Vanyel and FictionAlley

[melannen]

I just had a dream that there exists an episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series in which certain department heads on the U.S.S. Enterprise (headed by Captain Kirk) had taken to buying antique hardcovers of classic novels and leaving them lying around the Engineering break rooms in an attempt to wean Scotty off his technical manuals by giving him books that are beautiful hardware in their own right, with the result that Scotty and Cupcake and several other Engineering redshirts have started an enthusiastic book club that is reading the Valdemar novels.

And this animated episode I was watching even included a fairly long segment of what was actually happening in the novel they were discussing, in which Vanyel was drawn to quite closely resemble Spock in a glittery lavender version of Vulcan robes, and spent most of his time crying. In the rain. (As basically all I know about Valdemar is that Vanyel is gay and tragic, there are soulbonded horses, and the covers of my copies are pink and purple and sparkle, I'm kind of impressed with my brain for coming up with that. And traumatized.)

I'm not sure if I want to write that story more or less than I now want the Hot Fuzz story where Danny lends Nick the Valdemar books.

****

Anyway, I've been kind of vaguely following the FictionAlley vs. Pepsi controversy, and while it would probably be smarter of me not to, I feel compelled to add my $.02 American. (Look, me reading up on the intersection of neoliberal capitalism and self-enforced gift economies totally counts as research for my NaNo, okay? And sadly, that's actually true, and I only just now realized that part of what the economics in my novel is commenting on is fandom.)

Conflict of interest disclaimers first: The first online fandom community I ever participated in was FictionAlley, and I volunteered with them for awhile, way back in the day, though I haven't so much as visited the forums in years and years. Also, somewhat more recently, I wrote protest fic in which Harry Potter characters had kinky underage sex using Pepsi products.

So, I'm not even going to address the arguments that seem to be going around which sum up to "you're killing starving African children, and therefore you're evil!" and "anything involving raising money for fandom is automatically evil, unless I have personally vetted it first!" and "you're associated with the group of HP fans who were involved with founding FictionAlley, and therefore you're evil!" and "you're outing our porn to the masses, and therefore you're evil!" because, quite frankly, I have heard all of those arguments before, they come up time and time again and are pretty much equally fallacious every time, I find them so far beyond tiresome at this point that I have difficulty even caring. Also, lots of other people have been pointing out the problems with those arguments.

However, I do feel like I want to say a few things about a couple of the other arguments, especially because people who are rejecting the above arguments are putting these forward: that they should have turned to fandom for the money first, and that the "educational" thing is a smokescreen and they're not a 'real' charity.

Okay. I got into fandom through FictionAlley. They have been set up as an education-focused nonprofit since the beginning, and this has never changed. Yes, this was partly in order to soothe WB - FA has never been below the corporate radar - but it was partly because they really do serve an educational function. I was far from the only person to get started in fandom through FA, and their active userbase (unless it has changed *drastically* in the past few years, and I doubt it's that drastic) has been heavily, heavily skewed to young people who are getting involved in fandom for the first time, and often who are seriously writing fiction for the first time. FA, even through only the basic archive and forum functions, not even counting its special educational projects, puts a lot of effort into mentoring, providing guidelines and community safeguards, and encouraging and helping its users to actively work to improve their writing abilities, to live and think creatively, to learn how to read actively and critically, to value open exchange of information and ideas, and to help them come to fandom as a positive and accepting community.

Granted, this opinion might be skewed based on how much benefit I personally got out of coming into media fandom through that environment, and you can argue about the way they do it, or whether conceptualizing fic writing as a learning vector is a good thing, or how effectively they present themselves to fandom-at-large, but of course FA, just as a community, is educational, and saying that mission is "too vague" or that they need to justify themselves to you somehow - pisses me off. Any arguments along the line of "just a fanfic archive and therefore by definition of no redeeming value" or "they need to explain in detail every single thing they've ever done that's even vaguely charitable to people who have never been involved with them in any way" get shunted up to the "arguments I am deeply, deeply tired of" pile. Also, "yes, but what they're asking for in the grant is server money, not educational stuff" is a total fallacy too - if a community arts center was asking for money for a new roof, would you say that it wasn't charitable enough? Online communities need capital improvements too.

