Trope Tuesday: Accidental Baby Acquisition is a trope in both canon and fandom works where two or more characters find themselves suddenly responsible for taking care of a baby. Click on the image to learn more about this trope, or share some favorite examples!
“What you’ll notice from the chart is that between 2007 and 2009, things were happening with LiveJournal that made people not like it anymore. From the chart, you’ll see that it didn’t start to precipitously dip until a couple of years after that. You can see that Tumblr and Archive of Our Own, or AO3, are both climbing around the same time. I think that those had to get popular enough, enough people moving there so that those were a place for people to move to, because when there’s nowhere for you to go, they don’t go. You can think of AO3 and Tumblr as sort of the archive side and the social side of LiveJournal, so there wasn’t a single place that people could move to, so instead you see people going to both of those places.”
Long, long before tumblr, before the Internet was the beast it is now, I was a teenaged girl in the mid-90s who loved Star Trek. I’ve enjoyed the movies, but I have to admit I haven’t seen much of the last few series. I left home when DS9 was maybe in it’s 2nd or 3rd season and Voyager hadn’t been out long, so I never saw them wrap up. Saturday nights when I was a teen thought was classic trek at 5, TNG at 6 and DS9 at 7. Luckily my parents indulged my monopolizing the only TV for 3 hours.
There was a used bookstore in town. Then called Railroad Books (I think) since sold but now a bookstore and cafe again.
I loved the place. Cavernous, floor to ceiling shelves overflowing with books, many of them older. Plus cheap prices and you could get store credit by trading in books. When a well-meaning relative gifted me a giant pile of Louis L’Amour books, my sci-fi loving self traded them in here to get books I wanted.
One summer I made a little money by picking up the owner’s for her lunch every day. I have to admit I used the money to buy star trek trading cards because I’ve never been the best example of good decisions. But I ended up with a complete set by the end of the summer.
And I found, among other things, these. I didn’t realize at the time, but it was my first brush with a greater fandom world than could be found in my small town. I learned that one could be critical of media and still love it, or use it as a lens to examine other issues. That zine is a collection from Spockanalia, though I didn’t know the significance at the time. The other two books are officially licensed.
By the time I got to tumblr, many moons later, Star Trek had long since faded into the background fabric of my life, part of the foundations, most certainly.
But perhaps that’s part of why I slid so easily into the Sherlock fandom; in some ways it felt like coming home.
Ship Sunday: Fandom first started shipping Pepper Potts and Natasha Romanov after the release of Iron Man 2. It’s one of the most popular femslash pairings in the MCU fandom. Click on the photo to share your favorite Black Pepper fanworks and join the discussion on Fanlore.
Whether to comfort one another after a bad dream, driven by necessity–like a botched hotel reservation–or the fun result of a puppy pile, the Bed Sharing trope can be a fun one! Learn more about this week’s Trope Tuesday selection, share your favorite works, and discuss the many ways characters can find themselves sharing a bed by clicking the image.
3. No market for the zines? If you want them to remain in fandom circulation, donate them to *Escapade zine library https://escapadecon.net/
*K/S Press Library (Star Trek slash) https://fanlore.org/wiki/The_K/S_Press Contact: catalenamara at yahoo dot com (Note: they also have a European branch, which accepts donations)
If there are no fandom specific libraries and/or you are looking for a charitable donation/tax write-off, donate them to one of the 3 universities who will accept them. Most will pay for the cost of shipping. Here is a flyer that explains. http://www.mediafire.com/folder/j66kxj8w7t87z/Fanzine_Flyer
4. Oops, You’re Dead (this really falls under “Don’t Wait Until You’re Dead) If you have a will or a trust, spell out what you want to do with the zines. Include multiple options (”my zines go to my friend Mary Sue. If she is no longer living or reachable, please donate them to University of X“)
If you don’t have a will or trust ….at least tell your family and friends.
5. The Fail-safe Solution. No matter what you choose above, tuck a note inside your zines discussing what you want to happen to them after you pass. You can print out the fanzine flyer (see above) and stash multiple copies in among your zines. Scribble on the flyer - Please donate my zines. Thx, bye!
