There have been big waves in the fandom ocean over the years. It’s important to remember our history and how we got where we are. http://bit.ly/1MTEToZ
…the anatomy of Vulcan genitalia has been a topic of discussion for DECADES now, which I honestly find - as Spock himself so often says about other subjects - fascinating. From Fanlore (yes, Vulcan genitalia has its own page on Fanlore, because of course it does):
In The World of Star Trek (Ballantine, 1973), David Gerrold wrote about what he felt to be bizarre fan letters received by the creators of the show. Among them was a missive several pages long from an older woman who very carefully explained that she was married and this was not prurient interest, but that as red-blooded creatures have pink extremities, what she wanted to know about Spock – “with reference to particular extremities – if they were green.” Gerrold added, “Yes, they,” and added that the letter had been passed around for laughs and “idle speculation around the set had it that the particular extremity this woman was inquiring about was forked.”
So there ya go. I do recommend clicking through to the Fanlore entry, because it really is interesting, the astonishing breadth of fandom’s creativity, up to and including a pair of cosplayers dancing in penis costumes (one Kirk’s, one Spock’s). Somewhere, there is a video of that, but I can’t find it offhand, alas.
One of my favorite used fanzine agents is selling a few zines on eBay. But check out their (ugly, yes it truly is) website where they offer thousands of more zines. They agent for other fans and their prices are much better than on eBay or buying new. Every fandom you can possibly imagine - and possibly even a few fans you can’t. Their website sometimes lags their inventory, so if you don’t see a zine or a fandom, write to them. And don’t forget you can use Fanlore to learn more about a specific fanzine.
A recent post went around that talked about fandom history and included a link to this fanlore entry, but I think it’s important enough to have its own post – fandom (and fanfic!) history goes back a hell of a lot farther than LJ, and it is a fascinating history.
Guys, I’m watching the situation with AO3/OTW because I think it’s an important moment in Fandom-with-a-capitol-F, but I don’t think it’s time to panic about your favorite fics suddenly disappearing. Yes by all means please have a backup of your fics - throw them in google docs and/or another cloud storage and keep them on your hard drive and make a half dozen usb drive sticks and hell even go get them printed and bound if you like.
But that because they’re art that you should take ownership and responsibility for, and not because you think AO3′s going to suddenly go poof! I’ve been in fandom for over a decade now, and believe me, as someone who was around before AO3, it’s not going anywhere.
I am curious to see the direction the new management is going to take things, however. I’ll admit I didn’t vote in the last election - it was a busy time for me, and while I read a couple of the posts from some of the newer candidates on why they wanted in, I didn’t really have the time to look into the situation fully and I didn’t want to jump on a bandwagon to vote in a whole slew of people just because a post about them had a decent number of notes on Tumblr.
And that, I think, is the thing to watch for. Every couple of months or so I see conversations about LJ fandom vs Tumblr fandom, usually with people bemoaning the good old days. My own LJ is old enough to make a social media account of it’s own, but I’m leery to indulge in too much nostalgia. Yes there are things that I liked better about LJ than Tumblr/Twitter, but I was the first to whine in the mid-2000s about how I missed my old messageboards and Yahoo Groups. I finally shifted over to google chat (or hangouts, I guess they’re called now) but I still run Trillian with my old AIM and Y!M handles running in the background. Just in case.
(and don’t even get me started about IRC rooms)
My point is, I get the impression that we may be seeing OTW/AO3 shift a bit to some of the new school fandom ways. There are good things about bad things about that. I think we’ll see increased transparency and accountability because new school fandom sees fandom as being more of a legitimate business/artform. It’s gone mainstream, and with that it can no longer be run in private backrooms - even if those backrooms are virtual.
With that said, fandom would have never gained a lot of that legitimacy if it wasn’t for the passion and persistence of old school fandom. The very existence of AO3 was born out of the desire for fandom to run, well, an Archive Of Our Own. I still shake my head in awe at the people who turned building fandom infrastructures into their full time careers - very often on top of other full time careers (and raising a family on top of that).
To the folks over in the new school fandom camp, my only caution is to avoid getting drowned out by the details. You will never please everyone, and if you try to you’ll just drag everyone down into failure with you. There will always be someone who gets offended by what you do, or how you do it, or why or who or when. Tumblr fandom in particular gets caught up in being non-offensive to a fault, but as any business owner can tell you, the customer is not always right.
Anyhow, this has gotten long, so I’ll just end with this:
Back up your fics - because you should always back up your fics, not because there’s any need for panic.
To the outgoing OTW board members - thank you for the time/energy/sweat/tears you’ve poured into fandom
To the incoming/future board members - I wish you the very best of luck, and I hope you’re ready for a wild ride
To everyone else in fandom: take a moment to appreciate not just the authors/artists whose works you love, but the hidden people behind the scenes who make sure it’s always available to you at your finger tips
I am going to bold a part that speaks to me in the language of my peoples:
“With that said, fandom would have never gained a lot of that legitimacy if it wasn’t for the passion and persistence of old school fandom. The very existence of AO3 was born out of the desire for fandom to run, well, an Archive Of Our Own. I still shake my head in awe at the people who turned building fandom infrastructures into their full time careers - very often on top of other full time careers (and raising a family on top of that).
To the folks over in the new school fandom camp, my only caution is to avoid getting drowned out by the details. You will never please everyone, and if you try to you’ll just drag everyone down into failure with you. There will always be someone who gets offended by what you do, or how you do it, or why or who or when. Tumblr fandom in particular gets caught up in being non-offensive to a fault, but as any business owner can tell you, the customer is not always right…..
….To everyone else in fandom: take a moment to appreciate not just the authors/artists whose works you love, but the hidden people behind the scenes who make sure it’s always available to you at your finger tips.”
