End OTW Racism: A Call To Action

A fan protest against the lack of action from the OTW on addressing issues of harassment and racism on AO3 and within the organization

This is a Call To Action for Fans of Color and Allies

AO3 has acknowledged that they have a harassment & racism problem that its parent organization, the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), needs to address. Currently, people can use AO3 to harass others through fanworks, comments, and tags. Just a few examples include: racist Untamed “spitefic” that used anti-Indigenous slurs and was written specifically to lash out at fans of color; a Transformer fic that used its Black-coded character to reenact George Floyd’s murder in July 2020; someone naming a fandom scholar who criticized their Nazi omegaverse fic in the tags of the fic specifically to incite harassment to the scholar; writers using racial slurs against commenters who pointed out racism in their hockey fic; and so much more.

In June 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, the OTW committed to addressing these issues. It has been nearly three years and they have not yet implemented any of the changes they promised, other than a blocking/muting tool that was already in development before 2020. We need to hold the OTW accountable to their own promises. (See the section further down on “Why Are We Doing This” for even more detail.)

As fans, together, we are powerful. We are organizing to protest the lack of action on promises made by the Organization for Transformative works to deal with issues of racism and harassment on their platform, Archive of Our Own.

We call on fans to do any or all of the following actions any time between May 17 to 31, 2023 to send a message to AO3 and OTW that we will hold them to their promises.

On AO3

On tumblr

On Twitter

Help us make this a long-term campaign - sign up to help with other anti-racism projects and future actions!

What Do We Want?

Since their June 2020 statement, OTW has been working on updating their Terms of Service (TOS) to address racist and bigoted harassment, but with little transparency and only the vaguest of updates. It has been three years since their commitment to this update - we want to see the results of their work implemented in the next 6-12 months. Their TOS updates and complementary policies should include:

These points are not particularly new and are not our own innovation; please refer to Stitch's article written over two years ago, asking for several of these very things.

OTW has also already committed to various process-based actions for longer-term works towards centering antiracism, including hiring a Diversity Consultant. The last update that OTW published said that the consultant would be hired within the next five years (after already having had three years to work on it since their original commitment). That is not soon enough. We want to see the following process-based actions implemented:

Why Are We Doing This?

16 years ago, Astolat famously published her manifesto calling for a fandom Archive of One’s Own. In that time, AO3 has grown to be a central pillar of fandom, likely far outstripping its founders’ original vision. It is more than just an archive now; it is a central hub of the modern fannish experience. AO3 and the OTW must continue to grow and evolve with fandom over time to remain a healthy and functioning pillar of fandom. To that end, there are several areas in which the organization, as it admits itself, is lacking.

In June 2020, in the wake of the George Floyd protests and the uprising of the Black Lives Matter Movement, The OTW published a “This Week in Fandom” referencing the works of Dr. Rukmini Pande and Stitch, among others in which they discussed ‘making change for a better society’ through ‘conversations about race and racism’. In response, Dr. Pande and Stitch submitted a letter to the OTW calling for a more formal public statement than an offhand reference in a News Roundup that only served to call for thoughts and discussion without any indication the organization intended to do anything, policy wise, to address the issues being raised.

Eventually, the organization did remove the references to the works of Dr. Pande and Stitch and then made an official statement on the issue of racism within the organization and AO3. In it, they identified several things they would be prioritizing to combat harassment and benefit users. Some of those have been implemented (notably those that were already under development). However as of this writing, little else has been done especially in regards to:

By their own admission, the current tools and policies of the OTW are not sufficient to deal with issues of harassment and racism.

Several people who were involved in the founding of the OTW, including previous OTW Board members and staff on the original OTW Content Policy Committee, acknowledge that the founding of the OTW in 2008 and early board iterations failed us as a fandom by not doing enough, and by not even considering the way racism is perpetuated in fannish spaces, despite a long history of racism in fandom.

It has been nearly three years since the original commitment by the organization with little visible, measurable progress on these three crucial issues and a complete lack of transparency on where they are in regards to even beginning to deal with these issues. In fact, in Q&As, it was heavily implied by a member of the board that those calling for OTW to deal with issues of racism (which OTW had already acknowledged as a problem!) were not really fans but outside agitators.

This has cast significant doubt on the organization's sincerity and commitment to their stated goals, and on their position as leaders of a central fan tent-pole. Fans of color are not outsiders. They are right here, members of our community, and they are being harassed and targeted and driven out while space and platforms are being given to racists.

