yall ever heard about ao3s next of kin policy
..hmmm..
Who wants to be executor of my smut?
…is this supposed to be considered weird? I don’t get it.
I think it’s more that it was an unexpected feature. I’m glad it’s there.
Yeah I actually found it while prepping for brain surgery, and was incredibly relieved that it was a built-in feature and not something I’d have to leave convoluted instructions about or whatever. It’s a bit morbid, sure, but it’s a great feature.
…an unexpected but very appreciated feature.
This is a feature designed by women who’d been in fandom for decades, and who had faced the issue of, “X is dead, and we know she loved fandom, so… can we reprint her stories? Who can decide? Her family knows fuck-all about fandom. Who was her best friend? Do they know if she would’ve liked her story to be reprinted in the Best Of OTP Fic zine?”
Running across that once doesn’t make you think about a policy, but by the time it’s five to ten times, and then you’ve seen people vanish from the internet (might be dead; might just be not interested anymore) and nobody knows whether it’s okay to collect their fic in an archive or transfer it to a new one….
Yeah, the FNoK policy is one of the awesome things about AO3.
I’ve mentioned “romantic fantasy” in a few recent posts, and some of the responses have made it apparent that a lot of folks have no idea what that actually means - they’re reading it as “romance novels in fantasy settings”, and while some romantic fantasy stories are that, there’s a bit more to it.
In a nutshell, romantic fantasy is a particular genre of Western fantasy literature that got started in the 1970s, reaching its peak in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Its popularity sharply declined shortly thereafter, for reasons that are far too complicated to go into here; suffice it to say that you won’t find many pure examples of the type published after 1998 or so.
It’s tough to pin down exactly what romantic fantasy is in a few words, but you’ll definitely know it when you see it - there’s a very particular complex of tropes that defines it. I’ll try to hit the highlights below; not every romantic fantasy story will exhibit all of these traits, but most will exhibit most of them.
Romantic fantasy settings are typically “grown up” versions of settings that traditionally appeal to young girls: telepathic horses, wise queens, enchanted forests, all that stuff. Note that by “grown up”, I don’t mean “dark” or deconstructionist; romantic fantasy is usually on board with the optimistic tone of its source material, and any grime and uncertainty is the result of being a place that adult human beings actually live in. Protagonists are natives of the setting, rather than visitors from Earth (as is customary in similar stories targeted at younger audiences), though exceptions do exist.
In terms of stories and themes, romance is certainly a big presence, but an even stronger one is politics. Where traditional fantasy is deeply concerned with the geography of its settings, romantic fantasy focuses on the political landscape. Overwrought battle scenes are replaced by long and complicated discussions of political alliances and manoeuverings, brought down to the personal level through the use of heavily stylised supporting characters who function as avatars of the factions and philosophies they represent. Many romantic fantasy stories employ frequent “head-hopping” to give the reader insight into these philosophies, often to the point of narrating brief scenes from the villain’s perspective.
The “good” societies of romantic fantasy settings tend to be egalitarian or matriarchal. Patriarchal attitudes are exhibited only by evil men - or very occasionally by sympathetic male characters who are too young and sheltered to know better (and are about to learn!) - and often serve as cultural markers of the obligatory Evil Empire Over Yonder. Romantic fantasy’s heydey very slightly predates third-wave feminism, so expect to see a lot of the second wave’s unexamined gender essentialism in play; in particular, expect any evil or antagonistic woman to be framed as a traitor to her gender.
Usually these societies are explicitly gay-friendly. There’s often a special made-up word - always printed in italics - for same-gender relationships. If homophobia exists, it’s a trait that only evil people possess, and - like patriarchy - may function as a cultural marker of the Evil Empire. (Note, however, that most romantic fantasy authors were straight women, so the handling of this element tends to be… uneven at best.)
Magical abilities are very common. This may involve a unique talent for each individual, or a set of defined “spheres” of magic that practically everyone is aligned with. An adolescent lacking magical abilities is usually a metaphor for being a late bloomer; an adult lacking magical abilities is usually a metaphor for being physically disabled. (And yes, that last one can get very cringey at times, in all the ways you’d expect - it was the 1980s, after all.)