If there are THREE GENERATIONS OF FANFICTION, then I propose that they are:
Pre-internet
Internet 1.0
Internet 2.0
But what that tumblr post on “three generations of fanfiction” really showed is that tumblr is full of cranky old ladies, and lots of us were around and writing fanfic before LJ or Tumblr were a twinkle in their programmers’ eyes. Another thing it showed is that “old” has a hilariously variable definition in fandom. You kids think you’re “old” because you remember Quizilla? Back in my day, we posted our fic to Usenet! Uphill both ways on a 14.4 modem! (NB: I am 34. Also not actually old! Honestly, Tumblr! Life doesn’t stop when you graduate college!)
But I digress. The point is, that post is fascinating and deserves to be documented, so I have made a Tumblr page for it. I am about 1/3 of the way through looking at all of the reblogs with text in them. Please come help me organize it, add good reblogs I’ve missed, or suggest topics I haven’t covered.
Fanlore is a wiki on fandom history. Like all wikis, it’s better the more people edit it.
To anyone looking for a good summary of the OTW Elections events in past couple of months: Fanlore to the rescue. (Kudos to the everyone editing, that’s a great page!)
And in case you missed it earlier, Atiya and Matty, Board members-elect, posted an update. Please remember: the OTW and its projects, including AO3 and Fanlore, aren’t going anywhere—despite everything that’s happened, all our volunteers continue their daily work as they have for the past several years. Life goes on! Don’t panic: OTW and AO3 are in no danger whatsoever.
And then wander off to the rest of Fanlore because it’s lonely with so few editors.
I can’t wait for the days where scholarship has to muddle through ff.net and ao3 pseudonyms like “guys, I have evidence to believe that starfucker69 was a pseudonym for one of our landmark literary figures of the 21st century and that they in fact first began their writing career with filthy sinful Steggy smut.”
As an academic and a fan I both want and fucking dread this day because academics trying to tackle things like A/B/O, magic!cock, g!p, mpreg, rule 63, sex pollen like… the language academia is going to have to invent my god
future thesis: bottomdean89’s famously kudos'ed story, “A Knot to Remember,” operates at first under the conventions of the A/B/O genre, using omega heat sickness as its primary device for doing so, but in chapter 14, bottomdean89 clearly introduces the fuck or die trope to create a dialectic through which the ultimate theme of soulmates is realized
Future rebuttal: The secondary gender genre of alternate universe fanworks (colloquially referred to as “A/B/O” or “omgeaverse”) has, at its heart, an amalgamation of conventions and tropes, including chemical compulsion to copulate (”sex pollen”), coital tying (”knotting”), impregnation of those whose primary gender is considered to be male (”mpreg”), survival dependent on coitus (”fuck or die”), and metaphysical connection (”soulmates”). Rather than changing genres in chapter 14, bottomean89 merely shifts the focus from one element of the genre to another. This not only maintains thematic consistency–a predominant trait of bottomdean89′s future works–it also unites the chemical compulsion to copulate convention with the survival dependent on coitus convention in a way that is unique to the secondary gender genre. After all, the chemical compulsion of secondary gender reproductive cycle syndrome (”heat sickness”) is, at its epitome, a biological imperative, and should the characters fail to heed it, propagation of the species will not result, which can be considered a type of “death.” Additionally, situational risks to the character experiencing secondary gender reproductive cycle syndrome–such as dehydration, disorientation, hormonal fluctuations, and suggestibility–can lead to the character’s actual physical death, should they not be handled properly by a competent inseminating partner. In short, one of the primary hallmarks of the secondary gender genre is the fusion and unification of the chemical compulsion to copulate convention and the survival dependent on coitus convention, something which bottomdean89 illustrates with great skill in “A Knot to Remember,” and which allows for the ultimate metaphysical connection between the characters.
A couple of weeks ago, the RAW Fanthology team spent a weekend in the woods planning our @kickstarter launch. There was blood (fake), chicken escapes (real), Mizumono cosplay (a questionable choice) and homemade donuts (100% unquestionable).
We also spent a lot of time making Aimee sit on rocks and talking at a camera about why fandom and fandom publishing is so important to her (and the rest of us).
I’ve cut together some of my favorite quotes from that discussion so you can meet Aimee and learn more about what inspired the RAW Fanthology project and why we want to create published fanworks that exist as tangible objects.
Filk songs are a longstanding part of both media fandom and scfi-fi fandom history. Lyrics are often set to well known songs so that audiences can sing along. This filk song was performed in the early 1980s and released on the “Cosmic Connection” cassette tape.
THE TREKKER (to the tune of Simon and Garfunkle’s “The Boxer”) (lyrics by Cheryl White & Jeanne Cloud)
Ever wonder what types of fanzines are being published today? There are still many traditional print fanzines (just head over to Fanlore or click on my fanzine tag). But more recently, I’ve seen limited run art zines being produced. Kickstarter seems to be a popular way of funding these zines. I would have included more, but tumblr only lets me add a certain number of images.
Links to their Fanlore pages or their Kickstarter page below. Most are sold out, but a few still have copies available.
http://furyroadfanzine.tumblr.com/ (this is the one zine that has yet to be published, although they just concluded their Kickstarter fundraiser) (Mad Max Fury Road)
Seriously though, this scene. WHY DID THEY DELETE THIS SCENE?
And as they went away with Luke letting Han’s hand trail out of his, I thought, “…as though millions of Han/Luke shipper voices suddenly cried out and were silenced.”
In all my days I’ve never shipped this till…
Welp, if I didn’t ship it before…
True story from ancient fandom corner: people did ship it, and that shit was stomped on harder than any slash has ever been stomped on. There were lawsuits. SW slash went WAY underground–even in the days when all slash was underground. There were ‘zines, but they were precious as carbuncles and basically if you had one or wrote in one you were like a fucking badass slash bandit.
I may have reblogged this before but I am compelled to do so again.
True fact: Lucas films actually sued fans in the 70’ for publishing slash and gen fiction. I remember fanzines in the 80’s-90s would not touch Star wars with a fifty pole.