As for trying to raise money through fandom first - I've seen the suggestion floated that they work with OTW. And maybe people who are more closely involved with behind-the-scenes OTW stuff can help me here, but I'm not entirely sure what people expect that to accomplish. First, I want to point out again that FictionAlley was a registered nonprofit, doing outreach, publicity, and education, long before OTW was a glimmer in fandom's eye. They know how to do this stuff as well as OTW does. Second, I'm not exactly sure how OTW is expected to help - news flash, but they don't have a program to give out thousands of dollars in grants to struggling archives. As far as I can tell, all OTW could to is offer legal and other advice (which would be a bit silly, as several of the people high up in the relevant OTW committees are already involved with FA, and in fact used their FA experience to help OTW set up - am I the only one who remembers the wanking about that at the time?). Or offer to back up the archive through Open Doors, which would essentially mean closing down FA and all the extra mentoring things it does anyway - not a useful solution for people who value FA as more than an archive. And anyway, Open Doors isn't even fully operational yet.

As for running a donation drive of their own, see above about the young skew of the active membership and the focus on mentoring. Much of their membership, due to age, I suspect doesn't have the same kind of petty cash that makes a drive work well, and given the general tone - and, yes, the educational, mentorship slant - the idea of them doing what would be necessary to make an on-site donation drive work, given those conditions, leaves a very bad taste in my mouth, that asking for votes neatly sidesteps.

The question of running a nonprofit on corporate grants vs. member donations only is a really major theme and running argument in the RL nonprofit groups I work with. Basically, it sums down to: member donations are the ideal, but if you want to actually have the time, principles, and resources to accomplish anything other than fundraising, and your membership skews anywhere other than middle-aged or older upper-middle-class people, you pretty much have to go for the grants and sponsorships when you can.

Appealing to fandom at large - well, the reaction to them just asking for votes should be a good enough start at imagining how much worse it would be if that particular segment of HP fandom had been crass enough to ask for actual *money*. (The free laptops references would have never *ended*, just as a start.)

Basically, any problem I have with this comes down to two factors: first, that the message control on the FA end has been way, way suboptimal (but then, this is the FA crew. Mismanaged PR within fandom is practically its trademark).

Second, that the entire Pepsi Refresh thing is grotesque and horrible and not something we should associate with, and especially not something a site which is talking to young people should associate with. An argument I have a great deal of sympathy with, especially as, when I tried to go vote for FA on the site, they expected me to either link it to my facebook account or sign up for an account with them. Sorry, Pepsico, I'm not giving you my personal information. Given what happened the last time Harry Potter fandom coincided with a Pepsi ad campaign, it does seem like an even worse idea for them to be doing this. But, like I mentioned above, if you want to keep an org going, if you wants your money then you takes your grants.

Comments

[beatrice_otter]

RE: Valdemar. ... yeah, that's about what it's like. You forgot angsting over bullying, and soul-bonded humans. (I mean, the Companions--the horse-like creatures) soul-bond to their riders, but Humans soul-bond to one another, as well.)

[melannen]

Ah, so drawing him as Spock was even more appropriate! ^_^

Thank you for this.

[elke_tanzer]

I'd been wondering a lot why FA had not approached OTW to shelter a backup copy of the archive at AO3 via Open Doors, because the largest concern I'd seen voiced (as to why they needed new server(s)) was that the story archive was in danger of vanishing. I had not realized the extent of the forums etc, nor seen voicing of concerns about those going away.

Re: Thank you for this.

[melannen]

Well, like I mentioned in disclaimers, I haven't been active in the site in years and years (although actually I have been to the forums more recently, now that I recall, looking for demographic surveys) but, yeah, in my day, and I'm pretty sure still, the forums are a major part of the site, especially the mentoring and educational part, and a lot of the fic that got archived there came out of the culture that existed on the forums. I'm still lj friends with quite a few people I met only on FAP.

Even if I'm wrong about the forums still being that active - and I'm fairly sure I'm not - certainly if we saved the fic archives but not the forum archives, *so much* history, and context for the fic on the archive, would be entirely lost. Plus, there was even a fair amount of fic posted to the forum but not the archives - in the days when not everybody had a blog, people would post the little ficlets and cookies that weren't elaborate enough for the archive to pairing/character threads on the forums. People didn't really think of the forums as being something separate from the archive, since they really were two parts of one big, intertwined community, so I can see why people might not be thinking to mention them separately: if someone associated with FA says "we need to save our archive" without specifying, I suspect that "our archive" is just assumed to include FAP as well.

Anyway, also: Open Doors isn't even *operational* yet, not to mention the danger of putting all your eggs in one basket, so it's a bit disingenuous to say that people should go there first instead of trying to save their site as it exists. Open Doors, I thought, was intended primarily for sites that were no longer active or had no willing administrators, not for sites that are still thriving communities.

Re: Thank you for this.

