"What exactly is incest" is SUCH a difficult line to draw. I think I'd suggest leaving that up to the creators (in the full knowledge that people will have opinions about what does/doesn't count that will annoy me and that I will disagree with) because otherwise not only do you then have to legislate exactly which kinds of relationships count as incest but what counts as those relationships specifically. I also think for the purposes of filtering, if I'm looking for incest fic I want to read fic written by people who wrote incest intentionally and with their whole chests, and if I'm looking to avoid incest fic, I'm probably also looking at pairing tags, so if I encounter something tagged with a ship that's a grey area and it's not tagged as incest or CNTW but I'm squicked by that ship, I scroll past it. (And if I'm reading canon blind and don't know that pairing and they didn't write it as incest so they didn't tag it as incest or CNTW, I'm not going to be squicked unless I guess maybe I get into the canon later.)
For example, I've been into pairings where the fans not only couldn't agree whether adoption counted as incest, or whether it didn't count as incest if it was interspecies adoption (?????), but then also couldn't agree whether an adoption had actually taken place or not. I was just left there like "well I would like incest fic for this pairing... so I guess I'm filtering for only fic that's tagged for incest, because the It's Totally Not Incest crowd isn't writing it like I want to read it."
I think in all honesty, I may be overthinking some of this. It's been pointed out to me after making this post - especially related to the terminology aspect, but also this - that I've been trying to make this archive a "safe space" for absolutely everyone, and while an uplifting space is the goal for sure, everyone has their own definition of safe and their own comfort levels and their own squicks (and their own opinions on sexuality and gender). There are inevitably going to be people who dislike the decisions I make no matter what they are (which is not an inherently bad thing, just a disagreement) and I have to go with what I feel is best for the site and for me as (presently) the only admin.
The overall point I'm trying to make is that yes, I think if I go into the specifics it will be tedious and also unnecessary. So thank you for the comment, I really appreciate what you have said.
Oof, yeah, I can see how you'd be overthinking, but as you say, there's not really a way to make a place safe for EVERYONE, and, yeah, some people are not gonna like things you do. It's the nature of making anything that you intend to let other people see or use. I think pretty much every platform I've ever used and every website I've ever hung out on has made some kind of decision I didn't like and ime the major dealbreakers are never little details, they're always, like, "they changed content policies overnight so that half my friends were suddenly in violation of the rules over skeleton porn" or "they enforced a content policy that existed only in a mod's head" or "Elon Musk bought the site." I think if you're not doing that stuff you're probably good.
(Although if you could con Elon Musk into paying Twitter money for a small fanfiction archive I don't even think I'd be mad. Bilk that man out of everything and get paid!)
Comment on Queue Closing & Issues to fix
Kaesa Sun 05 Oct 2025 02:49AM UTC
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agnes Sun 05 Oct 2025 03:14AM UTC
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Kaesa Sun 05 Oct 2025 03:38AM UTC
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