Hi gang! Thanks for all the you do! This is more of a fandom ask, not a fic ask, so hope that's ok! Ive not been in any fandom at all for quite a while, so perhaps things change anyway, but previously there was always quite a big community on sites like livejournal, not just on collection sites like ao3 and ffn. Is this not the case for stucky? I don't think think I've seen you rev anything that's not on ao3 and was wondering if that's just that that's nothing anywhere else - thanks in advance!!
Hello, Anon! The reason why we mostly rec fics that are stored on Ao3 is because they have an extensive search and tagging system that makes it possible for us to do the work we do. It’s much more difficult to search elsewhere, and on top of that the Archive is a priceless resource that allows fandom to collect and archive their creations under our own control, instead of them being subject to terms and conditions we have no control over, which means that pretty much every fan author is at least crossposting their work to the Archive, which makes it the most efficient platform to search on anyway.
As for the migration of fandom away from LiveJournal, I don’t feel qualified to comment, since I was never involved with fandom on that platform. But I am hoping that maybe some followers will add replies with their own experiences, and Fanlore has an article on the subject as well that you might find interesting.
May I ask how Gene came to read your story? I'm especially curious because I came to fanfic in the late 90s when we all lived in fear of C&D letters and OMG don't let the creators know it's a thing and I assume this was during the zine era?
Yes, this was in the print zine era – I’m going to say ‘77 or ‘78. As best I and my friends can recall, the C&D letters did not plague fandom creativity until the 80s. When they began appearing, they featured greatly in the departure from active fandom of many of the old guard, who had been around since the beginning.
The 60s and 70s were a fabulous time to be doing creative work in fandom, because Gene welcomed the development of fannon. There was an active dialog going on between fan work and the studio during the original run of the series and the animated series. The actors also read fanfiction and even contributed to some of the earliest fanzines. I wrote about this here, here, and here.
So many people have asked me how on earth I was showing Gene my slash that I figure I better write a follow-up post to flesh out that story! It’s on my to-do list for the next few days. When I post it, I will tag you.
Thanks for the ask! I’m so glad you have remained in fandom all these years!
In which he reads slash and gets upset about zippers.
The first timeI ever spoke to Gene was in late September 1966, just weeks after Star Trek came on the air.
Remember your Star Trek history: he was not a Big Name or a Famous Person in the fall of 1966. At that point he was happy to talk with anyone who could string some intelligent sentences together and showed an interest in Star Trek. He really was accessible to pretty much anyone who asked for an interview, even for a science fiction club newsletter – which is what I was writing the first time I talked to him.
That first impression of a guy who was eager – eager – to chat at length on the phone about his show stayed with me, probably long after it should have. Star Trek caught on, then of course in the 70s the fandom grew and grew, but in my head Gene remained this friendly, easy-going guy you wouldn’t hesitate to approach and chat with.
Through the 70s he remained accessible to fans and interested in fan input. It’s said he was controlling in the work place, but was never that way
with the fans (in my experience). He would ask, “What do YOU think?”
then sit in that way he did, leaning forward and listening intently and
grinning at your eagerness and strong opinions over his creation.
As for sending Gene a slash story… At some point he said to me – as he said to many, many, many people in the early days – “Send me your work when it comes out.” What can I say? I was a dork. I took him at his word and mailed my work to his office, regularly, whenever I produced something. I highly doubt he read it. Perhaps he scanned samples of what came in to him from god knows how many fans? Because obviously he saw that one story of mine. Which is one of the things I find funny about the “zipper” incident: I got acknowledgement/feedback all of one time from the creator of Star Trek, and that is what he noticed and remembered about my story. Zippers.
One thing I’ve noticed - as a general rule - is that if the show/book/game/etc postdates ao3′s rise to prominence/creation, it tends to not have dedicated specialist archives of some kind, the way there were (and are still, tbf) tons of dedicated Harry potter-fic focused websites (or that old fandom friend you may admit you go to, Adultfanfiction), some to HP in general, some to specific pairings (offhand I can think of several that - last I checked about a year ago, were still active and getting fics added) or the few remaining actively updated Buffverse fic websites (Elysian fields - I think that’s the name - is a Spuffy one, for example).
Red Versus blue had one a few years back, no idea if it is still there or still being actively updated. And I can think of others (but RvB, while still ongoing, again predates the rise of Ao3)
By contrast, the MCU doesn’t seem (AFAIK) to have a lot of dedicated, high-traffic websites.
The reason, I imagine, is that as people were driven off FFN or LJ by restrictive rules (and that’s assuming the media doesn’t predate both entirely or partially), sometimes sloppilly applied, before ao3, making specialist websites was their only option.
But now if someone wants to see fandom content that isn’t allowed on other sites, Ao3, with their policy of maximum inclusion of works, is much more likely to be the place people go to.
Due South was such a gift. Do you know how useful the phrase “for reasons that don’t need exploring at this juncture” is in our every day lives? Just try it.
“I left the house without pants…for reasons that don’t need exploring at this juncture…”
“I was going down on him in the coat room…for reasons that don’t need exploring at this juncture…”
“I need you to get me two gallons of Mountain Dew and a kilo of cocaine…for reasons that don’t need exploring at this juncture…”
“I adopted this puppy while you were at work…for reasons that don’t need exploring at this juncture…”
The importance of Due South simply cannot be underestimated.
For those that were asking why I lost my old account ^ I mostly blame this event as half my stories got removed due to the 2012 one and someone spam reported me like mad, then someone hacked my account and deleted it altogether, just because they didn’t like the stories I was writing/hated the pairings
Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Star Trek: The Original Series Rating: Mature Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Kirk/Spock Characters: James T. Kirk, Spock, Leonard McCoy Additional Tags: classic slash, Tentacles, Alien Sex, First Time, Sex In A Cave Summary:
After their shuttle craft explodes, Kirk, Spock and McCoy seek shelter in a cave. While they await rescue, a badly injured, delirious Spock expresses his deep longing for an emotional relationship with Kirk.
