[ SECRET POST #5068 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #5068 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


01.
[19 Days]



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02.
[Love is Hard for an Otaku]


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03.
[The Three Investigators books]


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04.
[Princess Weiyoung]


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05.
[The Witches]


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06.
[Watcher Entertainment]


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07.
[Mike Chen/Strictly Dumpling]


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08.
[Event Horizon]


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09.
[19 Days]


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10.
[The Killing]


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11. [SPOILERS for Supernatural]



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12. [SPOILERS for Supernatural]



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13. [WARNING for mention of rape]



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14. [WARNING for mention of underage fiction]



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15. [WARNING for mention of underage fiction]




















Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 00 secrets from Secret Submission Post #725.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 1 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

ayrt

While normally "don't like, don't read" works for me, I don't know if that covers this situation, simply because there is a real person involved. IDK, without getting into detail, it's too close to certain aspects of situations where I was harmed as a child and teenager for me to be able to dismiss it with that reasoning, personally. That's just my perspective on the matter.

I'm not sure what the "right" approach to communicating with ao3 here is, as I am not super involved in fanfiction myself, but I don't think that this is an arbitrary place to draw a line at all.

[(Anonymous)]

RPF, even of child actors, is allowed, legally. Ao3 is an archive, and unless there is something actually serious to report regarding the fic then it's valid to exist. You can find it gross and upsetting, sure, but it goes against the Ao3 TOS to remove fic no matter how offensive or terrible it is, unless it's illegal content.

[(Anonymous)]

if it's sexual material of a REAL child it IS illegal content, like the fuck?

[(Anonymous)]

If it's photos/videos, yes, definitely. If it's text and clearly labeled as fictional, probably not, although I don't know if there have been any recent legal cases about it. There's really no such thing as "illegal fiction" in the US.

[(Anonymous)]

Only images of real children count as CSEM, not written content. If written content broke the law they wouldn't host it.

[(Anonymous)]

No child was harmed writing fanfiction.

[(Anonymous)]

No, and cussing doesn't make you right.

[(Anonymous)]

I understand that. I personally would never make the choice to host anyone's sexual fantasies about IRL minors. That's all I really have to say on the matter.

[(Anonymous)]

+1
I feel like drawing the line at "RPF NSFW involving a minor" isn't arbitrary at all. The existence of that content could actually cause real harm to a real child if they're made aware of it (which could actually end up becoming harassment very easily and very quickly), unlike these theoretical children harmed by fictional content. I wouldn't argue against AO3 hosting RPF, or RPF NSFW, or NSFW of fictional minors, even though I find all of those personally distasteful, but I would argue against this kind of content specifically.

[(Anonymous)]

Hmm...that's not a bad point. I don't like RPF in general, but I think if you were a kid and someone wrote a pornfic about you and it went viral to some degree... yeah, that'd be enough to break someone not mentally equipped to deal with that kind of thing. Kids are mean enough, and adults can be even worse.

[(Anonymous)]

Honestly I feel like the pearl clutching is causing half the problem here. The fic apparently doesn't have a lot of hits and I doubt many people would have even known about it if someone didn't decide to make its removal their moral crusade. If the original person reporting the fic had just heeded the warning tags and moved on no one would even be talking about it and there would be no chance at all of said fic 'going viral' (and really, has it? I've heard it brought up multiple times lately but never once has anyone actually said the name of the minor in question and I'm certainly not going to go look).

[(Anonymous)]

It's also far from the first fic about a real-life minor on the site. But underage fic in general is actually not at all as widespread as some people would have you believe. I ran some numbers.

There are 162,255 fics tagged Underage on all of AO3. Keep in mind, not all of these are Explicit, lots of them are about child abuse, etc. Sounds like a lot, right?

There are SIX MILLION fics on AO3 (roughly, not an exact number).

162,255 is what percentage of 6,000,000? 0.00270425%

Let's round that up to .003%

Yeah, I'm not gonna lose a lot of sleep over that. Even if you see it as a problem, it's not a very widespread one.

[(Anonymous)]

162,255 is actually 2.7% of six million.

I have no beef with AO3, but your math is way off.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

Damn, I didn't even do the math myself, I ran it through an online calculator. Good catch, thanks.

2.7 is also not worth losing any sleep over, so my point still stands.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, I have no idea if the fic went viral, I was just speaking hypothetically.

And I'm sure if the person complaining about the fic had any sense, they'd realize they were also putting the minor at risk by publicly posting about the fic.

[(Anonymous)]

There are a lot of "antis" whose whole shtick is amassing a big following of minors under the pretense that they're "protecting" them, and filling their whole accounts with "gross" art and fic that "needs" to be called out - where all their minor followers can see it, which they probably never would have if they weren't following these people.

They're also very invested in convincing kids that "pedophilia" (VERY loosely defined) is way more prevalent in fandom than it really is, to the point of inducing the kind of paranoia where you see it everywhere, even in totally innocent things and in adult work aimed at adults, to keep these kids in a constant state of fear and anger.

Who does that serve, I wonder? I tend it think it works to the advantage of the anti, because they've now got a big following of kids who think other adults are "dangerous" and only antis are "safe." I certainly do not think it's good for the kids!

[(Anonymous)]

There's also a pretty good chance that the fic was written by a minor, and if it's someone writing about a celebrity their own age, that has a very different feel to it than if it's a much older adult. But we have no way of knowing that - and we shouldn't, people should be able to keep their anonymity. We should allow more benefit of the doubt, IMO.

[(Anonymous)]

Why, though? What does fandom actually lose by not being able to host or read rpf about irl minors on ao3?

[(Anonymous)]

The ability to host or read everything else. You don't have to like it--I certainly don't--but the whole thing with OTW is about protecting transformative works by protecting ALL of them. The legal challenges of copyright are already a mire; further thin-slicing content only serves to provide more justification to shut the whole thing down, even if personally we can agree the content might suck. It's not being promoted, only hosted, and safely labelled and tagged and concealed behind age-appropriate warnings.

[(Anonymous)]

Really? Literally **EVERYTHING ELSE** being hosted depends on nsfw fic about a real life minor staying hosted? That’s the only way to have a fanfiction archive? I’m not sure the slope is nearly as slippery as you’re implying here

[(Anonymous)]

You know that this is a real thing that happens, and not on AO3, right? All the people who run countdowns to when a child star is "legal" and tell them about it (like happened to Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen) is, I think, vastly more harmful than an obscure fic on an obscure website that is labelled fictional.

[(Anonymous)]

What does that have to do with this particular fic? I'm not okay with either of those things.

[(Anonymous)]

AO3 basically has to host any content they legally can. If they excluded anything, it would be an undermining of the site's core values, which they've espoused and upheld from the very beginning.

If I were to build and run my own archive, there's honestly a lot of stuff I wouldn't permit to be posted on it. Even a lot of stuff that was purely fiction, I'd be like, nope, it makes me uncomfortable, I don't want my thing associated with that content. And that would be totally fine, because it would be my archive that I was rightfully in control of. Anybody who didn't like it could simply not use my archive.

But because of what AO3 is (basically a by-the-people-for-the-people archive that's entire MO is that it's a creative space free of arbitrary and unpredictable regulation) it has to remain totally impartial, and uphold the rights of its users to the fullest extent.