i was thinking about the ghosts of fandoms past and i realised that my first proper fandom experience is by now completely wiped from the net thanks to age. i feel i have some responsibility here to document an extremely belated fandom wank so buckle up and let me sing you the song of south park fandom circa 1998-2001
Does anyone know how to create a relationship/social network map? I have a draft one done but need help to make it look spiffy. It is for a vidding history project.
Youtube went online in 2005. This video was posted in Dec 2005. It may be one of the early fanvids posted that year? Would love to find earlier ones. Also, early AMVs welcomed.
Alaina Huffman: I adore Nichelle Nicholls. […] I’ve had dinner with her several times, and she’s told me so many great stories. […] Two of my favorite stories that she told me, one was how these things [conventions] started.
Lynn Zubernis: Oh right, because she was there.
Alaina: She was. The first real conventions were Star Trek. And what happened was, it was off the air and fans were really distraught and they wanted to get together, and they’re like, we’re gonna get together because we all really connect and we’d love it if you would come. I don’t know how many of them there were, but they wrote letters – this was back in the 70’s…And I don’t have all the details, though she tells the story beautifully, but they wrote letters back and forth to Nichelle and said look, we’re gonna have a little get together. It wasn’t a convention, it was at some hotel in NY, it was a ‘get together.’ […] And they said, if we can get enough people, we’d like to send you an airplane ticket and put you up in a hotel if you would come and meet us. And her and a few castmates were like of course! And then there were tons of people who ended up showing up.
Lynn: Because it was really popular, and didn’t they get it back on the air for a while?
Alaina: Yeah, with letters! And so that happened and that sort of created this fan world that happened, and then Gary and Adam were a part of that.
Lynn: They were really young too, they were like teenagers when they started this.
Alaina: Yeah I think like 14, it’s fascinating. And then my other side note on fangirling over Nichelle Nichols – my other favorite story she told me was about the kiss between her and Shatner. […] Do you know the story? From what I was told by her, the network at the last minute wanted to pull the plug on it. They got nervous, and they were like, no, let’s do a hug.
Lynn: Um, yeah, not the same…
Alaina: Right? We’re gonna make this really big social movement, this civil rights movement…or maybe not. And so the story she told was that Shatner said ‘okay, we’ll get to the hug, let’s do the kiss first though, we’ll just get it out of the way. Okay, you got it? Then we’ll do any version of the hug that you want.’ So this was back in the day before video village, before any of that technical stuff. There was the camera, film; you had to check the gate. Young readers may not understand that we had film. I remember when I started my career, we had film. And you’d have to re-roll sometimes, batteries died or whatever. So the story goes that they did the kiss, and then every take after that, Shatner went to hug her and leaned into the camera and crossed his eyes.
Lynn: So they couldn’t use it!
Alaina: [nodding] So that made all the takes unusable.
Lynn: OMG that’s amazing.
Alaina: Can you imagine how nervous that poor camera guy must have been? He must have been like I’m gonna get fired!
Lynn: What guts that took. I guess he was the star; he was the only one who could have done that – but he did it.
Alaina: Even when the network didn’t want to do it. So I’ve met Shatner several times, and I have yet to verify that story with him, but that’s the story she told me and I love it, it’s one of my favorite stories ever.
Congratulations to the fan who won with a $21 bid! That’s a pretty amazing price for 11 fanzines and comics. (Especially considering I see a lot of MUNCLE fanzines listed for $25 each.)
But the compensation that I would like to see for fan archivists is simply greater recognition. I wish that fans valorized their archivists the way they valorize their favorite fan artists and authors and vidders.
Technovolunteers tend to be invisible because many users assume that online archives are automated to the point that nobody in particular needs to actually own and operate the archives, and make regular decisions and oversee them and steer and guide and maintain them, and that simply isn’t the case. Even a highly automated archive has at least one person, and usually more, working hard behind the scenes, at the “back end.”
In other words, I argue that digital archive users tend to confuse the “servers” (the people who volunteer to serve them by building them working archives) and “servers” (the hardware that serves up fan works on demand). Fan archivists are humans, not machines. They deserve as much respect and admiration as prominent fan creators.
Only when fans own their own servers, as the famous AO3 rallying cry goes and only as long as fans are willing to do the work of building and maintaining the archives that live on those servers, and interfacing with their users and with the press, and putting redundancy measures in place, and making policy decisions and recruiting fellow volunteers and all of the other responsibilities involved with running an archive will fan archives exist.
So while I don’t think that fan fiction is too large a genre to completely archive, I do fear that at some point, the preponderance of corporate owned social media may lull fans into thinking that they don’t have to appoint themselves archivists of their communities’ material. If fans stop volunteering to fulfill this important cultural role, then fan works will cease to be archived in a reliable way.
“Not Tonight Spock! is a letterzine/reviewzine/adzine for the K/S community.Letterzines at the time tended towards the crudzine end of the spectrum; they weren’t much to look at but got the job done. Not Tonight Spock! was clean, nicely laid out, and chock-full of features. A given issue had articles (what we would now think of as meta), interviews with prominent K/S writers and editors, reviews of recent K/S zines, art, cartoons, K/S trivia or puzzles, and of course, letters. The editors were both American, but even in the first issue, letters came from fans in Australia, England, Canada and Scotland as well as all over the US.”
I'm getting my feet wet in the antis debate and do you know who would be good to follow for fandom meta?
Actually I’d love to hear from people reading my blog about where to read more fandom meta. You can start with the fandom meta tag on tumblr. There used to be a fandom meta newsletter on Livejournal (and now later Dreamwidth). I wish people still did newsletters or linkspam posts. Especially on this topic. Oh and vidding too.