“This story is probably the first fully-developed K/S short story that was actually published. In it, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are stranded on a planet when their shuttlecraft lands and explodes. Spock suffers from a blow to the head and is unconscious when they take shelter in a convenient cave. (Convenient caves are an amusing cliché used by many K/S writers over the past twenty-five years.) During his delirium, Spock expresses and acts on his deeply-suppressed desire for a sexual relationship with Kirk. McCoy feigns sleep, and Kirk, though initially confused, goes through with the encounter, presumably willingly. But the question is, will Spock remember when he regains consciousness?” (x)
“I remember reading “Shelter” in WS20 and going crazy waiting for the sequel to come out. As usual for many stories of this type, it ended with the ‘mating’ and there was no discussion of the ‘aftermath.’ And in this case, since Spock was ‘out of his mind’ during the mating, it was logical that we fen were going ‘bug-fuck nuts!’ waiting for the sequel to find out how both Kirk and Spock would feel later, on the Big E, when they were both in their ‘right minds.’ (x)
Originally published in Warped Space #20 in October 1976.
Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Star Trek: The Original Series Rating: Mature Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Spock/T'Pring, Stonn/T'Pring, James T. Kirk/Spock Characters: T'Pring, James T. Kirk, Spock, Stonn (Star Trek) Summary:
T'Pring’s thoughts during the Koon-ut-Kalifee, written partly as an explanation of the use of those alien genital features and partly because I thought T'Pring’s motivations in “Amok Time” weren’t sufficiently explained.
“I don’t usually read filk, let alone review it. Eight years of analyzing poetry in school has left me with little taste for anything that isn’t outstanding. However, this one should not be missed. It’s not the poetry that makes this so compelling, but the story. It is a first person narrative of T'Pring during the ceremony in ‘Amok Time.’ It is a wonderful portrait of this character and the reasons for her actions. I highly recommend this poem.” (x)
(Not to be confused with ‘purity wankers’, those are an altogether different kind of headache-inducing persons).
I know I promised No Discourse on this blog, but I have to say the following, because it’s been the bane of my existence within fandoms, for the past 20+ years. It’s also not something widely discussed in fannish spaces, probably because it still is the dominant mindset, particularly in geeky / nerdy fandoms. This post is also partly a reaction to the level-headedness of one person, in the sea of rage-filled, perpetual gnashing of teeth that is any comments section related to the putative Lord of the Rings prequel TV series produced by Amazon:
I’ve been asking myself for years
what exactly is it about geeky
fanbases that make responses like the above ridiculously thin on the ground. My theory is that such fandoms have a higher than average ratio
of what I’ve come to term ‘purists’, a group of fans also dubbed ‘elitists’ by others who’ve noted their patterns of behavior. And here’s the interesting
thing – from silly Japanese shounen anime all the way to sprawling
Western fantasy epics, they manifest in remarkably similar ways, to the
point where I’ve come to recognize the patterns instantly, over the past
twenty years:
refusal to accept almost any deviation from the Source Canon in
later adaptations + intensely hostile and genuinely angry reactions not
just toward the official content creators, but also toward fellow fans who
have the temerity to enjoy the new material (dislike of canon changes in and of itself isn’t enough to make one a purist, every person has their own personal likes and dislikes);
hold the entitled attitude that content creators are beholden to them and thus should only create the kind of content that the purist contingent finds the most enjoyable / that resonates most with their childhood nostalgia. If a content creator steps out of line (meaning create something different, while still following his or her own personal vision), then it’s perfectly acceptable to shout at them, mock them, drag their name through the mud and go on and on and on about how they ‘betrayed’ their fans (see the whole ‘The People Vs George Lucas’ debacle. How someone can create something with that title and not get laughed out of the room as gigantically entitled, but instead get hailed as a Passionate FanTM, is proof of how popular the purist viewpoint is in geeky fandoms).
general disdain toward transformative fannish endeavors (fan-fiction in general, fan-art and cosplay when they involve whatever new canon content is rejected.
Linked example used because it’s one of the many derapages of Tolkien
fandom specifically, on top of providing good snippets of the particular
brand of hostility and sneery contempt that I’ve come to associate with
fandom purists);
a seemingly obsessive fixation on constantly tearing down / railing at whatever one hates, rather than a focus on what one loves,
sometimes even decades after the fact (this has the effect of turning
entire fandoms into negativity binge-fests, or, to be far less polite
about it, toxic fucking cesspits that become the very opposite of a place where someone can decompress and enjoy their preferred content in peace);
to accompany above, sometimes the nonsense gets to the point
where creating an atmosphere actively hostile toward the fans of the New
Thing is precisely the intended effect (for example, fan-forum
after fan-forum for all sorts of nerdy canons, that involved a certain
subset of people constantly dogpiling, insulting and harassing the New
Thing’s fans, with the tacit approval of the non-interventionist mods.
The result has always been an exodus of generally non-purist fans,
whereas the purists were left to openly crow and gloat about it. The
assortment of insults over the years varied, but ‘idiot’ or ‘cretin with no taste’ were the most consistent);
a worldview that consistently turns the inherent subjectivity ofpersonal taste into objective opinion + the view that purist-accepted opinions are inherently superior to all others.(take a shot every time you see a canon with a divided fanbase get termed ‘objectively horrible / awful’ by the usual suspects. You’ll die of liver failure).
And I could keep going. Some of the above might sound remarkably similar to the so-called Tumblr ‘Antis’ and that’s not surprising, given the cross-polination that happens in fandom. The fundamental difference is that antis are largely transformative fans who judge content on the basis of its moral value, whereas purists / elitists tend to be curative fans with a very rigid opinion of what counts as ‘canon’, who view themselves as stewards of said canon against any notable alterations / any alterations that they personally dislike.
