Daria Wars?

Hiergargo posted "Trent vs. the Non-Bohemian Lanes" on PPMB.

A slight diversion from the usual. I went to one of the Daria fan sites this AM, and the web administrator stated that it was time for a one month rest.

Why? Two reasons: first, when asking for permission to post fan work, many of the people contacted blatantly refused. One person gave the excuse that "(X) is the only REAL Daria fan site" as an excuse. Another reason was that the site was under assault not only by computer attack, but from nastygrams from some right-wing group that wanted the administrator to get rid of all adult works on the sites. The administrator stated that he had been called just about every name except a son of God.

The post isn't there any more (or is carefully hidden), but my comments on the above.

1) I think that the problem with Daria fandom is that unlike your job or school or any real world social group, Daria fandom is more or less a random sampling of humanity. School, work, and informal groups have a way of excluding the type of people that we call "dicks".

In "flesh space" we can ignore those people or have them removed from the group. Usually, they don't even GET to the group. They're not hired, they flunk out, are arrested, whatever. In "cyber space", we can't ignore those people, and one comes to the conclusion quite quickly in any fandom that one is dealing with a bunch of sociopathic personalities.

So is Daria fandom chock full of nuts? Probably as much as any fandom. It only seems like everyone is nutty since we usually go out of our way to avoid crazy people in real life, and it is a shocker to be exposed to those people. Already, a notorious fan has been banned from SFMB for out of bounds behavior. I don't think that Daria fandom is worse or better than any other fandom, save for the fact that there is the disturbing tendency now for people to move from real names to "handles" in order for their personal privacy/safety to be maintained.

One class below the sociopaths, we find the "dicks". Many Second Fans are ASTONISHED, nay, HORRIFIED to find out that some BNFs and First Fans are...well..."dicks". Trust me, it happens. You try to talk to these people, and they unload both guns on you. These people are still struggling with some third-grade trauma, and they're going to take it out on you if they think they have an easy target.

Many "dicks" are still able to function in society. There are many of them on message boards all over Daria fandom -- we won't name names; trust me, you know who they are already. And some of our best authors and biggest BNFs are "dicks". And they will snap at you just for the hell of it.

Just smile, say, "thank you", and move on with your life. My two cents.

2) As for the cyberassault, I'd love to know the name of that group, so at least Daria fandom could hold them in collective and individual derision. But that's as may be.

A lot of Second Fans forget how sensitive the idea of "adult" works are. For the longest time in fandom, there WERE no erotic fan works. When "Ragged Denim" came out (T. Wilde and Ivanova), there was a firestorm of controversy. D.DEBBS ended up isolating herself; I don't know the story about that but the Martin Pollard faction won that fight.

When myself (and other fans) created "Lawndale after Dark", there was another firestorm. We KNEW there would be a firestorm. That's why it was created. Wouter Jaegers could write stuff like "Let's Be in Love" (Quinn/Stacy non-erotic slash) and there was the genre of fiction I am forced to call "rapefic" (character is raped, becomes a better person for it), but boobs and wangs were somehow out of bounds.
I thought that quite prudish; I am still pleased with the results.

Now, there's erotica all over, particularly at SFMB and The Daria-Jane Conspiracy. No one notices, or cares. However, I will tell another tale out of fandom.

At one time, Fanfiction.net used to host "R (or X)" rated works. You could get erotica on fanfiction.net, as well as Harry Potter fan fiction.

Xing, the webmaster of Fanfiction.net, was getting a lot of complaints. First, from those who felt like the X-rated work was leading fans to hell. Second, from places like JK Rowling's watchdogs zealously out to defend copywright.

So Xing did three things:
a) yanked all of the dirty stuff,
b) pulled all literature based fanfiction
c) pulled all reality show fan fiction (at one time you could find Ryan Stiles/Colin Mochrie slash at the "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" site -- I swear to your deity I am not killing).

People went wild over Xing's decision. I think I was the only one who understood it. Xing had a site to run, and he needed to keep the site safe. There wasn't that much erotic out there, he didn't need the lawsuits, and he found that slash stories involving real people crossed moral lines. So he killed the stories. He kept the site alive, more secure, more free of lawsuits.

If someone had to pull erotic stories from a Daria fan site, that would be fine. However, I hope someone would put up another site where those stories could be stored.

Finally, there's a way to deal if you want to post your stories on a Daria fan fiction web site and don't care if some other webmaster wants to post the stories. Just put this at the end:

This work remains the property of its original creator. The original creator agrees to grant any website a non-commercial license to publish and display this Work or to publish, display or otherwise use the Work in a non-commercial manner, with the condition that the work not be substantially altered from its original form. Sites which reprint this work acknowledge that the original creator retains all moral rights to the Work, includuing the absolute right to ask that the work be removed from any website. "Daria" and other characters which appear are creations of MTV/Viacom, and all rights are reserved.