oh look, the trolls are back...
Dec. 7th, 2012 11:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edenfallingYeah, the self-appointed ff.net police (specifically the group calling themselves Eliminator -- yes, there are multiple groups of these people, and they apparently have schisms and everything -- it's like a bizarre parody of actual fandom, only instead of creating stories, art, or whatever, they can only destroy other people's work) are once again on patrol!
The target this time is a Harry Potter ficlet I wrote back in freaking 2003 and posted to ff.net in 2004: Parseltongue (LJ mirror here), which was previously attacked by Greyshade (http://www.fanfiction.net/u/4076901/) on October 26th (as mentioned in this thread). Somehow after eight and a half years of peaceful existence on the net, it has mutated and become miraculously offensive unto the sight of... yeah, no, it's just that I pissed off some trolls and they can't let anything drop. *deep sigh*
"Parseltongue" is an experiment with my own border between squick and kink, specifically centered on the use of live snakes as aids to foreplay. (Yeah, yeah, I know, and I say I didn't write porn until this year. That's because I don't think "Parseltongue" is porn. It's more of a tease, and it fades to black before the actual sex qua sex.) Anyway, I left the characters unnamed and used second person because I wanted to make readers focus on the situation and the kink rather than on their feelings about various HP ships, or their feelings about what kind of sex would or would not be IC for various characters. I particularly did not want to wade into the very fraught waters of, say, Harry/Ginny versus Harry/Hermione, or into the problems that arise when writing Voldemort/anyone. Hence the literary avoidance tactic. :-)
Anyway, I am quite sure these trolls are still after me because they didn't cow me into leaving ff.net or deleting my stories this fall... because once again their bugbear is the false conflation of second person with interactivity, which was the point under contention in the previous round of accusations. There is no mention whatsoever of the ficlet's sexual content, which I think (if I were in the mood to accuse myself of breaking rules, which I am not because I don't think I did) might conceivably be construed to break the rating limit on account of kinkiness. (Kinky sex is inherently higher rated than vanilla missionary sex! It is dirty, bad, and wrong! We must think of the children! *removes tongue from cheek*)
From: Lord Imagawa (http://www.fanfiction.net/u/2642349/)
-------------------
Hello, there.
You've been warned before about your violations. I'm afraid that you're breaking 1 rule.
Here are the sections of rules that you break:
Entries not allowed:
5. Any form of interactive entry: choose your adventure, second person/you based, Q&As, and etc.
Solution: Simply insert a name instead of saying "you" or even change it so that it is not about the reader.
Please repair this story immediately, otherwise your story will be reported and deleted as the consequence.
Sincerely,
Lord Imagawa
(Member of Eliminator)
-------------------
You know, I am not even going to bother answering these people anymore. They just make me tired and sad about the seemingly inherent flaws of humanity. *deeper sigh*
If this is what ff.net has come to -- if this is the kind of petty, systematic harassment the site owners and mods are happy to let stand by not taking all of five minutes to clarify their rules one way or the other, instead of allowing the muddy wording that appears to conflate second person with interactivity (which I continue to maintain is a false equivalence) -- then I wish the mods and owners joy of their inundation with petty, stupid complaints over infractions that are not actually infractions.
I did my part to request a clarification of the rules. They ignored me.
I wash my hands of the issue.
-----
ETA: In the interest of keeping all discussion of this issue in a place where people can actually find it, I will mention that I got an anonymouse over at LJ who commented on this issue, but for unknown reasons attached the comment to a post about my recently fired coworker instead of this post. *shrug*
The target this time is a Harry Potter ficlet I wrote back in freaking 2003 and posted to ff.net in 2004: Parseltongue (LJ mirror here), which was previously attacked by Greyshade (http://www.fanfiction.net/u/4076901/) on October 26th (as mentioned in this thread). Somehow after eight and a half years of peaceful existence on the net, it has mutated and become miraculously offensive unto the sight of... yeah, no, it's just that I pissed off some trolls and they can't let anything drop. *deep sigh*
"Parseltongue" is an experiment with my own border between squick and kink, specifically centered on the use of live snakes as aids to foreplay. (Yeah, yeah, I know, and I say I didn't write porn until this year. That's because I don't think "Parseltongue" is porn. It's more of a tease, and it fades to black before the actual sex qua sex.) Anyway, I left the characters unnamed and used second person because I wanted to make readers focus on the situation and the kink rather than on their feelings about various HP ships, or their feelings about what kind of sex would or would not be IC for various characters. I particularly did not want to wade into the very fraught waters of, say, Harry/Ginny versus Harry/Hermione, or into the problems that arise when writing Voldemort/anyone. Hence the literary avoidance tactic. :-)
Anyway, I am quite sure these trolls are still after me because they didn't cow me into leaving ff.net or deleting my stories this fall... because once again their bugbear is the false conflation of second person with interactivity, which was the point under contention in the previous round of accusations. There is no mention whatsoever of the ficlet's sexual content, which I think (if I were in the mood to accuse myself of breaking rules, which I am not because I don't think I did) might conceivably be construed to break the rating limit on account of kinkiness. (Kinky sex is inherently higher rated than vanilla missionary sex! It is dirty, bad, and wrong! We must think of the children! *removes tongue from cheek*)
From: Lord Imagawa (http://www.fanfiction.net/u/2642349/)
-------------------
Hello, there.