No fan was ever sued. But there were stern letters sent.
“…At the time of the first movie’s release in 1977, Star Wars fandom grew rapidly, with fan clubs, zines, and fan-run conventions…… [Fan] Clubs were not restricted to the United States: both the Moons of Yavin Fan club in England [2] and Maikel Das’s Northern German Star Wars group [3] located in Hamburg [4] sprang into existence and operated for many years, producing both fanzines and art. ….
…… the editors of the Star Trek fanzine Sol Plus advertised for new submissions, saying: “…and please, Star Trek only, no Star Wars!” This showed that Star Trek fans were increasingly writing Star Wars material, and sending it to Star Trek editors for publication. [7]By 1979, however, Star Wars was being recognized at fan run conventions and the first FanQ awards were given to Star Wars fans: Maggie Nowakowska for her Star Wars stories the Thousandworlds Collected series, and Martynn, who illustrated Star Wars stories.[8]In 1980, the annual convention for fanzine producers and readers moved from Michigan to New York for one year. “The name, Mos’ Eastly Con, showed the growing influence of Star Wars. Organizers evenly split the panels between Star Trek and Star Wars; the remaining panels covered general topics (such as "the art of editing”).“ [9]Star Wars fanzines and other fan works continued to be published through the 1980s and 1990s, with interest in the fandom waxing and waning over the years, often timed to the release of a new movie. “
Seriously though, this scene. WHY DID THEY DELETE THIS SCENE?
And as they went away with Luke letting Han’s hand trail out of his, I thought, “…as though millions of Han/Luke shipper voices suddenly cried out and were silenced.”
In all my days I’ve never shipped this till…
Welp, if I didn’t ship it before…
True story from ancient fandom corner: people did ship it, and that shit was stomped on harder than any slash has ever been stomped on. There were lawsuits. SW slash went WAY underground–even in the days when all slash was underground. There were ‘zines, but they were precious as carbuncles and basically if you had one or wrote in one you were like a fucking badass slash bandit.
Aww, what a sweet scene that’s reminiscent of the past times Han went after Luke to save him. Any slash archive i’d been to since the late 90′s had a whole bunch of Han/Luke. I’ll never ship it for several reasons but it’s definitely up there with the Most Golden of Bros.
As for the dark ages slash thing: I did not know that. I found this site which explains that back in the 80′s ALL SW zines oddly had to go thru the official fan club to keep an eye on Lucasfilm’s image. In contrast to Star Trek which just shrugged and let the fans run free with spirks and kocks all akimbo. Even SW zines with hetero adult content received stern warnings. It’s very common and understandable for a franchise, especially back before the interbutts when content was more easily controlled, to want to keep its image as family or child friendly, and so crack down on any physical works of their copyright materials being made against that image (and profiting). That being said, we know Lucas isn’t exactly lgbt friendly. I can’t find any mention of actual lawsuits happening tho. Warnings and policy reminders only. Then it seems the fandom policed its own, which is probably why any adult zines went under-underground. Think of it as like the child-friendly cartoon fandoms on tumblr trying to keep porn out of the main tags. (Or when i had to buy sg-1 slash zines in a fan’s hush-hush hotel room instead of the con’s vendor room with all the other fanmade goodies.)
There might also be issue with this story of asshole fans leaving explicit slash zines on Mark Hamill’s property where his kids found it wtf
This urban legend cracked me up: ”There might also be issue with this story of asshole fans leaving explicit slash zines on Mark Hamill’s property where his kids found it wtf
“
I don’t think there were any SW slash zines created when Mark Hamill had small children, and even it there were, the zines were far too few and far between, and VALUABLE to throw into a yard. We need a Snopes.com for fandom.
Seriously though, this scene. WHY DID THEY DELETE THIS SCENE?
And as they went away with Luke letting Han’s hand trail out of his, I thought, “…as though millions of Han/Luke shipper voices suddenly cried out and were silenced.”
In all my days I’ve never shipped this till…
Welp, if I didn’t ship it before…
True story from ancient fandom corner: people did ship it, and that shit was stomped on harder than any slash has ever been stomped on. There were lawsuits. SW slash went WAY underground–even in the days when all slash was underground. There were ‘zines, but they were precious as carbuncles and basically if you had one or wrote in one you were like a fucking badass slash bandit.
From what I understand, the Phantom Menace brought Star Wars slash into the fannish mainstream, when Qi-Gon/Obi-Wan exploded onto the Internet ca. 1999-2000, and it was a big enough phenomenon that LucasFilm didn’t bother pursuing it anymore.
i vaguely remember hearing that this was because fans were really uncool and harrassed mark hamill by like. throwing explicit zines at his house. but my brain could be totally making that up
The Lucasfilm vs Fandom Dispute had nothing to do with fans throwing zines into Mark Hamill’s front yard. But it did involve adult themed fic (het) and a Swedish zine.
Seriously though, this scene. WHY DID THEY DELETE THIS SCENE?
And as they went away with Luke letting Han’s hand trail out of his, I thought, “…as though millions of Han/Luke shipper voices suddenly cried out and were silenced.”
In all my days I’ve never shipped this till…
Welp, if I didn’t ship it before…
True story from ancient fandom corner: people did ship it, and that shit was stomped on harder than any slash has ever been stomped on. There were lawsuits. SW slash went WAY underground–even in the days when all slash was underground. There were ‘zines, but they were precious as carbuncles and basically if you had one or wrote in one you were like a fucking badass slash bandit.
I may have reblogged this before but I am compelled to do so again.
Let’s all raise a glass to the badass slash bandits who have come before.
I never shipped it before but holy hell
Aw, Han/Luke was my first otp. I got into slash just as internet fanfic groups were on the rise and zines were fading out, so I had never even heard of the Lucasfilm vs. The Fans drama until now.
