It’s time again for Lord Pastel Lance’s late as fuck news reports on fandom discourse.(To be fair, in Our defense, this discourse in particular just got worse & worse & funnier as time went on so it was actually good that We postponed making this report.)
I’m gonna try to keep this short and to the point.
If you’re complaining about the lion switch and how it feels wrong and out of character, it’s probably because you were listening to what they were telling you all this time and not looking at what they were actually showing you, and missed what these characters are really all about.
Lets start with Red:
The way to Red’s heart is through “self sacrifice” and “selflessness”
This is how Keith impresses her the first time, by ejecting himself into space and putting himself in danger to free her.
Then you can see their bond growing each time Keith gives something up for the team or risks himself in some way for it.
Like In the BOM dream, where he chooses to give up his knife.
That’s how Lance ends up in it now.
He gives up an important part of himself for the team.
He goes “It doesn’t matter if I’m not the best and will never prove myself good at anything or ever be worthy, the team is more important.”
And if you watch from the beginning of the series you’ll see hints of what Lance is actually all about and what’s his true strength
There’s actually a post about this going around I can’t find now, but Lance is the guy that would always do something risky to save his friends.
And despite how he always acts, he’s actually the most selfless guy on the team
This is also why Red doesn’t accept Allura and why it’s so hard for her, because she feels like she sacrifices EVERYTHING for the team and their mission.
But I think deep inside she knows there’s some stuff that she does for selfish reasons or things she still keeps a secret from the paladins.
Then we have Black:
The way to Black’s heart is through “Confidence” and “Trust”
This is why Shiro struggles with it so much in the first two seasons.
Shiro appears like a confident leader but inside he’s full of doubts.
He’s trying SO HARD to be the best leader he can be but he has so much fear in him all the time.
And sometimes he has confidence and he manages to bond with Black, and sometime he doesn’t and Zarkon snatches his control away. So he ends up being very unstable.
This is also why Black won’t accept him anymore, Shiro lost the confidence again (after Zarkon snatched his control again and teleported him back to Galra prison) he lost trust in the lion and trust in himself.
He’s full of fears again and Black doesn’t want a pilot like that. (no it’s not cause he’s a clone)
But who always had alot of confidence? Keith.
Keith seems like a hot head that doesn’t think about what he’s doing because what he suggests and does always seems insane.
But he only does these crazy things because he’s confident he can do them.
One of his first action in the show is driving off a cliff saying “Shut up and trust me”. And he makes it with no problem.
This is why he’s the perfect person for Black. He knows what he’s capable of, he has so much confidence he is able to face Zarkon all by himself! He almost has too much confidence at times haha
(He’s not a crazy hot head like Lance says, he’s just confident he can do stuff most people can’t, and he does.)
Now the way to Blue’s heart
is through something like “eagerness to prove themselves”
I’m just gonna quote what the show runners said about her:
“..but really the Blue Lion is kind of like the mother Lion. She looks for potential in a new pilot. Something to nurture and foster. And I think she saw that in Lance. She saw someone who needed confirmation that they were valuable to this team. Even though they didn’t believe it in themselves.”
That’s why she accepts Allura.
And that’s why it eventually will accept Shiro aswell, because now that Black won’t accept him and he has no part on the team but he really wants to be part of Voltron, she’ll see his eagerness and will help him. (And Allura will have to pilot the Castle sometimes)
Blue was also said to be the “Teamwork” lion.
And uniting people and making people work together is Shiro’s true strength.
Again, you can see from the first episode. He won’t shut up about teamwork.
Which is also a big part of leadership that Keith is struggling with and why they will eventually find perfect balance as the two main co leaders.
So the lion switch is not there to put them in their DOTU lions for the old fans, or promote one paladin over the other or ignore the bonding they had with their lions until now.
It’s to show that these characters are finally at a place where they stop trying to be who they think they need to be, and embracing their true selves and true strengths.
This is all very well thought through character development.
MUCH AGREEMENT
I also feel like fans tend to assume that the traits that got the paladins into their initial lions in the first place are things that they can’t change. But like, if the lions search for certain aspects in people then it makes PERFECT SENSE for them to move between one person to the next.
Its not some kind of forced excuse. It’s a natural acknowledgement of how people WORK. They grow and change, and aspects of themselves that seemed so unchangeable before become malleable and less defined and they experience new things and learn more about themselves.
