While this article is interesting, as Courtney Milan pointed out, it's not clear there's any knotty legal problem underneath - the publisher admitted the lawsuit was unfounded, and more generally, shared tropes/ideas are decently well agreed to be not subject to copyright. (I don't know what the actual first work on Omegaverse was, but if it was on a copyright-disavowing site like AO3 that makes it even smoother.)
It does seem to point to a particular DMCA reform idea that i could see getting traction.
Maybe they should call it a throbbing legal question?
The New York Times won't let me read that, because I'm not mature enough or because I don't subscribe.
So, I googled "Omegaverse." That's fucked up.
I am interested by this, because I believe that there's a growing sense among the public generally that ideas and knowledge either are or morally should be legally protected as property, and I hate that a lot. People being upset about 'plagiarism' in contexts where they mean something much more like 'this work was definitely produced by someone who had learned things from prior work.'
On the porn front, it's kind of fascinating what sorts of things are appealing to a broad enough range of people to be popular. Under Rule 34, there's someone who's into anything you can possibly think of, but the stuff in the article apparently has widespread appeal.
It makes me long for the days when it was straightforward dinosaur-human sex.
Based on a quick review of a wikipedia page, these people are masturbating to status differences and the humiliation of the weak. That doesn't seem good at all.
I mean, I get that there's a whole thing about that in the non-fictional (less-fictional?) universe, but imagining a world where the status differences are based on biological stuff instead of socially-constructed bullshit seems like the "second time as farce" version of nobles claiming God gave them the nice house and all the good farms.
5- A good question for this story (Trigger warning: no sex or fetishes)- if academics are ultimately going to publish their research, even if they file a patent first*, what does it mean to keep secrets from foreign rivals? Of course they charged him with lying to federal agents not any sort of espionage, and given Trump's deep interest in the injustice of such charges I'm sure he has nothing to worry hahahahaha never mind.
*And of course the whole point of patents is they are public and are supposed to let other people copy your work after a limited period.
When it comes to disclosure in academia, not reporting $50,000/month income is a very big deal, espionage or not, and that kind of lie on his funding applications for U.S. grants (plus on the disclosure for every journal article he has ever written) should be treated seriously. Plus, it's almost certainly a millionaire who is cheating on his taxes. Fuck him.
||
Support for Abe's cabinet slumped to 29%, the lowest since he took office in 2012, in a poll published Monday by the Asahi newspaper. Another survey published by the Mainichi newspaper showed approval had plunged 13 percentage points in less than four weeks to 27%, according to a poll released by the Mainichi newspaper Saturday. Any level below 30% is traditionally seen as a danger zone for the government. Disapproval surged 19 percentage points to 64% in the Mainichi survey.|>
The real treasure is the airlift that gets us out of harm's way.
I am interested by this, because I believe that there's a growing sense among the public generally that ideas and knowledge either are or morally should be legally protected as property, and I hate that a lot.
I also hate it a lot. Ideas are going from being public goods to being private property. That's no way to run a creative economy.
I was just talking about this to someone at the other place! I find the whole thing interesting because I read a fair amount of shapeshifter urban fantasy/romance, and had never heard of the omegaverse *or* knotting!
The real treasure is the pedants that educate us along the way.
On a quick googling, sounds like someone thought the sex system from The Player of Games induced insufficiently fucked up sub/dom relationships.
Why can't people just be satisfied looking at the genitals of attractive strangers?
One of the more popular (it must be, since I know about it) Harry Potter fanfic trilogies is about James Potter, Harry's son, going to Hogwarts. This came out before J. K. Rowling wrote her play about James Potter going to Hogwarts, what with time travel and all. I don't think the author of the fanfic can complain, but I think that a curious series of events.
You're implying that Rowling plagiarized a fanfic on the grounds that she wrote a story about Harry Potter's kid going to literally the only existing school in the England she wrote about, because there was a fanfic about the same thing? Would you have called it plagiarism if she wrote a story about Harry Potter's kid breathing air or eating food, if a fanfic writer had gotten there first?