To be clear, someone disliking The Hobbit films or the character of Tauriel isn’t anywhere near enough to make them a purist. Someone disliking the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy or the Sequel Trilogy or the Yu-Gi-Oh spin-offs or various Gundam series or anything with a big enough Hatedom isn’t enough to make them a purist. What is enough is consistently filling the comments sections of anything positive toward any of the above and more with thousand of posts on how ‘terrible’ they are, what a ‘shill’ the author is, how little taste he has. What is enough is the aforementioned fixation with building fandom up on a base of perpetual hate, instead of love for one’s preferred content. What is enough is going out of one’s way to make fandom miserable for others.
If asked to point out the root cause of all
the above, I’d say it’s an unfortunate combination of the strong emotional investment more typical of nerdy fandoms (and we have historical
examples of this, see the shit Sir Arthur Conan Doyle got from his
fanbase, enough that it forced him to reverse course on an authorial
decision) + the divide between curative and transformative sides of
fandom + a fundamental disinclination of particular fans to give
even half a shit if fandom is as good a place to others as it is to
them.
The last part is bolded because it’s the key, I suspect. You can have 1
and 2 and (generally) not end up with someone who is a purist. 3 is
also needed, because constant expressions of negativity and hostility
require that one answer in the negative to the question 'don’t you care that fans of the New Thing are walking into a fandom that is consistently hostile to them?’
Purists, at a fundamental level, have zero respect for the fans of the
New Thing / New Canon and thus don’t believe that their own
actions should be tempered, for the sake of fandom being enjoyable for all.
This becomes very clear when you see that people who reject constant purist-style negativity justify it precisely out of care for their fellow fans and what sort of fannish environment they’re creating.
Examples:
And:
And:
@freedom-of-fanfic I know this doesn’t directly concern Tumblr Antis, but outside of Tumblr (and even in some parts of Tumblr, before the antis became particularly strident) purists have been a consistent reason for people leaving fandoms entirely and some of their attitudes and actions have served as bluepirints for later fandom derapages (antis).
a good post that illustrates beautifully how the purist escapades of anti-shippers aren’t so different from the escapades of fandom wankers purists of the past. the need to control the behavior of others is very similar, and the thought processes to justify it are also very similar.
another example of this kind of purist attitude from fandoms past would be people who organized to tell off creators whose fanworks featured self-inserts or ‘Mary Sues’. ‘It’s not canon’ and ‘they’re poorly written’ were the central complaints, and there was endless ‘make sure your OC isn’t a mary sue!’ meta content in fandom circles. It wasn’t until the late 2000′s/early 2010′s that this attitude was broken down to its misogynistic roots and rendered Uncool. ‘let women* write what they want, god. No need to tear each other down.’ ‘fandom is for fun.’ And we found other shit to tear each other down for, of course, but it was still a good step towards self-awareness.
(*’women’ being ‘transformative fandom members’, which was known to be overwhelmingly afab and/or women already, though increased gender spectrum awareness came later.)
Today, I think anti-shippers would largely agree that it’s absolutely ridiculous to tell someone off for making up a girl character who shits rainbows and writing fic about her just because she’s not canon or the creator makes everyone act out of character around their OC. otoh, they wouldn’t hesitate for a millisecond to tell the creator to check herself if she had her OC date a male character that’s too old for her, too evil, or is gay/bi/pan/headcanoned as such/antis overwhelmingly ship him with another canon guy. (Mary Sue lives, but only if she’s socially aware and not stepping on the toes of fandom wankers.)
Personally speaking, I think there are a couple of differences between canon purists and anti-shippers in terms of damage and behavior. In brief:
web 2.0 makes it hard for antis to get away from content they hate and hard for creators to get away from antis hating on them in a way that was not the case when canon was the purity standard (as opposed to morality/sj.) ‘curative fandom’ and ‘transformative fandom’ ended up on very different sites over the years; now we’re all together on viral sharing socmed. lmao. this raises vitriol levels to fever pitch.
we’re in public now. viral sharing sites means people who aren’t in fandom can see fandom content even if they don’t have the context to understand it. fanworks take on a pretty different connotation outside the shared dialogue of fandom spaces. at the same time we’re much less anonymous than we used to be. if you do something in fandom that society at large finds too distasteful, you could face some serious consequences.
in an online culture ready to shame anyone for anything and very sympathetic to authoritarian behavior, anti-shippers have positioned themselves as the Final Bastion Against Moral Depravity in fandom spaces. this has much better press than positioning oneself as the final bastion against People Who Dare to Create LotR Content Without Memorizing The Silmarillion. Canon purists were only ever going to be able to push their opinion as giant nerds; if someone tells them to fuck off, nobody will blink an eye. it’s just a creative choice. But there’s a very different social implication to telling a person who opposes writing fictional rape content to fuck off. (that’s what antis depend on.)
there’s also a different emotional toll between being told you’re stupid for not knowing canon well enough as opposed to being told you’re a real life pedophile/rapist/abuser/apologist/etc and being smeared as one for creating fictional immoral content or saying that creating fictional immoral content, especially in a fandom microcosm, is not the same as actually condoning these things irl.
long story short antis are in the right place at the right time to be much more hurtful and dangerous than canon purists ever were, imho.
but I do have a lot of hope that some - maybe many - individual antis will change their attitudes and quit being antis, even if it’s just from time passing. after all, I was once a Mary Sue Anti, complete with writing reviews to tell their writers to shape up and learn how to canon, and look at me now. anything’s possible.
(I apologize if I ever told you your 10th Member of the Fellowship was a bad idea. it was great, you were great, and you deserve to write whatever makes you happy.)
So, one of my soon-to-be fellow graduate students at A&M asked me to give her a rundown on Andy Blake and I was like GIRL, GO MAKE SOME POPCORN AND GET FIXINGS FOR S’MORES AND THEN COME SIT BY THE CAMPFIRE AND I WILL TELL YOU A TALE THAT WILL CHILL YOUR BONES.
And then I was like “… actually this is gonna take me a while, so… hold on?”
