I almost forgot that ageism in fandom is a thing. Apparently once you hit 25/30 years old you’re supposed to stop having interests in things. People need to freshen up on their fandom history and realize that fandom now wouldn’t be what it is if it wasn’t for older fans. Why before the internet when pass along physical copies of fic, do you really think it was 16y/o going to printing places and arguing with sales people there who refused to print out their Star Trek fic? Did the Harry Potter fansites emerge because 14y/o fans learned how to code overnight created them as opposed to older fans who grew up in the early internet boom. Geocities. Livejournal. Older fans have been paving the way for younger fans and creating spaces where fandom is accessible for everyone. So before you complain about “older fans” and Old Fandom, respect the fact that fandom culture wouldn’t be where it is now if it wasn’t for them.
So I’m on AO3 and I see a lot of people who put “I do not own [insert fandom here]” before their story.
Like, I came on this site to read FAN fiction. This is a FAN fiction site. I’m fully aware that you don’t own the fandom or the characters. That’s why it’s called FAN FICTION.
Oh you youngins… How quickly they forget.
Back in the day, before fan fiction was mainstream and even encouraged by creators… This was your “please don’t sue me, I’m poor and just here for a good time” plea.
Cause guess what? That shit used to happen.
how soon they forget ann rice’s lawyers.
What happened with her lawyers.
History became legend. Legend became myth…. And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost.
I worked with one of the women that got contacted by Rice’s lawyers. Scared the hell out of her and she never touched fandom again. The first time I saw a commission post on tumblr for fanart, I was shocked.
One of the reasons I fell out of love with her writing was her treatment of the fans… (that and the opening chapter of Lasher gave me such heebie-jeebies with the whole underage sex thing I felt unclean just reading it.)
I have zero problem with fanart/fic so long as the creators aren’t making money off of it. It is someone else’s intellectual property and people who create fan related works need to respect that (and a solid 98% of them do.)
The remaining 2% are either easily swayed by being gently prompted to not cash in on someone else’s IP. Or they DGAF… and they are the ones who will eventually land themselves in hot water. Either way: this isn’t much of an excuse to persecute your entire fanbase.
But Anne Rice went off the deep end with this stuff by actively attacking people who were expressing their love for her work and were not profiteering from it.
The Vampire Chronicles was a dangerous fandom to be in back in the day. Most of the works I read/saw were hidden away in the dark recesses of the internet and covered by disclaimers (a lot of them reading like thoroughly researched legal documents.)
And woe betide anyone who was into shipping anyone with ANYONE in that fandom. You were most at risk, it seemed, if your vision of the characters deviated from the creators ‘original intentions.’ (Hypocritical of a woman who made most of her living writing erotica.)
Imagine getting sued over a headcanon…
Put simply: we all lived in fear of her team of highly paid lawyers descending from the heavens and taking us to court over a slashfic less than 500 words long.
all
of
this
Reblogging because I can’t believe there are people out there who don’t know the story behind fan fiction disclaimers.
Yep I used to have disclaimers on all my Buffy fic back in the day. The Buffy creators were mostly pretty chill about fandom but it’s not like it is now. You did NOT talk about fandom with anyone except other fandom people and bringing it up at cons was a massive no no because of stuff like this.
I think Supernatural (and Misha Collins specifically) was when that wall between fandom and creators started to break down. It’s a relatively new thing.
I remember going to a Merlin panel down in London and a girl sitting next to me asked the cast about slash and I thought she was going to get kicked out!
Fandom history is important.
Oh, this brings back some not so-awesome ‘90s fandom memories!
Oh man, let me tell you about the X-Files fandom. Lawyers for FOX sued, threatened, and generally terrified the owners of fan websites on a regular basis. God help you if you wrote or created original art set in their (expansive) universe or worse - dared to write about their characters. Even people who weren’t creating fanworks, just hosting Geocities pages about how much people liked the show would be sent C&D orders or actually fined. When I was first discovering the concept, the first rule of fandom was you do not talk about fandom because the consequences could be devastating.
It was such a strange and uncomfortable experience for me when fans in LOTR and Potter fandoms suddenly started shoving their work in people’s faces speaking publicly about fandom and wanting to engage in dialogue with the creators and actors of the Thing they were into. Fan stuff was supposed to stay online, in archives and list-serves and zines we passed around because it just wasn’t cool to talk about it and it could get you in a boatload of trouble. The freedom we have to create and gather together in a shared space, or actually be acknowledged in any way by people outside the fandom was inconceivable to my fannish, teenaged self. I want fans these days to understand how amazing modern fandom really is, cherish the community, and appreciate what it took to get us here.
“if you found this by googling yourself, hit back now. this means you, pete wentz”
Oh hey, even more blasts from the past.
I was one of the ones who got a love letter from Anne Rice’s lawyers. Bear in mind that up until that point her publisher had encouraged fanfic and worked with the archive keeper (one of my roommates at the time) to drum up publicity for upcoming books and so on.
I could tell such tales of how much Anne screwed over her fans back then. The tl;dr version is that she and her peeps would use fan projects as free market research and then bring in the lawyers once it was felt Anne could make money off of it herself. (Talismanic Tours being one of the most offensive examples of this.)
But where fanfic is concerned not only did we get nastygrams but one of my friends had Anne’s lawyer trying to fuck up her own privately owned business which had NOTHING TO DO WITH ANYTHING ANNE RELATED. Said friend was a small business owner with health issues who wasn’t exactly rolling in money, so guess how well that went?
On top of that when yours truly tried to speak out about it I discovered that someone in Anne’s camp had been cyber stalking me to the point where they took all the tiny crumbs of personal information I had posted over the course of five years or so and used it to doxx me (before that was even a term and in early enough days of the WWW that this wasn’t an easy task) and post VERY personal information about me on the main fandom message board of the time. Luckily for me the mod was my friend and she took that down post haste, but it was still oodles of fun feeling that violated and why to this day I am very strict about keeping my fandom and personal lives separate online.
Hence why those of us in the fandom at the time who still gave enough of a shit to want to keep writing fic DID keep writing fic, but shoved it so far underground and slapped it with so many disclaimers they could’ve outweighed the word count of War & Peace. It wasn’t just for the purpose of protecting fic but for trying to protect our personal lives as well.
(Also would love to know who @tiger-in-the-flightdeck
knew. Life paths crossing after so many years….)
Lucasfilm also sent cease-and-desist letters to Star Wars fanzines publishing slash.
My favourite bit I read from one included the idea that you weren’t allowed to have any explicit content, of which anything queer, no matter how tame, was included, to “preserve that innocence even Imperial crew members must be imagined to have”.
Yeah. The same Imperial crew members who helped build the Death Star to commit planetary genocide.
(It’s one reason Sinjir Velus, while I still have some issues with him, feels like such a delicious ‘f*** you’.)