And beyond even that, the lions aren’t slot machines where you can just put in a certain character trait and get a paladin. They’re sentient creatures in this iteration of the franchise who are free to change their minds. And they DO. And its just fantastically interesting to look at what Allura SAYS they’re like in episode one (who, I might remind you, had NEVER piloted a lion before and who knew of exactly ONE group of paladins to base her assumptions on) and what they’re SHOWN to be like throughout the series.
I mean, I think it’s noteworthy that Lotor uses familial terms for Zarkon but only in a very stilted and formal manner. He talks about Zarkon as “My father,” but there’s no caress or softness or implication of more than just the formality. Allura also refers to Alfor as “father” but there’s a world of difference in Brooks’ delivery vs. LoCascio’s in that regard.
Lotor speaks of Zarkon only in a very distant manner and he doesn’t really speak of Haggar at all unless he’s talking to her directly in which case- the only time we’ve seen them in the same room Lotor is highly tense and angry and cutting basically all the frills off what he wants to say.
There’s a coldness to how Lotor talks about his father that isn’t just because they’re both royalty and the expected formality that begets. The warmest Lotor speaks of Zarkon is when he’s selling himself to the empire at large and even then, his glowing speech of his father’s triumph is juxtaposed with how loudly, profoundly critical Lotor is of “the old ways” and how proudly and confidently Lotor says that Throk’s aggression is his own undoing.
Lotor’s criticisms of Throk don’t feel like they were actually meant for Throk. I read them a lot as Lotor is projecting. There is a reason why Lotor has particular contempt for people who are belligerent, aggressive, and refuse to take no for an answer, all traits that easily describe Zarkon. Zarkon who kept sending robeast after robeast and basically just turning up the heat on Voltron without changing strategy in any conceivable way besides reaching for a bigger hammer.
But of course Throk is similar. Arguably, Lotor set him up in that situation by baiting him out into the public eye in a way he couldn’t refuse. Of course, once there, Throk would attempt to prove himself the Good Old Fashioned Galra Way as prescribed by Emperor Zarkon himself: with aggression.
The other interesting thing of that little interaction is that Lotor’s fighting style is a giant-killer by design.
Lotor goes into situations under-armed on purpose. When he really wants to engage the Lions he doesn’t use the cruiser, which is big enough it can at least give them pause. No- he uses his custom fighter, which is a tiny zippy little thing with highly responsive controls. And he dogfights, in a way that none of the other galra we’ve seen even come close to- he dodges, zips around, and maneuvers for his multiple enemies to hit each other.
Lotor is “that little fellow” by galra standards, and when we see him squaring off with Throk, visually, Throk brings to the table a massive, crescent-bladed chopper of a sword, compared to Lotor’s skinny little fencing rapier. And Lotor’s prior opponent before that was massive compared to him, and we see him handling both… almost exactly the way he fights ship battles, with a heavy focus on evasion and parrying done in such a natural, fluid manner that it’s not an exaggeration to say that practically as well as
Basically Lotor seems to have built his fighting style and honed his skills with a very specific kind of opponent in mind: a much larger, more powerful foe who can destroy him in one hit if any of those hits actually land. Likely, being outnumbered by larger, more powerful opponents.
Lotor’s fighting style is tailored to take out people like Zarkon.
And I think that’s pretty damning evidence of how they relate to each other.
I’ve heard some debate as to whether or not Zarkon had forgotten his marriage to Honerva as a result of the quintessance bath the way Haggar had. I’d argue that in fact, he did remember. And it makes him a much more interesting character.
Exhibit A: Zarkon made such a big deal of his anti-Altean propaganda that there’s no reason he wouldn’t have let her live after the failures of her robeasts if he didn’t remember. If he hates Alteans so much for the destruction of his home world, why let her live?
Exhibit B: Even if he kept her around because he only knew her as the one Altean he wouldn’t have a reason to favor her over his Galra generals that wasn’t personal. What reason would he have to give his token non-Galra minion preferential treatment over his pureblood Galra commanders.
Exhibit C. He never gets angry when she fails like he does with the military commanders. The only time he ever yells at her is when he’s going even crazier in his hunt for the black lion, and even then, he keeps her by his side. He necer sebtences her to a fate like Prorok’s, or sends her on a suicide missions. He basically gives her the highest position he can give her in the empire short of the throne.
Exhibit D: The first thing he does after coming back to life in the flashback (after processing that he’s still alive), is look for her. Only after he sees that she’s alright does he leave the room to figure out where they are.
