Solve et Coagula

Signal-boosting this, especially for any long-time Sheith folks from 2016-19: Donya Abrams, the writer who wrote everything Voltron for the website Hypable, is searching to see if anyone saved the text for one of her articles: https://www.hypable.com/voltron-shiro-lgbt-disability-importance/ (dead link). This was an essay, rather than an interview or review, that was very personal to her.

She has the rest, but this one got lost when she had to replace her computer and Hypable failed to reach out to her directly before shutting down their servers. Wayback doesn't have a capture. If anyone happens to have it, please ping me!

Once in a while, I trip and fall into re-reading a whole lot of HP fanfic. This time around, having been pointed to an archive for Fiction Alley which enabled me to recover a few favorite fics by an author I have huge respect for, I was reminded of the archive that exists for the H/Hr Portkey site and have been browsing it as well. Which led me to take another look at FF-dot-Net and some of the authors I had marked as favorites there.

And in re-reading, I am finding that my tastes in fanfic have definitely shifted over the years as I've gone through new fandoms. I used to be able to overlook a lot of gory violence in a fic if the plot was strong and the characters rang true. And I see a LOT of unnecessary violence in some HP fics, that feels like it was inserted just to make it feel more like war. Sudden POVs of a character introduced solely to be killed in yet another gruesome way. Rampant destruction in as many ways and places that the writer can think of. The apparent need to hurt as much as possible and provide no comfort.

And yeah, that just doesn't appeal anymore. I want my favorite characters to survive. I want them to land in a good place if they have to go through trials. I am definitely on Team Fluff over Team Angst and have no more patience with nihilism for nihilism's sake.

Some of this is probably coming from the diametrically opposed reactions I'm seeing to the second season of "Good Omens", which will be its own entry when I have time to get my thoughts in order. (Spoiler - I thought it was masterfully done, but does require a third season to complete the arc.) Suffice to say, a story has to stick the landing. In my opinion, HP did not stick the landing and fell apart in the last two books as Rowling suddenly realized she had to cram all the world-building and character development back into her preconceived box. The final season of "Voltron" was a hollow shell character-wise and full of bad decisions, only some of which were probably forced on the creative team by DreamWorks execs. My understanding is that "Game of Thrones" ended in a disaster, thanks to the TV team having to make up endings since GRR Martin is still writing the books. While I personally enjoyed some parts of the final season of "Sherlock", the kindest thing to say about it was it was messy.

I was mostly satisfied with how "Ted Lasso" ended. I felt the writing team had given themselves plenty of options to choose from, any of which would have support in the story. The main quibble I have is with the mostly male writers apparently not getting ( spoilers ) But there, I was invested in seeing the team land in a good place more than any specific ship.

Anyway, all this pondering is a reminder of the best advice to ever exist, especially with fanfic: write what YOU want to read. Because you're never going to satisfy everyone else who reads/views your work, even when it is ostensibly excellent in structure and development. So write for yourself, not an audience.

While I still think at its core AO3 is an incredible achievement in fandom, I will agree that things have been fraying around the edges there for a while. It was never meant to be THE fanfic repository - they make their code open source so that people can make their own sites for specific fandoms/ships, but that hasn't happened much. Then there was the DDOS attack that took down the site for several days.

The controversies last year and this year with electing new board members shows that there are struggles within the OTW and its leadership. I really don't think committed antis would have the patience or acting ability to volunteer for upwards of a year and then go through the platform/Q&A/chats process to get elected. But last year we had a candidate who (I think in part because of language barriers) appeared to endorse taking down enough "problematic" content from AO3 to make it acceptable to the Chinese government in the name of wider access. And while understandably that is not an option if AO3 is going to remain true to its stated mission of preserving all fanworks, some of the reactions were frankly unhinged in the levels of racism and conspiracy theories. And AO3 did nothing to try and address it.

This year we had a candidate who, in my opinion, did not deserve the automatic reaction of Republican=evil based on many of her political stances. However, she works for a non-profit with unclear motives in its save-the-children-from-screens purpose, her answers to the official Q&A showed a lack of understanding in a lot of areas in spite of volunteering at the OTW for months, and when pressed she chose to react with vitriol instead of try and give level-headed responses that might have convinced some people that her intentions were good. But this time AO3 tried to address it and did so in a very clumsy manner and never really addressed last year's problems.

The clumsiness continues with the org's current stance on LLM-produced texts (AI), better named as plagiarism software. While I admit that the OTW is kind of in between a rock and a hard place with how to enforce a ban on plagiarism software-produced texts, I disagree profoundly with the assertion that such texts qualify as transformative works. My compromise suggestion would be making some kind of tag to add to the Big Six, asking account holders to mark any works that were produced with plagiarism software. It's not a perfect solution - people are still not tagging/mis-tagging things every day - but it would help until such time that governments get a handle on the harm of plagiarism software and restricts its use to get it out of the arts.

The point of all this rambling is that I am thinking of backing up my fics here. They would be entries with the text hidden under cuts, tagged with fandom/ship and a unique tag. I need to verify that if I limit access to my subscribers or create a custom filter, that it would be enough to prevent them being scraped. I know the horse is out of the barn as far as my older fics, but I am currently keeping WIPs and my new work locked on AO3.

So, you may see some slightly spammy entries from me in the coming weeks if I go through with this. Scroll past the fics that don't interest you, but if you do read, I hope you feel moved to comment.

Many thanks to misscake for the invite!