February 2018

Hastily Written History Time: Fandom Edition

itsclydebitches:

( @cdpony I’m tagging you because you were kind enough to tag me first to continue this conversation and because I used the first paragraph of your post as a structure for my responses. If you’re interested I’ve already made a post regarding the usefulness/downsides of including ages on blogs, adult responsibility, and teen knowledge.) 

And for anyone else interested in learning a bit about fandom history: 

Hello! Let’s start by tackling this first misconception, that “The history of adults in fandom spaces is not a good one.” Which, to be fair, isn’t technically a misconception so much as a pessimistic acknowledgement of a necessity, because fandom does not exist without adults. Full stop. To provide just a few and broad examples…

It was an adult by the name of Virgil who gave us the Aeneid, what we now view as one of the first transformative works (of The Iliad), and that’s if we’re not counting both The Iliad and The Odyssey as co-authored, fixed texts of whole generations of mythology. Sort of like the ancient greek equivalent of you watching all your friends on discord spew out ideas and headcanons before you consolidate it all into one fic. Only, you know, it took longer. 

It was another adult, Johann Wolfgang, who wrote The Sorrows of Young Werther, a book so influential that it inspired not only a number of derivative works, but numerous suicides as well. This was one of the most well known precursors to modern day “celebrity culture,” wherein readers began emulating fictional characters to an alarming degree. 

Sherlock Holmes needs no introduction. The Strand Magazine aimed for a family readership, but it was adults who somewhat apocryphally wore black armbands to mourn Holmes’ passing and who wrote - and still do - more pastiches than my poor bank account can keep up with. 

(1974 meeting of the Baker Street Irregulars) 

It was the science fiction magazine Amazing Stories that helped start bringing fans together in an organized manner, including a letter page where long-time readers could contact one another. 

It was adults (primarily women) who organized letter campaigns to keep Star Trek on air, mailing groups to keep far-flung fans informed, fanzines to share their work, and conventions to spread their love of the show. 

Keep reading

delcat177:

@nyxavalon mentioned you in a post: It might have been when they added the crossover stuff?

Nah, crossovers were my original stomping grounds.  I still have a 20-something chapter crossover of All the Things from my MiSTing days (2000-ish?) saved to disk, it’s a treasure.  I should have checked the OP, it’s marked “purity wank” and yeaaaaah I get the picture |D

ff.net was the fucking Wild West before 2002, that was when they put up a bunch of restrictions and purged thousands of fics without warning and overnight.  They banned MiSTings, songfics, scriptfics, and NC-17 fics, and flat-out zapped them instead of warning people to take them down.  This was before everything was crossposted a zillion places and people were pissed–a lot of us lost work we didn’t have saved anywhere else.  An entire wave of authors bounced that year.

That having been said, I think the last time I visited was…2007, maybe?  And that was cruising for stuff to snark.  I can imagine it creeping back up to pre-purge levels by 2009 easy.

Strange fucking days.

GUYS. GUYS.

bitchwhoyoukiddin:

HOLY BALLS, Fanfiction.net is TWENTY YEARS OLD. It opened in 1998! (I think in autumn, but wtf do I know, I was 17 and had a better memory.)

I just emailed a thank you note to Support because holy shit it’s been 20 years and those guys have been doing the work for twenty damn years. I mean, y’all are welcome to your own opinions about the platform, but GUYS. This was the first major (i use that word with precision) multi-fandom archive and it still exists right now.

Cuz. Y’know. We should kind of honor the work of people who built and shaped the culture we take part in? That’s just kind of polite?

LLF is on Fanlore!

longlivefeedback:

The mods have finally discovered that @longlivefeedback​ has a dedicated Fanlore page. 

We’ve talked about it and decided that we should not edit this page at all, even to keep it updated, because we are definitely biased and, as our goals include various ways to increase feedback, we have an Agenda. However, we really would like it to stay up to date and serve as a resource/explanation of what LLF is, and so we’d like to ask all of you to edit the page as necessary. 

Currently, there’s no mention of several of our major projects and posts, including:

• The LLF Comment Builder
  
• Our FFN vs AO3 feedback study
  
• “Can I Say This?” Culture, Comments, and Concern
  
• Why People Don’t Comment: Data and History From the Tolkienfic Community
  

Thank you!