“In keeping with the intensely personal nature of the holiday, I intend to take the phone off the hook and disconnect the doorbell. Then I will pour myself a glass of Midori (green melon) liqueur and a dish of strawberry sorbet. Then I will reread [Gayle F’s] “The Cosmic Collected” from cover to cover. “Desert Heat”, which begins this collection, is the first K/S story I ever read and is still a damn good place to start
“
Fandom consumers are weird. When artists sell fanzines/doujins/fanart books etc etc no one bats an eyelash.
When I mention printing watercast (putting aside the fact that it’s actually an original and that’s what I meant) I get 50 messages about copyright.
🙄🤔
I think it’s part of the community’s idea that fic is valued less than art. (Personally I think I value fic less than art too…) For example: fic writers can’t table at cons; fic writers rarely can sell merch; fic is basically always free; fic writers can’t really get Patreon style support. Don’t talk to me about copyright because the same standard does not apply to fanart; I’m talking about what people are willing to pay for.
It’s because as a community we view fic as being worth LESS, if not worthless.
We have been printing and selling fanfiction (fanzines) for decades. It is part of fandom tradition. So ignore them. Or better yet point them towards Fanlore, the fandom wiki that documents our fandom history.
And look at the over 8000 fanzines printed since the dawn of time:
“When you get really into a fandom, it’s sometimes easy to forget that, well, it’s not real. You start speaking as if the characters are real people who live in a real world where sometimes shit happens. You start to judge them entirely by their own standards, and the standards of their world. Congratulations, you are being overly Watsonian.
Other times, for whatever reason, you fail to suspend your disbelief when engaging with fiction. All you see is the brushstroke of the writer’s work and how she has the power to make things happen with impunity. You start to judge the characters who live in a different universe by your own standards, or at least the author’s. Congratulations, you are being overly Doylist.
The two terms, Watsonian and Doylist, have been in vogue lately in several fandoms. And good, because this conflict in all literary analysis is a very useful and enlightening concept to keep in mind. And I promise you, once you understand them, you will see every fandom discussion as either Watsonian or Doylist.
They come from the Sherlock Holmes fandom. Dr. Watson is the narrator; he’s in the story. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was the author; he’s outside of the story.
So a Watsonian perspective is inside the story, because that’s how Watson was trying to solve the mystery. “What motivated the character to act this way?” “What are the characters’ beliefs and values?”
A Doylist perspective, on the other hand, is external, because the mystery was constructed by a Scottish Victorian who believed in fairies. “What were the author’s motivations for constructing the scene this way?” “What is the author trying to communicate to the reader through this text?” …Read More
Horizon 22, published 2000. Cover by Nick Spender.
Another of the Horizons that doesn’t always make the lists. I decided to scan the cover because I noticed Fanlore is missing this one as well as 23 (though they do have a listing for this issue.)
(Fanlore editors have my permission to gank my scans and add them to the wikis as needed.)
some thoughts about attribution & ownership of “ideas” in fic.
I wanted to write a proper post about this and still might: but fandom (or generally gift economy style spaces) has changed due to a lot of the younger members being brought up on architectures like tumblr. Until people (re)learn etiquette like crediting, attribution & understand this is CORE to encouraging new content creation - a lot of artists and writers are gonna be always doubtful.
Knight of Shadows, a Star Wars novel by Karen Osman. Cover art (dust jacket) by Eluki bes Shahar. Interior art and inner cover by Carol Waterman. Published May 25, 1982.
Yes, it’s a Darth Vader origin story written before Return of the Jedi! And a strange one to be reading so many years later, after 5 movies have rendered it further and further from the source canon. The name Anakin Skywalker is never mentioned. Luke is not referred to by name until the last page. And of course, there is no Padme Amidala. This is a novel of royal intrigue, with the Sith vying against the Jedi (with Darth Vader caught between his Sith birthright and his longing to be a Jedi Knight.)
Modern fans are probably baffled by all this. You have to remember, there was a time when two movies and a bunch of toy backing card bios were pretty much all we had in the way of canon. We knew Darth Vader was a Sith Lord; we didn’t have any real idea what a Sith Lord was. We didn’t have a history of the Empire or the Republic, we didn’t know who Luke’s mother was, and we had only just found out about Vader being his father. Or rather, Vader’s claim that he was Luke’s father. Yoda wouldn’t confirm this was true until The Return of the Jedi in 1983. (In 1982, this movie-in-production was still being referred to as Revenge of the Jedi.) Back then, it was possible Vader was lying, or telling the truth but not being Anakin Skywalker. And Leia being Luke’s sister was a bombshell dropped in Jedi, something probably no fan had even considered until that movie was released.
(Interior cover by Carol Waterman.)
(Interior art by Carol Waterman.)
This was one I bought simply because the cover amused me. That looooooming Darth Vader with the flaring ears makes me snicker. In spite of that, it’s a pretty kickass cover, and it certainly grabs the attention. The story’s not without its flaws (even considering the time period it was written in,) but it’s worth reading. I’ve seen copies as low as $5 on eBay (which is what I paid for this one.) It’s not a bad collectible for a Star Wars fan to have on their shelf.
Horizon 23, cover by Nick Spender. Published 2002.
For the longest time, I wasn’t sure this even existed. Most lists of the Horizon fanzine stop at issue 22. When this popped up with no photo on eBay, I thought the odds were good that it was a mis-listing (either the wrong issue number given, or issue #23 of the Horizon Magazine.) But as you can see, it’s real.
Horizon is one of the most highly regarded of the Blake’s 7 fanzines. Produced in Britain, most issues are digest-sized and professionally printed, with good-quality gen fanfic. #23 has four stories: Mitri by Marion Edwards, Swansong by Harriet Bazley, A Perfect Balance by Marian de Haan, and Regeneration by Marion Edwards.
