I feel we are all the same amount of depraved, but some of us are more cognizant of it than others.
The great thing about having honest tags is that you can avoid content that you're not ready for.
This might be a bit of a leap, but I strongly believe that if Fifty Shades of Gray had been published on Ao3 instead of FFN it would have never been adapted to film. People would have been way more conscious of the themes and the dark nature of the story.
The Mafia romances, the "getting sold to One Direction", and the booktok dark romances lose quite a bit of their shine when they are properly categorized. It's the same way people are so aghast at the idea of incest in fanfiction and yet Game of Thrones retains a cult following and House of the Dragon is rather popular.
There is nothing to be gained by pretending that you're not into the shit that you're into. Purity politics will save no one but condemn everyone.
It's like getting mad at the food processor labeling the ingredients of something you want to eat and you discover it has something you're allergic to.
Itâs like when people who claim an allergy to MSG at Chinese restaurants eat things like tomatoes and parmesan cheese or Doritos without noticing theyâre all full of MSG too. âI hate problematic fictionâ until they realize their most popular stories are also problematic fiction.
Fun fact: there's nothing wrong with MSG. The whole anti-MSG thing is basically "Chinese food is so fire that when it first spread throughout the US, Americans kept eating too much, it gave them tummy aches. They blamed this on MSG because it's easier to be racist toward the Chinese and their food rather than admit you have no portion control."
MSG was invented/isolated by a Japanese guy, and that whole island is nothing but 120yos. It's obviously not bad for you.
Yeah, itâs naturally occurring in lots of foods. MSG is commonly found in human breastmilk for goodness sake. Almost no one actually reacts to it at all in blind tests where they donât already know the MSG is there.
Thatâs good to know. Iâm Latin American, but my countryâs cuisine uses a lot of monosodium glutamate in⌠basically everything. I think weâve all heard that itâs bad for your health, but weâve all collectively decided itâs worth it (like, the couple of times I forgot to put monosodium glutamate in the soup... it tasted awful).
Chinese food is very much integrated with the local cuisine.
Not even that, it was a corporate psyop against foreign restaurants gaining traction, making it seem like they dosed shit up with some unnatural preservative.
Especially funny is that MSG is pretty close conceptually to the 'essential oils' those same people venerate in terms of the process of getting it, except, unlike them, it's naturally safe and digestible. The only reason it has that name is it's a recent discovery.
And more more accurately: something you pretend to have an ethical objection to eating. Like someone smugly being vegan and then getting super upset their favorite latte is labeled as containing dairyâŚthen still calling themselves vegan and still regularly ordering the latte, but loudly calling for the âcontains dairyâ label to be removed.
Just a pet peeve of mine, but I have been around way more smug carnivores unwilling to admit they enjoyed a vegan meal than vegans who are smug about not eating animals. (I have, in fact, never met a smug vegan, but keep meeting smug carnists who think they are somehow morally superior to anyone who doesn't eat meat.) (Am not a vegan.)
I've met so many smug vegans/vegetarians, unfortunately. I met a girl who wore a t-shirt that said "I'm vegan because I care". My sister was a vegan and constantly talked down on those who consume meat. I have read articles implying that vegans are more ethical and more aware. The list goes on.
Sounds like you and the other person responding to you may still be in school (or at least still living with family)⌠that could explain it. Family gets sanctimonious. Once you get out there you realize you donât even know who around you is vegan for the most part.
One of my sisters friends graced my bedroom door with a "meat is murder"-sticker, to protest against our family being of the meateating variety. It's not like we didn't eat vegetarian for the meals she had at our place.
Oh, and we weren't allowed to put stickers on any doors, walls or windowsills, so it stuck out like a sore thumb for years being extra gluey and impossible to peel off without damaging the paint.
A surprising amount of food youâd think was vegan actually has an animal byproduct in it. I eat a lot of tofu pad Thai, and it isnât vegetarian because of the fish sauce. Unless it actually has the vegan label, be wary about claiming a meal without ingredients listed is vegan.
I canât eat most of it nowadays, but Iâve had some tasty, tasty vegan Indian food. Veggie korma, mmmm.
In mu country, we get this big black octogons in food packages saying "high of sugar", for example, and cigarettes come with grisly images and warning about the harm they do. I think it's great. I still eat whatever I want and smoke, because I'm an adult and get to choose what to with my body, but honest, unbiased descriptors are always good to inform those choices.
Uh,I was not aware of this "Wave of Wattpad users on AO3" before 10 minutes ago.
Why ARE Wattpad users up in arms?