[elke_tanzer]

To my way of thinking, going to the OTW simply to inquire about the possibility of storing a backup copy of an archive in danger of vanishing, makes perfect sense, especially if an archive is in a "dire" situation. Open Doors may not be fully operational, but it's obviously partially underway, and there's no harm in making a simple inquiry.

But I freely admit that the few posts I read about the FA situation were less than clear about what the situation really was/is, and my understanding of "dire" is likely not the same as others' definitions of "dire".

And I hadn't understood (and still don't, I guess) that FA is still a thriving community. It sure sounded to me like it's not sustainable in its current incarnation.

But I also know that I've only stumbled across the periphery of a much larger situation, and I certainly don't have enough of an understanding of the challenges the FA maintainers are facing, nor the strategies they're trying, have tried, or will try, to keep their site active and sustainable.

I wish them all the best, but wow, the posts I've seen about the situation from the FA side of things sure were hard to understand, for me personally.

Re: Thank you for this.

[melannen]

I'm not very cognizant of the exact circumstances, and level of "direness" that FA is currently in, either, though I suspect that serving their own static copy of the archive would be well within their current resources, if that was all they wanted to do. (And I'm fairly sure that if FA had died as a community, I would have heard about it - at least from what I've read, I think the direness is solely the result of suddenly needing more operating capital, not a change in usership. Certainly they seem to have enough active users to think they can get the Pepsi votes they need mostly from their own users.)

But, yeah, the FA leadership communicates badly to people who aren't part of FA, often mismanages the FA community itself, it always has, and the long history of many of them being viscerally hated by large sections of fandom (sometimes with justification, even) doesn't help from either direction.

Re: Thank you for this.

[elke_tanzer]

*points to my icon with gentle laughter*

Thanks again for all of this. Having your additional perspective is really nice!

[futuransky]

Thanks for this. I didn't know about the history, nonprofit structure, or educational skew of FA, and it actually makes their decision to turn to the Pepsi thing make a WHOLE lot more sense.

I still think that funds could have been raised by tapping into the OTW's contacts and structures, which do skew very much toward people who are able to and do donate and who value fandom as a general principle (I was also thinking about Open Doors as a safety net, and that the OTW tends to be very flexible about seeing what they can do for people who are looking for help); it would certainly have made more wank, but would probably also have made some money.

I still don't agree with their decision, but I feel like I understand it a lot better from this post.

[melannen]

I would like to think that the OTW could help, but sadly, I don't think in the real world they could do much. (Maybe now after the backlash against the backlash, when people are - for once - actually feeling supportive of FA, maybe. But not out of the blue.)

Like I mentioned above, many of the OTW's "contacts and structures" that would be helpful in this situation involve people who were already involved with FA - several of OTW's founding lights were also FA founding lights. If those contacts could have been helpful, FA wouldn't really have needed to go through OTW.

And the amount of backlash that occurred against OTW at the time, just because they *did* welcome those FA people into their structure in the beginning, makes me suspect that any attempt for OTW to give FA special treatment (even if it's the same thing they'd've done for any other archive in that situation) would have ended very, very badly for both organizations, and I expect they knew that.

Maybe that is just paranoia, but it's a paranoia that's shared by everybody who marinated in HP fandom at the time when FA was at its prime, and still keeps up with the lingering - and very much alive - occasional relapses into the fannish politics of the time. Of which this current kerfuffle is *very much* a result, given some of the names who were instrumental in spreading the original story around.

[copracat]

Thanks for this post. I know a fair bit about fundraising (note: Pepsico not a shining example of best practice corporate philanthropy!) but next to nothing about FictionAlley. I appreciate your perspective. As a fundraiser, the judgemental statements about deserving vs undeserving grant recipients are getting on my nerves.

[undomielregina]

Personally, I'm not sure I'm really comfortable with the Pepsi Refresh setup as a whole, personally. The public voting seems so "dance for our amusement, puppets!"

[copracat]

course. It's a massive marketing campaign to get Pepsi's name all over Facebook and Twitter etc taking advantage of people's desire to do good in the world.

[undomielregina]

*nod* Of course. My biggest problem is that the vote tallies are publicly visible. If there was just an announcement of the winners at the end, I'd be bothered a lot less by the sense of the whole thing being a spectacle for external consumption, even though practically speaking the system would be almost identical.

(Also, I just noticed that I managed to proofread my comment terribly and have "personally" bookending the first sentence >.<)

[cesy]

The vote tallies are also inaccurate - ask Modest Needs about the "technical glitches" that somehow never got fixed.