Horizon in general is worth getting. Some of the stories are meh, of course (tastes vary from fan to fan), but it’s usually not terrible. Probably the only thing to watch out for is the fact that the earlier, A4 sized issues tend to have fading, making reading an exercise in eyestrain.
Bless every fan who stops and makes a scan of something old and beloved.
The Duarte Historical Museum has a special exhibit featuring select items from my Star Trek collection. It features:
Original scripts from the Star Trek The Original series starring William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy. Autographed photos Film clips from the original series Models of the Enterprise Tribbles Fan publications and more.
Here is a link to the museum’s website with more information.
Honestly, I think younger fen are the problem. They're in our yahoo groups, they go to our cons, they introduce their ideas into our forums, and they constantly try to bully us older people by telling us that things have changed and there are more modern ways and platforms to do them. We have been going to cons since before they were born, and writing zines for 30-40 years. (and don't YOU try bragging about how old you are. You're still in your 30s. Most of us fanosaurs are in our 60s!)
True: on tumblr, I get taken for a suspect old person, while on Zinelist, I’m a mewling infant.
But if we’re talking about Zinelist–and I assume we are because the only other yahoo group I’ve said anything in in years is the sedate Me & Thee–then there’s a piece of context missing from this criticism.
There’s hardly anyone below their 30′s anywhere on yahoo groups, and precious few even of those on Zinelist. “The Youth” by and large are not there and don’t care whether those spaces change their ways or not.
The reason people keep talking about Tumblr or keeping up with “modern” fannish spaces is simple: Zine editors keep asking “How can I sell my zine?” or complaining that they find it difficult these days. They hypothesize that young people don’t read books or never like paper copies of anything and that it is fundamentally impossible to make a successful zine these days. Other list members complain that they used to love fandom, but they feel lonely now and can’t figure out where the action is. The “bullying”, such as it is, is in direct response to these questions and laments.
I had to force myself to learn tumblr (and facebook!) just like I once had to force myself to learn livejournal. I was the crankiest about LJ. It was when I was in college, and it annoyed me that people were trying to replace the perfectly good mailing lists with this newfangled thing. Later, that attitude embarrassed me, not because LJ was better but just because it’s a self-defeating behavior that was shameful in a person in their early 20′s. That’s why I promised myself that, next time, I would give it a proper try and not wait till everyone else had already made the switch. Tumblr took me many tries, and it was not a pleasant adjustment. But having made that adjustment, I can say that it’s just as possible to be tl;dr as anywhere else, and it’s perfectly possible to have discussions if you want to. Witness the vast scrolling mass of text that is my tumblr most days.
I don’t think that tumblr is better or that change is fun or easy. I do think that “Where have the majority of the fen gone?” has a clear answer, and “Nobody cares about paper copies of anything anymore,” is patently false. Anybody who is happy getting their fannish conversation on Zinelist and who does their zines as a labor of love and a fun project between friends is doing fine. There is zero reason for them to listen to my advice.
Anybody who is doing their zine more like a business, on the other hand, desperately needs new buyers and, therefore, needs to change with the times. That goes for most people on Zinelist who are vocal about their zinemaking. Questions about what there’s a market for and what people want to see point to that type of zine press. It has nothing to do with a new way being better and everything to do with a new way netting more potential audience because you’re not financially able or not content to make zines for your current one.
The same thing happens with cons. Escapade was once the hot new thing. Now, it isn’t. It consistently runs smaller than our current attendance cap. It consistently can’t pay for the function space we want, and this is only getting worse. The way to fix that is to get new people to want to attend. They don’t have to be younger people, but in practice, they often are. We do reach out to past attendees and older fans who’ve never come before, but many of these people already know about the con and already know they aren’t interested in coming. We reach out to young people not because they are better but because, without them, the con will cease to exist.
(Speaking of which, for anybody else reading, Escapade is a fun slash con in L.A. coming up this March. We’re heavy on meta discussion and vidding. This year’s theme is OT3s. You should come!)
If you’re happy where you are, great! But if you ask “How can I sell more zines?” be prepared to hear answers you don’t like. It’s not bullying: it’s people trying to give you the help you asked for.
Escapade is one thing because it's an all slash con. Not all of us are into slash. But quite a few of us find MediaWest ruined and don't go anymore because of younger newer people. MWC is a place for older fen to enjoy the twilight years before we pass on. Young fen DO NOT belong there, and we do not appreciate being invited to join their fun or be exposed to their "ideas" or zines. We do not want change and the brats should leave us alone.
Ah. Well, yes, I see your point about MediaWest. I’ve only been once. I brought a bunch of Miami Vice vids, which fit in fine. (No shock there.)
It sounds like in the last few years, there has been a surge of new blood composed of furries and bronies. That does not seem like a close fit for the con. I’m not surprised there’s friction.
wow. So glad when I was a 20-something attending MW*C and running panels there I never once came into contact with this kind of “
We do not want change and the brats should leave us alone” mindset. Some of the best times I’ve ever had in fandom involved discussing ‘zines moving from paper to digital formats with folks like Jean Lorrah. I can’t imagine I’d be the same person I am now, if it weren’t for how kindly I was treated by my fannish grandmas then.
It seems like it’s a mixed bag these days. Some people want to let the con fade out in its current form. Some want to try to revive it, with varying opinions on what types of change are worth it. Some just want to supplement for things that aren’t happening anymore. I know they showed Escapade vid dvds last year because the MWC vidding contest no longer gets many submissions, if any. I couldn’t go, but I sent a DVD of vids in fandoms I thought would play all right there.