See, folk conceptions of intellectual property have gotten insanely expansive.
Yes, but how did she know Harry's kid's last name in advance?
22: James is the name of Harry's father. Kind of an obvious move that would independently occur to a fanfic writer and Rowling.
I was making a very dumb joke about the "potter" part.
I think the kid's name is in the last Harry Potter book, isn't it? (And of course Heebie was kidding.)
I guess we're supposed to listen to the last installment of the original series when we head to Montana later this summer, and to be honest, I'm dreading it. The second to last one really irritated me with how slow and plodding it was. I wish these books would all be rewritten by a charming writer, and just keep the story intact.
On the drive here, we listened to the first 2/3 of Born a Crime. I really found his childhood riveting, although his adolescence seems a little more standard. But on the whole I'm enjoying it a lot.
27: Maybe I can find an abridged version to slip in, instead, and no one will notice.
I'm sort of surprised that our kids are not particularly enthralled with the series. I assumed it was completely universal for kids, but I think they're tolerating it about as well as I am. I don't think Hawaii actually finished the last book, for example.
I never liked them much. I think they got huge as kind of a fad, and the fad lasted a really long time what with it being a seven book series and then the eight successful movies. Once it's not a focus of cultural excitement, the books aren't that great.
There's lots of camping in the last book.
Yes, but how did she know Harry's kid's last name in advance?
Harry Potter has two kids: James and Albus. The play by JK Rowling is about the younger one, Albus.
And one took Ginny's name, so it's Albus Severus Weasley.
Anyway, I liked the books just fine, but the last one was a bit slow in places and kind of implausible in others.
The third book was the best which is when we and probably most of the world started following it in depth. It was a cultural phenomenon with the launch parties- midnight lines for a mere book? My word! I don't know if it was a fad so much as people enjoying a shared thing that can't be replicated when it's not new to everyone at the same time. The last one is very video game like with all the quests to find this to find that to let them reach there. The play wasn't great on reading but as a live play I thought it was amazingly well done mixing special effects with live action. The plot- meh, time travel? Really? Notwithstanding my praise for book 3 which literally used the same device.
34- Are you trying to bring down the wrath of the fanbase on you?
SPOILER ALERT!
********************************
I don't remember it all that well, but I remember thinking that J.K. was not at all subtle in portraying Harry Potter as a Christ-figure in the last book.
And so that Harry dies and saves the world and also gets to get married and have kids and lead a normal life makes for a strange inversion of The Last Temptation of Christ
The people I know are still fucking ga-ga over Harry Potter. I know someone who wrote a whole published book of literary analysis of Snape.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Snape was an asshole.
35 Weren't they all a bit implausible in places?
I'm willing to accept that a certain percentage of British children can levitate things with the power of their mind.
Teenage boys have things levitate all the time with barely any thought at all.
xelA has been reading the Harry Potter books. This is a massive breakthrough for him. He's a decent enough reader, but there's a big difference between _Danny the Champion of the World_ which is where he was at the start of our current lockdown, a couple of months back, and reading the entirety of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets completely unaided by either parent. He's now about 1/3 of the way through the Prisoner of Azkaban.
I've never had any interest in them myself, and secretly (or not so secretly) judge adults who read them (for themselves, not for their kids).
The Calabat is obsessed with Harry Potter. He's through the third book and half of playtime now seems to involve penalizing Slytherin.
I far prefer her to Philip Pullman because she is so much less preachy and keeps in better control of her material. The first Dark Material book was absolutely great, though, and some of the ones from before he was famous are also pretty good. But my standards in children's literature have risen sharply since I started reading it out to my poor mother. E. Nesbit is tremendous fun.
Spoilers below (but surely there's no one here who would care.). I'm still so angry about HP7 on so many levels. The whole point of the series is that Harry realizes that he doesn't want to be an Auror and that his place is as Professor of Defense Against the Dark Arts at Hogwarts! Also Snape spends all that time getting back into spying on Voldemort including killing Dumbledore for no payoff whatsoever? What was the point? Just to give him a chance to whine about how he never got over his high school crush? Grow up! Also how is randomly camping somewhere in the whole fucking UK a plan to find a sword? And last, but certainly not least, maybe one of the kids doesn't marry the person they're dated in high school?