Later on, they were apparently persuaded to ‘allow’ fans to write slash, provided in ‘remained within the nebulous bounds of good taste’.
(On a related note, if I wasn’t quite so attached to my URL, I would 100% change it to ‘Nebulous Bounds’, because that’s just downright catchy)
Anne McCaffrey had this huge long set of rules about how exactly you were allowed to play in her sandbox. Dragonriders of Pern was my first online fandom, and I was big into the Pern RP scene - and just about every fan-Weyr had a copy of these lists of rules McCaffrey wanted enforced. One of which was ‘no porn’ and another was basically ‘it can’t be gay’ (and for a while ‘no fanfiction posted online’? which??? anyway.)
She relaxed a little as time went on, but still.
Let’s not forget: the reason AO3 is called ‘Archive of our own’ is because it was created in response to some bullshit that assholes were trying to play with fan creators. Basically (if I remember the fiasco correctly) trying to mine fandom creators for content which they could then use to generate ad profit on their shitty websites. When the series creators objected, the fans tried to pull their content, only to find that the website hoster resisted, claiming their content was all his now.
That wasn’t even all that long ago…
fandom history class
Interesting! wow
I remember back in the days having to put a disclaimer on EVERY. SINGLE. ONE of my Twilight fanfic chapters. That’s what everyone did. Even though sometimes it was simply a: I don’t own these characters. I play with them.
It was so strange not doing it on AO3 at the beginning.
I still disclaim. Fandom may be more mainstream, but you never know who might get lawyer happy. You can bet I’ll cover my arse best I can at all times.
Oh man, Pern fandom. I was originally in Pern fandom in the early 00s, when the Rules were still going strong. When I left the fandom and came back and found that there were FORUM CLUBS?! With the posts just where ANYONE COULD READ THEM?! AND NEW DRAGON COLORS?!?! Holy shit, mind blown.
And I remember the list on ff.net of authors whose work you weren’t allowed to fic, including Anne Rice. And literally everyone putting some kind of disclaimer on their fic. It was just how fandom operated.
This isn’t even ancient history. Back in 2010, there was an extremely nasty incident in which Diana Gabaldon (the author of a number of formally published Doctor Who self-insert fics the Outlander series) put up a blog post that began like this…
OK, my position on fan-fic is pretty clear. I think it’s immoral, I _know_ it’s illegal, and it makes me want to barf whenever I’ve inadvertently encountered some of it involving my characters.
As if this weren’t already a strong statement coming from a woman who seems to be oddly invested in writing sexy assault scenes (not that there’s anything wrong with subversive female fantasies, but I’M JUST SAYING),
Gabaldon continued in the same vein, comparing fanfic to home invasion and adultery (as well as other bizarre and unsavory things in her responses to the comments on the now-deleted post). When “fandom” rose from the depths of Livejournal to challenge her, she became even more offensive and belligerent, and other popular writers (such as George RR Martin, who was ironcially part of the Livejournal fandom culture himself) came to her defense. This “debate” led to a number of think pieces in mainstream media about how entitled and ungrateful fans were destroying traditional publishing, not to mention high-profile male creators publicly complaining about cosplay, teenage girls attending comic conventions, and other visible manifestations of fandom.
What has changed since then is that the young people (primarily women) whose work was nurtured in fandom communities have become professionals, and they’re transforming the entertainment industry from the inside. Fanfic writers are now publishing original novels and editing their own literary magazines for genre fiction. Fan artists are now working for Marvel and DC and putting out original graphic novels with major presses. Video game fans work as programmers and localizers, and cosplay enthusiasts have become character and set designers.
This cultural shift is not just a white thing and not just a straight thing and not just an American thing. Representation in fiction and art - traditionally published or otherwise - is hugely empowering, as is being part of a supportive community. I don’t mean to suggest that fandom is changing the world… but it kind of is.
one thing i particularly love is how shows have characters that write fanfiction because shows have writers that wrote fanfiction. current fan culture hasn’t been this way for very long, but it’s been this way for long enough, and now it’s in children’s cartoons like adventure time that if you like a book or a show, you might write your own adventures for it and read it to your friends, no big deal. i don’t remember seeing any girl in any show writing fanfiction where that wasn’t the punchline, that she was a sad freak…you still see that joke sometimes, but increasingly there’s also support and approval for the collaborative, imaginative storytelling fans do for fun, and that’s really cool.
Oh man. I remember my first fan war, part of which was “any gayness is automatically rated R/18+ and thus not acceptable on this forum THINK OF THE CHILDREN.” Good times.
There is a reason livejournal took off so well and became the home of fandom for almost 15 years. It was easy to use. You could filter your posts by friend locking it or allowing certain individuals to see it, so you can interact with real life and online friends. LJ cuts made it easy to post long fic (you see it today in the “keep reading” thing on tumblr) and it was easy to join communities. Communities had similar properties to individual LJs. You could also filter your friends list so it was easy to catch up on stuff. The tagging system actually functioned well! The expression of things through icons! Comment threads were wonderful. You could actually organize and talk about stuff without it being all over the place!
I miss LJ ok?
On that note, I remember when it was common practice to bump the rating of a fic up if it contained slash. At all. Two dudes holding hands? PG. Two girls kissing? PG-13. There were so many het fics that were complete smut (which we called lemons) that were rated R, but the same smut for gay characters was NC-17. And that was before ff.net changed its rating system.
and don’t even get me started on the backdoor hidden speakeasies where RPF was forced to hide. these days 1D fic gets pulled to publish by mainstream publishers, but once upon a time not so long ago to write anything about real people was so taboo you risked losing friendships and being kicked out of forums and mailing lists and shunned to hell and back.
whispered passwords to locked forums passed through private messages, praying the person you were inviting wasn’t just looking to out you and get you kicked from the main fandom areas.
it was a whole different world not even ten years ago kids. be grateful for what you have and never forget the burning times.
Remember back in the old days when we used PG-13 and R to rate fic, before the Motion Picture Association of America attacked with claims of copyright infringement, forcing ffnet and others to switch to “Teen” and “Mature” because the MPAA “owned” the letter R? And for weeks, there were fics everywhere written without the letter R at all?
Remember when literary agents would message fanfic writers and tell them they would NEVER represent anyone who had ever in their entire lives written even a single fanfic, and that the only shot anyone had at ever being published was to delete their fanfic and never write any again? And then if you dared talk about this, you’d be told a confusing jumble of “that’s absolutely true, nobody wants to represent someone who doesn’t follow the rules” and “you’ll never be published anyway, why give up your hobby for an impossible pipedream?”
Remember when all fanfiction was considered plagiarism in academic circles and students could face disciplinary actions for writing it even though it had nothing whatsoever to do with their classes?
Remember that scare when fanfiction was on the verge of being declared criminal in the US, as part of some draconian anti-net-neutrality legislation (there have now been so many I’ve forgotten which one), and everyone was frantically backing up their favorites lest sites go dark?
