I got pretty fed up with looking for words to replace said because they werenât sorted in a way I could easily use/find them for the right time. So I did some myself.
It’s angry, your heart , as it pants to keep up
Your breath a stutter, your cry an aborted scream
Is it terror or pleasure in your blood?
What coils within you coils within you coils within you
As lightening takes you down
So Iâm on AO3 and I see a lot of people who put âI do not own [insert fandom here]â before their story.
Like, I came on this site to read FAN fiction. This is a FAN fiction site. Iâm fully aware that you donât own the fandom or the characters. Thatâs why itâs called FAN FICTION.
Oh you youngins⌠How quickly they forget.
Back in the day, before fan fiction was mainstream and even encouraged by creators⌠This was your âplease donât sue me, Iâm poor and just here for a good timeâ plea.
Cause guess what? That shit used to happen.
how soon they forget ann riceâs lawyers.
What happened with her lawyers.
History became legend. Legend became mythâŚ.  And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost.
I worked with one of the women that got contacted by Riceâs lawyers. Scared the hell out of her and she never touched fandom again. The first time I saw a commission post on tumblr for fanart, I was shocked.
One of the reasons I fell out of love with her writing was her treatment of the fans⌠(that and the opening chapter of Lasher gave me such heebie-jeebies with the whole underage sex thing I felt unclean just reading it.)
I have zero problem with fanart/fic so long as the creators arenât making money off of it. It is someone elseâs intellectual property and people who create fan related works need to respect that (and a solid 98% of them do.)
The remaining 2% are either easily swayed by being gently prompted to not cash in on someone elseâs IP. Or they DGAF⌠and they are the ones who will eventually land themselves in hot water. Either way: this isnât much of an excuse to persecute your entire fanbase.
But Anne Rice went off the deep end with this stuff by actively attacking people who were expressing their love for her work and were not profiteering from it.
The Vampire Chronicles was a dangerous fandom to be in back in the day. Most of the works I read/saw were hidden away in the dark recesses of the internet and covered by disclaimers (a lot of them reading like thoroughly researched legal documents.)
And woe betide anyone who was into shipping anyone with ANYONE in that fandom. You were most at risk, it seemed, if your vision of the characters deviated from the creators âoriginal intentions.â (Hypocritical of a woman who made most of her living writing erotica.)
Imagine getting sued over a headcanonâŚ
Put simply: we all lived in fear of her team of highly paid lawyers descending from the heavens and taking us to court over a slashfic less than 500 words long.
all
of
this
Reblogging because I canât believe there are people out there who donât know the story behind fan fiction disclaimers.Â
Yep I used to have disclaimers on all my Buffy fic back in the day. The Buffy creators were mostly pretty chill about fandom but itâs not like it is now. You did NOT talk about fandom with anyone except other fandom people and bringing it up at cons was a massive no no because of stuff like this.
I think Supernatural (and Misha Collins specifically) was when that wall between fandom and creators started to break down. Itâs a relatively new thing.
I remember going to a Merlin panel down in London and a girl sitting next to me asked the cast about slash and I thought she was going to get kicked out!
Fandom history is important.
Oh, this brings back some not so-awesome â90s fandom memories!Â
Oh man, let me tell you about the X-Files fandom. Lawyers for FOX sued, threatened, and generally terrified the owners of fan websites on a regular basis. God help you if you wrote or created original art set in their (expansive) universe or worse – dared to write about their characters. Even people who werenât creating fanworks, just hosting Geocities pages about how much people liked the show would be sent C&D orders or actually fined. When I was first discovering the concept, the first rule of fandom was you do not talk about fandom because the consequences could be devastating.
It was such a strange and uncomfortable experience for me when fans in LOTR and Potter fandoms suddenly started shoving their work in peopleâs faces speaking publicly about fandom and wanting to engage in dialogue with the creators and actors of the Thing they were into. Fan stuff was supposed to stay online, in archives and list-serves and zines we passed around because it just wasnât cool to talk about it and it could get you in a boatload of trouble. The freedom we have to create and gather together in a shared space, or actually be acknowledged in any way by people outside the fandom was inconceivable to my fannish, teenaged self. I want fans these days to understand how amazing modern fandom really is, cherish the community, and appreciate what it took to get us here.Â
âif you found this by googling yourself, hit back now. this means you, pete wentzâ
Oh hey, even more blasts from the past.
