This Is Really How I Feel Sometimes

"Transgender rage is more powerful than the courts.

Transgender love is more hopeful than the law.

We have always been here and no "ruling" can eradicate us!"

Seen in Belfast, Northern Ireland

the thing is. The THING is. Uhhhhhhhh. Watching interviews of Andrew where he talks about his spiderman is heartbreaking, sometimes. Because he's trying not to say directly why exactly it was compromised, but you know exactly what he's saying. He says he went into the project thinking he was going to bring something to the character, and that was taken away by the corporate america, that he was too young to have been exposed to that kind of system. Stephen says playing Spider-man was a harmless experience, to which andrew is quick to laugh, "oh yeah it was harmless" he mocks. And Stephen is like oh was it not?? And andrew is like, let's not get to that, Stephen. Its all light, it's all funny, until you know exactly why it wasn't harmless. Andrew just wanted Peter to be free, he wanted Peter to have an MJ who didn't fit the typical standard. He wanted Peter to become more inclusive than ever and put that in the cinema. How powerful would that have been? How beautiful, and eye opening, and a breeze, too. It would have been cool to realise that oh yeah, superheroes are normal people. They can be gay. Spider-man represents all of that, Spider-man is white, skinny, black, a girl, a middle aged man, Spider-man is also a pig, for god's sake. Spider-man could easily be bi, too. But that was too forward for 2014, apparently. And it truly breaks your heart seeing him trying to talk about the injustice that happened to him, the kind of shock it must have been to realise that people- people who are supposed to be perpetuating new ideas and should be a medium to bring awareness- are in fact, downright homophobic. And if not homophobic- let's give them the benefit of doubt- they would definitely not want to take the risk. They will not put their jobs at risk. They would not, in fact, help him make this character reach it's potential. And it's not just about him, it's about so many characters who become wasted potential because of this. Fiction imitates reality a lot of times and it's heartbreaking to realise that so many people in real life also don't reach their full potential because of this system.

And now. NOW I'm so happy he's got to be Peter again. And he's got to throw a peace sign and be a disaster bi. Truly deserves it. Truly phenomenonal and beautiful and makes me wanna jump like a fucking seal and clap and dance and give him all the flowers and say love that for you. Love that for you, Andrew. Love that for all of us, you lovely human being.

These are so feckin cute!!

🌈{x}

A writer friend told me something that broke my heart a little bit today; they're going to quit publishing their fanfic.

My instant thought was that they had been trolled or attacked or that something terrible had happened in their life because this person is so passionate about their writing. It wasn't any of that. Engagement with their works has been going down, as it has for many of us. Comments are like gold dust a lot of the time, and just looking through the historical comment counts on old fics on ao3 demonstrates this trend very clearly. It was not simply the comments dropping off which caused them to decide to stop posting, however.

My friend came across a discord server for their fandom (I should point out here that their fandom interest and mine diverged a couple of years ago, we stay in touch but don't currently read each other's posts because I'm not into their fandom and they would rather gouge their eyes out with a wooden spoon than read anything Star Wars) and specifically to share fic in that fandom. They joined, because we all love a good fic rec, only to discover that their latest multichapter fic, which has almost no comments and very few kudos, is being hotly discussed in this server as one of the best stories ever. Not one of these people has bothered to say this to them on the fic. When they asked, none of participants could see the point in telling the author of the fic they apparently loved so much that they love it.

This discovery has absolutely destroyed my friend's love of sharing fic. They share because they love seeing other people's enjoyment, and fic writers do that through comments and kudos/reblogs/likes because we don't get paid. There is no literary critic writing a blog post/article about how amazing the story is for us to copy and keep/frame. There is no money from royalties. All we have are the words of the people reading our works.

Those people on that server could have taken five minutes of the time they spent gushing about how amazing my friend's story was to other people and used it to tell the one person guaranteed to want to hear that praise how much they loved it. They could have taken a moment to express their opinion to the person who spent hours upon hours plotting, writing, editing, and posting those chapters. Instead, they deprived my friend of thing that keeps them sharing their writing, and in the process have killed their love of it. My friend now feels used and unmotivated.

I won't be sharing a link to their fic, they said I could share their experience but not their identity. I know they plan to post one final chapter. I know they intend to express their hurt at being excluded from the praise for the thing they created, and I know they intend to announce that as a consequence they will not be posting for a long while, if at all.

So please, I beg you, don't hide your love of a story from the writer. It's just about the only thing we have.

COVID is slowly becoming a “third world” disease. While first world countries are hoarding vaccines, having doses for populations many times their size, third world countries can’t get any because pharma companies want to sell to the first world countries first. Even then, first world countries will receive them first. While rich countries recover from COVID, they will forget about the pandemic while many other countries live the absolute worst moment of the pandemic without being able to vaccinate their population.

the fact he even had to ask 🙄

__

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But first they must catch you 🏳️‍⚧️ Prints

My fish army. I need you.

If you are a fanfiction author who posts to AO3. Your work has probably been scraped into these datasets.

huggingface.co

Chat-Error/archiveofourown-newest · Datasets at Hugging Face

We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.

huggingface.co

nyuuzyou/archiveofourown · Datasets at Hugging Face

We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.

Send them a copyright takedown notice if you think your work is in this. Escalate to a DMCA report if you need to: https://www.copyright.gov/512/sample-notice.pdf (and send it to: dmca@huggingface.co)

Make sure to grab all your work IDs from Ao3.

Restrict your work to the archive.

Glaze your art.

So many of us are affected. You aren't alone. Maybe together we can take down this theft.