Never take fanfiction for granted. Never take AO3 for granted. Never take the fact that Stephanie Meyer declined to sue EL James for granted. (I’m no Twilight fan and I loathe 50 Shades but in truth that could have been a disastrous test case, so God bless Meyer for her decision.)
So I’m on AO3 and I see a lot of people who put “I do not own [insert fandom here]” before their story.
Like, I came on this site to read FAN fiction. This is a FAN fiction site. I’m fully aware that you don’t own the fandom or the characters. That’s why it’s called FAN FICTION.
Oh you youngins… How quickly they forget.
Back in the day, before fan fiction was mainstream and even encouraged by creators… This was your “please don’t sue me, I’m poor and just here for a good time” plea.
Cause guess what? That shit used to happen.
how soon they forget ann rice’s lawyers.
What happened with her lawyers.
History became legend. Legend became myth…. And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost.
I worked with one of the women that got contacted by Rice’s lawyers. Scared the hell out of her and she never touched fandom again. The first time I saw a commission post on tumblr for fanart, I was shocked.
One of the reasons I fell out of love with her writing was her treatment of the fans… (that and the opening chapter of Lasher gave me such heebie-jeebies with the whole underage sex thing I felt unclean just reading it.)
I have zero problem with fanart/fic so long as the creators aren’t making money off of it. It is someone else’s intellectual property and people who create fan related works need to respect that (and a solid 98% of them do.)
The remaining 2% are either easily swayed by being gently prompted to not cash in on someone else’s IP. Or they DGAF… and they are the ones who will eventually land themselves in hot water. Either way: this isn’t much of an excuse to persecute your entire fanbase.
But Anne Rice went off the deep end with this stuff by actively attacking people who were expressing their love for her work and were not profiteering from it.
The Vampire Chronicles was a dangerous fandom to be in back in the day. Most of the works I read/saw were hidden away in the dark recesses of the internet and covered by disclaimers (a lot of them reading like thoroughly researched legal documents.)
And woe betide anyone who was into shipping anyone with ANYONE in that fandom. You were most at risk, it seemed, if your vision of the characters deviated from the creators ‘original intentions.’ (Hypocritical of a woman who made most of her living writing erotica.)
Imagine getting sued over a headcanon…
Put simply: we all lived in fear of her team of highly paid lawyers descending from the heavens and taking us to court over a slashfic less than 500 words long.
all
of
this
Reblogging because I can’t believe there are people out there who don’t know the story behind fan fiction disclaimers.
Yep I used to have disclaimers on all my Buffy fic back in the day. The Buffy creators were mostly pretty chill about fandom but it’s not like it is now. You did NOT talk about fandom with anyone except other fandom people and bringing it up at cons was a massive no no because of stuff like this.
I think Supernatural (and Misha Collins specifically) was when that wall between fandom and creators started to break down. It’s a relatively new thing.
I remember going to a Merlin panel down in London and a girl sitting next to me asked the cast about slash and I thought she was going to get kicked out!
Fandom history is important.
Oh, this brings back some not so-awesome ‘90s fandom memories!
Oh man, let me tell you about the X-Files fandom. Lawyers for FOX sued, threatened, and generally terrified the owners of fan websites on a regular basis. God help you if you wrote or created original art set in their (expansive) universe or worse - dared to write about their characters. Even people who weren’t creating fanworks, just hosting Geocities pages about how much people liked the show would be sent C&D orders or actually fined. When I was first discovering the concept, the first rule of fandom was you do not talk about fandom because the consequences could be devastating.
It was such a strange and uncomfortable experience for me when fans in LOTR and Potter fandoms suddenly started shoving their work in people’s faces speaking publicly about fandom and wanting to engage in dialogue with the creators and actors of the Thing they were into. Fan stuff was supposed to stay online, in archives and list-serves and zines we passed around because it just wasn’t cool to talk about it and it could get you in a boatload of trouble. The freedom we have to create and gather together in a shared space, or actually be acknowledged in any way by people outside the fandom was inconceivable to my fannish, teenaged self. I want fans these days to understand how amazing modern fandom really is, cherish the community, and appreciate what it took to get us here.
“if you found this by googling yourself, hit back now. this means you, pete wentz”
Oh hey, even more blasts from the past.
I was one of the ones who got a love letter from Anne Rice’s lawyers. Bear in mind that up until that point her publisher had encouraged fanfic and worked with the archive keeper (one of my roommates at the time) to drum up publicity for upcoming books and so on.
I could tell such tales of how much Anne screwed over her fans back then. The tl;dr version is that she and her peeps would use fan projects as free market research and then bring in the lawyers once it was felt Anne could make money off of it herself. (Talismanic Tours being one of the most offensive examples of this.)
But where fanfic is concerned not only did we get nastygrams but one of my friends had Anne’s lawyer trying to fuck up her own privately owned business which had NOTHING TO DO WITH ANYTHING ANNE RELATED. Said friend was a small business owner with health issues who wasn’t exactly rolling in money, so guess how well that went?
On top of that when yours truly tried to speak out about it I discovered that someone in Anne’s camp had been cyber stalking me to the point where they took all the tiny crumbs of personal information I had posted over the course of five years or so and used it to doxx me (before that was even a term and in early enough days of the WWW that this wasn’t an easy task) and post VERY personal information about me on the main fandom message board of the time. Luckily for me the mod was my friend and she took that down post haste, but it was still oodles of fun feeling that violated and why to this day I am very strict about keeping my fandom and personal lives separate online.
Hence why those of us in the fandom at the time who still gave enough of a shit to want to keep writing fic DID keep writing fic, but shoved it so far underground and slapped it with so many disclaimers they could’ve outweighed the word count of War & Peace. It wasn’t just for the purpose of protecting fic but for trying to protect our personal lives as well.
(Also would love to know who @tiger-in-the-flightdeck
knew. Life paths crossing after so many years….)
Lucasfilm also sent cease-and-desist letters to Star Wars fanzines publishing slash.
My favourite bit I read from one included the idea that you weren’t allowed to have any explicit content, of which anything queer, no matter how tame, was included, to “preserve that innocence even Imperial crew members must be imagined to have”.
Yeah. The same Imperial crew members who helped build the Death Star to commit planetary genocide.
(It’s one reason Sinjir Velus, while I still have some issues with him, feels like such a delicious ‘f*** you’.)
Later on, they were apparently persuaded to ‘allow’ fans to write slash, provided in ‘remained within the nebulous bounds of good taste’.
