[discourse] in defiance of the authorās wishes (re: mxtx fandom)
table of contents
: contextĀ
: moral arguments
: addressing the legal side of thingsĀ
: closing remarks
Context
on March 17, 2018, mxtx posted:
āAs long as you don't split or reverse the top/bottom positions of the main couple, I won't mind what you ship. I myself have a lot of fun shipping couples in mainstream shows, and isn't reading all about finding joy? You can imagine freely or ship whoever you like, just don't break up or reverse the top/bottom positions of the main couple.ā
(I realise that the äøęäøé āno splitting or reversingā rule might be implicit within the entire Chinese danmei fandom, so i do not wish to single mxtx out. for example, i know that Chinese 2ha fans also go around policing people who ship, say, chu wanning with shi mei ā so this isnāt just a mxtx thing. although i do not know if other danmei authors have explicitly stated āno splitting or reversingā since i have not been a part of other danmei fandoms.)
Nevertheless, āno splitting or reversingā became the constitution in Chinese mxtx fandom. Fans parade around with the slogan āęéę»ā which means ākill yourself if you split or reverseā. Since the pronunciation of ęéę» (chai-ni-si) sounds like āchineseā, some fans on the Chinese internet have been putting āchineseā in their bios to mean ākill yourself if you split or reverseā.
From now on I will be referring to split/reverse ships as cult ships, as Chinese fans like to call them.
There are two main consequences of the āno splitting or reversingā rule (on the Chinese internet):
You will receive permanent bans with no option for appeal if you post cult ship fanworks in the novel communities on Weibo
It is implicitly agreed upon that you are not allowed to use individual character tags, the novel tag, or the author tag when posting cult ship content on any platform. So, for example, if you write Wei Wuxian x Jiang Cheng, you are not allowed to use #weiwuxian #jiangcheng #mdzs #mxtx. The name given to this conduct of tagging only your cult ship is åå°čŖč, which means āenclose a piece of land and amuse oneself within itā. You are not allowed to step out of your land.Ā
However, not everyone agrees with the practice of ādonāt step out of your landā ā this includes people from both sides of the debate. Some official shippers believe that cult shippers should not have any land to begin with, and purposefully leave the cult ship tag unblocked so they can police cult shippers at every opportunity. Some cult shippers believe that because their ship involves the individual characters, originate from the novel written by the author, they are in the right to use the individual character tags, the novel tag, and the author tag, and that people who dislike their ship should just use the block function.Ā
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Moral Arguments
There are two main types of moral arguments that Chinese official shippers make.
1. If you split the official ship, you condone cheating behaviour and that makes you a bad person.
The first argument is too trivial so I will leave the refutation as an exercise for the reader to do at home /j
2. You are not respecting the author's wishes and that makes you a bad person.
The author has wished many different things. For example:
Screenshot 1 translation:
I strictly forbid any crowdfunding or fundraising related to me, my works, or my characters, regardless of the purpose, whether it be for celebration, group buying, rankings, charity, or any other named activities.
Screenshot 2 translation:
Once again, I emphasize: No new social media pages related to my works are allowed, nor organizing readers in a roundabout way, whether it be for celebrations, group buying, rankings, charity, or any other named activities. Please also refrain from flamboyantly organizing any collective birthday events.
Screenshot 3 translation:
I've repeated many things many times and do not wish to repeat myself. Could everyone please just listen to my words occasionally.
(A brief aside before I address the second argument, something I used to say when debating Chinese fans: āI donāt think people who violate the author's wishes mean any disrespect. I donāt think theyāre shipping or hosting charity events or birthday parties out of spite, but rather, it just so happens that the author prohibits a ship they enjoy or an event they organise. Just because I cult ship, for example, doesnāt mean I hate the author.ā And they would respond: āif you really liked the author, you wouldnāt go against her wishes. You do not deserve to like the author. You are a mxtx anti.ā And I would say, āI like my mom a lot, but I wonāt listen to everything she says, simply because I donāt think everything she says is right. Plus, I donāt think the world can simply be explained by like vs. dislike. Also, Xie Lian said this: [For instance, if you admire or like someone, you won't always treat them well, no matter what happens.]ā But then the most hilarious thing happened, in the revised version, a rebuttal for that scene was added:
ćāFor instance, if you admire or like someone, it doesn't mean you will always treat them well, regardless of what happens."
"Why not?" San Lang questioned. "If that's not possible, it only shows that this so-called 'liking' isn't anything significant."
Xie Lian shifted the conversation, asking, "Then... does it mean that aside from liking someone, the only other option is to dislike them? Are these the only two attitudes one can choose from?"
San Lang chuckled and retorted, "Why not? Right is right, wrong is wrong. To love is to love, to hate is to hate. Why can't things be clear and straightforward?āć
ā¦ ah.)
To address the second argument for real, i believe that producers retain no moral authority over the methods by which consumers engage with their products. for instance, i believe that choosing not to follow the official ātwist, lick, and dunkā method when eating oreos does not constitute disrespect towards the oreo brand. Or to use another analogy, suppose a farmer selling apples insist that you peel the apples before eating them. I believe that it does not make you a bad person if you choose to eat the apples unpeeled, despite the farmer being the one who watered and harvested the apples from their trees.