I wonder if there is HP fanfic where knotting is involved? Actually I don't really. Of course there is.
40: The premise of her book is that Snape was not an asshole, but was misunderstood. I actually think it's more interesting if he is an asshole, but he does the right thing because it's the right thing.
46: The drop over the Dark Materials trilogy is one of the most dramatic I've ever seen. The first one was amazing, the second one mediocre, and the third one so irritating I sold the books to a used book store. I never told my kids about them to spare them the disappointment.
47: Honestly, have you spent much time around kids that age? It's exhausting.
re: 46
Interesting. My wife has just read the Dark Materials trilogy, and was grumbling about the quality of the last one, too. I read it too long ago to remember although I do remember the general payoff not being worth the effort.
I always get Philip Pullman mixed up with Bill Paxton.
And so that Harry dies and saves the world and also gets to get married and have kids and lead a normal life makes for a strange inversion of The Last Temptation of Christ
Harry Christ can get married and have kids and lead a normal life, he's an Anglican saviour.
48- I believe the incantation you're looking for is Engorgio.
Not even trying to be subtle:
The Engorgement Charm (Engorgio), also known as Growing Charm, is a charm that causes the target to swell immensely.... If the caster attempts to engorge the target beyond a certain point it will violently explode.
They could make childbirth easier by shrinking the baby and heart surgery easier to expanding the patient.
My memory of the third book of the Pullman series is that there was basically an entire first-contact SF novel about aliens shaped like wheels that could have been cut out without losing anything relevant to the plot established in the previous two books.
I think maybe it was an ironic reversal of something C. S. Lewis did in one of his space trilogy novels (which somehow I have never read) but anyway it killed any momentum the book might have had.
57: yes. Completely pointless. And meant spending far too much time inside the head of an intensely boring character (the ex-nun) rather than the two interesting characters we had spent the preceding two books getting to know and like.
We used the wheels we were not the wheels. It's like you didn't even understand the point about self-consciousness. Stupid bipeds.
It's like you didn't even understand the point about self-consciousness.
I missed that day. What's the answer?
49.1: According to HP7 he's neither an asshole nor misunderstood, but instead a classic "nice guy."
I think "asshole who realized he had to the right thing" (i.e. 49.1) covers it better.
60 - sorry, was so bored by then that I apparently didn't retain much.
"Fuck, I'm a wizard-Nazi and will be killed if I openly quit."
If he were a wizarding nice guy, he would have just pulled a bunch of hair from her dead body, brewed polyjuice potion, and hired a prostitute.
Do we think there does or does not already exist a fanfic whose plot is roughly that of 67?
I'm a little afraid to google it, since I'd guess polyjuice-centered Snape fanfic is likely to be Hermione roleplaying.
We know she can make the potion, but I don't think she's attracted to Snape for his body.
OT: Is there any reason to favor a particular candidate in the PA primary for Auditor General?
Somebody's tape recorder just called to ask me to vote for them.
It looks like Snape/Harry fanfic is 3 times as popular as Snape/Hermione. So it's probably going to be Snape making a potion so he looks like Ginny.
Did the dog rescue people take back the woman's dog because they didn't want racists to have dogs or because they don't want people who dangle dogs in the air by their collar to have dogs?
I think she also had a long string of Instagram posts about the dog getting hurt repeatedly, which seems weird.
That kind of fits with her pattern of loudly announcing when she commits a crime.
71: Michael Lamb has our support, because LAMB AUDITS WOLF, then WOLF ATTACKS LAMB.
I kind of want to vote for him just because Trump is attacking his cousin or nephew or whatever. Also, state officials from this area are thin on the ground now.
