Thats Ral And Tomik

Seriously AO3? I just wanted to get to the next part of the series (the last part ended with a cliffhanger that would get solved in the next part. That's the only thing I remember from when I read it 5 years ago)

Please AO3, get back online. I just wanted to finish my bedtime reading :(

wtf?! cool.

You know what I don’t get?  When fanfic authors apologize for long chapters.  It’s like?  You gave me bonus content, for free, and you’re sorry about it?  Bruh.  I have already named my firstborn after you.  Dude.

not to be a dick but imo the mcu will always be fundamentally unsatisfying to me compared to the comics in part bc of how much it lacked in avengers team development

like speaking as an iron man fan i will always be bitter that

1) tony stark didn’t qualify at first like um excuse me? tony stark was a founding member of this bitch in the comics like i do not Care for your ultimates inclinations, you could at least have had him unquestionably be part of the team from the get-go lmfao mcu miss me with this,

2) the fact that tony didn’t qualify at first not ever being addressed in any explicit way as a Tragic Mistake like. honestly i’m just mad tony had to Prove His Heroism ™ to be taken seriously when he’d already proven his heroism before plenty of times,

3) i know everyone digs being salty and petty these days but tbh the fact that “does steve even care about tony?” is even a topic of debate is just. Wrong. i do not give a flying FUCK to who your notps and otps are i do not Care, what i care about is the mcu doing justice to the iron man legacy and steve and tony’s relationship is unquestionably one of the strongest and – yes – most passionate in the comics and let me tell you this WE WERE ROBBED OF ITS DEVELOPMENT,

4) the near non-existence of the general fucking concept of the avengers listening to tony and respecting what he has to say in times of crisis like lol. also the general concept of giving him the benefit of the doubt (like he was shown giving to thor while he’s arguing with steve during the aou log scene, like he’s implied to have done regarding wanda)???? yeah,

5) mcu you are honest to FUCKING GOD wasting the big trifecta (tony, thor, steve). you’re wasting them. you’re fucking wasting them @@@@ mcu for the love of fuck fix this. mcu where are my Big Three combo battle moves. mcu where’s thor lending himself as middle ground when tony and steve start arguing. mcu where’s tony and thor sharing the weight of their space experiences. mcu where’s my intense close-ups of thor, tony, and steve’s reactions when they see one another in danger during battles. mcu where’s steve’s “TONY, YOU GAVE ME A HOME” stuff. mcu where’s thor’s “tony you’re one of the most noble men i’ve ever known” stuff. mcu where’s tony’s “steve and thor, you’re my idea of higher power because of the things you inspire me to be” stuff. jesus christ we were ROBBED what a WASTE,

6) no visible captain america memorabilia rooms in tony’s towers/avengers facilities? *deep breath* FAAAAAAAAAAAKE,

7) (and before anyone hits me up like “but in the mcu tony has no reason to ever have been a cap fan bc of his dad” or whatever let me just tell you: a) my thoughts are way too 3D for that sort of black-and-whiteness but ok, regardless, b) if the price of sticking howard into mcu steve’s backstory was to finish the possibility of adult cap!fanboy tony actually like, welcoming steve to the team when steve wakes up in the present, then that was NEVER a price i was willing to pay),

8) natasha only called him shellhead in a movie that was So Bad that we barely even got to register the fact that tony was called shellhead in the mcu. what sort of fucking CRIME

9) someone at some point has got to call him Golden Avenger or i’m gonna have to quit,

10) “stark” “rogers” yeah yeah i get it you’re emotionally stunted men hurr hurr durr whatever let tony call him STEVE to his face before i get even more pissed and start straight up demanding the comic canon GOOD MORNING BELOVED,

11) whatever twisted mcu bullshit has led people to conclude that the avengers – shining beacon of light in 616 tony’s life, his legacy, part of his family, his most passionate affair – is the most unhealthy unrewarding thing in mcu tony’s life like jesus christ THE AVENGERS WERE SUPPOSED TO BE TONY’S PRIDE AND JOY MCU WHY DID YOU DEPRIVE ME,

12) you seriously expect me to take an ENTIRE mcu tony run where he doesn’t wear a superhero logo (not his own) t-shirt AT LEAST ONCE? jesus

End OTW Racism: A Call To Action

A fan protest against the lack of action from the OTW on addressing issues of harassment and racism on AO3 and within the organization

This is a Call To Action for Fans of Color and Allies

AO3 has acknowledged that they have a harassment & racism problem that its parent organization, the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), needs to address. Currently, people can use AO3 to harass others through fanworks, comments, and tags. Just a few examples include: racist Untamed “spitefic” that used anti-Indigenous slurs and was written specifically to lash out at fans of color; a Transformer fic that used its Black-coded character to reenact George Floyd’s murder in July 2020; someone naming a fandom scholar who criticized their Nazi omegaverse fic in the tags of the fic specifically to incite harassment to the scholar; writers using racial slurs against commenters who pointed out racism in their hockey fic; and so much more.