There are definitely things I think should have been changed years ago that led to the con being less popular in some quarters (with vidders, for example), but it does sound like the most recent influx of people is causing a bigger than usual culture clash. That anon is being a jerk, but I do understand their frustration.
Dear all, I’m pleased to announce that Katie Morrissey, Eric Sellinger & I are co-editing a special edition of Transformative Works and Cultures on romance fans and fandom. See the above CFP for details, and please consider submitting articles!
I have been rereading the MsScribe saga today, which I now believe was so much more than an account of fandom because to have been able to write it is to understand fandom as it operated. This is important because we spend a lot of time on this website talking about how fandom should be, not about how it currently exists, as actual fact. Charlotte Lennox’s analyses of fandom, particularly, of how MsScribe was able to manipulate fandom, were very sharp, and talked about things that fannish people were not necessarily willing to talk about.
A few things struck me as particularly prophetic about this current state of fandom.
The fandom community is completely defenseless against bad faith actors who know how fandom works.
Consider MsScribe’s meteoric rise. Consider how knowing the right words is the one and only condition to being considered Good.
Fandom operates on a couple of perverse incentives:
Trauma will earn you not only sympathy, which it should, but also earn you authority to speak to a number of topics.
Trauma had become the only way that you earn authority to speak to those topics.
In the times of MsScribe, this manifested in her story about her accident and her stay at the hospital, but it was very interesting how she trotted out the story in irrelevant contexts.
MsScribe has also claimed to have experienced sexual assault.
Now, this is combined with fandom’s de facto policy of Always Believe. This set of rules on which fandom operates does not mean that Always Believe should be done away with, but that we have to understand that it should come as no surprise that bad faith actors will exploit this rule.
Accusations of racism and bigotry elevate fandom to a higher level of importance than it actually is.
I have a post or two about how fandom is not actually important in the grand scheme of things, so I will not belabor the point here.
Fandom still plays a huge part in the lives of fans, however, so it must be important, right? How do we make it seem more important?
I believe MsScribe’s stunt with the racist and homophobic sockpuppets presages fandom’s abuse of social justice language. This is not a new point, but by elevating shipping wars to the levels of racism and homophobia, people can claim righteousness and justify their overzealous reactions.
The thing is that nowadays, fandom no longer even requires sockpuppets to be made. Offences in order to generate appropriate outrages do not need to be odious neo-fascist statements; they are everywhere, manifest. You need to keep up with the latest non-ablest language, or you’re out. This is why fandom will never be able to surpass MsScribe’s sophisticated level of wankatry–there is simply no need for it.
Separately, it amuses me to no end that fandom remembers Dan Savage as the guy who said some unwise things about asexual folks, and not one of the media dipshits who championed the Iraq war.
So a lot of the dynamics that we’re talking about right now have already been in existence in fandom, literally as early as the first true fandom history was written. Scary, no? But this is also why I completely reject analyses like Devin Faraci’s that paint this generation of fans as particularly “entitled,” as though “entitled” is not the right wing’s favorite bludgeon with which to hit Millennials. I also reject Aja Romano’s lol-tastic version of how fabulous and important fandom is in her numerous, brazenly ahistorical posts for Vox.com. I invite the likes of Charlotte Lennox, who has a real understanding of fandom and its history, as well as a willingness to talk about oft avoided things, to contribute to the discourse instead.
****Coming to you soon, maybe: A long ass post about everything wrong with Faraci’s and Romano’s takes on fandom.
So, I had a shared blog on tumblr called learningtocomic, where me and a
couple of friends would occasionally post things about our comicking
shenanigans, and oftentimes use it as a platform for thinking through
various aspects of the comicking process. It had a respectable 200+
followers.
And then it got deleted due to tumblr stupidity.
That’s….
that’s a lot of content that has now disappeared into thin air. I’m still waiting for a response from tumblr support
before I go around salvaging what I can, but in the meantime, I’m
thinking a lot about the content that we create here, for free, and put
up on this here website.
Server space isn’t free. Designing and
maintaining a web platform isn’t free. Any web platform needs developers to make
it usable, support personnel to keep it a safe and sane space, and good
management who actually considers our
needs. When a service is “free”, it means that at least one of those
things is missing. Tumblr doesn’t consider our needs. LJ is poorly
managed. DW could probably use some more personnel, and has very little
server space.
Right now, what with the LJ servers moving to Russia, and
some predictions that the Russian company wants to gradually phase out
the American (money-losing) side of LJ, I hear that many LJ people are
decamping to DW. With Yahoo basically in freefall, I think tumblr will
die in a few years. Already, various fandoms are going in different
directions: imzy, discourse, etc.
Further fracturing of fandom
aside, that doesn’t solve the problem that we keep expecting hosting and
web platforms to be free. Fandom, which generates a lot of free
content (and accompanying wank), requires hosting and web platforms that
aren’t free. Because free actually means “our sales and marketing team is bigger than our development team”. Free means “we are selling your information to the advertisers”. Free means “oops we deleted all of your content but we don’t give a fuck because you’re not actually our customer.”
So we are faced with two options: (1) migrate from site to site like digital vagrants, losing content and communities along the way, or (2) pay.
I’m
not saying that *everyone* has to pay. Half of fandom are still in
school, and another quarter are working 2 jobs and barely making ends
meet. But my experiences in fandom has also really shown me its
generosity. I recently was putting together a fan anthology, and had a
payment process that was “pay what you can if you have financial
trouble” coupled with “chip in $5 or $10 if you can help”, and the
donations not only covered the people who couldn’t afford full price,
but also covered incidental printing and shipping costs.