But yes, when I was really, really into Star Wars, H/L was THE main slash pairing, and there were sooo many good pages dedicated to hosting fan works. (My favorite H/L fanwork archive, btw, was Elusive Lover, which was also a zine at one point. I’m sad to see it’s no longer hosted! :( So many good fics and art there.)
Then the prequel trilogy happened and most everyone’s slashing efforts went to Qui-Gon/Obi-Wan and later Obi-Wan/Anakin, and the flow of new Han/Luke fic & art slowed to a trickle.
Anyway it’s really sweet to see folks discovering this pairing for the first time. If you’re willing to dig a little, there are still countless treasure troves of H/L fanwork out there, from the previous generations of SW Slash fans.
Elusive Lover is still available via the WayBack machine.
Seriously though, this scene. WHY DID THEY DELETE THIS SCENE?
And as they went away with Luke letting Han’s hand trail out of his, I thought, “…as though millions of Han/Luke shipper voices suddenly cried out and were silenced.”
In all my days I’ve never shipped this till…
Welp, if I didn’t ship it before…
True story from ancient fandom corner: people did ship it, and that shit was stomped on harder than any slash has ever been stomped on. There were lawsuits. SW slash went WAY underground–even in the days when all slash was underground. There were ‘zines, but they were precious as carbuncles and basically if you had one or wrote in one you were like a fucking badass slash bandit.
As far as we know, no one was sued for publishing a Star wars slash zine or fiction. The reason that Star Wars slash zine fandom went dark, had to do with one gen and one het story published in 1981: the Swedish zine The Dark Lord (sexual torture of Han) and then later Slow Boat To Bespin (Han/Leia). This led to Lucasfilm issuing a series of protocols requiring the publication of family friendly material. These protocols put a damper on Star Wars zine publishing overall because they were subjective and arbitrary.
a fun fact: there is ‘a pornographic biography’ of aaron burr - which was published anonymously in 1861
and yes, it gets pretty graphic
“Burr put his arm around her waist, and pressing her to his throbbing heart, applied his lips to those ivory globes which rounded up over her dress, almost to the nipples. The effect of this was instantly apparent. The warm-hearted girl sighed heavily, there was a choking sensation in her throat, and her large dark eyes were rolled up in her head with such a softness in their expression, that Burr must have been more or less than man, not to have desired a more intimate acquaintance with her. […] Burr threw up her clothes, and revealed such charms as seldom have been exposed to the light of the sun. The smooth, round belly, the voluminous yet compact thighs, the robust calf, and small foot and ankle, the satin smoothness of the skin, and other graces not to be mentioned, but whose pouting and moist freshness betokened a guarded virginity, which, however, longed for the pressure of manhood, all these so fired him with passion, that he had scarcely the necessary patience to prepare himself for the amorous encounter.”
Symposium broke new ground in terms of making the area of fan studies something that fans themselves could have an ongoing voice in. To quote:
“TWC’s Symposium section was designed as a fluid category for fannish meta and personal essays. We want many voices to be heard, including nonacademic ones. Fan communities have been producing complex and insightful discussion for years. However, their publication in specialized zines, mailing lists, and blogs has meant that the content has too often been inaccessible and unknown to outsiders, meaning that academic study of fan texts and cultures has failed to take into account communities’ discussion of their own activities.”
On March 8, 2000, the Official Star Wars Website began hosting fans’ homepages, offering attractive features like 16 megabytes of web space, dynamic content, an official URL (fan.starwars.com), and a sweepstakes. They cite a desire to encourage fan creativity. But in their Terms of Service, which all users must agree to, they expressly forbid derivative creative works and take ownership of fans’ intellectual property, particularly “derivative works,” despite the fact that any Star Wars-related fan creativity is inherently a “derivative work.”….
The Terms of Service (section 8.4) states, “The creation of derivative works based on or derived from the Star Wars Properties, including, but not limited to, products, services, fonts, icons, link buttons, wallpaper, desktop themes, on-line postcards and greeting cards and unlicensed merchandise (whether sold, bartered or given away) is expressly prohibited. If despite these Terms of Service you do create any derivative works based on or derived from the Star Wars Properties, such derivative works shall be deemed and shall remain the property of Lucasfilm Ltd. in perpetuity (note: that means forever).
It is my, and many other fans’, strong belief that offering fans homepages and then claiming anything posted on that web space as the intellectual property of Lucasfilm, Ltd. "in perpetuity” amounts to a tactic being used by Lucasfilm to fight their ongoing trademark and copyright war against fans by luring fans into their territory and taking over explicit legal ownership of anything they display there. It is also my belief that this is a grave and devious disservice to fans.”
A long and ugly formatted list of the first two screens of books/essay etc that contain references to Fanlore. The search engine was Google Books and I only looked st the first few pages of results.
Do fans have a phrase or word that describes these clueless press articles meant to amaze the clueless, the “oh my goodness, can you believe there is such a thing as fan fiction out there?” sort of thing journalists have been writing for decades? It seems like these articles get a little more sophisticated centimeter by centimeter (and there are a handful of good ones out there), but they mainly are hammered out via template. There must be a fannish word for these wide-eyed, look-it things.
All this leaving tumblr talk is making me hark back to the LJ days of old, man oh man.
some of the older fans here, who remember when we had to blog uphill both ways in the snow, will recall that The Great LJ Fan Migration didn’t just happen within a few months.
It took years for fandom to fully migrate and build a presence on the alternative site DreamWidth, and in between those years LJ made several fuck-ups that lead to its own demise, turning it into the fandom* ghost town it is now.
Brief history:
LJ is sold to SixApart in 2005. Previously ad-free for nine years and run by one guy named Brad Fitzpatrick, 6A monetised it, introduced ‘sponsored’ accounts in addition to basic, paid and permanent, which gives you ads in exchange for more features. It was annoying, but LJ had grown into a behemoth by then so it was understandable.
6A then later sells to Russian company SUP in ‘07.