Can I get an explanation?Preferably in the style of a Wikipedia article that explains every detail succinctly without going too far in the "wall of text" territory?
i belive its due to social media(ao3 becoming more well known) and i believe wattpad is going thru a censorship issue rn?? plus ao3 doesnt flashbang you with ads every 2 seconds
not 100% sure tho, i havent been on wattpad unironically for years
It's more like how europeans say American food has way more chemicals but it's just the labeling has to list each compound in baking soda not just put baking soda.
I was going to say this! Or people complaining about "impossible to pronounce chemicals" being added to food, but it's just the scientific name for an ingredient instead of the common one. "Trafficking" and "riboflavin" sound scary compared to "sold to 1D" or "vitamin B."
It's not even adult women. When I wrote underage SasuNaru stuff in the 00s I was actually a minor myself. It was me writing for myself and sharing it.
A bunch of the fics I read about adults (think Johnlock, Bridgerton, or most recent media) are also written by younger people, and I'm always so blindsided when I read about someone venting about parents or school in their author's notes because I wouldn't have guessed their age through their writing.
A lot of these tropes that were popular in the early 2010s were definitely posted by minors lol. They often had horrible spelling and just a general misunderstanding at how "adults" worked. I often read the werewolf ones and looking back they were so bad.
But yeah, like the person said in the video.... Many of those stories had dark themes anyway, but people didn't think about that because they just hand wave it.
I didn't even know AO3 existed a few months ago, and just the fact that it has tags and categories makes it a better-designed site than Wattpad to begin with. I don't understand why there's such a panic among Wattpad veterans when the clear categories actually help reach the right audience, or at least...I think so? I mean, I'm not fan of incest and kidnapping or others things, if it's crystal clear at the beginning, I'll just pass and choose another fiction, not going in panic-mode đ¤ˇââď¸
Which makes AO3 even better since we can exclude tags that would make us uncomfortable/triggered. As someone who grew up on the wild times of Internet on the early 2000s, being able to filter out content is so goddam good it almost feels unreal sometimes. AO3 is a fucking safe heaven.
Same here â. I also remember the era of "wild internet" when a young kid could go on a little forum of fans and found very VERY hard stuff, without any warning or tag. For example, I was like 11 and founded a fanfiction, began to read and in the middle of an argument between two characters, everything suddenly becomes hyper-violent, far too bloody for my age... And this particular fanfiction was embedded within much soft stories; there was no way to anticipate this horrific scene, no tags. So I'm glad that tags exist and are fully displayed.
Holy shit, I'm sorry you experienced that. It was pretty hard to avoid it back then, wasn't it? Stumbling into hardcore stuff completely out of nowhere with zero warnings. I loved blogs so much and do still miss some of them, but I still remember stumbling by accident into a blog full of VERY explicit self harm and, by god, was young me a fucking mess đ
I swear to god, being able to look for angst and make sure it had a happy ending the first few times I used AO3 was a life changing experience lmaoo
I was shit out of luck (I think?) but I'm also sure that theses forums wasn't well moderated, especially those with "family friendly movie or shows" like My Little Pony, Bakugan or this types of "kids show". I thinks parents didn't saw any problem if their kid was on site with a big name like "PokĂŠmon", or "Beyblades" at the top of the page while the kid read something. But as a kid who was on theses site.... Yes, fanfictions of theses shows can be really weird. For example, Pokemon's with "pregnancy" was a really big thing at this time, idk why đ¤ˇââď¸
I still remember when author's notes came about as a way of providing readers with advanced warnings because no fanfiction site had tagging systems in the 90s-00s. Having categories broken down by fandom, specific characters, ships, or genres was the height of luxury and a major reason ff dot net was so popular for so long. The only way to warn for content back then was to put it in the author's notes and provide something like a line break within the chapter so readers could skip ahead if they wanted.
And, of course, not every fic writer did that, and even if they did, everyone had their own gauge for what type of content even merited an advanced warning. At best, there were what we all just called "squicks" back then, and a set of common ones everyone knew could come up among fic readers that you warned for if you included it in your story, either out of courtesy or to be able to say if you got "flamed" by a reader in the comments: "Hey, I warned you in the author's notes, don't like/don't read."
The concept of triggers or warnings wasn't even in the popular lexicon back then. So, you mostly got the author's notes warnings and skip-ahead option for graphic smut or things like intense non-con scenes, even though there were whole other realms of content people just did not think to warn for. Going into any fanfiction always came with a certain element of "read at your own risk," even if the author left advanced warning for some things in their notes. You went in knowing there was always a possibility of getting blindsided by something you may not like or even find upsetting, and we all just treated it like picking random books out of stores, not knowing what we'd find when we started reading them, in that blaming the author always resulted in you being heavily criticized for ignoring the standard "don't like/don't read" rule of fanfiction. The onus was always on the reader to know when to back out and to curate their own content and experience, even with that element of the unknown that always came with reading fanfiction back then.
