Oh, man. Well, usual caveats about my failing memory, etc. etc.
I don’t remember exactly when I saw the first Sexymermaid story – it may have been as early as 2003-2004, but it might have been a year or two later. She started out writing Spike/Illyria (or at least, that was the one I saw first). As I recall, that first story wasn’t too bad. The prose was competent. The characterization was a bit iffy in places, but probably no more so than a ton of other fics. She soon switched to writing Spike/Xander, though, whether because she realized that she had a larger audience there, or because she liked m/m slash better, or both, I don’t know. And she started making manips to go with her stories.
Several things became obvious very quickly: She was incredibly prolific, she was not that good at making manips, and she had a huge kink for D/s slavefic featuring an uber-feminized, uber-submissive Spike. Stuff that hit the kink buttons of a sizeable portion of Spander fandom too, apparently, and hit them hard. At the time, Buffy fandom had seen very little like it; there were human AUs, but nothing quite like what she was doing. She became MASSIVELY popular. She was soon cranking out half a dozen multi-chapter fantasy slave AU epics at once – in the first and most famous one, Spike was a geisha in some kind of faux-Japanese Orientalist setting, and Xander was a gardener who… I dunno, I only read like half of one chapter, realized that it was Not My Thing At All, back-buttoned out, and politely ignored everything else she ever wrote.
I actually can’t remember if she was responsible for the Fairy Spike thing or not, but it sounds like the sort of thing she was into. Again, it took place mostly in communities I was not a part of, but I gather that it started out with someone, possibly Sexymermaid, posting a manip of a teeny Spike with butterfly wings pastede on yay, perched on Xander’s erect penis. This apparently set off a flood of Fairy Spike Spander manips and Fairy Spike Spander fics, which made the old school Spander slashers livid with annoyance. However, it also led to Shapinglight’s very funny Fairy Spangel parody ficlets, so it wasn’t all bad.
The massive popularity seems to have gone to her head. Success did not make her humble; quite the opposite. As her volume increased, her quality went down, but she refused to get a beta, because she felt that a beta would have diluted her unique vision. And when people asked her to please put her manips behind a cut, ostensibly because Think of The People On Dial-up (there were still people on dial-up in those days) but really, I suspect, because the subject matter squicked the hell out of people who didn’t share her kink, she flat out refused. There was apparently a major flame war between her and her followers and the people who didn’t like her stuff on a locked Spike-smut community on LJ – I only heard the echoes of it. I think she got accused of racism at one point, because of her ‘exotic’ settings. She accused her detractors of just being jealous of her popularity and talent.
(My personal opinion is that yes, her detractors were jealous of her popularity, but they weren’t wrong: her stuff was often objectively bad. Imaginative as hell in some respects, but poorly crafted.)
Anyway, the feud flared up periodically for the next several years, until finally Sexymermaid flounced from the fandom. Last I heard, she was successfully cranking out original m/m erotica for some internet publisher somewhere, which is honestly where her niche probably was all along.
ETA: I forgot, I’m pretty sure she was the one who started the “Darker_FillInTheBlank” community fad on LJ. It started out with darker_spike, and then there was darker_wesley and darker_this and darker_that. At one point there were at least a dozen of them. Ostensibly they were for any darkfic, but for all practical purposes they re-defined darkfic to mean
only
D/s slavefic.
Try to imagine it. It’s the spring of 1990, and “Star Trek: The Next Generation“ has been on the air for three seasons - and is about to break the Original Series’ record by having a fourth season.
Denise Crosby (Lt. Tasha Yar) left the show before the first season was over. Gates McFadden was summarily fired and replaced for season two, only to return in season three at the insistence of Patrick Stewart. So change had always been a possibility.
There was no internet. Which meant no spoilers like we now know them. No set reports. No speculation amongst the fans outside of conventions or groups of friends. Which meant no way to cope with the anxiety, no bulletin boards to post “AHHH! WTF?” on while you waited.
We may know now how it all turned out, but back then? I’ve got friends who where trekkies in the day, and the summer of 1990 was full of anxiety!
This was an amazing story arc, really.
I remember seeing graffiti saying “Picard Lives” which was basically the 1990 equivalent of a hashtag.
I feel like this and the cliffhanger at the end of S1 of The West Wing are about on equal footing. I lived neither live (I came into TWW in S2), but, SHEESH.
There was in fact internet, but it was EXTREMELY limited and very few people had access to it.
Over that summer, it exploded with, well, Star Trek fandom.
We were away from the tv, I forget why (coulda been anything, it was on Saturdays in my town), and come to find out our VHS ran out thirty seconds from the end. We didn’t even know it was the season finale till we saw there was a rerun the next week. I wrote my mother, “Can’t have missed much, unless it was Picard coming on the bridge screen covered in rocker switches and flywheels.”
I had just gotten home from my first year of college.
That year, we’d take our trays from the dining hall into the largest living room at Bryn Mawr, where dozens of women would cram around a tv to watch each week. It was packed – there may have been 50-100 people.
Star Trek around a TV set in a college dorm room, which was the way my parents and their friends watched classic Trek when it first aired.
So then I came home from Hogwarts (it was Hogwarts; Google “Bryn Mawr”) back to the way things used to be, just me and Mom and Dad. Who were Trekkies, luckily, but still.
Shows didn’t do arcs in those days, and cliffhangers were rare outside Doctor Who. So it was a stunner. I had no friends to scream with after it was over. I had to wait until September.