In June 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, the OTW committed to addressing these issues. It has been nearly three years and they have not yet implemented any of the changes they promised, other than a blocking/muting tool that was already in development before 2020. We need to hold the OTW accountable to their own promises. (See the section further down on “Why Are We Doing This” for even more detail.)

As fans, together, we are powerful. We are organizing to protest the lack of action on promises made by the Organization for Transformative works to deal with issues of racism and harassment on their platform, Archive of Our Own.

We call on fans to do any or all of the following actions any time between May 17 to 31, 2023 to send a message to AO3 and OTW that we will hold them to their promises.

On AO3

Change the title of ten (or more!) of your most recent or most popular fanworks to include ‘End Racism in the OTW’ in the beginning, and provide a link to this post in your summary or first/top creator’s note

Post a new fanwork any time between May 17th to 31st with “End Racism in the OTW” either as the title or at the beginning of the title. The fanwork does not have to be long - it can be a 100-word fic, a quick sketch, a podfic of a ficlet, a 20-second vid/edit, a short piece of meta, etc. In the summary or first/top creator’s note, provide a link to this post

If updating any WIPs with a new chapter, add ‘End Racism in the OTW’ to the title and provide a link back to this post in your summary or first/top author’s note

Update your AO3 icon using the profile pic graphic in our Social Media Toolkit

Plan to maintain these changes until May 31, 2023, or longer if you wish

Send a message to the OTW asking for an update on their 2020 commitments!

For Readers: leave encouraging comments on fanworks with the "End Racism in the OTW" title to show your support of this initiative.

On tumblr

Reblog this Call to Action with the tag #End OTW Racism

Update your profile pics and banners using the graphics in our Social Media Toolkit

Follow this account for updates and signal boost our posts

On Twitter

Follow @/EndOTWRacism (remove the backslash) and signal boost our pinned tweet

Update your profile pics and banners using our graphics, and change your display name to include #EndOTWRacism

Use sample tweets and graphics from our Social Media Toolkit to tweet about your fanworks, and use the hashtag #EndOTWRacism

Help us make this a long-term campaign - sign up to help with other anti-racism projects and future actions!

What Do We Want?

Since their June 2020 statement, OTW has been working on updating their Terms of Service (TOS) to address racist and bigoted harassment, but with little transparency and only the vaguest of updates. It has been three years since their commitment to this update - we want to see the results of their work implemented in the next 6-12 months. Their TOS updates and complementary policies should include:

Harassment policies that can be regularly updated to address both on-site harassment and off-site coordinated harassment of AO3 users, with updated protocols for the Policy & Abuse Team to ensure consistent and informed resolutions of abuse claims

A content policy on abusive (extremely racist and extremely bigoted) content; by abusive, we are talking about fanworks that are intentionally used to spread hate and harassment, not those that accidentally invoke racist or other bigoted stereotypes

These points are not particularly new and are not our own innovation; please refer to Stitch's article written over two years ago, asking for several of these very things.

OTW has also already committed to various process-based actions for longer-term works towards centering antiracism, including hiring a Diversity Consultant. The last update that OTW published said that the consultant would be hired within the next five years (after already having had three years to work on it since their original commitment). That is not soon enough. We want to see the following process-based actions implemented:

Hiring a Diversity Consultant within the next 3-6 months

Committing to a policy of transparency on this topic, with quarterly updates on the progress of these projects including challenges and their plan for overcoming those challenges. These quarterly updates should be published on OTW News page and newsletters, not solely discussed in Board meetings

Why Are We Doing This?

16 years ago, Astolat famously published her manifesto calling for a fandom Archive of One’s Own. In that time, AO3 has grown to be a central pillar of fandom, likely far outstripping its founders’ original vision. It is more than just an archive now; it is a central hub of the modern fannish experience. AO3 and the OTW must continue to grow and evolve with fandom over time to remain a healthy and functioning pillar of fandom. To that end, there are several areas in which the organization, as it admits itself, is lacking.

In June 2020, in the wake of the George Floyd protests and the uprising of the Black Lives Matter Movement, The OTW published a “This Week in Fandom” referencing the works of Dr. Rukmini Pande and Stitch, among others in which they discussed ‘making change for a better society’ through ‘conversations about race and racism’. In response, Dr. Pande and Stitch submitted a letter to the OTW calling for a more formal public statement than an offhand reference in a News Roundup that only served to call for thoughts and discussion without any indication the organization intended to do anything, policy wise, to address the issues being raised.

Eventually, the organization did remove the references to the works of Dr. Pande and Stitch and then made an official statement on the issue of racism within the organization and AO3. In it, they identified several things they would be prioritizing to combat harassment and benefit users. Some of those have been implemented (notably those that were already under development). However as of this writing, little else has been done especially in regards to:

Improving admin tools for the Policy & Abuse team

Reassessing the current mandatory archive warnings with the possibility of implementing others

And, most importantly, reviewing the Terms of Service (TOS) to allow the Policy & Abuse team to address harassment that is currently not covered by the existing TOS

By their own admission, the current tools and policies of the OTW are not sufficient to deal with issues of harassment and racism.