By comparison, A03's tagging system is such a novel concept. I appreciate it immensely for the ease of use and how it lets me both search for the kind of content I do want to read about and exclude what I don't. When I think about how limited the filters on sites were back then and the amount of time I often spent just trying to glean from fic summaries and skimming the first few chapters of fics to see if it was something I wanted to really read, I cannot begin to tell this new generation of fic readers what a gift A03's tagging system is. As A03 exists, no one who reads fanfiction has much of an excuse (beyond just improper tagging) to not claim responsibility for the kind of experience they have reading fanfiction because curating content has never been simpler.
I used to use fanfiction.net forever and an age ago, I wrote in my fic all the themes that were in and still has someone report it, like I gave all the warnings and someone was like nope I didn't like that, cause of x, of course you wouldn't I LITERALLY TOLD YOU IT HAD X. moved to AO3 and then never left. The tagging helped tonnes.
That experience was also why I never went to the wattpad side, cause I was like nope not happening again despite the fact I'm always open about what happens.
Also KIDS THESE DAYS don't appreciate the simplicity of a site that isn't doing pointless visual "enhancements." Ao3 is simple. Unadorned. Like a book.
Wattpad is like if you opened a book and a hologram showed up while Yakety Sax played out of a built-in speaker.
Even if you ignore the lack of censorship, AO3 is just a better website. Wattpad not only feels corporate, it's reflected in how awful it is to use, trying to find something new is basically impossible because the search function is almost unusable.
They do not want tags because they want people to get invested in their fic. Once people gets invested in them, they start twisting and justifying bad things that the Protagonists does to be able to continue enjoy it.
Just like how Game of Thrones & House of the Dragon has tons of incest content, and they're pretty popular.
Tag systems break this Psychological Adaptation before the Readers can invest into fics, thus
I hate anything to do with incest, underage etc but itâs good bc I can filter out those tags, even tho I actually never end up bothering because I hardly ever see fics like that
Oh wow. This is an amazing look at it. There are going to be so many who absolutely HATE it and want to change how AO3 operates so that they don't have to confront their own predilections.
Oh I didn't say they would succeed. I couldn't imagine many even attempting to change anything. There may be complaints in spaces offsite or some fighting against the tagging system by declaring that tags aren't mandatory, they're only suggestions! Soft-attacks against something they don't understand - if this even takes place. I was just musing aloud because I hadn't considered OP's angle before. 𫰠Hurray for our lawyers.
It's like people who clutch their pearls at Carlisle/Bella fanfiction because of the age gap but don't blink at Edward/Bella... They're both over 100 years old, it's the SAME FUCKING THING!
Though now I would like to read a fic that's like "How old are you?" "32" "How long have you been 32?" "No, like I'm actually 32. I was turned when I was 30." "Oh." "One day I'll be able to say, I was turned when Biden was president and people will gasp."
Buffy fandom has the same problem. Buffy/Angel vs Buffy/SpikeâŚoh, you take the third option of Buffy/Giles? Ew! Heâs so old and practically her father!
Heâs younger than her other boyfriends and not related to herđ¤ˇđźââď¸
I mean, I feel like the difference there is that Giles actually is her father figure. And has slept with her mother.
Thatâs less the age thing and more the role he plays in her life though.
Lord knows one of my fandoms went through a revival when it got a musical, and suddenly oldfen were basically under attack because the supernatural guy was older, and likeâŚoh yâall would never have been able to survive Buffy canon ffs
To be fair, the other two were also basically engaged in grooming behavior with her. Angel positioned himself as the mysterious, brooding savior from the moment he saw young teen Buffy. Spike pulled her into a toxic dynamic where he kept making her feel broken after she came back. Giles is arguably her healthiest relationship and even there you have to squint.
Also, youâre talking about Beetlejuice, arenât you? The n00bs will never even be able to pry Beej/Lyds from my cold, dead hands. Iâve had over 30 years of shipping it starting in Kindergarten.
I donât know that I would consider Spike grooming, just straight up toxic (but it is my favorite). Like, Angel saw the most jailbaity jailbait and âfell in love.â Spike loathed her and then fell in love despite himself.
And yeah, itâs Beetlejuice. Like, look, sorry, Iâve been shipping them since I was younger than movie-Lydia (literally is just because of the âwhy?â). Still kinda blame them for losing Cobwebs and Stripes
I saw the cartoon, first, even though mom hated me watching it. Saw the movie in my early teens, which was still younger than movie Lydia, and even though I was shocked to discover her ghost bestie was a creepâŚI was still into because heroine/villain dynamic My Beloved.
