There’s a story that gets told about this early 70s ‘zine.
The
Old Ones say that when Mark Lenard (the original Sarek) saw this
displayed in the dealer’s room at a convention, he picked it up, gazed
at the cover for a long silent moment, then closed his eyes and theatrically sighed,
We have a long and rich history of fanfic stretching over 40 years. Printed fanzines dominated for the first 25 years and have now given way to websites and online archives. However, time and age has taken its toll on these early paper fanworks and the fans who created them. There are still some fan writers who may have interest in sharing their older printed fan works but for whatever reason are unable to. The barriers to transforming paper fanfic into the online world can seem overwhelming.
Wouldn’t it be nice if the OTW would offer a hand to these early fans? Even if only a few are interested, what a statement it would make about our values and our willingness to work together to not only preserve our history but to also signal to both ourselves and the world that all generations of fans and their creations are valued and worth preserving.
What if the OTW were to say something like this:
“If you are a fan with printed fanzine era fanfiction and would like to make it available online, please contact us. We can put you in touch with volunteers who may be able to scan your fic. We can also connect you up with fans willing to convert your fic into html format which you can then upload to your AO3 account. And last we have volunteers who can assist you with setting up your account and posting. We want everyone to be able to climb on board this crazy digital archive and sail with us as far as this journey can take us. We are AO3 and this is our home. We want to help make it yours too.”
I realize that the OTW may not have the time or energy to organize something like this. So, in line with fandom tradition, I am tossing this happy idea out into the fandom ether in the hopes someone will say: “Hey, even if the OTW can’t take on this additional workload, I can. And I will. Come on everybody, let’s put on a play.”*
*The good news is author contact info and fanzine digitization is currently available. What is needed is someone to organize and recruit volunteers to convert and assist authors, plus outreach. The play is written and the theatre is waiting, someone just needs gather the actors and step onto the stage.
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I’ve had several readers express interest in helping get printed fanzines online. If preserving this history is something you care about, friends, do me a favor and reblog and / or volunteer!
I think I remember @aiffe and @real-life-sucks-ass asking me about helping. If there were others I apologize I’m not remembering right now, but I hope you see this anyway!
While I won’t be organizing this, if some does step up, I’ll be certain to post about it so tell people to follow me here or check in on my Dreamwidth blog. My DW blog accepts anonymous comments so they can also leave their info there. https://morgandawn.dreamwidth.org/1552584.html
It just kills me when writers create franchises where like 95% of the speaking roles are male, then get morally offended that all of the popular ships are gay. It’s like, what did they expect?
I feel this is something that does often get overlooked in slash shipping, especially in articles that try to ‘explain’ the phenomena. No matter the show, movie or book, people are going to ship. When everyone is a dude and the well written relationships are all dudes, of course we’re gonna go for romance among the dudes because we have no other options.
Totally.
A lot of analyses propose that the overwhelming predominance of male/male ships over female/female and female/male ships in fandom reflects an unhealthy fetishisation of male homosexuality and a deep-seated self-hatred on the part of women in fandom. While it’s true that many fandoms certainly have issues gender-wise, that sort of analysis willfully overlooks a rather more obvious culprit.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we have a hypothetical media franchise with twelve recurring speaking roles, nine of which are male and three of which are female.
(Note that this is actually a bit better than average representaton-wise - female representation in popular media franchises is typicaly well below the 25% contemplated here.)
Assuming that any character can be shipped with any other without regard for age, gender, social position or prior relationship - and for simplicity excluding cloning, time travel and other “selfcest”-enabling scenarios - this yields the following (non-polyamorous) possibilities:
Possible F/F ships: 3 Possible F/M ships: 27 Possible M/M ships: 36
TOTAL POSSIBLE SHIPS: 66
Thus, assuming - again, for the sake of simplicity - that every possible ship is about equally likely to appeal to any given fan, we’d reasonably expect about (36/66) = 55% of all shipping-related media to feature M/M pairings. No particular prejudice in favour of male characters and/or against female characters is necessary for us to get there.
The point is this: before we can conclude that representation in shipping is being skewed by fan prejudice, we have to ask how skewed it would be even in the absence of any particular prejudice on the part of the fans. Or, to put it another way, we have to ask ourselves: are we criticising women in fandom - and let’s be honest here, this type of criticism is almost exclusively directed at women - for creating a representation problem, or are we merely criticising them for failing to correct an existing one?