Fanfic is so bizarre and confusing. Apparently Bucky Barnes/Captain America/Iron Man in the Omegaverse is the biggest OT3 in fanfic, but, and here's where it gets weird, Iron Man is the Omega? I don't think I understand the Omegaverse at all.
You'd probably have to read a bunch before it made any sense to you, which seems like a big investment just to avoid being puzzled.
8: To return to the porn part of the thread: My sense of a LOT of the porn kind of fanfic* is that it's about writing disguised women/women as men, either to be able to write characters who are woman-ish and have sex with men and it's not terrible or to be able to write the terribleness/ambiguity of sex with men at some distance. I think a lot of the omegaverse stuff isn't about eroticizing dominance and inequality so much as it's about imagining already-existing inequality and compulsion in a way which distances it and renders it less upsetting. This general "women disguised as men" thing is, IMO, why there aren't a lot of cis men who write fanfic and there's not much of a cis gay audience.
My opinion is not a popular one - it's considered impolitic to point out that cis gay men aren't very interested in this sort of porn even though it's nominally all about men having sex with men and this is because it's not actually particularly written about realistic gay characters; it's considered impolitic to say that porn is about anything except what gets people off; and it's considered impolitic to say that gender inequality really shapes how we experience desire rather than desire being some kind of truth which wells up in a non-Foucauldian way from within.
Anyway, I think that tropes like the omegaverse stuff and "male" pregnancy are in general not at all about men; they're about the way that it's much easier for women to experience sexual desire and sexual narratives when they don't have to think about the actually-existing conditions under which one womans. Thinking about actually existing womanhood is a buzzkill and gets in the way, sexually speaking; much better to write stories that capture some aspects of women's experience but that don't totally remind one of womanhood.
I think that especially for straight women, desire doesn't come into being in some kind of politically appropriate way; it's always going to come from an experience of domination and inequality and so to have any kind of desire is inevitably to negotiate those things.
*There's a great deal of fanfic that is not porn; more frustratingly, there's a lot of fanfic which is substantially plot but has enough porn that if you don't really want to read the porn it's irritating.
So a major point of Alpha/Omega in the Omegaverse is to indicate to the reader which character is intended as the stand-in for the female reader (namely, the Omega), much as age in Lesbian porn are intended to indicate to the watcher which character is intended as the stand-in for the male viewer (namely, the MILF)?
On balance, actually, I think that the pornier kind of fanfic is good and it reflects a distinct improvement over my youth, when quite a lot of sexual stuff was unofficial/unspeakable and women generally were not encouraged to think of and articulate their own desires. If you're basically a prude like me, it's a bit squicky and/or risible, but the fear of squick and risibility tends to make sexual things worse for women and AFAB people IMO.
I'm not well enough read in the area to be fixed on my opinion of it. I was just going off by reaction to a quick glance.
82: Not exactly, IMO. It's more like, "what if people who were not women experienced these things that women experience" or "what if I could isolate and describe these experiences common to women without having to do all the backstory of Being A Woman In The Real World". It's an SFnal distancing technique, except with porn.
I also think that a lot of yaoi/"gay" fanfic is about allowing women to write and identify with all characters, again without the various complexities and stressors of writing the real world. To be a sexually assertive woman is...well, let's say that even if you're incredibly good-looking, young and rich it comes with some serious difficulties. In porn, you can get around that by writing a porn world in which the woman is just accepted as sexually assertive, you can world-build until you have a satisfactory scenario...or you can write non-women people to identify with.
It's like, those wretched Stargate series are a fantasy about having meaningful work more than they're a fantasy about space, and lot of fanfic is as much a fantasy of equality as it's a fantasy of sex.
I always wondered why fanfic seemed to be 95% written by women and 95% consumed by women while containing 5% female characters. Frowner's analysis makes a lot of sense, though grounded in extreme pessimism.
But the Omegaverse is explicitly NOT about equality. The whole point is that Alphas and Omegas are not equal, in a heightened way that's similar to, but even more extreme than real world M/F inequality (the most transparent parallel being that only Omegas can get pregnant). That is, it's doing a very different thing from the more typical M/M fanfic that you're talking about in 85.