We, as fans of color and our allies, find the current state of fandom and current actions (and lack thereof) unacceptable. Fandom is our space, all of ours. We, as a fandom, have a right to a racism-free space and have a duty to our fellow fans to create that space. Unlike so much of the world, this is a space we can control and make better. It is a space we must make better. To read even more about this movement, visit our FAQs.

across the spiderverse must have really flipped some timeline irl because this is the first time I've seen a character in media engineered as tumblr sexyman material (faceless, overly personable, quirky mannerisms, awkward and goofy but also dangerous, hole) ignored for the actual handsome character. feeling like someone's middle aged dad rn going "isn't this spot guy kind of like sans? I thought you and your friends loved this kind of thing" to my son who is lining the walls of his room with pictures of miguel ass.

you ever think about how the twins destroying the Hutt presence on Tatooine avenged a grandmother they'd never even met

(support me on kofi!)

wow…….. love is love 🫶🥲❤️

[image description: a screenshot of a tweet by Melanie Lynskey:

“Was informed by my daughter that her two stuffies, Meowy and Doublecat, are wives to each other and are raising 7 kittens together. Embarrassed to say that I thought they were just pals, but #HappyPrideMonth to Meowy and Doublecat”

end description.]

photography by @runaround_hound!

If you haven't read the "Bunsen and Beaker's relationship" article on the Muppet Wiki you're missing out on a great summary of how the two have canonically gone from "could be read as gay but probably not intentionally" to "we're not even pretending these two are straight" over the years. these aren't even half of the entries btw

The Anarchic Spider-Man! By Jhony Caballero

Literally

MILES AND HOBIE ! 🤟

i know we're all sick of self-care being a marketing tactic now, but i don't think a lot of us have any other concept of self-care beyond what companies have tried to sell us, so i thought i'd share my favorite self-care hand out

brought to you by how mad i just got at a Target ad

OP this is EXCELLENT

Now THAT’S a self care resource! If you’ve gotten distracted by capitalism’s appropriation of “self-care” and watering the meaning down to nothing this is a super helpful guide to cut through the bullshit.

You might also like sophygurl's self care flowchart

Truth is, it reads more like "she can do everything" and "him, it's just Ken"

And ken is a slang used in French that means "to fuck"

So "Him, it's just fucking"

Which I think is even more hilarious

there is no greater proof that no one cares about ken than the fact that in french a ken doll is literally a fuck toy and none of us knew about it

Had to explain it to some friends this morning so I'm copying it here

friend 1: [shares the tweet]

friend 2: johannes please confirm

me: I can confirm

you can read it like "She can do anything. He's just Ken." and that's clearly the intent but there's a type of slang called verlan where you basically reverse words https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verlan

"verlan" is verlan of "l'envers" (reversed) like if you want to say idk "policeman" there's the correct word "policier" but there's also among other words the more familiar "flic" and if you say it in verlan it's "keuf". COUREZ YA LES KEUFS (that would be one of the local equivalents of RUN, THE PIGS ARE COMING)

SO

one of the words to say "to fuck" is "niquer". And the verlan of that one is "ken". HAHAHA TU T'ES FAIT KEN (HAHAHA GET FUCKED) SO tldr you can also read that tagline like "She can do anything. He can just fuck."

I hope this answers your question

friend 1: That absolutely rules

Thank you Johannes that's made my morning

me: you're welcome

TiL

thank you johannes Tumblr university is the best adult learning program

Okay, THIS sorts it out! Fabulous. 😀

Catradora angst/comfort for a kofi ;; A little bit of me vaguely rehashing my hc that Adora still sometimes has nightmares about Catra after they reconcile (but they're working through it)

Reposting these tags with consent from the person that wrote them. The post about the Sex Offenders Registry is locked, but these tags are too important to go unnoticed.

Younger queer people need to realize that the SOR being used against queer people simply for being queer isn’t some ancient history thing. It still impacts queer people today. And it can quite easily be used that way again.

Listen!

When you hear people throwing around the talking point of “well there’s a high rate of sex offenders in the trans/queer community”, this has to do with why.

Being on the sex offender registry isn’t inherently equivalent to whatever horrific sex crime you’re meant to think of when it’s mentioned. It evokes imagery of pedophilia and rape, but there is a lot that can get you put on it and not a lot you can do to be taken off of it.

Public crossdressing used to be able to get you put on the sex offender registry (and by used to I mean as recently as 2011).

Public urination (you know, the literal only option for someone who’s homeless and doesn’t have access to public bathrooms, a venn diagram where trans people are more likely to rest in the meeting zone) can get you put on the sex offender registry.

