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flurbejurbvondurpThis is so fucking stupid. Why can’t artists and writers even give the option of pay? It’s not like anybody is holding a gun to reader’s heads forcing them to donate. It’s donated money! You’re telling me Article 13 removes people’s option to even donate???
Article 13 is causing all sorts of bullshit, but this is nothing new for Ao3 and it’s important for folk to know. Writers or anyone hosting content on Ao3 should never ever link back to a ko-fi or patreon or even mention needing donations due to legal restrictions placed on Ao3 in order to exist. If you are found out or reported, they can delete your account.
So the way Ao3 works? Is that the only way they can protect us from content creators and their legal teams, is to be like “hey, look, this is transformative work for fun! It earns no money!” And that’s how they get around what many authors still in this day and age think of as plagiarism and defemataion.
It’s actually in Ao3′s Terms of Services, not because they are monsters who don’t want you to thrive, but because it’s the only way to protect fan creators from the proverbial wolf at the door. I’m just old enough to remember when Anne Rice and Star Wars were going after people and filing official take downs for fan works and threatening to sue people. I know actual people who got real letters telling them to take down their fanzine or else.
And every time I see someone creating a patreon or ko-fi for the fanfic, my heart jumps up into my mouth. Like sure, let people know you have those things? But don’t have tiers that say things like “fanfic updates”. And for the love of god never post links to them in your Ao3.
deadcatwithaflamethrower nearly lost their account some years ago because they mentioned having a donation drive on their tumblr and someone reported them.
How, HOW did we get to a point in fandom where fanfic has to be free to survive is no longer basic common knowledge?
ok i’m writing this as an occasional writer who doesn’t have a ko-fi or a patreon or a mechanism for people to pay me, and who is old enough to remember legal crackdowns and C&Ds. The ones of my youth were Buffy and X-files, if you would like to carbon-date my experience and my viewpoint.
I suspect it has to do with …. i mean, well, at a basic level with capitalism and putting a monetary value on all labor and people confined within that system declaring self-esteem and self-value by putting monetary value on things they do for fun
specifically, in recent years there’s been growing awareness that crafty people–and crafts are largely artworks created by women–undervaluing their work, knitters and crocheters and stuff. But like, also that they undervalue their work because society in general undervalues their work, because mass production has cut people’s expectation of the time and labor put into a work. But like there’s pushback? There’s I’m gonna spend 200 hours on this and you want it for $20 because you can get a cheap blanket at walmart for $20? fuck you, pay me
the entire “fuck you, pay me” ethos surrounding undervalued art made primarily by women
and people applying that to fanfiction isn’t nuts, that is a logical leap. you want this thing from me? You’re in my comments demanding updates? pay me. it’s labor, it’s not easy to write this, this is a thing i work on, pay me.
fanfiction as a 100% non-profit hobby in order to be legally safe is fucked up, illogical thing, frankly. It’s the way things work right now, it’s a fact we live under, but it’s not–it doesn’t MAKE SENSE under capitalism
and i mean, frankly i think capitalism needs to break? I think it would make more sense for everyone to have universal basic income and universal healthcare and guaranteed housing and not charge for fannish stuff they do for fun because they don’t need to in order to live
because i think trying to shove transformative creative work into the capitalist frame is doomed to fail, because we are all independent creators and monopolistic giants have spent decades lobbying to make intellectual property law work for them, to say they own the things we want to tell stories about when storytelling is a integral human behavior and they’re robbing us of it.
but while we live in a capitalist society and can’t afford to do labor without charging for it or we’ll starve, or won’t be able to afford or meds, or will get evicted, it follows completely that fanfic writers will think, “okay so this is something I can do that there’s demand for, I need money, pay me”
I get asked three questions fairly regularly by family, friends, and/or coworkers:
1.) You love to write, so why not write something to publish?
2.) You love coding, so why not get [insert this dev job]?
3.) You love to [crafty thing], so why not sell on etsy?
My go-to answer is to change the subject, because literally no actual answer shuts people the fuck up and even that doesn’t always work. Sure, that sounds rude, but almost twenty years of this, your tolerance runs down.
All of the above entry is correct and painfully true, and also goes to my problem: there’s no value in an activity that doesn’t make money, and the unholy idea that if you aren’t making money at x activity, you should is right behind it. And that is where we start to devalue things because someone chooses not to charge for them.
However, this is less a philosophical debate now than one of economic, so lets talk about how well letting the market decide fucking anything. Give you a thought.
Which of these in a money-based fanfic economy is going to sell well?
1) two white men pairing (or a white man and white woman)
2.) literally any fucking thing else
Which of these in a money-based fanfic economy is going to sell well?
1.) conventional romance
2.) literally anything else
Which of these in a money-based fanfic economy is going to sell well, and using time to create as a factor, make more money?
1.) a plotted novel
2.) lots of short porn
Which of these in a money-based fanfic economy is going to sell well?
1.) popular fandom
2.) small fandom
Like, none of these problems are new ones or ones we don’t debate the fuck out of already, but if you think its not going to get an order of magnitude worse when substituting literal money for comments, come on.
Money makes a difference, and not just on a conscious level; whether you realize it or not, you’re going to tailor for the audience (and profit) not just in how and what you write, but what you want to write. Because come on, in a choice between a profit making idea that takes x hours and one no one will care about or won’t make much for the same [x] hours, guess what’s going to take precedence?
Congratulations: we’re recreating the publishing industry with all its problems and literally none of its very, very limited controls, such as they are; sure, there’s community pressure and standards, but compared to money, what do you think that’s going to be worth? And we’re doing this to ourselves, on purpose.
So this is going to be fun.
Yes. This.
I’m oddly reminded of that time one of my tumblr posts got linked on facebook and some guy criticized my “article” for being “reactionary clickbait” – which would be a fair criticism if I’d actually been a journalist publishing a paid editorial, and not an anonymous tumblr user shitposting into the void for attention.
I know I have a somewhat formal writing style and tend to use academic lingo and occasionally even include proper source citations in my tumblr posts, but it never even occurred to me until my post was viewed and judged out of context that anyone might project actual expectations of reputability onto a casual unmonetized personal fannish tumblog.
That is to say,
I think people who want to monetize fandom are suffering under the misapprehension that they can have their cake and eat it too. They want all the lack of regulation, the lack of accountability, the spontaneity and the freedom of a non-profit fandom space, plus the profitability, plagiarism protections, etc. of a regulated marketplace.
I mention plagiarism protections in particular as I’ve literally seen people on this hellsite throw shit-fits because someone “stole” a GIF they made (no original embellishments – just a straight translation of a video clip to graphics interchange format) and used it as a reaction image in someone else’s post without credit. The shit-fit-throwers somehow failed to realize that the very act of making a GIF from a video and posting it without the video creators permission is, in itself, a form of stealing.
I’ve written at length about why I like non-profit fandom because it is non-profit – why I consider it crucial that a portion of fandom remain un-touched by the forces of capitalism [see post].
TL&DR people think they want to sell fanfic, without any real understanding of how monetizing their hobby would radically alter the hobby itself. What they actually want is to live in a socialist society with universal basic income where they can afford to spend time on the things they want to spend time on without fear of poverty.
That last paragraph, yes, god. We need that.