Exhibit E: He never tries to correct her when she talks about Voltron as “ours”. This means that, because she was the head researcher on quintessance and the comet Voltron was made from, Voltron feels that she has equal claim of it. He only calls it his when he’s in the middle of his fanatic quest for the black lion, and he was clearly loosing it. The writers could have been generic and have Zarkon say something about how he has the stronger claim to the black lion. He views her as an equal among an ocean of mediocre minions.
In short, Zarkon knew all along that Haggar was his wife. And he continues to hold her up to high esteem in the next emmys. But none of that mattered to him, because even even she couldn’t remember their marriage, he still had more tryst and respect for his wife and her work than he had for every Galra in the fleet.
okay this is the best version so far and i’d like to just. show y’all the best shots of the galra gang that weren’t visible in the other versions because DAMN:
SWEET
KEITH MEETS WEBLUM GALRA AGAIN?
FFFFFUUUUUKCK
and also this:
the cat is latched onto her head im fucking sobbing
I love that the ladies either have no hair or short hair. I wanna see what that black thing on the back of her head is, it’s clearly part of her genetics, and I love her claws/large hands. So far Lotor seems to be the most humanoid of the hybrids and the one with his hair down and half a skirt, which is pretty cool since usually it’s female characters to get that type of treatment. Also look at how beautifully cocky she looks, I need her to be the Lance of the group. Bonus if she also hits on girls.
I love that too? And yes most ladies in media always have long hair, and even if they had short hair they never wore makeup so it’s a nice touch.
As for her black things, I assumed they were head ridges, like what Thace and most galra have? Like, they look like they sit on top of her head, like how Thace’s head ridge does:
But for some reason WG’s look kinda weird? Maybe because they’re placed at an angle of something. And she has four (I think, we haven’t seen the other side of her head yet), while most galra have only one.
As for her hands surprisingly, they’re actually not that big really? One thing I noticed when watching the Belly of the Weblum how her hands actually seem to be the size of an average human? Like, when I first saw Keith pull her out of her ship I noticed how how small they are? Like they fit perfectly inside his:
Especially when compared to Kolivan’s:
I actually wanted to comment about her hands long ago, as I got the impression (also based on her short stature), that she wasn’t completely galra (or at least, quite young for one). While I never got around to commenting on them before sdcc, I did feel quite vindicated when the reveals came that she was actually half-galra and not full.
Regarding her personality, WG is actually quite special as we already have an officially released episode where she appears in. While she doesn’t talk and we can’t see her face, we can assume a bit of her personality from her actions, and what I deduced was really interesting.
(Pulls out my old notes about the Weblum Galra from before…)
I agree with all of this! But to add on this…
She is an sneaky and flexible fighter similar to Pidge
She can come up with plans on the fly and follow them just as easily
She is the “Keith” of the group; she has her awkward moments…
She probably has strong technical skills, since she has a computer built into her armour, similar to the same one as Pidge has…
She is willing to work with the paladins if she must
Oooh I like this!
Is that what was happening in that scene with Lotor? If so, that’s actually really cute. Give me all the Lotor’s squad bonding moments.
And the observation with Pidge I never considered that! That’s actually quite interesting. It seems like Lotor’s generals aren’t going to be a direct parallel to the paladins, instead incorporating elements from all paladins. I honestly like this better, as we’ll get more fleshed characters as a result.
Just some ramblings on this shot
Now a lot of people are speculating about this mystery woman, if she is Allura’s mother, which I doubt, or Haggar, or a random Altean woman.
I’m basing my theory on the source material from the Fleet of Doom movie and a one-off episode of the original series, just to examine the update that the crew might give us. I’ll make it very clear from now that I highly doubt it’s a random new lady, because I trust Lauren to avoid the cliche women in refrigerators trope, where Zarkon has every villain origin story ever of losing his wife.
If you zoom in, you see traces of magic on her face, as if it made her ill. Sacred Alteans are implied to be members of the royal family and the ones with magic. In the fleet of doom movie Haggar says that Zarkon did this to her, he turned her into a witch, and gave her magic, and in the old sexist cartoon she remained loyal to him despite that.
In here, I’m thinking that this is the first time they have ever used quintessence to heal someone, and as @eatyourgrapes told me, it would explain why her eyes are yellow, while the purple quintessence made Zarkon’s eyes purple.
The aesthetic is a mix of Galra and Altean, and Zarkon practically reviving her from her death bed would explain why she would be so loyal, and parallel her scene by his bedside, as he once did to her.
