callistawolf

The ascension.

Reblog to let your followers know that despite your current obsession your previous obsessions still exist and are simply lying dormant until they awaken and strike again

yeah. you all get it.

Astarion dissaproves

The first single from The Tortured Poets Department is…………. Fortnight featuring @postmalone 🤍 I’ve been such a huge fan of Post because of the writer he is, his musical experimentation and those melodies he creates that just stick in your head forever. I got to witness that magic come to life firsthand when we worked together on Fortnight. Honestly can’t wait for you guys to hear this song at Midnight TONIGHT and see the video at 8pm ET TOMORROW.

forafortnight.com

Fortnight featuring Post Malone is the first single from THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT. Hear our department’s anthem at midnight tonight and watch the premiere of the music video at 8pm ET tomorrow!

you know i have never heard a convincing arguement as to why AO3 should not moderate the content that is posted to their website and i think a lot of the arguement against moderation on AO3 boils down to, terminally online people thinks community moderation is the same as government censorship and personally sending the cops to someone’s house to arrest them irl/

Just because you don’t agree with an argument doesn’t mean it’s a bad one. When it was founded the people made a promise to its users. “We will host all transformational works(fanfic) allowed by US law.” This promise came about after other sites had routinely purged fanworks without warning. Not just the same things people call for moderation on now but far more reaching and random. Like FF.net purged ALL mature/NC17 fics from their site, they also purged and banned the ENTIRE genre of songfics(written equivalent of fan made music videos made by putting song lyrics between paragraphs of story prose)

Ao3 bringing in any sort of content moderation or limits on what fics they will host would be breaking that initial promise to their users.

I guess if you’ve never woken up and found chunks of your fave fandom, some fanworks you yourself created just gone, because whoever was hosting it decided to change the rules on you, you wouldn’t understand. And unless you primarily read fics at sites other than Ao3 because of their determination to keep that promise you won’t have to.

see that is the thing that i really do not get, Like the thing that i cannot understand about this arguement is that bad moderation means no moderation should be allowed? It’s ok for AO3 to host racist fanfics and child porn, because the alternative is just random deletions? Like why is the alternative to no moderation bad moderation? Why do AO3 defenders keep on acting like the only options are either no moderations at all, or else it will be fanfics deleted without rhyme or reason? Like why is the argument always in black and white extremes?

One. Ao3 does not host child porn. You can stop with that lie right the fuck now. Child porn(or the more correct term Child Sexual Abuse/Exploitation Material) is when someone has a child under their control and forces them to perform sexual acts and either photographs or films it. It is a recorded documentation of abuse and is in fact illegal(and therefore not allowed to be hosted on Ao3) It is wrong, immoral, and illegal because a real live, breathing child with thoughts, and feelings is being hurt and will have to live with the memory of their abuse for the rest of their lives.The term does not apply to non-photorealistic fanart, or to written words depicting events that did not actually happen(meaning there is no victim and no-one has to live with the memory of the events).  Treating either fanart or fanfic as the same as  real life abuse is an insult and dis-service to every single child that has ever been sexually exploited because you think their suffering is equivalents to lines on paper.  That you think the immorality of CSEM is because it makes you feel “icky” and not because they were being hurt and exploited.  People writing fanfic of two teenage characters making out is in no way equivalent to a real life child having their rape recorded, but I routinely see people calling for moderation on Ao3 acting like it is.

Two. As for the racist(and every other kind of bigotry that can be depicted) I’m going to be honest. I don’t trust the various fandom communities to make a set of standards that aren’t just one group of fans forcing their will and preferences onto the rest of fans. I don’t know what fandoms you’ve been in, but I’ve seen fandoms with interracial ships where if you have the black character top you’re being racist because it’s playing into racist mandrigo tropes. But at the same time you would have people claiming that having the black character bottom you’re also being racist for making the black man submissive. So are both depictions/options racist, are neither of them, or are people just trying to make their personal fic preferences/interpretations some sort of moral issue and force people to cater to them?  I’ve been in fandom communities where the admin/moderators refused to let anyone post fics that didn’t match their preferences(despite claiming to be friendly to all fics) So it’s very much coming from a place of experience that says trying moderate Ao3 based on racism, or any other problematic metric/rubric you want to use will just end up being used to silence people(including other fans of color)

Racism exists in fandom because we live in a racist society and that will filter into ALL media, including fanfic. Trying to remove so called racist fanfic won’t make society any less racist. All it does is give a tool for bullies to try to control and harass people. Everyone has their own personal biases some conscious, some only in their subconscious that they haven’t bothered to unpack  Trying to moderate content based on standards like racism, homophobia, xenophobia, etc… will inevitably lead to the moderators own personal biases leaking through resulting in uneven, inconsistent moderation resulting nothing but hurt feelings and fighting. 

