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itsclydebitches · 3 years

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Here's a quandary I've suddenly found myself in: where do you stand on writers deleting their own works, fanfiction or otherwise? I've had this happen to me on more than one occasion - I go to look for an old favorite and find it's since been deleted from whatever site I read it on.

On the one hand, I'm inclined to think that, "Sure. The author wrote it, it's their call. I don't own the work - I certainly didn't pay for it. It's their decision, even if it's disappointing."

But at the same time I can't help but consider the alternative - if I believe in death of the author (and I do), that an author's work fundamentally isn't solely theirs once it's been published, posted, etc., then it also seems wrong to have a work deleted. Stories aren't the sole property of their creator, after all.

But then I circle back. D'you think there are different obligations between authors and readers and the works being made in fandom space? I know if I had bought a book and the author decided they wanted it back, I would feel pretty comfortable telling them no, given I'd paid for it and whatnot. But that's a different world from fanfic and fandom space generally.

So. You're insightful Clyde, I'm curious as to what you'll have to say here (and to all y'all thinking about it, don't flame me. I haven't decided where I stand here yet - haven't heard a good nail-in-the-coffin argument for or against yet).

Val are you a mind reader now? I’ve been thinking about this exact conundrum the last few days!

(And yeah, as a general disclaimer: no flaming. Not allowed. Any asks of the sort will be deleted on sight and with great satisfaction.)

Honestly, I’m not sure there is a “nail-in-the-coffin argument” for this, just because—as you lay out—there are really good points for keeping works around and really good points for allowing authors to have control over their work, especially when fanworks have no payment/legal obligations attached. In mainstream entertainment, your stories reflect a collaborative effort (publisher, editor, cover artists, etc.) so even if it were possible to delete the physical books out of everyone’s home and library (and we're ignoring the censorship angle for the moment), that’s no longer solely the author’s call, even if they have done the lion’s share of the creative work. Though fanworks can also, obviously, be collaborative, they’re usually not collaborative in the same way (more “This fic idea came about from discord conversations, a couple tumblr posts, and that one headcanon on reddit”) and they certainly don’t have the same monetary, legal, and professional strings attached. I wrote this fic as a hobby in my free time. Don’t I have the right to delete it like I also have the right to tear apart the blankets I knit?

Well yes… but also no? I personally view fanworks as akin to gifts—the academic term for our communities is literally “gift economy”—so if we view it like that, suddenly that discomfort with getting rid of works is more pronounced. If I not only knit a blanket, but then gift it to a friend, it would indeed feel outside of my rights to randomly knock on their door one day and go, “I actually decided I hate that? Please give it back so I can tear it to shreds, thanks :)” That’s so rude! And any real friend would try to talk me out of it, explaining both why they love the blanket and, even if it’s not technically the best in terms of craftsmanship, it holds significant emotional value to them. Save it for that reason alone, at least. Fanworks carry that same meaning—“I don’t care if it’s full of typos, super cliché, and using some outdated, uncomfortable tropes. This story meant so much to me as a teenager and I’ll always love it”—but the difference in medium and relationships means it’s easier to ignore all that. I’m not going up to someone’s house and asking face-to-face to destroy something I gave them (which is awkward as hell. That alone deters us), I’m just pressing a button on my computer. I’m not asking this of a personal friend that is involved in my IRL experiences, I’m (mostly) doing this to online peers I know little, if anything, about. It’s easy to distance ourselves from both the impact of our creative work and the act of getting rid of it while online. On the flip-side though, it’s also easier to demean that work and forget that the author is a real person who put a lot of effort into this creation. If someone didn’t like my knitted blanket I gave them as a gift, they’re unlikely to tell me that. They recognize that it’s impolite and that the act of creating something for them is more important than the construction’s craftsmanship. For fanworks though, with everyone spread around the world and using made up identities, people have fewer filters, happily tearing authors to shreds in the comments, sending anon hate, and the like. The fact that we’re both prefacing this conversation with, “Please don’t flame” emphasizes that. So if I wrote a fic with some iffy tropes, “cringy” dialogue, numerous typos, whatever and enough people decided to drag me for it… I don’t know whether I’d resist the urge to just delete the fic, hopefully ending those interactions. There’s a reason why we’re constantly reminding others to express when they enjoy someone else’s work: the ratio of praise to criticism in fandom (or simply praise to seeming indifference because there was no public reaction at all), is horribly skewed.