Several people who were involved in the founding of the OTW, including previous OTW Board members and staff on the original OTW Content Policy Committee, acknowledge that the founding of the OTW in 2008 and early board iterations failed us as a fandom by not doing enough, and by not even considering the way racism is perpetuated in fannish spaces, despite a long history of racism in fandom.

It has been nearly three years since the original commitment by the organization with little visible, measurable progress on these three crucial issues and a complete lack of transparency on where they are in regards to even beginning to deal with these issues. In fact, in Q&As, it was heavily implied by a member of the board that those calling for OTW to deal with issues of racism (which OTW had already acknowledged as a problem!) were not really fans but outside agitators.

This has cast significant doubt on the organization's sincerity and commitment to their stated goals, and on their position as leaders of a central fan tent-pole. Fans of color are not outsiders. They are right here, members of our community, and they are being harassed and targeted and driven out while space and platforms are being given to racists.

We, as fans of color and our allies, find the current state of fandom and current actions (and lack thereof) unacceptable. Fandom is our space, all of ours. We, as a fandom, have a right to a racism-free space and have a duty to our fellow fans to create that space. Unlike so much of the world, this is a space we can control and make better. It is a space we must make better. To read even more about this movement, visit our FAQs.

Fanon is like:

“I know all the Robins! Smiley, Angry, Smarty and Stabby! Sometimes Girly is there too!”

That’s…that’s literally it. You did not lie.

Hank, why do you have a stark computer? I thought you would've made your own.

Hank: I use a Stark sometimes because I know Tony spies on it, and it’s fun to type weird things into google and watch him freak out and try to decifer what it means. Recently, I’ve been researching “What to do when you have romantic feelings towards shrubs.” Tony didn’t look me in the eye on our last skype call. It’s pretty great.

You know, Hitler was obviously a big douche for what he did to the Jews. I think history would judge him differently, however, if he had just narrowed his focus to trannies. I could get behind that sort of thing.

Ok, wow. Yeah. I'm gonna go with wow.

So you know how I have this thing where I respond to anon hate with interesting historical facts? Yeah, that thing. See, that thing works because normally I get anon hate that's directed at me specifically. So I can brush it off and give y'all interesting history and everybody wins except the person insulting me.

But this isn't like that. I mean, sure, this is horrifically offensive to me, since I'm both Jewish and trans. But it's not just hatred towards me; it's hatred towards every other trans or Jewish person.

So, after some thought (by which I mean staring at the ceiling and saying "what the fuck" for several minutes and then cuddling my dogs for a while), I've decided to address the situation as follows:

Instead of me providing an interesting historical fact to make this anon feel exactly as pointless and irrelevant as they are, I'm throwing this thread open to every trans or Jewish follower who wants to add some historical facts. They can be facts about trans things, or Jewish things, or facts about bylaws or bog bodies or bridge construction. Whatever you want. If you're trans or Jewish or both, add some facts.

I'll start:

The Talmud (for those of you who don't know, the Talmud is a collection of Jewish legal commentary, opinions, and rulings and is essentially a guidebook to Jewish law and practice and also the Jewish tendency to argue over every goddam thing) recognizes 6 distinct gender categories.

The first two are the classic male and female (zachar and nekevah is Hebrew). But after that, it gets interesting.

The next gender category is "androginus," a word borrowed from Greek. It describes someone who has both male and female characteristics. After much argument, the Talmud more or less concludes that a person in this category is obligated to perform some male religious duties and some female religious duties, and that the details are determined by individual context. For instance, an androginus may or may not be alone with women (something a woman may do and a man may not), depending on the person and the precise situation. Essentially, in modern terms, an androginus is analogous to a bigender person.

Then, there's the tumtum. I know that sounds ridiculous in English, but I promise it's a totally normal sounding word in Hebrew. Tumtumim (yeah, that's the plural, and again, I promise it doesn't sound silly in Hebrew) are people whose gender characteristics are unclear in some way. A tumtum is different from an androginus because an androginus is acknowledged to inhabit multiple genders, while a tumtum has only one gender, but that gender is uncertain to observers. In modern terms, the tumtum might be analogous to someone whose gender presentation is ambiguous or who is questioning their gender.

The last two categories are the saris and the ay'lonit. A saris is a person who is identified as male at birth, but develops female characteristics later in life. An ay'lonit is the exact reverse (an afab person developing male characteristics later). These terms are generally understood to refer to intersex people, but there is an interesting exception. A saris can be someone who had a penis but who had it removed for some reason. This means that the status of saris (and that of ay'lonit by extension) can include those whose gender is altered by choice. So, saris and ay'lonit can apply, in modern terms, to both certain categories of intersex people and to binary trans people.

I personally know of multiple Jewish trans people who have started using some of these terms to describe themselves, and I love it. Would the rabbis of the 1st through 8th century recognize the way we use these terms now? Probably not. But hey, I don't need their permission, because:

For this commandment which I command you this day, is not concealed from you, nor is it far away.... it is very close to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can fulfill it. (Devarim 30: 11-14)