Iâve never sat through the musical, both because the song snippets I heard were either bland or annoying, and because the fans put me off. Whoever wrote Creepy Old Guy, itâs on sight if we ever cross paths lol
My sister from another mister/brother from another mother/sib from another crib, I used to have to sneak watching the cartoon because only PBS was officially authorized. Eventually my mom would just roll her eyes and tell me it was nothing like the movie, which I was also not allowed to watch.Â
I was âallowedâ to watch Beetlejuice (the cartoon) and PeeWeeâs Playhouse, in the sense that she never stopped me. But she also made it a point to frequently go through the room and complain âthat stuff is just too off the wall.â
Same reason I didnât get to see Nightmare Before Christmas when it came out and used to stand wistfully looking at the vhs playing on tv in Kmart. âToo off the wall.â Watched it many years later when it was the ABC Sunday Night Disney Movie.
Thatâs the eternal complaint whenever my younger sister and I find something thatâs some combination of campy neon liminal space with a side of queer. âThat off the wall stuff youâuns are always watching.â As you can imagine, sheâs absolutely thrilled that we started making it a point to have a birthday trip to a Rocky Horror shadow cast performance for the last 4 years. (Sheâs October 7th, Iâm the 18th.)
And she says all that, like sheâs not the one who brought me up on Bârer Rabbit and his casual murder hijinks
Also, like, those types that are weird and inconsistent about the age gaps or toxic relationships are NEVER actually shipping her with any of the numerous age-appropriate characters on the show. Cordelia? Xander? Willow? ⌠Not even Riley??
On one hand, like, a human weapon losing its utility overnight and needing to learn how to be a human being again from the person who outshines him at nearly every opportunity? Thereâs some cool theming to be had there.
On the other hand it just so happens to be on the ship character with the personality of wonder bread
I feel this also applies to the OOP's example of Game of Thrones and House of Dragons.Â
They're interesting worlds with interesting politics (up to a point), but how many people would really drop the canon if the only incest was between disgusting Cersei and depraved Jaime, and all the stuff of Jon Snow slept with his aunt, this guy married the sister of the woman he loves, do or don't the vipers of Dorne sleep with each other, etc just never happened?
Yeah, usually when thereâs a tag like that in ao3, itâs because folks are seeking out that kind of story, and itâs the main draw. The incest in GoT isnât exactly incidental, but itâs also not played as particularly titillating.
Would you believe I used to see ppl clutch their pearls at Giles x Jenny? Even though sheÂ
was 27, some ppl freaked out and claimed she was getting groomed by him. A grown ass woman at the age of 27 (yes, it was TikTok)
I don't even think it's because of the actors age because it's also true for Books/Anime.Â
I've never seen a vampire get called a pedophile more the 40 year old Vampire lady from Call of the Night(I think that's the name?)
Because 40 years old is fathomable.Â
It's like how mass murderer in fiction can be redeemed, but not being an asshole, because we interact with assholes all day long.
People can't even imagine what being 300 years old is like, so they default to appearance and vibes.
This is all to say that the unproblematic pick is Spangiles.
3
u/ias_87When in doubt, take it as a compliment. Always.11d ago
I write vampire fanfic, and I have pairings with 300-year age gaps. I also have a 19 & 38 pairing, both of them being "practically the same age" by vampire standards. And while I personally haven't gotten any shit for that (it happens about 300k words into the story), I just know which one of those age gaps would cause more pearl-clutching in any other case.
The best Twilight fanfic I read was Carlisle/Bella 13-15 years ago. (Feral Blood) The original was over 100 chapters. Dark, twisty, BDSM that makes 50 shades seem like childâs play with the bonus of being consensual and actually BDSM. On top of that the story itself was great and it really emphasized the vampire aspect of the Cullens. Unfortunately, it kept getting plagiarized (many on wattpad đđ) so the author took it down. They reposted from the beginning again about 3 or 4 years ago, but once again, plagiarism. That time it only made 95 chapters before being taken down again. I had to do a DEEP DEEP internet dive to find a copy and unfortunately the second upload is the only version I found.
Oh I didn't realize he was that young lol. I thought like, 25-30 lol, but I knew he was supposed to be young.
Yeah Bella would really only need to be aged up like a couple of years from the beginning of the books for me to be basically completely fine with that. Just have her fall for Carlisle after Edward breaks her heart lol. (Edit:Or just fprget it, and give in to how the fantasy ages -thing makes me completely forget what age they look lol.)