May 2007 was the first strikethrough. Fandom banded together, collectively shat on LJ staff for deleting an HP porn community pornish-pixies, along with several others, for alleged paedophilia and ‘violation of the TOS’. Several personal blogs and communities also got deleted and the uproar was huge. Deleted journals looked like this, hence the name. There is outrage, there is uproar, there are news articles, a BNF attempts and fails to burn a t-shirt.
People were already talking alternatives by then - InsaneJournal, DeadJournal and JournalFen being the most popular ones, but each had their own faults. JF was invite-only and 18+, DJ was extremely buggy and tended to break down and IJ was…ass-ugly (and ableist). Communities were scattered, there was some general shifting around and there was the beginnings of Scribblit, an fandom-oriented blog community, which didn’t really go anywhere. LJ had been active for 9 years, fandom had been present for around the same time, and people were reluctant to move. At the end of the day, not much changed.
But here’s the kicker of the whole shebang: SUP was planning to take LJ public. Strikethrough/boldthrough was them cleaning up the mess.
In August, three months later, it happened again only this time the deleted journals were bolded. There was more uproar, only this time people started talking seriously about moving.
Things are quiet for a year or two, but most people have lost trust in LJ staff. In this time: LJ disables basic accounts, changed the layout of the profile page, disables comment headlines which made kinkmemes a special sort of hell to navigate.
DreamWidth started its roots around early ‘09 with invite-only accounts for beta testing, run by previous staff split from the LJ board. This was the days before kickstarter and crowdsourcing, so it was kind of a big deal.
It wouldn’t be until 2011 that the platform would complete beta testing and open to membership. Biggest early comms are kink_bingo and scans_daily.
AO3 also start gaining users around this time.
The move to DW is gradual and took years. People dropped off the radar, lost contact, some people stayed - it wouldn’t be until late 2013 that DW and LJ would be on equal standing fandom-wise.
Parallel to this, Tumblr was getting popular and some people skipped DW altogether and just moved to Tumblr.
LJ is by now a ghost town, but it’s going to take years before any significant change in userbase will take effect and make a dent in Yahoo/Tumblr’s pocket.
All has happened before and will happen again etc etc, because when fandom makes a blogging platform grow in size, they will inevitably have to sell out and this eventually fucks its userbase over. Tumblr has an estimated userbase of 30-50 million, which is at least three times the size of LJ when it was bought.
I’m glad people are so optimistic about all this, but I also doubt that much is going to come from it.
I’m sure that people older than me, who moved from usenet to yahoo mailing lists and Geocities, have a lot more experience in this.
(*LJ is still the most popular blogging platform in Russia, let’s not forget. Just because fandom doesn’t reside there any more doesn’t mean it’s completely irrelevant.)
I think a blogging platforms popularity is its ultimate downfall. More users = more bandwith, which means it costs more to operate. If you want to keep things running, you HAVE to monetize it. There’s no ifs ands or buts about it. You can’t expect something that’s all volunteer to work perfectly all the time, and really, you shouldn’t. I actually don’t think xKit guy should go to so much trouble to “fix” Tumblr. He doesn’t work for Yahoo, he’s not getting paid for it but Yahoo ultimately benefits from his hard work.
Fandom has had a long, sad history of not wanting to pay for things, and its very telling that the greatest rage swells up when platforms go after illegal (scanlations, fansubs and so on), and questionable content (all the porn) first. That’s ultimately what gets fandom to move: the lack of easy access to free stuff.
Tl;dr: blogging platform gets popular; becomes too costly to operate; clears out all of the illegal/questionable stuff; monetizes somehow (ads, usually); fandom gets pissed and leaves. Lather, rinse, repeat.
I think I’m gonna post some Fandom Drama stuff for a while here since I’m sick and tired of watching people repeat history. Because, trust me, these sorts of hijinks are nothing new. Also, don’t let the radfems fool you, women are usually just as depraved as men when it comes to fandom content and drama. Sometimes worse. Who am I kidding? Often worse.
Anyway, the Tl:dr is: LJ decided to monetize more of the site and bowed to a conservative Christian group, which largely involved them opening the basement doors and cleaning out all of the child porn. There’s a few things to keep in mind here…
- Livejournal has always been pretty heavily female dominated. By heavily, I mean, a community of 300 people would only have three to five guys in it. Seriously. Guys were like unicorns in LJ fandoms.
- Naturally, the purge pissed a lot of people off, and not just the people who were mistakenly axed. Porn depicting underaged characters has been a staple of fandom for some time, and much of the discussion in the above link is by women who were DEFENDING it as a harmless exploration of sexuality (since no actual children were involved, and at the end of the day it was all fiction/drawings (which I agree with, even though I detest the stuff).
- I am 100% certain that many of the women who once drew underaged characters in various fucked up situations now lead the charge against child porn. Likely because they now have children of their own, and have forgotten what they drew/wrote as teenagers.
- Oh yeah, a good portion of LJ’s most prolific NC-17/M rated artists and writers were teenaged girls. So it was often 15 year olds drawing or writing porn of 12 year olds. Boys, usually. Gotta have that shota.
- Something similar happened to DeviantArt but I haven’t located that rundown of events yet (if anyone even bothered to document it). Many people flounced and came to Tumblr where presumably they could post their pre-timeskip NaruSasu yaoi in peace (they’re 12, before the timeskip, btw - could hardly browse the Naruto tag without running across it).
- Where they were hounded again when Yahoo bought the site and decided to try to contain the porn, and crack down on the underaged stuff. Again, this heavily effected a lot of female fanartists, and people were generally pissed. But I’m guessing most of you don’t remember any of that, even though it only happened a few years ago.
Just about seven years ago, on 29 May 2007, hundreds of fans with accounts at Livejournal made the shocking discovery that their blogs, and those of some of their friends and favorite fandom communities, had been deleted without prior notice.
