately risky category was -- I think of chan as "adult-minor" relationships; there is also the question of stories about kids having relationships among themselves, the distinction between older/younger kids, explicit stories vs. G/PG rated ones etc.
On a practical level, the archive would want to ask authors to extensively label their stories anyway, for searching/sorting purposes, so it would be easy to create searches where individual users could avoid seeing any particular category of stories that might be illegal in their own country. It would also be good if people could set preferences in their profile so they automatically weren't shown stories of any particular types they just didn't want to see at all (hey, maybe we can get rid of pairing wars while we are at it! we can only dream *g*). The archive and the nonprofit running it clearly should be set up in a country with less restrictive laws, and which does not make site owners liable for content posted by users."
The rules of the site have started to become clearer: On the Archive, no one will be subjected to censorship based on one person's "ick."
There's even a thread started about how the categories/warnings (taxonomy) should be implemented. Some users dislike the idea of being forced to restrain their works to pre-defined labels. Astolat responds,
"I don't see why we can't have both! A fluid tagging system layered on top of a fixed taxonomy would imo be ideal and provide a lot of this added flexibility.
I do think that for an archive on this scale, a base-level fixed taxonomy is critical for ensuring readers can get to a manageable base set of stories to consider reading. Imperfect, yes, but it's like democracy: the worst system except for all the others.
I would suggest having "caveat lector" and "deliberately uncategorized" options in this taxonomy, so people could choose to keep their stories out of the categories. Readers can then choose whether they want to see those stories listed, based on whether they are in a sort of casual browsing frame of mind or whether they are looking for something very specific"
Thus setting the grounds for the current Archive tagging/warning system, where there are canonical (filterable) tags and warnings that authors can choose to use, the option to write custom warnings and tags, or the option to forgo warnings and tags altogether— Such is every user's right, defined by the Archive Terms of Service.
How did the other multifandom archives react to this display of fannish community?
Well, one of the FanDomination founders decided to throw his 2 unwanted cents into the ring. I'm not going to bore you with his whole rant, because he's a wildly misogynistic bully, and because he spends most of the comment talking about shit that doesn't matter. But here's an excerpt anyways:
"Why does a fic reader/writer need to be on thier board at all? Do they have an investment in the operation? Also, why would there HAVE to be a female on the board? That seems pretty sexist to me to REQUIRE one to be 'legitimate'. Are you saying that males are incapable of truly understanding the nature and intricacies of fandom? Sounds like a bunch of feminazi horseshit to me.
-The Great Me of the Saturn Necklace, Jim."
.... Yeah. Okay, Jim.
Safe to say the other archives are a little jealous, and the project of AO3 hasn't even begun yet.
In 2009 the Archive entered open beta, welcoming all kinds of fans. By the time closed beta ended and open beta started, they'd amassed 668 fandoms; Some created during the closed beta include Supernatural, Bandom, American Idol RPF, Stargate, and Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
As an Adam Lambert fan of the past decade, I'm most interested in the American Idol RPF section of the site, because as of February 2010, there were 369 American Idol RPF fics on the site, and 201 fics on the site tagged with Adam, which was over 100 more fics than any other character in the American Idol RPF category besides Kris Allen with 165 fics. Kris and Adam's pairing tag had 175 uses. Astolat herself has written 40 Kradam fics, some of which I happen to enjoy.
But it just goes to show that Astolat was right: "If we build it, we will come." The Archive had no issue finding users seeking refuge from censorship and banning, and RPF communities were no exception. There were 286 My Chemical Romance fanfics as of that same time, and thousands upon thousands of fics for bigger fandoms like Stargate and Harry Potter. 409 Harry Potter fics were tagged as M/M, more than any other relationship category, and a truly astounding number considering the Harry Potter fandom's history of censoring slash shippers.
The most popular Supernatural pairing at the time? Wincest. There were over 240 Dean/Sam fics, and a meager 64 Destiel (Dean/Cas) fics, in comparison. It's not particularly shocking if you know that Astolat herself wrote about Wincest a lot.
Back in modern day, fandom spaces are once again overrun with 'concerns' of "degeneracy," leading some naive fandomgoers to beg or demand that the Archive get rid of the maximum content inclusivity— the reason the Archive of Our Own was even created, the principles that it has stood on since it was merely a thought in Astolat's head— and instead acquiesce to censorship, in the manner of Moms for Liberty.
This is not an essay to argue the morality of fiction. This is an essay about why the Archive was created. What the Archive of Our Own stands for is an effort to create a place by readers, for readers, where authors wouldn't have their fics and accounts deleted just because the moderators spontaneously decided to change the site rules, and where the site could curate a legal team to defend itself and it's users from unjust cease & desist letters.
I have no conclusion for this part, but I'm going to curb myself here, because this is already so long. Maybe I'll do a part 2 later, so I can cover the more recent years? We'll see.
disclaimer: I volunteer for the AO3/OTW, but my opinions are solely my own. I am not speaking on behalf of the org. [I'm obligated to disclose this.]
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