[ SECRET POST #5886 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #5886 ⌋

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


01.



__________________________________________________



02.



__________________________________________________



03.



__________________________________________________



04.



__________________________________________________



05.



__________________________________________________



06.



__________________________________________________



07.



__________________________________________________



08.
[Stargate SG-1]



__________________________________________________






























09. [SPOILERS for Treasure Planet]




__________________________________________________



10. [WARNING for discussion of incest]

[Vampire Game]



__________________________________________________



11. [WARNING for possible discussion of transphobia (JK Rowling related)]




__________________________________________________



12. [WARNING for discussion of transphobia, other bigotry, suicide]
























Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 00 secrets from Secret Submission Post #842.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Intellectually I know what OP is doing is wrong.

Emotionally I feel like what OP is doing is, at least, neutral, morally.

Psychologically I'm interested in the fact that most of the people opposed to this secret have alluded to personal reasons why they might delete fic, but none of them, not even the anons, have actually put forward a solid reason why it's not okay for that fic to still exist with an orphan author, other than filing off the serial numbers.

Filing off the serial numbers makes perfect sense. But I can't think of any other reason, other than someone's fandom identity getting doxxed, why someone would really need their fic deleted rather than orphaned.

Also, re: the outrage about this secret, it's the internet and it's 2023. Most people should have a reasonable expectation that anything they put online might either be deleted randomly due to a server crash, or stay there forever after being archived or the site admins going AWOL.

So yeah, waiting for a reasonable reason here to hate the OP. Noting that 'fuck you' is not a reason.

[(Anonymous)]

See, to most people 'respecting the author's wishes' IS a reasonable reason.

AO3 is the biggest fandom archive out there with huge traffic. If your fic is live on there it will turn up in related tag searches. There's a huge difference in accessibility between that and a fic that has been deleted from AO3 and can only be found on Wayback machine. The least barrier of which is that somebody has to know the deleted fic even once existed to go looking for it. It's not reasonable to treat those two situations as equal, and it's also not reasonable to treat an author's decision to delete their work as meaningless.

[(Anonymous)]

NAYRT, but this seems very much like a matter of opinion to me. Fic that's uploaded to the internet is part of a massive gift exchange between strangers. It's a gift regardless of whether it has a specific recipient. Trying to take back a contribution to the whole seems a lot more rude to me than anyone re-uploading something that was once online. Along with their fic, an author is removing all record of the comments it received (which other people spent time writing), the bookmarks and notes it got (which are now broken for everyone who bothered to try to keep track of it), the work anyone else put into it (if the fic had a beta reader), etc. On top of diminishing the collective library and making it inaccessible to anyone who just happened to get into the fandom after they got out. While they still have as much of a right to read everyone else's free stuff as they always did.

If their story lived on a private drive on a computer that no one else can look at, I'd buy that the author had a right to expect that a deletion would be as final as shredding their junk mail and then taking out the trash. But it should not need to be spelled out, IMO, that the internet is not their coffee table. And neither is fandom.

[(Anonymous)]

WTF???
If you help a friend fix their car, does that give you the right to use that car whenever you please? No, it doesn't. Just as writing a comment on a fic doesn't entitle you to decide what happens to it. And are you seriously trying to say that writers who delete their fic shouldn't be allowed to read anymore?

[(Anonymous)]

What? No.

First of all, someone posting a fic on the internet isn't "giving" it to you, they're sharing it with the community, those are different things.

If I tell someone they're welcome to pick tomatoes from my garden in the summer, that doesn't mean I've promised to grow tomatoes every summer forever because they're now entitled to them because they expect them to be there! Even if they helped weed a couple of times! Or they developed a recipe for them!

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

Yes, but. In the world of published books, an author can, say, decide they don't want a particular book of theirs to ever be republished/printed. They can also try to collect as many copies of their as they can to destroy them. But they can't really do much to stop someone selling old copies of the book in second hand stores, or ebay, or garage sales. And while some people may respect the author's wishes and avoid any old copies of the book, if the author doesn't provide a reason or a strong reason to do so, I feel like most people wouldn't see the second hand market for the book existing as a moral outrage.

I kinda see reuploading a work as an orphaned work a bit like the second hand book market - out of control of the original author because the work was public at one point. Except at least in this case the author's name is disconnected from the work.

[(Anonymous)]

No, reuploading an orphaned work is like putting it up on Amazon in a new edition.

Passing around pdfs with people you know through email is the second-hand book market, that's fine, nobody's objecting to that.

[(Anonymous)]

NAYRT

But what you're saying seems like a much closer analogy to me than most of what people are trying to give you as counter-examples.

[(Anonymous)]

If the author consented to orphaning their work then its done by their own terms.

Consent. Consent is the issue here.

[(Anonymous)]

NAYRT

But seeing as none of us need (or got) the author's consent to write fanfic in the first place, what grounds to you have to argue that it's necessary, at whichever arbitrary point you decide to apply that?

[(Anonymous)]

When you're taking their entire works exactly as they wrote them? It's not a blurry line, this one.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

I think consent was given at the point of upload - or at least an agreement and understanding that once you make a work public, you can never fully control it again. Same thing happens with published book authors, or hell, published tweets.

