the notes on that last poll are insane there was someone who said they separate fics into "porn" and "story" and they didnt stop for a second to think that sex in and of itself might be a story??? the way some of you people trivialize sex and explicit art is fucking bonkers to me. you sound like a christian when you act like sex cheapens art or like art focusing on sex is a completely separate category from non-sexual art. explicit fics, yes even pwp (which i believe is a misnomer anyways), are telling stories and they're stories worth telling because sex is normal and healthy and deeply important to many of us. just because something gets you off doesn't mean it's cheap or meaningless. i'd argue that things that engage the viewer sexually are very meaningful because human sexuality is complex and beautiful and worth sharing and exploring. Grow up and read about the guys you like sucking eachother off

Stop putting DNI on your tags and stop bringing shipping discourse into AO3

AO3 hid the story and asked OP to remove the tag (the fanfic is not even removed) due to the inflammatory tag. That's deserved. AO3 is not a social media for people to fight over ship and chronically online discourse. It's a library. If people keep bringing DNI and discourse into AO3 it'll make the place toxic for writers and reader.

What are you trying to accomplish with putting DNI? Do you think people actually care about DNI? No, it's just making you looking like an asshole doing this

Also AO3 was founded by a Wincest and Thorki shipper. Astolat made AO3 because FF net and other sites keep purging nsfw fanfic. AO3 is literally made for problematique shipper that op don't like.

Then OP doing this? For what? People want to enjoy reading their fanfic not seeing DNI and online discourse on AO3. I hate using the word virtue signaling as it's often used to demean progress but this is what a real virtue signaling looks like 🤦🤦‍♀️

(I bet op wrote more inflammatory tags on their fic other than 'proshitter DNI get a life' because it take a lot to get your story hidden or removed)

please help me- i used to be pretty smart but i’m having so much trouble grasping the concept of diegetic vs non-diegetic bdsm!

gfkjldghfd okay first of all I'm sorry for the confusion, if you're not finding anything on the phrase it's because I made it up and absolutely nobody but me ever uses it, but I haven't found a better way to express what I'm trying to say so I keep using it. but now you've given me an excuse to ramble on about some shit that is only relevant to me and my deeply inefficient way of talking and by god I'm going to take it.

SO. the way diegetic and non-diegetic are normally used is to talk about music and sound design in movies/tv shows. in case you aren't familiar with that concept, here's a rundown:

diegetic sound is sound that happens within the world of the movie/show and can be acknowledged by the characters, like a song playing on the stereo during a driving scene, or sung on stage in Phantom of the Opera. it's also most other sounds that happen in a movie, like the sounds of traffic in a city scene, or a thunderclap, or a marching band passing by. or one of the three stock horse sounds they use in every movie with a horse in it even though horses don't really vocalize much in real life, but that's beside the point, the horse is supposed to be actually making that noise within the movie's world and the characters can hear it whinnying.

non-diegetic sound is any sound that doesn't exist in the world of the movie/show and can't be perceived by the characters. this includes things like laugh tracks and most soundtrack music. when Duel of Fates plays in Star Wars during the lightsaber fight for dramatic effect, that's non-diegetic. it exists to the audience, but the characters don't know their fight is being backed by sick ass music and, sadly, can't hear it.

the lines can get blurry between the two, you've probably seen the film trope where the clearly non-diegetic music in the title sequence fades out to the same music, now diegetic and playing from the character's car stereo. and then there are things like Phantom of the Opera as mentioned above, where the soundtrack is also part of the plot, but Phantom of the Opera does also have segments of non-diegetic music: the Phantom probably does not have an entire orchestra and some guy with an electric guitar hiding down in his sewer just waiting for someone to break into song, but both of those show up in the songs they sing down there.

now, on to how I apply this to bdsm in fiction.

if I'm referring to diegetic bdsm what I mean is that the bdsm is acknowledged for what it is in-world. the characters themselves are roleplaying whatever scenarios their scenes involve and are operating with knowledge of real life rules/safety practices. if there's cnc depicted, it will be apparent at some point, usually right away, that both characters actually are fully consenting and it's all just a planned scene, and you'll often see on-screen negotiation and aftercare, and elements of the story may involve the kink community wherever the characters are. Love and Leashes is a great example of this, 50 Shades and Bonding are terrible examples of this, but they all feature characters that know they're doing bdsm and are intentional about it.