I was one of the ones who got a love letter from Anne Riceâs lawyers. Bear in mind that up until that point her publisher had encouraged fanfic and worked with the archive keeper (one of my roommates at the time) to drum up publicity for upcoming books and so on.
I could tell such tales of how much Anne screwed over her fans back then. The tl;dr version is that she and her peeps would use fan projects as free market research and then bring in the lawyers once it was felt Anne could make money off of it herself. (Talismanic Tours being one of the most offensive examples of this.)
But where fanfic is concerned not only did we get nastygrams but one of my friends had Anneâs lawyer trying to fuck up her own privately owned business which had NOTHING TO DO WITH ANYTHING ANNE RELATED. Said friend was a small business owner with health issues who wasnât exactly rolling in money, so guess how well that went?
On top of that when yours truly tried to speak out about it I discovered that someone in Anneâs camp had been cyber stalking me to the point where they took all the tiny crumbs of personal information I had posted over the course of five years or so and used it to doxx me (before that was even a term and in early enough days of the WWW that this wasnât an easy task) and post VERY personal information about me on the main fandom message board of the time. Luckily for me the mod was my friend and she took that down post haste, but it was still oodles of fun feeling that violated and why to this day I am very strict about keeping my fandom and personal lives separate online.
Hence why those of us in the fandom at the time who still gave enough of a shit to want to keep writing fic DID keep writing fic, but shoved it so far underground and slapped it with so many disclaimers they couldâve outweighed the word count of War & Peace. It wasnât just for the purpose of protecting fic but for trying to protect our personal lives as well.
knew. Life paths crossing after so many yearsâŚ.)
Lucasfilm also sent cease-and-desist letters to Star Wars fanzines publishing slash.
My favourite bit I read from one included the idea that you werenât allowed to have any explicit content, of which anything queer, no matter how tame, was included, to âpreserve that innocence even Imperial crew members must be imagined to haveâ.
Yeah. The same Imperial crew members who helped build the Death Star to commit planetary genocide.
(Itâs one reason Sinjir Velus, while I still have some issues with him, feels like such a delicious âf*** youâ.)
Later on, they were apparently persuaded to âallowâ fans to write slash, provided in âremained within the nebulous bounds of good tasteâ.
(On a related note, if I wasnât quite so attached to my URL, I would 100% change it to âNebulous Boundsâ, because thatâs just downright catchy)
Anne McCaffrey had this huge long set of rules about how exactly you were allowed to play in her sandbox. Dragonriders of Pern was my first online fandom, and I was big into the Pern RP scene – and just about every fan-Weyr had a copy of these lists of rules McCaffrey wanted enforced. One of which was âno pornâ and another was basically âit canât be gayâ (and for a while âno fanfiction posted onlineâ? which??? anyway.)
She relaxed a little as time went on, but still.Â
Letâs not forget: the reason AO3 is called âArchive of our ownâ is because it was created in response to some bullshit that assholes were trying to play with fan creators. Basically (if I remember the fiasco correctly) trying to mine fandom creators for content which they could then use to generate ad profit on their shitty websites. When the series creators objected, the fans tried to pull their content, only to find that the website hoster resisted, claiming their content was all his now.
That wasnât even all that long agoâŚ
fandom history class
Interesting! wow
I remember back in the days having to put a disclaimer on EVERY. SINGLE. ONE of my Twilight fanfic chapters. Thatâs what everyone did. Even though sometimes it was simply a: I donât own these characters. I play with them.
It was so strange not doing it on AO3 at the beginning.
I still disclaim. Fandom may be more mainstream, but you never know who might get lawyer happy. You can bet Iâll cover my arse best I can at all times.