Now, I think she is Allura’s aunt, not her mother, as Allura takes after her father in terms of appearance, and there is some good content to work with in the original. Haggar disguised herself as Allura’s aunt in one of the original episodes.
And this is what original Haggar looked like before being corrupted
So now we have potential to spin around the old cliches and sexist bullshit and create very sympathetic origins and motivations. Keep in mind, Haggar seems to be the one holding the grudge against the royal family, as Zarkon seems apathetic towards Allura, while Haggar wants to get rid of her.
Furthermore, if this woman is just a random Altean fridged lady, she can’t really be Lotor’s mother. Zarkon and Haggar were surprised that Allura survived after all these years, and they are the only immortals around. Throk refers to Lotor as an exiled brat, so Lotor is fairly young and not important enough for his parents to let him join the immortal club.
The voice director for the series said that we will find out incredible things about Haggar, that there is rich history there. Allura did not recognise her, as her face has changed, and she most likely distant herself from the royal family for a reason, they must have wronged her big time. Haggar could be her title, not her real name. She did always seem to be the one putting herself back behind Zarkon.
say what you want about woobifying villains, but i think tragic backstories and redemption via love are staples for good reason. we want to believe that people are fundamentally good, just hardened by a harsh world. that suffering earns you a happy ending. because then it means something, then pain isn’t just senseless and futile.
people don’t ‘excuse’ the actions of villains because they just don’t take those actions seriously. i think it’s a kind of projection – we forgive them because we want to forgive ourselves, and we look for the good in them because we want to see that in the world, even in people who have wronged and hurt us. because earth is a goddamn terrifying place if other humans really are evil, if they’re really monsters.
and idk, i just think it’s kind of beautiful that we all want to believe that the scariest mass-murdering motherfucker alive can be brought down by something as pure and innocent as love. that love is the answer, not violence. i don’t think that’s cheap or ‘problematic’ or a bad influence. i think it’s human, and profoundly optimistic in a way that few people are brave enough to be.
If I didn’t hold the hope that love could make a difference, my world would be cold and bleak.
People who ONLY ever like “pure, cinnamon roll” characters and try to buff away every flaw and every morally grey dimension and reduce stories to pure heroes and pure villains give me the creeps, because it seems to me like those are people who refuse to acknowledge their own capability to do terrible things, the inevitable fact that they have done things that hurt others in the past and will do so again (because that IS inevitable if you interact with other humans), who never question themselves, who think incredibly harsh standards of judgment are just fine because of course THEY would never need forgiveness or mercy.
THOSE are the people who are most likely to stomp on your face with a boot while being utterly convinced they’re doing the right thing and you deserve it. And they will never admit they were wrong and they’ll never apologize, because only bad people do bad things, and of course they’re not a bad person, so if they did it, it must have been good.
Give me friends who are honest about their own capacity to harm, who know where their own darkness lies, and can see it played out in characters good, bad, and – best of all, somewhere in between. Who understand when to rage, when to forgive, and when to just walk away. Who understand that other people, just like them, are ever-changing bundles of contradictions. Those are people I feel I can trust.
^This last comment. I’ve been thinking about this, and it’s not just that “every villain is a hero in their own mind.” I think it’s that act of making oneself into a hero in one’s own mind, of giving up self-criticism and clinging to an identity that’s based being Good, that opens the door for a person to do truly horrible things to other people. I honestly wonder whether philosophies or faiths where good is a thing you ARE rather than a thing you DO are more prone toward instigating violence in the name of said philosophy.
This. This, this, THIS.
Reposting this bit for emphasis because I think it also speaks directly to what’s wrong with Tumblr’s black-and-white-morality Purity Culture:
“THOSE are the people who are most likely to stomp on your face with a
boot while being utterly convinced they’re doing the right thing and you
deserve it. And they will never admit they were wrong and they’ll never
apologize, because only bad people do bad things, and of course they’re
not a bad person, so if they did it, it must have been good.”
There are definitely fic (and canon) narratives of villain redemption that are creepily worshipful and too ready to dismiss the harm the character has done. Some seem so eager to get to redeemed character stuff they don’t give their wrongs enough weight. But those are individual problems. Done right, these can be some of the most powerful stories.
“we forgive them because we want to forgive ourselves, and we look for the good in them because we want to see that in the world, even in people who have wronged and hurt us.”
Very much this.
