Now what?

[kaethe]

I'm confused about what the actual issues are re: the deletion of the HP fan-artists. I know some of the story--artwork that included minors in graphic sexual situations, possibly reported by WB to LJ/6A, accounts deleted. I'm just not sure whether people are up in arms because they don't think the accounts should have been deleted *in spite of*

Comments

[tsuki_no_bara]

my guess about it always seeming to be hp fandom that gets caught in this kind of thing is that as far as people outside the fandom are concerned, harry's fifteen, because that's how old he is in the last movie, or he's still eleven, because that's how old he was in the first book. so someone hears "harry potter porn" and is squicked right the hell out, because they're imagining kids - not teenagers - having sex. the kids are canonically all underage, and i'd imagine there's a lot of hogwarts-era smut, just because that's how old people are in the books. fandoms with canonically "legal" characters aren't going to throw out nearly as much underage porn or almost-porn, even if the actual amount of porn is the same. (that made sense, right? say sga fandom is just as porny as hp fandom - hp still has a metric fuckton of underage characters in canon. sga doesn't.) and hp fandom is HUGE and probably slightly more visible because of book #7 and movie #5. it's kind of a lightning rod.

[kaethe]

Yeah, that makes sense. I also think some people just get squicked by anyone under the legal age--which most people, I'd venture to guess, think of as 18 even if it isn't in their area--being shown in a graphic sexual situation. Yeah, kids *do*, but when adults stare at it, it gets into a murky area.

[mad_maudlin]

Most of the disagreement is the criteria for deletion--for instance, one author apparently got baleeted because the art depicted characters in movie-style school uniforms, even though they were clearly depicted as older teens. It's also because of LJ's ongoing issues communicating what criteria they're using for judging a work obscene enough to delete, beyond the legal statutes. Also, they're not just deleting the offending account, but all accounts registered to that username. Many people are taking it as a sign that 6A is moving towards an IPO (not sure if this has been confirmed or not) and are thus trying to sanitize their services so as not to scare investors.

[turlough]

For one thing we were told that LJ had learned its lesson in May and that no accounts would be summary suspended without due process again (like it's put down in their own abuse policy for example: http://www.livejournal.com/abuse/policy.bml) We were furthermore told that LJ would use the Miller test for deciding what was "obsence" and that most fanfic and fanfart "of course" wouldn't risk being targeted.