In keeping with their narrative focus, romantic fantasy stories almost always have an explicitly political character with a strongly progressive bent. However, most romantic fantasy settings share mainstream fantasy’s inexplicable boner for monarchies, so there’s often a fair bit of cognitive dissonance in play - many romantic fantasy settings go through elaborate gymnastics to explain why our hereditary nobility is okay even though everybody else’s is icky and bad. This explanation may literally boil down to “a wizard did it” (i.e., some magical force exists to prevent the good guys’ nobles from abusing their power).
I think that about covers it, though I’m sure I’ve overlooked something - anybody who knows the subject better than I do should feel free to yell at me about it.
(As an aside, if some of this is sounding awful familiar, yes - My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic draws a lot of inspiration from romantic fantasy, particularly the early 90s strand. It’s not a straight example of the type - there are very few of those around today - but it’s not at all subtle about its roots.)
Oh, I read so much of this as a teen and young adult. It might have started a touch earlier than the 70′s with Anne MacCaffrey and Dragonriders of Pern? The most obvious example I can think of is Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar books and over in the comic book medium, I think Wendy Pini’s Elfquest just squeezes in.
One thing about this genre, when I reread something from it that I loved 20 or 25 years ago, I go from extreme and affectionate nostalgia to quite literally blushing in embarrassment over some of those cringe-worthy bits you mentioned.
Yeah, Lackey’s Valdemar books are basically the platonic ideal of romantic fantasy for a lot of folks - though in spite of being arguably the most influential romantic fantasy author of her generation, Lackey herself was a relative latecomer to the genre.
As for McCaffrey, I’d hesitate to classify her Dragonriders of Pern series as romantic fantasy. I’ll grant that later entries in the series certainly develop in that direction, but especially early on it hews a lot closer to traditional heroic fantasy. Her Talent universe, however, is a dead-perfect example of the type, in spite of having an extremely variant setting.
(For those who haven’t read them, McCaffrey’s Talent books take place in a gonzo far-future space opera setting, revolving around the personal dramas of a pseudo-noble caste of godlike telepaths who enjoy their privileges as a consequence of being the setting’s only economical source of faster-than-light communication and transport. Weird stuff.)
I read so much Mercedes Lacky and Anne McCaffrey as a kid. I’d love to hear about the decline of the genre - I’m guessing that modern feminism and the lgbt movement had a lot to do with it? That is - the growth out of a lot of the more cringey tropes morphing the genre into something distinctly different?
Yeah, there were a number of different factors involved. Losing the LGBT audience was certainly part of it - not because of the inept handling of the subject matter per se, but because a lot of LGBT readers were reading romantic fantasy simply because they couldn’t get that kind of representation anywhere else, and when more LGBT authors started getting published in the mid 1990s, they had better options.
The Internet itself was another big culprit. Commercial Internet service went mainstream circa 1995, and suddenly, a lot of content that had formerly been the province of a hard core of dedicated hobbyists was accessible to everyone - most critically, online fanfic. Many folks, particularly among younger readers, found that online fanfic scratched the same itch as romantic fantasy; I recall a great deal of mid-to-late-1990s fanfic that basically applied the tropes and forms of romantic fantasy to video game settings, for example. (Chrono Trigger was an oddly popular choice - anyone old enough to remember that?)
This was compounded by mishandling by both authors and publishers. Though the new communication channels afforded by the Internet could have been a great boon to them, most romantic fantasy authors (correctly) perceived online fanfic as competing for their audience, and responded with extreme hostility. We’ve talked a bit about Mercedes Lackey; her stance on online fanfic was legendarily draconian, and often backed with litigation, to the extent that her nascent Internet fandom was basically smothered in its crib. By the time she mellowed out on the medium, it was too late. A lot of other romantic fantasy authors and publishers followed the same trajectory.
Lastly, the final nail in romantic fantasy’s coffin was basically J K Rowling’s fault, believe it or not. During the period in which romantic fantasy literature enjoyed its peak popularity, YA fantasy literature was in a low ebb; there wasn’t much of it coming out, and most of it wasn’t very good, so a lot of kids were reading romantic fantasy (in spite of its subject matter often being wildly inappropriate; I’ve mentioned in the past how many books about teenage girls having sex with dragons I ended up reading!). That youth demographic ended up being the last bastion of romantic fantasy’s mainstream readership - then the YA fantasy renaissance of the late 1990s stole that audience wholesale.
