Of course, you don't have to support the OTW if you think they have immoral goals.

Generous of her, there. (I particularly like the implication that you do have to support OTW if you don't think their goals are immoral.)

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Oh, yes. elfwreck is ever so much a paragon of generosity.

There is also this rage-inducing post about how, if you write fanfic? You're female, even if you're transgendered. And if you're female, you support OTW because you just do. So shut up and stop criticizing women who write fanfic, right now. (The author of this one disabled comments).

OTW: the only thing worse than its lawyers are its supporters.

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I cannot place why that name is familiar, and she's not in the Wiki. Can you remind me?

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I honestly don't think she's been wanked before (or if she was, it wasn't in a fandom I know). I only know her name because every single discussion of OTW I've read in the past few weeks? There she fucking is.

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It's like this:

Being gay can get you raped, murdered, tortured and left for dead, and many other things, just in the US.

Around the world, being gay is illegal in over 90 countries, and the penalty is death in at least 7 of them. In others, being gay will get you thrown in a mental hospital to "cure" you. Being that they still use electroshock therapy in the US, I'll assume this isn't a pleasant stay where they feed you porridge all the time.

You compared fan fiction to gay marriage.

Does that help a bit?

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*headdesk*

I kind of like the way the OP dealt with it, though.

I am of the opinion that something formed for the purpose of meeting some of the OTW's goals would be a generally good thing. So far as the OTW is the best/only game in town, I'm cautiously in favour. But honestly, it's not sliced bread yet, and I don't like the way its leadership is currently running. Making an arse of yourself across fandom to defend something that hasn't got its shit together is kind of dumb.

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Yeah, so do I. While I wouldn't quite agree with erestor's position on freedom of speech, she's in Germany, coming out of a different legal context and a far different history, and it makes sense that she's not completely and totally supportive of an American organization that claims to be international but is, in fact, responsive to US law.

If OTW was just focused on the archive (which some of their supporters in erestor's post claim they are, which is...confusing), I wouldn't have a problem with it. And I think it would actually have been wiser to divide the board/volunteers into a number of smaller committees, and say, "Okay, you're handling the archive, you're handling legal," and so on. As it is, while it's not really fair to blame OTW for not having their shit together yet, their defenders are acting like they do, and some of them are all, "OMG, how dare you criticize this organization that is attempting to represent you!" When someone says they don't feel the OTW is representing males/the transgendered/male-dominated fandoms/anything but LJ fandom (these are the most common complaints I've seen so far), then the same defenders snap, "Oh, but that's because they're not trying to represent everyone."

I saw someone, maybe in that post I linked, that said OTW is speaking Corporate instead of Fandom. Which makes a lot of sense.

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I had to reference the "dessert topping and floor wax" line in regards to OTW, because it so is, except that it's not floor wax but they'll refer you to another store that sells fandom-friendly floor wax. Unfortunately, the dessert topping is in the health-food section and it still tastes kind of waxy.

I wish that they had just said "we're for slashers, OK?" because that's really what this seems like. Archive by slashers, for slashers (even if they're writing gen and het and, goodness forbid, femslash.)

Admittedly, I have a small flist but the people I know who write f/f aren't talking about OTW that much.

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I wish someone in the debates I'd seen would use that line. It would make things a good deal clearer.

Whenever someone corners one of their supporters about all the contradictions in the group's premise, the response seems to be, "Well, I'm not an official member of OTW, so I can't speak for them." Then will the official members of OTW please speak up? At least offer concrete premises to counter the confusing shit their supporters are spreading. They can't police everyone, but one central document that people could refer to- besides the confusing "Our Vision"- would help.

"we're for slashers, OK?" because that's really what this seems like.

That line "We value our identity as a predominantly female community..." (which causes more problems than the rest of it put together) only makes sense if you're talking about the history of slash. SF/F fandom isn't like that. WoW isn't like that. Comics isn't like that. Etc.

Admittedly, I have a small flist but the people I know who write f/f aren't talking about OTW that much.

That's interesting. I have seen a few genficcers complaining that they feel OTW isn't making an effort to include them, but no words from f/f slashers. Or het writers, even.

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That line "We value our identity as a predominantly female community..." (which causes more problems than the rest of it put together) only makes sense if you're talking about the history of slash. SF/F fandom isn't like that. WoW isn't like that. Comics isn't like that. Etc.

You've got it. I came into fanfiction via anime fandom. When I started in anime fandom back in '96, more women were entering it and writing fics but the first anime ficcers were men. Once Sailor Moon got dubbed, the girls got in and never, ever left. There's also been a shift to shorter fics but that's more to do with the shift away from mailing lists and personal websites to LJ and archives. There are men on my flist who write anime fics, mostly low-rated het and gen. I don't know if they'd recognize "transformative work" as part of their fic, which is mainly "non-canon pairing starts dating, and in the meantime lots of spaceships blow up."