[(Anonymous)]

At the point of upload you're consenting to the site's TOS, and on all the fandom archives I use, the TOS will outright ban reuploading other people's work. If you don't like that, start an archive where reposting is explicitly allowed in the TOS.

[(Anonymous)]

well thank you, this was the most inspirational post to never write a fan fic for ao3 ever again.

[(Anonymous)]

DA

I've been amazed at how many people manage to understand that if they say something in the presence of other people, there is no way to erase it from everyone else's memory, but are shocked that their computer coming with a delete button does not give them that exact power over umpteen billion other people on the entire internet. It's pretty wild.

[(Anonymous)]

OK, here's a reason: maybe the takedown was temporary (they have a stalker situation? They're trying to change pseuds, so they took down everything with their own pseud and are waiting a bit before they put it back up? They're having a psych crisis and want to not think about fandom or the internet while they deal with that, but also don't want to permanently orphan because they plan to get better? They've got an abusive partner whose forcing them to close all their online accounts but they're working to get away from them? They're having a financial crisis which means their internet access will be patchy and they won't be able to monitor anything, so they pulled it down until they get it figured out? Lots of reasons you may want to take down fic without irreversibly disavowing it?)

And then they want to put it back up under their name, but now it's competing with someone else's upload, which has more hits and kudos already. That doesn't have their name on it. That they can't even politely request the reposter to take down because it's orphaned. That they might even face people accusing *them* of plagiarism for reposting orphaned works under their name!

There's a fucking difference between "archiving" something and "publishing" something. Archive all you want! That's your right and good for you! Don't fucking publish stuff unless you have consent, and don't expect other people do to the work of keeping their own stuff published forever, either, they don't owe that to anyone.


OP is frankly lucky they haven't had any plagiarism abuse complaints for this yet. (AO3 will still know it's them.)

[(Anonymous)]

Not to mention the nonzero chance they pulled fic down from AO3 because they don't want their fic on AO3, specifically, for some reason. AO3 is not "the internet" it's a specific site run by actual people that some people boycott for reasons.

(And that some people get suspended from. You could in fact get someone in trouble with AO3 if you repost + orphan a fic that they took down because AO3 asked them to.

Or, for that matter, that a friend or someone asked them to, because it was hurtful for personal reasons. Imagine if someone you know posted a fic that included stuff that felt way to close to something personal you'd told them about a bad situation you were in, you asked them to take it down, they said omg I had no idea I'm so sorry and pulled it... and the next time you checked it was up again, orphaned.)

[(Anonymous)]

DA

Social justice rhetoric has been coopted into something completely meaningless, when people are "boycotting" something they never sent money to in the first place. And if the AO3 employs people who are even minimally competent with computers, there is zero chance of them mistaking a third party reuploading a fic with a hypothetical suspended author. I think you're grasping at straws with this one.

The only way I know to make it unlikely that your secrets end up in writing "that could be seen!! By other people!!" is to not confide them to writers. Second best is to be very clear, when you tell someone, about what you expect them to refrain from doing with that knowledge. There really isn't a third option that's effective. But the internet is the absolute last place to put anything if you want control over who can see it, or when they stop being able to see it. It was designed to frustrate attempts at censorship, no matter who's doing the censoring.

[(Anonymous)]

DA

The OP is not interfering with an author's name being associated with that story in the future: the only one jeopardizing that connection is the author themselves. If people were't freaking out about it at every turn, here, we might be able to put our heads together and come up with something productive and fair that would make it easier for people who want to come back out of the closet as the author of [whichever fic they removed their name from] in the future.

Also, there is no "plagiarism" involved when the OP is not claiming to have written the work.

[(Anonymous)]

If you're posting someone's work to AO3 that is not your work, it's plagiarism by the AO3's terms of service whether you orphan it or not.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

Those are all possible reasons, though they do seem like they'd be the exception rather than the rule.

While I don't necessarily think OP of this secret is the hero in this situation, the discussions in this thread have convinced me that fic writers are no different to any other person who publishes something widely for free, and as such are subject to the same consequences.

Or, don't fucking publish stuff if you can't deal with the idea of no longer having perfect control over access to that content.

[(Anonymous)]

"reasonable expectation" of your work having an indeterminate fate doesn't justify others' poor actions.

I don't hate the OP, but I am judging the hell out of them. They either don't grasp the concept of respecting others or simply don't care, placing their whims above someone else's comfort.

And the idea of "well, it was there, it was accessible to ME at one point, therefore (insert action here)" is no different from thief logic.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't have any beef with people making value judgements here.

However, talking about thief logic in reference to work that was published for free just doesn't work here (or it works about just as well as published authors calling fanfic writers thiefs of their content).

[(Anonymous)]

"Most people have a reasonable expectation that if they walk on a busy street there might be danger from cars, so it's harmless if I mow down pedestrians for fun".

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, you can make the same extreme analogy about morality of fanfic writers themselves writing fanfic against the original published authors' wishes.

Considering that the whole of fandom banded together to agree that it was fine to ignore Anne Rice's express wishes against fanfic being written about her characters, I think the extreme moral outrage over this secret is pretty ironic.