Which is
to say – it’s doable, if we don’t take web platforms for granted. If,
when we migrate to the next place, we say “let us pay what we can”
instead of diving straight into creating beautiful works of art (and
then scrolling past the flame wars.)
For me, the next space is Dreamwidth – it is already fan friendly and has half of the features that I want. And for the other half – well, if I want something, pay for it, right? So, here is my plan of action: 1) buy a DW paid account,
even though I don’t have any use for its current paid features.
Because its developers need money if I want them to improve the site. (And heck, I pay much more for Netflix.) 2) make some suggestions
to DW for features that would make the site better. (Top on my list:
option to buy image hosting, ease of posting to different accounts,
ability to reblog) 3) start consolidating my creative content on DW,
and crossposting there. (Maybe other people might slowly move there, as
well, especially if the site is given the financial strength to
improve.) 4) pay for fanart, fanfics, original writing, original art, etc. Because the work we create is also worth something.
The weirdest muncle zine covers I’ve found so far. They are, in order, The Dunwich Affair (1985, 1990), The P.U.N. From U.N.C.L.E. # 1(1991), The Curse of the Round Robin (1989), and Hello…Goodbye (1981). The Curse of the Round Robin is slash. The rest are gen. The sheer diversity is fascinating. The first is a novel-length Lovecraft crossover, the second is a book of jokes and puns, the third is, presumably, a round robin, and the last is the script for a muncle/Beatles crossover play. (Images from fanlore.)
I learned a lot about fandom couple of years ago in conversations with
my friend Britta, who was working at the time as community manager for
Delicious. She taught me that fans were among the heaviest users of the
bookmarking site, and had constructed an edifice of incredibly elaborate
tagging conventions, plugins, and scripts to organize their output
along a bewildering number of dimensions. If you wanted to read a
3000 word fic where Picard forces Gandalf into sexual bondage, and it
seems unconsensual but secretly both want it, and it’s R-explicit but
not NC-17 explicit, all you had to do was search along the appropriate
combination of tags (and if you couldn’t find it, someone would probably
write it for you). By 2008 a whole suite of theoretical ideas about
folksonomy, crowdsourcing, faceted infomation retrieval, collaborative
editing and emergent ontology had been implemented by a bunch of
friendly people so that they could read about Kirk drilling Spock.
There is no God, life has no meaning, it’s all over when you can’t search on the slash character.
Having worked at large tech companies, where getting a spec written
requires shedding tears of blood in a room full of people whose only
goal seems to be to thwart you, and waiting weeks for them to finish, I
could not believe what I was seeing.
The transcription of his talk is amazing, everyone who has an interest in fandom and platforms and the way we interact with the sites we use should read it.
(As someone who ran a fandom newsletter at the time of the Great Delicious Disaster, this guy saved my fucking life - so much of that process was automated in Greasemonkey and independent user scripts, and after Delicious shit the pot we were able to move it over to Pinboard with relatively little issue. And then newsletters and LJ fandom in general went away relatively quickly, but that’s a different story. The point is, this dude was amazing when fandom needed someone to be amazing for us.)
But man, I feel like his talk should be required reading for anyone who runs an online platform that attracts fandom, or wants to attract fandom, or really just wants to foster community.
In my foolishness I asked, “Could you make me a list of those features? I’ll take a look, maybe some of it is easy to implement.”
Courtesy of the UCLA Library, here are the memos exchanged between Robert Justman, Gene Roddenberry and John D.F. Black covering the development of Star Trek’s iconic opening monologue.
I see a lot of young-ish fans on Tumblr being uncomfortable with the idea of “old people” still being in fandom. Even episode 17 of One True Podcast, “Stomping On Each Other’s Lawns - Generational Divides in Fandom”, which was trying to have people from both sides of “the generation gap” actually had fans in their early 20s and late 20s and referred to the fact that there were even some people in their 40s and 50s kicking around tumblr–acknowledging older fans while implicitly claiming they’re much rarer than in reality.
There are plenty of very young people on tumblr. There are plenty of not-so-young people on tumblr. It’s quite a spread.
AO3 was proposed in 2007, almost a decade ago. The people who jumped on board to help build it initially were not primarily students. We were mostly adults with careers already; that’s what gave us the skills to take on a major project like that. A decade later, I am in my mid-30′s. Some are younger; many are much older.
There was that silly wank a while back about the X-Files supposedly being for teens the same way Buffy was marketed for younger people… only The X-Files was blatantly marketed for an adult demographic back in 1993 when it premiered. Twenty-something plus twenty-three years equals a fanbase in its late 40s. The venerable X-Files archive, Gossamer, was started by people who are now officially Old. Same with Fanfiction.net, MediaMiner, and all of the other great fandom infrastructure we’ve known and loved.
I hate that “The kids these days” shit. Young people are just as welcome in fandom as anyone else.
But I wish you guys wouldn’t sell yourselves short by thinking that you have to be ready to build AO3 when you’re a teenager and that you’re passé and must abandon all of your hobbies by 30.
Mainstream media is already going to tell you that adult women are required to take care of other people’s children instead of taking care of ourselves. Culture is already going to tell you that old women can’t have fun or seek pleasure, that women in general are suspect and can’t be trusted to read “problematic” books without being brainwashed.
Fandom is here to tell you that other people’s kids can be your friends if you both choose it, but you’re nobody’s free therapist, nanny, or censorship board. Fandom is here to tell you that you can backbutton when you want, but you can also read what you want, even if it’s “bad”. Fandom is here to tell you that you can enjoy your hobbies for the next however many decades until they carry you out feet-first.