And you’d better believe that room was PACKED. The anticipation was intense. You could’ve heard a pin drop in big, echoing, Erdman hall.
That was probably the most vivid experience for Trekkies of my generation and the original generation, second only to “I am and always shall be your friend.”
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
#this makes me happy#in a deep deep place in my blackened soul
Originally published January 19, 2001, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1418
How the Grynch Stole Fandom by Doctor Spoofs
All the fans who were fannish liked Fandom a lot, But the Grynch who lived up in Dotcom did not.
From his cyberspace Web, the old Grynch sat and schemed. “I cannot withstand all these fanboys!”* he screamed. “I tried to ignore them, to just look away But they kept on coming, and finally one day No matter which way I looked, there they all were Like a bunch of cockroaches let out of a jar.”
Now, fandom had not been a bother at first First Fandom was small and quite far from the worst. The Grynch watched it grow, disbelief in suspension, When he saw them hold the First Fandom convention. It wasn’t so bad when it centered on books. “These fans are all dweebs, nerds, and bumblers, and shnooks. But they’re harmless enough,” said the growly old Grynch. “Can I tolerate them? Why, sure, it’s a cinch.”
But then fandom grew: more conventions and ’zines! Printed on ancient Gestetner machines. It seemed that, no matter which way the Grynch turned, The fans multiplied, “Like rabbits, I’ve learned, They chatter, they argue, they flake and they filk. How much of my patience will SF fans milk?”
And fandom spread more; now just books weren’t enough! No, no, they were fannish for all kinds of stuff! And through the next years, he saw fans of all stripe Displaying fan love for weird shows of all type. They wrote about Xena, The Prisoner, and Blake They swooned for Dark Shadows, UFO, for God’s sake! They raved about Kolchak and followed X-Files, They all adored Buffy. (They even liked Giles!)
When cyberspace opened, that’s where the Grynch hid. You’d think he’d have known (and he wished that he did) The cyberspace vacuum was filled in short order With fannish-run websites from border to border. No longer were paper or printers required; The fans could do now what their hearts most desired.
They filled up the net with more fandomesque tripe. “I can practically see them all gleefully type! Oh, joy. There’s another Hulk episode guide! Where can a Grynch go to? Where can a Grynch hide To escape all that endless and Byzantine clamor That’s pounding my head with the force of a hammer? If I had forseen it, I might have prevented! Al Gore from having the damned thing invented! It’s something I should have done long before now. I must stop fandom from spreading… But HOW?”
The Grynch had once tried it, a while it had been. He’d contacted Paramount and said, “It’s a sin. ‘Cause Star Trek, you know, is owned just by you. All these Trekzines are out there! I think you should sue!” And Paramount did so, as quick as a bunny, They shut down the fanzines, lest they make fans money. The fans were all flummoxed, but could not resist When they received letters with, “Cease and Desist.”
But in the end, fanzines, they kept coming out. This irked the Grynch greatly; it made the Grynch pout. He had to stop fandom right down at its core. And if he did it right, there’d be fandom no more…
And then…he had an idea.
The Grynch had a horrible, wondrous idea. “I’ll beat them by playing their own fannish game I’ll start up a website…and steal their name! There won’t be a fandom, if I own it all Their websites will crumble; momentum will stall; From this moment on, I will see fandom’s fall!”
And the Grynch straight away fashioned “Fandom Dot Com.” “By fans and for fans,” said the Grynch with aplomb. The fans, they just loved it, they flocked by the ton. And they told their friends, and they came on the run. Created new websites and posted the things, On Star Wars, Godzilla, and Lord of the Rings. The theory, you see, was by acting as one The fans would not ever be put on the run By studio lawyers with frozen-fish faces, Subpoenas and letters and leather briefcases. They’d have fandom fun, Oh yes, come one and all, They answered the summons, they heeded the call. And the Grynch? He just sat there and, when all seemed calm, Why, that’s when the Grynch dropped his Fandom Dot Bomb.
It started when one fan decided that she Would make a domain she called “Fandom.TV.” The Grynch called his lawyer, and out went a letter, And it warned the fan girl that she’d really better “Surrender and transfer” the name - yes she oughtta If not, she’d be labeled as a cybersquatter, And hit with huge fines. Sure, it didn’t seem fair. But the Grynch said, “I own it! And you don’t. So there.” She begged and she pleaded. She said, “Why so rough? You cannot own fandom!” But the Grynch, he said, “Tough.”
“It’s mine now, I own it; yes, Fandom is mine, And though you may howl and boycott and whine, I still will control it, and I’ll keep it small, And, eventually, I’ll get rid of it all. The Doctor Who fans down in Whoville? They’re gone. I’ll vacuum out all Space: Above and Beyond. American Gothic, and Hercules, too I’ll even crush kidsites for Winnie the Pooh. Yes, now I’ll own fandom! I’ll trademark it soon! And I’ll send all fans from the Earth to the Moon! So c'mon you fan geeks – Whattayou think of that?” And he sat there, and he sat and he sat. And who should show up… But the Cad in the Hat?**
“You silly old Grynch,” said the infamous Cad, “You may think you’ve got them; you think they’ve been had. But I have some news here to tell you, dear lad. Fandom, you see, can’t be trademarked, my son For fandom, you see, why - it’s for everyone! Your lawyers are zealous. Why I’ll give you that And for that I will give you a tip of my hat. But this will not stick; no, you simply can’t win. So knock off that sneer and dispense with that grin. Fandom, dear Grynch, why - it’s been here for YEARS And will be when we’ve left this vale of tears. You think you can stop it; I fear you are wrong. And so, my dear Grynch: Can’t we all get along?”