YES YES YES HOLY SHIT YES FUCKING THANK YOU!
Also food for thought: the obvious correction to a lack of non-male representation in a story is to add more non-males. Female Original Characters are often decried as self-insertion or Mary Sues, particular if romance or sex is a primary focus.
I really appreciate when tumblr commentary is of the quality I might see at an academic conference. No joke.
This doesn’t even account for the disparity in the amount of screen time/dialogue male characters to get in comparison to female characters, and how much time other characters spend talking about male characters even when they aren’t onscreen. This all leads to male characters ending up more fully developed, and more nuanced than female characters. The more an audience feels like they know a character, the more likely an audience is to care about a character. More network television writers are men. Male writers tend to understand men better than women, statistically speaking. Female characters are more likely to be written by men who don’t understand women vary well.
But it’s easier to blame the collateral damage than solve the root problem.
Yay, mathy arguments. :)
This is certainly one large factor in the amount of M/M slash out there, and the first reason that occurred to me when I first got into fandom (I don’t think it’s the sole reason, but I think it’s a bigger one than some people in the Why So Much Slash debate give our credit for). And nice point about adding female OCs.
In some of my shipping-related stats, I found that shows with more major female characters lead to more femslash (also more het). (e.g. femslash in female-heavy media; femslash deep dive) I’ve never actually tried to do an analysis to pin down how much of fandom’s M/M preference is explained by the predominance of male characters in the source media, but I’m periodically tempted to try to do so.
All great points. Another thing I notice is that many shows are built around the idea that the team or the partner is the most important thing in the universe. Watch any buddy cop show, and half of the episodes have a character on a date that is inevitably interrupted because The Job comes first… except “The Job” actually means “My Partner”.
When it’s a male-female buddy show, all of the failed relationships are usually, canonically, because the leads belong together. (Look at early Bones: she dates that guy who is his old friend and clearly a stand-in for him. They break up because *coughcoughhandwave*. That stuff happens constantly.) Male-male buddy shows write the central relationship the exact same way except that they expect us to read it as platonic.
Long before it becomes canon, the potential ship of Mulder/Scully or Booth/Bones or whatever lead male/female couple consumes the fandom. It’s not about the genders involved. Rizzoli/Isles was like this too.
If canon tells us that no other relationship has ever measured up to this one, why should we keep them apart? Don’t like slash of your shows, prissy writers? Then stop writing all of your leads locked in epic One True Love romance novel relationships with their same-sex coworkers. Give them warm, funny, interesting love interests, not cardboard cutouts…
And then we will ship an OT3.
I JUST WISH I COULD FIND ANY ARAGORN/ARWEN SHIPS (OR INSERT CANON SHIP NAME FROM ANY FANDOM) WHATSOEVER THEY HAVE AS MUCH CHEMISTRY AS ANY OF THE SLASH SHIPS THAT ARE THE WHOLE FANDOM
Wait, were you in LOTR fandom as the movies were coming out? Because I remember there being TONS of Aragorn/Arwen shippers all over the place. If you’re not finding them now, you could just be looking at the wrong fic archive (of which LOTR fandom used to have about 500 with different focuses).
The ship ratios I see on AO3 are really, really different from my experience while the movies were first coming out. (Though Aragorn/Arwen is pretty popular there actually.)
I couldn’t find them on FF.net and I didn’t bother on AO3 and I never really read any others and I was born in 1994? If there are still other archives I’d love advice and I’d love advice as to how to sort through the fics that only tag canon ships because the fics are in line with canon and-
Wait a minute, did you say that the canon heterosexual ship was popular when the LOTR movies were coming out, and wasn’t drowned out by slash?????
…the Internet has changed so much in the past two decades!!
Forgive me, but I really don’t think it has.
This is an issue of perception and different fandom dynamics more than of any real lack of canon het shippers. Plus fic ≠ all of fandom or all of a character’s popularity. Plus fic that is still online now ≠ all fic that once existed.
