Existential Flame War

[filkertom]

The LJ thing is getting really ugly.

Just go here here. (Original link courtesy of ataniell93; revised link courtesy of cacie.) The very first comment is made by burr86.

A LiveJournal employee.

Using his LiveJournal professional account.

Dude couldn't even create a sock puppet to be snarky with.

I usually don't go back and patronize places that treat their customers like this. And I usually give the manager a firm and slightly loud piece of my mind before heading out the door.

Current thoughts on the unpleasantness?

(Also, hanabishirecca has created a community, fandom_action, about legal protection for fan creations.)

ETA: eleri, the mod of that community, deleted the post (reasons below in comments). Here is a good link to it, but if you don't want to load a 1 MB+ HTML page, here's the gist of it:

Captain Sassy Pants (pirate_eggie) wrote in efw:

POST DETAILING HOW IMPORTANT THE OP'S ADDICTION TO HARRY POTTER FANART IS AND HOW LJ/SA'S LATEST EGREGIOUS INSULT TO FREEDOM OF SPEECH WILL ULTIMATELY LEAD TO THE OP'S DEPARTING LIVEJOURNAL FOR MORE CHILD PORN-FRIENDLY WATERS

SOME STUPID MACRO ABOUT STRIKETHROUGH '07 AND A HACKNEYED COPYPASTA PIRATE SONG

INVOCATION OF GODWIN'S LAW

First comment in the thread, by burr86 (LJ employee Abe Hassan):

Clarification that the subjects of the drawings were at least six years old, thank you very much.

To me, the problem is not that it's fandom wank, not that it's in efw, but that an employee of LiveJournal/SixApart, using his work account -- the one in which he replies (or doesn't reply) to users' concerns -- is snarking to a user about an issue the user has with LJ/SA. And in a way that implies that anyone who likes the art is a pedophile. (I have seen the art, which doesn't do a thing for me, but it is in fact two adult characters in a consentual relationship.)

Bluntly, it's like going into Burger King, paying for the burger, and then they follow you out to the table and change your burger while you're eating it -- grab it out of your hand and take out the tomato and put in some pickles -- and you say, "Excuse me, but what the hell are you doing? I paid for that" and the BK employee doing it says, "Oh, you're one of those people who likes that kind of burger. Well, you're not welcome here, but we'll keep your money."

Or something.

If he wanted to snark along with everybody else, he should've done it from a sock-puppet account. Or said, "Listen, guys, completely outside of the situation...". Or actually tried to address the problem, as a lot of LJers have been asking LJ/SA to do.

That's why everybody was ticked off. It has nothing to do with fandom, fanfic, or even whether something is child porn -- it's that one of the only responses LJ has made over the past few days to a growing number of questions... is insulting snark.

Comments

[dinpik.livejournal.com]

Sorry, no. It's fandom that doesn't get it. Anyone who thinks that people aren't going to judge you base on what you write is kidding themselves. It's a fact of life.
It happens to pros and fans alike, and the idea that fandom is somehow immune because, hey, it's fandom! is boggling. Especially since you can find the same judgments happening in fandom, i.e. shipping-wars, "X is better than Y and anyone who likes X is an idiot!", etc.

[cheshyre]

So, by your reasoning, burr86 doesn't get it, and everybody condemning him for his comments in efw are correct.

It doesn't matter that he's "on vacation and his time's his own" (as you commented above). Because he wrote it, it's okay for us to judge him on that basis.

Nice to know where you stand.
_____
reposted to correct bad lj tag

[dinpik.livejournal.com]

People already are judging him based on what he wrote, in case you haven't noticed.

To touch on gmth's open letter: every time you put up a work of fiction, you're showing something about yourself. This goes even further for writing sex. Because sex is such a hot button issue, people are going to make judgements about you, the author, whether you condone or perform the type of sex you write about in real life or not is irrelevant.

Fandom on LJ doesn't exist in a happy little bubble of fans-only anymore. Perfect strangers may find what you write -- and you -- horribly offensive. If you're not ready to deal with that, don't post your stories publically.

[magicaltrevor.livejournal.com]

*QUICK SNARK MODE*

Golly, thanks! What I needed was one more person telling me that fans are an overreacting, unreasonable bunch and that anybody can say anything they want about us, and that we have absolutely no right to complain about it!

Nobody's saying we're not ready to deal with a random stranger being a complete dick to us. As a slasher, I deal with that all the time, and I deal with it well, thank you. But I have every right and reason to be pissed the hell off when the owners of a company I patronize are being snarky to my kind. Moreover, I have every reason to complain about it wherever I want, and I can't understand why you seem so hell-bent on convincing us that our outrage isn't legitimate, our anger misdirected, and our actions futile.

So thanks a lot for your valiant and tragically unappreciated efforts to save us fen from ourselves, but I gotta tell ya: I'm an angry feminist leftist atheist pacifist pro-choice sex-positive female-identified nerdy fannish genderqueer vegetarian writer of Beatles slash. So there's about X0 million people lined up outside of my proverbial door right now trying to convince me to keep my mouth shut in just about every area of my life and every decision that I make, right down to the shirt I'm wearing.

Take a ticket n take a seat.

[dinpik.livejournal.com]

Nobody's saying we're not ready to deal with a random stranger being a complete dick to us

Actually, I've seen a number of people say just that the last few days. And, if you'll look up, the quote from gmth's post is about how it feels to be judged based on what you've written. It happens to pros and it happens to fans, and right or wrong or fairness has nothing to do with it. As I pointed out earlier, there's judgments about people based on what they write in fandom itself, with shipping wars, with preferences about types of fic, etc.

I'm an angry feminist leftist atheist pacifist pro-choice sex-positive female-identified nerdy fannish genderqueer vegetarian writer of Beatles slash.

That's nice. I wonder if I can get that to scan?