Seven and a half pages worth of Word document and approximately 4500 words later, I have finished my summary of the Sordid Tale of Victoria Bitter/Jordan Wood/Andy Blake. I figured since I went to the trouble of writing it all down, I might as well publish it here as opposed to just passing it along to my friend. If anyone reading this has anything to add that they feel is important and/or which I couldn’t put here because it’s now in locked posts that used to be public or which you have permission to disclose/make public, please feel free to comment!
Many people avoid commenting not because they didn’t want to comment, but because they didn’t know how to comment.
Commenting is also a matter of confidence
Even among readers who are authors themselves, many aren’t sure what to say or how their comment will be received.
A sense of community encourages commenting
People who feel more connected to the community, perhaps because of personal friendships and a sense of community built through other platforms and forms of communication, seem to have a greater desire to comment. After all, one feels less pressure when writing to a friend than an author to whom one feels little or no connection.
Why People Don’t Comment
The other day, in response to @longlivefeedback‘s initial post about increasing feedback on AO3, I reblogged the post and shared some of my own data and research around the topic. I am a Tolkien fandom historian and own the archive the Silmarillion Writers’ Guild. In 2015, as part of my research, I conducted a survey of Tolkien fanfiction readers and writers. The survey was approved by the Institutional Review Board of the university where I was a grad student at the time, and was administered using Google Forms. There were 1,052 total participants; 642 of them were authors, and 1,047 were readers. As I came out of the survey overwhelmed with data and unsure where to begin, a key area of interest among my fandom friends was commenting, so I have recently been looking closely at the survey items related to commenting, which brought me to @longlivefeedback’s post.
In addition, I am an archive owner myself, contemplating a major software change in the next year or so. Like probably every archive owner ever, I’d like to increase the amount of commenting and interaction that happens on my site. Therefore, I had been considering many of the same questions as @longlivefeedback about AO3 but on a smaller scale for my own archive. They asked me to share some of my research and conclusions from the past several months of crunching data and discussing what it means with other members of the Tolkienfic community.
Under the jump: Commenting as a learned skill, commenting and confidence, the 3Cs, and a case study in the Tolkienfic community.
Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Star Trek: The Original Series Rating: Mature Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Kirk/Spock Characters: James T. Kirk, Spock, Leonard McCoy Additional Tags: classic slash, Tentacles, Alien Sex, First Time, Sex In A Cave Summary:
After their shuttle craft explodes, Kirk, Spock and McCoy seek shelter in a cave. While they await rescue, a badly injured, delirious Spock expresses his deep longing for an emotional relationship with Kirk.
“This story is probably the first fully-developed K/S short story that was actually published. In it, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are stranded on a planet when their shuttlecraft lands and explodes. Spock suffers from a blow to the head and is unconscious when they take shelter in a convenient cave. (Convenient caves are an amusing cliché used by many K/S writers over the past twenty-five years.) During his delirium, Spock expresses and acts on his deeply-suppressed desire for a sexual relationship with Kirk. McCoy feigns sleep, and Kirk, though initially confused, goes through with the encounter, presumably willingly. But the question is, will Spock remember when he regains consciousness?” (x)
“I remember reading “Shelter” in WS20 and going crazy waiting for the sequel to come out. As usual for many stories of this type, it ended with the ‘mating’ and there was no discussion of the ‘aftermath.’ And in this case, since Spock was ‘out of his mind’ during the mating, it was logical that we fen were going ‘bug-fuck nuts!’ waiting for the sequel to find out how both Kirk and Spock would feel later, on the Big E, when they were both in their ‘right minds.’ (x)
Originally published in Warped Space #20 in October 1976.
Remember when we had to read fanfiction on our desktops… Not even laptops. having to get get plopped down in the family computer room to pull up your naruto and yugioh self insert stories on lunaescence archives and fanfiction dot net with god & everyone watching you.
The amazing thing about
the term “canon” is that it didn’t bubble up from the undifferentiated mass of
fandom (who actually knows who came
up with memes?). We know exactly and specifically where the word comes from when used in this context: an
essay written by a Sherlock Holmes fan in 1911, who compared the wild and
crazy veneration that fanatical Holmes fans have for the original stories, to holy writ.
Another name for the books assembled in the Bible was the canon, as opposed to other books that, for various reasons, were
left out of the Bible and “didn’t count.” In other words, the term was
originally used ironically and in a self-deprecating way to talk about the almost religious intensity of Holmes fans.
Part of the reason the
term canon caught on was because, even in the 1910s, the public was so mad for
Sherlock Holmes that there were all kinds of illegal imitators and non-Conan
Doyle authors and knockoffs, and yes, there were even amateur works that were distributed by mail (what today we’d call “fanfiction,” some of which even survives today), so a crucial distinction began to arise between the stuff
that was “official” and the stuff that wasn’t. So, here we have the three
things that we need to even have the concept of canon as we define it: 1) a group
dedicated enough to actually care, who can communicate, 2) a necessary
distinction between “official” and not, particularly due to the presence of amateur works (what today we’d call fanfiction), 3) a long term property that could
sustain that devotion.
Now, of the three, which
do you think was the one that was absent from a lot of science fiction fandom’s first few decades? It’s
actually 3. Canon only matters if it’s something other than just a single
story, which the business model of the pulps discouraged. Like TV in the 1960s, every story had to be compartmentalized and serial storytelling was mostly discouraged.
One fandom, big from the 1930s to the 1960s was E.E. Smith’s space opera Lensman series. The Lensman stories were so popular
that it received 5 sequels, all of which were planned from the outset. Some Lensman
fanfiction from the 1940s is actually still available for reading. Part of the reason the Lensman stories were so popular is that it described a consistent world with consistent attributes: Inertialess Drives, aliens like Chickladorians, Vegians, Rigellians, pressor beams, space axes, Valerian Space Marines, superdreadnoughts, “the Hell Hole in Space,” the works. It was way easier to get sucked into this than it was with the usual “one and done.”