The big change in the last two decades is that it’s no longer cool to be openly homophobic, so you don’t get a lot of forums, archives, etc. that openly ban slash. Lots of slash showing up in mixed-pairing spaces feels like slash is overwhelming everything else, but the actual numbers don’t always bear that out, especially when you consider the numerical argument above in this thread.
I’m with you that Arwen/Aragorn had as much chemistry as Aragorn/Legolas, Aragorn/Boromir, yadda yadda, but there are like two billion potential m/m ships in LOTR, so I would expect the baseline of shipping m/m to be pretty high even if people like canon ships, straight ships, and Arwen herself. There were also a lot of fights in the fandom at the time over Arwen being the boring one and Eowyn being awesome vs. calling that attitude out as internalized misogyny. (It was one of those “the popular girl” vs. “the nerdy girl” fights. Or call it “not like the other girls” if you like. You know exactly the stupid fight I’m talking about. Lots of fandoms are still having it today. Arwen was extremely popular in the wider movie audience but possibly not as popular among the specific sort of fans who were writing the fanfic.)
Personally, I do like straight ships, but I rarely like canon ships, and I hated Arwen’s casting back then and disliked the changes from the books. I have since mellowed, but I’d still be more likely to read fic for a non-canon het pairing than a canon one, just because I prefer non-canon ships in my fic. What I’m saying is that there were a lot of factors in people’s interest in Aragorn/Arwen fic above and beyond an interest in slash or a judgment about canonical chemistry.
During the time period we’re talking about, AO3 was founded. And, yes, we struggled a lot against the idea that we were ~all slashers~ and didn’t get other aspects of fandom, but the truth is that many, many of the founders of OTW were slashers. (I wasn’t on the founding Board, but I volunteered from the beginning and was on that crew’s friendslists on Livejournal.) Specifically, we were the wave of slashers who ditched FFN over the “NC-17″ ban and over the prevalence of homophobic trolling and went to Livejournal. That’s why AO3′s comments format looks so much like LJ’s comments format. It’s also why AO3 has such a tendency towards m/m, high ratings, and tagging for specific kinks and triggers. On older spaces, you’re lucky–very lucky–to even get character tags. Tagging for sex and romance-related things and for minutia is something that comes out of slash fandom. Defining “het” as distinct form “gen” or “canon compliant” is also something that comes out of slash fandom–or at least out of slash being seen as mainstream and significant. When looking for a ship like Arwen/Aragorn, you’re struggling against older ways of classifying things. If it’s got a plot besides romance and is about them, what’s the need for a ship tag?–would be the thinking in parts of fandom.
Tumblr loves AO3. Tumblr loves a bunch of big action franchises with mostly male casts. It’s easy to have a Tumblr dash that’s all slash all the time… unless you only like Steven Universe… or you’re still fighting the Team Edward vs. Team Jacob fight… Or you spend all your time on Wattpad or FFN instead of AO3. It’s more a question of which fans, fandoms, and fannish spaces we surround ourselves with than of what exists total.
There’s also another factor: Time.
The LOTR movies came out 2001-2003, and the height of the fandom was during that period. By now, a lot of that fic will have been deleted forever, so whatever is left is the stuff that happened to be posted on a long-running site or that somebody bothered to preserve. And which things people think need preserving and defending are not a random sample. Things that seem “normal” often don’t get preserved because no one is feeling defensive of them. Things that seem embattled and likely to be deleted are more likely to inspire conscious preservation efforts.
In my experience, slash fandom tends to be very concerned with its own history and with making its own spaces where its content is welcome. It tends to be very, very concerned with fic about how the ship got together. Slash fandoms of the past weren’t concerned with whether a pairing would be canon (since it never would), and fans tended to stick with a pairing and fandom for longer after the canon finished. (This has changed in recent years.)
Canon het shippers, meanwhile, are most active right before the ship gets together in canon and tend to move on to a new fandom once canon ends. Sometimes, they write tons of fic, but equally often, the focus is on meta or cosplay or art that sticks close to canon. The big canon het fandoms I’ve been in that have also been big for fic were always ones like The X-Files or Castle where a lot of the fic was ‘how they got together’ stuff written before it actually happened or ‘why does our show suck?’ stuff written after. This is because canon het shippers get a lot more of what they want from canon itself. (Again, this is changing with the times and varies by fandom.)