I think this is the best post I’ve read on here for a while…
This is something that started to bug me yesterday. So I
came across a simple theory about Haggar’s voice actress Cree Summer. Now
before I start I should note that Cree is an excellent voice actress and has
been doing voice work since she was 10 to 12 years old, providing the voice for
Penny in Inspector Gadget, and going all the way till now. She tends to do
smaller bits in the shows she’s working on as additional voices so that new
actors don’t have to be hired for very small parts like that of the weblum
character in Voltron.
That being said the post from @eastofthemoon that I ran across gave the theory
of “What if the Weblum was actually Haggar when she was younger.” At first I
tended to dismiss it. After all, as I said above, Ms. Summers does a LOT of
additional voices in shows she’s cast in, so this shouldn’t be that big a deal.
Yet something stuck in my craw, as the person noted that it could be that the
Weblem was Haggar due to the fact that both she and Cree share the same voice.
So I went back and re-watched the episode and came across
something interesting in watching.
During the segment with the video Coran is
younger, and we’ve only seen that form once before, during the time loop that
he and Allura were in during the first episode, where she even states that he
gets younger as the trip progresses.
I figured that this had to be from around
the time of the Black lion flashback, so I went looking and, nope, Coran has
his first look with the ponytail and long bangs during that time frame.
So again, that got me curious.
We know that Alfor and Coran
were friends, as we see them shopping together during the time that both
sported the ponytail look and were at the place that was the Space mall.
But it
is interesting to note that that was the time when they got the first lion
built as well and we see Alfor being friends with Zarkon. So we know then that
the video was made BEFORE the lions were built or even the material crashed on
Zarkon’s home planet.
That being said, and this is where things get weird, if
Coran was making that video when he was younger then he was when the lions were
built, then what do we make of the weblum itself in that video. Clearly that
was made for Altean’s going into the weblum to harvest the material for the
lenses. This would at least imply that whoever was doing the voice was also
Altean and apparently worked with a Younger Coran.
So how does Haggar fit into this? Well with the revelation
that she is Alten, and in the new poster clearly showing that her hair is white,
we can assume that she is related to Alfor and Allura. The Royal family it
seems are the only members that bear that color hair, and the only other two
people that do too are
Lotor and Haggar. We know that Haggar knows magic and
that Allura can harness her darker magic (as I’m assuming the light blue is the
light side of the Altean force, and the pink is the dark side of the Altean
force –thus shown to be far more destructive in nature).
If Haggar is working with Coran here as the voice of the weblum, then we can
assume that she is either related directly to Alfor, or Alfor’s family as she
has the white hair. The fact that the Weblum is a goof doesn’t seem to match
Haggar’s modern personality (although 10,000 years could alter someone’s
personal views) could indicate that this is some random character that Cree
voices. However, why use her, other then again, it’s a bit part and meant to be
amusing. And of all times, during the point where we meet the Weblum Galra.
This at least makes me pause and wonder.
Could Haggar be Allura’s Aunt? Instead of the original series
having Alfor only have a brother in Cobra, could Alfor have had a sister in
Haggar? Might she have been very different back then, friendly with Coran and
her brother and sank down into the depths of dark magic after seeing the
destruction of the home world that was Zarkons?
It’s just a thought, but given Haggar’s appearance and age, I’m certain that
she may be a bit older then Alfor was and possibly was friends with Coran as
the Weblum character seems to be playing a bit with Coran as they make the
video in its own weird way. Plus we have heard that higher voice come from
Haggar at points when she’s excited over something.
Given this, I’m erring on the side of caution when I theorize that maybe, just
maybe, Haggar might have been the goofy Weblum that we see, and that events
that followed the making of that movie changed how she really was.
every time I see more of the ‘ao3 is evil’ crap circulating I think, ‘well, tumblr is evil too and I don’t see you stop using it’
You know, the more I think about this, the more I think the real complaint isn’t that AO3 hosts “evil” content, it’s that it doesn’t allow harassment/dogpiling of “evil” creators as easily as Tumblr. Abuse won’t remove or even re-tag a work except in a handful of very specific cases, but they will suspend or ban users for harassment, including filing repeated unfounded Abuse reports. Authors also have at least some ability to screen/block comments on works, and there’s no direct messaging system outside of commenting on works through which to pursue harassment. You can follow a creator but you can’t block them (much less encourage others to do the same).