[undomielregina]

spent most of his time crying. In the rain.

This is pretty much the books in a nutshell.

Thanks for the explanation of the FA culture. I've been feeling squidgy about the direction of the rhetoric was taking, although not about the actual fact of the outrage. Fandom communities like FAP are, at least to some extent, comparable to community centers, and it's not their fault that they're not serving an easily identifiable or quantifiable community. I've been increasingly uncomfortable about the classism I'm seeing in some of the anti-FAP discussion, especially surrounding the idea that anyone who can participate in fandom must have plenty of leisure time and disposable income. There's so much evidence to the contrary that I can't believe people are advancing that argument in all seriousness.

(I've also seen the argument that FA's directors probably have the money to pay for the servers themselves, which makes me really uncomfortable. I don't think "if you really loved it and it was in serious trouble, you'd just foot the bill for it by yourselves" is really appropriate.)

FA's communication with outsiders needs serious work, though. Their statements have been seriously problematic, defensive, hyperbolic, and unprofessional, as has their handling of the initial grant proposal.

[melannen]

>>anyone who can participate in fandom must have plenty of leisure time and disposable income.

Oh, man, that argument! Another one I've been having to shoot down for years and years and years. News break: just because you're rolling in disposable income, and most of the people you go to cons with are too, doesn't mean the fan down the way isn't unemployed/on disability/not on disability but would be in a fair world/using fandom as a sanity break from a horrible underpaying job/using a public connection while between crash spaces after being kicked out by the seven housemates necessary to make rent/a fourteen-year-old who can't spend any money without parental permission/otherwise dependent on a provider who monitors money but not internet/from a country where your socioeconomic categories don't carry over/etc etc etc. I hate that argument. (hay, look! I'm not an OTW member because I don't have a credit card! Because I don't have the steady income or credit history to qualify for one I'd be willing to use!)

[trinity_clare]

I'm glad you're making this post, since what you remember of FAP lines up nicely with my own memories (and if my experience there is still representative, I'd suspect a good portion of their forum users are still in middle school, so really not much with the petty cash).

*uses this icon because even on DW, 10 years after joining fandom, the icon credit is still "I think I got this from FictionAlley"*

[melannen]

Yeah, I didn't join until I was over 18, but that's mostly because I didn't have reliable enough internet access until I was in college - I'd been on a few message boards, but never anything that immersive. And that was my first experience of being on a community where 18 made you an old fogey.

[kaz]

Although I mainly "grew up" in Silmarillion fandom, my early fandom experience was sort of split between that and FictionAlley and I too have fond memories of FAP and its newbie-focussed friendly culture. In fact, thinking back I got my LJ invite code from a thread on the forums (this being back when LJ still used invites) and since I only got to DW via LJ in a way I wouldn't be here at all without FAP. So, I agree and thank you for posting this.

[melannen]

There are more of us around than anybody expects! (FAP alums unite! or something.)

[flourish]

Thanks for saying this. This is the post I wanted to make but felt unable to (because coming from someone who's associated with FA it would read as defensiveness, and rightly so.)

[melannen]

I am glad you think it's useful (especially since you know so much more about this than I do!)

I suspect there's a certain amount of defensiveness in my post too (it was my home for awhile dammit!), but it was clear that somebody who actually experienced FA needed to speak out, and at least I was never associated one way or another with any of the people who still have massive grudges held against them.

[flourish]

For sure. I got up the courage to post my own comments too, FYI, on my DW, so if people would like to see another perspective (and a different one) there it is.

via metafandom

[phoebe_zeitgeist]

Thank you for this. I know nothing at all about FA, and damned little about HP fandom; but I do know a bit about fundraising for small organizations that can't afford entire professional fundraising departments, and from that perspective I've been uncomfortable with the way the argument has gone so far. I appreciate both the background and the clarity of analysis more than I can tell you.

Re: via metafandom

[melannen]

Yeah. My main RL group is currently in the throes of having *lost* its major corporate grant (of questionable provenance) and is dropping back on adbook sales - which at least mean you're whoring yourself out to local businesses rather than multinational ones? But of course not every org can even do that.

It seems like the success of OTW and the various single-purpose disaster drives (which are always much, much easier to get people to give money for - not that it's very easy even there) have given a lot of people an odd idea of how difficult fundraising actually is.

Re: via metafandom

[flourish]

Ironically, Heidi was one of the people behind the Haiti fundraising drive. Which, I mean, you can kind hate on Heidi for lots of reasons, but she does know about fundraising, which made me LOL a little at people going "but if only FA knew more about fundraising!"