6. Don’t Forget The Rest…. The fandom history archives at Universities want more than just zines. Your letters, correspondence. Fanzine flyers and convention program guides. Fan Art. Fan Vids (yes, even VCR tapes) . Filk! If you are downsizing now, contact morgandawn at gmail dot com. and she can help guide you on what to do with the non-fanzine materials.
7. Publishers Final Note: if you are a zine publisher and want your works to be digitally preserved, contact morgandawn at gmail dot com. She can put you in touch with Texas A&M University who is scanning and archiving fanzines for their closed special collection. https://fanlore.org/wiki/Sandy_Hereld_Memorial_Digitized_Media_Fanzine_Collection
This has been updated as of March 29, 2018 with more detailed info about the reseller options
Did you know that within a few weeks of The Force Awakens opening, more than 350 fics showed up on AO3 for this ship?
Click on the image above to read about this and more, and come share your fanwork recs and everything you know about The Sisterhood of the Traveling Jacket on Fanlore!
* who has shipped Spirk since that night in 1967 that Amok Time first aired * and helped storm NBC to keep TOS on the air for a 3rd season * and wrote fanfic way back in the day * and was privileged to be around for the earliest days of fandom, when Leonard used to come to your house if that’s where the fan club was meeting and sit on the sofa with you in that Spock hair cut and eat cake
All of you who are writing TOS/AOS fan fiction and creating fan art now: remember, YOU are the ones shaping the traditions of fandom. You have inherited the kingdom. Bless you for keeping it vibrant, growing, alive. In fifty years, you will be the ones who are remembered for molding it and handing it down to the future. It probably doesn’t feel like now, but you are making history.
Your current addiction to TOS and the feels you get when you contemplate the love between Jim and Spock will be with you for life. It won’t always be in the forefront; you will sometimes go years, sometimes go a decade, without Star Trek being more than a passing thought. But then something will remind you and every consuming feeling you feel right now will come rushing back, every bit as powerful and deep and strong as it is today. All there, right where you left it.
The friendships you make in fandom will be with you for life. Like all friendships, they will wax and wane as the focus of your life shifts over time, but you will always be able to pick up the thread. You will — to give you a hypothetical example — be 77 years old and discover Tumblr and get a rush of Spirk feels after a decade of not giving TOS a thought, and contact your 83-year-old fangirl friend in the nursing home, to whom you haven’t spoken in several years. You will open the conversation with, “So, Jim and Spock love each other and that just makes me so happy.” And your friend in the nursing home will sigh and say, “Yes. They do love each other. It’s such a comfort.”
That look that Jim and Spock give each other, of absolute adoration and acceptance and love? That’s real. It’s rare, but it’s real. One of my greatest joys in life is to see my son and his husband give each other looks like that. Of course I don’t know you; I don’t know your strengths and struggles or your place on the spectrum of gender or anything about your sexuality or what you look like or what your life has taught you to believe about yourself, but I do know this: YOU DESERVE TO BE LOVED AND LOOKED AT THE WAY JIM AND SPOCK LOOK AT EACH OTHER. Please don’t accept less than that in your life.
The future of our planet does not seem very hopeful at the moment. But please remember that when Gene created Star Trek, the world was in turmoil and the future seemed very bleak. Star Trek is, was, always shall be about hope. Reach for it. When TOS first aired, we hoped to see some form of a Starfleet on the horizon in our lifetimes. That vision must be passed on to you. Do it. Make the world worthy of launching the human race out into space. CREATE STARFLEET.
You are all creative and funny and amazing. Far more amazing than you know. Be kind to yourselves. Live long and prosper, kids.
Tags are in reference to my first bullet point. Meant as a kudos to your work, but feel free to untag yourself if you don’t want to be linked to my ramblings; I won’t be offended! (Also, this extends to a thousand other artists and writers out there who deserve kudos. tag at will.)
The author of this October 2017 post passed away recently and if there is one blog entry that encapsulates her, it is this one.
A collating party was an event where friends were invited over to physically help put together the finished pages of a fanzine. It was a volunteer effort and a major social event.
“Print shops used to charge a LOT extra for collating. I was fortunate that aside from the very first issues of my first zine in 1975, which were only 20-30 pages along, I didn’t have to do that as I found a print shop in the San Francisco Bay Area that specialized in small press books, and because they had specialized equipment collating was free.
