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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.
WORD. Remember your history.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to curate your fandom experience. 2000s Tolkien fandom has dozens of different archives with very little overlap as to what each accepted, plus hundreds if not thousands of mailing lists and journals where people shared fic. Yes, many of them had anti-slash or other gatekeeping rules in place that I personally did not agree with. So I did not post or interact there. But this also meant that people who did not want to encounter same-sex pairings or adult content at all had a place where they could consistently find the stories they wanted and form friendships with people who had similar tastes. And those of us who were “canon heretics” (as we used to call ourselves back then) could find fanworks and hang out with people who shared similar views to us. And those who were there for the kinkiest of adult stories had their sites and groups and lists too.
Tl;dr: There is nothing stopping people from starting their own archive or group for the kinds of fanworks they want to see. AO3 has been put into an unfair position by needing to be everything to everyone when their mission, as the OP says, was very clearly to serve as an open, uncensored space for literally any fanwork you could imagine.
(Posted by @dawnfelagund)
#strikethrough not only got rid of the slash communities#it also took out discussions on Lolita#not supporting it but critical discussion on the book and the issues presented by the author#who didn’t support it either#but also communities for sexual assault victims#wanna know how fucked up that is?
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