Take for example, this amateur guide to the Lensman series, with art by Betty Jo Trimble.
Canon “policy” as we know it today, as a part of a corporate strategy, started with Star Trek: the Next Generation. Before that, there was no “multimedia property” big enough to necessitate it; Star Wars just didn’t care, which is why pre-Zahn “expanded universe” stories like the Marvel comics were so bonkers. There was no reason to believe that the Trek novels, including good ones by John M. Ford and Diane Duane, were anything else than totally official. Roddenberry, though, was deeply angry about losing control of the film series, and due to his illness (hidden from the public at the time), his canon policy was enforced by his overly zealous attorney. In Star Trek canon, for a long time, the only thing that counted was what was on screen. And not even that…the Star Trek animated series, for several decades, was decanonized. (It wasn’t until Deep Space 9 that animated references crept back in, and today, it’s as canon as everything else).
I don’t want to scare anyone, and this is hearsay, but I’ve heard from three people who were there that Next Generation writers, at least as long as Roddenberry and his attorney were around, were encouraged to not think of the original series as canon at all. References to Spock and even an episode that had an appearance by the Gorn were rewritten.
The Star Trek canon policy was so harsh and unexpected that rules were invented deliberately to kick out popular reference sources, like the rule that starships could only have even numbered nacelles, which meant much of the Franz Joseph guides, published in the millions and praised by Roddenberry and others as official, were vindictively decanonized.
Star Wars canon is interesting because it was entirely created by the West End Roleplaying Game. It was the only major Star Wars product printed in the Star Wars Dark Age, the 5-6 years between 1986-1991 when all toy lines and comics were canceled and the fandom was effectively in a coma or dead. The Roleplaying Game was the first place that information was collected from diverse sources like the comics and novels. Every single Star Wars novelist read the West End game because it was the only time all this information was in one place.
Marvel Comics canon is a very interesting example because it was a harbinger of things to come: superhero comics were one of the earliest places in geek culture where the “inmates started to run the asylum”…that is to say, fans produced the comics, guys like Roy Thomas (creator of the Vision and Ultron) who started off as a fanzine writer. Because of the back and forth in letters pages, there was an emphasis on everyone keeping it all together that didn’t exist at DC, which at last count, had 5 (!) totally contradictory versions of Atlantis.
I think what probably gets me deeply into my feelings about this “JKR should have just made her students Of Color to start with, she can’t ret-con and pretend she did it right the first time” is that I grew up with Anne Rice and Anne McCaffery, two female fantasy writers who hated headcanons and fandom and sued people for deviating from their original vision or doing any kinds of derivative works without their express contractual permission.
I feel like people who get irritated with her about defending black!Hermione don’t appreciate how much healthier JKR’s attitude toward the inclusivity movement in her fandom is than theirs was. Or Moffat’s is. Or Gatiss’s. Or Whedon’s. Or Green’s. Or even, until very recently, Lucas’s.
She’s not a PCR, but goddamn, at least she’s passing us the milk rather than pissing in our cornflakes.
Jo is actually almost entirely responsible for fanfiction being what it is today.
BUT WAIT, I hear older fandomers cry. X-Files, Star Trek, Xena, how dare you. And yes, I say to those fandomers, you held those banners first! Be proud of the paths you forged. But Jo–
Jo did something no author or creator had ever done before.
She was a household name who encouraged fanfiction.
When I first began writing fanfiction in 1998, it was common practice to preface your fic with this massive disclaimer about how you weren’t selling it, and it was for fun, sometimes quoting the Fair Use part of the Creative Commons act, and even begging authors not to sue. Because in those days, that was a very real danger. Eleven-year-old me had reams of fanfiction on floppy disks I didn’t dare send to archives because I might get arrested and taken to Plagiarism Jail.
And then there was Jo. And no, Jo said, this is not a private amusement park at which you may stare longingly from the other side of wrought-iron gates. It is a giant sandbox. Here are my pails, here are my toys. Come sit and play with me. Eventually you may decide you like some other sandbox better, and all I ask is that you leave my toys here for others to play with, and not try to take them with you. But why should I lock you out of my sandbox? It is, after all, far more fun to play in a sandbox with many people than by yourself.
People were boggled. They didn’t get it. They thought she was crazy. And the fans? They kept loving, and writing, and drawing, and creating, and Jo kept loving them back. Potter Puppet Pals, A Very Potter Musical, Potter!, Remus and the Lupins, all stuff Jo just kind of went “whatever, they’re having fun.”
And attitudes began to change. And then someone else threw her lot in with Jo, someone who doesn’t get a lot of credit for contributing something massive to fandom culture and should:
Stephenie Meyer.
Yeah, you read that right. The goddamn author of Twilight, who refused to sue teenage girls who just wanted Bella to end up with Jacob. (And who is way more gracious than I would be about Fifty Shades.) She actually has a fanfiction archive right on her website! I’m serious: Smeyer has links to a personally-curated list of Twilight fanfiction she personally enjoyed or found interesting. Whatever you may think of her writing, that loving attitude of “we’re all here to have fun, I love that you love my world and my characters, please enjoy” was such a departure from the days of C&D letters and page-long disclaimers.
These two women changed the face of how fandom works forever. Yes, their work is flawed. They are products of their time and upbringing. But just the fact that they embrace the concepts of “my world as I see it and my world as you see it are not the same, and that’s not just okay, that’s good” is something to be celebrated.
I have a lot of issues with Meyer, but her treatment of fans is not one of them.
This is fascinating and all credit to Meyer and Rowling for being so instrumental in changing the culture. I do just want to add that the producers of Xena actually hired a fanfic writer to scriptwrite on their final season. As it often did (with a female TV action hero, with a musical episode), Xena helped to point the way.
Starting December 2017, fans have pooled their resources and we now have access to 2,000 scanned fanzines and permission from multiple authors to assist them in converting their paper fanzines stories into something they can post online. First up are Leslie Fish and Connie Faddis, who are of some fame in the Kirk/Spock fandom.