if I'm talking about non-diegetic bdsm, I'm referring to a story that portrays certain kinks without the direct acknowledgement that the characters are doing bdsm. this would be something like Captive Prince, or Phantom of the Opera again, or the vast majority of bodice ripper type stories where an innocent woman is kidnapped by a pirate king or something and totally doesn't want to be ravished but then it turns out he's so cool and sexy and good at ravishing that she decides she's into it and becomes his pirate consort or whatever it is that happens at the end of those books. the characters don't know they're playing out a cnc or D/s fantasy, and in-universe it's often straight up noncon or dubcon rather than cnc at all. the thing about entirely non-diegetic bdsm is that it's almost always Problematic™ in some way if you're not willing to meet the story where it's at, but as long as you're not judging it by the standards of diegetic bdsm, it's just providing the reader the same thing that a partner in a scene would: the illusion of whatever risk or taboo floats your boat, sometimes to extremes that can't be replicated in real life due to safety, practicality, physics, the law, vampires not being real, etc. it's consensual by default because it's already pretend; the characters are vehicles for the story and not actually people who can be hurt, and the reader chose to pick up the book and is aware that nothing in it is real, so it's all good.

this difference is where people tend to get hung up in the discourse, from what I've observed. which is why I started using this phrasing, because I think it's very crucial to be able to differentiate which one you're talking about if you try to have a conversation with someone about the portrayal of bdsm in media. it would also, frankly, be useful for tagging, because sometimes when you're in the mood for non-diegetic bodice ripper shit you'd call the police over in real life, it can get really annoying to read paragraphs of negotiation and check-ins that break the illusion of the scene and so on, and the opposite can be jarring too.

it's very possible to blur these together the same way Phantom of the Opera blurs its diegetic and non-diegetic music as well. this leaves you even more open to being misunderstood by people reading in bad faith, but it can also be really fun to play with. @not-poignant writes fantastic fanfic, novels, and original serials on ao3 that pull this off really well, if you're okay with some dark shit in your fiction I would highly recommend their work. some of it does get really fucking dark in places though, just like. be advised. read the tags and all that.

but yeah, spontaneous writer plug aside, that's what I mean.

ok i've been called a sex freak tranny too i get where you're coming from but like also please be more careful with extremely vague posts about Problematic Kinks

no. people's openness about what two consenting adults can do in private has no bearing on how likely they are to be child abusers or close ranks about child abusers & thinking there is some correlation is a sign that your stance on sexual abuse is mediated more by disgust reaction and aesthetic associations than by structural analysis. there is a pretty hard and obvious line between not condemming consensual sex acts between adults and being a pedophile and thinking that it's some sort of spectrum or slippery slope there imo speaks poorly to your conceptualization of why SA is a bad thing.

people love to say that X or Y kink Normalizes Abuse, but, like, actually think about communities where sexual abuse is 'normalized' in society. is the problem with the catholic church that it's too pro-kink? is the problem with US professional gymnastics that it's too pro-kink? is the problem with the amish that they're too pro-kink? was the problem with the british entertainment industry in the 1970s that it was too pro-kink? is the problem with the prison system that it's too pro-kink? &c. &c. &c.

sexual abuse doesn't happen because people are degenerate perverts and everyone is too accepting of that, sexual abuse happens because society is full of institutions that give adults structural power over children and men structural power over women. giving credence to the former, even in the form of thinking you have to be "super careful" about perverts, is a straightforwardly reactionary position.

People know that the whole "don't portray [harmful action] because viewers might recreate it" thing is a rule for children's shows right? It's supposed to be shit like "don't show peppa pig playing with fire so we don't get sued if a kid watches it and burns their house down." Not like, fanfiction for adults.

if i have to see someone use the word “grooming” one more time in an incorrect way i’m going to start throwing things. like YES this person had an inappropriate relationship with this other person. YES this person was abusive and manipulative. YES this person seemed creepily obsessed with this other person. etc etc etc. but that doesn’t automatically equal grooming !!! abuse isn’t necessarily grooming, stalking isn’t necessarily grooming, even pedophilia isn’t necessary grooming ! grooming refers to a SPECIFIC PATTERN OF BEHAVIOR that predatory adults will use on children before actually abusing them in order to normalize and suppress the abuse beforehand! it’s specifically nonviolent and is used to make the predator harder to get caught, to get the victim to trust and fear them, and to normalize said inappropriate behavior before it actually happens. i cannot fucking stand what the internet has done to this term. if you’re talking about domestic abuse, use the word domestic abuse. if you’re talking about rape, use the word rape. if you’re talking about stalking, use the word stalking. if you’re talking about straight up pedophilia, use that word. this is one of those words i’m putting on the shelf until the internet knows how to use it properly

hey ao3 can you like give the extra $38k you made from this month’s funds drive to charity