And it’s said that the Grynch heart grew 5 sizes that day, But it was said wrong, I am sorry to say. “No deals!” said the Grynch, with a satisfied cough, “A shame,” said the Cad. And he sent for the SMOF. And the SMOF worked him over; oh, they did a job, There’s nothing like SMOF when you want a good mob. and when they were done, the Grynch still wouldn’t sway And that’s when they brought in the old SCA. And they got medieval as only they can. And that terminated the Grynch’s swell plan.
So fandom was saved and we can go home, Because, my dear friends, that’s the end of this poem.
Hi, I read a post where you mention that you were aware of spoilers during the last seasons of Buffy, if I remember correctly you said, that Joss&Co weren't happy of the Spuffy shipping in S6, but in S7 they definitly play with the idea of Spuffy, do you know why they decided to do this, or if it was just fanservice?also, have you heard anything of why the writers of s10 decided make Spuffy canon? is just that i'm disapointed that B never told S that she love him and now they are supposedly over
Yes, during S6 and 7, I was friends with people who had access to scripts and sometimes (rarely) writer’s notes early. There were also a lot of interviews with the writers published while S6 and s7 were airing, and there was a radio show, The Succubus Club, which regularly featured BtVS and AtS writers to discuss the episode which had just aired. And lastly, several of the writers (Jane Espenson in particular) did a number of Buffy Q&As at various conventions and writer’s groups.
You have to keep in mind a couple of things here: One, this was all fifteen years ago, and the relevant interviews are no longer available on the net, if they ever were in the first place. Take anything I say with a grain of salt; it’s only my possibly inaccurate interpretation. Two, the writers themselves disagreed on a lot of things, so their statements about the characters often contradicted each other. There was one Succubus Club show I remember in particular where Drew Goddard and David Fury were discussing Spike’s motivations, and it was obvious that Goddard was of the opinion that even an evil vampire could choose to do good things even if he couldn’t be ‘good’ in an absolute sense, while Fury was visibly struggling to reconcile Spike’s actions with his own belief that evil vampires could only do evil things, finally coming up with a Spike-exceptionalism theory that Spike must have kept part of his soul or something like that. It was fascinating to realize that the writers had the exact same sort of arguments that we do, and Joss never seems to have felt the need to sit down and codify or clarify any of this stuff.
Thirdly, the writers will cheerfully change their message depending on what story or character agenda they’re pushing at the time. And the story or character agenda they’re pushing can change in the course of a season. So you’ve got Marti Noxon interviews early in S6 where she seemed to be pushing Spuffy, and Marti Noxon later in the season saying stuff that seems anti-Spuffy.
There were two sets of leaked episode notes that I know of. One was an outline of the episodes for the first half of the season. From that, we know that Normal Again was originally supposed to be Episode #10, and the turning point of Buffy’s depression. Tara was supposed to die and the rest of the season would have been devoted to fighting Dark Willow. That one is pretty straightforward.
The second set of notes is one I know much less about, because I missed the chat where the person who had it did their Q&A about it. And it kills me, because I would give a kidney to see what they actually said. This is the set that fractured the BAPS mailing list so badly. It was a rough outline of the second half of S6, not broken into episodes so far as I know. The only things I know for certain about it was that it said that Buffy and Spike would have an “S&M relationship,” and that by the end of the season, Spike would be “barely reformed.” To the best of my knowledge, there was no mention of the attempted rape (which we know from an interview with Stephen DeKnight was a relatively late addition to his script by Marti Noxon to up the drama quotient of Spike’s conflict with Buffy), and no mention of the soul.
So keeping all that in mind, this is my interpretation, based on the interviews, notes, and other stuff:
Originally, Spike and Buffy’s relationship was only going to last into the middle of the season, and it wouldn’t get nearly as abusive and awful as it eventually did. And I truly don’t think that the writers expected it to become a shipping juggernaut. So I think that in the beginning of the season, they pushed it in a sort of joking way. The popularity of the ship caught them totally by surprise, and they were shocked that so much of the audience thought it would be perfectly OK for Buffy and Spike to be a real couple. That’s when we started seeing interviews backing off the Spuffy. And that’s about when Joss got cold feet about killing Tara, and kept pushing it back, and they had to do something, so they filled the plot holes with more Spuffy, which they made worse and worse in an attempt to make the audience go off the pairing. The writers were again shocked that so much of the audience sympathized with Spike rather than Buffy, and their continuing attempts to make the audience react they way they felt that the audience ought to react culminated in the attempted rape.
More writer’s interviews: Marti Noxon was visibly surprised when an interviewer compared Buffy beating Spike up to domestic abuse. Spike was evil. Why would anyone see him as a victim? Buffy was supposed to be the victim. Jane Espenson and Steve DeKnight argued against doing the attempted rape, but were overruled by Joss and Marti, who honestly didn’t seem to think it was that big a deal. Once again, the writers severely misjudged the audience’s reaction. Fandom melted down. It didn’t help that they finally killed Tara in the same episode. As I recall, ratings, which had been falling all season, plunged. The show had just gotten too dark for an audience which had enough real-world darkness to deal with an a post 9-11 world.
