is some of the best writing I’ve ever read for a ship.
“I let you know me”
“We’re conjoined”
“I’m yours.”
“My compassion for you is inconvenient”
Honestly, Hannibal and Will just have some of the shippiest dialogue ever written and I am constantly bowled over by it like I write some super gushy Hannigram shit in my fic sometimes but nothing, nothing I could do could ever compare to the original ohmyfuckinggod
mizumono has the best ending, and it’s such a pity there’s no award for that.
So I’m on AO3 and I see a lot of people who put “I do not own [insert fandom here]” before their story.
Like, I came on this site to read FAN fiction. This is a FAN fiction site. I’m fully aware that you don’t own the fandom or the characters. That’s why it’s called FAN FICTION.
Oh you youngins… How quickly they forget.
Back in the day, before fan fiction was mainstream and even encouraged by creators… This was your “please don’t sue me, I’m poor and just here for a good time” plea.
Cause guess what? That shit used to happen.
how soon they forget ann rice’s lawyers.
What happened with her lawyers.
History became legend. Legend became myth…. And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost.
I worked with one of the women that got contacted by Rice’s lawyers. Scared the hell out of her and she never touched fandom again. The first time I saw a commission post on tumblr for fanart, I was shocked.
One of the reasons I fell out of love with her writing was her treatment of the fans… (that and the opening chapter of Lasher gave me such heebie-jeebies with the whole underage sex thing I felt unclean just reading it.)
I have zero problem with fanart/fic so long as the creators aren’t making money off of it. It is someone else’s intellectual property and people who create fan related works need to respect that (and a solid 98% of them do.)
The remaining 2% are either easily swayed by being gently prompted to not cash in on someone else’s IP. Or they DGAF… and they are the ones who will eventually land themselves in hot water. Either way: this isn’t much of an excuse to persecute your entire fanbase.
But Anne Rice went off the deep end with this stuff by actively attacking people who were expressing their love for her work and were not profiteering from it.
The Vampire Chronicles was a dangerous fandom to be in back in the day. Most of the works I read/saw were hidden away in the dark recesses of the internet and covered by disclaimers (a lot of them reading like thoroughly researched legal documents.)
And woe betide anyone who was into shipping anyone with ANYONE in that fandom. You were most at risk, it seemed, if your vision of the characters deviated from the creators ‘original intentions.’ (Hypocritical of a woman who made most of her living writing erotica.)
Imagine getting sued over a headcanon…
Put simply: we all lived in fear of her team of highly paid lawyers descending from the heavens and taking us to court over a slashfic less than 500 words long.
all
of
this
Reblogging because I can’t believe there are people out there who don’t know the story behind fan fiction disclaimers.
Yep I used to have disclaimers on all my Buffy fic back in the day. The Buffy creators were mostly pretty chill about fandom but it’s not like it is now. You did NOT talk about fandom with anyone except other fandom people and bringing it up at cons was a massive no no because of stuff like this.
I think Supernatural (and Misha Collins specifically) was when that wall between fandom and creators started to break down. It’s a relatively new thing.
I remember going to a Merlin panel down in London and a girl sitting next to me asked the cast about slash and I thought she was going to get kicked out!
Fandom history is important.
Oh, this brings back some not so-awesome ‘90s fandom memories!
Oh man, let me tell you about the X-Files fandom. Lawyers for FOX sued, threatened, and generally terrified the owners of fan websites on a regular basis. God help you if you wrote or created original art set in their (expansive) universe or worse – dared to write about their characters. Even people who weren’t creating fanworks, just hosting Geocities pages about how much people liked the show would be sent C&D orders or actually fined. When I was first discovering the concept, the first rule of fandom was you do not talk about fandom because the consequences could be devastating.
It was such a strange and uncomfortable experience for me when fans in LOTR and Potter fandoms suddenly started shoving their work in people’s faces speaking publicly about fandom and wanting to engage in dialogue with the creators and actors of the Thing they were into. Fan stuff was supposed to stay online, in archives and list-serves and zines we passed around because it just wasn’t cool to talk about it and it could get you in a boatload of trouble. The freedom we have to create and gather together in a shared space, or actually be acknowledged in any way by people outside the fandom was inconceivable to my fannish, teenaged self. I want fans these days to understand how amazing modern fandom really is, cherish the community, and appreciate what it took to get us here.
“if you found this by googling yourself, hit back now. this means you, pete wentz”
Oh hey, even more blasts from the past.
