and a lot of it is excellent.

Including some excellent gen.

Some of the excellent stuff is by Dana.

So, this whole Australian thing? Hugely annoying. Disrupting my online fannish routine. Also, I think, really bad law.

What Australian thing, Emily?

Oh, sorry. Um... the text of the particular act seems to be here and some discussion here. That lj seems to be particularly focused on how that act (and others) affect chan, but there are a lot of people who write, say, 16- or 17-year-old characters who've gotten nervous. A lot of HP writers have taken their stuff off the Web completely (including a ridiculously multiparted work in progress that I was reading).

ETA: so yeah, largely HP writers for obvious reasons, but not exclusively.

EATA: Also, skyehawke.com apparently operates under Australian law, so there's some concern there. Comments at [link]

Huh. Bugger.

I suppose I'd better take Invisible to See down from Skyehawke, then. My characters are seventeen, but from the looks of things they need to be 18+. Which - annoying. Although I actually rather sympathise with (what little I gather from a cursory scan of the info of) the Act, because chan totally does my head in.

Meanwhile, a friend has just fallen belatedly into X Files fandom...except that she can't find any fandom to fall into. I've pointed her towards fic, but what she actually wants is meta, and discussions, and suchlike. Anyone got any suggestions? Most X Files writers I can think of have moved on to pastures new - is that the case for everyone? Or is there anywhere she could go, maybe even just to read up on OLD meta?

I've missed most of the Australian discussion but caught some of the Skyehawke discussion, Fay. Penknife had a post about it in her LJ that's probably worth looking at.

Chan doesn't exactly flip my lid, either, but there isn't evidence that it contributes to actual, um... actions. My verbal skills seem to be gone, sorry.

Cheers, Dana!

Chan doesn't exactly flip my lid, either, but there isn't evidence that it contributes to actual, um... actions. My verbal skills seem to be gone, sorry.

My understanding (v. limited) is that abusers generally pass through a number of stages before actually acting upon their desires. A key thing in this progress is normalising the desire, often through finding like-minded people. From engaging in quite a lengthy discussion wrt Parent-child incest in fic (and the related topics of chan and cross-generational relationships) I have come to wrap my head around why some people write Adult/child. Kind of. In terms of romanticising the sugar daddy figure (as in 'The Seventh Veil') and the reader/writer casting themself as the younger person.

However, there are a hell of a lot of adults out there who see children (and I'm not talking sexually mature teenagers of the Britney Spears variety, I'm talking children) as objects of erotic desire. There are a LOT of those people out there, whether we're actively engaging with them in fandom or not. It bothers the hell out of me that some of them could (and surely MUST, because it is not hard to find things online) be reading fanfic. Maybe even showing it to children, in the way that abusers DO sometimes show porn to the children they're grooming. I don't think that's a wild and crazy possibility, I think it's a likelihood, and it bothers the hell out of me.

Er. So - yeah. Still. Arse. Feck.

Eh...mm. I think you can take as read my objections to that -- that I find it disturbing as well, but I don't think it provides grounds for outlawing it. Don't particularly want to end up the chan-defender here.