Reblogged fyeahgothicromance
unspeakablearchives
Reblogged
past all arguments with gen AI 'art' being pushed as a tool to make art more accessible, as a disabled creator myself, it's important to remember that:
- a service that requires the stolen art of millions of uncredited artists in order to function
- demands insane amounts of water and electricity, harming the environment and poisoning local communities around their data centers
- used deliberately to take away paying jobs from real human artists so cooperates can save a buck, and frankly to my belief, implanted and encouraged the infighting so they could use us as a scapegoat and get away with it
it's capitalism, it's greed and it's ableist. That's not a tool for accessibility, that's a tool for exploitation
Reblogged thedruidsforest
You too can get the satisfaction of maiming or killing a spy embedded in your organization.
I have a suggestion
Reblogged
“You are responsible for the minors in your fandom!!!”
No, I’m fucking not. I’m not your parent. My past-times do not automatically sign me up to act in loco parentis. If you need someone else to monitor your own content consumption online, go get mommy and/or daddy to set up a content blocker on your computer.
Louder for the minors in the back, please.
What I’m responsible for in my fandom:
1. Making a good faith effort to include relevant and informative tags and labels on my creative works.
2. Making a good faith effort to use the “author chose not to warn” rating, a “contains potentially upsetting content” note, cuts or community ratings, or otherwise indicating that there might be untagged, triggering content if I’m not up to or don’t want to tag it.
3. Being a good fandom citizen; not sending death threats or hate, not bullying people, being kind and thoughtful to those I interact with, and leaving alone things that would prompt me to act otherwise.
4. Curating my own experience; not engaging with people or material that I know will be harmful or upsetting to me, disengaging when I realize that something is harmful or upsetting to me, and using tools such as blocklists and tag filters to hide content I don’t want to see.
5. Doing the opposite of whatever the fuck bullshit is going on in tiktok at all times.
Reblogged
Sometimes you see a post of someone saying dark fiction should be banned and then another person will respond to that saying "No, there's nothing wrong with dark fiction, as long as the bad things are portrayed as bad", and the thing is... I also don't agree with that.
I think what people don't realize when they say stuff like that is that those are literal Hay's Code guidelines. "Yes you can portray the bad thing, as long as it's explicitly said to be bad, and done by bad people, and all the bad people are punished for it".
Saying "dark themes can be portrayed, but only if they're portrayed as bad" is not advocating in favor of art, it's more advocating in favor of propaganda. The main purpose of art is not to be didactic, or to teach good morals or a guideline to tell people how to live their lives.
So yeah, characters can have shitty harmful opinions and never learn or be corrected in the narrative, villains might never be punished for their actions, the evil toxic romance might be portrayed as sexy, and no one will turn to the camera to tell you how the bad thing is bad and you shouldn't do it in real life.
Because just as we say that porn is fiction and not sex-ed, fiction in general shouldn't be taken as educational material and it should not need to be that, it's not its job. We are not gullible little kids, and I don't want to be treated like one. I'm old enough to know not to replicate something just because I saw it in a cartoon, let's tone down with the infantilization and paternalism please.
Reblogged
a reminder that ao3 was created as an archive. not a social media.
ao3 is run on fans’ donations. it’s a nonprofit organization, run by fans, for fans. it has no ads. no capitalism or algorithm bullshit.
ao3 allows works that depict all kind of taboo, morally questionable, disgusting, socially unacceptable subjects, no matter how graphic, how explicit it is being portrayed (that’s what tags, warnings and ratings are for!).
ao3 does not have censorship, nor does ao3 allow censorship.
Reblogged
i feel like something that's missing from some people's understanding of kink fiction and fantasy is, like... in fiction and fantasy, everything is in-scene.
when real people do kink in real life, you gotta do all that good out-of-scene stuff like discuss boundaries, set limits and expectations, check in with each other, do aftercare, et cetera et cetera et cetera... but in fiction, everything can be in-scene!
the people in that fanfic don't exist any more than, like, the make-believe sexy football star and make-believe sexy cheerleader in a couple's roleplay exist. that couple doesn't need to get into character and then pretend to be a sexy football star having an important consent conversation with a sexy cheerleader, because that's a conversation that's already happened out-of-scene and out-of-character. (i mean, if you're into in-character negotiations, chase your bliss.) when they're in that scene, they can just pretend to be a sexy football star having sex with a sexy cheerleader. that's okay.
so like. when fiction does kink in a way that would be unsafe or harmful irl... just keep in mind that you're not watching actual people neglecting check-ins or ignoring their set contract or genuinely harming each other. you're watching a scene without the behind-the-scenes bits, and that's okay.
this has gotten a couple replies along the lines of "yeah, you can just assume the characters worked all the important consent stuff out when you weren't looking!" which is true in some cases, but not the point i was trying to make, so please bear with me while i try to rephrase myself.
when i say in fiction, everything is in-scene, i mean that the fiction IS the scene.
if someone went up to their partner and said "hey, wouldn't it be sexy if we pretended you were manipulating and controlling me in an unethical way for sex reasons?", and then they talked through all the good and necessary consent and risk-awareness things, and then they played that scene out - that's a made-up scenario where pretend bad things happen, but no real-world people come to real-world harm, right?
now, if someone writes a story where one character manipulates and controls another in an unethical way for sex reasons... that, too, is a made-up scenario where pretend bad things happen, but no real-world people come to real-world harm.
kink fiction doesn't have to be about characters consciously and conscientiously Doing Kink. kink fiction can be stories where the kinky things people fantasize about or roleplay (but wouldn't want to happen in real life) do happen in the universe of that story. because the story is a scene.
Reblogged
throughout the twilight series, we watch Bella's sense of self systematically dissolved in an almost clinical fashion, beginning with the dissolution of her ability to access the common understanding of the world (that scene in the movie where she watches her friends have fun while she's escaping a murderous vampire), and ending with the opening of her mind to Edward's ability.
By the time Bella let's Edward into her mind and the end of BD, she has been completely destroyed and remade in the Cullen's image, mind, body, and soul. She's not Bella Swan anymore, in any way whatsoever.
It's such a good metaphor for cultish religion that it actually comes off as kind of subtle if it were intentional? But it's not intentional, which is absolutely WILD to me.
It makes me wonder what the others were like before they were made in the Cullen image. Like, we know that Edward rebelled, which under this reading means that even after his physical "transformation", he wasn't fully gone. Edward Masen was in there somewhere, and by the end of the 20s, was rinsed out.