It’s estimated that Livejournal suspended approximately 500 blog accounts. The only notice of this was was the strike through the names of the suspended blogs, which led to this event being called Strikethrough.
At the time, Livejournal was the primary blogging platform for fandom. Its friends list and threaded conversations enabled fans to find each other and have discussions. Its privacy settings allowed fans to share as much or as little as they chose. It was a place to publish and archive fan fic, art, and meta. These features give some idea why the deletions of so many fandom blogs was devastating.
Speculation and uncertainty were rampant during the two days it took for Livejournal to finally respond to demands from users for information. At first, LJ stated only that it had been advised that journals listing an illegal activity as an interest could be regarded as soliciting for that illegal activity, which put the site at legal risk. It was eventually revealed that Livejournal and its owners at the time, Six Apart, had been contacted by a group calling themselves Warriors for Innocence, a conservative Christian organization with ties to the militia movement who accused of being a haven for pedophiles and child pornography.
LJ had based the account suspensions on the tags used in LJ blogs. LJ users list their interests in their profiles, and those interests functions as tags. LJ took the blanket view that there was no difference between blogs listing “rape”.”incest”, or “pedophilia” among their interests, and blogs with posts tagged “rape”. “incest”, or “pedophilia”. As a consequence, some of the accounts that were suspended were support sites for people like rape survivors and gay teens, as well as the fandom sites that posted book discussions, RP, fan fiction, and fan art.
Livejournal grudgingly issued a partial apology to users on 31 May, but it took months for the organization to sort through the suspended blogs. According to Livejournal, most of the suspended accounts were restored. Not all of the suspended accounts were restored, and some of those that weren’t belonged to the support groups and fandoms.
One result of Strikethrough was that many communities and individual fans locked their blogs so the content could be viewed only community members, or those on their friends lists. Other fans opened accounts at blogging platforms like JournalFen, The Greatest Journal, or Insane Journal. There was definitely an atmosphere of mistrust and paranoia that hadn’t previously existed, and part of the problem was that Livejournal had not come through with promised clarification about what sort of content violated the ToS.
So, of course, it happened all over again.
On 3 August, Livejournal once again suspended a number of accounts without warning. This time, the account names were bolded, and the event became known as Boldthrough.
These deletions were the result of decisions made by a group consisting of members of LiveJournal’s Abuse Prevention Team, made up of LiveJournal employees, and Six Apart staff, that had been set up to review blog content. This group was had been empowered to declare blog content offensive, a violation of the ToS that was defined by the team as content not containing enough serious artistic value to offset the sexual nature of the material. The team was empowered to terminate accounts without warning.
Anxious and angry LJ users had to wail ten days until LJ issued a response. Eventually, the ToS was changed to state that accounts deemed in violation of the ToS would in future be deleted only if the offender refused to delete offending content.
Just a few days before Strikethrough, LJ user astolat proposed a new blogging platform and fan fic archive be created by fans, for fans. This was the birth of the Organization for Transformative Works, a non-profit organization dedicated to provide access to fanworks, and to protect and defend fanworks from commercial exploitation and legal challenge. Strikethrough and Boldthrough definitely pushed the project along. OTW opened DreamWidth in beta mode in April 2009, and began open beta testing of Archive of Our Own in November 2009. [MeeDee edit: The OTW was not involved in the creation or development of Dreamwidth. 11/4/2015). The OP has issued a corrected version of her 2014 post and has also added the following:
DreamWidth opened for business in the summer of 2008. DW was conceived by former LJ staff members who shared the vision of a journal site created by people who understand journal users because they are journal users, too. Like LJ, it is a for-profit business that features both paid and free accounts. Unlike LJ, DW is dedicated to being totally ad-free. From the outset, it was designed to be fandom-friendly, and the ToS do not restrict the type or appropriateness of content. Initially, invites were required to open an account. This was done to control how many new accounts were created at any given time, and to ensure that sufficent resources — hardware, bandwidth, and support — were available. The invite system encouraged former LJ users to bring along their friends, and helped to ease the transition of fandoms from LJ to DW. The invite system was discontinued in December 2011.
In mid-January 2010, DreamWidth came under pressure by an undisclosed group who tried to convince DW’s server and PayPal, among others, that DW was a platform for child pornography. DW refused to give in to the harassment and intimidation, and promptly notifed users about the situation. The only consequence of the group’s pressure was that new requests for paid services were temporarily put on hold until DW was able to find a new payment processor service. DW remained true to its Guiding Principles by keeping users informed throughout this incident, and respecting freedom of expression by refusing to delete any posts or blogs to satisfy the demands of the group of trolls.
Which brings us to Tumblr.
Tumblr was launched in 2007. While not all fans have embraced it, citing reasons like character restrictions in replies and asks and the difficulty of finding others who share one’s fandom, it’s certain that the majority of fandoms are well-represented.
However, in July 2013, fans once again expressed outrage when Tumblr - without warning – removed without warning accounts flagged as “NSFW” or “Adult” from public searches, made those blogs inaccessible to Tumblr users not already following them, and deleted a number of tags from its mobile app, including #gay, #lesbian and #bisexual. In a manner unsettlingly reminiscent of Strikethrough and Boldthrough, Tumblr did not immediately respond, and the response posted 24 hours later was widely regarded as a non-apology apology. Tumblr claimed it had been trying to get rid of commercial porn blogss, and eventually asserted that all the removed accounts had been reinstated.
If there’s a lesson to be learned from this, it’s that of George Santayana: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Most blogging and social networking sites are in business to make a profit, and fandoms make them uncomfortable. They inevitably take steps to control the content being posted, to keep outside groups or their new owners happy, disrupting fandoms and deleting material that fans had considered to be safely stored.
The only solution I can see is for fans to copy and back up the things that are important. Maintain active accounts at several sites. Keep a list of your friends’ pseudonyms and emails.
Because the only thing that’s certain is that it’s going to happen again.