I don’t know for sure when the writers decided that Spike would get a soul. I also don’t know if they always intended for him to get it on purpose. I wouldn’t be awfully surprised if they had left it up in the air til the last moment, and that’s why they didn’t tell JM what his character’s motivations were. But I think it’s very likely that the enormous backlash to Seeing Red (which they would have been getting around about the time they were writing and filming “Grave”) influenced their decision. After that, I think they felt that the only possible solution was for Spike to deliberately seek out a soul.
Once Spike got a soul, I think they were still up shit creek without a paddle. They had never bothered to create the same kind of distance between souled and unsouled Spike that they’d always been careful to preserve between Angel and Angelus. I think – and this is pure speculation on my part – that maybe Joss had wanted to do Spuffy for real in S7, but with the attempted rape, they wrote themselves into a corner. No matter what, a huge part of the audience would always see souled Spike as the same guy who tried to rape Buffy, and putting Buffy together with Spike would be difficult.
(Now, I’m going to take a minute and say that it wouldn’t have been impossible, because the S10 comics FINALLY took the bull by the horns and addressed that problem, and did it in a sensitive and nuanced way. But it definitely would have been hard, and in S7, I think the writers just wanted to hurry on past the whole issue as quickly as possible.)
But anyway – at the same time… ratings were tanking, and Buffy/Spike shippers were one of the few groups of fans still grimly watching on. So I think they tried to please everyone. No real romantic relationship for Buffy and Spike, because that would be seen as anti-feminist. But they kept teasing romance to keep the shippers watching. And of course even though SMG had telegraphed her intention to quit when her contract was up, they were hoping not to be cancelled, and kept sneaking ideas for a revamped show or a spinoff into S7, which is one reason the plot is a mess.
So basically, I think the story of Spuffy was a story of the writers being at odds with the audience and to some extent with themselves, and Joss being distracted by Firefly, and things spinning out of control and being imperfectly patched up. It’s notable that over on AtS, the widely hated Cordelia/Connor plotline was going on at the same time.
As for why the comics writers decided to do Spuffy in S10, I don’t know. I don’t have any connections there. Nor do I know for certain that it’s over between them there. Probably, but nothing’s over till the Chirago demon sings, you know?
Sometimes I remember the Supernatural fandom in all its beautiful disaster, and I want to say “thank you, Supernatural fandom.” It was the trailblazer of sin, it sinned so hard so that we can all sin comfortably today.
OMG, I remember the fanfiction net announcement to no longer host NC-17 stories! Gosh. Makes me feel nostalgic (and happy we have AO3 now because it's fabulous).
YESSS. Remember when fic was measured in ks, but it meant kilobytes and not ‘a thousand words’? And how you had to keep a close eye on your floppy disk volume to optimize storage space? And ASCII art in headers? and huge disclaimers?
and WEBRINGS? Webrings still fuck me up, man. I feel like that’s what some of these tumblr ‘networks’ might be trying to replicate, but I can’t tell.
…I think I have zip disks somewhere, now that I think about it, holy shit.
I weirdly love that there are crotchety fandom elders around who say shit like “in my day, (insert fandom term) meant this specifically, but now you kids just use it to mean any old thing.”
It seriously gives fandom such a sense of heritage and family, like yes grandma, tell me more about how you had to write fic uphill both ways in the snow when you were my age.
I’m approaching crotchety old grandma.
No but this is me.
DRABBLES ARE EXACTLY 100 WORDS NO MORE NO LESS AND DON’T FUCKING TRY TO TELL ME OTHERWISE.
This is me also. A crackship is NOT the same as a rarepair and the two terms canNOT be used interchangeably.
YOU CAN ONLY HAVE ONE OTP.
It’s literally right there in the name. It is your ONE true pairing.
WE HAD TO HANDCODE OUR PORN KIDS. NONE OF THIS FANCY INSTANT LAYOUT SHIT. WE HAD TO HANDCODE THE WEBSITES TO HOUSE OUR PORN.
Now, run down to the corner store and get granny a candy bar. Here’s enough money to get something for yourself, and you will keep the change and put it in your piggybank.
If you were underage and you wanted to get on the smut mailing list, you had to lie about your age, and act more mature than the actual legal adults on the mailing list.
You kids with your creator acceptance and Canon ships. Back in my day we had to put a thousand word disclaimer about how the characters were not mine and we HAD TO LIKE IT! Now go make me a cup of tea my bones are acting up again
We didn’t have your fancy YouTubes to hold all our videos. We married two VCRs (that’s Video Cassette Recorder, chirren. Google it) together and prayed generation degredation didn’t kill the quality, and we appreciated it!
You want videos on the Internets, you say? Well, we paid one nice lady to host a site where we could all download .mov files, but none of them were very long, because our DIAL UP MODEMS couldn’t handle the bandwidth, and we didn’t want to wait days at a time to download 20GB.
Granny’s GERD is flaring. Go get me a peppermint.
Not even crotchety fandom elders agree on things, though. As a veteran of The X-Files fandom, I initially thought of drabbles as being 155 words.
One of the [Star Trek fan] clubs sent me its constitution, and it
contained something that pleased me,” said the producer-writer. “It stated that the members believed in tolerance and love and not only were willing to listen to viewpoints opposed to theirs but would actively seek them out. If ‘Star Trek’ can accomplish that, it has all been worth it.
