SEMIFINALS
Luz Noceda(left) from The Owl House
vs.
Percy Jackson(right) from Percy Jackson and the Olympians
Propaganda for Luz:
Propaganda for Percy:
none submitted yet! :(
End OTW Racism: A Call To Action
A fan protest against the lack of action from the OTW on addressing issues of harassment and racism on AO3 and within the organization
This is a Call To Action for Fans of Color and Allies
AO3 has acknowledged that they have a harassment & racism problem that its parent organization, the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), needs to address. Currently, people can use AO3 to harass others through fanworks, comments, and tags. Just a few examples include: racist Untamed “spitefic” that used anti-Indigenous slurs and was written specifically to lash out at fans of color; a Transformer fic that used its Black-coded character to reenact George Floyd’s murder in July 2020; someone naming a fandom scholar who criticized their Nazi omegaverse fic in the tags of the fic specifically to incite harassment to the scholar; writers using racial slurs against commenters who pointed out racism in their hockey fic; and so much more.
In June 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, the OTW committed to addressing these issues. It has been nearly three years and they have not yet implemented any of the changes they promised, other than a blocking/muting tool that was already in development before 2020. We need to hold the OTW accountable to their own promises. (See the section further down on “Why Are We Doing This” for even more detail.)
As fans, together, we are powerful. We are organizing to protest the lack of action on promises made by the Organization for Transformative works to deal with issues of racism and harassment on their platform, Archive of Our Own.
We call on fans to do any or all of the following actions any time between May 17 to 31, 2023 to send a message to AO3 and OTW that we will hold them to their promises.
On AO3
- Change the title of ten (or more!) of your most recent or most popular fanworks to include ‘End Racism in the OTW’ in the beginning, and provide a link to this post in your summary or first/top creator’s note
- Post a new fanwork any time between May 17th to 31st with “End Racism in the OTW” either as the title or at the beginning of the title. The fanwork does not have to be long - it can be a 100-word fic, a quick sketch, a podfic of a ficlet, a 20-second vid/edit, a short piece of meta, etc. In the summary or first/top creator’s note, provide a link to this post
- If updating any WIPs with a new chapter, add ‘End Racism in the OTW’ to the title and provide a link back to this post in your summary or first/top author’s note
- Update your AO3 icon using the profile pic graphic in our Social Media Toolkit
- Plan to maintain these changes until May 31, 2023, or longer if you wish
- Send a message to the OTW asking for an update on their 2020 commitments!
- For Readers: leave encouraging comments on fanworks with the "End Racism in the OTW" title to show your support of this initiative.
On tumblr
- Reblog this Call to Action with the tag #End OTW Racism
- Update your profile pics and banners using the graphics in our Social Media Toolkit
- Follow this account for updates and signal boost our posts
On Twitter
- Follow @/EndOTWRacism (remove the backslash) and signal boost our pinned tweet
- Update your profile pics and banners using our graphics, and change your display name to include #EndOTWRacism
- Use sample tweets and graphics from our Social Media Toolkit to tweet about your fanworks, and use the hashtag #EndOTWRacism
Help us make this a long-term campaign - sign up to help with other anti-racism projects and future actions!
What Do We Want?
Since their June 2020 statement, OTW has been working on updating their Terms of Service (TOS) to address racist and bigoted harassment, but with little transparency and only the vaguest of updates. It has been three years since their commitment to this update - we want to see the results of their work implemented in the next 6-12 months. Their TOS updates and complementary policies should include:
- Harassment policies that can be regularly updated to address both on-site harassment and off-site coordinated harassment of AO3 users, with updated protocols for the Policy & Abuse Team to ensure consistent and informed resolutions of abuse claims
- A content policy on abusive (extremely racist and extremely bigoted) content; by abusive, we are talking about fanworks that are intentionally used to spread hate and harassment, not those that accidentally invoke racist or other bigoted stereotypes
These points are not particularly new and are not our own innovation; please refer to Stitch's article written over two years ago, asking for several of these very things.
OTW has also already committed to various process-based actions for longer-term works towards centering antiracism, including hiring a Diversity Consultant. The last update that OTW published said that the consultant would be hired within the next five years (after already having had three years to work on it since their original commitment). That is not soon enough. We want to see the following process-based actions implemented:
- Hiring a Diversity Consultant within the next 3-6 months
- Committing to a policy of transparency on this topic, with quarterly updates on the progress of these projects including challenges and their plan for overcoming those challenges. These quarterly updates should be published on OTW News page and newsletters, not solely discussed in Board meetings
Why Are We Doing This?
16 years ago, Astolat famously published her manifesto calling for a fandom Archive of One’s Own. In that time, AO3 has grown to be a central pillar of fandom, likely far outstripping its founders’ original vision. It is more than just an archive now; it is a central hub of the modern fannish experience. AO3 and the OTW must continue to grow and evolve with fandom over time to remain a healthy and functioning pillar of fandom. To that end, there are several areas in which the organization, as it admits itself, is lacking.
In June 2020, in the wake of the George Floyd protests and the uprising of the Black Lives Matter Movement, The OTW published a “This Week in Fandom” referencing the works of Dr. Rukmini Pande and Stitch, among others in which they discussed ‘making change for a better society’ through ‘conversations about race and racism’. In response, Dr. Pande and Stitch submitted a letter to the OTW calling for a more formal public statement than an offhand reference in a News Roundup that only served to call for thoughts and discussion without any indication the organization intended to do anything, policy wise, to address the issues being raised.
