ratcreature | being somewhat touchy, I guess

I was vexed that it was on LJ, so I set up a thread for myself on my DW as well. You could quite readily do that, only with a slight and, as you say, simple change of focus.

The earlier meme the LJ one was inspired by and linked in the post was on DW, also for fic only, so it seems this kind of comm exist on both services.

It's not that I am that invested in getting anon comments that I want to set up something for myself. I might have tried it, if the existing one had room for me, but what I am grumpy about is the general situation, and that this kind of thing happens again and again. Like a kink meme is started in a fandom: explicitly mentioned only fic prompts and responses; a holiday exchange: fic only; or they mention "fanworks" in one sentence initially, but it's clear in the rest of the exchange and the beta/cheering stuff that they really thought only about writing; or better yet an exchange allows fic and art, but people can opt out from receiving art, but not from wanting fic.

It's a systemic problem, yes.

I know that feeling. It makes me grumpy too. WTH, I did not even come here for fic.

It's getting to me more and more, that so often nothing but fic seems to count, and isn't even thought of, not even when including more people would be no additional complication. And forget about it if being inclusive means making adaptations. Like years after the AO3 announced fanart would be supported, and made assurances that it wouldn't just be an afterthought but integral and an archive for all fanworks, still nothing. Apparently it's not even worth mentioning anymore why there is still no progress whatsoever.

I guess they feel that linking but not hosting is good enough for non-text-based works. I don't know, AO3 is a mess and I don't really want to post to an archive, so I don't pay attention to them. But it bugs me when I'm in the middle of a conversation about fandom -- or so I thought -- when it comes out that everyone else thought they were having a conversation about fanfic writers and fanfic readers and couldn't conceive of "fandom" indicating anything else.

For me both is a symptom of the same thing, A major part of the "mission" of AO3 is according to them to preserve and protect fanworks, and if non-text is just embedded, that is pointless, because the art is not on the server fans own. It won't matter that I posted my fanart to AO3 because if I for whatever reason fail to pay my webspace, three months later all my stuff will be just broken. This hurts the archive too, because the longer this goes on, the more likely you are ending up with a bunch of broken images, like it happens so often on older LJ comms for graphics, like when you now browse a community with post from ten years ago with embedded pictures, many of them are gone. And with its infrastructure being used quite a bit now for Big Bangs and such fests that are mixed media, that will even affects a portion of the texts in the archive, not just plain fanart.

And if I wanted to post pornographic fanart. I couldn't either, because my webhost won't host that and most free image services will delete it too if they notice.

And it's not that I don't understand that the logistics and also the legal aspects of hosting images and sounds are more complicated than plain text, so I wouldn't mind so much if the updates, roadmaps and plans and such AO3 puts out showed that it is still an actual goal, and they are pursuing it, but there are the problems X, Y and Z, but it seems mostly forgotten. It's like you say, they talk about "fanworks" as "transformative works" but all actions are only for fanfic.

The more I think about, the more the lack of fanart hosting for AO3 seems weird, because the OTW is perfectly willing to host fanart on Fanlore, no?

They claim it is not "archiving" there, but "fair use" hence contrary to fannish standards there is no policy of asking artists or even removing art if artists object to it being there (because for example they want the traffic to their site). Now some editors do ask, before they upload, but the official policy says that's not needed. Frankly their image policy is one of the reasons I stopped being an editor there (the other being how the wiki committee that was active some years back acted towards me). I suppose legally this "fair use" conceit makes a difference.

On a more practical note, I suppose it is a scale issue. Even with all the zine art that has been uploaded to Fanlore, the traffic is probably quite modest in comparison to what images on AO3 could mean.

Then there are more legal issues with images I suspect, that could cause trouble, for example the issue of art showing underage characters, but put in explicit porn. Now with the AO3 being US based fictional depictions might not count as childporn, but for example there are photorealist art styles that when executed with enough skill aren't easily distinguished from photos. Text doesn't run into that problem.

I had my fan art on DeviantArt for a couple of years but periodically fan art gets targeted by various stalkers (apparently harassing artists is something of a group activity in the DA culture) so I had to move my gallery twice and start my flist over.

Then DA itself began locking artists out of their own work. The intention was to address copyright infringement issues and protect DA from being prosecuted for facilitating the theft of intellectual property. In some instances this makes sense, but I ran into cases after case where artists were locked out of their own work because even though they created the image, it was a representation of a fictional character and fell into a legal gray area as far as ownership goes. To be on the 'safe side' DA frequently opts to treat such art as the property of the canonical copyright holders. If you can't get written permission from, say, DC Comics, then your drawing of Batman will be locked down and eventually deleted, your gallery placed on a list of artists to be periodically targeted.

I finally gave up and moved everything to Tumblr. There, I get art love and the members fight to keep my name attached to the image. So far I have no complaints whatsoever. I still post on LJ art coms but I no longer sweat the yawning chasm of indifference of both LJ and DW users.

Yeah, I've heard about trouble with dA from others. Also for much fanart they aren't really an option, both because they don't allow porn, and also digital manips run into problems of their TOS because you don't have the rights to the source photos, and iirc they don't see that as fair use, and go against that even more than against drawn fanart.

I've recently started posting to Tumblr. mostly because I've had others upload my art there anyway, and at least if I post I get the likes, but I'm not that thrilled with the platform. It is more welcoming for artists than DW, but the interface is cumbersome for talking, and organizing with tags there and finding things is hard, and for all the quirks and teething troubles AO3 still has with its search and filtering, I like those features there, even despite its currently total lack of consideration for art in the interface in previews and browsing (not to mention that you can't properly archive art).

On the plus side for Tumblr is that their TOS at least is only against NSFW video, but okay with pictures, so unlike most other photo hosts they don't object to outright to explicit images (though I'm not convinced that they would be especially protective of drawings showing teenagers having sex, if anyone started to seriously complain to them about the content on their servers, and that it wouldn't end up like the LJ "Strikethrough" incident). Still, I think it would be good for fanart, even more than for fanfic, to have fannish infrastructure hosting the images, and I hope AO3 will get its act together at some point, to become another option for fanartists and not just fanwriters.

They claim it is not "archiving" there, but "fair use" hence contrary to fannish standards there is no policy of asking artists or even removing art if artists object to it being there (because for example they want the traffic to their site).

I can see that they wouldn't want to have a policy of requiring permission-or-takedowns for every single image they use for articles on the site, but given that they seem to be using the wiki as a sort of archive for images they have uploaded en masse (most of the fanart there doesn't seem to have articles to justify its presence, IIRC), that is impressively obnoxious.

I can see why for practical reasons, for example that for older pieces current contact info can be hard to come by, the policy is to allow upload without explicit permission, but there should be at least the possibility for artists to have their art removed without too much hassle. When I objected to my art being uploaded there after I left fanlore (because I want the traffic to go to my own site, and the chance for comments, not people just staying on fanlore), the wiki committee refused to delete. Eventually by talking with editors rather than the wiki committee I got it down to just cut preview images (like I use for teaser) being in the fanlore article rather than my full art, and links going to my art itself, and after some more effort got the files deleted on the wiki. The article didn't even talk about the images, they almost never do, they were just dumped in a gallery. One wasn't even fanart.

being somewhat touchy, I guess

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fan art fun time

Re: fan art fun time

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