epershand

So here's a moment they don't cover in the pamphlet everyone gets when they join an RPF fandom (ha): what's the least creepy way to emotionally process watching a celebrity you care about go through hard times, knowing all the while that what you're watching is going to be a significant theme in your fandom's canon in the future?

This is a real family going though a real period of significant grief and trauma. And I am genuinely sad for them, in the abstract way that one is sad when the family of a casual acquaintance is going though grief and trauma. But... Jeff Smith isn't just the father of a drummer in a band I like. He's also a character who appears in a whole lot of fiction I've read in the last six months.

The easiest way for me, personally, to deal with my feelings about this fictional character would be to read fiction about it. But that is really messed up when the ~~character~~ person I'm talking about isn't fictional. And isn't dead yet. I have to keep telling myself that it is not.okay. for me to think of this week as being "the episode where Spencer's father was gravely ill."

Retroactively, I'm feeling really weird about all the fic I've read that uses George Ross's death for thematic purposes, even though that happened in 2006 and I didn't read any of it until 2011. This is people's lives and their deaths and their trauma. And while I can normally shut off the part of my brain that views them as fictional characters in a never-ending, never pausing show from the part of my brain that views them as people who happen to be celebrities, that part is broken right now.

And... I just don't quite know how to deal with that.

Caption: Brendon Urie from tonight's Tonight Show appearance, with "JEFF ♥" written on his arm. Not shown: the alternate drummer who joined the band so that Spencer could be with his family. Image via

starafar.

In the ongoing pursuit of ways that one should and should not spread fanfic that is no longer online: what are people's general feelings about sharing links to Internet Archive caches of fic? This is a bit of a debate I've been having with myself ever since March/April, when the Fic Lost And Found Archive discussion was going on. Prior to that, I'd never had any qualms about archive.org links, but since then I've been a lot less certain.

On the one hand:
- The material is definitely there and anyone can read it.
- If I'm the recipient of a rec of a fic that doesn't resolve, then my first step is usually just to jump directly to archive.org to look it up, so I'd might as well do it for others, right?
- When you're dealing with older fandoms (the two most recent cases where I've thought about this were with Smallville fic and 90s-era DS9 fic) the odds are a lot higher that it's the original archive that's gone down, rather than the author intentionally pulling it.

On the other hand:
- Point one above was really rules-lawyery. Capability doesn't necessarily equal right, especially on the internet, where it's *possible* to do a lot of things people would rather not.
- If it was the author intentionally pulling it, I should probably respect their wishes, right? (Just as with emailing PDFs, I'm totally willing to send friends links to archive.org caches of fic; it's posting a recs list that includes the fic in question where I run into a gray area.)
- What if the story has moved? Maybe there's a copy on LJ, or on the AO3. Maybe the archive itself has moved--I was thoroughly convinced for a while that the Smallville Slashdom was completely gone, but it later turned out it had just migrated domains. Shouldn't I exert a diligent effort to post a rec to a more current location where the author can actually get feedback?

The last time I posted a link to an Internet Archive cache publicly was in a batch of DS9 recs I did well over a year ago; based on Google Analytics data, that post still gets several hits a month from people looking for links to that story in particular.

In the current case, I was trying to find a specific Smallville story to add to

melannen's Identity Porn collection. In this case, the fic was on a personal domain hosted by the author, which is now gone. The author IS on the AO3, but she hasn't added the series in question, and she has no accessible contact information or links to other accounts in her profile. Presumably the actual answer in this very narrow case is to leave a comment on one of her other fics asking for her to put the series on the AO3. But I'm still curious for the wider case.

Knowledge, sir! Useful for its own sake, sir!

Entries tagged with fannish ethics

Complicated RPF feelings

Fannish morality: archive.org edition

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