(On a related note, if I wasn’t quite so attached to my URL, I would 100% change it to ‘Nebulous Bounds’, because that’s just downright catchy)
Anne McCaffrey had this huge long set of rules about how exactly you were allowed to play in her sandbox. Dragonriders of Pern was my first online fandom, and I was big into the Pern RP scene - and just about every fan-Weyr had a copy of these lists of rules McCaffrey wanted enforced. One of which was ‘no porn’ and another was basically ‘it can’t be gay’ (and for a while ‘no fanfiction posted online’? which??? anyway.)
She relaxed a little as time went on, but still.
Let’s not forget: the reason AO3 is called ‘Archive of our own’ is because it was created in response to some bullshit that assholes were trying to play with fan creators. Basically (if I remember the fiasco correctly) trying to mine fandom creators for content which they could then use to generate ad profit on their shitty websites. When the series creators objected, the fans tried to pull their content, only to find that the website hoster resisted, claiming their content was all his now.
That wasn’t even all that long ago…
fandom history class
Interesting! wow
I remember back in the days having to put a disclaimer on EVERY. SINGLE. ONE of my Twilight fanfic chapters. That’s what everyone did. Even though sometimes it was simply a: I don’t own these characters. I play with them.
It was so strange not doing it on AO3 at the beginning.
I still disclaim. Fandom may be more mainstream, but you never know who might get lawyer happy. You can bet I’ll cover my arse best I can at all times.
Oh man, Pern fandom. I was originally in Pern fandom in the early 00s, when the Rules were still going strong. When I left the fandom and came back and found that there were FORUM CLUBS?! With the posts just where ANYONE COULD READ THEM?! AND NEW DRAGON COLORS?!?! Holy shit, mind blown.
And I remember the list on ff.net of authors whose work you weren’t allowed to fic, including Anne Rice. And literally everyone putting some kind of disclaimer on their fic. It was just how fandom operated.
This isn’t even ancient history. Back in 2010, there was an extremely nasty incident in which Diana Gabaldon (the author of a number of formally published Doctor Who self-insert fics the Outlander series) put up a blog post that began like this…
OK, my position on fan-fic is pretty clear. I think it’s immoral, I _know_ it’s illegal, and it makes me want to barf whenever I’ve inadvertently encountered some of it involving my characters.
As if this weren’t already a strong statement coming from a woman who seems to be oddly invested in writing sexy assault scenes (not that there’s anything wrong with subversive female fantasies, but I’M JUST SAYING),
Gabaldon continued in the same vein, comparing fanfic to home invasion and adultery (as well as other bizarre and unsavory things in her responses to the comments on the now-deleted post). When “fandom” rose from the depths of Livejournal to challenge her, she became even more offensive and belligerent, and other popular writers (such as George RR Martin, who was ironcially part of the Livejournal fandom culture himself) came to her defense. This “debate” led to a number of think pieces in mainstream media about how entitled and ungrateful fans were destroying traditional publishing, not to mention high-profile male creators publicly complaining about cosplay, teenage girls attending comic conventions, and other visible manifestations of fandom.
What has changed since then is that the young people (primarily women) whose work was nurtured in fandom communities have become professionals, and they’re transforming the entertainment industry from the inside. Fanfic writers are now publishing original novels and editing their own literary magazines for genre fiction. Fan artists are now working for Marvel and DC and putting out original graphic novels with major presses. Video game fans work as programmers and localizers, and cosplay enthusiasts have become character and set designers.
This cultural shift is not just a white thing and not just a straight thing and not just an American thing. Representation in fiction and art - traditionally published or otherwise - is hugely empowering, as is being part of a supportive community. I don’t mean to suggest that fandom is changing the world… but it kind of is.
one thing i particularly love is how shows have characters that write fanfiction because shows have writers that wrote fanfiction. current fan culture hasn’t been this way for very long, but it’s been this way for long enough, and now it’s in children’s cartoons like adventure time that if you like a book or a show, you might write your own adventures for it and read it to your friends, no big deal. i don’t remember seeing any girl in any show writing fanfiction where that wasn’t the punchline, that she was a sad freak…you still see that joke sometimes, but increasingly there’s also support and approval for the collaborative, imaginative storytelling fans do for fun, and that’s really cool.
Oh man. I remember my first fan war, part of which was “any gayness is automatically rated R/18+ and thus not acceptable on this forum THINK OF THE CHILDREN.” Good times.
There is a reason livejournal took off so well and became the home of fandom for almost 15 years. It was easy to use. You could filter your posts by friend locking it or allowing certain individuals to see it, so you can interact with real life and online friends. LJ cuts made it easy to post long fic (you see it today in the “keep reading” thing on tumblr) and it was easy to join communities. Communities had similar properties to individual LJs. You could also filter your friends list so it was easy to catch up on stuff. The tagging system actually functioned well! The expression of things through icons! Comment threads were wonderful. You could actually organize and talk about stuff without it being all over the place!
I miss LJ ok?
On that note, I remember when it was common practice to bump the rating of a fic up if it contained slash. At all. Two dudes holding hands? PG. Two girls kissing? PG-13. There were so many het fics that were complete smut (which we called lemons) that were rated R, but the same smut for gay characters was NC-17. And that was before ff.net changed its rating system.
and don’t even get me started on the backdoor hidden speakeasies where RPF was forced to hide. these days 1D fic gets pulled to publish by mainstream publishers, but once upon a time not so long ago to write anything about real people was so taboo you risked losing friendships and being kicked out of forums and mailing lists and shunned to hell and back.
whispered passwords to locked forums passed through private messages, praying the person you were inviting wasn’t just looking to out you and get you kicked from the main fandom areas.
it was a whole different world not even ten years ago kids. be grateful for what you have and never forget the burning times.
Remember back in the old days when we used PG-13 and R to rate fic, before the Motion Picture Association of America attacked with claims of copyright infringement, forcing ffnet and others to switch to “Teen” and “Mature” because the MPAA “owned” the letter R? And for weeks, there were fics everywhere written without the letter R at all?
Remember when literary agents would message fanfic writers and tell them they would NEVER represent anyone who had ever in their entire lives written even a single fanfic, and that the only shot anyone had at ever being published was to delete their fanfic and never write any again? And then if you dared talk about this, you’d be told a confusing jumble of “that’s absolutely true, nobody wants to represent someone who doesn’t follow the rules” and “you’ll never be published anyway, why give up your hobby for an impossible pipedream?”
Remember when all fanfiction was considered plagiarism in academic circles and students could face disciplinary actions for writing it even though it had nothing whatsoever to do with their classes?
Remember that scare when fanfiction was on the verge of being declared criminal in the US, as part of some draconian anti-net-neutrality legislation (there have now been so many I’ve forgotten which one), and everyone was frantically backing up their favorites lest sites go dark?
Never take fanfiction for granted. Never take AO3 for granted. Never take the fact that Stephanie Meyer declined to sue EL James for granted. (I’m no Twilight fan and I loathe 50 Shades but in truth that could have been a disastrous test case, so God bless Meyer for her decision.)