You've been warned before about your violations. I'm afraid that you're breaking 1 rule.
Here are the sections of rules that you break:
Entries not allowed:
5. Any form of interactive entry: choose your adventure, second person/you based, Q&As, and etc.
Solution: Simply insert a name instead of saying "you" or even change it so that it is not about the reader.
Please repair this story immediately, otherwise your story will be reported and deleted as the consequence.
Sincerely,
Lord Imagawa
(Member of Eliminator)
-------------------
You know, I am not even going to bother answering these people anymore. They just make me tired and sad about the seemingly inherent flaws of humanity. *deeper sigh*
If this is what ff.net has come to -- if this is the kind of petty, systematic harassment the site owners and mods are happy to let stand by not taking all of five minutes to clarify their rules one way or the other, instead of allowing the muddy wording that appears to conflate second person with interactivity (which I continue to maintain is a false equivalence) -- then I wish the mods and owners joy of their inundation with petty, stupid complaints over infractions that are not actually infractions.
I did my part to request a clarification of the rules. They ignored me.
I wash my hands of the issue.
-----
ETA: In the interest of keeping all discussion of this issue in a place where people can actually find it, I will mention that I got an anonymouse over at LJ who commented on this issue, but for unknown reasons attached the comment to a post about my recently fired coworker instead of this post. *shrug*
(no subject)
Date: 2012-12-08 06:15 am (UTC)What bugs me the most about this whole situation is that the rule in question would be SO EASY to clarify, no matter which direction the owners and mods chose to come down on. All you have to do is say flat-out that either second person is only forbidden when used in the service of an otherwise interactive story and does not make a story interactive by itself (which is true!), or say flat-out that all use of second person is forbidden whether it is interactive or not.
But will anyone clarify the rule?
No. Of course not. That would make too much sense.
*headdesk*
...On a completely different topic, I am now partway into vol. 5 of Kuroko no Basuke -- Kagami has met Aomine and Kuroko has revealed some of their mutual history at Teikou. I loved the bit where Kuroko punched Kagami in the middle of the match with Shuutoku (sp?) to bring him back to reality, and also Riko's dead-on analysis of how many more times Kagami could jump and realization that they needed to spend one of those on blocking Midorima's first shot of the quarter, to rattle him. Yay Riko! (You are right that the boob jokes about Momoi are really annoying. *sour face*) Also, the difference between Aomine's expression in his early days at Teikou and his expression in the present day is, um, yeah. Poor kid. It's like he was pushing on a wall that he thought was made of stone, and all of a sudden it turned into tissue paper and he stumbled off a cliff. But man, he still seems like a complete JERK right now.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-12-08 01:08 pm (UTC)Ahem.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-12-09 05:03 am (UTC)Yeah, ff.net just does not seem to care about creating a user-friendly experience for the people who create the content that brings readers (and thus page views) to their site. It seems like a very short-sighted approach to me.
I also remain baffled by the way various anonymouse commenters during this "saga" have implied that I am using the site wrong because I didn't already know about these forum groups and the ridiculous, hair-splitting differences among them. Well, why should I have known about them? I don't use ff.net's forums! I was there before the forums existed, never asked for them to be added, and have never felt I was missing anything by not bothering to explore the new functions. I use ff.net to read and post fic, amen, the end.
As I said to
(no subject)
Date: 2012-12-08 05:41 pm (UTC)But! Yes, I dearly love how much of a little thug Kuroko is. And the fact that he only ever does this to /Kagami/, that it's his fear for what might happen to his new partner that brings that side of him out.
Riko is, indeed, amazing; considering the fact that she's /not/ a basketball specialist, she's even more amazing.
And, yeah, when you see what Aomine was like at Teikou it's just a moment of "omg, ow". And you see what it is Kuroko's trying to get back, and just how far from that Aomine's come, because yeah he's a /total/ jerk right now. You get the impression he was always a bit of a jerk in that basketball-monofocus "manners, huh, what're those?" kind of way. But he's way far down a hole now. (Though it never fails to amuse me how much of that is still focused on Kuroko despite Aomine's cosmic obliviousness; I mean, he's totally jealous of Kagami.)