To answer a common question, yes, we are aware of the University of Iowa and other projects to preserve fanzines. Morgan Dawn, our main organizer, is in the process of contacting authors and artists that have worked with those projects to see if they have interest in and need assistance with converting their fanfiction for online posting. For now, the two archives that we think that most of the authors will select are the K/S Archive and Archive of Our Own (AO3).
This is not an OTW sponsored project. We’re simply doing what fans have always done: connecting fans who need help with those fans who want to help.
What You Can Do:
The bulk of this project will be copy-editing OCRs (Optical Character Recognition, a program for converting PDFs back into text) so they are as error-free as possible. This means taking a text doc and making sure there aren’t “1"s when there should be “i"s and so on. We’ll have a PDF of the original text for you to refer to as you go.
To help in this effort, we are compiling lists of author’s works and their permissions: what we have, what we need scanned, put through OCR, and edited. This will be a continuing process as more authors get in touch.
Further along, we may need people to help authors set up fanfic accounts and post to them.
We’re interested in what fanzine era authors you’d like to see post their fic online. Please let us know if you have any specific stories or authors you want to get out there, and come help us bring them to the newest chapter of fandom! Contact us via this form: https://goo.gl/forms/sKWJApJfFyRd6WH93
Journey to B-Hive 6, a Blake’s, ahem, Bear’s 7 Fanzine. (Art by Betty Eros Costa)
What, you’re SURPRISED there’s a teddy bear version of Blake’s 7? Fans have ALWAYS been wonderfully ridiculous. Why shouldn’t there be a teddy bear AU? It’s cute, and that’s reason enough for its existence.
I will bet cash money these teddy bears actually existed too, lovingly created by some fan. And deep down, I want a “Viola Bearstol” on the table next to my bed. (Even though he’d probably steal my Vicks vaporub and cough syrup.)
Chapters: 18/18 Fandom: Star Trek: The Original Series Rating: Mature Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: James T. Kirk/Spock Characters: James T. Kirk, Spock, Leonard McCoy, Original Characters Additional Tags: Alternate Reality, Religions, Slash Summary:
A time-travel mission gone wrong traps Kirk in the past and returns the Enterprise to a different and challenging future.
Published in the print zine Fesarius #5 in 1980, “rich in plot and characterization and undoubtedly controversial in its conclusion, Sunset and Evening Star is the product of four years of work and is one Leslie Fish’s finest efforts.”
Want to help authors bring more print fanzine stories online for the next generation of fans? Come help us at Zinedom!
Starting December 2017, fans have pooled their resources and we now have access to 2,000 scanned fanzines and permission from multiple authors to assist them in converting their paper fanzines stories into something they can post online. First up are Leslie Fish and Connie Faddis, who are of some fame in the Kirk/Spock fandom.
To answer a common question, yes, we are aware of the University of Iowa and other projects to preserve fanzines. Morgan Dawn, our main organizer, is in the process of contacting authors and artists that have worked with those projects to see if they have interest in and need assistance with converting their fanfiction for online posting. For now, the two archives that we think that most of the authors will select are the K/S Archive and Archive of Our Own (AO3).
This is not an OTW sponsored project. We’re simply doing what fans have always done: connecting fans who need help with those fans who want to help.
What You Can Do:
The bulk of this project will be copy-editing OCRs (Optical Character Recognition, a program for converting PDFs back into text) so they are as error-free as possible. This means taking a text doc and making sure there aren’t “1"s when there should be “i"s and so on. We’ll have a PDF of the original text for you to refer to as you go.
To help in this effort, we are compiling lists of author’s works and their permissions: what we have, what we need scanned, put through OCR, and edited. This will be a continuing process as more authors get in touch.
Further along, we may need people to help authors set up fanfic accounts and post to them.
We’re interested in what fanzine era authors you’d like to see post their fic online. Please let us know if you have any specific stories or authors you want to get out there, and come help us bring them to the newest chapter of fandom! Contact us via this form: https://goo.gl/forms/sKWJApJfFyRd6WH93
Zinedom is a project dedicated to helping fanzine authors bring their fanfiction online to the next generation of fans. Current active projects we are assisting with include:
Star Trek Kirk/Spock fanzines
Starsky & Hutch fanzines
And any other fanzine authors who request assistance to post their paper fanfiction online
How Can I Get Involved?
We need fans to proof converted stories, help keep track of assignments, and do outreach to authors and artists. We also need fans who own fanzines and are willing to scan or are willing to loan or donate zines for scanning.
Is it true that fanfiction.net banned reader/self insert fics because, according to their logic, if a child reads such a fic, that makes the fic child porn, and thus said child’s parents could sue the website? That’s what I heard. It sounds beyond ridiculous.
(submission)
…Yes, although it must be specified that the problem is the juicy lemon, so to say. It is perfectly in tune with their 2002 ban on anything even remotely explicit, and then their 2012 purge. The 2005 ban on 2nd POV and self-insert fics was explained in 2012 with this message:
I’m– not going to comment on that unless explicitly asked because anything about that website makes my head shake so hard I get cramps in my neck and the secondhand embarrassment is almost unbearable.
Can you please comment? Now I’m curious. Because this is completely and utterly ridiculous.
Omg where do I even begin. You can’t talk about FFnet censorship on one type of content without dragging the discourse to all the type of content it has banned since its creation. And you can’t talk about the disaster of its management (despite its size and out of control in/fame) without also talking about the staff of the site. Let’s go a bit in order.