- Mod Rose

Yeah!  Fanlore welcomes edits and adopts Plural Point Of View

PSA: ‘antis’ named themselves. please stop accusing everyone else of naming them.

freedom-of-fanfic:

into-september:

freedom-of-fanfic:

into-september:

freedom-of-fanfic:

for those of you who aren’t in fandom, here’s some context on why people talk about ‘antis’ so much.

when the move to tumblr obliterated fandom communities, tags became our new community space, and it was considered hella rude to ‘tag your hate’. so if someone wanted to complain about a ship, they would tag their venting or critical posts ‘anti-[ship]’ so it would still have a tag but wouldn’t pop up in the ship tag.

shockingly (/sarcasm), fandom members began to form social groups around being ‘anti-[x]’ because the anti-[x] tags would act as a community space just as the [x] tag would. members of these spaces began to identify themselves as being ‘anti-[x]’, exactly the same way others would describe themselves as being an ‘[x] shipper’/’[x] fan’.

and hey, it’s not exactly a wonder that when people are bonding over disliking something they begin to think worse and worse of the thing(s) they dislike. and in a fandom space that’s heavily mixed with social activism - where media representation of marginalized relationships is near-worshiped, and ships are praised or criticized on that basis - is it a surprise people who were anti-[x] turned to policing fandom via enforced ‘education’ on why their ship is Bad? (or that what anti-[x] self-identifiers considered themselves to be ‘anti’ to expanded to fiction containing kink/rl kinky relationships, darkfic, or fictional relationships that would be unquestionably abusive irl?)

so:

Antis named themselves. They call themselves ‘antis’ in reference to their identification as someone who is opposed to a ship, a kink, nsfw content/porn, etc. 

• this self-made label naturally grew out of how fandom communities gather on tumblr

• People who are anti-[x] will refer to themselves as ‘an anti’

• when people like me are addressing people who are anti-[ship], anti-[fiction genre], anti-[kink], anti-[content], etc as a whole, it’s more efficient to refer to ‘antis’ as a general term - though this also follows how antis refer to themselves as individuals
  

if you don’t know this then I assume that you’re not really in fandom spaces (or kink spaces, probably) and you probably also have no idea that anti spaces use and abuse the definitions of words like ‘pedophilia’, ‘incest’, and ‘abuse’, applying them liberally to content they dislike even if the content has nothing to do with these buzzwords

so I hope this gives you some context on ‘antis’.

this has been a PSA.

Note: Although the noun “anti” grew from varieties of the adjective “anti [x]”, it refers to this lot, which is… not the same as just being a hater in general.

Do not confuse people being “anti [x”] with being “an anti”. Yes, they named themselves, and no: the adjective and the noun are to not the same. 

to go into more detail regarding @into-september‘s addition (thank you; if I understand it correctly, the following will be more specifics): 

people who consider themselves ‘anti-[ship]’ aren’t always part of the doxxing, harassing, suicide-baiting communities. they may just not like a ship for a variety of personal reasons and respect that others disagree and enjoy shipping it. I’d call these antis ‘people with NOTPs’, but unfortunately this term fell out of use and now it’s hard to tell who doesn’t like a ship but also doesn’t like harassment and who thinks shippers are terrible people who deserve harm for their shipping choices. 

fanlore also linked to the post about early tumblr anti-shipping history that I wanted to reference but couldn’t find while making this post, but it’s really good and you should read it.

To be clear, what I meant is that I’ve seen people describe themselves as “an anti” in the meaning “I am against pedophilic/incestuous ships and I will actively argue against their right to exist on the internet”. 

In the most extreme cases, “pedophilic” is defined as “shipping any character younger than the age of consent in a number of US states if you the shipper are older than them, particularly if you’re shipping them with someone who is also older than the age of consent”. “Incestuous” can be actual familiar relationships, but is also applied to “well they once said they’re like family in canon”. 