There are lots of spots of female LJ fandom that seem to be lacking OTW buzz or anti-buzz. Writers of f/f, writers of anime and manga fics, het writers, sports RPF writers, people who only write fics for public-domain work...and that's just my flist.

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That line "We value our identity as a predominantly female community..." (which causes more problems than the rest of it put together) only makes sense if you're talking about the history of slash. SF/F fandom isn't like that. WoW isn't like that. Comics isn't like that. Etc.

Yep. Now, I saw one of the people who I think was on the OTW board talking about how OTW is only about media fandom and the lines about the predominately female community are about that fandom. Now, okay, if you're going to define media fandom that way, that might be true, but the question is, is OTW going to try to equally represent all fandoms which create fanworks that may legally meet the definition of "transformative" or is it about creating an institution for media fandom (which they define as a historically predominately female community)? I'm not really sure. The thing is just that they're putting one group in the center.

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Whenever someone corners one of their supporters about all the contradictions in the group's premise, the response seems to be, "Well, I'm not an official member of OTW, so I can't speak for them." Then will the official members of OTW please speak up? At least offer concrete premises to counter the confusing shit their supporters are spreading. They can't police everyone, but one central document that people could refer to- besides the confusing "Our Vision"- would help.

If I wanted to be cynical I might say that they're not clearing up things on purpose because "there's no such thing as bad publicity".

That line "We value our identity as a predominantly female community..." (which causes more problems than the rest of it put together) only makes sense if you're talking about the history of slash.

I saw one OTW support respond that the first fan-vid was made by a women, yet there's lots of men who think that the first fan-vid was made by a man, and that's what the "We value our identity as a predominantly female community..." was about. If what they mean is "document the history of fan works made by women so as prevent appropriation by men" they should just say so (or make a list if that's just one of the things they mean).

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Coming out of the same legal context and history as she does, let me just say that erestor's ideas about freedom of speech made me roll my eyes almost as hard as elfwreck's babbling.

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Good to know! I thought they sounded extreme (although elfwreck still fails hard for trying to compare fanfic to interracial marriage), but wasn't sure how able I was to judge.

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I don't agree with them either, but I think it's because she's German, and that attitude is commonplace there. In Germany, it really is against the law to deny the Holocaust.

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Ashenmote is also German.

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Ah, whoops. I misread your comment. Sorry about that.

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They're not specifically defining that group because it's fuzzy, not an exact group with sharp edges, and subject to change as they get more active and acquire more members and so on. They don't mean to leave anyone out, but they're not crusading on behalf of people who just want to be left alone.

And yet, they have language on their site that only makes sense if applied to female-dominated media slash fandom, and people (hint: you) showing up everywhere there's dissent or questions to launch extreme comparisons and whine that they shouldn't be hatin', OTW is wonderful and innocent and kittens and puppies and flowers and hearts. Plus, there is Heidi. Oh my god, there is Heidi.

Seeing people praise the OTW? Does not lead to breaking out in hives when seeing the initials. Reading constant defenses of how the language on their site and their purpose and their association with Heidi are perfectly perfect and having defenders show up in random places (hint: here) to whine? Means I want to see them go down in flames.

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If I were an OTW advocate, I sure would be telling Elfwreck not to speak to non-supporters.

IMHO, though, I think the OTW stands a chance (depending) of creating a better archive software. I was talking to a programmer and he said that it's definitely doable even with only one competent person, depending on just how ambitious they want to get. Also, if they never are sued, then the rest won't be a problem.

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The "ambition" part is what gets me. If they try to hang on to everything that was suggested back in May, when the project was just an archive, they'll be trying to create, among other things:

*an archive with every pairing (and threesome) from every fandom ever
*an archive that categorizes things for category-driven readers and that doesn't categorize things for non-category-driven readers
*an archive that is totally open to everyone but at the same time keeps out badly-written stories and Mary Sues
*an archive that runs for free but looks as good as any professional website like eBay or Amazon
*an archive with built-in options for disabled readers, so they wouldn't need to own their own software

And so on.

That's the major reason I think this will fail. Instead of settling on a number of manageable goals and working from there, they appear to want everything, all at once, and no one from the core group has said, "This is what we're not aiming at."

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At first, on the software side, they were saying that they wanted something that was scaleable and corrected a lot of ff.net's flaws and was opensource. I think that's possible. The things where you start having to really make trade offs are on policy: how can you have open ness and quality control at the same time? We'll just have to see when they start making those decisions.

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What you listed might indeed be possible. But the lack of communication about it means that a lot of people still have pie-in-the-sky dreams, and they might be awfully disappointed when they find out those won't be used.

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The mood I'm in, I'm feeling petty enough to be anti-OTW just because elfwreck is so batshit gung-ho for them. She's getting fail-cooties on them.

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