Eventually, the organization did remove the references to the works of Dr. Pande and Stitch and then made an official statement on the issue of racism within the organization and AO3. In it, they identified several things they would be prioritizing to combat harassment and benefit users. Some of those have been implemented (notably those that were already under development). However as of this writing, little else has been done especially in regards to:
- Improving admin tools for the Policy & Abuse team
- Reassessing the current mandatory archive warnings with the possibility of implementing others
- And, most importantly, reviewing the Terms of Service (TOS) to allow the Policy & Abuse team to address harassment that is currently not covered by the existing TOS
By their own admission, the current tools and policies of the OTW are not sufficient to deal with issues of harassment and racism.
Several people who were involved in the founding of the OTW, including previous OTW Board members and staff on the original OTW Content Policy Committee, acknowledge that the founding of the OTW in 2008 and early board iterations failed us as a fandom by not doing enough, and by not even considering the way racism is perpetuated in fannish spaces, despite a long history of racism in fandom.
It has been nearly three years since the original commitment by the organization with little visible, measurable progress on these three crucial issues and a complete lack of transparency on where they are in regards to even beginning to deal with these issues. In fact, in Q&As, it was heavily implied by a member of the board that those calling for OTW to deal with issues of racism (which OTW had already acknowledged as a problem!) were not really fans but outside agitators.
This has cast significant doubt on the organization's sincerity and commitment to their stated goals, and on their position as leaders of a central fan tent-pole. Fans of color are not outsiders. They are right here, members of our community, and they are being harassed and targeted and driven out while space and platforms are being given to racists.
We, as fans of color and our allies, find the current state of fandom and current actions (and lack thereof) unacceptable. Fandom is our space, all of ours. We, as a fandom, have a right to a racism-free space and have a duty to our fellow fans to create that space. Unlike so much of the world, this is a space we can control and make better. It is a space we must make better.
To read even more about this movement, visit our FAQs.
okay i want to sit at the cool kids table with all these school polls
were you allowed to leave the school premises during the school day
yes
yes but only for lunch
no
other? (explain in tags!)
don’t forget during the WGA strike that animation is not covered under the WGA deals and as a result animation has gotten the shortest possible end of the stick in under-staffing, under-paying, and generally turning the field into gig employment.
please sign the petition here for Disney to recognize animation production workers as a union and reblog this post!
OP this is EXCELLENT
Hey btw, if you're doing worldbuilding on something, and you're scared of writing ~unrealistic~ things into it out of fear that it'll sound lazy and ripped-out-of-your-ass, but you also don't want to do all the back-breaking research on coming up with depressingly boring, but practical and ~realistic~ solutions, have a rule:
Just give the thing two layers of explanation. One to explain the specific problem, and another one explaining the explanation. Have an example:
Plot hole 1: If the vampires can't stand daylight, why couldn't they just move around underground?
Solution 1: They can't go underground, the sewer system of the city is full of giant alligators who would eat them.
Well, that's a very quick and simple explanation, which sure opens up additional questions.
Plot hole 2: How and why the fuck are there alligators in the sewers? How do they survive, what do they eat down there when there's no vampires?
Solution 2: The nuns of the Underground Monastery feed and take care of them as a part of their sacred duties.
It takes exactly two layers to create an illusion that every question has an answer - that it's just turtles all the way down. And if you're lucky, you might even find that the second question's answer loops right back into the first one, filling up the plot hole entirely:
Plot hole 3: Who the fuck are the sewer nuns and what's their point and purpose?
Solution 3: The sewer nuns live underground in order to feed the alligators, in order to make sure that the vampires don't try to move around via the sewer system.
When you're just making things up, you don't need to have an answer for everything - just two layers is enough to create the illusion of infinite depth. Answer the question that looms behind the answer of the first question, and a normal reader won't bother to dig around for a 3rd question.
Final Fantasy VII: The one true, absolute, unequivocal love of Cloud Strife’s life is none other than…
Tifa Lockhart
Aerith Gainsborough
Barret Wallace
Zack Fair
Feminists with no class consciousness are rly like "Poor Marie Antoinette she was a victim of child trafficking, sold as a 14 year old little girl to a 15 year gross old man she had never met, they didn't let her keep anything she brought from one palace while moving to another palace, she was an immigrant struggling in the highest position a woman could take in a foreign country, the rich ladies at court were so mean to her she had no choice but to LARP as a milkmaid in her special cottage in her palace to cope, she was a teenage queen for 20 years when the Revolution broke out, the mean revolutionaries accused her of SA'ing her son, ok it was one guy who I refuse to learn the name of who was immediately booed by everyone else in the court but let's blame it on the revolutionaries as a whole because they were so mean-"
do you guys want to know one of the coolest things ever btw. i'm going to tell you either way i just like to give you the illusion of choice
when anteaters find an anthill they don't just stick their face in and slurp with reckless abandon. they leave behind enough ants to rebuild the ant society and also don't eat queens. they're not just hunting the ants they are essentially farming them. isn't that the coolest
if you reblog this post without my anteater fact i hate you. it's the most important part.






witchstone



xiranjayzhao

