[Amalthia]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

Why do people have to sort themselves out into "men" and "women"? Even in something that should be as inclusive as fan fiction, where we should be dealing with minds, not bodies, some people have to make a distinction. Are we reading the story, or staring through the computer at the person behind the keyboard? Why can't things be made for people?

Not sure if you noticed or not but almost everything made for "people" is actually made for men. Good writers do tend to write stories that do appeal to a wide audience.

That's a big reason why OTW bothers me: they want only a specific type of writer, and in large part that type is defined not only by what the person chooses to write (media slash) but by how that person happened to be born (female).

I'm not sure where you're getting your information but I've never seen anything like that. There have been discussion about fan fiction and legal issues and that because slash is so obviously not at all like the canon it may be slightly more protected if there was a lawsuit. From what I understood Gen stories are at more risk than ship/slash fics. I could be wrong on that it's been a while since I've read up on this topic.

It's particularly offensive when I see someone say, in effect, "we've been mistreated, so now it's our turn to mistreat other people" --

I'm not sure that's what the women are saying. No men are being mistreated. They are equally able to create their own fan fiction accounts and post gen/het/slash fics.

I think you're equating not being paid attention to with mistreatment. At least that's what it seems like to me. Most of the organizations posts that I've read seem to want to include all fandom and they don't specify gender of preferred fans or their preferences for Gen/Het/Slash/Femslash.

It makes me highly uncomfortable to see an organization say that female RPF slash writers are "real" fanfic writers but male literary gen writers are not.

I've never seen anyone I know that volunteers on the OTW say something like that. You'd really have to cite your source on this one.

Furthermore, one person who volunteers on the archive who may believe this way does not reflect on an entire organization. There are literally hundreds of fans who've volunteers to help create the OTW archive and each person has their own viewpoints and opinions. But I saw no where on their official statements any endorsement of any kind of fan fic being more legit than another.

And yes, they have presented themselves as the face/voice of fanfic; if necessary, I can go dig up examples. If they were just an organization, an archive, I wouldn't care; those, in all forms, have been popping up like mushrooms since the first fanfic was written. It's when they try to define what fanfic is, and what a fanfic writer is -- and when that definition is at odds with what many fanfic writers believe it is, whether it includes them or not -- that I take issue.

I think it's very important to have definitions because at some point fan fiction could be legally challenged and so their language has to be clear and it's important to state up front the OTW's position which states that fan fiction is transformative and deserves protection.

Another consideration is that defined terms make it clear what fan fiction is to outsiders who may not know what fan fiction is.

The archive is basically trying to save fan works from being lost and to give a central hosting location that's owned by fans so that we can't be given the boot from webhosts who do not approve of slash fan fiction.

As a gen writer you've probably never had to worry that some bigot would complain about your story to your webhost which would convince them it's better to delete your website than to investigate to see if the story in question truly had questionable content. Many stories have been lost when author's websites were deleted for hosting fiction that contained adult male/male sexual relations.

The archive is there to prevent that from happening again.