Don’t forget the last year’s affair that sufficiently ended all fanfilm work in Star Trek. And you now can make a movie of maximum of 15 minutes and two parts, no more epic stories. And you have to put the disclaimer there.
because we built this kingdom, motherfuckers, with the trekkie zine housewives before us.
So here’s a story. One Fourth of July I was walking down the street and ran into a BNF who I’d met a couple of times at a slash-centric con. It turned out she lived in the same building as one of my boyfriends at the time, which was nearby, so she invited me to stop by. She had a small group of friends there, and one of them was an older woman with short, white hair.
“How old are you?” she asked.
I told her my age, probably about 28 at the time.
“I’ve been reading fanfiction longer than you’ve been alive,” she said.
Here’s another story. A couple of years ago at GeekGirlCon they had an “elders speak” panel. It included some women who had organized Star Trek cons in the 70s and 80s. So, first off, we really have always been here, this is a kind of geekiness that has always belonged to women. Andthey talked about women doing fandom back then secretly, about having to ask their husbands for money so they could travel to meet other fans. And two of the women on this panel were a couple who’d met each other in fandom.
One of the main reasons I go to slash cons is to connect with my foremothers in fandom. A lot of them aren’t on Tumblr or Twitter, some never even really got into LiveJournal. But they’re still here, doing their thing, having Fourth of July parties and emailing with their friends about fandom. Our elders are our history, our proof that we have always been here, that “media fandom” (fandom of Western TV and movies) is our house that we built with our hands.
respect your fandom mothers and grandmothers you ungrateful little buggers
It’s just hilarious to me that kids on here think that your interests fundamentally change as you get older. Your responsibilities change and, hopefully, you start looking at things and evaluating with more life experience….which, btw, is why a lot of the over 30 people here side eye the shit out of you guys many days. Because lived experience and life experience makes you see things in a different light…even fictional stuff. But you don’t just all of a sudden turn 30 and become this boring person who has no interest anymore in all the nerd things and fandom you liked at 15 or 20 or 25. You are the same person. You still need an outlet for your interests and you still crave those safe spaces to geek out the same way you do as a kid. We’ve always been here. Other women came before us.
FYI In 1993, the most popular Superman website was run by a woman named Zoomway. She was a life long Superman fan who started the site after Lois and Clark hit the air and she had thousands of women (many of whom were older btw) who followed her site. She wasn’t some 20 year old kid. She was a grown woman with life experience decades older than most of you who was writing feminist commentary about Superman and attending fan expos before any of you were born. I was only a kid when I first starting reading her writing and she was the one who introduced me to Superman fandom. She died of cancer a few years ago and her loss was deeply felt.
Women older than you built literally every iconic fandom you post about on here.
I need the community I’ve found within my fandom more now at 43 than I ever needed it at ages 18 or 20. The more life wears on me, the more I live and love and lose, the more I treasure this space of flails and joy and analysis over episode ephemera, shared with a chorus of voices flung far and wide around the world, small sections of which have become friends, shining lights who I look for whenever I log on.
I joined fandoms when I was 18 and I’ve never looked back.
Been in fandom 20+ years and counting <3
(also, omg ZOOMWAY)
First fandom 40 years ago. Still here. Squee is for life, not just for kids.
I started out in serious actual fandom participation at 13 or 14. I am almost 35. Fandom is a big reason as to why I am still around to see 35. Fandom has given me a means and a reason for surviving. Maybe I didn’t build the very house, but I have been helping to make the house a home, too, and I hope the young ones of now find their lights and their reasons for being somewhere in the fandoms that they belong to.
I’m 34, and I’ve been in fandom since I was 13. Guess what, the impulses never change, only the choice of canon.
On the downside, that magical day when you will be a Real Adult and thus have only “Real Adult Interests”? It’s not gonna come. I have literally never seen this happen with a person who is significantly invested in fandom. Not ONCE. Your new fandom may end up being Roman history, or the equivalent of Downton Abbey, but there will always be a fandom, given approximately twelve months for your brain to do what it does.
On the upside, if you accept this now, your future will look a lot less clean and bleak and alien to you. You will never successfully Stepford Wife your brain into only having “appropriate” interests, and that’s a good thing.
So anyway, move over, kid. We’re both welcome here. There’s room at the table for all stages of the fannish lifecycle.
So I’ve been meaning for a while now to get on to Fanlore and start documenting fandom stuff for posterity. And the Always Sunny fandom has finally given me the perfect impetus for it.
Today I edited my first wiki page, documenting the Dennis is the Bar incident. I feel so proud.
We’re pleased to announce that after seven months, the Archive of Our Own is once again available on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine!
Late last year, the AO3 suddenly vanished from the Wayback Machine, a non-profit archiving service. We reached out to its maintainers several times during this period, to find out why AO3 pages weren’t archived anymore. The project’s director contacted us this week and explained the problem.
Rather than excluding only pages belonging to users who had asked for their content to be taken down (e.g. their profile page or specific works), the entire archiveofourown.org domain had been mistakenly excluded. The folks at the Wayback Machine have corrected this problem and the AO3 is available there once more. (Check out the Archive homepage from 2010!)
While the Wayback Machine is a great service, and another useful tool in the efforts to preserve fanworks and fan history, this is a good reminder not to keep all your eggs in the same basket. Download works you might want to read again in a year, crosspost your own works to other sites, and be sure you save back-ups locally and/or with a trusted online service.
GUYS! They are all back! I am in raptures! Here are a few of the deleted fics I’ve found on the Wayback machine previously, all links are once again live. As always, download and save copies for your personal use because you never know when stuff will disappear!
Pictured: An archive preventing another archive to do archiving
This is a bad idea. This is a monumentally bad idea, not to mention ever slightly sinister. I can go through all the reasons why AO3 might have done this, but they all falter before the central fact of fandom archiving, which is that fandom archiving is hard enough right now. Do the people who made this decision even remember when we lost entire fandoms? I thought this was the same group of people who distrust website owners who like to make on-the-fly, by-the-seat bloodless business decisions that destroy communities and fandoms overnight.
Because this is asking all of us to trust AO3 a whole lot, okay? This is asking us to trust a single point of failure, and even if we decided to invest our life savings in the good intentions of the folks at AO3, that much trust–AO3 could still fail. There are many many ways an organization like AO3 could fail; the fact that all of their money is in a Paypal account, for example.
Think about what happens if AO3 fails. Then we would truly have no backups or fail-safes, so we must do all that we can to ensure AO3 does not fail. Donations. Volunteering. The near-deification of AO3 that we already have right now that prevents us from being critical of what it’s doing. I don’t even believe that this was the purpose of this decision at AO3, but this is the consequence, intended or not.
Being an archive doesn’t mean being a single, monopolistic archive. It means that you do all that you can to facilitate archiving. And this is the opposite of that.