- Ffnet has 1 admin
“FanFiction.Net was created by Xing Li while he was a student at University of California, Los Angeles. The original servers for the site were connected to his then-employer. This employer “recouped part of the cost in order to use it as a test for how well their servers worked.” [1] When these costs rose to over $2000 a month, Xing Li’s employer wanted compensation. [need cite] Xing Li tried to cover these costs with paid memberships, something that was a failure. [2] Advertising on the site was initially used, removed, then later implicated.“
- Had moderators not even out of high schools, one of which in particular was 13 at the time
“Flourish (was on staff at the age of 13 [3], left FFN.net in September 2001 during The Cassandra Claire Plagiarism Debacle, and became one of the founding members of FictionAlley.Org)”
- It brought down the age restriction for signing up to 13 sometime after the first purge
“Registration was open to all people who claimed to be over 18, and by 2002 over 118,000 people were registered. (The age limit has since been moved down to 13.)” [4]
- But still had a pop up system to warn users that they were going to read mature content, asking to prove that they were over the age of 17. This was indeed deemed, together with the request of only admitting people claiming to be 18 for getting an account, insufficient. As many know, in 2002 the admin wrote an announcement, part of which regarded NC17 content:
“NC-17 based entries will no longer be accepted. Though they are very small portion of the site the adult stories have generated almost all of the complaints filed on record in the past year. Moreover, the highest concentration of them are growing in areas with subjects targeted to younger readers and with increasingly controversial subject matters. However, not all NC-17 based stories fall into the description but as result of their increasing volume a decision has been made to resolve this problem. Innocent writers will be affected but this has to be done considering the non-filtering scheme of the site.” [5]
- Still, things were peachy because the management of the website sucked majestically, with the admin himself disappearing into the void, leaving the website heavily understaffed for its huge content, making the users so used to not being able to get back from moderators after abuse reports etc, that our gorgeous fandom police started getting up. Like LU (The Literate Union) founded in 2009, or Critics United founded in 2010 (which fans blame 2012 purge on), or the LJ group Warriors Of Innocence (reportedly behind LJ Strikethrough)
Here things start getting fun.
- 2012 Ffnet goes on a purge for stories that violate the 2002 ToS. The fact that those stories managed to exist for 10 years tells you a lot about the website (and you can bet that there are still many more hidden there). Even though the purge should have focused on explicit content, songfic, RPFs and whatever else:
“Reports in ffdotnetrants on LiveJournal and the fanfiction.net M-Rated Story Purge forum say that a “swear word” in the title or summary of a gen story was enough to get a story deleted without warning.“ (<- this source has been deleted from LJ, so take it however you want)
- Huffingtonpost ended up making an article about it titled "The Book Burning That Wasn’t: Thousands of Works of Fiction Destroyed and No One Pays Attention” Initial estimate talked about more than 60k fanfic deleted in their top 20 categories, but then it was rectified to 8k. Considering the total number of works, 8k is barely noticeable. Still, putting together this info with the users complain that even the leaders of CU wrote stuff that shouldn’t have been on the site while still dogpiling reports on others’ stories, you can sum up the situation with “UGH”
It’s not the end.
- “Our” leader and saviour admin of Ffnet comes back with other incredible ideas, like in 2010 when he went on a forum purge:
“On the night of November 25, 2010, FanFiction.Net purged its forums, deleting threads not updated for 9 months. This was announced less than 10 hours before an automated engine mauled through forums by creation date. During the night after Thanksgiving, while most of the site’s chiefly American population slept and was away from a computer, over 60,000 forums were affected. As a result, 22 million posts (66% of all posts ever made) were deleted during the purge. Instead of "reducing clutter”, the intent posted on the front page, the event resulted in thousands of completely empty forums with no archive or backlog of any sort. Important forum discussion, sentimental and cultural value formed in forums since they were introduced in 2005 was lost. Only forum subscription statistics showed there used to be content. When the purge completed, 90% of the General forums were empty. The site took no action about forums with no posts prior to the purge. It completely changed the way users viewed their forums, from a safe haven, to something entirely temporary.[6][7]“
-Or that other time- actually the same day, when he went on a PM purge:
"This process took more than two days to finish, and some users were able to feverishly back up their old correspondence. After the event, users expected better service, or another type of compensation, but received none. The site is yet to keep its promise made on November 26 to bring mobile forums "in a few days”[7]“
- And it makes things just peachy when:
"the site removed "libel” as a forbidden practice from their ToS in 2008, and would not endorse petition movements such as letting writers delete offensive signed reviews on their own.[8] The staff took an idle stance during the flame war concerning The Author Alliance in 2004, when several thousand stories were removed in Sonic the Hedgehog and Pokemon fandoms, a deed Xing Li noticed in the site’s article on AllExperts.“ (<- link broken for the last part)
So you can see how I really really really can’t bring myself to be shocked at their "readers fic can make you a CP creator, congrats!” when all this is going on. Purges at the drop of an hat without warnings, ToS changed that although fought hard and nail (let’s remember that the first petition against 2002 ban had at its closure more than 20k signatures, the second petition for the 2012 purge counted more than 40k) was indeed ignored by everyone for 10 years before fandom police started doing the job moderators weren’t doing or couldn’t do, lowering the age restriction to 13 even though with this management I can’t in all honesty believe that there aren’t NSFW fics there that haven’t been picked up and that are perfectly available to random readers, though I hope they have reached their so hard-fought purity. I do pity the lot of them because they clearly weren’t ready to manage a website that big.
But this is also why antis trying to police AO3 make me laugh so much. AO3 rose from the ashes of FFnet and LJ purges. How quickly do they think users who were personally involved in these will forget about it all to convert to their moral crusade?
AO3′s code is open source. It’s not in easily installable format, but it’s all there on github. Any teens (or anyone else) who is unhappy with AO3′s content choices, are free to grab the code and set up their own website, with whatever content restrictions they like.
AO3, however, will continue to have a “NO LIMITS OTHER THAN THE LAW” approach to content. (That’s not strictly true; they also don’t allow doxxing, non-fannish content, or non-fanworks posts like “what should I write next” posts instead of stories.) AO3 was designed specifically to host content that was vulnerable to takedowns on other sites. AO3 is really, really fond of the “don’t like? don’t read” policy for controversial topics.