“Antis”, as such, are out on a moral crusade that within some people’s logic justifies the dogpiling/doxxing/IRL reporting of people because but think of the children. In comparison, people hanging out in the “anti-naruto” tags will not think they’re saving CSA victims by bitching about how stupid Sasuke is.

Apologies for misunderstanding! reblogging to share your clarification. 

Fandom: Just A Bunch Of Non-Notable People Getting Together And Doing Nothing Notable. Not!

meeedeee:

On occasion, the main Wikipedia takes the position that fandom activities are not “notable”. Case in point:

Sectus = 450 fans attend a Harry Potter convention, a 4 day series of fannish and scholarly events.  Wikipedia deletes the convention page: The convention is not notable and not worth documenting because it  “…is just a school get together with Harry Potter fans.”

In contrast, see Fanlore’s Sectus convention page. Fanlore is a fan run, non-profit wiki that focuses on media fandom history. You do not have to be a BNF or “notable” to be included. And anyone can participate in editing.

But it is not just media fandom that gets the side eye. The Bay Area Science Fiction Association (a fan club for sci-fi fans) was almost deleted because the fan club had not been mentioned by any “third party sources.” (“Articles by notable people that cover BASFA in some detail, a solid history in a notable fanzine, notable events that BASFA has had a recognised role in or organised”). 

The page was finally allowed to remain, but it was touch and go for a while: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Bay_Area_Science_Fiction_Association

finally found this post from 2014

heroofthreefaces:

I seached my name at Fanlore this week. With the exception of a Star Trek Voyager filk to the tune of the theme from Gilligan’s Island having won an annual alt.startrek.creative award during the heyday of Usenet, I seem to have disappeared with the print fanzine era. That’s what comes of hosting your work yourself to the exclusion of FF.net and AO3, I guess. Of course if it really mattered to me I would have looked before now.

heroofthreefaces  also wrote:

“Perhaps that’s how smaller wikis work - and yours isn’t the first comment I’ve got suggesting it - but 1) it’s against the TOS at WIkipedia and that forms an impression 2) perhaps I’m spoiled but I didn’t have to do it for myself at TVTropes (Or, for that matter, at Wikipedia. There was an entry there for Arthur, King of Time and Space before notability became a thing.). “

It is not against  Fanlore’s TOS to write about yourself or what you know about fandom. We use Plural Point of View instead of demanding notability.  We realize that fandom is participatory, and that a fandom “wiki” (lower case) is not an academic or journalistic publication.  Because fandom rarely meets the mundane world’s notability requirement …there is a reason most fandom activities won’t be recorded on Wikipedia. They delete fan run conventions labeling them as “just a bunch of school kids getting together”

But back to Fanlore….. if the article is too one sided or unbalanced, someone can always label it  “Needs More PPOV” and  another someone will see if they can add more info (aka..it’s a wiki and it takes many hands to create.)

I find it sad when the voices that measure fandom and finding it wanting and lacking “notability” come from within the community.   Fandom may be participatory…but we do not have to participate in our own marginalization. 

heroofthreefaces:

auronlu replied to your post “I seached my name at Fanlore this week. With the exception of a Star…”

Complaining about fanlore not having things is like complaining that no one’s written a wiki entry or posted a photoset of your favorite thing. I have a huge chunk of 1980 and 1990s fandom I really should add but I haven’t because I’m a lazy ass. It sounds like you are more motivated so GO DO IT and stop waiting for another fan just like you to do it for you!

While this is good advice in the general case, nevertheless there is a distinct conflict of interest (of a sort that is actively against the TOS at Wikipedia) in me making a Fanlore page about The Hero of Three Faces.

Actually, no it doesn’t present a conflict of interest. Fanlore does not use Wikipedia’s TOS or follow Wikipedia’s gatekeeping policies. It uses “plural points of view” which means you don’t have to have a purely objective perspective in order to contribute. If your page is biased in one direction, someone will market it “needs more plural points of view ” and then someone else will help fix it. Fanlore recognizes that fandom has always been a participatory experience not an academic or journalistic one. So go forth and make pages about the things that you love. This is your history and no one else will write it but you.

lcn71:

meeedeee:

heroofthreefaces:

I seached my name at Fanlore this week. With the exception of a Star Trek Voyager filk to the tune of the theme from Gilligan’s Island having won an annual alt.startrek.creative award during the heyday of Usenet, I seem to have disappeared with the print fanzine era. That’s what comes of hosting your work yourself to the exclusion of FF.net and AO3, I guess. Of course if it really mattered to me I would have looked before now.

