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

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Lost in my ranting against those things is the fact that I have no problem with authors using them to advertize--I mean, yeah, I put the pairings on my fics, exactly because if I write a Lilah/Eve story I expect people who'd be interested in reading a Lilah/Eve story might want to read it and wouldn't find it otherwise. And I understand that a lot of ratings and warnings can work the same way. It's the culture that assumes an author must accurately label her fic in this way to which I object.