It has another focus: An archive that won’t vanish because of someone’s fit of pique. In addition to the FFN and LJ takedowns, AO3 started soon after the Harry Potter “Detention” archive, for Harry/Snape fic, vanished literally overnight because the owner got into a fight with one of her appointed mods. *Poof* hundreds of fics gone. Fortunately, they were available through Google cache for a while, and there was a mad rush to find & download all the fics. In the end, I believe only 4 stories were entirely lost - fics where the authors didn’t have a backup, and hadn’t been accessed recently enough to show up in the cache. AO3′s other purpose is to preserve fanworks that would otherwise disappear because of site host drama or just walking away from the fandom and not wanting to pay host fees anymore. So it’s not only created for controversial fic; it’s created to endure internal drama about its policies - a nonprofit corporation, unlike an individual fan, can’t just vanish the project overnight.
The current pack of antis, mostly teens and college-age kids, are generally not aware that cries of “your fic is HORRIBLE and GLORIFIES CRIME and IMMORALITY and SEDUCES INNOCENTS INTO PERVERSION” have been going on for literally decades, and that AO3 was created to host exactly that kind of fic.
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!
The Organization for Tranformative Works (which runs AO3) has the Fan Culture Preservation Project, as part of Open Doors, which is dedicated to sheltering at-risk fandom contact.
The Foresmutters Project was a test case for Open Doors, collecting very early Kirk/Spock material and preserving it. Once it was successful, Open Doors became fully operational.
If you’re interested in preserving fanzines and fan culture, you need to ask the OTW about volunteering with the Fan Culture Preservation Project. They already have a project going, but they can always use more people to help.
Open Doors does not assist fan authors with moving their print fanfiction online. They do assist with preserving print fanzines at universities and they will move at risk already online archives to AO3. But that’s all they are currently set up to do,
So if you want to preserve fanfic AND make it accessible to fans (not just stored inside paper fanzines in a warehouse museum Indiana Jones style), then this informal project is the way to go. This is not an OTW project…think of it more as peer-to-peer fan help, like we’ve done for generations.
For the fandom history side, apparently there’s an LJ community titled “Sam is my Demon Jesus”
that was founded in October 9th 2007 - 3x01 aired on October 4th and
that is the first place anyone used the term “boy king”.
There’s plenty of savior imagery around Sam in-show that predates that; and evil!Sam goes back to 2x14, with a healthy dose of “oh what if he went evil” in the fandom going back to s1. There could be dark!Sam+crown of thorns art that predates s3. But that specific combo, savior/messiah + Boyking, can be tied back to 3x01 and probably that LJ community. (Their profile pic is that weird smiling Jesus statue with Jared’s head on it >.>)
As for the first painting/piece of art… that’s a little more complicated.
I cannot date what we have archived, because a decent portion of it is from deactivated blogs. Unless there’s a way to access Tumblr’s metadata on the original posts, all I can do is guess as to how old things are. No way to find the first one there.
We also are limited to archiving what’s on tumblr, or things off of DA/LJ that we have permission to archive to tumblr. So I’ve got a very limited pool of data that I’m going to come across naturally for that era.
Most of the fandom artists seem to have migrated over to tumblr at some point during 2011 or so (one of the major LJ ToS issues was in 2010, so…), but not every fandom artist brought all of their art to tumblr. Some fandom artists are just on DA, some brought select pieces over to create a portfolio or posted what people requested, and some just started posting new art.
I’m also pretty sure that LJ didn’t have a tag system back in 2007. So
trying to find art from that era is going to be… just as difficult if
not more difficult than finding meta from that era :/
There’s a lot of fandom history and old art I’ve got no access to, and no way to preserve; DA and LJ make it pretty easy to just erase things from existence when you delete your account, unlike tumblr’s pseudo-archive format. If the first painting with a crown of thorns belonged to a deleted account? It’s gone.
Look, I knew Gene. We talked many times about the idea of Jim and Spock being lovers. He had no problem with it at all.
But you know what he did have a problem with?
Zippers.
He was adamant that by the 23rd century humans would have a better solution to fastening their clothes than zippers and buttons. And I mean, he felt passionately about this.
Passionately.
It’s because of this that those first gold shirts the crew wore in Where No Man Has Gone Before got scrapped in favor of shirts that didn’t show the fasteners. And also why the cast were sewn into their environment suits while filming Tholian Web and could only use the bathroom at lunch before being sewn back into costume til quitting time.
And it was the reason for Gene speaking quite sharply to me once—the only time he ever did — and I hung my head and felt like a kid in trouble with her dad. He read a slash story of mine and got on my case for writing zippers & buttons into the undressing scene. Really kind of chewed me out.
Didn’t bat an eye at a fairly graphic description of Jim and Spock having sex — but boy was he upset about those buttons!
Sue Little has graciously referred her “B7 Zine Shelf” – an archive where she has uploaded a number of scanned zines: Full Circle, Orbit#1-3, Shadow One, as well as several collections of her own stories – to the Facebook B7 fanfic group. They can be downloaded from there in pdf format.
Looking For Volunteer Transcriptionists & Phone Interviewers
The Media Fandom Oral History Project is in its 6th year. This summer we were graced with a wonderful intern, Megan Genovese who was able to dedicate full time to the project. We are now looking for fans willing to transcribe the summer 2017 interviews which are 1 - 2 hrs long. You can work at your own pace.
We are also looking for 2-3 more interviewers to help interview those fans who were not able to schedule a slot with Megan over the summer. The interviews would be conducted over the phone using a dial in conference call system.
The commitment is modest - we’re looking for someone to do 2 interviews a month over the phone. You would be responsible for contacting the fans, collecting the permission forms and scheduling a time to be interviewed. The interviews are 1-2 hrs long.
If interested, please email me at morgandawn @ gmail.com
Sue Little has graciously referred her “B7 Zine Shelf” – an archive where she has uploaded a number of scanned zines: Full Circle, Orbit#1-3, Shadow One, as well as several collections of her own stories – to the Facebook B7 fanfic group. They can be downloaded from there in pdf format.
