I Aim to Misbehave

[alixtii]

You know what what? In some ways, I think I miss the days when everyone in fandom thought fanfic was illegal. (I say this is as someone who entered fandom in 2004, so I'm not sure if there has exactly been a sea-change, but it sure feels like it to me.) Because now everyone's on about what we can do to look like fine upstanding citizens, and at least when we thought we were criminals we were more genuinely subversive. When we thought we were all committing copyright infringement, other things which may have been illegal but ethical, like providing porn to teenagers, didn't seem like such a big deal. But now the "fanfic is legal" zeitgesit is taking over, and everyone's calling for us to clean up our acts, and I have to wonder what exactly we're losing out on.

The specific post that got me to post this is this one, "Looking Ahead as Fen," but it's nothing new and mirrors conversations I've been seeing going on all through the FanLib and Strikethrough07 discussions.

I don't like disclaimers (and for the most part don't use them), don't like warnings (and only warn for rape), don't like ratings (I've switched to just using "Work Safe" and "NWS," and am thinking about a "Maybe Work Safe" option). I refuse to flock a post just because it contains adult content (even if that content is incest or cross-gen). I've ranted about most of these issues (often in metafandom-linked posts) before, and the idea that we have to start doing these things (making our art and literature fit into cookie-cutter boxes) to make ourselves acceptable to the Man just sort of makes me retch.

Let's be bad guys?

Comments

[heyiya.livejournal.com]

I know what you mean. Okay, I don't write fic, and I find the fanarchive stuff totally amazing and feel like writing a paper about all these recent events... I think the organizing, radical forces in fandom are really being harnessed right now and it's extremely cool.

But, frankly, I'm rather in favour of the underage distribution of "adult" fiction. I doubt that the presence of will scar the little children for life, at least not in a bad way (the most 'scarring' book I ever read, Plague 99, was in the children's section of the library anyway; reading explicit sex in Samuel R. Delany at the same age just made me interested and sympathetic to deviancy, and I think that's a rather positive outcome). Especially given that the 'underage' we're talking about is often mid-to-late-teens, when 'childish innocence' is not a terribly relevant category, at least when it comes to the imagination...

It comes down to the fact that I don't see legality as a big deal, really; there are enough laws I passionately and politically disagree with, especially in the US, that I definitely think of legality as just something you have to conform to in order to avoid trouble, but not a good in and of itself. So yeah, I liked it when it was pretty much ignored.

[heyiya.livejournal.com]

the presence of SEX, that was meant to say