AO3/OTW have been trying to contact the Internet Archive team repeatedly for the past couple of months, and haven’t heard back. We have no idea what’s wrong, but it’s nothing on our end /o\ The AO3 definitely wants to be archived! You’re very welcome to contact them as well—please ask them to look into this, too!
Signal boosting since it’s sadly common for people to assume these things without contacting AO3/OTW first for answers.
Thanks Christy for the feedback! I’m glad to know it’s not anything on the AO3 end.
The larger consequence, which I was trying to get at, is that this now makes AO3 the single-point-of-failure. It’s an important development, whether or not it is of AO3′s doing. It also demonstrates the power of the Internet Archive, but the Internet Archive at least has a public API. It was a semi-public, semi-open long lasting institution that now apparently does not seem as public and open anymore.
The point, as it should always have been, is that we see a problem. What do we do about it?
**As for something that does not matter as much: I didn’t contact AO3 because I’m not a journalist? I made a post about something and it got cleared up, got a bunch of people fired up, and more people are now aware of the it. Let’s direct our energy to getting a response from the Internet Archive, because currently as I can see the problem persists.
Yep. And if bugging the Internet Archive doesn’t work–or even if it does–it’s a good idea to tell friends what you want done with your fannish stuff when you die, post your fics multiple places, create backups of things you like from AO3, etc. Archiving is not a one-and-done thing: redundancy is key.
Purely for AO3, there is the “fannish next of kin” system, where your FNOK can contact AO3 any time to gain control of your account. (So pick someone you trust to not falsely report your death.) Outside of AO3, it’s still good to have someone who can take over your accounts or nab your zine collection before your family arrives to be confused by your porn and throw your geeky stuff in the trash.
I want my friends to print out copies of my fic and put a copy of my vids onto a flash drive into the urn along with my ashes and shoot me into space.
This is absolutely fabulous! It features gorgeous vids as well as fascinating discussions bout them and a lot of theoretical/technical information about vidding as a fannish work and as an art form.
Thank you @lim for putting this together!!!
“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
“
Hmmm…. first story I ever read was 12 Degrees of Separation (and it’s still my favorite). It took two days for my 2400 modem to download it, but it was great.
Pictured: An archive preventing another archive to do archiving
This is a bad idea. This is a monumentally bad idea, not to mention ever slightly sinister. I can go through all the reasons why AO3 might have done this, but they all falter before the central fact of fandom archiving, which is that fandom archiving is hard enough right now. Do the people who made this decision even remember when we lost entire fandoms? I thought this was the same group of people who distrust website owners who like to make on-the-fly, by-the-seat bloodless business decisions that destroy communities and fandoms overnight.
Because this is asking all of us to trust AO3 a whole lot, okay? This is asking us to trust a single point of failure, and even if we decided to invest our life savings in the good intentions of the folks at AO3, that much trust–AO3 could still fail. There are many many ways an organization like AO3 could fail; the fact that all of their money is in a Paypal account, for example.
Think about what happens if AO3 fails. Then we would truly have no backups or fail-safes, so we must do all that we can to ensure AO3 does not fail. Donations. Volunteering. The near-deification of AO3 that we already have right now that prevents us from being critical of what it’s doing. I don’t even believe that this was the purpose of this decision at AO3, but this is the consequence, intended or not.
Being an archive doesn’t mean being a single, monopolistic archive. It means that you do all that you can to facilitate archiving. And this is the opposite of that.
AO3/OTW have been trying to contact the Internet Archive team repeatedly for the past couple of months, and haven’t heard back. We have no idea what’s wrong, but it’s nothing on our end /o\ The AO3 definitely wants to be archived! You’re very welcome to contact them as well—please ask them to look into this, too!
Speaking as the co-chair of the AO3 development team, I promise there’s nothing sinister going on here! As @christycorr mentioned, this wasn’t our idea, and we’ve been asking what the problem is since at least September (we’ve sent emails, too). We’re sad and frustrated we haven’t gotten a reply.
On the off chance anyone reading this knows someone who can help, please let us know! (You can use the Technical Support and Feedback form on the Archive, a contact form on the OTW site, reblog this with a note, poke me here on Tumblr – whatever you prefer.) We’d really like to be archived again.
Hey, folks! Like sarking (aka sarken) said, this isn’t the way we want things to be, we don’t know why it’s happening, and we’re trying to change it. We’re sorry for the inconvenience of not being able to use the Wayback Machine to access older versions of AO3 at this time.
I’m sorry, I don’t understand this. Has someone on the AO3 team gone AWOL (not responding to messages for MONTHS) but has also sabotaged the archive by blocking it from being archived on the Wayback Machine? And the rest of AO3 can’t do anything about it? I have about a hundred stories on AO3 - and this is very worrying. A little reassurance that the problem is in hand would be very welcome.
The answers to your questions are in the tumblr thread.
This is not AO3’s plan or fault. It is the WayBack Machine.
“Speaking as the co-chair of the AO3 development team, I promise there’s nothing sinister going on here! As @christycorr mentioned, this wasn’t our idea, and we’ve been asking what the problem is since at least September (we’ve sent emails, too). We’re sad and frustrated we haven’t gotten a reply.
On the off chance anyone reading this knows someone who can help, please let us know! (You can use the Technical Support and Feedback form on the Archive, a contact form on the OTW site, reblog this with a note, poke me here on Tumblr – whatever you prefer.) We’d really like to be archived again.”
and
“Hey, folks! Like sarking (aka sarken) said, this isn’t the way we want things to be, we don’t know why it’s happening, and we’re trying to change it. We’re sorry for the inconvenience of not being able to use the Wayback Machine to access older versions of AO3 at this time.If you have any insight into this problem, you can contact our Support committee, contact our Communications committee, or send us an ask on Tumblr.”
something thats makes me a tiny bity salty is the emphasis of juggernaut fandoms like Star Trek and Harry Potter on sites like Fanlore. Yeah, those kinds of fandoms are what created a lot of what fandom is today, but fandom is now so, so much more than them that in most cases people don’t even know the roots of terminology they’re using like ‘lemon’ and ‘slash’.
fandoms like Overwatch, Tokyo Ghoul and Teen Wolf are kind of from a different era - the rules have been set, the jargon’s all there, and the audience is only growing as time goes on. So how come half the OW ships don’t have a page on Fanlore, and the other half were put there by me?
heres what id like to see in ALL fandoms in a perfect world:
- An at least SOMEWHAT centralised fandom, even on a site-by-site basis (e.g this is where you get news, this is where you find zines, this is where you get fic reccommendations etc.)
- Well maintained and informative pages on Fanlore.org
- Their own wiki with relevant information
And on an inter-fandom level:
- an organised effort to preserve fandom terminology, and to make sure relevant explanations are easy to find (have y’all ever seen a 100 word drabble bc i sure haven’t)
- A push towards centralised fanfiction on one site (hopefully ao3 bc its the easiest to use by a long shot)
and how can this be achieved on a personal level?