In a collating party, stacks of individual pages were placed in sequence around the perimeter of a table. Zineds (zine editors) would invite local fans over, and people would walk around the table picking up pages in sequences - over and over and over again, until the process was complete and the zines could be bound.“ - catalenamara, message from a private mailing list (January 2018), quoted here with permission
3. No market for the zines? If you want them to remain in fandom circulation, donate them to *Escapade zine library https://escapadecon.net/
*K/S Press Library (Star Trek slash) https://fanlore.org/wiki/The_K/S_Press Contact:
kathleener at aol dot com
(Note: they also have a European branch, which accepts donations)
If there are no fandom specific libraries and/or you are looking for a charitable donation/tax write-off, donate them to one of the 3 universities who will accept them. Most will pay for the cost of shipping. Here is a flyer that explains. http://www.mediafire.com/folder/j66kxj8w7t87z/Fanzine_Flyer
4. Oops, You’re Dead (this really falls under “Don’t Wait Until You’re Dead) If you have a will or a trust, spell out what you want to do with the zines. Include multiple options (”my zines go to my friend Mary Sue. If she is no longer living or reachable, please donate them to University of X“)
If you don’t have a will or trust ….at least tell your family and friends.
5. The Fail-safe Solution. No matter what you choose above, tuck a note inside your zines discussing what you want to happen to them after you pass. You can print out the fanzine flyer (see above) and stash multiple copies in among your zines. Scribble on the flyer - Please donate my zines. Thx, bye!
6. Don’t Forget The Rest…. The fandom history archives at Universities want more than just zines. Your letters, correspondence. Fanzine flyers and convention program guides. Fan Art. Fan Vids (yes, even VCR tapes) . Filk! If you are downsizing now, contact morgandawn at gmail dot com. and she can help guide you on what to do with the non-fanzine materials.
7. Publishers Final Note: if you are a zine publisher and want your works to be digitally preserved, contact morgandawn at gmail dot com. She can put you in touch with Texas A&M University who is scanning and archiving fanzines for their closed special collection. https://fanlore.org/wiki/Sandy_Hereld_Memorial_Digitized_Media_Fanzine_Collection
Did you know that Tenou Haruka and Kaiou Michiru’s relationship has drawn considerable controversy due to the censoring of their canon relationship in some media interpretations?
Click the image above to read about this and more, and also share your fanwork recs and everything you know about Tenou Haruka/Kaiou Michiru on Fanlore.
As
promised, we would like to let you in on the finances regarding “RADIANCE”
since there seem to have been a few concerns about how exactly our Kickstarter
money was spent.
So… First
off, our campaign reached a total of 54.143,00
€ on Kickstarter.
Let’s break it down…
There were
some other expenses with regard to this project, we did not bring to account
but covered from our private funds (e.g. travel expenses (for meetings with
project partners), software, telephone bills,…). We gladly took these on, but did
not wanted to let them go unmentioned if only as a little heads up for other
future fandom project organizers; it’s not only time and nerves you’re going to
have to be willing to spend… ;)
Why do you have money left?
When we
budgeted “Radiance” we added a financial buffer to be on the safe side should
any “emergencies” occur. As you all know, we had to use up some of that buffer
money to pay for the re-shipping of lost and/or damaged “Radiance” parcels as
well as to cover the costs for returned parcels.
Due to
popular demand we put up the remaining few hard copies and digital copies of
“Radiance” on our Etsy
store. The proceeds of these sales also make up a part of the money that we
have left.
What are you going to do with the spare money?
As promised,
we split the remaining 3.990,36 € into 3 equal parts and donated 1.331 €
each to Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch** and @fannibalfest-toronto.
(Sorry the texts are in German…)
Amnesty International:
Human Rights Watch:
Fannibal Fest:
…
AND THAT’S
IT – our project “Radiance – A Fannibal Anthology” is officially finished!!***
Many many
THANKS YOUs and HUGS again to everyone who has joined and supported us on this
exciting endeavor!! We owe the success of this project to you!!
