Something Just Like This

Apparently it's been 20 years since I created my dragonydreams Yahoo email account, which means it's been 20 years since I decided to get involved in fandom. I created this account with the sole purpose of signing up for Yahoo Groups to read Buffy fic. I believe that I submitted/posted my first fic about 6 weeks later in September. But creating the email account was the first step to entering fandom.

I don't even want to imagine what my life would have been like if I had not taken that first step. I can't imagine my life without all of the friends that I have made in all of my various fandoms. I would not be the person that I am today without all of you.

I know that I'm not on here all that much anymore, lured away by the flashy gifs of Tumblr, but I'll try to make more of an effort to check in here more than once every several weeks because I do miss you. ::hugs::

I really didn't want to post about this, but since this newest forest fire does affect me, I'll comment.

I'm sure by now most of you have hard about Warriors for Innocence and their attack on LJ predators. I won't go into the details because liz_marcs explains it very well here, with follow-up here.

Last night all of my Heroes fic comms threw up mod posts asking the members to flock their posts containing incest or underage sex. I was fully expecting that after having read liz_marcs's post during the day. These kinds of things have a way of traveling far and wide and inciting panic.

From what I have been able to glean from reading the various posts - and this is just reading, I'm doing any of my own investigating - LJ is suspending communities/journals that have "hot words" in their user info/profiles. I don't believe that they are looking at the content of actual posts. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.)

ETA: athenewolfe has done some research on this too and posted about it here.

I do not have, and never have had, any inflammatory words in my user info interests, not anywhere in my profile itself. I spell out the pairings (Willow/Giles, Spike/Angel – not Spangel, Peter/Claire – although I do have Paire) and even when my interests expanded to include slash, pairecest, and petrellicest, I never added those words to my profile page. I also do not mention the ratings of the fics that I write in my profile, although all fics are clearly rated in their posts.

As I've stated before, I do not condone RL incest. I just like reading and writing about fictional characters having incestuous relationships. And just in this one fandom.

So while I have complied with all mod-requested requests and flocked my posts that contain incest and/or underage sex, I will not be flocking my fic at my LJ. Fic and fandom related things are just about the only things not flocked on my journal. I do not friend back everyone who friends me because sometimes it's just for icons and sometimes just for fic. When people do not comment to my posts, I have no idea why they're there. I do not want to have to friend them back in case they are there for the fic.

Am I being naïve? Quite possibly. Should I be joining the mass hysteria and locking down everything that may be slightly offensive? I'd have to lock it all, and keep it locked. Almost all of my fanfic involves a younger woman/older man – Claire/Peter, Willow/Giles, Willow/Spike, Willow/Angel, heck, even Lindsey is older than Willow, although not by as many years. Two of those relationships aren't even with humans.

I joined Live Journal to communicate with my friends and share mutual interests. This wonderful community is being destroyed and compartmentalized and it is not the same open and welcoming place that it was when I got this journal almost three years ago.


I thought about locking this post, but that seemed hypocritical, so it's public.