RatCreature (
ratcreature) wrote2012-12-12 08:37 pm
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being somewhat touchy, I guess
I've seen a bunch of links to an anon end of year feedback meme, and I checked it out, but once again, as so many memes, it is only for fic writers, not any other fanworks, even though no modifications in the feedback meme setup would be needed to make it more inclusive. Doing anything else but fic writing in this corner of fandom feels like being invisible sometimes.
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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.
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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.
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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.
fan art fun time
(Anonymous) 2012-12-15 04:19 pm (UTC)(link)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.
Re: fan art fun time
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.
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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.
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