Tumblr, by contrast, generally ignores any abuse report that doesn’t involve the DMCA, and aggressive anons can and have driven bloggers off the site entirely. The fact that the same tactics are used by social justice bloggers and neo-Nazis (for instance) doesn’t matter – they’re the affordances of the site, by accident or design, and an entire fannish generation have gotten very used to performing their fannish (and moral) identity in this fashion.
(I thinks it’s relevant that AO3 was designed by fandom’s LJ generation and in some respect mirrors the affordances of LJ circa 2010. Tumblr is a very different site and that, moreso than age differences, seems to be at the root of this – though of course age intersect with site experience in a non-trivial way.)
ding ding ding ding.
Ao3 requires you to police your own consumption of content. Ao3 won’t let you destroy someone’s online presence simply because you don’t like it. Ao3 won’t let you impose your own morality on other without cause.
If you have issues with this, and the fact that Ao3 requires you to have responsibility and agency, then you seriously need to sit down and have a damned good long hard look at yourself.
The question I usually fail to see being answered when people bitch about the content on AO3 is – so who gets to decide?
You? Me? A committee of my friends? Of yours? Of those who have the most kudos? Of those who have no interest in fandom, but want to protect other people from dangerous content, whatever it may be? Who gets that power, and how long will they have it?
Who are you comfortable with giving the power of regulating all the content? What happens in grey areas? What happens when something you like isn’t liked by the Decider? Is there an appeal? Who gets to make the arguments for and against something?
The world is complex and there are no easy answers.
The impossibility of creating a censorship board that curates based on content is a great reason why those things don’t exist, and shouldn’t.
Certain people are screaming that AO3 is bad because it’s not a “safe space.” The real problem they have, though, is that AO3 was created to be a safe space – for writers. And it does a pretty good job of that. It was designed to be a place where writers are safe from arbitrary content rule changes, random and unwarned deletions, and abuse-report abuse (which is common on ff.net). The Four Big Warnings + CNTW system is beautiful in its fairness and simplicity.
Antis can’t take control of it. And because control-freakdom is at the heart of their “movement,” this drives them into frenzies. Good. It motivated me to dig a little deeper into my pocket to donate on the last drive. For all the pleasure AO3 has given me over the years, that’s money well spent.
The real problem they have, though, is that AO3 was created to be a safe space – for writers.
Preach it loud and hard!
I’m a member of the LJ generation, and when I first came to Tumblr (grudgingly and out of desperation, I might add, since it tragically seems to be the only place to really connect with other fandom peeps) I was horrified at how people here had established this sort of fucked up bully culture, where nobody is responsible for monitoring their own consumption, and rather they expect everyone else to custom tailor content to the whims and desires of the Shrieking Banshee Masses. And woe be to the person who doesn’t bend and break! “I’m going to bully you while accusing you and your Big Mean Poopie Content of being the actual bully, so I can hopefully distract you and others from realizing I’m being a royal intrusive asshat who failed Astronomy 101 b/c I clearly believe the world revolves around me.”
The irony here is that this in itself is an abuse tactic – victim blaming with a side of gaslighting. Pot, meet kettle.
And it’s the exact same mentality that drives right-wing lunatics to kick up a fuss about the existence of icky cootie gay people in media because we need to “protect family values”, or who take to screeching at Starbucks because their particular religious symbolism isn’t portrayed on the winter holiday cups and OMG WAR ON CHRISTMAS, STARBUCKS STOP OPPRESSING ME BY NOT CATERING TO MY PERSONAL TASTE.
The mentality is one and the same – “Cater to ME ME ME or FACE MY DIVINE WRATH even if it means taking away other people’s freedom!” while hiding behind a flimsy-ass shield of faux righteous anger.
And when these bozos find an environment or situation where they’re unable or not allowed to bully people into silence and submission, they stomp their feet and pitch a tantrum and claim that they’re the ones being oppressed. Identical shit, different pile, and it’s the exact same infantile, schoolyard rubbish no matter which side it’s coming from.
This was a really interesting read. The last poster in particular but all of it.
Okay, so I find the history behind this discussion really interesting, because there are two things that stand out to me. One is the thought AO3′s culture is equivalent to LJ circa 2010. This is almost true, except you actually have to go back further. Ao3 and Dreamwidth are both specifically trying to recreate the fan culture of Livejournal from 1999-2007, and I can say that with some authority because A) I was there (olllld) and B) both were founded in 2008/09 as a direct response to the shit happening on LiveJournal and Fanlib.