I was one of the ones who got a love letter from Anne Rice’s lawyers. Bear in mind that up until that point her publisher had encouraged fanfic and worked with the archive keeper (one of my roommates at the time) to drum up publicity for upcoming books and so on.
I could tell such tales of how much Anne screwed over her fans back then. The tl;dr version is that she and her peeps would use fan projects as free market research and then bring in the lawyers once it was felt Anne could make money off of it herself. (Talismanic Tours being one of the most offensive examples of this.)
But where fanfic is concerned not only did we get nastygrams but one of my friends had Anne’s lawyer trying to fuck up her own privately owned business which had NOTHING TO DO WITH ANYTHING ANNE RELATED. Said friend was a small business owner with health issues who wasn’t exactly rolling in money, so guess how well that went?
On top of that when yours truly tried to speak out about it I discovered that someone in Anne’s camp had been cyber stalking me to the point where they took all the tiny crumbs of personal information I had posted over the course of five years or so and used it to doxx me (before that was even a term and in early enough days of the WWW that this wasn’t an easy task) and post VERY personal information about me on the main fandom message board of the time. Luckily for me the mod was my friend and she took that down post haste, but it was still oodles of fun feeling that violated and why to this day I am very strict about keeping my fandom and personal lives separate online.
Hence why those of us in the fandom at the time who still gave enough of a shit to want to keep writing fic DID keep writing fic, but shoved it so far underground and slapped it with so many disclaimers they could’ve outweighed the word count of War & Peace. It wasn’t just for the purpose of protecting fic but for trying to protect our personal lives as well.
Lucasfilm also sent cease-and-desist letters to Star Wars fanzines publishing slash.
My favourite bit I read from one included the idea that you weren’t allowed to have any explicit content, of which anything queer, no matter how tame, was included, to “preserve that innocence even Imperial crew members must be imagined to have”.
Yeah. The same Imperial crew members who helped build the Death Star to commit planetary genocide.
(It’s one reason Sinjir Velus, while I still have some issues with him, feels like such a delicious ‘f*** you’.)
Later on, they were apparently persuaded to ‘allow’ fans to write slash, provided in ‘remained within the nebulous bounds of good taste’.
(On a related note, if I wasn’t quite so attached to my URL, I would 100% change it to ‘Nebulous Bounds’, because that’s just downright catchy)
Anne McCaffrey had this huge long set of rules about how exactly you were allowed to play in her sandbox. Dragonriders of Pern was my first online fandom, and I was big into the Pern RP scene – and just about every fan-Weyr had a copy of these lists of rules McCaffrey wanted enforced. One of which was ‘no porn’ and another was basically ‘it can’t be gay’ (and for a while ‘no fanfiction posted online’? which??? anyway.)
She relaxed a little as time went on, but still.
Let’s not forget: the reason AO3 is called ‘Archive of our own’ is because it was created in response to some bullshit that assholes were trying to play with fan creators. Basically (if I remember the fiasco correctly) trying to mine fandom creators for content which they could then use to generate ad profit on their shitty websites. When the series creators objected, the fans tried to pull their content, only to find that the website hoster resisted, claiming their content was all his now.
That wasn’t even all that long ago…
fandom history class
To this day, *talking* about writing or reading fanfiction – just acknowledging that it exists – to anyone other than people I know are in fandom as well, feels like a dangerous act. The strict separation I maintained between my real life identity, my online identity, and my fandom identity (yes, they were separate, because some of the most vicious and mocking people were fellow nerds) has broken down a bit these days, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to integrate them as freely as some younger fans do.
The OTW Legal Committee’s mission includes education, assistance, and advocacy.
We create and post educational materials about developments in fandom-related law on transformativeworks.org and on archiveofourown.org.
We assist individual fans when their fanworks are challenged, we answer fans’ questions about law relevant to fanworks, and we help fans find legal representation.
We partner with other advocacy organizations and coalitions in the U.S. and around the world.
We advocate for laws and policies that promote balance and protect fanworks and fandom.
And much more!
I haven’t been involved in fandom stuff all that long, but I find this stuff so fascinating!
whew, i feel old, but that’s mostly bc i was on forums way way waaaaay too young. but this? yes. all the way.
people had password protected forums on the weirdest, most unconventional websites. before you could even be approved by the mods they would search your blog, your other accounts, question you, everything, all because we were broke teens and preteens trying to do something for fun and if someone got in who could doxx you or send your work over to a lawyer? that was it, you were OVER. that’s also part of where fandom wars and the defense of fandom came from: quote unquote “enemy” fandoms would infiltrate just to hurt you.