Bolding for emphasis:
Mainstream media is already going to tell you that adult women are required to take care of other people’s children instead of taking care of ourselves. Culture is already going to tell you that old women can’t have fun or seek pleasure, that women in general are suspect and can’t be trusted to read “problematic” books without being brainwashed.
Fandom is here to tell you that other people’s kids can be your friends if you both choose it, but you’re nobody’s free therapist, nanny, or censorship board. Fandom is here to tell you that you can backbutton when you want, but you can also read what you want, even if it’s “bad”. Fandom is here to tell you that you can enjoy your hobbies for the next however many decades until they carry you out feet-first.
Fandom is here to tell you that it’s 100% okay to put your own needs first.
I see a lot of young-ish fans on Tumblr being uncomfortable with the idea of “old people” still being in fandom. Even episode 17 of One True Podcast, “Stomping On Each Other’s Lawns - Generational Divides in Fandom”, which was trying to have people from both sides of “the generation gap” actually had fans in their early 20s and late 20s and referred to the fact that there were even some people in their 40s and 50s kicking around tumblr–acknowledging older fans while implicitly claiming they’re much rarer than in reality.
There are plenty of very young people on tumblr. There are plenty of not-so-young people on tumblr. It’s quite a spread.
AO3 was proposed in 2007, almost a decade ago. The people who jumped on board to help build it initially were not primarily students. We were mostly adults with careers already; that’s what gave us the skills to take on a major project like that. A decade later, I am in my mid-30′s. Some are younger; many are much older.
There was that silly wank a while back about the X-Files supposedly being for teens the same way Buffy was marketed for younger people… only The X-Files was blatantly marketed for an adult demographic back in 1993 when it premiered. Twenty-something plus twenty-three years equals a fanbase in its late 40s. The venerable X-Files archive, Gossamer, was started by people who are now officially Old. Same with Fanfiction.net, MediaMiner, and all of the other great fandom infrastructure we’ve known and loved.
I hate that “The kids these days” shit. Young people are just as welcome in fandom as anyone else.
But I wish you guys wouldn’t sell yourselves short by thinking that you have to be ready to build AO3 when you’re a teenager and that you’re passé and must abandon all of your hobbies by 30.
Mainstream media is already going to tell you that adult women are required to take care of other people’s children instead of taking care of ourselves. Culture is already going to tell you that old women can’t have fun or seek pleasure, that women in general are suspect and can’t be trusted to read “problematic” books without being brainwashed.
Fandom is here to tell you that other people’s kids can be your friends if you both choose it, but you’re nobody’s free therapist, nanny, or censorship board. Fandom is here to tell you that you can backbutton when you want, but you can also read what you want, even if it’s “bad”. Fandom is here to tell you that you can enjoy your hobbies for the next however many decades until they carry you out feet-first.
Bolding for emphasis:
Mainstream media is already going to tell you that adult women are required to take care of other people’s children instead of taking care of ourselves. Culture is already going to tell you that old women can’t have fun or seek pleasure, that women in general are suspect and can’t be trusted to read “problematic” books without being brainwashed.
Fandom is here to tell you that other people’s kids can be your friends if you both choose it, but you’re nobody’s free therapist, nanny, or censorship board. Fandom is here to tell you that you can backbutton when you want, but you can also read what you want, even if it’s “bad”. Fandom is here to tell you that you can enjoy your hobbies for the next however many decades until they carry you out feet-first.
Also the original poster is being very kind but I just wanna say something real quick which is I’m 36 and I was around for the inception of AO3 and know three of its original founders and lemme just say this: We built this fandom thing into what it is, which you benefit from. And we built off of what was already in place by those that came before us. And you? Will build off of what we’ve given you. So…. don’t say ew, you’re old, that’s creepy. Say woah, that’s awesome, tell me things!!!
I see a lot of young-ish fans on Tumblr being uncomfortable with the idea of “old people” still being in fandom. Even episode 17 of One True Podcast, “Stomping On Each Other’s Lawns - Generational Divides in Fandom”, which was trying to have people from both sides of “the generation gap” actually had fans in their early 20s and late 20s and referred to the fact that there were even some people in their 40s and 50s kicking around tumblr–acknowledging older fans while implicitly claiming they’re much rarer than in reality.
There are plenty of very young people on tumblr. There are plenty of not-so-young people on tumblr. It’s quite a spread.
AO3 was proposed in 2007, almost a decade ago. The people who jumped on board to help build it initially were not primarily students. We were mostly adults with careers already; that’s what gave us the skills to take on a major project like that. A decade later, I am in my mid-30′s. Some are younger; many are much older.
There was that silly wank a while back about the X-Files supposedly being for teens the same way Buffy was marketed for younger people… only The X-Files was blatantly marketed for an adult demographic back in 1993 when it premiered. Twenty-something plus twenty-three years equals a fanbase in its late 40s. The venerable X-Files archive, Gossamer, was started by people who are now officially Old. Same with Fanfiction.net, MediaMiner, and all of the other great fandom infrastructure we’ve known and loved.
I hate that “The kids these days” shit. Young people are just as welcome in fandom as anyone else.
But I wish you guys wouldn’t sell yourselves short by thinking that you have to be ready to build AO3 when you’re a teenager and that you’re passé and must abandon all of your hobbies by 30.
Mainstream media is already going to tell you that adult women are required to take care of other people’s children instead of taking care of ourselves. Culture is already going to tell you that old women can’t have fun or seek pleasure, that women in general are suspect and can’t be trusted to read “problematic” books without being brainwashed.
Fandom is here to tell you that other people’s kids can be your friends if you both choose it, but you’re nobody’s free therapist, nanny, or censorship board. Fandom is here to tell you that you can backbutton when you want, but you can also read what you want, even if it’s “bad”. Fandom is here to tell you that you can enjoy your hobbies for the next however many decades until they carry you out feet-first.