Sorry I just realized that 87 misreads 85 (that is, I missed that the first paragraph and the other two paragraphs were talking about very different things).
86: There's lot more straight pairings in fanfic than you think, although I'm not totally sure what the percentages are. (There's got to be some dissertation somewhere which could tell us.) It's just that it's easier to position the non-straight pairings as perverse, hence interesting. If you read a lot of, eg, Draco-Hermione fanfic, you're just some stupid girl who might as well read a Harlequin romance, and hence uninteresting; if you're reading something else, it's a lot easier to condemn.
Joanna Russ, famous and extremely respected feminist science fiction writer and critic, apparently wrote a whole bunch of Kirk/Spock fanfic, now locked up in the archive with the rest of her papers. Now that I think about it, I think I've cribbed a lot of "why fanfic" thoughts from a short essay she wrote, too.
Assuming that you are more in the market for light fantasy, extra Sherlock Holmes cases and "Stargate Atlantis but the indigenous people rise up" stories than anything else, there's a lot of very well-written and fun stuff out there. Many SF and fantasy writers cut their teeth on fanfic and some publish respectable work and fanfic.
AO3 has been about 80% blessing. On the one hand, the pleasure of having small favorite sites and livejournals is gone, and a bunch of stuff just plain got lost when Livejournal collapsed. On the other, having one centralized site has IMO raised the average quality of the writing immensely. It's not that everything is terrific, but quite a lot is very good indeed - and the floor has been raised a great deal. I remember in the dim pre-Ao3 past that just toothgrindingly bad writing was incredibly common, and now while I encounter a lot of stuff I definitely don't want to read it's just meh and not barbarous.
Yeah, Frowner's thing makes perfect sense, and I've had similar thoughts. It can be very hard to get into romantic/sexual heterosexual plots in fiction if the sort of baseline expectations of straight romance are irksome; in real life I manage this sort of thing by trying to only be involved with men as strange as I am, but you can't really sort through fiction for what it's going to be like before committing to reading it the way you can with people you're dating. I can completely see why you'd want a genre of romance that just completely avoids the annoyances of how our culture treats women.
And the Omegaverse is for people who want to separate their fantasy life from how women are treated in reality, but whose main sexual fantasies are entirely centered around the power differentials between men and women in our society? So you invent two new genders which retain the dynamics you find hot but which have different names so you can keep it as fantasy?
Can't you just dress up Commander Riker in a midriff-baring top?
Maybe, imagine these dynamics existed but they didn't feel natural? Write a plot that would look conventional with a female character, but when it's Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark being treated that way, the things about it that are troublesome to you are more visible and easier to think about?
I was looking at the top 10 HP pairings earlier, and 4th/5th/6th are indeed just the canonical M/F pairings (the obvious Romione and Hinny, and the far less obvious to me Jily). But they're around half as popular as Remus/Lupin or Harry/Snape, and a quarter as popular as Draco/Harry. So as you say, it's very popular, but not nearly as popular as M/M.
92: They did that one in the show. An early season, too.
I completely missed the link to Standpipe's blog.
Typo, that should be Lupin/Sirius Black.
Draco's unrequited crush on Harry isn't fanfic. It's in the text.
I never got into the fanfic, but I did once become invested in a theory that Ron was a time-traveling Dumbledore.
That got linked here, from The Toast maybe? I think it was the first thing I ever saw from The Toast.
I heard of it before The Toast existed, but they did push it.
91: I think that's one of the things, but as with other kinds of porn I assume there's a lot of other stuff re various fetishes and transgressions as well, plus novelty value.
Also you're assuming that women only identify with the omega/feminized characters and I think that's pretty incorrect.