Oh man, Pern fandom. I was originally in Pern fandom in the early 00s, when the Rules were still going strong. When I left the fandom and came back and found that there were FORUM CLUBS?! With the posts just where ANYONE COULD READ THEM?! AND NEW DRAGON COLORS?!?! Holy shit, mind blown.
And I remember the list on ff.net of authors whose work you werenât allowed to fic, including Anne Rice. And literally everyone putting some kind of disclaimer on their fic. It was just how fandom operated.
This isnât even ancient history. Back in 2010, there was an extremely nasty incident in which Diana Gabaldon (the author of a number of formally published Doctor Who self-insert fics the Outlander series) put up a blog post that began like thisâŚ
OK, my position on fan-fic is pretty clear. I think itâs immoral, I _know_ itâs illegal, and it makes me want to barf whenever Iâve inadvertently encountered some of it involving my characters.
As if this werenât already a strong statement coming from a woman who seems to be oddly invested in writing sexy assault scenes (not that thereâs anything wrong with subversive female fantasies, but IâM JUST SAYING),
Gabaldon continued in the same vein, comparing fanfic to home invasion and adultery (as well as other bizarre and unsavory things in her responses to the comments on the now-deleted post). When âfandomâ rose from the depths of Livejournal to challenge her, she became even more offensive and belligerent, and other popular writers (such as George RR Martin, who was ironcially part of the Livejournal fandom culture himself) came to her defense. This âdebateâ led to a number of think pieces in mainstream media about how entitled and ungrateful fans were destroying traditional publishing, not to mention high-profile male creators publicly complaining about cosplay, teenage girls attending comic conventions, and other visible manifestations of fandom.
What has changed since then is that the young people (primarily women) whose work was nurtured in fandom communities have become professionals, and theyâre transforming the entertainment industry from the inside. Fanfic writers are now publishing original novels and editing their own literary magazines for genre fiction. Fan artists are now working for Marvel and DC and putting out original graphic novels with major presses. Video game fans work as programmers and localizers, and cosplay enthusiasts have become character and set designers.
This cultural shift is not just a white thing and not just a straight thing and not just an American thing. Representation in fiction and art – traditionally published or otherwise – is hugely empowering, as is being part of a supportive community. I donât mean to suggest that fandom is changing the world⌠but it kind of is.
one thing i particularly love is how shows have characters that write fanfiction because shows have writers that wrote fanfiction. current fan culture hasnât been this way for very long, but itâs been this way for long enough, and now itâs in childrenâs cartoons like adventure time that if you like a book or a show, you might write your own adventures for it and read it to your friends, no big deal. i donât remember seeing any girl in any show writing fanfiction where that wasnât the punchline, that she was a sad freakâŚyou still see that joke sometimes, but increasingly thereâs also support and approval for the collaborative, imaginative storytelling fans do for fun, and thatâs really cool. Â
Fanfiction.net still has the list of creators whose work you arenât allowed to fic. Itâs in the âRules and Guidelinesâ section you have to accept before being allowed to post a new story, right at the end, just below to section on how to properly rate your content.Â
(Your acceptance of the Rules and Guidelines eventually expires – your existing stories stay up and you can add chapters to them, but you have to accept the rules again to post new stories – which I guess makes sense because then, if the rules got updated since your last post, youâll theoretically read them again and learn then new rules.)
FanFiction respects the expressed wishes of the following authors/publishers and will not archive entries based on their work:
Anne Rice
Archie comics
Dennis L. McKiernan
Irene Radford
J.R. Ward
Laurell K. Hamilton
Nora Roberts/J.D. Robb
P.N. Elrod
Raymond Feist
Robin Hobb
Robin McKinley
Terry Goodkind
Failure to comply with site rules will result in the removal of stories and/or suspension of account.
I wonât apologize for posting another work in progress because unlike all those other times Iâm nearly done with this one. However if youâre looking for someone to blame please feel free to blame @delightfulharmonypoetry
After this Iâll be posting weekly updates on Fridays between 6-7PM CST
Ink Child Writing 