As you
might know, with RAVAGE
ANTHOLOGY we have already embarked on another journey, and we are very touched
and grateful for all the familiar and new names and faces that signed up to
join us for the second round :)
Sincerely
Romina
& Jamie
(* Kickstarter
doesn’t offer the option to pay via Paypal directly, but when a payment can’t
get collected via credit card after the campaign is over and the backer whose
payment could not be processed does not want to drop their pledge, Kickstarter
allows to arrange an “outside payment” via Paypal.)
(** We
initially said we wanted to donate to Rainbow Railroad but this organization
only accepts American or Canadian credit cards so we decided to give one third
of the money to another organization that has put LGBT rights on their agenda,
and chose Human Rights Watch.)
(*** There
are 3 backers who have yet to tell us their shipping addresses! If you are out
there and wonder why you still haven’t gotten your book, please reach out to us
via mail to lovecrimebooks@gmail.com!
We’re going to hold on to the books for a few more months.)
Does anyone have a mailing address for the Kirk Spock Archive? Need to send fanzines. -Z
They have a Contact Us button on their website, maybe you could send them an email with your request. Good Luck.
Perfect. Thanks! -Z
Also, there is a digitized zine archive, mostly 60s and 70s I believe, at Texas A&M called the Sandy Hereld Collection. Not sure if it is K/S archive, but you could Google them and email or call them to find out for sure.
I volunteer on the Sandy Hereld Digital Fanzine Collection and can be reached at morgandawn@gmail.com It is not part of the Kirk/Spock Archive (which is fan run) but accepts donations of scanned zines. The university, Texas A&M will also accept donations of paper zines. And of course the K/S Lending Library (fan run) can be reached via Kathy R and would love to get copies. I pmed you her email address and you can also write to me direct.
so I recently applied to volunteer with AO3 and part of one of the questions was related to fandom and my history with fandom. I normally say I’ve been in fandom for 12 years. 12 years ago, I was bugging @voldiebuns before a color guard practice because I was boreed, and she handed me Loveless and told me to read it and leave her alone. So whatever, I read it, and from there got dragged into fandom. I’m not really sure how Loveless lead to FFn and fandom in general, but it’s definitely a marked point in time as when I really realized that there was this obsessive group on the internet. It’s also when I learned about Slash and Yaoi (which is what the cool kids called it back then.)
I remember us getting our moms to drop us off at Borders (god I miss that store) and we would go through the manga section looking for manga. I remember binge watching 18 episodes of Kuroshitsuji while home alone and being afraid to turn around. I remember @voldiebuns, @magickallity, and I writing 20 minute fanfiction challenges.
But none of that is even the point of all of this, because I also remember 2 years before reading Loveless, finding a little site called Quizilla. Quizilla was designed to be a quiz hosting site, as it’s name would suggest, but it had a thriving fanfiction corner. And the fanfictions were glorious, by the way, almost all of them were either Harry Potter self insert fic - where you could date either Harry, Draco, Fred, or George, vampire stories or gratuitous porn. And you think the porn on AO3 is bad? The porn on Quizilla was glorious. it probably shaped a lot of who I am today… which might be a bad thing? Most of it was either straight or lesbian, and it was all trashy and poorly written. One in particular I remember was a girl who in the previous story had had sex with her best friend at a slumber party, seducing the guy working in her parents back yard and having sex with him in the pool. He lined her up with the water jet and… yea. I read that 14 years ago. It made that much of an impression on me.
Anyways, Quizilla had little user functionality built in, and it was certainly not designed to be a fanfiction archive. But there’s something about fandom that just builds itself in whatever corner of the web it can. And that’s something that I think a lot of the newbies in fandom don’t realize. We have something so great in AO3, it’s a space built for us, by us. Quizilla had a very shitty search function so really the only way to find even readable stories was to go through the top 10. Which was our version of reviews/rating. You wanted to be in the top whatever you could.
There was a forum I was on, I don’t know if it was the official one. I hope it was deleted with quizilla in 2014, because I was a little shit at 13, as most people are, and there are things I know I said that I want to remain hidden.
OH I forgot the best part of Quizilla!! Banners. Banners were such a weird thing. Basically for your story to be a legitimate story you had to have a banner. I think it’s why I cringe when I see stories with banners on AO3. I just associate it with Quizilla and that part of my life. They would be images done up to look like the book cover for the story and they were… I mean it was early 2004, what do you expect from a bunch of teens and tweens?