Back in 2003, many large fandoms also tended to hide on mailing lists or single-fandom archives, and these would be segregated by taste. I wasn’t hugely active in LOTR, so I don’t know what all of the more canon-ish places were. (I mostly read trashy Legolas/orc porn and that kind of thing, which was in very different spaces, not just from the het but from the overwhelming masses of fluffy Aragorn/Legolas. I notice that AO3 has a ton of Gimli/Legolas, which was the big book ship but very much not what was popular at the height of the movie fandom. I remember a ton of complaining about that, actually.)
As for where to find stuff now, I would dig through the following.
I don’t entirely agree with Fanlore’s assertion that there wasn’t much het in this fandom. I just think authors failed to clearly distinguish between gen and het with canon ships. I don’t have any useful advice for easily sorting out those two categories, nor do I have any good advice on how to find the good stuff among the really dreadful badfic. If you want Aragorn/Arwen, you’re going to have to hunt, which sucks, but I just don’t agree that it’s a sign that it wasn’t popular at the time.
I remember all of the women who wanted to get married in Arwen cosplay. It was a Thing like GOT cosplay weddings are a Thing now. Arwen was at least as ubiquitous as Daenerys is now.
The fic I personally remember loving best (aside from trashy porn) didn’t focus on Aragorn/Arwen, but it might amuse you:
Who Knackered Aragorn’s Catamite, now on AO3 but formerly on the Henneth Annûn Story Archive. Notice what Fanlore says about the impetus behind this archive: “Other non-commercial, high-quality Tolkien archives existed, but most were limited by genre (e.g. slash-only or slash-excluding), by pairing, or to a small group of authors.” (And, yes, I know what the fic is called, but it’s partly about the royal marriage being on the rocks and then recovering.)
tl;dr - Joining an old fandom requires going on an archeological dig. Good luck!
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.
Fandom for 23 years, and I still smile at the memory of Zoomway and her absolute awesomeness.
Stumbled on my first Star Wars fanzine about 36-37 years ago.
I wrote Star Trek fanfic for the first time in 1978.
We’ve been here all along and we’re not going anywhere.
I wrote my first Trek fanfic just after ST:TOS premiered. I didn’t even know that fanfic was what I was doing: didn’t even know the genre had a name. Later on, when I was in nursing school, I came to know the women in New York who were in the process of organizing those first Trek conventions of the 70s. I worked some of those cons and made friendships there that last to this day. The people who ran private presses dedicated to K/S slashzines and presided over dealers’ tables piled high with them are now pro writers and editors with worldwide reputations… and they are still fans.
Which is as it should be. Fandom isn’t something you need to grow out of to prove your adulthood (or justify it to others). And it’s their own insecurities that people trying to push that position on others are running from. So fuck that noise. Long-term fannish lives are the original Slow Burn story… and it’s one we’ll still be writing for years to come.
My friend is heavily into the Star Wars fandom and we had a drunken moment where she was admitted in her twenties she was terrified that she was going to lose that passion, that thing that so defined her, and the resolution a bottle of absinthe brought her was she was still the same person she was at 15 - she just had more spending money
then she cackled like a witch in a disney movie and dropped a few hundred on merch on cafepress
she’s a mom with two kids who are being indoctrinated in the ways of the force, and she’s glad that her eldest is now old enough to sit through the movies at the cinema - because her parents wouldn’t take her to the Ewok movie when it aired [she dodged a bullet, have you seen that?]
you don’t grow up, you just get more money to spend, sure she might justify buying that animatronic porg for her little girls, but she’s the same woman who bought the official barbie wonder woman dolls in their boxes for her little girls that she will never let them touch.
Adding to the ‘what are y'all adults doing in fandom?’ Discourse
The saddest part is these young exclusionists might grow up to give up on what they love out of this internalised shame. I do hope it’s not the case tho. And that they will grow instead to realise their interests remain valid and in turn will vouch for it to younger people as well.
Another amazing series of fanzines from the 1980s. Beautifully produced by Fern Marder and Carol Walske. The eBay seller has been helping fans find homes for their fanzine collections for years and I have bought from them many times before.
This – and many other old school Star Trek fanzines – are selling below $10. Jim and MelodyRondeau are wonderful fans who have been helping fans find homes for their Star Trek fanzines for decades.