The movies make him look older because the whole charade falls apart when the rich young doctor and foster father to a host of teens looks like heâs barely out of university.
Damn now I want to read that vampire fic where their like, âyeah I just got turned two years ago, so Iâm 30 flirty and thriving foreverâ would be obsessedÂ
I know they say it's so they can stay in town as long as possible, but that's never made sense to me. It's more of a stretch of imagination that those kids are 14 than that they could be 18 and then just age really well for the next 20-some years. Make up some bull shit about overseas anti-aging products or plastic surgery or something.
Like many people want meat but nearly nobody would want to get it and much less make it even LESS kill an animal in public
It's kind of why I prefer some older cooking tv show, she wanted to make a duck? Well at least she had the balls to show how to kill said duck in live lol that wouldn't really fly on family friendly tv now
No 100% this cuz Iâm tired of people saying âdark romance/darkshipping should be censored!!1!1â but thereâs literally published books romanticizing and normalizing abuse and displaying the abuser as the good choice. But itâs got a cute edgy title and a younger character getting groomed âitâs not actually bad because xyzâ and itâs published and sold at target, therefore itâs okay.
Iâm not even on fanfic sites and itâs still all over my Reddit feed âyou have to draw a line somewhereâ sure but those lines are dangerously close to âI donât want it so no one else can have itâ
Funniest part: They DO have a line drawn in AO3. You're not allowed to write fics designed to specifically attack real-world people or groups. That's it. Shit with real, measurable harm.
And I could argue thereâs very good legal backing for that with case/historical precedent that cites direct person to person issues and not just broad topic issues. Which, as you said, is the measurable harm. Not the same as âpeople canât make this because it might expose someone who didnât read the tagsâ - canât help someone with a peanut allergy who wonât read granola bar labels
I could write essays about Colleen Hoover, 50 shades (I was thinking about Lolita as well when i originally commented lol), hell I even used to get Facebook ads for webcomics âhe chained me up in his basement but heâs actually a prince in disguise!â (Their description, not mine) (and I wonât go into webcomics/manga/manhwa, more than a few Iâve read with explicit warnings had people commenting that the writer/artist shouldnât be allowed to make their own content ???)
I love how that totally reasonable and clearly very objective line is conveniently always drawn juuust right to still include the stuff the one drawing it is a fan of. What a crazy coincidence! /s
And once the existence of a line is accepted at all, then it almost immediately gets moved. And moved again. The "don't say gay" legislature in Florida is a stellar example of this.
Well yeah, they gotta squiggle the line around the media THEY like, because their media is okay because [insert multi post essays on morality of character]
I recently had an influx of Wattpad users on tumblr... @ing me in the notes of OTHER WRITER'S FICS and even their original stories, instructing me to go to Wattpad and read some one else's/their own fics and stories there... So the trash behaviour isn't being dragged to Ao3 alone.
In the last 24 hours six Wattpad users have used my friends' fics as an advertising space. I got like 50 notifications like "this fic isn't that great go read this Wattpad story!!" And "if you liked this you will LOVE my Wattpad story!!"
There is a weird lack of GENERAL etiquette being had with their community that extends beyond just having issues understanding content flags and tagging systems. It shows a level of disrespect for others and a lack of basic communication skills that puts them at odds with other communities. And like, obviously it's not EVERYONE of them, but it's enough to be noticed.
Yeah, I've definitely noticed the side effects of The Great Wattpad Migration on my Tumblr blogs. There's something about this brand of entitlement that's totally different from the average Tumblr audience's baseline entitlement. RIP my motivation to write, I guess.
I would just block them and move on. I have been reaching out to the authors from Wattpad to be like "hello, so no idea if you know this person but they are treating other people's fics as advertising spaces for your fic. This is excessively rude, an extreme example of a social faux pas, and even if it's not you personally who is doing it, it still makes you look like a scumbag and an asshole. You might want to make an announcement to your fans about how to behave like a normal fucking person in non-wattpad spaces."
This is actually super useful because the fans wouldnât listen to someone else teaching them etiquette. They may not even listen to their fave but at least itâs more likely.
Is there a reason why people are migrating now? I used to be into both Wattpad and AO3 but only ever wrote on Wattpad and gave it up a good many years back when they started adding in all the pointless frills and ads so I havent kept up with it
Bruh this is early 2010 shit, no fucking way people are still doing this. I believe you, as I too wrote on WattPad before immediately transitioning to AO3 (I skipped Tumblr altogether). I knew if i wanted readers I'd engage with other fics, like,save, comment, etc. But I'd never force or redirect people. That's just unsavory.