One addition/correction: Dreamwidth is not an OTW project, though both OTW and Dreamwidth were developed by fans partly because of frustrations with LiveJournal, including but not limited to Strikethrough.
…And then came “Creating a Safe and Friendly Fandom.“ We’re all part of fandom, we know it can be the most wonderful thing in the world - and the most awful (though apparently we’re not as bad as the fandom for the original "Beauty and the Beast” - I really need to find the stories on this) The panelists offered advice on how to handle hate (ignore it, don’t go looking for it, for the love of God don’t feed the trolls) …..
I feel like I am channeling a fandom encyclopedia today, but that’s OK.
Some of the divisive Beauty and the Beast fandom history has been written up on Fanlore. The short version: After Season 2, the show killed off the main romantic female lead and brought in a new female character. This caused the “Classic vs Season 3 Split” where Classic fans of seasons 1 and 2 would shut their eyes and plug their ears when anything from season 3 would appear.
From Fanlore: "I was at Tunnelcon
2 and went to a video showing for diehard fans of classic BATB (first
and second season). While it was wonderful to see interviews of Linda
and Ron which I had never seen, it was disconcerting to hear that people
would refuse to watch even music videos with third-season shots in
them. I kept thinking "they missed the kiss in the cave, they missed
Vincent kissing Catherine as he left her” but they saw this as a
terrible betrayal of what the show was about and I have to respect the
fact that these people had a fairy tale shattered to bits by the killing
of Catherine.“
…..Then I went to “The Evolution of Fanfic,” which interested me since I caught the end of the era where fan fic was something found in fanzines and sharing them was a very private, under the table thing. I remember that I didn’t get into fandom until college, when I finally had internet access. This panel felt very academic, and was interesting. The very first slash story, for example, was a Kirk/Spock story that started as a writing exercise in which the writer didn’t identify the characters or their sexes, though the author said in her notes that’s who she was writing about. Apparently, it’s online somewhere, and now I have to find it…. Anyway, the gist of this panel is that we all have it easy these days…
Star Trek K/S fans held their annual Kiscon convention in Seattle this weekend. This is the celebratory cake, festooned with artwork from Courts of Honor. Courts of Honor was written by Syn Ferguson who was the guest of Honor.
From Fanlore, the fan-run wiki about media fandom:
“Lost in a crowd is a panfandom tumblr meme that started in August 2015. It is a text-based meme in four parts: character A can’t find character B in a crowd and says “This calls for drastic measures,” character A shouts something that character B is guaranteed to find offensive, character B leaps out of the crowd and shouts something angry in reply, character A says either “There they are” or “Found them”. Often the thing guaranteed to anger character B is an insult to character A. memedocumentation identified the origin of the meme as a Steve/Bucky post on August 10 by jibblyuniverse.[1] As of October 2015, the post has over 46,000 notes.”
Until AO3 came along, no multifandom archive had ever really come close to the size or popularity of FFN, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t other multifandom archives or that they were all small. There are or have been a number with tens of thousands of fics, just not millions.
Media Miner (MM, MM.org) is an archive a lot of us in anime fandom fled to when Fanfiction.net banned porn. It was pretty hot in the early-mid 00’s. I drifted away from MM when I left mailing lists and got active on Livejournal. In recent years, I hear its mods have disappeared, taking key passwords and things with them. It has suffered many technical problems, and users even suggested AO3 adopt it via Open Doors. (Sadly, that’s not possible unless the site owner approaches OTW, though I also see a notice that MM has moved servers, so perhaps it’s doing better again.) Currently, based on the index page, MediaMiner hosts 92,350 fics. There is a separate fan art section with 16616 pieces listed.
A brief snapshot of fandom in early 2007: The first Naruto series had wrapped, and Naruto Shippuden had just started airing. Supernatural was wrapping up its second season with a shocking finale in “All Hell Breaks Loose.” Kingdom Hearts II and Final Fantasy XII came out only the year before, and Final Fantasy 7 fandom was back with a vengeance with the release of Advent Children. The world
The world waited breathlessly for the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.And fandom on LiveJournal was on fire.
The article is definitely worth the read. I loved this last bit:
“It’s a place by fans, for fans, where fans can gather and archive their work without concern for legality or censorship. It was born from a desire not to be beholden to original content creators or advertisers, and it has always been true to that goal, staying afloat primarily through charitable donations from users. Fandom has fragmented across social media—some users remained on LiveJournal, while others migrated to Dreamwidth or Tumblr or JournalFen.
For many though, AO3 was the advent of fandom coming together to defend their hobby and preserve their history, a place where the principles of fannish creativity would outweigh watchdog and advertiser concerns about controversial content. Six years and over a million fan works later, they’re still going strong.”
“Hanson Erotica was a domain…..which hosted Hanson fanfic, focusing on erotica, both het and slash. The site opened in 2001. Some popslash and The Moffatts fic was also hosted.
Site’s Context In The Wider World Of Fanfiction
“FanFiction.net’s decision to delete all RPF fiction [in 2001] was also a small blow dealt to the hanfic world. Somewhere around 1000 hanfic stories were archived there, but even at that, it was hardly the primary source for hanfic. Fans continued to host their stories on personal websites, and a few moved to LiveJournal. Those who lingered on and continued to write simply had to make the best of things. With all three boys finally over the age of consent, smut became more popular than ever before. Whereas “erotica” was often kept entirely separate from other stories, or strongly warned for when it wasn’t, adult material started to be integrated into more and more mainstream stories. Sites such as HansonErotica.com, HansonPorn.com and LustJunkie.com were among the first to embrace the smutty side, rather than keeping it hidden and secret.”[1]
livejournal, fanfiction.net and ao3 which one were you?
those quizilla ones where you play spin the bottle and end up making out in a closet with either orochimaru or troy bolton
THREE generations
THREE generations!?
