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AO3 was created deliberately as the place for taboo fanfiction that no one else wanted to host.
It was created in significant part in response to the spontaneous deletion of adult and queer content fanfic on other archives; specifically fanfiction.net and livejoural.com.
I cannot stress this enough. Fanfiction.net and livejoural.com straight up deleted users adult and queer content without warning, backup or recourse.
AO3 was created so that authors could host queer fic, porn, and transgressive adult material without the threat of deletion.
AO3 was created as the place for shipcest and underage fic.
If you want a clean archive with no taboo material, those archives exist. AO3 was created to be their alternative.
I’m all for free speech and the taboo. If you want to write a fic about a specific kink, and it’s not my thing, I’ll just keep scrolling. The only time I feel the need to voice my concerns or opinions is when the fic in question actively encourages practices such as p*dophilia and b*astiality, the normalization of which can be actively harmful to minors or helpless animals. Otherwise, you do you, my dude.
Have you run across a lot of fics which *encourage* the reader to commit child molestation or sexual assault on animals?
Depicting an act in a narrative is not encouraging a reader to commit a crime.
I believe these topics can be handled tastefully and in a plot-relevant way. My issue is with stories that are straight-up porn meant to serve as personal spank bank material. While these stories might not outright say such acts are okay, posting them serves to normalize these subjects to some capacity. As someone who grew up with pretty much unlimited access to the internet, exposure to these stories did influence my perception of healthy relationships and myself, and I don’t want anyone else to endure the inner struggles I had to.
I’m generally pro-kink and LGBTQ+ rights as someone within both communities. I do think there should be some line, though. I don’t mean to sound combative and I know censorship is a complex issue; these are just my thoughts on the matter.
I entreat you to ask yourself a simple question.
Is there anyone you trust to decide what counts as “tasteful depiction” and what counts as “straight up porn”?
How do you personally make that distinction without actually reading the material in question?
What possible line can you draw between “this is art with merit” and “this is not art and has no merit”?
Who do you trust to draw that line?
I’ll be happy if I never fucking see the “normalization” argument ever again. I’m so sick of it, and it makes me sad for people every fucking time I’m unfortunate enough to come across it again.
When I was ten years old, four years before I officially joined fandom, I knew not to emulate what I saw in fiction because even innately, I knew it was unrealistic, and I GREW UP MORMON. I believed gay people could never act on their sexuality in a moral way until I was almost SEVENTEEN. I was extremely sheltered in a very cult-like environment, never allowed to think for myself, never allowed to ask unacceptable questions, and I still was somehow able to figure out that fiction, even pure self-indulgent fiction, was not real, and that I shouldn’t treat it like it’s real.
The reason why is pretty simple; Mormons still believe in secular education. Even though porn was off-limits, doing weird things for fun was usually still okay, and I was taught typical moral lessons by adults I trusted like don’t get into cars with strangers and don’t leave the house if nobody knows where you’re going. I also have my own internal sense of logic and morality that wasn’t completely sealed away by my indoctrination, so I was able to figure out when a character was doing something actually good and when it was time to suspend my disbelief for the sake of the narrative.
My question every time is this; If you were tricked somehow by FICTION into believing something immoral was moral in real life, how bad of a childhood must you have had? How utterly did the adults in your life fail you to allow you to absorb everything you read uncritically?
It breaks my heart. Really, it does.
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