There were probably half-a-dozen other significant factors that contributed to romantic fantasy’s commercial decline, but those are the highlights.
lizziegoneastray
I knew it was Rowling’s fault I couldn’t find “my” type of fantasy anymore! All of a sudden, everyone seemed to be trying to write the next Harry Potter. It was quite upsetting, as I had rather liked the fantasy genre the way it was before, back when it was generally agreed upon that magic ought to have actual rules :P I had no idea there was an actual name for this type of fantasy. I miss it dreadfully, though :( though, yes, certain scenes in the Mage Winds trilogy were pretty horrifying when I was ten…
Another element in the decline was related to the development of the internet, but only tangentially.
In the late 80s and early 90s, anime and manga began to be licensed more and more in the Americas and Europe. At first, most offerings were male-focused and had a narrow audience, but with the shift from bbs and rec.alt. to free personal webpages (thank you Netscape!), information about series from Japan spread much faster. At this point, the fansub community boomed (no really, boomed to the point where there were distributors in countries all over the world, not just in college clubs), due to the ability to publish their catalogs and contact information more easily. This brought a variety of shoujo and josei series to the attention of a wider audience, specifically of women, and suddenly female geeks who formerly had been following Romantic Fantasy found out that entire swaths of television and comics were already dedicated to them in Japan. (You can thank Sailor Moon for the explosion of shoujo that decade. No, really. I’m serious.)
1995 was a big turning point. In a single year, while Sailor Moon was finishing up season S and moving on to Super S, the following powerhouse anime were released: Fushigi Yuugi, Magic Knight Rayearth, Wedding Peach, Gundam Wing, Evangelion, and Slayers. Of these, the first 3 were shoujo; Fushighi Yuugi was an ancient China-themed portal anime that pretty much nailed the Romantic Fantasy genre right down the middle, Magic Knight Rayearth was a mecha portal magical girl series, and Wedding Peach was a real world magical girl series. As for the others, Gundam Wing was intended as a shounen SF war story to reboot the Gundam franchise, but it ended up with basically a yaoi fanbase dominated by women (fandom-wise, it was the Supernatural of its day, but with more lead characters and less incest). Evangelion was a groundbreaking grimdark apocalyptic disaster as notorious as it still is famous, and its audience was pretty well split in every way imaginable, including on whether they hated it or not. The only unmitigated success of the year not to draw most of its fanbase from among women was Slayers.
The impact of that year and the following (1996 was the year of Escaflowne and Hana Yori Dango) was immediately obvious if you went to SF&F cons in the US. The cosplay shifted, the panels shifted, there was a lot of sudden interest from women in what had been presented as a mostly male genre often erroneously equated with porn. Many women I had formerly discussed Bradley, Lackey, McCaffrey, and Rawn with were now discussing CLAMP and Takeuchi-sensei and the best places to get reasonably-priced import manga.
So yeah: internet fanfiction, Rowling/Duane/the YA crowd in general, books by queer authors who didn’t encourage us to think of ways to die heroically, anime & manga, and of course Supernatural Romance. Romantic Fantasy was a genre so tenacious that it took that many blows for it to mostly fall (and I would argue that it still informs fantasy television today). Or, conversely, you can think of the need that women have to see fantastical stories that reflect us as so powerful that for over 2 decades it drove an incredibly diverse group of women to all converge on a genre that didn’t entirely satisfy most of them but on which they were totally willing to spend money, because it was a genre women were actually producing for ourselves, and nobody else was listening.
There’s a reason women dominate fic.
musashigouda-deactivated2019032
hey ao3 can you like give the extra $38k you made from this month’s funds drive to charity
blooming-wilting
You know it legally is a charity, right?
If x charity aims for £10, but gets £15, would you expect then to give back the extra five or give it then to another charity? No. Any extra costs go into the “rainy day” fund; sometimes servers crash or break, sometimes false reports are made that require the legal team, sometimes you need to hire coders or what not to implement new features or fix bugs or deal with broken code …
The money they aimed for is the bare minimum, which goes towards things like basic server costs and domain names and legal advice and so forth, but they don’t just “pocket” the rest (as people claim). It’s not a business. It has no advertisements. It needs some “rainy day” cash to function.
You can’t ask a charity to give money to another charity.