- contribution to Fanlore.org (honestly this website is a godsend)
- fanfiction/fanart/fanwork rec lists that are comprehensive and easy to find
- just… makin fanworks is gud
The reason that fanlore lacks content in some areas is because none of the fans in that fandom have started participating. Fanlore is user driven which means if fans aren’t working on the content it doesn’t get added. The good news, is that because many of the smaller fandoms have enthusiastic participants, that only one or two people can make a huge difference in terms of both the quality and quantity on Fanlore. So spread the word, ask people to create a free account and cheer them onwards.
Pictured: An archive preventing another archive to do archiving
This is a bad idea. This is a monumentally bad idea, not to mention ever slightly sinister. I can go through all the reasons why AO3 might have done this, but they all falter before the central fact of fandom archiving, which is that fandom archiving is hard enough right now. Do the people who made this decision even remember when we lost entire fandoms? I thought this was the same group of people who distrust website owners who like to make on-the-fly, by-the-seat bloodless business decisions that destroy communities and fandoms overnight.
Because this is asking all of us to trust AO3 a whole lot, okay? This is asking us to trust a single point of failure, and even if we decided to invest our life savings in the good intentions of the folks at AO3, that much trust–AO3 could still fail. There are many many ways an organization like AO3 could fail; the fact that all of their money is in a Paypal account, for example.
Think about what happens if AO3 fails. Then we would truly have no backups or fail-safes, so we must do all that we can to ensure AO3 does not fail. Donations. Volunteering. The near-deification of AO3 that we already have right now that prevents us from being critical of what it’s doing. I don’t even believe that this was the purpose of this decision at AO3, but this is the consequence, intended or not.
Being an archive doesn’t mean being a single, monopolistic archive. It means that you do all that you can to facilitate archiving. And this is the opposite of that.
For some reason, the Internet archive thinks that the AO3 is set to “no index”. They’ve been trying to work with the Internet archive for a while to get it resolved but so far they .have not found a solution. Definitely let AO3 know that this is a concern of yours and poke them to see if there’s an update. My information is about a month old but it is of concern to anyone who wants to preserve fandom history.
…..this issue notes that the “ridiculous ‘28-day video law’ … whereby the Government was planning to make it illegal to keep video recordings of ANYTHING for longer than 28 days, was abandoned, although they are still planning legislation concerning video recordings (and audio).”
From Horizon Newsletter #21 (December 1988) (Fanlore)
I admit that this is a very self-centered post, but the whole point of it is to tell you to not delete your fics unless you absolutely must.
The rest of us of course have no say over this. As writers you (and I) should be able to scrub our writing off of the earth, for whatever reason we wish. But I beg you, for the good of all of us, and no matter how terrible, regressive, atrociously written you think your fic is, please don’t delete it.
Just today, I have spent an upward of 2 hours looking for the remnants of Adelaide’s Freudian Slip, a rare novel-length Harry/Ron fic, trolling the Internet Archive, ffnet, livejournal, etc., etc., etc. I had chapters 1-5 and 10, 11, 14, but not the rest, which are tantalizingly out of reach. It’s not only frustration on my part, though that is there, but also this sense of loss that I can’t help but feel, this sense that try as we might, try as we must, the message in the bottle never made it to land. You may not want anyone to read your story now, but you may no longer be the person who first set the message to sea. The fifteen-year-old you, the twenty-two-year-old you, she was trying to reach someone, was she not?
A lot of us was half raised by fandom, leaving pieces of ourselves scattered across the net. There is something poetic in letting the raw fits and starts of our teenage-hood stay for someone else to find, someone in the midst of their own fits and starts. Though there is poetry–and sadness–in ephemera too, so who am I to say. I just thought, there is enough uncertainty in the world, so let this be something that lasts.
Of course, I don’t begrudge anyone filing off the serial number and going pro, because for one, part of the story is still out there for us to find, and for two, if it was me about to be able to reach a whole new group of people, I would take the chance in a heartbeat. And writers do have to live.
But beyond living, sometimes we dream. Fandom is nothing but fantasies, the best of which being the fantasy that we can exist communally, on the margins, outside the market. The worst thing that can happen to that fantasy and shatter the dream is professional publishing, which though necessary, is a necessary evil. Someday the communal dream can come true, and like stories, that dream will live longer than you and I, but that dream can’t reconcile with this world.
Anime Fandoms Are Popular on AO3 If They’re New Enough
We’ve all heard that FFN is the place for anime fandoms and even that anime fans find AO3 unwelcoming. While I do remember some unfortunate PR errors early on, I think anime fandom behavior actually shows a different pattern: fandoms tend to establish themselves on whatever platform is popular when they get big. Once they’re established, they don’t tend to move.
The charts above show big anime/manga fandoms on AO3 and FFN, grouped by canon age. One shows all data; the other is zoomed in so you can see the smaller fandoms more clearly.
AO3 went into open beta at the end of 2009. It became popular circa 2010-2011.
I left my name and contact in a place fandom people could see and I legit panicked. Hard. A friend didn’t get why I was so freaked but fuck, I have been in fandom for going on 17 years you guys. I remember some shit, and it doesn’t even brush the surface of how it was in the 90s, or the 80s, or fuck, the 70s.
People’s stories and accounts were deleted by moderators for writing slash or porn. People’s websites were sent cease and desist letters and shut down completely. People lost their jobs. People were sued. People’s families lost their shit. People were stalked at their work and their homes.
We have the Organization for Transformative Works and Archive of Our Own to protect against that but shit. Before JKR and Stephenie Meyer started defending and encouraging us, before Markus and McFeely shipped Stucky and Sterek was queerbaited openly by MTV, before Cassandra Clare and EL James exploded with their fanfic gone legit, we were hunted. We were targets. We were hated.
You can’t erase that paranoia. You can’t forget what it was like to be afraid that what you created would be destroyed or cause you harm in your physical life.
I still worry. I worry a lot. I am still afraid my tumblr or AO3 or Dreamwidth will be found. I’m still afraid that my art will be exposed and I will lose everything. I hate it so much but I can’t trust in anything but hiding. I just can’t.
So there’s this lovely folk song, variously called “Farewell tae th’ Creeks” or “Banks of Sicily,” which like many folk songs has gone through a lot of different permutations. The above is a rendition by the Chad Mitchell Trio; their lyrics can be found here, while the original lyrics can be found here.
What happens when filkers get hold of something like this? Welllll … a lot of things.
Here’s “Green Hills of Harmony” (lyrics) by Al Frank, performed here by (I think) Dandelion Wine. It’s about the Dorsai, a fictional mercenary society from a science fiction book series by Gordon R. Dickson.
