an observation

cupidsbower:

Within a generation of genuinely good reform that makes things better for particular groups, there will be a backlash from people who weren’t yet alive way back when and don’t remember what it was like in the bad old days, but are sure something about the reform is a scam.

This is true for major things, like vaccines, or women being able to have their own bank accounts, paying jobs, maternity leave, and the vote. And it’s just as true for smaller things like a fan-run Archive of Our Own (so named, after Virginia Wolfe’s famous feminist essay, for a reason)
that makes fanfiction available for free with a mandate to legally protect it as long as it conforms to the Terms of Service.

The current backlash against the OTW I’m seeing all over my dash is completely unsurprising, because we’re at that point in the organisation’s life. There are now fans who weren’t in fandom yet when we made the OTW and AO3, and who have no idea what fandom used to be like.

The fact the backlash is riddled with right wing vocab and lack-of-fact-checking laziness is just as predictable. I doubt most of it is even said with genuine worry – it’s just concern trolling. It’s another face of the usual efforts by the right to suppress the work of women, queers, and other minorities. And yes, I’m being serious. Both right wing trolls and Russian trolls infiltrated fandom conversations, where they overlapped with social justice movements, during the USA’s 2016 election, and they haven’t gone anywhere. Fandom is a nice juicy target for that kind of propaganda effort, because we tend to skew left and be full of minority-identifying people.

This anti-AO3 push is not just wank. It’s propaganda, and it’s attempting to sow discord, distract from important issues, and do harm.

Thanks to those of you who have taken the time to point out those posts are rubbish.

Note: The OTW is a charity, run by fans for fans. I was one of the original Board members, but I’m not currently doing any work with them.

You can read more about the OTW and the AO3 for yourself here: http://www.transformativeworks.org/.