Are You Getting Queerbaited Or Are You Being Misled By Your Internet Echo Chamber

rainer maria rilke, letters to a young poet

SEEKING: ORIGINAL SUPERWHOLOCK FANS

Now seems like a good time for this.

So! Let’s get this out of the way first: I’m not here to belittle you, make fun of you, call you cringey, or whatever other shitty bullying behavior is the cool du jour. We don’t roll like that in my house.

No, reality is quite different.

Hi, my name is Nina and I run a hands-on museum at anime and pop culture conventions that details the history of fandom, and if you’re an original Superwholock fan, I want to interview you.

(I also want your gifsets, fanart, fanfiction, prominent crossover theories, etc.—the paraphernalia that make up a fandom.)

Here’s the thing: Superwholock, along with Rise of the Brave Tangled Dragons (which was somewhat concurrent), is the first fan-created crossover megafandom. This is a HUGE DEAL for a fandom curator, because....almost all of you are still alive!! You’re all primary sources!! YOU WERE THERE!! Speaking as someone who’s normally tracking down 80-year-old Trekkies and diary entries from the original Sherlock Holmes fans 140 years ago, do you have any idea, any at all, how EXCITING that is??? When it hit me that I could cut my work on a Superwholock exhibit in half by doing firsthand interviews instead of having to track down old message boards and Fanlore articles, I literally jumped off my bed and yelled. It’s less work AND it’s a better, more accurate exhibit.

Your experiences in Superwholock are part of fandom history. An important part, in fact. And I have the chance to interview and talk to you FIRST HAND. (That’s every curator’s dream. Ask any curator in the world “if you could have an hour to talk to [long-dead person in their field], would you?” and you’ll get an “are you fucking KIDDING me? Where’s the time machine???”)

Questions I’ll ask you will be things like what drew you to the fandom, how it started out, how you (and others) reacted to major development in the parent fandoms, and what your part of the community was like. You can reply in written form, by doing a video, drawing a comic, whatever you like as long as it’s in an archivable format (meaning I can save it to show people your exact words later; don’t let the phrase “anime and pop-culture convention” fool you, I do my best to follow museum archival best practices and won’t show anything without a provenance). This means I’ll also need either your first name and last initial, or a username you’re comfortable appending to your words. If you’re under 18, I’ll also need a parent’s permission if you want to appear on video. And although I didn’t have a chance to do a full filming of the museum before COVID (I was supposed to show at Phoenix Fan Fusion this year and that was going to be the filmed version....sigh), I can provide you with hard copy from conventions that have shown the museum. And my driver’s license, if you’re a minor and your parents are nervous.

I’d like to add here that while some of the museum’s exhibits are, uh....QUESTIONABLE by modern standards of taste, I have never had to kick anyone out for being disrespectful to older works. (I have had a few people giggle over the typewritten zines because the copy quality is so bad, but that’s of the “wow, dinosaur technology” variety of giggle. You’d understand if you saw them.) You will not be put in a position to have to defend yourself from bullying or fallout. A lot of people look at older works and are actually heartened to see just how long the history of fandom is.

If this is a project that would interest you, please EMAIL ME at fandommuseum@gmail.com. And spread the word to other fans you might know!

it’s not fair

Once you’re the focus of all that attention, it’s addictive.

Marie Howe, from Magdalene: Poems; "What I Did Wrong"

Text ID: His cheek against my cheek, / his mouth on my mouth, / his hands on my hair / to be gathered / close closer / This was the source of my suffering and joy

like or reblog

So I just found out that there are more people making works on AO3 with a million tags on them in protest to AO3 not removing that one fic (you know the one). I would just like to state my own personal opinion about that right up front: if you’re trolling AO3, no matter your reason for doing so, you’re the asshole.

I know we all call it AO3, but the a stands for Archive. It’s a site built on the premise that fanworks deserve to exist and shouldn’t be taken down, unless the author is making that decision for themselves. 

This means that there are lots of works on AO3 that I think suck. There are works that are poorly written or boring or morally reprehensible. And guess what? All of that is protected because it’s not about a single work, it’s about fanworks in general and all of us having a place we can rely on to have our backs. 

The whole point of AO3 is not deleting works just because someone complains about them. The work needs to violate the Terms of Service and if it doesn’t, then it shouldn’t be removed. The rules that protect me protect those other works too. 

The volunteers at AO3 take the site’s goals and premise very seriously. They aren’t going to make snap judgements about a work, not even a work with a million tags. They also aren’t going to make snap judgements about implementing a limit on tags when there hasn’t been one before. 

They need to talk things out and discuss the short and long term ramifications. They need to talk about where to draw the line, and how can they explain why they decided to draw the line there? Will this decision affect works that already exist on the Archive? What do we do about them? Those authors posted before this new rule came into being, so you can’t punish them for a rule that didn’t exist at the time. 

Creating more works with the same issue just means that volunteer tag wranglers have even more work to do. Mass reporting a work that has already been reported just means that Policy & Abuse volunteers have even more work to do. If you fill up their lives with nonsense tags or repeat reports, you know what they can’t do? The thing that everyone (including them) wants them to be doing. 

People who volunteer for AO3 also read on AO3. They are as annoyed about these works as you are. But making more work for them to do isn’t the answer. Being patient is. It’s going to take time for them to make decisions about things like tag limits. It’s going to take time for them to code the limit into the site. It’s going to take time for them to test the code and make sure it doesn’t break anything. And in the meantime:

Filter out the author and bookmark your filter in your browser so you don’t have to enter it every time.

Add the work-blocking code to your site skin so you never need to see that work again, as long as you’re logged in.

There are tools you can use to avoid the things you don’t want to see. Creating a bigger problem isn’t the solution. It’s just a dick move.

*violently taps screen*

LET ME REBLOG IT!!!

Anyways I’d like to cite Mads Mikkelsen having to fight himself from kissing Hugh Dancy at the end of Hannibal.

King shit right there.