setepenre-set:

ladyspock7:

sainatsukino:

azryal00:

fanfichasruinedmylife:

pagerunner-j:

demonicae:

tiger-in-the-flightdeck:

racethewind10:

emma-regina4ever:

beckpoppins:

adiwriting:

fandomlife-universe:

So I’m on AO3 and I see a lot of people who put “I do not own [insert fandom here]” before their story.

Like, I came on this site to read FAN fiction. This is a FAN fiction site. I’m fully aware that you don’t own the fandom or the characters. That’s why it’s called FAN FICTION.

Oh you youngins… How quickly they forget.

Back in the day, before fan fiction was mainstream and even encouraged by creators… This was your “please don’t sue me, I’m poor and just here for a good time” plea.

Cause guess what? That shit used to happen.

how soon they forget ann rice’s lawyers.

What happened with her lawyers.

History became legend. Legend became myth….  And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost.

I worked with one of the women that got contacted by Rice’s lawyers. Scared the hell out of her and she never touched fandom again.
The first time I saw a commission post on tumblr for fanart, I was shocked.

One of the reasons I fell out of love with her writing was her treatment of the fans… (that and the opening chapter of Lasher gave me such heebie-jeebies with the whole underage sex thing I felt unclean just reading it.)

I have zero problem with fanart/fic so long as the creators aren’t making money off of it. It is someone else’s intellectual property and people who create fan related works need to respect that (and a solid 98% of them do.)

The remaining 2% are either easily swayed by being gently prompted to not cash in on someone else’s IP. Or they DGAF… and they are the ones who will eventually land themselves in hot water. Either way: this isn’t much of an excuse to persecute your entire fanbase.

But Anne Rice went off the deep end with this stuff by actively attacking people who were expressing their love for her work and were not profiteering from it.

The Vampire Chronicles was a dangerous fandom to be in back in the day. Most of the works I read/saw were hidden away in the dark recesses of the internet and covered by disclaimers (a lot of them reading like thoroughly researched legal documents.)

And woe betide anyone who was into shipping anyone with ANYONE in that fandom. You were most at risk, it seemed, if your vision of the characters deviated from the creators ‘original intentions.’ (Hypocritical of a woman who made most of her living writing erotica.)

Imagine getting sued over a headcanon…

Put simply: we all lived in fear of her team of highly paid lawyers descending from the heavens and taking us to court over a slashfic less than 500 words long.

all

of

this

Reblogging because I can’t believe there are people out there who don’t know the story behind fan fiction disclaimers. 

There was a huge kerfuffle with Marion Zimmer Bradley before the Anne Rice controversy. It’s a drawn-out tale; I recommend looking it up because I might miss something. ;-

wasn’t there a similar kerkuffle in the star wars fandom

like, back in the time of zines, didn’t Lucasfilm go down hard on the shipping or did I dream that

I’m sorry to say I don’t  know, being relatively new to fandomland. Does anyone else know the history on this? 

when I first got into reading fic, I sort of researched the history of fandom a lot (fandom archaeology! such a nerd) and, uh…

that DEFINITELY happened. Luke/Han shippers had their stuff basically blacklisted from zines because lucasfilm banned ‘adult content’ fanworks…and all slash was considered ‘adult content’ DDD:

the fans panicked. nobody would publish han/luke.

also a lot of fans were all ‘moral outrage’-y at the idea of slash in general (and luke/han in particular).

the luke/han pairing went *way* underground; people passed their fic around privately and secretly. nothing was published in zines until the first issue of Elusive Lover in 1996.

and even after this, the whole ‘slash is against the RULES!!1!1!!’ mentality seemed to persist for a good long while in the star wars fandom, because even online fic for the prequels would sometimes have, in addition to the ‘it’s not mine! please don’t sue me!’ disclaimers, rather *terrifying* (esp. for young me) warnings on them

like 

‘we can’t promise you that lucasfilm won’t legally go after you if they find out you read this’ 

type warnings

honestly, the way that fans are clamoring for CANON GAY STAR WARS  characters now is…really sort of amazing and wonderful to me.