Gene Roddenberry, March 23, 1976 in an interview printed in the Oakland tribune
So what, are you planning on becoming a boring old fart with no hobbies or interests? Without us “old people” you wouldn’t even know what fanfiction is.
hoooooly balls
no offence to young talents (and i use this word for a reason - young writers might surely have talent, but not experience) but i’d like to see anon enjoy a fandom where all the fic was produced strictly by 15 yr olds
and the irony of this being a reaction to a post/piece of history that clearly shows who are the people that kickstarted fandom as we know it today.. wow
Okay wow.
I think a lot of younger fans have no idea what fandom was like before the internet. Sure, you probably hear stories, and not to make “I walked fifteen miles both ways uphill to read my fanfic and I LIKED IT” sort of statements, but y’all realize that if it weren’t for the people who had come before, fandom wouldn’t be here, not in the incarnation it is now, not something that belongs to and is created by fans who exercise a fair amount of freedom to remix and re-imagine and rebuild the worlds we love, right?
When you talk to older fans, you’re most often talking to women who might have been the only woman in the fan spaces they had access to, who traveled to conventions or found ways to exchange letters in the regular mail with other fans. You’re talking to people who had to bring their fic to the copy shop and print it out and mail it, who risked printers refusing to print it, who risked things getting damaged or destroyed.
You’re talking about people who fought to get their slashfic printed. Actually fought, had shouting matches, received threats, had manuscripts destroyed in malice, because it wasn’t acceptable then, in so many ways.
You’re talking to people who, when the internet was still in its primordial state, risked C&D letters from companies and creators who tried to protect their copyrights with the most iron of fists, who saw every fan creation as an assault.
Again, you’re talking to people who fought, who moved from web host to web host as the people hosting their servers were threatened with lawsuits.
These are things that happened, and, what, you’re saying the people who lived and fought to make fandom what it is today, to make it a space where people can talk about and write and draw more or less anything they want and find other people who want it to didn’t live their lives valuably?
They gave you this. They fought sexism and homophobia and draconian ideas about rights. They traveled miles and spent their own money for this.
I’m not yet an Old Fan, but I’m not a Young Fan either, and I’m so fucking grateful to every fan who came before me for creating the place where I can do the things I love and be myself and where my experiences in fandom are respected by my colleagues and the people I care about.
These are the people you should be asking to tell you all about their lives, to share their experiences; these are the people you should be learning from and absorbing as much as you can from if they’re generous enough to share. These are the people who can give us hope that even though we’re still fighting a lot of things, like companies who’ve now realized our value trying to capitalize unfairly on the work of fan artists, like continued sexist and anti-queer attitudes prevail and how they reflect on people’s attitudes toward fanwork and its value. If you’re telling someone to get a life, if you don’t think a life in and of fandom is valuable, you’ve fallen for those lies; you’re discounting not only their value, but your own value as a fan.
Next semester I’ll be teaching a small seminar class on fandom for the first time, and am currently doing research to put together the reading list for the course.
One of the difficulties of fandom as an object of study is that a lot of the best essays and meta analysis happen in places like LiveJournal, Tumblr, and other non-indexed sites that can be difficult to search for and track.
So! If there is a great blog post, comment thread, or other meta analysis or exchange that you know of that addresses topics such as:
representation or lack thereof in fandom and fanworks
personal expression of identity or experience in fanwork
fan wars or other major fandom community events or upsets
relations between fandom communities and the creators of the works that inspired them
personal meaning or value of fandom and/or fandom communities
specific fanworks that had a major impact on a fan community
interpretation or discussion of the meaning/relevance of “canon” in relation to fandom
It is the summer of 1975 and this Star Trek fan was hard at work editing her fanzine, The Communicator. She is surrounded by paper tribbles, a by-product of The Fannish Writer in her natural habitat.
*photo used with permission of both the photographer and the editor.
can you imagine if tumblr was around when the original star wars came out and in the two year gap between movies there were heated arguments between luke/leia shippers and han/leia shippers and all kind of vague posts and fandom wank and thousands of luke/leia fics on ao3 and people devotedly making gifsets of luke/leia with florence + the machine lyrics only for it be revealed that they were SIBLINGS like can you imagine the fallout
like i’m imagining something akin to the great ron/hermione vs harry/hermione ship war of 2011 and all the thousands of words of meta and hate blogging debates over the dancing scene in deathly hallows, like if all that had happened and people became so deeply entrenched in their points of view and then jk rowling was like “word of god is that harry and hermione are long lost twins” like IT WOULD BE INCREDIBLE
But this sort of stuff DID HAPPEN.
fandom shit WAS THERE since 1977 and onwards. Just because the technology was different doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.
There were fan clubs like The Royal Order of the Rebel Forces, started in 1977 by “Paula Truelove”. There was an official newsletter Bantha Tracks that published fan art and meta.
There was adult het and slash (Han/Luke) themed fan fiction since the early 1980s, much of which (especially the latter), had to be circulated privately bc of the uproar it caused with some of the fandom and Lucasfilm.
“Before the internet, fans kept in contact via regular mail and letterzines, which were small, cheaply produced zines that printed letters from the subscribers, often including new zine announcements, meta discussions and essays, and flame wars as well as friendly chat and news about the movies and the fan community. Some fan club groups also produced their own letterzines, some including members’ fan fiction and fan art.” Check the vintage zines out, they’re still selling on ebay
I imagine perusing the family photo album leads to some awkward moments nowadays.