The other thing is the idea that anon-harassment culture started with Tumblr. Because, kiddos, did it ever not. Tumblr is very much Fanfiction.net circa 1998-forward. (That’s right, FF.N was basically always awful.) But how we got from there to here is actually really interesting And tangly. And long.
Up to the late 1990s, fan communities were often small and decentralized because there was a huge fear that fans would be targeted by content creators if they drew too much attention. Since several authors (Anne Rice, Mercedes Lackey, Anne McCaffery) actually DID issue cease&desists to fan creators, it’s kind of understandable where the fear came from. It’s also why you still see fanfic floating around with disclaimers, something young!tumblr loves to mock.
Harry Potter changed *everything*. Like, I really can’t emphasize how much. Fanfiction was always there, being shared on email lists or privately hosted or literally mailed cross country. But Harry Potter hit BIG in 1997. It had a massive crossover appeal that hadn’t been seen since probably the original Star Trek, and the baby Internet was all. over. it. If you weren’t there, imagine Twilight. But bigger. And J.K. Rowling stood out from other creators by condoning fanfiction in her very early interviews. Not to mention there was a lot of down time between books and, as you might know, the fans do not do well unpoliced.
This led to, I’m not kidding, an explosion of sites like FF.N. I don’t think a lot of younger users get how revolutionary AO3 is: not just because it created a safe space, but because of how much it’s done to centralize fanfiction on the internet. We used to get our fix through webrings and e-serves, so in the late 90s/early 00s we thought nothing of having dozens of scattered fanfic sites.
At the same time, the Digital Millennium Copywrite Act was coming down. The legality of fanworks was getting more and more complex. And no one knew how to handle these questions, because they had literally never come up before. When it was just authors going after individual fans, things usually went quick and brutal. Fans had neither the money nor the legal teams to stand up to creators, even if (as we were slowly beginning to realize) we had a strong case to create and share fanworks. So, if you got hit with a takedown notice, you took your fic down and laid low, hoping to avoid any further interest.
But now the legal burden was shifting from individuals to well-funded corporations. Fanfic.net and LJ didn’t want to shut down their fan-contributors, who were creating a huge stream of free content and bringing in advertising revenue. At the same time, they didn’t want to get shut down by a lawsuit if Lucasfilm found Han/Chewie smut and decided to go after the real money. The next 10 years were basically all of us – authors, fan creators, website executives – stumbling through brand new legal territory and figuring it out by trial and error. FF.N erred on the side of caution by becoming more and more restrictive. They shut down the entire Anne McCaffrey and Anne Rice sections, and eventually banned “pornographic” fanfiction from the site in an attempt to cover their legal rears. (It backfired, unsurprisingly, because say what you will about fandom: we like our smut. Also, FF.N had other issues that we won’t get into here will discuss shortly.) A bunch of other sites folded or waned in popularity as fandom wars divided the fan population. Authors scattered to the winds, and a lot of them ended up on LJ.
LJ started out very user friendly. We’re talking an open source code, an almost entirely volunteer staff. Even after it was sold to 6Apart in 2005, LJ was pretty permissive. A lot of that had to do with the aforementioned DMCA, which protected ISPs and hosting corporations. Like I mentioned above, a lot of the migration from FF.N to LJ (as a place for fanfiction SPECIFICALLY) came when FF.N started banning explicit fanworks. Why? Because FF.N targeted these fanworks based entirely on user reports. “Tell us if you find porn,” FF.N said, “And we’ll take care of it.”
Backup real quick. LJ, in many ways, set the standard for online privacy in a way that was far ahead of its time. Friendslocked journals were the norm rather than the exception and many, many communities disallowed anonymous commenting. (I’m not saying LJ wasn’t toxic as fuck, by the way. It is 2017 and let’s all have a moment of acknowledgement for how terrible LJ culture actually could be.) But LJ, on the whole, was much, much better at self-policing than FF.N. On FF.N, all of your stuff was out in the open. It was just there. Anyone could read it, anyone could report it.
And these two sites coexisted. All BNFs had a private journal and a public FF.N page. So if I hated someone and I wanted to harass them off the internet, on LJ, I’d have to make multiple sock puppets and concoct elaborate multi-journal ruses to do it on LJ (haha, who would do THAT?). What am I to do? Simple: Head off to FF.N and anonymously flame them there!