So I personally can’t blame anyone for deleting. I’d like to hope that more people realize the importance of keeping fanworks around, that everything you put out there is loved by someone… but I’m well aware that the reality is far more complicated. It’s hard to keep that in mind. It’s hard to keep something around that you personally no longer like. Harder still to keep up a work you might be harassed over, that someone IRL discovered, that you’re disgusted with because you didn’t know better back then… there are lots of reasons why people delete and I ultimately can’t fault them for that. I think the reasons why people delete stem more from problems in fandom culture at large—trolling, legal issues, lack of positive feedback, cancel culture, etc.—than anything the author has or has not personally done, and since such work is meant to be a part of an enjoyable hobby… I can’t rightly tell anyone to shoulder those problems, problems they can’t solve themselves, just for the sake of mine or others’ enjoyment. The reason I’ve been thinking about this lately is because I was discussing Attack on Titan and how much I dislike the source material now, resulting in a very uncomfortable relationship with the fics I wrote a few years back. I’ve personally decided to keep them up and that’s largely because some have received fantastic feedback and I’m aware of how it will hurt those still in the fandom if I take them down. So if a positive experience is the cornerstone of me keeping fics up, I can only assume that negative experiences would likewise been the cornerstone of taking them down. And if getting rid of that fic helps your mental health, or solves a bullying problem, or just makes you happier… that, to me, is always more important than the fic itself.

But, of course, it’s still devastating for everyone who loses the work, which is why my compromise-y answer is to embrace options like AO3’s phenomenal orphaning policy. That’s a fantastic middle ground between saving fanworks and allowing authors to distances themselves from them. I’ve also gotten a lot more proactive about saving the works I want to have around in the future. Regardless of whether we agree with deleting works or not, the reality is we do live in a world where it happens, so best to take action on our own to save what we want to keep around. Though I respect an author’s right to delete, I also respect the reader’s right to maintain access to the work, once published, in whatever way they can. That's probably my real answer here: authors have their rights, but readers have their rights too, so if you decide to publish in the first place, be aware that these rights might, at some point, clash. I download all my favorite fics to Calibre and, when I’m earning more money (lol) I hope to print and bind many for my personal library. I’m also willing to re-share fic if others are looking for them, in order to celebrate the author’s work even if they no longer want anything to do with it. Not fanfiction in this case, but one of my fondest memories was being really into Phantom of the Opera as a kid and wanting, oh so desperately, to read Susan Kay’s Phantom. Problem was, it was out of print at the time, not available at my library, and this was before the age of popping online and finding a used copy. For all intents and purposes, based on my personal situation, this was a case of a book just disappearing from the world. So when an old fandom mom on the message boards I frequented offered to type her copy up chapter by chapter and share it with me, you can only imagine how overjoyed I was. Idk what her own situation was that something like scanning wouldn’t work, but the point is she spent months helping a fandom kid she barely knew simply because a story had resonated with her and she wanted to share it. That shit is powerful!

So if someone wants to delete—if that’s something they need right now—I believe that is, ultimately, their decision… but please try your hardest to remember that the art you put out into the world is having an impact and people will absolutely miss it when it’s gone. Often to the point of doing everything they can to put it back out into the world even if you decide to take it out. Hold onto that feeling. The love you have for your favorite fic, fanart, meta, whatever it is? Someone else has that for your work too. I guarantee it.

So take things down as needed, but for the love of everything keep copies for yourself. You may very well want to give it back to the world someday.

#fandom #fic things #mymetas #never any easy questions on this blog huh? lol

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vinayv224 · 6 years

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What’s at stake in publishing essays like Jian Ghomeshi’s New York Review of Books piece?

Ian Buruma, the editor of the New York Review of Books, is out of a job. The news comes following Buruma’s decision to publish a lengthy essay by disgraced Canadian celebrity Jian Ghomeshi about how Ghomeshi’s life changed when, in 2014, he was fired from a radio station after multiple women accused him of sexual assault. (Ghomeshi was eventually acquitted in court after he agreed to sign a peace bond and apologize to one of his accusers.)

The New York Review of Books has not said whether Buruma resigned or was fired, and has not responded to a request from Vox for comment.

The Ghomeshi essay was published not long after Harper’s magazine published an essay by former radio host John Hockenberry, who retired in December after he was accused of sexual harassment by multiple women. (“Looking back, my behavior was not always appropriate and I’m sorry,” Hockenberry said at the time.)