fucking HELL goddamn USENET LISTSERV TRANSFORMERS FANFIC jesus christ
motherfucker HAND MIMEOGRAPHED FANZINES DELIVERED BY THE POST OFFICE THROUGH MAILING LISTS
with SHITTY SELF INSERT MONSTER MOVIE FANFIC BY FORREST ACKERMAN IN THE 40s and then later SAUCY KIRK / SPOCK SEX IN THE 70s
GOD DAMNED SHERLOCK FANS TITTERING IN SALONS ABOUT THEIR OWN VERSIONS OF ADVENTURES WITH THEIR FAVORITE DETECTIVES
FUCKING DANTE WITH HIS SELF INSERT BIBLE FANFIC
AND FINALLY VERGIL, COOING OVER HOMER
GET OFF MY LAWN*
* note: i was actually not part of this generation of fanfic, but it makes me mad when people forget that fandom as we know it today has existed since at least the 1930s and that fannish behavior and transformative works are AS OLD AS GODDAMN TIME
spacemohawks get in here and be salty with me about these youngins who don’t even know about 1970s gay-ass Kirk / Spock fanfic GODDAMN THE Y OUTH OF TODAY
My friend airy-minotaur actually wrote her thesis on fanfiction/fandom history. So maybe give that a read!
And OF COURSE if you ever have questions about K/S, fandom history in general, or whatever really, you can always send me an ask.
RESPECT YOUR ELDERS. Know your fandom history.
With love,
Mommy Mohawks
Weren’t “lemon” and “slash” kinda concurrent for a bit before everyone just decided to go with “slash”?
Nope. ‘Lemon’ was for explicit porn of any gender combination and was used in (English-speaking) anime fandom. It comes from the title of a hentai anime, Cream Lemon (which is from the 80s, but I’m not sure when it became known to English speakers). The term was most common from the 90s through the mid 00s, I think. Lime/citrus/etc. were an 00s addition to the terminology. You still sometimes see any and all of these used, especially on sites that anime fandom was using back then and is still on (ff.net, mediaminer.org). They were also more common when there were still major sites that had them in the name, like the Sakura Lemon Archive.
‘Slash’, in contrast, just means m/m; there’s no specific level of porn implied. It was coined in the 70s or early 80s. (”K/S”, which it comes from is definitely pre-80s, but people saying the word “slash” out loud to mean any m/m fic pairing didn’t start immediately. I know some people on Fanlore have been combing through old letter zines to try to find the first mentions of “slash” as opposed to “/”, so we know how people were imagining it was pronounced–and the results are more 80s than 70s, I think?) Some anime fans do use the term, but anime m/m fic in English has traditionally been labeled ‘yaoi’ for smut and ‘shounen ai’ for non-explicit romance. These days, I see more use of just ‘yaoi’ without a distinction between ‘yaoi’ and ‘shounen ai’ and more use of ‘BL’ (because that’s what commercial m/m is actually labeled as now in Japan).
Different meanings, different eras, different communities.
Wow, every time I think I can’t hate the “let’s commercialize fandom” contingent more, I come across something like this:
ML: Yeah, I guess I’m so far removed from fanfiction as a primary mode of fandom because I’m so in a very different world of behavior rather than a single point of origin fanworks. And what I really mean, I guess, by ‘canon is a little less important,’ is that there’s the incredible loop of production and consumption, so that producers are consumers are producers are consumers are producers are consumers. And so at any point along that trail someone can join in the fandom. So someone can be, can know StarKid, and become part of the fandom that way, even if they weren’t necessarily deep into Harry Potter before that.
ML: I really strongly disagree with anti-consumerist fandom. Because it’s missing a whole part of the production cycle that is absolutely necessary for people to understand in order to actually get canon. And in order to actually get fanworks! (Meredith Levine in an interview with Fansplaining, August 2015)
Funny how it is a person who analyze fannish interactions for profit that redefines fandom as commercial. Not only should be accept it when we get overrun by people trying to make money off us. We’re actually now supposed to accept when we get moved to the frienges of “fandom” to make room for the “real” thing–MONEY.
This may be a good point to remind ourselves why some of us keep on holding high the banner of non-profit fandom and its role in fannish history. So in that vein, here are two of my favorites quotes.
We need a central archive of our own, something like animemusicvideos.org. Something that would NOT hide from google or any public mention, and would clearly state our case for the legality of our hobby up front, while not trying to make a profit off other people’s IP and instead only making it easier for us to celebrate it, together, and create a welcoming space for new fans that has a sense of our history and our community behind it. (Astolat, May 2007)
Because I want us to own the goddamned servers, ok? Because I want a place where we can’t be TOSed and where no one can turn the lights off or try to dictate to us what kind of stories we can tell each other. (Speranza, January 2008)
Because with everything I see and know and post about the OTW, with everything that’s going on, at the end of the day, this is OUR space, for however we want to define our, for however inclusive we want it to be. The one thing that won’t be included, however, is third party platforms trying to make money off OUR CONTENT!
Bolding the parts that speak to me:
“This may be a good point to remind ourselves why some of us keep on holding high the banner of non-profit fandom and its role in fannish history. So in that vein, here are two of my favorites quotes.
“We need a central archive of our own, something like animemusicvideos.org. Something that would NOT hide from google or any public mention, and would clearly state our case for the legality of our hobby up front, while not trying to make a profit off other people’s IP and instead only making it easier for us to celebrate it, together, and create a welcoming space for new fans that has a sense of our history and our community behind it. (Astolat, May 2007)
“Because I want us to own the goddamned servers, ok? Because I want a place where we can’t be TOSed and where no one can turn the lights off or try to dictate to us what kind of stories we can tell each other. (Speranza, January 2008)
Because with everything I see and know and post about the OTW, with everything that’s going on, at the end of the day, this is OUR space, for however we want to define our, for however inclusive we want it to be. The one thing that won’t be included, however, is third party platforms trying to make money off OUR CONTENT!”
