We’ve got a really great bunch of Hugo finalists this year, including everybody who ever uploaded their drunk Batman making out with Captain America fanfic at three AM on a Saturday night, as Archive of Our Owbn (AO3) was nominated for best related work. All joking aside, this is a very good thing, as AO3 is an example both of the very best modern fandom can do and something that would’ve never gotten a nomination before fandom had to defend itself from the Puppy takeover.
Let me explain.
As you know Bob, fandom, including fanfiction writing fandom, has been on the internet since the very beginning and as a community has had to mostly depend on commercial platforms Like Livejournal, Yahoo groups and Delicious to organise itselves and as such was always dependent on the kindness of at best uncaring strangers. These sort of platforms tended to tolerate, but not encourage fanfiction at best, actively purged it at worst. AO3 therefore started from the desire to have an independent space for fans by fans, not beholden to the whims of commercial entities. As such it fits squarely in the fannish tradition of zine making and con running for the love of it all.
– but ALSO, and here's what's important to realise, this is a community project, a community space, and it was DESIGNED to TEACH.
(Did you know when it was first proposed, they trialed Ruby and Python to see which was quicker for beginners? I know 'cause I voted Python 🐍🤷🏻♀️😂)
— Macey || Jennifer Mace (@englishmace) April 3, 2019
But AO3 is more than that. It’s also a major open source project that’s rare in that it’s been largely run by women and, as the Twitter thread above explains, was set up to be a community project and a teaching project from the start. It’s responsive to its users and remarkably stable, when compared to social media sites like Tumblr or Facebook — it doesn’t have to serve ads after all. AO3 is open to all content, doesn’t censor, allows its users anonymity and pseudonimity and has a brilliant tagging and search functionality that keeps it all useable.
Both for what it offers and the platform it offers it on it’s worthy of a Hugo nomination, but without Worldcon fandom having to defend itself against the Puppies, a group of sad sack rightwing writers who wanted to use a reactionary backlash to cheat their ways to a Hugo, AO3 would’ve never be nominated. Thanks to the Puppies, actual fans mobilised to save their fandom from being taken over, we got organised and long term attempts to make it more inclusive and as a whole Worldcon fandom became more diverse. And with that diversity, that influx of new people both and old fans re-energised, came a new view on what was Hugo worthy or not.
The Puppies, with their obsession with strong men being manly men doing real manly science fiction and fear of women hate a project like AO3, mostly female run, catering to a philosophy of building consent and being welcoming rather than “getting gud”, hosting all those cootie inducing stories about K-pop stars french kissing each other. That’s why having AO3 among the Hugo finalists is a blow for inclusivity and a raspberry in their direction.
That it was named by Naomi Novik in a direct reference to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own? Icing on the cake.