The midjourney stuff just reminds of when we were trying to find a new platform to host the ao3 donation form, and companies kept trying to tell me about all their "ai" features that would track donor engagement, and figure out the optimal pattern to email individual donors asking for follow up donations, and all the ways they suggest we manipulate people into staying on our websites. It was a great way to filter out who either wasn't listening to us when we described our ethics and donor base, or just didn't believe us.

Now granted ao3 is a unique case based on a) the amount of page views we get in any given time period and b) the fact that most donors absolutely do Not want to be identified as such anywhere, (the default "list of recent donors" module got nuked Immediately) but it surprised me some that the concept of "donors who value their privacy and would be furious at even the whiff of AI" is unique. Some of us really are just existing in different worlds.

Is it me or is the anti movement... really american? We have that stereotype over here that americans are super uptight about sex and super shy about it and obsessed with purity and hiding it from the children and stuff. Idk as a european it always striked me as a product of american culture

it’s very, very American. While there are certainly antis who aren’t American, many of them are.

I have a lot of theories as to why this is, but a lot of them are covered in this post: anti-shipping as the cool new trend (while it’s mostly about the age bracket of anti-shippers as of June 2017 (this time last year), it’s an americentric post talking almost entirely about US phenomena).

tl;dr version? anti-shipping is:

the natural result of growing up both LGBT+/queer and marinated in American-flavored Puritan Christianity/purity culture 

with a side order of valuing safety over freedom 

b/c you’ve always had freedom of information 

but you’ve never known a sense of security 

thanks to lifelong internet access 

paired with post-9/11 paranoia.

add a dash of radical feminism/exclusionist thinking

never being taught how to think critically, and

zero education on sex of any kind, and

viola: anti-shippers. 

Another big reason it's so hard to take anti-fiction arguments seriously is because I have reading comprehension, can read critically, and can enjoy fiction without having it radically change me.

I've never read any fiction with dark themes, no matter how sexualized, glorified, or whatever, that even began to make me think about condoning or supporting it in real life.

It's to the point where I'm genuinely confused by what point Antis is trying to make. Do they think that people are so brainless that they just support everything they read? of that somehow, if you read it enough, it just washes away all of your morals and core beliefs?

“degenerate” isn’t a cool edgy trendy insult it’s literally Nazi language

“degenerate” isn’t a cool edgy trendy insult it’s literally Nazi language

no but how much audacity and sheer entitlement do you have to have to tell people they need to stop posting their darkfic and porn fic and any other fic you don’t like to ao3 so you can have a safe space when ao3 was literally created as a safe space for writers to post their content without fear of it being randomly wiped out by pro-censorship assholes with an agenda like what has happened to plenty of other fic archives before?

“but a lot of us see ao3 as a safe space to get away from that kind of nasty content” - lol you can see the middle of a busy interstate as a safe space all you want too but that doesn’t mean that you get to walk into the road and scream at all the cars going by that they’re the ones infringing on your safe space either

ao3 is not, has never been, and will never be a site meant for nothing but children’s stories. you can “see it” like that as much as you want but there’s a difference between fiction and reality and that view of what ao3 is like is as fictional as the stories posted on it.

Lmao you’re an adult, you shouldn’t be using the word squick. Use trigger. Use your grown up adult words to explain how you feel instead of leaning on a cutesy uwu term that no one outside of tumblr uses. It’s embarrassing.

Idek if this is serious or ironic honestly

I really think everyone needs to truly internalize this:

Fictional characters are objects.

They are not people. You cannot "objectify" them, because they have no personhood to be deprived of. They have no humanity to be erased. You cannot "disrespect" them, because they are not real.

I´ve lately seen many young peeps in fandom spaces, worrying about openly shipping their ships because of what antis might do

so let me tell you something:

antis are huge losers who are gonna find something to hate you for no matter what you do

even if you ship EXACTLY what they ship, theyre gonna yell at you for "not shipping it right"

so, my piece of advice: just do whatever you want and tear up the house! antis are gonna hate no matter what, so ignore them and find some good companions by being yourself