It needs what it gets to function and improve.
kiena-tesedale replied to this post
They don’t “pocket” excess money. They have a publicly accessible budget - waaaay more info than most charities, in fact. In it, you can clearly see where each dollar goes. (Also, you are vastly underestimating either how much traffic AO3 gets or how much servers/hosting costs.)
In my experience, people who don’t work in web design and hosting just have no concept of how heavy a load something like AO3 would have. Not only is the traffic absolutely buck wild, but the quantity of data that archive needs to store is fuckoff crazy. I’m talking “more than the library of congress” crazy. The only reason it doesn’t require Netflix levels of data serving is that it’s text based rather than video.
AO3 is in the top 300 websites in the world, and the top 100 in the US. It is the number 2 literature website.
Number 2 in the entire world. JSTOR is 20.
It sees about 6 million people a day. About 250k an hour. Each of those people is loading multiple pages, many are running searches that execute on literally hundreds of potential variables per search. The demands involved are astronomical.
JSTOR, btw, makes 85 million dollars a year.
It’s 18 ranks below AO3′s traffic, and takes in 650 times the amount of money.
But let’s say you think that’s an unfair comparison. Would you say that the Project Gutenberg Literature Archival Group- another text based archive that handles literature operating outside traditional copyright requirements- is more similar?
Because it sees all of 4% of the traffic that AO3 handles.
Care to guess its budget?
Double that of AO3.
AO3 is doing shit on the kind of shoestring budget that I fully, 100% cannot comprehend. And that’s just the archival service.
The 130k also pays for the OTW’s legal team, which they use to defend the right of fandom to fucking exist.
It’s absolutely batshit fucked up that people are fighting to have the OTW defunded and AO3 shut down. They are the only organized group that actually stands directly between fandom- all the art and the fics and the vids and the music and the chats and the memes and everything we love about interactive, transformative work- and an incalculable amount of lawsuits.
I gotta say, I’m gettin’ real sick of this anti-AO3 discourse.
C’mon, guys. C’mon. Please. Do your research and learn your fandom history. We do not want a repeat of Strikethrough. Or a foreign company swooping in to buy the platform because the initial owners viewed the content on said platform as toxic. (I’m not sorry, I’m still hugely bitter over how the whole 6Apart thing went down on LJ.)
I weirdly love that there are crotchety fandom elders around who say shit like “in my day, (insert fandom term) meant this specifically, but now you kids just use it to mean any old thing.”
It seriously gives fandom such a sense of heritage and family, like yes grandma, tell me more about how you had to write fic uphill both ways in the snow when you were my age.
carapace-cowl
I’m approaching crotchety old grandma.
notalwaysweak
No but this is me.
DRABBLES ARE EXACTLY 100 WORDS NO MORE NO LESS AND DON’T FUCKING TRY TO TELL ME OTHERWISE.
This is me also. A crackship is NOT the same as a rarepair and the two terms canNOT be used interchangeably.
lil-miss-choc
YOU CAN ONLY HAVE ONE OTP.
It’s literally right there in the name. It is your ONE true pairing.
I get around this one by have one OTP for each fandom. It’s my OTP for that fandom.
I am a crotchety old fandom grandmother and I approve this message
the drabble thing irks me SO MUCH it makes me feel like an old lady yelling at kids on her lawn
#oh fandom #THE DRABBLE THING #DRABBLES ARE 100 WORDS #ONE GODDAMN HUNDRED WORDS EXACTLY #jfc that’s what made them such a fun and interesting challenge #was getting it to exactly 100 words #and the rush of FINALLY getting there after picking and poking #or the sheer dumb joy of nailing it within a word or two on the first shot #so you only had to do the most minor editing #do not give me a fucking 8000 word fic and call it a drabble #ThAT IS NOT A DRABBLE (via @wasoncedelight)
IF IT IS MORE THAN 100 WORDS IT IS A FICLET NOT A DRABBLE OMG WHY DON’T YOU JUST CALL IT A HAIKU WHILE YOU’RE AT IT???
‘Scuse you, I am the SPINSTER AUNT, not the crotchety grandma!