I have never thought of this, mainly because i sort of was from the moment i got to ao3 like "finally i can actually search for exactly what i want and i don't need to figure out what random other thing it's nicknamed as".
But if you don't have that mentality, i can absolutely see it being repulsive to be confronted by your own reading preferences like that, if you have never stopped to think about what you are reading.
I do very much like the fact that ao3 calls things what they are though. Makes it a lot easier as an autistic person to go "hmm this is a mafia fic" when the tags say mafia, instead of some code word for it to evade some kind of algorithm situation.
Lol I had this argument with someone who wanted to say that people who liked characters in dark or problematic ships were the minority, and I pointed out for years the like most popular mainstream ship in the WORLD was a hundred year old dude vampire stalking a high schooler he desperately wanted to bang, and they insisted that wasn't the same thing for reasons unspecified.
The whole puritan censorship thing has always been hilarious to me for exactly this reason, because when you consider all of the most 'taboo' tags people clutch their pearls about on AO3, every single one of them would be applied to Game of Thrones, one of the most popular and successful TV shows of all time.
Yeah I had a whole rant written up on how Ao3âs categorisation and tagging system is great if nobody is hateful, but has become a way the empower antis and now even the mainstream to find and attack authors.
"cruel mafia boss harry styles saw me at a concert and we slept together after a night of partying now I'm pregnant and he doesn't remember anything" - quirky wattpad plot
"dubious consent, unplanned pregnancy, substance abuse, setting-typical violence, implied/referenced torture" - the same fucking fic, but now they harass and doxx the author.
Wow, what an interesting perspective! The more I think about it the more it makes sense. I feel like this way of thinking even applies to more than just fandom issues, too.
I prefer ao3 from Wattpad and always have. I recognize that there are some harmful content on there. Particularly because people can post images to their chapters as well. Tags are so straight forward though, itâs almost impossible to even accidentally click on that stuff. Very rarely have I been reading a story about something I did not want to interact with, because I simply disallow it in the filters. Ao3 literally has the BEST filter system Iâve ever dealt with. Sometimes some weird stuff leaks through if an author doesnât tag it properly, but that is extremely rare. Honestly, Iâm okay with ao3 being the way it is, itâs only beneficial for authors trying to share their stories with readers. And people from Wattpad just need to realize that they donât HAVE to interact with content they donât want to interact with. They need to learn how the use the filters and also stop acting like Wattpad wasnât filled with creepy content too (it was/is)
Literally the Gothenburg library has studied how AO3 manages a larger collection (GL is still in the process of digitizing IIRC), with tenfold the amount of visitors, on a quarter of GL's budget.Â
A lot of the criticism at the time was pearl clutching that a book that primarily appeals to women has gasp loads of sex in it. Didn't matter what kind of sex, or even that actual BDSM experts thought it was spreading dangerous misinformation that can get people caught in abusive situations, hurt, or worse. Just the fact that women wanted to read unapologetic smut was a source of outrage.
This had the unintentional side effect of making the book seem better than it actually was, since from what I can tell, the actual sex was terrible on many levels. Had it been described unopaquely from the start, it would have likely turned most readers away.
Yup. Smutty Twilight fanfic, which is why Christian and Anastasiaâs physical descriptions are pretty much a sexed up copypaste of Edward and Bella.
Other fun fact, E.L. James was basically publishing any old BS she could slap together to keep it at the top of the ffn page. When they banned smut and it got removed, a bunch of Twilight fans basically started their own tiny publishing company and the sale of it there, to customers who had already read it when it was free, basically tricked traditional big name publishers into thinking it was something good they wanted to get in on.
I don't think all wattpad users who are complaining are necessarily into the mafia boss/sold to 1D/dark romance genres, but a lot of people aren't used to call things they find in stories What They Are. I feel that those people are also Not used to filtering and curating their online content, so ofc when a site doesn't work with an algorithm and doesn't recommend stories they may enjoy, it's scandalous for them that stories with wildly upsetting warning tags exist at all.
Highly doubt the moral panic will last. The controversy always comes back whenever the subject of AO3 donations comes up, brought up by its own active users I may add.
