"characters as harm" bet

[kradeelav]

i'm gonna bet something:

in the next two to five years it'll either "become" technically illegal or dangerously close in a court case (in the US. this law already exists elsewhere iirc) to draw characters from somebody else's registered IP (eg Disney) "in a harmful manner*"

*anything relating with bdsm (oh excuse me "glorifying sexual violence"), harmful stereotypes, inciting violence, minors and harm yadda yadda.

obviously the point i'm making is that it'll upturn any legal protections art has as of right now in the states and the definitions will be so broad that folks can interpret however much they wish. as we've seen on twitter taboo artists cancellations, that way leads to darkness.

(in some senses - it's already getting there if you're too brazen about it and/or don't have the money to not give a shit. unofficial blacklists in the animation industry and all. :v ) i also say "other people's IP" specifically because in this day and age when corporations essentially have a monarch's power to sway laws when public opinion is with them ... and how they've always really disliked satirical/controversial art of their own "content" ... this feels like easy pickings instinctively.  most sites already ban a list of live-action sexuality/kinks (eg period play is one of the most banned, if not bdsm outright), and a great majority of them are working on "no kink in art either" (instagram, tumblr, patreon).

anyway, thoughts like this have me working on a project before end of year that's essentially a banned artist's webring/advocacy group. i was sitting on it a bit (because i'm lazy and was hoping that it wasn't going to be necessary), but mmm, clock's ticking too fast for my liking. more on this soon!

Comments

[draculard]

My beta and I have had conversations about this -- how it feels like playing with fire to write "problematic" and kinky works for a Disney-owned property in particular. She has pipe dreams of setting up an old-school forum that explicitly welcomes *hand waves* *vague noises* this kind of thing. As it stands I think she has the money, but not the time.

I definitely think you're right though. Child-friendly censorship is now the norm online and tumblr-style puritanism re: fiction is becoming mainstream (and doing it way faster than I would have believed five years ago). At the same time it seems like anti-LGBTQ sentiment is becoming more mainstream as well (or maybe I'm being presented with a pessimistic worldview based on where I live), and the two are often tied together. It sometimes seems like there's this sentiment among the more liberal cishet community that being queer is "fine," so long as you're not kinky -- kinky people are the true degenerates, and it's best to prioritize getting rid of them first! And then there are certain non-kinky queer folk who will gladly take up that cause, not realizing that the underlying message here is "Once the kinks are out of sight, we'll come for the lower-level degenerates, and that's you."

(I'm thinking now about an anti-porn speaker who came to my base when I was in the Navy. We were all required to attend his speech. It was anti-porn, anti-BDSM, anti-kink, and subtly anti-queer. Later I looked it up and found out his organization took funding from a Christian group, I think "Focus on the Family." But don't quote me, because that was 8 years ago. The point is that after just an hour listening to this guy, several of my queer-friendly, kinky straight friends came out of the auditorium with their minds blown, talking about how right he was, and how evil and vile it was that porn exists! I couldn't change their minds; luckily there was a cishet guy in our squad who they did listen to and none of them were permanently turned away from kink or porn. It was a few years later that I started seeing the same exact arguments crop up on tumblr, from high school and college-aged kids).

[kradeelav]

oh ha ha, your mention of 'focus on the family' brought memories back as I remember mom going to a few of their school workshops/seminars, wow! may even still have a pamphlet somewhere around that was going on the evils of pokemon for sheer ... morbid nostalgia factor? damn, though. that's crazy you had to go through that there.

absolutely to your point of the puritanism + anti-LGBTQ sentiment becoming more mainstream shockingly fast. I almost want to say 2010 was a high point of the free-wheeling internet; the whole 'do not flame for writing BL!' wasn't a thing as much, and social media hadn't really started cracking down yet... agh. it's also interesting how a lot of old Leather books described exactly what you were saying about ... i hesitate to use the word "assimilationists" because there's a lot of unnecessary baggage there, but it fits with this specific context of cishet queers wanting to sweep the more "sexual" elements under the rug.

tell you what, though, if i get this webring up and going in the next month, there's a standing invitation to your friend to link up and see what we can do together there, even if it's just talking or affiliate links at minimum. :>

[kradeelav]

Ohhhh I need to grab both of those books you mentioned. Thank you for the rec and the thoughtful comment!

[flowersforgraves]

there's been a lot of uproar in certain circles lately re: AO3's finance meeting, which I don't particularly want to get into (there's a lot of twitter threads about it), but I know a lot of fans are relying heavily on the OTW to do the legislative legwork to protect fan creation. I'm extremely hesitant to lean on them given how they've responded to criticism before (on a range of topics from racism to the transformative nature of audio fanwork), so I'd really be interested in seeing that webring go up though I'm not a visual artist myself.

[kradeelav]

good to know even tangentially about the OTW's subtleties there - more awareness about a topic's never a bad thing, and I appreciate you giving me a heads up.

More variety of organizations would be amazing - makes for a much healthier ecosystem that way if one organization fails for whatever reason (internally, externally, bad decisions), there's others to close the ranks. Technically I'm imagining this webring as the 'banned creatives webring' so it'd include non-visual (and non-fandom) art as well, if that's any bit of good news your way. :>