YKINMKATO WAS FUCKING NECESSARY AND YOU KIDS DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU LET SLIP AWAY
If this post gets 150 notes I’ll make a DS9 anime opening.
parmachkais
you maniacs asked, I delivered:
Jesus Christ I’m laughing to tears this owns
RISE YOUNG BOY TO THE HEAVENS LIKE A LEGEND
What he says: I’m a writer
What he means: I just spent ten hours on Pinterest going through memes. I was trying to find a good hair shade for a side character I’m never going to describe. I haven’t slept in three days and haven’t touched the document in a week. My search history is so fucked up I’m probably on a no fly list. I have read so many conspiracy theories I can’t remember what’s real. Time is an illusion. God is dead.
Throw back to a chapter in Fisheye Placebo when Jen the graffiti artist was first introduced :D
She’ll be in the new upcoming chapters again, but now you can read all the existing webcomic for free on my website https://www.yuumeiart.com/fisheye-placebo/
Another Moira x Leyendecker study ( Arrow Collar Advertisement, 1912-2, panorama )
Still can’t get over how much this boss fight represents all my general rage at the greedy goddamn bean counters of the world
You guys, you must stop doing this. You must. We cannot keep yelling at you about it because it makes us so angry, and we are already angry all the time, about real things, like how our lives are turning into a real world Handmaid’s Tale, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha haha ha ha ha ha ha. We cannot keep spending our energy being mad at mediocre men for writing mediocre books that inexplicably win awards and that people tell us to read, for some fucking godawful who knows reason.
So men. My guys. My dudes. My bros. My writers. I am begging you to help me here. When you have this man in your workshop, you must turn to him. You must take his clammy hands in yours. You must look deep into his eyes, his man eyes, with your man eyes, and you must say to him, “Peter, I am a man, and you are a man, so let us talk to each other like men. Peter, look at the way you have written about the only four women in this book.” And Peter will say, trying to free his hands, “What? These are sexy, dynamic, interesting women.” And you must grip his hands even tighter and you must say to him, “ARE THEY, PETER? Why are they interesting? What are their hobbies? What are their private habits? What are their strange dreams? What choices are they making, Peter? They are not making choices. They are not interesting. What they are is sexy, and you have those things confused, and not in the good way where someone’s interestingness makes them become sexy, like Steve Buscemi or Pauline Viardot. Why must women be sexy to be interesting to you? The women you don’t find sexy are where, Peter? They are invisible? They are all dead?” He is trying to escape! Tighten your grasp. “Peter, look at this. I mean, where to begin. ‘She could have been any age between eighteen and thirty-five?’ There are no other ages, I guess? Do you know what eighteen-year-olds really look like, in life? Do you know what thirty-SEVEN-year-olds look like, god forbid? And not that this is even the point, but why are these supposedly sexy and dynamic and interesting women BOTHERING with your boring garbage ‘on the skinny side of average’ protagonist? Why did you write it like this, Peter?”
And maybe Peter will say at last, “I don’t know.” Maybe he will be silent for a long long long time, and then maybe he will say, “I guess it’s scary and difficult for me to imagine the interiority of women because then i would have to know that my mother had an interiority of her own: private, petty, sexually unstimulating, strange: unrelated to me and undevoted to my needs. That sometimes I was nothing to my mother, just as sometimes she is nothing to me. That I was not at all times her immediate concern.”
“I know, Peter,” you can tell him gently.
“I don’t want to know that my mother was a human being with an internal life, because to know that would be to risk a frightening intimacy with her,” Peter will say, maybe. “Because to know that would be to know that she was only a small, complicated person, no bigger or smaller than I am, and I am so small. To know how alone she was. How alone I am. How alone we all are. That my mother survived with no resources more mysterious than my own. And yet she gave me life. My God: she gave me life. How can I pay her back for that? And how can I forgive her for it? How can I ever repay her for the good and the evil of it, my life, every day of my life?” He will be sobbing probably. “I am frightened of her. I am frightened of loneliness. I am frightened of dying. O God. My God. I didn’t know. I didn’t know.” Drool will run from his mouth as he cries. The way babies cry. He will be ashamed. You must hold him. You must say, “Shh, Peter. Shh.” Wrap your man arms around him. Hum into his thin hair as your own mother hummed once into your own sweet-smelling baby scalp. Kiss him gently on his mouth. There. You did it, men. You fixed sexism. Thank you. You’re the real hero here, as always, you men, and your special man powers, for making art.
Writers: Bad people are still people with their own problems and emotions, even when they cause problems and distress and hurt other people.
Tumblr Gremlins: Problematic. Blocked.