Bolding for emphasis:
Mainstream media is already going to tell you that adult women are required to take care of other people’s children instead of taking care of ourselves. Culture is already going to tell you that old women can’t have fun or seek pleasure, that women in general are suspect and can’t be trusted to read “problematic” books without being brainwashed.
Fandom is here to tell you that other people’s kids can be your friends if you both choose it, but you’re nobody’s free therapist, nanny, or censorship board. Fandom is here to tell you that you can backbutton when you want, but you can also read what you want, even if it’s “bad”. Fandom is here to tell you that you can enjoy your hobbies for the next however many decades until they carry you out feet-first.
I’m in the last 15%, still running archives, still running fan cons, still going to fan cons and pro cons (Wizard World Philly – weeeeee), still creating zines, Advent Calendars, and other fannish creations and having a ball doing it. Find your pleasure every day. There are enough people out there trying to take it from you.
The K/S video artist begins by cataloguing all the scenes of
Kirk and Spock together, and then selects the ones that when
matched with the music will bring out what the fans call the
“slash premise,” that is, that the two men are in love and sexually
involved with each other. As I said before, the advice ranges
from the practical “Look at your video material without sound the
sound will confuse you”; “Use the show’s own cuts, fades, dissolves,
etc. since you can’t do them yourself’) to the aesthetic
("Watch MTV or VH1 and just see what they do”; “Don’t be too
literal, for example, having a line like ‘rain is pouring down’ and
showing someone in the shower”).
The fans seem less concerned about their relation to video
technologies than they are to writing technologies. Although the
video contest is often the high point of a slash convention, going
on for a tremendously raucous and pleasurable three or four
hours, fewer of the fans are involved in making videos, or “songtapes,”
as they are called. One reason is obvious: the greater difficulty
of access to video equipment, especially editing equipment,
than to desktop publishing and photocopying technologies,
which are often available in the fan’s own workplace and can be
used even while on the job.
That the fans are concerned to make this technology more available, however, can be seen in the scheduling at fan conventions of workshops such as one I attended called “Song Tapes for the Masses.” The workshop, organized by two fan video artists known for making songtapes that are not particularly slick but highly effective and popular with the fans offered the novice or would-be songtape producer advice that was both practical and aesthetic.
The songtapes are, in fact, music videos made right at home with two VCRs, an audio cassette deck, and a stop watch. The organizers of the workshop handed out a helpful chart that allows the songtape maker to write down each line of, usually, a rock song with a love theme,
the duration of each phrase, and the duration of the video segment
that will be matched vvith it. The video segments are taken
from fans’ private collections of the seventy-eight (plus the pilot)
Star Trek episodes and the seven Star Trek films, which are also on
tape, copied from video store rentals.
A sentiment I’ve seen going around a lot lately is that fanfic is predominantly slash. You see it in every “Why so much m/m?” rant and in most meta about AO3. I’ve heard versions of it on Fansplaining and much more blatantly and egregiously on One True Podcast.
But if you bother to look at FFN where shipping statistics are harder to generate, you see that het still outnumbers slash in most fandoms, and even the big slash fandoms often have more het than they do on AO3. If you look at Wattpad, Mary Sue/1D guys vastly outnumbers 1D slash. Twilight is a het juggernaut fandom, and it’s far from alone. It’s just AO3 where slash is king. That’s because AO3 was founded as a reaction to slash being less welcome elsewhere. AO3′s ship-centric structure that makes it so easy to get statistics you guys use to shit on slash was created because it was hard to search for slash on previous websites. Those sites were run by people who didn’t think it was important because they assumed most stories were the default, “normal” type: het. (Or, in many cases, “gen” with canon-ish plots with canon-level het content.) Complaining about AO3 being slash-heavy is tantamount to saying that people with similar tastes aren’t allowed to group themselves by those tastes. It’s saying that it’s not okay for there to be even one place where slash outnumbers other things.
It makes me angry that many of the big purveyors of meta in this day and age are so ignorant of recent fandom history that their arguments start from the blatant falsehood that most fic is slash. If most fic around you is slash, it’s because you’ve chosen to surround yourself with like-minded fans. Love AO3. Hate AO3. It’s up to you whether you use it at all. But don’t use it as a weapon just because you’re insecure about your own tastes or angry that nobody is spoon-feeding you longfic of your favorite ship.
This thought brought to you by marathoning a lot of old One True Podcast episodes while driving home for the holidays. (Seriously, guys, way to disrespect other fans.)
Next time you see someone’s meta starting from this assumption, call them on it.
I mean seriously, I remember a time when finding an M/M pairing was rare as fuck and the author felt compelled to put a whole bunch of warnings on it just to make sure people went into it knowing full and well that two guys were gonna kiss and might actually have sex, lest they be yelled at for inadvertently tainting the reader with gay cooties forever.
“this is a LEMON fic w/ 2 guys, don’t like don’t read!!!”
yeah this is like ‘within living memory’ kind of stuff for people who aren’t even 30 yet. like even ten years ago it was still an issue. when FFN decided explicit smut was against their rules, you can fucking bet the people who were getting their smut reported and deleted were first and foremost the slashers. when livejournal was wholesale purging ‘pedophiles’, they started with queer communities and gay ship communities.
hence: AO3, which protects users from harassment, targeting, or unfair deletion. and which has a whole lot of slash, not at all coincidentally.
I run an entire panel on this! Specifically, I run a panel called “Don’t Like, Don’t Read: A Queer History of Fandom.” I’ve run it once, so far, but I’m doing it again at Sacanime Winter 07 (just a few weeks away), and I’m hoping to get in at YaoiCon and Fanime.