I just. When we talk about recent fandom history, we talk about FFn, and Adult Fanfiction, and LJ. But let’s bring Quizilla into the history of it all too.
so I recently applied to volunteer with AO3 and part of one of the questions was related to fandom and my history with fandom. I normally say I’ve been in fandom for 12 years. 12 years ago, I was bugging @voldiebuns before a color guard practice because I was boreed, and she handed me Loveless and told me to read it and leave her alone. So whatever, I read it, and from there got dragged into fandom. I’m not really sure how Loveless lead to FFn and fandom in general, but it’s definitely a marked point in time as when I really realized that there was this obsessive group on the internet. It’s also when I learned about Slash and Yaoi (which is what the cool kids called it back then.)
I remember us getting our moms to drop us off at Borders (god I miss that store) and we would go through the manga section looking for manga. I remember binge watching 18 episodes of Kuroshitsuji while home alone and being afraid to turn around. I remember @voldiebuns, @magickallity, and I writing 20 minute fanfiction challenges.
But none of that is even the point of all of this, because I also remember 2 years before reading Loveless, finding a little site called Quizilla. Quizilla was designed to be a quiz hosting site, as it’s name would suggest, but it had a thriving fanfiction corner. And the fanfictions were glorious, by the way, almost all of them were either Harry Potter self insert fic - where you could date either Harry, Draco, Fred, or George, vampire stories or gratuitous porn. And you think the porn on AO3 is bad? The porn on Quizilla was glorious. it probably shaped a lot of who I am today… which might be a bad thing? Most of it was either straight or lesbian, and it was all trashy and poorly written. One in particular I remember was a girl who in the previous story had had sex with her best friend at a slumber party, seducing the guy working in her parents back yard and having sex with him in the pool. He lined her up with the water jet and… yea. I read that 14 years ago. It made that much of an impression on me.
Anyways, Quizilla had little user functionality built in, and it was certainly not designed to be a fanfiction archive. But there’s something about fandom that just builds itself in whatever corner of the web it can. And that’s something that I think a lot of the newbies in fandom don’t realize. We have something so great in AO3, it’s a space built for us, by us. Quizilla had a very shitty search function so really the only way to find even readable stories was to go through the top 10. Which was our version of reviews/rating. You wanted to be in the top whatever you could.
There was a forum I was on, I don’t know if it was the official one. I hope it was deleted with quizilla in 2014, because I was a little shit at 13, as most people are, and there are things I know I said that I want to remain hidden.
OH I forgot the best part of Quizilla!! Banners. Banners were such a weird thing. Basically for your story to be a legitimate story you had to have a banner. I think it’s why I cringe when I see stories with banners on AO3. I just associate it with Quizilla and that part of my life. They would be images done up to look like the book cover for the story and they were… I mean it was early 2004, what do you expect from a bunch of teens and tweens?
I just. When we talk about recent fandom history, we talk about FFn, and Adult Fanfiction, and LJ. But let’s bring Quizilla into the history of it all too.
Dude, you are not alone! A lot of the people who built AO3 were already older and thus missed the… err… glory of Quizilla, but I always see a lot of people on Tumblr being like “Why does no one remember???” Half the responses to that ‘three ages of fanfic’ post are like that.
I didn’t realize there were so many lesbian stories on there. That’s interesting. Were they still reader inserts banging canon characters?
Particularly for those who were kind enough to participate in our survey last week, or to share it even after we halted data collection (because we received so many responses so quickly!), I wanted to give you something interesting right away. As you know, the academic writing and publishing process can be lengthy, so who knows when you might get a full paper from us! But in the meantime, this was the analysis I did this weekend.
The survey asked for participants to indicate what platforms they use/used from a given list, and also to indicate a date range (e.g., Tumblr 2006-2018). I parsed those date ranges in order to determine for a given platform how many of our participants were active in a given year. (This actually gave me an excuse to write some code for the first time in years. Jupyter Notebooks are super cool.)
(Click on the image above for full resolution!)