@theglintoftherail makes a very good point: ao3 is a goddamn haven. and they’re a great team of lawyers and people dedicated to protecting fanworks! part of the reason it’s so great is because they know there’s no one like them out there. they also go to the ends of the damned earth to protect you and to be inclusive, which is why there’s shit like tentacle porn and underage and dubcon. because they’re dedicated to protecting readers and creators to the death. they don’t advocate for it and they have the extensive rating and tagging system because of that (legit the best tagging system i’ve ever seen) but they don’t know if you’re dealing with trauma or if you need to get something out.
do not forget your fandom, kids. jesus
Who else knew nothing about this? A show of hands
I’m just the right age to remember the disclaimers and to have HEARD about the Anne Rice, Anne McCaffrey, and X-Files fiascos, but I was never in any of those fandoms and I was more or less on the tail end of that. I can’t imagine having to be scared to tell people I write fanfic. So glad we’ve come so far.
20+ years ago, I used to be terrified someone would try to sue me for the fanfic I was writing. I covered my work in disclaimers and posted it from school PCs on the ‘guest’ account so no one could track me. I remember looking up at the school security camera as I posted my work, wondering if the school got a Cease & Desist letter if they’d trawl through the footage and discover it was me and know I was writing naughty gay fanfic. I imagined the entire school finding out what I’d written.
Conversely, last year, I featured in the ‘notable fans’ section of the Tomb Raider 20th Anniversary’ book – an official publication – as a fanfic writer.
It’s fantastic how fandom is becoming a part of enjoying content and is slowly, slowly being normalized ❤
This is where we can all say thank you to JK Rowling and Stephenie Meyer for the major role they played in mainstreaming fanfic.
I only heard tales of the fanfic woes and legal shit but I did experience (or was close enough to see) a few of the fan art harrumphs. I still am leery of drawing fan art for people and it still boggles me to see people with redbubble stores and public (searchable) fan work for sale. (Another recent bungle in the fandom jungle was that Jane hat from firefly fandom. Remember kids– it’s never over and don’t get too comfy. )
all right. so. this is a Harry Potter AU, in rambly and abbreviated form.
this is a version of events where, on the morning of November 1st, 1981, the police are called to a house in Surrey.
when they arrive, a large man with a red face and a moustache is waiting for them, brandishing a baby.
to be more accurate: he is brandishing a basket. the basket contains a baby.
he tells the police that his wife found the basket on their doorstep that morning. “Gave her the shock of her life,” he says, with a chuckle that does not seem the least bit sincere.
the police officers have a lot of questions about this, but the man does not have any useful answers. his wife, he tells them, is not in any shape to be interviewed. “she’s been poorly,” he says, “and we’ve got a baby of our own to worry about, keeping us up at all hours.”
the baby in the basket seems to be about a year old. he is cheerful, seems healthy aside from a cut on his forehead, with a crooked sticking plaster on it. he has startlingly green eyes.
there is no identifying information in the basket, except for a torn scrap of paper with ‘his name is Harry’ on it in a delicate hand.
there is nothing else to be done, it seems. the officers take baby Harry, and leave.
one of them comes back a few days later for a follow-up interview with the woman who found the baby. she seems a little fragile, and her own baby, in the next room, keeps up a constant shrieking tantrum the whole time the officer is there. “I’m sorry,” the woman says, with a brittle smile. “this has all been a bit much. I recently lost my sister, you see.”
i’m literally going to write out of spite a fantasy series focused on the relationship between two gay wizards in the 1920s who are driven apart due to one’s lust for power, ultimately leading to a final confrontation between the two to determine the fate of the world. and you know what??? jk can’t even sue me for it since she never actually incorporated it into her works, so boom i win.
“Frederick Joseph, a marketing consultant from New York City, recently created the #BlackPantherChallenge with the aim of raising $10,000 through a GoFundMe page to benefit the Boys and Girls Club of Harlem. Within days, he had surpassed the goal, raising more than $40,000. The hashtag took off on social media.
Now there are over 200 campaigns, including in cities like Toronto, London and Ghana, he said. The campaign has attracted the attention of celebrities like Octavia Spencer and Viola Davis. Spencer wrote on Instagram that she would rent out a theater in Mississippi so underprivileged children could see the movie on the big screen. Davis lent her voice to a fundraiser in Austin, which just recently raised the entire $4,000 to send 200 kids to see the movie.
The hope is that “Black Panther” won’t just be a fun night at the movies and a chance to see a costumed hero save the world from destruction. The film, and its predominately black cast and crew, can impact aspiring artists, directors, and writers from the black community who don’t see themselves represented frequently on screen.”
