I’d like ao3 to know that I love and appreciate its service to the fan community
but also, that the staff of ao3 need to remove the rampant amount of CP and rape fics from their site if they truly wish to be a source of service to fandom communities, because unchecked sexually abusive content harms all young members of fandom, and THAT is a disservice.
There is literally no but. Don’t make addendums to my post. Make your fucking own. Thanks.
Anyway, in this house, we love and support ao3 as is because we know fandom history and understand that fiction doesn’t affect reality on a 1:1 basis unlike this yahoo.
Also, fandom isn’t just for young people, and young people should be taught how to curate their internet experience. Ao3 makes it literally so easy. Also, it’s not rampant. At all. You people are looking for things to complain about and making it bigger than it really is.
Also that is NOT CP because a real child wasn’t hurt to make those fics. Go after actual child rapists for Gods sake.
The entire reason that AO3 exists is that every other site started by saying they were just going to get rid of the child porn, and then the rape, and then the abuse, but then what they actually did was get rid of all the LGBT content, and all the support communities for survivors, and eventually anything that contradicted the political opinions of the people in charge.
So a group of fans came together, with no support from any company or organization except donations freely given by other fans, and they said ‘Fuck it, no censorship. At all. Ever. Doesn’t matter how much I hate whatever you have to say, I’m not gonna prevent you from saying it because then nobody can ever prevent me from saying the things that actually matter.’
And they made the best damn tagging and filtering system in existence at the time, so you could avoid seeing things that you hate or things that can harm you, but they never tried to curate what was and was not allowed on the site. Because they’d seen what happened to all of their predecessors, and they refused to let it happen to them.
No matter how many children started whining about things they had no comprehension of.
“The entire reason that AO3 exists is that every other site started by saying they were just going to get rid of the child porn, and then the rape, and then the abuse, but then what they actually did was get rid of all the LGBT content, and all the support communities for survivors, and eventually anything that contradicted the political opinions of the people in charge.”
All this. But let’s not fool ourselves it’s “children” doing all the whining. Plenty of ‘children’ are fine with curating their own internet experiences, and plenty of adults are weeping crocodile tears of “What about the children?” when they want to bitch about content they don’t like. Whining knows no age, and neither does pretending you believe something is harmful to children & survivors as a way to gain power and control over what others can read.
If you hate it, don’t fucking go there. It’s that. Fucking. Simple.