If you appeared in  media fandom print fanzines, there may be info about you….that’s where Fanlore is strongest. They don’t have a list of every media fandom fanzine published, so perhaps you can add the info?

My particular slice of the Highlander fandom isn’t there at all. It’s like the first 3 years of the fandom just didn’t exist.

History is written by the victors.

History is written by the people who show up and write it.  The only reason Fanlore has info on 8000 fanzines is because a few crazed fans spent 5 years every day adding the info. And scoured eBay sales for info about zines. And badgered friends to send them info about zines. And pretty much are obsessed with everything fanzines. 

In fact every damn thing on Fanlore was added by a fan who rolled out of bed one morning, looked at Fanlore and sputtered: “Hey, that’s not right”  and  then sat down and started writing about their crazy love.

So head over to Fanlore and claim your victory spoils and start adding those missing 3 years.  http://www.fanlore.org

Unpopular Opinion Time

olderthannetfic:

lierdumoa:

I’m really tired of seeing that post going around claiming that JKR transformed the fanfiction landscape for fans. I’m particularly rolling my eyes at people using Anne Rice as an example of “how it used to be” before JKR “liberated fandom.”

The internet liberated fandom.

The internet also turned Anne Rice into a laughingstock. 

Anne Rice got in arguments with amazon reviewers who left critical reviews on her books – she wrote lengthy hubristic screeds. She sued fanfiction writers. Her anti-fan attitude reached new heights after her divorce. She fired her editor. 

Anne Rice treated her fans poorly, and she looked “hysterical” and “unhinged” doing it. The public chalked her behavior up to her having a midlife crisis, or a nervous breakdown. 

We give JKR too much credit for making supporting fanfiction a cool thing to do. And we don’t give Anne Rice enough credit for making terrorizing fanwriters an uncool thing to do. 

.

I hear older fans say that fandom “forgot what it was like” in the days of Anne Rice.

But Anne Rice wasn’t just ‘forgotten’ was she? No. She was deliberately and systematically discredited and erased.

By fandom.

.

Stop talking like JKR did fandom some big favor by supporting fanfiction. Supporting fanfiction was lucrative for her. Supporting fandom always did more to benefit JKR than it did to benefit fandom.

Stephanie Meyer similarly treated her fanwriters well because it was the financially intelligent move.

Because the whole internet saw what happened to Anne Rice. Because Anne Rice showed authors that there are consequences to disrespecting your fanbase.

.

Do you know why authors today are so nice to fanfiction writers? Because the ones who aren’t get punished, just like Anne Rice was punished.

Because being mean to fanwriters, in this day an age, is CAREER SUICIDE.

JKR didn’t change the rules. Fandom did. The internet did. The internet gave fandom a voice. The internet made that voice loud. So loud that it drowned out the voices of individual authors. So loud that authors became beholden to their fans in a way they had never been before.

So I’m getting real sick of seeing that post going around claiming “if it weren’t for JKR we wouldn’t have AO3″

JKR didn’t create modern fandom.

Modern fandom created authors like JKR.

I think good ol’ Anne was laughed at well before it had anything to do with fanfic though. There was that incident involving the abandoned building getting bought and made into a tacky restaurant… so she took out ads in the local paper in the persona of Lestat because… IDK… Because Anne Rice.

The big change I remember with HP was that it was a book megafandom even before there were movies. I recall that JKR was kind of against porny fanfic at one point, but the fanbase was much too large and too full of horny teenagers to give a shit. (Did the writer of that other post forget this? I distinctly remember people thumbing their nose at “No dirty fic” or “No dirty fic in public” or whatever her reaction was way back when.)

When I talk to oldschool fans who were writing fic in the 1980s and before, they often see a huge gap between a book fandom and a tv/movie fandom. Younger fans rarely see a sharp division. I think HP contributed a lot to that shift.

