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I get this question all the time, which is ironic since I tend to be public enemy #1 for the “AO3 is racist” crowd. (Or maybe they’ve moved on by now. I don’t really keep up with them.)
No, there is no good faith interpretation. It’s recycled Star Wars wank from 2015, SamSteve vs. Stucky wank from the same period, etc. etc.
The “anti-racists” in question include a lot of big names who should know better. Their central arguments boil down to:
- The demographics of which characters get shipped and/or written about on AO3 are racist.
- A lot of individual fics about characters of color on AO3 are racist.
- AO3’s refusal to “listen” and then censor is racist.
- Fans of color “need” to be able to speak up about fic that is racist… in that fic’s comments.
It’s all ass-backwards because it focuses on the needs of the reader to find the content they want, which is content creator influencer hell, not the writer-focused AO3 approach.
The whole point of AO3-style fandom is that everyone has access to posting, and you can write what you want. Want more fics about your fave? Write them.
There are individual AO3 fics I find racist, but the vast majority of the discourse around the site focuses on things like writers who ship the black dude but use him as a prop boyfriend and not the single perfect tear woobie who’s obviously their favorite. Is the pattern racist? Well, yeah, but you won’t solve it by trying to restrict those fics. And the extreme form of this turns into a cliched top/bottom shipwar, which just makes everyone involved look like a moron.
Teaching people how to write their tops with personalities is far more likely to make the collective fic in a fandom less racist than demanding that they switch which pairing dynamic they’re into. Making more original media where the man of color is the woobie in the first place would also help.
Plenty of the discourse is crying that such-and-such a m/m ship is super popular on AO3, temple of m/m, while gen about characters of color or some particular het ship with a nonwhite character is less popular. “Why don’t you ship het instead of m/m” is a gigantic red flag for people who refuse to understand libido or accept it as a valid reason for anything.
A lot of the discourse is anti-kink despite lying about this fact. “Boo hoo hoo, I for sure psychically know who’s a racist white person and who’s a kinky black person whose id doesn’t match up with mine!” etc.
There’s also a lot of “This fic is race kink!” nonsense thrown around about any fic where a man of color has a big dick, as though penis size by itself is the racist cliche often summed up as “big black cock” and as though all ethnicities and nationalities are subject to identical stereotypes. This garbage gets uncritically repeated by newly-minted “woke” people falling over themselves to correct hundreds of years of injustice by yelling at others for a couple of days on twitter.
This is where the “you’re calling me an anti to silence me” garbage comes from. Sound like a kink-hater, get treated as one.
AO3 does have bullying problems by now, and the various blocking and muting features were overdue. They are now being implemented, which is great. Anyone with half a brain cell should see that these are key anti-racist measures so that people can block idiots who write fic they hate or who leave shitty comments…
But a certain number of jackasses complain even about that because it will ~silence fans of color~ who need to go tell someone they’re a racist in their fic comments.
These dumbass arguments have been circulating for years at this point, so the talking points have boiled down to catch phrases.
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Damn right I’m against “discussion” when it means telling everyone that only white people would like nasty kink.
When the whiny “plz censor AO3” crowd stops sounding exactly like that asshole who used “freaks of color” in a past discussion about these kinds of things and when they’re ready to discuss how to write extreme kink about their faves non-racistly without reducing the kinkiness, then I will be ready to listen to their arguments.
But they have none other than “write the kind of fic I like!”
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