oh you’re watching fullmetal alchemist? i love that anime. the way it just [clenches fists] [falls on the floor] [begins crying] sh i t.…

why is it not more wellknown that women can have an actual literal disorder that not rarely makes them literally suicidal for up to 10 days every month before their period lmao like… teach this in class? it’s not a joke?

Wait what??

here here here (there’s more sites saying the same thing)

it’s called PMDD (Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder) and it’s basically PMS but make it Super Hardcore, it’s a hormonal disorder and to my knowledge they’re not exactly sure what causes it - there’s theories tho - but there seems to be little research on it anyway. As I said it’s similar to PMS in terms of symptoms [mood swings, lethargy, cramps, changed sleeping pattern, libido, appetite] but the symptoms get so severe that they are interfering with your daily life and impacting it negatively. Especially in terms of psychological symptoms, while it doesn’t go that far for everyone who has it and also not every month, a lot of the people who experience it are sent into a severe depressive episode beause of it and it’s really not rare at all for them to experience legitimate suicidal thoughts that go away the second they get their period (or up to two days in from what I’ve read).

I’ve read different claims on how many people it affects, some sources say 5%, others 8%, others say 2% so I don’t know about that, but menstruating people need to know this lmao. Not knowing that your suicidality is caused by a literal physical disorder that you have can be so dangerous, especially when you already struggle with such issues anyway or are trying to recover from mental illness and don’t realize that your “relapses” are symptoms of an actual disorder.

also I originally said women but of course this applies to menstruating trans men and nb folks too.

I’ll reblog this every time I see it because YUP

the amount of times me or friends are having a Seriously Bad Time and then a few days later be like “oh, i just got my period, everything makes sense now” and like, let out this huge sigh of releif because it means you’re not relapsing and it will go away soon…

Damn, I was hoping Arya would find Gendry, not Ed Sheeran

me sending encouragement and compliments on anon

So I’m on AO3 and I see a lot of people who put “I do not own [insert fandom here]” before their story.

Like, I came on this site to read FAN fiction. This is a FAN fiction site. I’m fully aware that you don’t own the fandom or the characters. That’s why it’s 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 “please don’t sue me, I’m poor and just here for a good time” plea.

Cause guess what? That shit used to happen.

how soon they forget ann rice’s lawyers.

What happened with her lawyers.

History became legend. Legend became myth….  And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost.

I worked with one of the women that got contacted by Rice’s 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 aren’t making money off of it. It is someone else’s 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 else’s IP. Or they DGAF… and they are the ones who will eventually land themselves in hot water. Either way: this isn’t 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 ‘original intentions.’ (Hypocritical of a woman who made most of her living writing erotica.)

Imagine getting sued over a headcanon…

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 can’t believe there are people out there who don’t know the story behind fan fiction disclaimers. 

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 it’s 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. It’s 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 ‘90s fandom memories! 

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 weren’t 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 people’s 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 wasn’t 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. 

“if you found this by googling yourself, hit back now. this means you, pete wentz”

Oh hey, even more blasts from the past.

I was one of the ones who got a love letter from Anne Rice’s 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 Anne’s 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 wasn’t 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 Anne’s 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 wasn’t 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 could’ve outweighed the word count of War & Peace. It wasn’t just for the purpose of protecting fic but for trying to protect our personal lives as well.

(Also would love to know who @tiger-in-the-flightdeck knew. Life paths crossing after so many years….)

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 weren’t allowed to have any explicit content, of which anything queer, no matter how tame, was included, to “preserve that innocence even Imperial crew members must be imagined to have”.

Yeah. The same Imperial crew members who helped build the Death Star to commit planetary genocide.

(It’s one reason Sinjir Velus, while I still have some issues with him, feels like such a delicious ‘f*** you’.)

Later on, they were apparently persuaded to ‘allow’ fans to write slash, provided in ‘remained within the nebulous bounds of good taste’.

(On a related note, if I wasn’t quite so attached to my URL, I would 100% change it to ‘Nebulous Bounds’, because that’s 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 ‘no porn’ and another was basically ‘it can’t be gay’ (and for a while ‘no fanfiction posted online’? which??? anyway.)

She relaxed a little as time went on, but still. 

Let’s not forget: the reason AO3 is called ‘Archive of our own’  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 wasn’t even all that long ago…

fandom history class

To this day, *talking* about writing or reading fanfiction - just acknowledging that it exists - to anyone other than people I know are in fandom as well, feels like a dangerous act. The strict separation I maintained between my real life identity, my online identity, and my fandom identity (yes, they were separate, because some of the most vicious and mocking people were fellow nerds) has broken down a bit these days, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to integrate them as freely as some younger fans do.

Everybody should know that AO3 is just one project of the Organization for Transformative Works. Their mission is much broader than just hosting a (very good) fanfic site. They do all kinds of fandom history archiving and publish an academic journal, but most importantly, they perform legal advocacy to protect the fair use rights of people who make fanfic or fanart.

The OTW Legal Committee’s mission includes education, assistance, and advocacy.