FF.N became synonymous with anonymous hate long before the anti-smut censorship came down. But once those rules were in place, the system was rife for abuse by the Purity Police or grudgewankers. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaay before it was cool to dm “kill urself” to someone on tumblr, it was happening on FF.N. All you, the early internet user, had to do was post a report link for your rival’s FF.N account on your LJ. Hate a pairing? A kink? Why not post a scathing rant, link included, to this captive audience of ALL YOUR FRIENDS.
Yeah, this system had no room for abuse.
So. FF.N opened the door and fandom came rushing through like the raging assholes we are. Certain Fandoms Alluded To Previously got so deeply divided that they split and formed their own fanfiction archives that occasionally rained hate on each other. Everyone else slowly withdrew to LJ, where locked communities offered some level of protection. Then, irony of ironies, fandom as a whole got targeted by the purity wankers. And of course, of course, it came back to Harry Potter.
It’s 2007. Things have quieted down since 2001, when certain unnamed people’s fics were targeted for plagiarism and deleted from FF.N even though, just to be clear, they actually were plagiarized and, while there was an element of mob persecution, the actual fact remains that the work in question was legitimately in violation of FF.N’s TOS.
Ahem. It’s 2007. And everyone’s fairly chill. Creators are far more comfortable with fanfiction and fan creators are confident in posting their work so long as they aren’t profiting directly from it. Hosting sites, meanwhile, are profiting from fanworks, but they’ve got the legal shield of the DMCA to hide behind, so they’re feeling A-OKAY. And then Warriors for Innocence appears. WfI existed before strikethrough, and they existed after, but they made their mark on fandom when they reported upwards of 500 journals, most of them fan journals and communities, to LJ. The theory runs as follows: 6A, the company who’d bought LJ 2 years prior, realizes that the DMCA didn’t protect them if the fan works in question are “indecent”. Compounding this, 6A is already trying to clean up the famdomier aspects of LJ. Either they’re looking for a sale, or sites like ONTD are bringing in massive amounts of hits. WfI brings 6A a perfect hit list, and 6A goes to work.
So one morning we all wake up and find that hundreds of journals, including the pornish_pixies community and several BNF’s personal journals, have been deleted. Literally gone: a lot of the media stored on these communities has been purged forever. Hope you had backups. Also gone: large swaths of the Pretty Gothic Lolita community, Lolita book discussion groups, and rape survivor communities.
In a quest to rid LJ of “pedophilia,” 6A wiped out a large swath of ethically questionable fanfic, and woke a beast. Again: We like our porn. 6A took a step back and restored some of the deleted journals, but the damage had been done. AO3 was already being discussed as a response to Fanlib, a hosting site that wanted to charge for access to fanfiction. (Yes, if you’ve been following along, that was a terrible idea. But that’s a post for another day.) But as AO3 began to change and grow, creators specifically wrote provisions into the TOS that guaranteed a strikethrough-esque event could never happen on the site. A specific kink or pairing would never be considered a violation of the TOS. The onus was on the reader, not the author, to protect themselves with the information given. Basically, AO3 took the early fandom nugget “Don’t like, don’t read” and made it policy. When peole say AO3 grew out of Livejournal, they’re specifically referencing this. One event that proved ALL OF OUR LONGSEATED FEARS WERE TRUUUUUUUUUE.
Rising from the ashes of LJ, you also had Dreamwidth. I’m actually kind of surprised DW wasn’t mentioned in the OP, since it grew out of the same ideology as AO3. Run by fans, for fans, because LJ (which at this point had been sold to SUP Media) had no idea what it was doing. Also like AO3, DW went to extreme lengths to make a safe fan culture inherent to the structure the site. Stay within the law, and DW and AO3 will back you up.
It’s worth noting that Tumblr actually predates Strikethrough. But Tumblr, unlike DW and AO3, wasn’t designed for fans. It didn’t carry the legacy of Strikethrough with it the way AO3 and DW did. So I guess– I have no evidence, but I’m surmising – that’s how it fell into the role of Natural Successor to Fanfic.net and Livejournal. It’s kind of inevitable, actually, that since neither LJ nor Tumblr was made for fans, they ended up falling into the same black hole of fandom collision. Kinkshaming people off the internet for literally as long as there’s been an internet. And then, on the other hand, you’ve got DW and AO3, who’ve watched fandom rip itself apart AT LEAST 3 times and are determined not to let it happen again. DW and AO3: We haven’t cared about the filthy shit you’re into since 2008.
That’s it, folks. Fandom mom wrote almost 2k words on early fandom and now she needs a nap.
superheroladies 