Taken together, the two essays seem to form a bizarre new genre: the “I’m sorry you’re offended” apologetic, the “regrettably, mistakes were made” expression of non-guilt. As pieces of writing, they are less interesting for the fact of their existence than they are for the fact that they were granted prestigious platforms in literary institutions like Harper’s and the New York Review of Books.

Titling his essay “Exile,” Hockenberry writes of his fall from grace and defends his actions on the somewhat confused grounds that our pornographic culture has killed romance.

“Do I dare make a spirited defense of something once called romance from the darkness of this exile?” he asks. “Not only do I dare, knowing what righteous anger is out there, I really believe I have no choice.”

Meanwhile, in “Reflections From a Hashtag,” Ghomeshi writes of experiencing suicidal depression after his fall from grace, and as a result of receiving “a crash course in empathy.” To illustrate his newfound empathy, he describes meeting a woman on a train and feeling an urge “from my days as a Somebody. Tell her about your show. Tell her about your band. Sell your book.”

But instead, he writes, his newfound empathy led him to listen to his travel companion talk and to ask her questions — “As if maybe I had the ability to be worthy without reciting my résumé” — and to leave without ever giving her his name. (One might assume that he’d also want to withhold his name because he is now famous for being accused of sexually assaulting women, but Ghomeshi does not confront that assumption in his essay.)

Notably, neither Hockenberry nor Ghomeshi engages meaningfully with the accusations against them. Hockenberry will only allow that he is “guilty of bad judgment,” and he condemns his accusers for not responding when he reached out to them, expressing furor over their “stony and, in my view, cowardly silence.” (Some of Hockenberry’s accusers told the Cut that he had never reached out to them.)

Ghomeshi, for his part, leaves out the number of women who accused him of sexual assault (24), what the accusations include (beating and choking), how far back the accusations go (to his college days; he’s currently 51), and why the charges against him were eventually dropped (he had to “publicly accept responsibility” for his actions but did so while maintaining that he was not admitting wrongdoing).

As Buruma’s ousting attests, the backlash against essays like Hockenberry’s and Ghomeshi’s was intense.

“The worst thing about this accursed genre of personal essay — ‘My Year of Being Held Responsible for My Own Behavior’ — may be that it consists, almost necessarily, of terrible writing,” wrote Jia Tolentino at the New Yorker.

“I feel sorry for a lot of these men, but I don’t think they feel sorry for women, or think about women’s experience much at all,” wrote Michelle Goldberg for the New York Times, adding, “Maybe they’d find it easier to resurrect their careers if it seemed like they’d reflected on why women are so furious in the first place, and perhaps even offered ideas to make things better.”

But what’s at stake here is less the question of whether their essays were any good, and more the question of why they received the platforms they did in the first place. What message was Buruma sending when he put Ghomeshi’s essay in the New York Review of Books, and was it ever worth reading?

Both mea culpas failed to engage with the allegations at hand. Harper’s and the NYRB gave them a platform anyway.

The obfuscations from Ghomeshi and Hockenberry follow a familiar, consistent pattern that we’ve seen time and time again when men accused of hurting women prepare to reenter public life: Be vague, imply heavily that it was all a long time ago and you’re the real victim here, and never discuss what’s happened to the people you hurt. (Men who’ve notably veered away from this pattern include Community creator and Rick and Morty showrunner Dan Harmon, whose apology after a female Community writer accused him of sexual harassment set the high-water mark for this kind of public redemption attempt.)

So the interesting question here is not, “Why are these men so bad at apologizing?” — it’s pretty clear that they’re bad at apologizing because they don’t seem to want to actually admit that they did anything wrong. They consistently frame themselves, not the people they hurt, as the real victims of their actions. “Here’s the thing about being an erstwhile ‘celebrity’ who is now an outcast,” writes Ghomeshi: “You’re not just feeling sorry for yourself. You’re also feeling sorry for everyone around you — sometimes even the strangers.”

Instead, the interesting question is, “Why are literary institutions like Harper’s and the New York Review of Books giving these men platforms from which to publish their bad apologies?” What is the literary interest in having a Canadian musician who allegedly abused 24 different women say that now he can no longer use his fame to pick up women? Is there any value at all in that piece of writing, outside of generating hate clicks online?