I haven’t been involved in fandom stuff all that long, but I find this stuff so fascinating!

whew, i feel old, but that’s mostly bc i was on forums way way waaaaay too young. but this? yes. all the way. people had password protected forums on the weirdest, most unconventional websites. before you could even be approved by the mods they would search your blog, your other accounts, question you, everything, all because we were broke teens and preteens trying to do something for fun and if someone got in who could doxx you or send your work over to a lawyer? that was it, you were OVER. that’s also part of where fandom wars and the defense of fandom came from: quote unquote “enemy” fandoms would infiltrate just to hurt you. @theglintoftherail makes a very good point: ao3 is a goddamn haven. and they’re a great team of lawyers and people dedicated to protecting fanworks! part of the reason it’s so great is because they know there’s no one like them out there. they also go to the ends of the damned earth to protect you and to be inclusive, which is why there’s shit like tentacle porn and underage and dubcon. because they’re dedicated to protecting readers and creators to the death. they don’t advocate for it and they have the extensive rating and tagging system because of that (legit the best tagging system i’ve ever seen) but they don’t know if you’re dealing with trauma or if you need to get something out. do not forget your fandom, kids. jesus

Who else knew nothing about this? A show of hands

I’m just the right age to remember the disclaimers and to have HEARD about the Anne Rice, Anne McCaffrey, and X-Files fiascos, but I was never in any of those fandoms and I was more or less on the tail end of that. I can’t imagine having to be scared to tell people I write fanfic. So glad we’ve come so far.

20+ years ago, I used to be terrified someone would try to sue me for the fanfic I was writing. I covered my work in disclaimers and posted it from school PCs on the ‘guest’ account so no one could track me. I remember looking up at the school security camera as I posted my work, wondering if the school got a Cease & Desist letter if they’d trawl through the footage and discover it was me and know I was writing naughty gay fanfic. I imagined the entire school finding out what I’d written.

Conversely, last year, I featured in the ‘notable fans’ section of the Tomb Raider 20th Anniversary’ book - an official publication - as a fanfic writer. 

It’s fantastic how fandom is becoming a part of enjoying content and is slowly, slowly being normalized <3

This is a Very Important Fandom History Class - all newer/young fans should read this, and if you’re interested, check out more of the creators vs. fans history on Fanlore. I vividly recall the days when we were regularly threatened (and, in fairness, legally they were right) by cease-and-desist letters or calls from lawyers from Universal, Fox and other studios. I was in the X-Files fandom from its earliest days, and I know this happened to friends of mine. This was back in the days of actual paper zines - there was no FF.net or AO3, or really much of an Internet.

The Internet, though, had really just become a thing right about the time X-Files hit the airwaves in the early ‘90s (we had some of the first fan chats on the old Delphi forums – ah, the days of waiting for a line of text to slowlyyyyy unfold across the screen!), and so everything was already in the midst of a shift…it would be a little while before the studios realized that fans sharing and creating content was, bingo, FREE PROMOTION for their properties, and something to be encouraged, not shut down.

I never cease chuckling now when I read an issue of Entertainment Weekly that tries to analyze and parse fanfic or fan art, or see studios sending out content directly to Big Name Fans whom they know will blog and create buzz about it. Or see actors and talk show hosts sharing fan art and stories on the air, for good or for not-so-good. We would never have dreamed this would happen back in the old days, when we had to run scared of most of the studios in order to create fanworks.  We’re actually pretty mainstream now, and although that, too, has its good and bad points, it’s SO MUCH BETTER now for fan creations than it ever has been. 

Treasure that freedom – but know the past, too.

When I read Ngozi’s policy on fanworks for Check, Please, I nearly cried. The idea of a content creator encouraging fandom, LOVING fandom? That was revolutionary to me in 2016. IN 2016. But even there, she does ask that people acknowledge that the characters belong to her. 

I grew up in fandom as an X-phile, and was doing kind of a lot of fanart/t-shirts and was METICULOUSLY careful to make no profit of any kind on them because it probably WOULD have gotten me sued. I wasn’t out money, but it worked out to the dime covering costs and no more. 

I’ve been pondering fanwork-friendly fandoms as a concept for a while now, and have some ideas for ways of protecting both content creators and fans. Anyway.

Learn this history, young’uns. And then get off my lawn. *shakes cane*

do you guys remember that one text post about pyjamas the terror being an anagram for harry james potter? 

so initially I was going to draw only harry wearing a pyjamas the terror t-shirt, but then I googled online anagram generator and had so much fun with it that ended up drawing the entire gang

(on twitter)

ron (through tears): no one tell him

r.i.p. more like R.I.P.PED *zombie bursts out of ground and flexes his sick ass muscles*

i don’t think people really get how little feedback fanfic authors actually get? like the effort to reaction ratio is so abysmally skewed here that a fic nearly 50,000 words long takes an entire year to amass like. 16 comments. someone reblogged a fic i wrote at 4 am and tagged it with a 5-word compliment and i can’t stop thinking about it, not because it was so nice but because half the time you post a fic you’re going to hear nothing and anything feels like so much

fandom culture is so, so good about giving artists the credit they’re due, but we gotta start doing that for writers too. you’ve got no idea how much people put into their stories and get maybe a handful of reblogs and a dozen-odd kudos. that’s not enough. writing is an endurance sport and y’all need to start giving fic writers a reason to endure it and improve their craft. encourage writers like you encourage artists. reblog fics, leave tags, leave comments, acknowledge that these stories do not just spring into being for your entertainment. 