…People forget. Or in some cases, they were just born too soon.
The only thing that has changed about fandom is the communications technology. Everything else remains the same.
(And at this end of things, I’ve been around long enough for my first-and-only Star Wars fanfic to have been published in paper. [Happy accident associated with this: someone involved with the fanzine was instrumental in helping the FBI catch the woman who was running around impersonating me.])
The Han/Luke wars were epic.* And so many other meta wanks it would make your head spin. Issues of the Star Wars newsletter/letterzine, The Southern Enclave, are online and you can some of it. It captures the moment in the mid-1900s when Star Wars fans decided to start publishing slash fiction in defiance of decades of threats from fellow fans (and of course Lucasfilm).
*From Fanlore: “In the 1980s, the phrase “Han/Luke” did not always refer to the slash pairing - instead it was most often used to discuss the fandom wars between those fans who preferred Han Solo to Luke Skywalker(or vice versa). “
I reblogged that post about paying fan writers last night on my phone while I was falling asleep, but this morning it occurs to me that young fans not having been around for copyright wars is also why we have the discussion going around for underpaid artists.
Because artists could only slip through the legal loophole of “charging for materials, not profiting from the copyrighted IP” if they kept their prices lower. $20 for a piece of art at a fan convention could easily be proven as charging for the material it took to make the art, the cost of printing off several copies to sell, and the cost of renting a booth to sell it at. You start charging $75, $80 for a piece of art that isn’t using outrageously expensive materials (costumes, canvas paintings, framed & matted artwork), the companies are going to start getting suspicious about whether you’re profiting, and profits get into sticky copyright legal issues that could get your ass sued.
So then we come into the internet age. We come into the age of digital art, digital commissions. The age wherein copyright holders are confusing the hell out of veteran fans because they went from sending Cease & Desist letters to fan websites to holding contests for fanfic and fanart right in broad daylight. Like. What the everloving hell.
So you have people who grew up charging $20 for a printed-off piece of art because that was how they had to do things to stay under the radar, and suddenly you have these artists coming up who are charging a fair-trade price for their work because suddenly the threat of lawsuit is virtually gone. And you have a lot of pushback because people were used to fanart being cheap because we literally could not charge what it was worth before now. And that translates into paying digital artists for original art as well, because people don’t always grasp the separation between paying for commissioned art of your own intellectual property and paying for a piece of fanart that cannot (could not?) be accurately priced because of copyright issues.
So yeah. Fan artists undercharge and fan writers don’t charge at all because companies like Fox and Universal and the WB held the threat of legal action over us for years and years. And honestly, I’m still not sure I trust them, even with this “Yes! Give us free marketing by spreading your popular fan works around!” attitude. Fuck, they even made a movie out of a fanfic – given, the names were changed, but everyone knows it was a fanfic, and that’s… huge.
What is this brave new world that has such wonders in it.
In the pre-Internet days the cost for fan art was much higher than just materials. Most fan art was sold in person at conventions (selling prints by mail never took off). At conventions, originals and prints both sold for hundreds - if not thousands - of dollars at fan auctions. It left many fanzine publishers shaking their heads in wonder.
Fanzine prices did try to recoup the cost of materials - but that cost was vague and many fans argued over whether it should include the cost of renting a table at a convention to sell the zine or the cost of buying a comb-binding machine to assemble the zines. There are lots of discussions about Fandom and Profit on Fanlore: http://fanlore.org/wiki/Fandom_and_Profit
Most fanzine publishers argued that the limited print run - and the fact that there was limited profit - would insulate them from copyright claims. But even then they understood that, like today, “no or little profit” was not a complete defense against infringement. Instead they relied on keeping their sales down and used word of mouth advertising.
I reblogged that post about paying fan writers last night on my phone while I was falling asleep, but this morning it occurs to me that young fans not having been around for copyright wars is also why we have the discussion going around for underpaid artists.
Because artists could only slip through the legal loophole of “charging for materials, not profiting from the copyrighted IP” if they kept their prices lower. $20 for a piece of art at a fan convention could easily be proven as charging for the material it took to make the art, the cost of printing off several copies to sell, and the cost of renting a booth to sell it at. You start charging $75, $80 for a piece of art that isn’t using outrageously expensive materials (costumes, canvas paintings, framed & matted artwork), the companies are going to start getting suspicious about whether you’re profiting, and profits get into sticky copyright legal issues that could get your ass sued.
So then we come into the internet age. We come into the age of digital art, digital commissions. The age wherein copyright holders are confusing the hell out of veteran fans because they went from sending Cease & Desist letters to fan websites to holding contests for fanfic and fanart right in broad daylight. Like. What the everloving hell.
So you have people who grew up charging $20 for a printed-off piece of art because that was how they had to do things to stay under the radar, and suddenly you have these artists coming up who are charging a fair-trade price for their work because suddenly the threat of lawsuit is virtually gone. And you have a lot of pushback because people were used to fanart being cheap because we literally could not charge what it was worth before now. And that translates into paying digital artists for original art as well, because people don’t always grasp the separation between paying for commissioned art of your own intellectual property and paying for a piece of fanart that cannot (could not?) be accurately priced because of copyright issues.