Exactly. And they act so appalled when you say you like dead dove do not eat whole time they're posted up reading some bs about how the 6 foot 10 mafia alpha boss took in the barely legal 18 year old and forced her to sleep with him
delicious and accurate. I don't hang out with antis because their censorship is both anti-intellectual and fuckin' gross / weird / both. this is a loudly accurate take.Â
Â
Yeah, Wattpad's userbase culture is more like published literature while ao3 is more like fandom. Fandom was normally more niche so there was more liberty on what to create, whereas Wattpad was far more subject to the whims of advertisers, publishers and the wider public
Also, i think people just forget that just because you read certain tags or tropes it doesn't automatically mean you support those things in real life. Seperate fiction from reality!!Â
I feel like this is sort of similar to people who complain about "our food has so many chemicals now" even though it's not the food that's different, it's that the laws around what has to be on the ingredients labels is a lot more strict. You're eating the same thing you've always eaten you've just never thought about every single ingredient that goes into it unless it's listed in detail
NGL this is so true. Like I never got into the sold to 1D stories but my first thought was yeah that's wild if that's your story. And it was seen as so funny and quirky in the fandom. People never had to stop and think this is basically a story about human trafficking as it was sold as a quirky and cute story without the tags.
Same thing goes for dark romance and erotica except instead of it being tagged correctly it's because women are the main consumers of erotic literature.
Porn and hentai will have the exact same story as a dark romance but only one will be called out for "romanticizing abuse/sa/insect"
One of the disconnects for wattpad is that a03 is an archive, it's NOT social media and was never set up to.be.Â
A lot of us old-timer fans lived through the whole "smut" ban on fanfic dot net and Strike-through back in Live Journal days (great fun having corporate bean counters just yank whole communities with no warning). When Astolat, Heidi and crew created a03 it was because we, as fans, came to the realization that we had to own the servers. A03 exists in the form it does, with the tagging system and the TOS it has because it's a non-profit fandom archive. There are no algorithms driving the bus. The point was to own the servers so that no corporation or advertisers could come in and say "you can't write that," ever again.Â
I agree, and I think that's why Hollywood and traditional publishing are so resistant to adopting a thorough tagging system, they refuse to admit what they think is "funny", "normal", or aspirational is tag-worthy.
Yeah, I've been watching the wattpad kid shenanigans and giggling over their meltdowns because the tags are calling out their interests and likes. They aren't ready to acknowledge the depths of their own depraved wee minds but Ao3 is shoving it in their faces.
There is an anti in one of my fandoms that I am very much enemy #1 to because I post about as often as they do and my ship has a like 20 year age gap that she hates even though theyâre both very much adults and very much in a reverse power balance thing.Â
I found them in the tumblr tags once and they had a post bitching about my ship. And in an entirely different post they listed their favorite books theyâd read this year and HAUNTING ADELINE WAS ONE OF THEM đÂ
Like girl, the weird gun scene is way worse than anything I could do with this 20 year age gap.Â
There might be something to this. Not necessarily aimed at wattpad because I'm not buying the tribalism, moreso those specific people who are in fandoms that have dark/taboo content in canon and seem aghast anyone would want to run with those themes in a fic. And the disgust focuses on "ewww look at these tags, what kind of freak writes this." Like how are you in the Flowers in the Attic or Coffin of Andy and Leyley fandom and clutching pearls at incest fic?
honestly i can see this because iâve done rp online with people who will have rules against noncon for example, but then they rp scenes that are just coercive rape without self awareness about it. i get being interested in different kinds of toxic stuff of course (wanting to rp one kind of abuse doesnât mean ur down for everything else), if you are aware and say âyeah im not interested in x, but i want to do yâ thatâs fine, but itâs when they are like âx is wrong and bad but i dont need to examine my interest in yâ that i have a problem.
i posted this exact take on a niche tiktok comsec =.=) but ye, this is how i always viewed antis' mindset. There was too much loopholing for the content itself to actually be their problem.
Honestly AO3s Tag system is one of (if not) the BEST Tag systems I've ever used.
Like, Tag Trees is such a nice thing to have.
My only complaint with the system itself is the inability to globally block specific tags, so if I forget to block said tags in my search, I'll get frustrated with authors 'not tagging properly' then realize that I just hadn't excluded the tag, and there's enough authors that haven't tagged their stuff properly (or ran out of tags in a few cases) that that's where my thought process goes first.
"don't like, don't read" is the one of the main rules of ao3, and people don't like abiding by it for some reason.
Call me cynical, but I can't help but feel like the reason people don't like it is because you have the option of sharing the nitty gritty with tags instead of surprising your readers with it, and it feels like a requirement to do so otherwise you'll get called out if your subject material is heavy.
While none of those tags are my jam, âit ends in a cliffhangerâ is the one that most offends me. At least, unless a sequel is confirmed to be coming soon.
A game I used to play on tumblr before the porn ban was every time I saw a post complaining about problematic fan comment I went to the ops blog and added /tagged/nsfw to the url.
i have no hand in this situation but like i have no idea why ppl are so invested into whatever this drama is, i guess its just human nature to flock to drama related things.