Jonathan, like Phryne Fisher, clearly hasn’t taken anything seriously since 1918.
And, I would suspect, for similar reasons.
^^^This. Jonathan being in World War I makes total sense. It’s
almost impossible for him not to have been. Given his age and background, he probably
volunteered in 1914.
Of course he’s going to not take anything seriously. Of
course he can shoot. The drinking, the skittishness, the recklessness, the
sense of ‘keeping your head down’, the scepticism about traditional heroism….
The one with more actual experience of death, carnage and
fighting is Jonathan. Not Rick. Not Ardeth Bey. Jonathan.
When Rick says ‘I’ve had worse (situation/odds)’ and Jonathan replies “ Me too”. That’s probably true.
Drop The Mummy
into the real world context and that’s a character who’s going to have seen a
lot of his school friends die, along with the myths and tales of heroism they
were raised on. Sort of makes the line where Evie’s scolding him for drinking/messing
about a lot darker…
Evie: Have you no respect for the dead? Jonathan: Of course I do, but sometimes I’d rather like
to join them.
I HAVE SO MANY FEELINGS RIGHT NOW
*record scratch*
Wait a minute. Why is it being assumed that Rick and Ardeth wouldn’t have fought in WWI, as well? Johnathan isn’t that much older than any of them–in fact, there is a good chance that he, Rick, and Ardeth are all of an age. Just because Johnathan’s hair is thinning doesn’t mean he’s a decade older.
It was a LOT easier to lie about your age back in the day. So much easier.
Johnathan is the soldier who fought in WWI and became disillusionsed with pretty much everything except wanting to live (most of the time) and live well–and where is the shame in that? He would have seen some of the darkest shit humanity has to offer, and he kept going. And the thing is, though, archaeological digs at that time were DANGEROUS. Not from curses (usually) but from assholes who would turn up with guns to try and steal anything you discovered. Johnathan never really STOPPED having to deal with dangerous pricks, it was just less dangerous than death raining down from the sky in bomb, bullet, and mustard gas form all the time.
Rick grew up in Egypt as an orphan. What paperwork? He joined the French Foreign Legion, which fought in World War I in some seriously critical battles on the Western Front in Europe. Rick is the soldier who quickly grew disillusioned with everything, but he didn’t know how to stop being a soldier. Johnathan had a career and schooling to fall back on. Rick had guns, the talent of not dying easily, and not much else. When the army finally left him behind because he was literally the only survivor of his last FFL battle, he literally didn’t know what to do. At all. “Looking for a good time” was code for “Please someone give me a fucking purpose.”
Ardeth grew up in the desert. He probably never enlisted…but if you think his people didn’t fight against invading forces during WWI, think again: that region of North Africa was swarming with soldiers on both sides, and they alll tried to claim everything they stumbled over even while in the midst of fighting each other. Ardeth spent his entire life fighting to protect what belonged to him, what belonged to his people, and trying to keep assholes from stealing things that didn’t belong to anyone (for good reason). By the time the war was over, Ardeth was disillisioned in everyone except his own people, and seriously fucking done with stupid idiots who stole in the name of archaeology. He is completely (justifiably) resigned to the worst when Rick the Magic Survivalist returns to Hamunaptra.
This has been another episode of “Actual History adding context and depth to character behavior”
I love when “The Mummy” fandom comes out to play. But it’s even better when the history side of tumblr is also in “The Mummy” fandom.
Every time this post comes around I am compelled to watch The Mummy again.
There’s no more powerful movie franchise in the universe than Star Wars — a fact once again proven by the $1.3 billion global haul of The Last Jedi — yet there’s been a great disturbance in the Force over the past year, thanks to the upheaval surrounding Solo: A Star Wars Story. The upcoming Han Solo origin story has been plagued by problems, most notably the firing of its original directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller after they’d already been shooting the project for months and the subsequent hiring of Ron Howard, as well as rumors that star Alden Ehrenreich’s performance was so unsatisfactory that the studio had to hire an acting coach for him. All that combined with an absence of official photos or footage from the film (which lands in multiplexes in less than four months), anxiety has steadily mounted about the upcoming prequel.
But this evening, fans can finally breathe a sigh of relief, because the first snippets of Solo: A Star Wars Story have arrived.