Third. I would just like to mention just how heartless and unempathic you sounds when you act like random mass deletions and purges are no big deal. You have no idea how much it hurts to wake up and find something you created just gone. To find large swaths of fics that you enjoyed again and again, that you found comfort in, deleted never to be recovered. To say nothing of when Livejournal caved to a bunch of right-wing christian evangelical trolls and deleted a bunch of users and communities. People were devastated. people lost support communities and were frantically trying to find the friends they had made in those communities.

I know it may be hard to believe but fiction and art do not cause harm just by existing. A story that may be upsetting and triggering for one person, may bring healing and comfort to another, because everyone brings their own set of experiences and persepctives into every story they read, and therefore each takes something slightly different from it.  But you and every other person calling for moderation on Ao3 act a story causes harm to everyone, again just by existing.  It’s an insane perspective that makes no sense to me. A story I am not forced to read can’t hurt me any more than someone practicing a different religion can hurt me.

There are several ways that you can moderate AO3.

If you read a story and have strong opinions on it, e.g. you think it’s racist to write Adeline as a bully when she’s such an amazing hero character in the source material or you think that author CerseiFan69 writes such creepy stories that you never want to interact with them ever, it’s great that you’re thinking for yourself and trying to do some critical analysis.

You deserve the power to control your own reading experience, which AO3 gives you. However, I don’t trust you to tell the difference between a badly written story by a young writer who is black and wrote Adeline as a bully because Adeline’s accent reminds her of her real life high school bully, versus a badly written story by a writer who’s actually horrible. Likewise, you shouldn’t trust me to tell you which authors you should read as spine-chillingly excellent takes on dark content versus authors who make you want to scrub out your brain with steel wool.

I love the freedom of AO3, where I might write a bad story but at least I know that some moderator won’t judge me harshly and take it down.

Listen. The 11th Commandment is not “Thine beliefs are codified and just”. It’s “Don’t like, don’t read.”

You have no right to censorship. Period.

If you open the door to so-called “Good Censorship”, that just means it’ll open the more easily to across the board censorship.

Back in the day, we lost entire communities because people decided to report on and censor queer fics. Slash fic was specifically targeted for the simple reason that it was slash. No other reason than that. And because of that roll-out ban, not only was the fic lost, but the communities and the fandom groups and friend groups woke to found entire swathes of their community had been deleted from the sites they were communicating on and through. But it wasn’t limited to fic either - it was queer resources. It was LGBT-friendly newsletters and websites. It was information and resources for abuse survivors. But because there was mention of queerness or abuse, it was slashed and burned to nothing. Religious groups would report fics and sites for spite because they didn’t agree with the content. We had ship-wars where people would get their rivals’ materials purged by reporting them. There were ‘protect the children’ asshats back then coming for anything they didn’t like personally.

AO3 is drawing the line in the sand and saying it won’t happen on their site. It’s why they were created and they’re sticking to it.

This is a long post but its important. I get what the initial poster was trying to say but... no. Because who is deciding what gets censored and why? And how could those standards change away from their original intention and be used to push an agenda that's sinister towards marginalized groups? It absolutely could happen and if you think it couldn't, you're very, very, very naive.

The filtering tools on ao3 are there for a reason. You are your own content moderator. Period, full stop, end of story. That's the way it was meant to be and the way it should remain.

Textpost memes for your viewing pleasure, dear audience!

karlach is so right, he is a lil freak

i............... need him biblicaly. i need him in a way thats concerning to feminism

silly lil guys! dont let go...

I THINK! After 200 years in constant close quarters with six other people that also couldn't see their own reflections. That Astarion just like. Fusses and grooms and tidies the TadFools without even realizing what he's doing. Just mid conversation without stopping to mention it at all. One of Lae'zel's beads almost falls out so he is turning to refasten it while she continues talking to someone else. Gale is explaining a theory to him and he's brushing dirt and loose hairs off of the shoulders of his robes. He puts a cute little bauble on one of Wyll's horns.

Return to the Shadows.