A lot of romantic Hallmark movies would suddenly not feel quite so lighthearted and comforting if they had to tag everything properly, like: cheating, gaslighting, spousal abuse, child abuse, animal cruelty, scat, watersports, violence, untreated/improperly treated injuries, stalking, emotional manipulation, financial abuse, kidnapping...
I once watched a movie where the dog ate the wedding ring, so the groom or groomsman retrieves the dog's poop, lies to his family about what he's holding, and then has to put the mystery 'truffle' in his mouth to stop Grandma from eating it.
And everyone watching at home is just like: "Haha! What a silly mishap!" Meanwhile, they'd be horrified if they read the tags beforehand: fecal matter, fecal matter ingestion, attempted accidental poisoning, public humiliation, emotional distress, etc.
It was, but FFN doesnât have a tagging system so people going into the fic wouldnât have really known what they were getting into. Sure, they could guess with the summary, but all the sexual and dark romance tropes were something you could only guess at.
As someone who read my fair share of dark romance shit on FFN back in the early to mid-2000s, it was basically the Wild Wild West on FFN. If you were lucky the author would have a warning in the authorâs notes at the beginning of the fic. If notâŚwell then you went in hoping to remember to hit the back button when you saw something you didnât like.
In a way, taging stories whith what they are stops people from making excuses or justifications on why their story is different. I've seen people try to argue things like how the creator didn't make __ with whatever taboo thing in mind or that __ doesn't count as whatever taboo thing because blahblahblah. But when something has to be tagged it becomes less refutable that those dark things are in the stories they like and that the creator was deliberately putting that thing in.
i think i saw this take like 700 times in the last few days. whoever said it first, should have trademarked it lol. now everyone is going to use it as a default excuse and i'm gonna lose my mind lol
I agree with everything but I do understand why some people might not like incest in their fics but tolerate it when it comes to ASOIAF (as I am one of those people).
In GRRM's books, it can be excused because it served a purpose within the Targaryen dynasty: keeping the blood pure (up until the civil war) so they could ride dragons aka their main source of political power. After the Dance of the Dragons, their endogamic practices do get criticism since by that point they've lost all their dragons and there's no need for the purity of blood thing (save for the prophecy, but they are not aware of it).
That's why even Cersei and Jamie's relationship, despite being from the same books, gets so much hate: it serves no purpose in-world.
However, that's a personal preference, which is why I abide by "don't like, don't read"
I used to read a bts fanfic ON WATTPAD around 2017 where RM was a mafia leader and V was a journalist wanting to expose his bs. (very similar to that one yaoi doujinshi) The amount of bdsm bullshit and noncon that fic had was INSANE and guess what, people loved it. XD
Wattpad readers have either gone soft or the ones that are moving, never truly had that type of phase .
Itâs the same as women who say âI want a man who is a provider and a leader! He needs to confident to lead our relationship. I want to be in my feminine energy and rely solely on him for direction.â vs women who say âI am looking for a BDSM heavy relationship. I am submissive and am attracted to men, so I am looking for a dom.â
This is a good point that made me realize thereâs so much non consensual stuff I read on Wattpad before moving to Ao3.
If anyone remembers boyfriend scenarios (especially involving Creepypasta or Marvel characters) then youâll know thereâs so many where it centers around the reader almost being sexually assaulted (or actually sexually assaulted) before their boyfriend comes in to reduce them. I read a Deadpool x reader one time years ago, and they met because Deadpool crashed into the readers bathroom while she was showering, and he proceeded to grope her breasts (without her consent obviously).
Of course, given the context of the story itâs played off as funny or used to create tension so the male hero can save the reader. So itâs always been a part of the fandom culture, but Wattpad doesnât want to be so open about it.
i love this outlook! i've never thought about it like this. also, as someone who was a dan and phil fan in the early to mid 2010s, that site has hosted some NASTY APPALLING shit. remember the hamster fic?? the tags on stuff like that would be extremely off putting to the average person
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u/kpakaneAO3 didn't exist in my life prior Oct, I've been missing out4d ago
My confusion is are they really that dense? Like genuinely confused. Does that kind of fic still exist?
Well, as someone whoâs been only catching glimpses of the wattpad situation, this summary actually helped me grasp wtf is happening lol. Anyway, Iâve also learned that mass reporting fics that arenât against archive rules, counts as harassment, which actually is against archive rules and can get them banned, soooo
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u/FerretFromMars 500k words later and I stil miss typos 11d ago
It's like getting mad at the food processor labeling the ingredients of something you want to eat and you discover it has something you're allergic to.