If Hockenberry’s and Ghomeshi’s essays are supposed to have literary value, why aren’t they engaging in good faith with the counterarguments against them? If they have journalistic news value, why aren’t they engaging with the facts that are already part of the public record? If they are more than self-absorbed excuses and “I’m sorry you were offended but you must understand that in my day, it was considered acceptable for men to attack their colleagues”-ing, then where is that value supposed to lie?

Buruma said Ghomeshi’s story was valuable because it was rare. Let’s unpack that.

In an interview with Slate’s Isaac Chotiner last Friday, Buruma argued that Ghomeshi’s story was valuable because it had not been heard before. “It is an angle on an issue that is clearly very important and that I felt had not been exposed very much,” Buruma said.

He added, “I think nobody has quite figured out what should happen in cases like his, where you have been legally acquitted but you are still judged as undesirable in public opinion, and how far that should go, how long that should last, and whether people should make a comeback or can make a comeback at all.”

In a sense, Ghomeshi’s story is unusual, because he has faced some definite consequences for the actions of which he was accused. There have been a lot of stories told by men who got away with sexual assault — Roman Polanski wrote a memoir! — but it’s relatively rare for those men to lose standing and prestige after facing accusations. The story of falling from grace after being accused of hurting women really is pretty rare.

But we don’t value stories only because they are rare. As Chotiner pointed out in the interview, O.J. Simpson, like Ghomeshi, was acquitted of the charges against him in a criminal court, and like Ghomeshi, he lost his celebrity standing after he was accused of hurting a woman.

Unlike Ghomeshi, of course, Simpson was accused of murdering two people: his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman. And when Simpson tried to tell his side of the story in a book titled If I Did It, the outcry was so massive that the book was canceled and the editor who acquired it was fired. It would eventually be published by a less established publisher, with all proceeds going to Goldman’s family.

If I Did It was a scandal because it allowed Simpson to profit from his alleged crimes. And it prioritized his story over those of the people he was alleged to have hurt. It was unquestionably a rare story, but it was still not considered valuable.

Nonetheless, if we take Buruma at his word and accept that Ghomeshi’s story has news value because it confronts an underexamined problem, then shouldn’t Ghomeshi have been pushed to accurately characterize both the accusations against him and their legal resolution in his essay?

No, Buruma said when Chotiner asked him that question. A concern like mentioning the peace bond Ghomeshi had to sign as part of his acquittal “does not really add or take away anything from the story at hand, which is what happened afterward and what happened to him.”

In that case, Buruma’s argument is essentially that what’s really valuable here is the story of Ghomeshi’s suffering. The question of what he’s suffering for — the harm he is accused of inflicted on 24 women — becomes irrelevant. His suffering becomes more important than theirs.

Promoting essays like Ghomeshi’s and Hockenberry’s is not a harmless intellectual enterprise in free speech hypotheticals. It has real consequences.

The idea that the suffering of accused men is more newsworthy and valuable than the suffering of those they allegedly hurt is fundamental to the widespread narrative that the #MeToo movement has gone too far. It’s a narrative Buruma appeared to endorse in his interview, in which he also argued strongly that the “Fall of Man”-themed NYRB issue in which Ghomeshi’s essay appeared should not be interpreted as an anti-MeToo statement. He added, however, that he was concerned that the movement may have overreached itself. “Like all well-intentioned and good things, there can be undesirable consequences,” he said.

It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that for magazines like the New York Review of Books and Harper’s, the value of essays by figures like Ghomeshi and Hockenberry is supposed to lie in a corrective to the dominant narrative, in a sense that the #MeToo movement has gone too far and that we need the voices of those who were hurt by it in order to stabilize the status quo.

But it’s also difficult to understand how the #MeToo movement can be said to have gone too far when Donald Trump was credibly accused by dozens of women of sexual harassment and still get elected president, when the Supreme Court currently includes one man who was accused of sexual harassment and may soon include another. It’s difficult to understand how one can reasonably make the argument that the men who lost their jobs in the wake of the #MeToo movement were hurt by the movement and not by their own choices to harass and assault their colleagues.

And it’s difficult to understand how spotlighting their voices in the way the New York Review of Books and Harper’s have is doing anything more than reinforcing a system in which men’s social status is considered to be more valuable than women’s bodily safety, in which accusations of sexual violence are brushed aside as so much shrill hyperbole, and in which powerful men are able to hurt those they have power over with impunity. It’s difficult to understand how these essays are doing anything more than striving to return to the system that necessitated the birth of the #MeToo movement in the first place.

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