On the subject of problematic stories, fanfiction archive policies, and “(x) fans DNI"…

Here’s my analysis on… well, how a visceral moral/ethical response can never fully work in tandem with the practical considerations of policy and enforcement.

Yes, there are some stories that I find irredeemable, stories so upsetting that I would genuinely not want the writers of them to ever interact with me. Mostly these are stories about truly horrible acts– things like rape, child molesting, domestic abuse, racist hate-crimes, genocide–

–and I don’t just mean any story that mentions or depicts these acts in any way, because lots of stories can talk about those concepts without making me hate the author or wish the story would disappear.

No, I’m specifically referring to stories that portray these things in a way that strongly suggests the author likes them… a lot, to the point of probably wanting to commit these acts in real life.

And yes, there are some stories that do convey that feeling quite strongly, without much room for other interpretations. I’m not gonna claim that every story has the right to a charitable interpretation. Some people do just… write to express really hateful, toxic thoughts without any redeeming quality about them.

And yes, I do think that there are certain stories that "All Reasonable People” would agree fit in that category.

Not many of them. The vast majority of stories have some room for sympathy. And even for the worst ones, reasonable people can disagree a lot on just what should be done with such stories. But I’d say that for those few, bottom-of-the-barrel worst stories, those same reasonable people would at least be in agreement that the writer is someone they would not want to ever be around, and that the stories do nothing much except spread hate and encourage hurtful ideas.

Practically speaking, though– just how could you structure the rules and rule-enforcement of a fiction site to exclude those stories specifically?

For instance. Say I’m a site-owner writing my terms of service and trying to make it clear there’s no tolerance for rape or abuse, underage sex, racism or sexism or homophobia…

Well, for one thing, there’s all the technical detail of how you define every one of those things. And that’s its own whole set of challenges, which have been explored in many many other essays. Do stories about sex-pollen or mating cycles count as rape? Can a coffeeshop AU romance between customer and employee ever truly be consensual, with that power dynamic where the employee knows she can get fired if a spurned customer makes a retaliatory complaint to a manager? And how clearly do you have to show characters planning out healthy boundaries to stop BDSM play from being abuse? Is it abusive to ship characters who have had fantasy or sci-fi battles with each other? In a world that has magical beings, robots and clones and space aliens of all kinds, what even counts as a race? And in that same diverse setting, is a character’s age defined by number of years, mental maturity level, appearance, or some combination thereof?

It’s all been analyzed into oblivion, without ever reaching an overall consensus.

But even on the topics where there is consensus– even regarding scenarios that that are very obviously rape or abuse or racist violence or child molestation in the consensus of All Reasonable People– even there, how would I word the policy so I’m not prohibiting critical discussion of those topics?

If I just say, for instance, “stories can’t have child sex abuse or racial hate crimes in them” …

…then, I’d be making it technically against the rules to post a story in which, say, a traumatized character talks to a therapist about their childhood experience of being a victim of sexual or racial violence.

And of course I don’t want to ban that kind of story! Being free to talk about traumatic experiences is vitally important. Being free to show fictional characters having that kind of talk can also be vitally important.

And, personally, the degree of detail or explicitness also isn’t what I’d try and regulate. The gist of the rule I’d want to write would be something along the lines of, “I don’t want any stories that show these things and glorify them, eroticize or romanticize them; that portray them in a positive way.”

But this rule– like most definitions and rules, honestly– cannot be written in a way that inherently, explicitly forbids all the stories I want to keep out, while inherently, explicitly allowing all those I want to allow.

Language simply can’t do that.

Apart from rules written in programming language for governing the activities of software, rules never work “inherently” and “explicitly,” anyway. They work in conjunction with human rule-enforcers.

The closest I could get to my goal, here, would be to use something like that vaguely written rule, “No stories that glorify, eroticize or romanticize these things,” and then have a team of moderators interpret it on a case-by-case basis.

A case-by-case basis is the most high-effort way to enforce anything. But for a LOT of things, it’s the only way that comes close to working. Anything that can only be defined as “I know it when I see it!” …has to be regulated by people knowing it when they see it.

And yes, if all those people had the same general common sense that I consider myself to have, and enough time and freedom to exercise it– yes, I think they would be able to weed out all the stories that “All Reasonable People” would consider so toxic as to have no redeeming value.

But two big problems here:

1. This would require the moderators to read every story-- or at least to read and make a decision on every story that got enough reports from users who felt it broke the rules. Unless the site was very small, this would be a huge undertaking, requiring many hours of labor from the mods.
2. Unless the site was very small, they would not be able to do it without also weeding out some stories that do have redeeming value.

Because they would have to draw the line somewhere.

And with a large enough population of site members, a large enough team of moderators, and a large enough volume of stories posted, they could not draw that line consistently.

There would, inevitably, be complaints from all directions– writers of all walks of life making accusations of bias, citing specific stories that got allowed, and contrasting them to other specific stories that got taken down.

There would be bias. There would be unfairness. It’s not avoidable. And no matter who you are and what your tastes in fiction may be, it would, without fail, happen to some things that you think it shouldn’t happen to.

Now, depending on your tastes, you may feel this would be a fair tradeoff for a site that successfully kept out most or all of the fiction you consider the worst.

But, so far, that has not been the case with any big fanfiction site.

On every large site that bans certain types of fanfiction identified on a case-by-case basis, there is widespread dissatisfaction with how it is or isn’t enforced. It just isn’t possible to do that kind of enforcement, on that kind of scale, and keep any large percentage of people satisfied.

Even AO3, which has very few rules of that sort, still gets its share of complaints. It does have some rules– no monetizing fanfiction, no plagiarism, no doxxing– and those are, to some degree, things that have to be interpreted and identified on a case-by-case basis by individual volunteer moderators.

And even with these comparatively simple decisions, there is a limit to how much of that they can get done in a day, and how consistent they can be at it… and, therefore, a limit to how much of the userbase they can satisfy.

And if you want to understand why they won’t make more rules about the content of the fiction–

–just try to imagine, for a few moments, adding all that, on top of the current enforcement tasks those volunteers already do.

Imagine the logistics of it, the details. The work of reading and categorizing everything that gets reported. The dilemma of where to draw the line in each and every case, without those decisions forming any unfair pattern of inconsistency.

It could be done, maybe.

But it hasn’t been done successfully, on that scale, ever.

If you were in their position, would you want to take that risk?