If anyone is interested, here’s links to my slideshow and my speech itself. Sorry that the speech is a bit poorly edited.
Thanks for the links! I really enjoyed your presentation. I wish you could focus more on transgender fic because that seems to be on the rise. Along with the genderbending/genderswap fic debate.
A sentiment I’ve seen going around a lot lately is that fanfic is predominantly slash. You see it in every “Why so much m/m?” rant and in most meta about AO3. I’ve heard versions of it on Fansplaining and much more blatantly and egregiously on One True Podcast.
But if you bother to look at FFN where shipping statistics are harder to generate, you see that het still outnumbers slash in most fandoms, and even the big slash fandoms often have more het than they do on AO3. If you look at Wattpad, Mary Sue/1D guys vastly outnumbers 1D slash. Twilight is a het juggernaut fandom, and it’s far from alone. It’s just AO3 where slash is king. That’s because AO3 was founded as a reaction to slash being less welcome elsewhere. AO3′s ship-centric structure that makes it so easy to get statistics you guys use to shit on slash was created because it was hard to search for slash on previous websites. Those sites were run by people who didn’t think it was important because they assumed most stories were the default, “normal” type: het. (Or, in many cases, “gen” with canon-ish plots with canon-level het content.) Complaining about AO3 being slash-heavy is tantamount to saying that people with similar tastes aren’t allowed to group themselves by those tastes. It’s saying that it’s not okay for there to be even one place where slash outnumbers other things.
It makes me angry that many of the big purveyors of meta in this day and age are so ignorant of recent fandom history that their arguments start from the blatant falsehood that most fic is slash. If most fic around you is slash, it’s because you’ve chosen to surround yourself with like-minded fans. Love AO3. Hate AO3. It’s up to you whether you use it at all. But don’t use it as a weapon just because you’re insecure about your own tastes or angry that nobody is spoon-feeding you longfic of your favorite ship.
This thought brought to you by marathoning a lot of old One True Podcast episodes while driving home for the holidays. (Seriously, guys, way to disrespect other fans.)
Next time you see someone’s meta starting from this assumption, call them on it.
I mean seriously, I remember a time when finding an M/M pairing was rare as fuck and the author felt compelled to put a whole bunch of warnings on it just to make sure people went into it knowing full and well that two guys were gonna kiss and might actually have sex, lest they be yelled at for inadvertently tainting the reader with gay cooties forever.
“this is a LEMON fic w/ 2 guys, don’t like don’t read!!!”
yeah this is like ‘within living memory’ kind of stuff for people who aren’t even 30 yet. like even ten years ago it was still an issue. when FFN decided explicit smut was against their rules, you can fucking bet the people who were getting their smut reported and deleted were first and foremost the slashers. when livejournal was wholesale purging ‘pedophiles’, they started with queer communities and gay ship communities.
hence: AO3, which protects users from harassment, targeting, or unfair deletion. and which has a whole lot of slash, not at all coincidentally.
I run an entire panel on this! Specifically, I run a panel called “Don’t Like, Don’t Read: A Queer History of Fandom.” I’ve run it once, so far, but I’m doing it again at Sacanime Winter 07 (just a few weeks away), and I’m hoping to get in at YaoiCon and Fanime.
If anyone is interested, here’s links to my slideshow and my speech itself. Sorry that the speech is a bit poorly edited.
That’s a great talk! I love the look at femslash in zines. It does feel like it is specifically aimed at femslashers and designed to be given at a femslash con though, and it sounds like that’s not the case?
It feels like you’re positing a trajectory of fannish enlightenment that goes from starting at m/f, transitioning to m/m, and ending up at f/f. It works that way for some people, but it’s a mistake to posit this as the path to self awareness for the queer female fic fan, which is what the subtext here feels like to me. It’s just like that annoying thing slashers do where we pretend that slash is somehow more advanced than het, and any sufficiently mature, experienced fan will have “graduated” to it.
For me, types of pairing are more like flavors at the ice cream shop. I may or may not feel like pistachio today, and I’m annoyed that few places carry red bean or black sesame, but I didn’t find myself and suddenly stop ordering chocolate. I realize it’s a talk on queer fandom history, not just queer pairing history, but there are plenty of queer fans whose fic tastes never do end up aligning with their real sex lives. There’s no unidirectional “progress” here.
“Now, for those of you who have never seen Robin of Sherwood, which is probably everyone”
Hahaha. That is so true! Poor RoS fandom. If only it had been more easily available on VHS in the 90′s, it probably would have had a resurgence. Same with The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne. Time was, Michael Praed was to fandom like Richard Armitage is now.
“You’ll notice I didn’t really talk on “The Man From UNCLE,” which was an early fandom based around a British television show.”
MFU is a U.S. show staring an American actor playing either an American or Canadian agent (depending on whether you count tie-in materials as canon) and a Scottish actor playing a Soviet agent with an accent that wandered from the UK to the USSR and back again. The boss is British (essentially reprising his role from North by Northwest, not that anyone ever said so on the show), but it’s definitely not a British television show. The Professionals was the UK show that had an early slash fandom. Blake’s 7 was another big zine fandom, though not wall-to-wall slash like Pros fandom was.
“The Uber novel. Kind of a step up in quality from zines.”
This is a bit of a headscratcher for me. Ubers were certainly a massive step up in the availability of long, quality f/f fanfic. Zine novels were a thing long before Xena premiered. 80 pages isn’t anything new or special for fic by the 90′s. Again, I get the sense that this talk is specifically addressed to a femslash con crowd?