We've naturalized various mainstream straight male perspectives on sex so that unless we are feminists of the kind one is now not supposed to be, we don't very often think, "oh, [various gross and demeaning acts] are about men eroticizing domination". We just sort of assume that a generic alpha-straight-guy sexuality is good and natural and requires no further explanation, but of course when that's your baseline, almost anything women actually want looks weird and perverse. (And also, anything men do that's not generically alpha-straight/heteronormative)
I think that cis women particularly are put in a position where there is no "healthy sexuality" between equals truly available. And even more than that, women and AFAB people have all always encountered a lot of mainstream narratives about sex that naturalize and invisibilize or eroticize like, horrible domination of women. Horrible, real and inexorably linked to the rest of the condition of women. That's built into the erotic imaginary; there's no sexuality without it. By comparison, a little bit of omegaverse stuff, where there's rules and reasons beyond "we said women are inferior because it's convenient", is pretty lightweight.
Also, there's a lot of reversal porn - the seemingly big strong person actually...turns out to be an omega!!!!, And there's a lot of critical stuff within fandom - there was a whole fandom thing about fifteen years ago when someone wrote this Stargate Atlantis omegaverse thing and someone else (who was a much, much better writer) wrote a series of reversals and criticisms. Was this rude? Were the first stories feminist or not? Anyway, the reversals/criticisms/"feminist" omega stuff is just as common as the other.
(I go to a book group where a lot of people are Very Old School Fans indeed and they can tell you chapter and verse about this stuff. Honestly, there ought to be some kind of Year Chronicle which records the big annual scandals and debates and conflicts; this sort of used to be fanzines but I am picturing something enormous and leatherbound.)
I think this is what I read. Which is only marginally more weird than arguing that Dumbledore made Voldemort pregnant.
it's considered impolitic to point out that cis gay men aren't very interested in this sort of porn even though it's nominally all about men having sex with men is really interesting because I had thought that was just taken as a given. I've basically always been one layer removed from fanfic stuff, so I know a lot more about the people who are reading and talking about it than I do the fic itself. Also the VOSFans Frowner identifies above.
Thank you, Frowner. This makes sense of a lot of strange stuff for me.
75 Munchausen by proxy but with dogs.
103.last: I love the ideal of a giant, beautiful leather-bound tome that upon opening reveals carefully stitched, multiply-photocopied zines, the pages so fragile they can only be handled with gloves. For a longer collection, the design for the spines is obvious.
105: Well, I guess it's not so much impolitic to mention as "we don't mention it because it raises some questions about, eg, straight women writing all these extremely implausible stories about nominally gay men - like, is that okay because fantasy or....sort of creepy because gay men actually exist* and writing weird versions of them for sexual purposes is weird? And because it raises some questions about just why so many women aren't interested in straight porn but are interested in imaginary-gay-men porn that complicate one's understanding of desire and porn in ways that are not just "it's all okay, don't yuck my yum!"
I dunno, I have a lot of mixed feelings about fanfic because on the one hand, I think that it's good that women and AFAB people are able to write directly about sexual stuff, but on the other, I don't think it's easy to cordon off one's porn consumption from one's understanding of the world - that is, I think it's impossible to consume a lot of porn which fetishizes gay men (in this weird sort of heteronormative-not-very-realistic way) and not make yourself on some level weird about the actual gay men you encounter in the world. It's true that people's sexual fantasies don't really have a simple point-for-point correspondence to how they see the world, so it's not like reading yaoi is going to make someone act creepy** but I just don't think that we escape from the effects of repeated images and stories, and I do think that we have at least some choice not to engage with really unsavory ones.
*It just occurred to me that in at least some of its incarnations, the whole omegaverse thing might count as a work-around to the whole "it's sort of creepy to write extremely unrealistic gay male characters" thing since technically it does not purport to be gay people regardless of the genders involved.
**An unusually good-looking friend of mine did tell me that in his surprisingly-immature-given-that-everyone-was-in-their-mid-twenties-or-older social circle, he had been repeatedly harassed by women who wanted to see him make out with one of the other guys and who used specifically yaoi tropes to explain why they wanted to see this, why he was the appropriate candidate, etc. The whole thing gave me the creeping fantods and once again made me glad of my rigidly conventional upbringing.
"In this house, we don't tolerate voyeurism if you have to entice people into the acts you want to view."