The Organization for Transformative Works stands for transformative works in all their colors. Because we are supported by donations from fans like you, the OTW’s many projects are able to remain entirely censorship-free. This means that the OTW supports fannish works and preserves the history of fan culture without worrying about external cultural pressures.
Fanworks hosted on the Archive of Our Own range from fluffy and cheerful to dark and gritty to steamy and sexy to thoughtful and eloquent (and some are all of the above!).
Fans don’t need to fear that their works might be purged from AO3 in order to make the site more attractive to advertisers. As we said yesterday, because we depend on fans and not advertisers to fund our hosting costs, the Archive can remain fully independent and accept as many fannish works as the servers can hold.
This was a fundamental tenet of the OTW. When writing AO3’s terms of service, we aimed for maximum inclusivity because we wanted to create a space that wasn’t limited by commercial considerations. In it we state, “You understand that using the Archive may expose you to material that is offensive, triggering, erroneous, sexually explicit, indecent, blasphemous, objectionable, grammatically incorrect, or badly spelled.” The Archive has works representing all of these warnings (and more!) and will continue to for as long as our servers are functioning.
But AO3 is only one of our many projects whose content our organization doesn’t censor, and whose users rely on that promise of freedom of speech.
Fanhackers houses discussions on fannish non-fiction topics, and Transformative Works and Cultures is an academic journal dedicated entirely to fan culture studies. Both Fanhackers and TWC accept submissions from non-academics, and welcome a vast range of experiences and outlooks on fandom and fan traditions.
Meanwhile, Fanlore, our ever-growing repository of fan history, maintains a plural point of view policy on all its articles. After all, there is no “right” way to look at the history of fan cultures. All sides of a story are valid, and fans are given a space to “tell their own stories from their own perspective,” as stated in Fanlore’s Plural Point of View policy page.
You are the creators, and we respect your right to make your works the way you choose to make them. We’ve been around for seven censorship-free years and were hoping to raise US$70,000 this week. Fandom has come through for us in only two days! With four more days to go in our drive, how far will you all push our donation meter? With your support, we can keep the OTW’s projects independent and censorship-free.
We would also like to let AO3 users who are still receiving our emails for the drive know that these will continue to be sent until Friday, October 24th. As our account holder list has become quite large, it takes several days once the email process begins for everyone to receive the email. We began this process late Sunday so some of the information is now out of date — our apologies!