every single damn writer i know feels like half of their readers see them as a machine. that’s gotta change. 

so last night I had a dream that everyone in scooby doo went to college or something except for shaggy and scooby and shaggy was morosely trading in the mystery machine for a prius and the last thing I remember before waking up was scooby saying “raggy why” and shaggy goes “we need a car with better gas mileage scoob”

although character backgrounds are fairly fluid through the Scooby Doo franchise, of all the gang, Norville “Shaggy” Roberts is A> the most financially well of, and B>the most likely to get an athletic scholarship. Daphne’s parents are rich, but she has for sisters, and the money is her parents still. Shaggy however is the sole beneficiary of the estate of his late uncle Beauregard, who left him an unspecifiedly large fortune and a large southern plantation. Shaggy is independently wealthy. Shaggy is also said, at multiple points across the various series, to have, in high school, won numerous awards in both Track and gymnastics. Coupled with the fact that he can outrun Scooby at times, and Great Danes can sustain speeds of 30 mph, means Shaggy can outrun Usain Bolt, atleast is there’s a mummy behind him, or a pizza at the finish line.

TL:DR Shaggy is doing fine and you don’t need to worry about him.

Now, let’s talk about how, CANNONICALLY, Scooby can speak human languages because he is distantly related to dread Cthulhu…

of all the useless information compiled on this website, this is the best thing I’ve ever heard

Please share. Help me make this post go viral.

Almost 2 years ago, on July 31, 2015, I wrote a prose piece on suicide, titled “The Morning After I Killed Myself.” I posted it on my personal writing blog. The piece spoke from the perspective of a young woman looking back at her life after committing suicide, observing the effects it had on her peers. Within only a few weeks, my piece had been shared over 300,000 times directly on the blogging site, and as of today, it has been shared over 7 million documented times across the Internet.

Unfortunately, ever since I posted it, I have also come across at least 150 cases of it it being plagiarized. 150. And certainly countless more, considering these are only the cases I have been able to find myself. I have lost count of how many times I’ve had to contact websites to ask them to remove the plagiarized versions, how many times I’ve had to file DMCA notices, how many times I’ve had to enlist the support of my readers to bring awareness of the plagiarism to the attention of host sites. I have sent countless emails, filed countless notices, sent in countless reports, etc. On and on. 

I’ve had people steal my piece for English class projects, for art projects, get it published on well-known websites under their own names; I even had one girl steal the piece and submit it to the same national art and writing contest I won national medals for when I was in high school. I’ve had people steal my piece and copy its lines and twist its lines and meaning into a highly manipulative and distressing version that blames suicidal individuals for their thoughts and actions, leaving me in distress and sadness at my original message being distorted to such a degree, especially as someone who has personally struggled with suicide. It’s gotten to the point where on one single well-known website alone, The Odyssey, there have been at least 5 different plagiarized versions of my piece published at any given time, with new versions appearing each week.

I remember clearly when one girl used a plagiarized version of my piece for a final art project for her class. This girl was innocent; she had no idea she was using a plagiarized version of my work. I clearly remember her begging me to call her on the phone, a complete stranger, so she could explain, and listening to her break down in tears as she apologized profusely for using a stolen version of my piece when she was not at fault whatsoever.

It is unacceptable, damaging, and devastating to an author when their work is plagiarized, especially to the extent that my piece has been. It is unfair. It is hurtful, it is disappointing, it is inappropriate, and most of all, it belittles the time, effort, and dedication the author put into the work. We need to support and uplift the artists and writers we have left instead of destroying them.

Just yesterday I was contacted by several different individuals telling me that a plagiarized version of my piece is making the rounds on the Internet again. I cannot go a single week each month without being informed of more plagiarism of this one piece that I wrote almost 2 years ago.

Please. If you see plagiarized work floating around, whether it is mine or anyone else’s, report it. Comment on it. File a notice. Speak out about it. 

Artists and writers do not exist in a vacuum. They have human feelings; they are human beings. They feel hurt and pain and frustration when you take credit for their ideas and their words and art. Plagiarism takes an enormous toll. It is no exaggeration to say that over the past 2 years that my piece has been stolen, my mental health has taken a hit due to something I spent a great deal of time on being taken away from me over and over and over again.

Please share this, if you have the time. Not for me. But for all the artists and writers whose brilliant and emboldening work you have the privilege, not just the opportunity, but the privilege, to observe, learn from, and immerse yourself in every minute of every day.

Painted Lady and the Blue Spirit! Drawn for patreon a while ago :) *re-upload 

NaLu Week - Day 1: Wander

i don’t know if this will be my only nalu week entry but we’ll see

Fairy Tail + Types of Love

Invaluable source of information: click

Mother and daughter, Queen and Princess of Crystal Tokyo :) Based on the work of the incredible female painter Madame Le Brun, titled “Self Portrait With Her Daughter”.