But yeah: the internet is what created modern fanfic fandom. It is no longer possible to force a zine publisher to hand over every copy of their zine for destruction.

HP got big right around the time that big, public fanfic archives were a thing, and it had some great organizers who were already experienced in other fandoms and new how to build great websites. That contributed to its fanfic fandom’s culture as much as anything JKR did. One effect was that a number of those sites were full of slash and porn and whatever else fans wanted to post. Some of the earlier megafandoms would have a more public het or gen presence but lock down the slash and maybe the more explicit het stuff too.

FictionAlley’s existence probably contributed a bit to the founding of OTW, but JKR being mildly pro-fic? Pfft!

olderthannetfic:

collegecutiepie:

atomicheavybike:

zetsubonna:

prismatic-bell:

zetsubonna:

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.

Do want to add, however, that JKR wasn’t always in favor of fanfiction and saw it as “not as valid” as actual writing. This changed after the series ended, and she eventually came around to fan always adapting the content, especially bc she was no longer actively writing about that universe. So she wasnt always accepting, but she was never Anne rice levels or terrible about it. so oddly enough, sephanie meyer, for all the issues I and many have with her, largely was one of the first authors to actively engage and encourage readers to engage in fan works

JKR was also concerned about porny fanfic being found by kids. Not that I want kids reading that, obviously, but it’s not true that she was like “Yay! All fanfic is great!” She originally had a very tepid, ass-covering, good PR kind of response.

But there were earlier authors who encouraged fanworks… Like MZB before the notorious disagreement with that one fan. The debunking of that “lawsuit” urban legend combined with the sheer volume of fic online is what has forced rights holders to be more pro-fanfic.

JKR may have influenced a few other writers, but she’s not really the source of the change. I’ve heard funny stories about fans calling up Roddenberry’s office to ask research questions for their fanfic (yes, even weird porn questions). In the late 90s/early 00s, JKR’s attitude was nothing special. When Warner Brothers went after fan websites, the bad PR from fans is what made them back off, not JKR’s feelings. JKR was rolling with the times; don’t give her more credit than she’s due.

We stopped using legal disclaimers because fandom got more militant about a basic right to remix. We also realized that the disclaimers offer zero legal protection while harming our fair use case (since most of them were like “I acknowledge that I have no right, but I’m poor, so don’t sue!”).

Newly Digitized!

zinedom:

Hot off the scanners and fresh from Zinedom’s feverish proofreaders:

CALENDAR BOYS by ANNE ELLIOT

Rated: ADULT (NC-17)
Categories: Fiction Characters: McCoy
Genres: Kirk/Spock Slash
Story Type: First Time, Humor
Universe: ST:TOS Original Universe
Warnings: None
Word count: 14280 Read: 6
Published: 02/08/2018 

Kirk isn’t sure he wants to be a nude pin-up in the calendar one of the ship’s cadets wishes to create, even though the proceeds will go to charity.

Originally published in 2004 in the print fanzine Astray In The Wilderness. Published online February 8, 2018 (today!)

“This is an absolutely delightful story, the obvious inspiration being the movie ‘Calendar Girls,’ A brave ensign on the Enterprise decides that the perfect way to raise money for a relief effort would be to have the officers of the Enterprise pose for a calendar that would be sold to raise money. The officers are agreeable until the ensign wants them to pose naked! Or as the ensign puts it ‘well, that is, naked apart from a carefully positioned piece of equipment - or several in the case of the ladies.’” (x)

Want to help authors bring fanzine stories online for the next generation of fans? Come help us at Zinedom!

heroofthreefaces:

I seached my name at Fanlore this week. With the exception of a Star Trek Voyager filk to the tune of the theme from Gilligan’s Island having won an annual alt.startrek.creative award during the heyday of Usenet, I seem to have disappeared with the print fanzine era. That’s what comes of hosting your work yourself to the exclusion of FF.net and AO3, I guess. Of course if it really mattered to me I would have looked before now.

If you appeared in  media fandom print fanzines, there may be info about you….that’s where Fanlore is strongest. They don’t have a list of every media fandom fanzine published, so perhaps you can add the info?