Sex work is pretty much an automatic way to end up on the sex offender registry if you’re caught. (This is especially weaponized against black trans women who do sex work)

“Deviant Sexual Intercourse” (aka literally any sexual activity aside from penis-in-vagina penetration) could get you on the sex offender registry as recently as the early 2000s. That effectively impacts the entire queer community in one way or another.

The sex offender registry is, first and foremost, useless. It tells you nothing about what someone did. It’s mentioned to quickly associate a person or a group of people with the worst possible crimes imaginable.

It has been used against us time after time and it will continue to be used for that.

And this is where the push of purity discourse in fandom shows its fetid, fascist underbelly.

This is why they are making being trans in public a felony in some states.

MARGOT ROBBIE Inside the Barbie Dreamhouse (June 16, 2023)

rsd is not a condition. rsd is not a diagnosis. rsd is not a medically recognized symptom of adhd and the experience “rsd” describes is not exclusive to adhd at all. this does not mean people with adhd can’t experience rejection sensitivity, but “rsd” as an “adhd” thing is a concept with no emprical backing developed by one man, with claims of it being brain-based without any evidence behind that claim, as well as many other claims surrounding the “nature” of rsd. adhd is a condition characterized by executive dysfunction, which can involve emotional dysregulation, but acknowledging that is different from the framework of “rsd” and seeing people on this site pass this around without critical thought and even claiming rsd is “adhd only >:(” makes me sick. you’re buying into what’s basically pop psychology instead of scientific research.

emotional dysregulation and rejection sensitivity is by no means adhd exclusive, and people with adhd experiencing those things doesn’t need to have its own special label or whatever when there’s no meaningful difference between someone with adhd experiencing those things and someone without adhd experiencing those things. that’s not logical and a ridiculous mentality of “rsd is adhd ONLY because our rejection sensitivity is SPECIAL” completely goes against building common ground with other neurodivergent people for petty and invalid reasons.

the amount of misinfo going around about adhd on this site is uncanny. please investigate claims others make about disability and do your research - actual research, which doesn’t include tumblr posts that lack citation and oft unreliable sources like ADDitude Mag and WebMD. it would be INFINITELY more productive to operate on a shared experience of emotional dysregulation and rejection sensitivity among varying groups of neurodivergent people than to feed into this nonsensical idea of “adhd-only special super rejection sensitivity.”

if you allow me to second this op, i became aware of the whole rsd thing being bullshit during my research for my current graduation work. i looked through many articles, hundreds even, in english, portuguese, spanish… granted, i did not exhaust EVERY possible science research website, but i favored ones that had good rep and that i already knew could help me get easy resources. still, no mention of rejection sensitive dysphoria, for my research that contained adhd as a keyword.

i feel like the case that happens here is that people see adhd and rsd through the lens of false correlation, and by that i mean, they observe a phenomenon that DOES happen, which is people with adhd feeling alienated from their peers and having a negative sense of self when it comes to social situations, and immediately think: “oh! this happens a lot with people who have adhd? must be a symptom!” when rather, it is related, yes, but it is more of a risk.

and this risk is not related to the very existence of adhd, but rather to outside circumstance, specifically ableism and underdiagnosis. during my research, some articles would cite going undiagnosed until adulthood as a higher risk for comorbid anxiety and depression. also, negative labels and rejection from family and peers contributed to low self esteem, negative self perception and oh shocker!/s social anxiety (sources, if you want them, sorry some of them are in portuguese: 1, 2, 3, 4).

its not that adhd CAUSES any of this. its just that its a high risk because of ableist environments and often a lack of diagnosis, which leads to you feeling pretty fucking bad about yourself and wondering why are you so different. i mean, i know i did. but i think thats something that can happen with ANY disorder, specially disorders that can persist through your whole life and affect pretty much every corner of your life. i may even be confident enough to say that, if i had done a research on autism, i may have found pretty similar results. ableism and rejection is something common to the experiences of pretty much all of us neurodivergent people!! there is literally no need to confuse a common experience with something that only this disorder or that disorder can have.

don’t apologize, this is good!

TL;DR:

for the redditors coming here, this is how we spread news of important events in the world, with a Destiel meme

For everybody who's been here a while and felt like Wiley E. Coyote just after running off the edge of the cliff when they scrolled down to find nothing below

Nobody should be using GPT detectors for anything important.

This is from a recent study that found that GPT detectors were misclassifying writing by non-native English speakers as AI-generated 48-76% of the time (!!!), compared to 0%-12% for native speakers.

It is irresponsible to use AI-generated text detectors as evidence of academic misconduct, and that's putting it mildly.

Spider-Punk design by Jesús Alonso Iglesias & Evan Monteiro

You’re a kowboy (kermit cowboy) like me