The Y axis is number of survey participants who indicated using the platform during a given time, and the X axis is year. (This starts at 1990, though I’ll note there were 10-ish participants who indicated using usenet, email lists, and/or messageboards in the 1980s.)
Some interesting things to note: (1) See how fanfiction.net has a spike where there was a big drop off but then it stabilized? That’s around the time that they cracked down on adult content. (2) I expected to see Livejournal decline drastically sooner, but it actually continued to climb a bit after Strikethrough and related things, until Tumblr and AO3 both started getting very popular. Based on what I’ve seen qualitatively so far, I do think that people were starting to leave, but that there had to be critical mass elsewhere in order for that leaving to start going en masse. There were also a lot of people who continued using Livejournal while they picked up other platforms as well. (3) As my PhD student collaborator Brianna said, we have “a beautiful arc of AO3 and Tumblr being besties forever.” (This makes sense to me based on some findings from my previous work about AO3, and how Tumblr filled in the gap of social interaction left by Livejournal.)
In the “other” category of fan platforms used, the most popular was Discord. This doesn’t surprise me! For the most part, participants had only been active in it for the past couple of years, which is why it didn’t show up specifically in the survey (which was constructed based on interview data we already had). We also saw less frequent mentions of Facebook, reddit, delicious/pinboard, and IRC.
Digging into the qualitative data will give this data much more explanatory power, but I think this is very interesting!
We also asked participants what their primary fandom was for each platform they used. Based on a pretty simple analysis (most popular words!), here are the top five fandoms from each platform:
Usenet: Star Trek, Buffy, X-Files, Star Wars, Sailor Moon
Email Lists: Harry Potter, Star Trek, Buffy, X-Files, Gundam Wing
Messageboards: Harry Potter, Buffy, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Sailor Moon
Fandom-Specific Archives: Harry Potter, Buffy, Stargate, X-Files, Doctor Who
Fanfiction.net: Harry Potter, Naruto, Buffy, Star Wars, Gundam Wing
Livejournal: Harry Potter, Supernatural, Stargate, Doctor Who, Merlin
DeviantArt: Harry Potter, Naruto, Kingdom Hearts, Supernatural, Final Fantasy
Dreamwidth: Harry Potter, Supernatural, Marvel, Stargate, RPF
Archive of Our Own: Marvel, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Supernatural, Teen Wolf
Tumblr: Marvel, Star Wars, Supernatural, Harry Potter, Teen Wolf
Twitter: Star Wars, Supernatural, Marvel, RPF, Yuri on Ice
Note that this is NOT necessarily representative of the overall popularity of certain fandoms on these platforms. Our survey, because it was targeting research questions about fandom migration, asked for participants who had been in fandom for 10+ years. This means that our results skewed older (mean 31; median 30; SD 8.6). And of course, most of the participants are currently in fandom, which means that it also misses people who have left fandom.
It is interesting to see the change across platforms and over time though! My favorite tidbit is how Star Wars was popular, dropped off, and then came back with gusto.
This is only the tip of the iceberg on this data analysis! If there’s anything else that is easily shared as we do this analysis, I’ll continue to do so. Otherwise, wish us luck and I’ll eventually share a completed analysis if/when (fingers crossed!) we publish on this.
I have a list of emails from everyone who participated and wanted to give us that info to share the results. If you’d like to be added to that list, send me an email at casey.fiesler@colorado.edu. Or just feel free to follow me here, or myself and Brianna on Twitter.
As somebody whose online fannish life started in 1992, I am wondering if the map would look different if the sample size of fans in their 40s were larger. Then again, it makes sense that Buffy and X-Files were the first Internet mega-fandoms of the 1990s for a lot of folks.
What fandoms would you expect to see with more 40-something fans?
Thinking back on Usenet, Ranma ½ was pretty massive. Other than that, nothing springs to mind that could rival the size of the fandoms above during the 90s. X-Files was one hell of a megafandom in its day. I can think of a lot of oldschool fandoms that are still hanging on, but they didn’t have their greatest productivity then.
