“It’s become a sort of purity culture staple to call out Archive of Our Own, because we cannot apparently enjoy nice things.
[…] Some fans argue that AO3 should be actively moderating more of the content posted on-site, even though it has exclusionary tag systems so that you can, personally, tailor and be responsible for your own AO3 experience.
Don’t like a pairing or tag situation? Hide it and you never have to worry about seeing it! In addition, AO3 does have a Policy & Abuse team that deals with issues like plagiarism, harassment, and violations of its content policies; it’s not the Wild West out there, despite what this new breed of moral panic-mongers would have you believe.
[…] There’s a persistent, and, for me, exceedingly strange swerve these days towards demanding The Powers That Be censor and remove fanworks that some users deem problematic, often with a pearl-clutching sentiment attached that the youth are being corrupted from exposure to unsavory themes, or the mere possibility of exposure.
These sentiments always remind me of the people who used to assert in the 18th and 19th centuries that the act of novel-reading would corrupt a young woman’s mind, and that (especially) women couldn’t be trusted with so dangerous an activity as reading or choosing their own reading material.”
y’all, if even uninvolved people writing articles can see that you’re being jackasses, it’s time to own up to your jackassery and knock it the fuck off.
bring back the era of “dont ilke; dont read” where you simply just dont read the stories that have tags you dont like