Disney dropped a 45-second sneak peek of the Howard-helmed film ahead of its maiden full-length promo on Good Morning America on Monday morning. We get introduced to the young hero as he attempts to join the Imperial ranks; we see him racing speeders; we get glimpses of his furry BFF Chewbacca, his future pal Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover), and his iconic ride, the Millennium Falcon. There’s also a brief shot of Game of Thrones star Emilia Clarke, whose role has been shrouded in mystery.
While there may not have been enough to convince Star Wars die-hards that Solo will soar following its production-history troubles (Ehrenreich has nary a line of dialogue), at least we know that the film does in fact exist. And it will be blazing into theaters on May 25.
Watch: Harrison who? Meet the guy who was almost Han Solo 40 years ago:
The change from Li Shang is concerning, and not only because it’s erasing a very distinctly bisexual character. Forget sexuality: even if you prefer a more platonic interpretation (which I don’t), Li Shang clearly respects, admires, and likes Mulan as Ping and as a person. He loves her as a friend long before he loves her as a woman, girlfriend, or wife. The entire point of the movie is that Li Shang loves Mulan as a person (platonically, romantically, either way), not just as a potential mate. The entire point of the entire ending is that people do not award women the same respect offered to men. (Mushu: “Huh? You’re a girl now, remember?”) The entire point of the finale is that Shang and Ping’s friends do give Mulan the same respect as a woman, because her gender doesn’t matter: she is still the same person with the same good strategic sense, and they’ll trust her whether she’s wearing armor or a dress.
If this “Chen Honghui” hates Mulan/Ping until he finds out that she is a woman, that isn’t just erasing Shang’s bisexuality: it’s also sexualizing Mulan and stripping her of all her agency and accomplishment. In this version, Mulan isn’t worthy of respect as a person. She is only worth admiring as a woman. He can’t like her as a warrior, as a strategist, as a friend, as a person; he can only like her as a woman. Let me rephrase this: Instead of giving Mulan a chance to earn the same respect Chen offers to all his other warriors, he’s only going to appreciate her once he sees her as a woman. As an “approved” sexual object. ONLY THEN is it worth noticing her or granting her basic human decency and respect. “Something like love,” as the description tells us, clearly has nothing to do with any of her personality and everything to do with genitalia. Even if he was completely and entirely straight, we should see that he’s at least befriending Mulan/Ping before the Gender Reveal. Straight guys can still recognize another man’s good qualities and appreciate them for what they are. If Ping isn’t even a friend before “he” becomes Mulan, then this isn’t “something like love;” it’s just lust and objectification, pure and simple. The “rivalry” is also bullshit. The fact that “rivalry” can change so quickly into “something like love” means only that for Chen, a set of imaginary genitalia is all it takes to completely shift his perspective on someone from “worthy of competition” to “worthy of sex.” What, so he’s just going to abandon the rivalry now that she’s a woman? Oh – because she’s only a woman. He doesn’t have to compete with her anymore, because that’s not what you do with women. A rivalry would imply that she’s still a man, and at least he can view a rival as a decent warrior; but now, she can be comfortably reduced to Sex Appeal.
Also… what about that personality? “Cocky?” A “mean, bullying streak”? Thinks of Mulan as “his chief rival?” Are you going to strip the male lead of EVERY shred of decency? Li Shang isn’t a bully: he is a soldier who pushes his men (and woman) to excel, because this is wartime and that’s the only way to survive. He genuinely cares about them and shows real pride when they show signs of improvement. He doesn’t see them as rivals; he sees them as friends for whom he is responsible. Sure, he doesn’t like Ping at first, but that’s got nothing to do with gender and more to do with the fact that Ping’s initial behavior is so inflammatory. (Dodges commander’s questions; starts fights in the rice line; holds the other soldiers back in training; cheats on assignments, even if that’s the result of Mushu’s intervention). Once Ping proves himself as a person and as a warrior, Shang doesn’t hesitate to reward Ping with all the admiration Ping deserves.
Disney is so concerned about removing every hint of bisexuality from its movies, it’s also utterly destroyed any decency they could have in a heterosexual romance. In their attempts to make everything nice and straight and cisgendered, they’re bending their characters WAY out of whack.
They’re taking Mulan – originally a woman who denies gender boundaries to prove that gender doesn’t matter to personal worth – and they’re turning her into a person who can’t earn respect,honor, or even the admiration of her fellow soldiers until she puts on a dress and can be seen, not as a warrior or as a person but as an object of desire.
And they’re taking Shang – originally a man who cares about his fellow soldiers and who respects Mulan regardless of her gender presentation – and turned him into a cocky asshole who only cares about himself and is only able to appreciate Mulan when she is female, and even then, only because he’d like to have some sex.
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