So yeah. Fan artists undercharge and fan writers don’t charge at all because companies like Fox and Universal and the WB held the threat of legal action over us for years and years. And honestly, I’m still not sure I trust them, even with this “Yes! Give us free marketing by spreading your popular fan works around!” attitude. Fuck, they even made a movie out of a fanfic – given, the names were changed, but everyone knows it was a fanfic, and that’s… huge.
What is this brave new world that has such wonders in it.
In the pre-Internet days the cost for fan art was much higher than just materials. Most fan art was sold in person at conventions (selling prints by mail never took off). At conventions, originals and prints both sold for hundreds - if not thousands - of dollars at fan auctions. It left many fanzine publishers shaking their heads in wonder.
Fanzine prices did try to recoup the cost of materials - but that cost was vague and many fans argued over whether it should include the cost of renting a table at a convention to sell the zine or the cost of buying a comb-binding machine to assemble the zines. There are lots of discussions about Fandom and Profit on Fanlore: http://fanlore.org/wiki/Fandom_and_Profit
Most fanzine publishers argued that the limited print run - and the fact that there was limited profit - would insulate them from copyright claims. But even then they understood that, like today, “no or little profit” was not a complete defense against infringement. Instead they relied on keeping their sales down and used word of mouth advertising.
“A modern day Dudley Do-Right, Constable Benton Fraser is a Canadian Mountie who goes to Chicago with his pet wolf to find his father’s murderer. Extremely polite and moral, Fraser eventually teams up with streetwise Detective Ray Vecchio, choosing to stay in Chicago after uncovering corruption in the RCMP makes him persona non grata at home.”
……i……………….
My favorite thing about Due South (and there are a lot of things I like about Due South) is that at one point, there was a lapse in production, and when the show returned, it was with a new actor playing Ray. Which happens sometimes in media, they replace an actor for whatever reason. The difference here is how they dealt with it.
They had the main character aware of it.
So the first episode of the season has everyone addressing the new guy as Ray. His coworkers, his friends, his family. Everyone’s like, HEY RAY.
And Fraser is slowly going nuts, because THAT IS NOT RAY WHY IS EVERYONE CALLING THIS GUY RAY IT IS CLEARLY NOT RAY? WHY IS RAY’S MOM HUGGING THIS GUY AND CALLING HIM RAY HOW DOES SHE NOT KNOW HE IS NOT RAY?
Long story short: Ray had to go undercover or some such police nonsense, and Ray 2.0 was PRETENDING TO BE HIM so no one in the criminal underworld would notice he was gone. And everyone knew this except for Fraser.
It was the most insane way to deal with an actor switch I’ve ever seen and to this day I am in awe of it.
w ait wh
d………do they get the original Ray actor back????
NOPE.
Two Rays. Original Flavor Hardened Chicago Gumshoe Ray, and New Ray, a scruffy, slightly younger, a Little Less Jaded Ray.
You haven’t seen a ship war until you’ve seen the ship war of CHOOSE YOUR RAY.
I was there. Oh, let me tell you about the Ray Wars.
I consider myself to be a “middle era” slash fan. I entered slash fandom in the early 1990s at a time where queer activism was rising and the Internet was just taking off. By then slash fandom had a good 20 years already under its belt. But even in the 1990s, if you were gay and/or into slash, it was something you kept hidden from other fans until you were sure you’d be welcomed. Many women lived in fear of being outed to their families, children, employers or churches. And some were outed with predictable consequences. A lot of this is detailed on Fanlore:http://fanlore.org/wiki/Slash_Controversies
In my days of new-to-fandom, there was not much online slash fandom and few opportunities to find a slash community. If you posted about slash on Usenet, you were harassed. I was desperate to find slash fans and I located an old school Star Trek fan club in my area. I was welcomed by the group, invited into the club presidents home and offered a place at the table: but only if I could assure them I was not one of those filthy slashers. I said nothing and needless to say I did not return. Thankfully I found a slash mailing list (Virgule-L) and then the Internet happened and things changed.
Years later I ran into an early Star Trek fanzine publisher who told me that when she started publishing her slash zines in the 1980s, members of her local fan group had to swear they would not order the zine or take part in its production. Slash fanzine publishers were forced to stop selling their zines at fan conventions. Fans reported slash zine publishers to customs. Zines were seized by customs and fans had to explain in person why they were importing pornography. A fan in South Africa could not risk buying a slash zine, so the zine publisher and her friends mailed the fan 15 pages at a time, each from a different address. It is not surprising that many of the slash stories written and published in that era were written under a pseudonym. So persistent were the anti-slash fans, that after decades of being confronted with the same objections to slash over and over again, that slash fans wrote The Generic Slash Defense Letter.
The acceptance of slash within fandom has gradually lifted across fandom communities - but not everywhere and not for everyone. And the echoes of these incidents is something that many of us from that time - and the people who came immediately after us - still carry in their individual and collective consciousness. I look back now and shake my head in wonder. I also look to fandom today with gratitude that slash has become more accepted. And I look forward to tomorrow with the hope that we continue accepting it and the fans who read and write it.
Mediawest is a 30+ year fan run media convention held in Michigan each year. They offer hundreds of panels. Here is a cross-section of the panels across the years (links go to Fanlore, the fan-run fandom wiki):
1981:
Feminism on Ice: Fannish Fems
Legal Aspects of Fanlit
Cycles in Treklit
Star Wars as Literature
Fan Wars or the ST-SW ‘Feud’ (that’s Star Trek vs Star Wars)
Fandom on the Web: how to set up your own home page.