And here’s Frank Hayes’s parody of “Green Hills,” entitled “Don’t Ask” (lyrics). It’s … also about the Dorsai. Sort of.
And here is what may be the most recent riff on the same tune: Erin & Rand Bellavia’s Pegasus-nominated filksong “Cliffs of Insanity.”
There’s much more to the story!
(You’re right about Dandelion Wine–that’s the recording from their album “The Face on Mars.”)
See, one major reason the Dorsai are still heard of, despite the Childe Cycle books not exactly being bestsellers anymore (Dickson died in 2001 and hadn’t published a new such book in almost a decade even then), is this:
In 1973, at TorCon 2, the 31st World Science Fiction Convention in Toronto, the only security there were local rent-a-cops, who among other things didn’t get along with the fans and didn’t really work out well–notably someone walked off with a Kelly Freas original (Kelly being one of the most well known artists in fandom) by showing the art show rent-a-cop a receipt for a much cheaper piece. The guard didn’t know any better than to say “no way you paid that for this piece.”
So, the legendary Robert Asprin, SF writer, cosplayer, SCAdian, filker, and fan extraordinaire, decided Something Must Be Done. Thus, he set up a fannish group to help work conventions: Door guards, hall monitoring (for drunk fans needing help back to their rooms as well as extraction from uncomfortable come-ons), auctioneering, even operations help. He got permission from Dickson to call the group the Dorsai Irregulars, the idea being that these were the “weirdos” of the otherwise traditionally military mercenary Dorsai.
And Bob himself being one of the major filkers of his age (arguably, he brought filk out of the back rooms and into function space at conventions; he definitely assigned the filk community its signature whiskey), he got some of his filker friends to help. To this day the roster of the DI is chock-a-block with some of the leading lights and senior songsters of the filk community, including Bob and Anne Passovoy, Murray Porath, Michael “Moonwulf” Longcor, Mark Bernstein, Bill and Gretchen Roper, Bill and Brenda Sutton, Steve MacDonald, John Hall, and more I’m not going to list one by one.
I’m talking around 2000-2008 here, so fanfiction.net was established, livejournal came to be a thing, and it definitely wasn’t the olden days of zines or early Internet mailing lists, but it was different from today.
- fanfiction.net used to host a lot of things that it doesn’t host today, like RPF, original fiction, humor lists, NC-17 rated stuff, original poetry, etc. The original fiction hosting was nice, because you could put your original stuff under the same account as your fan fic, and sometimes people who liked your fan fic would go read it. Readership of original fiction dropped a ton when it moved over to fictionpress.com (and the loss of lists was genuinely upsetting).
- Geocities “shrines” were very much a thing! They were so terrible and so wonderful. I miss my like ten geocities pages. Even aside from geocities, having your own site to host your stuff on instead of just putting it on fanfiction.net or some kind of blogging platform was the epitome of Internet cool, and seemingly a lot easier to do than it is today.
- Archiving was a thing! Usually one would put a little note on the top of their fics about whether or not it was okay for people to archive them on their geocities sites or whatever.
- We wrote disclaimers on everything, but I think at this point people were also bored with disclaimers, because the disclaimers were ridiculous. Some of them were haikus. A lot of them were lengthy protestations about how very poor we were, filled with words of love for the specks of lint in our pockets that the powers that be were going to get if they sued us.
- Epic authors notes for everything.
- The whole debate over whether or not all slash needed to be rated NC17, which I think for a lot of authors led to the idea that if they were going to write slash, which was by necessity explicitly rated, then they better deliver the goods. As a kind of prudish kid, I was terrified of slash and would not open it, despite being a pretty outspoken baby lesbian.
- While we are on slash debates, I remember people discussing whether or not slash just meant having a character date someone of a gender they wouldn’t normally date, therefore if canonically gay characters were written as straight, that was also slash.
- Further adventures in slash debate - the ongoing discussions about whether or not it was realistic to have more than two gay characters in a story. Because statistics.
- Battles about the evil child corrupting nature of slash aside, it seems like nobody much questioned the morality of what you were writing. Rape fic? Go for it. Abusive relationships? Totally fun and edgy, right? Your would be slash stud has a canon female love interest?? Kill her. Or make her evil. eeeevil. Why would you not?? Also, don’t question how stereotypes and harmful social trends might be causing you to write a character the way you are. (Note: I overall think the way that fandom self regulates these days is mostly better).
- Remember that time a certain author of a certain series of popular vampire books started actually suing her fans, because I certainly do (note: it didn’t stop fanfiction).
- Lemons, limes, smut, pwp, drabbles (which had to be exactly 100 words, it was a rule), vignettes, squicks, flames…
- If you liked writing about musicals, there was just one section on fanfiction.net to cover all of musical theatre.
- Then there was livejournal, and the days when everything happened on livejournal. Those were fun days.
- Comments. Comments were long, and beautiful, and glorious. Of course, ficcers were still begging for more of them, but compared to today they were much more freely given. Constructive criticism was also a thing. I remember actually, a group of people debating about whether or not the kudos button being added on AO3 (it wasn’t always there) would bring about the death of comments. That was a bit extreme, but comments do happen less since that was added.
- Mary Sues, and the painstaking effort that went into not making your female characters Mary Sues. Glad fandom seems to be over that.
- No such things as headcanons. Those are a really cool thing that we didn’t have when I was a kid.
The practice of making fanzines originated in science fiction fandom in the 1930s, when they were called fanmags. The first printed fanzine was “The Comet,” a fanzine published in 1930 by Raymond Arthur Palmer and published by the Science Correspondence Club in Chicago.
The term fanzine itself dates to at least 1940, and zine may be a back formation. The term and the tradition spread to the emerging media fandom in the 1960s and 70s. Another branching off occurred at roughly the same time with punk culture acquiring the practice via rock music fans who were familiar with sf fandom. Note that punk zine scholarship usually ignores the existence of media fanzines and describes a narrative of historical evolution from sf zines to punk zines to a broader zinester culture. Another inspiration cited for the rise of nonfannish zines is the alternative press boom in the 1960s.
That is the question. Mine was bought off eBay (and there was a bidding war for it.) I am currently checking out a few zine dealers online to fill holes in my collection. I’ll recommend them as soon as I know they’re reliable. (I don’t recall seeing that specific issue listed yet, but an updated list was promised soon.)
There *is* a copy of 5th Season #5 on eBay for $5 +shipping, but it’s missing the front cover. However, if it’s the content you want, you can always get the high-res scan of the cover from me and have it printed to slap onto the front.
You can buy that one here. I have bought many many things from this seller, and have never been cheated. (You basically buy it, then add a message at checkout telling the seller which issue you want.)
Also, email Jim and Melody Rondeau. They agent used zine sales for other fans. They do not keep their website updated, so best bet is to email them with what you are looking for: http://www.crossovers.net/makeitgoaway/fanzinehome.htm I buy from them regularly.