I am thinking of potential counterarguments, and the strongest one I came up with is: ābut products like oreos and apples are fundamentally different from intellectual property.ā And I think the main issue here is that, to employ economics terminology, the content of novels like tgcf is a non-rivalrous good (not the novels themselves but the abstract content), which means that my consumption of it does not reduce availability to others. In other words, unlike Oreos or apples wherein after I purchase them, the specific items I bought are no longer physically in the hands of the vendor; after encountering characters like Shen Qingqiu, Shen Qingqiu still exists abstractly in MXTXās head. This gives the illusion of ownership on the authorās part. I want to be very careful here because I think itās easy to equivocate between different uses of the word āownershipā. I am not arguing that the author fails to retain ownership in negation of all the blood, sweat, and tears that went into the creative process, i.e. their copyright. Instead, I am contending that, just as I paid for my Oreos and apples, upon my purchasing of the Seven Seas version, the paperback Chinese version, and the revised uncensored version of TGCF on JJWXC, the author does not own the ways by which I choose to engage with these fictional entities. Once a work is made public, its ontology becomes independent of the authorās intent, and in all its readersā heads exist distinct versions of the characters, in effect making them belong to all of us.
(There. As a bonus I have also resolved the issue of not being āchineseā enough. Ah, is this a bad place to make a communism joke?)
Addressing the legal side of things
In 2022 I wrote to the legal team at AO3, and here is their response:
Regarding the āmoral rightsā, thatās actually a thing. Upon receiving lots of spam from 12-yr-old readers that āyou are breaking the lawā, I did a quick Baidu search (Chinaās Google) concerning the legality of splitting/reversing ships. Surprisingly, the search results yield āyes, itās illegalā, and hence the 12-yr-olds' confidence. But that is akin to getting a cancer diagnosis from searching symptoms on Google. So I dug deeper.Ā
After reading tens of published papers and court cases, here are the key takeaways of what I found:
Given that intellectual property rights are a bit behind in China, they have largely based their laws on US copyright law. As organizations like OTW continue to fight for the rights of transformative works in the US, China probably will just follow suit.
The semantics of ādistort, mutilate, or otherwise harm the integrity of their works in a way that harms the authorās reputationā is very vague and debatable. There are at least three ways to interpret it (I think one of the papers I read offered four). The first is that they only have to prove that you distorted the integrity of the work. The second is that you satisfy the condition of harming the authorās reputation. The third is that you satisfy both conditions (integrity of work and authorās reputation). It depends on the court.Ā
None of the court cases pertained to unserious, just-for-fun fan works. Usually what happens is someone makes a film out canon, for example, and sell it for profit, or someone publishes their own novel which contains characters from another published work.Ā
And that is for China only^ if you live outside of China, you are under another country's jurisdiction.
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Closing remarks
I am addressing this issue because it has impacted me and my friends in many ways. "kill yourself if you split/reverse the official ship" is probably the least of our concerns, mainly because it is such a popular phrase that we've become desensitized to it. @/Eleven receives private messages on Lofter on a weekly basis of people wishing her entire family to get murdered. A hualian main friend of mine has been posted to Weibo for following me; and I had to pull a Shi Qingxuan with "hey let's not be friends anymore if being associated with me is gonna get you cancelled".
mxtx has been through a lot and i understand where she's coming from. and maybe, the people who identify as "kill yourself if you split/reverse the official ship" don't truly mean it -- maybe they're just expressing their love for the official ship.
Recently i've been seeing the sentiments I used to only witness in Chinese fandom surface on Twitter and sometimes I worry that western mxtx fandom is going to turn into Chinese mxtx fandom, with the in-group/out-group mentality -- you're either with us or against us. At the end of the day, I do like mxtx, I admire her tenacity and I think she's a brilliant author, I love her works and the characters in them. I simply do not want to be backed into the corner of "anti" due to not following every order she gives.
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Had a dream this morning that Archive of our Own had a Random button which would simply take you to a random fanfic, like Wikipedia has. (AO3 does not appear to really have this, I checked and couldn't find one, but I kinda wish they did.) Someone had started a game where whatever fic you got, that was your new fandom, which is very fun! I would love this meme in real life.
The problem came in where so many people used the button that it broke and just started sending everyone to Stealing Harry, and like...I have fond memories of Stealing Harry but it's not my best work and nobody should be assigned to be a Harry Potter fan in this day and age.
So I decide to go off and find Astolat and demand she fix this but when I finally did (there was a whole quest) she turned to me like the baddie in a horror flick and said, "But that's the most random story there is" in a dark voice and I was terrified and woke up.
In the cold light of day I know there are more random stories by me on the archive, let alone by others, but I'm not going to try to get back there to argue my case. Pretty sure whatever I spoke to was actually the demon specifically assigned to plague fandom and not Astolat at all.
I'd say "get thee behind me, demon" but I know just how many porny fics on AO3 begin with that premise. (I've written some.) Begone foul spirit, and take your Satanic Panic with you!
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