The Internet: Is it fracturing fandom into two groups: those "with” and those “without”?
Who died and left you in charge?: Why doesn’t fandom seem to be the nurturing environment it was intended to be?
The Internet: Will discussion with production personnel help or hinder fandom?
Ten years from now will there still be such a thing as face-to-face fandom, or will everything be done electronically?
Star Wars: Do we really need to see the first trilogy?
Great babes of the galaxy: Women in sci-fi and fantasy.
Fans in therapy: Can a therapist grasp and appreciate fan activity/creativity?
1997:
Why do we fear alien invasion? Discussion group.
The new Star Wars trilogy: Making a good thing better, or tampering with a classic?
Lesbian slash: Is there room for letting the girls have some fun too?
Is fandom a close knit community, or just another hobby?
1998:
Academic Lurkers: Is anyone else getting tired of having to curb their tongue for fear of what these researchers are going to write about us?
Fandom and the Internet: Making this new influence add to fandom instead of undermining it.
Generational differences: Young fen like the 'Net, while older fen prefer print. Is there a way to bring them together?
The allure of The Weather Channel.
Bonkers for honkers: Men with big noses and the women who love them.
Getting Started on the Internet: Tips for Mac and Wintel users.
1999:
Airwolf: Is there any way to bring this show back?
Printed vs. Computer Story Controversy: What is fair to both sides - to authors and editors.
When Fans Attack: On (internet) discussion lists, why do fans flame rather than use the delete key?
Media Fandom: What happened to the good ole" days? Is fandom changing too much?
2000:
Curling Up with a Good Computer: Given the proliferation of on-line material, is printed matter becoming a vanishing breed?
Internet: Isn’t this supposed to be fun? - Keeping personality clashes from destroying a fannish list
Internet: negativity — Is there an online epidemic?
Mailing Lists - Conventions all year 'round?
2001:
Star Wars: Is slash taking the fandom into new directions, or the same old arguments?
George Lucas: Do we really know George Lucas? Did we ever?
Online fans vs. the old guard- a different crowd?
What do you mean isolating? The Internet as a way of bringing people together.
Are Zines dying?: The Net as behemoth competition.
What causes “live and let live” fandoms to suddenly break into open warfare?
The Joy of Smarm: Rediscovering the value of friendship
“The Studio Will Sue You For That”: Can they make fandom illegal?
2002:
Researching On The Net - How do you know the information you’re getting is correct, and how do you know what sites are helpful?
Lesbian Slash: State of the sub-genre.
Lord of the Rings: Are fans willing to read fanfiction from a movie based on a set of books?
Fanfic Story Warnings: Who has the responsibility for choosing and not choosing what people read?
The Elders Speak: What writing and fandom was like in the Good Old Days before the 'net, before desktop publishing, even before (gasp) VCRs.
Future of Fandom: What will publicity in the mainstream media mean for the future.
2004:
Fanfic: Respect for Characters, Respect for Fans. Allowing space for different interpretations of a character versus expecting fan writers to respect established interpretations
Academics and the Fan: Academics analyze fans in books, students subbing to lists to observe us for class papers… how do you feel about being studied and do you look at their reports?
LiveJournals and Blogs: What changes have LJ and blogs - good and bad - brought to fandom?
2005:
Is IDIC dead: has fandom become more mean-spirited, ungenerous and selfish?
LiveJournal: Does it promote a multi-fandom fannish culture?
Where Have All The Gen Fans Gone? Is fandom really slashier now, or does it just seem that way?
I Can’t Wait!: Downloading episodes off the net. Is it copyright infringement or your right?
2006:
Our husband and those (provocative?) posters of your favorite male star: Can they live together in peace?
Fanfic and the Internet: Just because we publish on the web, does it mean we don’t have any standards?
Star Wars: Padme, Shmi and Leia: Womanhood, Sexuality and Feminism in Star Wars –do the new films represent female victimization? Is the original trilogy more feminist?
2007:
Fandom drama: How to survive when fandom politics chew you up and spit you out.
The Change From Analog to Digital TV or It’s February 17, 2009, Why doesn’t my TV work?
Easy Access to TPTB in the internet age: Is it helping or hurting our shows?
2008:
Femslash: Why so scarce? Where is the girl love? Where is the fic?
Organization for Transformative Works: Ready or Not, Here It Comes, and It Could Affect Your Fandom
Were the Good Old Days Really Good - or just new at the time?
Fandom: Love the show, but can’t stand the fandom? What do do?
Zines on Ebay: Is it 'okay’ in the fandom world to resell your zine collection online?’
LiveJournal: What’s the advantage/draw of a LiveJournal over a personal webpage?
2010:
Actor-Fan Inter-action on Twitter & Elsewhere: A blessing, or a curse?
Can we be feminists and still watch various series without contradiction of our values?
Disappearing Fanfic: GeoCities is gone, authors leave fandom and their sites/stories disappear and the Wayback Machine doesn’t always work. Is it time to start saving stories as soon as you read them if you ever want to read them again?
Fandom and Age: How we 'fanosaures’ feel about all the young whippersnappers sniffing around our stash?
VHS to DVD or Better: Share your experience with converting your bulky VI IS tapes to a more compact storage medium.
In the 1990s, panels at fan-run conventions asked: “Is fandom getting less ‘safe’?” They lamented that: "Fans back then were nicer to each other than they are now.“ And they worried that: "Computers are ruining fandom!” Perpetual topics!