“ When I get triggered, unless it is by a deliberate act, it is actually the fault of the people who hurt me in the first place! And I refuse to let them off the hook and blame perfectly innocent people who just wanna write their fanfiction! I may hate that fanfiction, but that is irrelevant to the question of whether or not people should be allowed to post whatever they want. “
holy shit /CLAP CLAP
y’all i know this is a long post you might be sick of by the time you scrolled down this far but its fucking important and, all of this, this history, i fucking lived through this. i was there for the LJ strike/boldthroughs and the discussions of Where Do We Go From Here, I lived it.
this is important and i swear to god, this shit is the sword i’ll die on.
Dominiak, M. [Bardicvoice]. (2018, Feb 27). And the new winner for first use of “mansplaining” is - an online comment concerning #Supernatural! @SuperWiki @FangasmSPN twitter.com/jessesheidlowe… [Tweet].
Blast from the past: this was posted to many online Trek groups in 1995. (I’ve removed the link because like many Trek websites from the ‘90s, it’s been taken over by domain name speculators and is now a pr0n site.)
GLAAD & Gay & Lesbian Science Fiction Groups Launch Internet Petition Drive for Gay/Lesbian Characters on Star Trek: Voyager
The USS Harvey Milk Gay & Lesbian Star Trek Association, Planet Stonewall Gay & Lesbian Science Fiction Association and GLAAD SFBA are sponsoring an e-mail petition drive to persuade Paramount and the producers of UPN’s new “Star Trek: Voyager” television series to add a positive, on-going gay or lesbian character to the featured cast by this fall.
The website and petition, co-sponsored by the three organizations, is located at: [link removed]
“We are extremely disappointed by the fact that Paramount and the producers of the program have consistently ignored Gene Roddenberry's plans to regularly feature anonymous but identifiably gay crew members on ST:TNG, a plan which he announced just two months before his death in 1991.” said Tim Perkins, Voyager Project Visibility Director. “Since that announcement, three seasons of TNG and two new series, Deep Space Nine and Star Trek Voyager, have been produced by Paramount … but we have yet to see ourselves portrayed as part of a future in which Roddenberry saw us as fully integrated and accepted into society.”
Given the future that Gene Roddenberry envisioned, in which poverty, racial prejudice, sexism and even war have been eliminated among humankind, it is logical to assume – as Gene has publicly acknowledged – that homophobia and discrimination based on sexual preference will also have been abolished. The group believes that the producers should move to more effectively reflect that vision by incorporating a character that would illustrate an end to prejudice based on sexual orientation… just as the characters of Uhura and Sulu illustrated the end of racial prejudice and the character of Checkov illustrated an end to nationalist enmities and divisions on Earth.
The e-mail petition will be supplemented by a paper petition which will be circulated at Gay Freedom Day celebrations in San Francisco, New York and other cities.
The website, which features short fiction, reviews, news, art and discussions by and for gay & lesbian Star Trek and science fiction fans, also allows visitors to rate each episode of Voyager on a number of criteria, from plot, acting and special effects to scientific plausibility and social relevance.
During its first two weeks on-line, the petition has garnered signatures from 33 states and eleven nations, including Sweden, Switzerland, Great Britain, Israel, Italy, South Africa, Germany, Hong Kong, Portugal, Australia and Canada.
Voyager, alas, did not feature any “positive, on-going gay or lesbian character” (at least that were out of the closet ;-), despite Robert Duncan McNeill’s and Robert Beltran’s pushing for it. Not to mention Jeri Taylor. But 20 years later, Discovery did.
The year is 1972 and your favorite TV show, Star Trek, has been off the air for years. Even worse, your local TV columnist “Dick” never liked your show, but now that it is finally being offered again in rerun, he’s started up again.
So what to you when your local TV columnist is being a dick in those pre-Twitter days? You send him letters.
So by the 1980s all is well in terms of Star Trek fandom and the media, right?…Well, that depends on what type of Star Trek fan you are. For slashers, the public eye was something to be feared and avoided. (Read more about the risks of being an early slash fan on Fanlore).
But on occasion, even the unwanted eye could be friendly, as in the above 1984 Baltimore Sun article. Nonetheless, most of slash fandom was not pleased with their fan fiction being exposed to a wider audience.*
Source:
The Evening Sun (Baltimore, Maryland) · Fri, Mar 16, 1984 · Page 13 “Under-the-counter magazine presents alternative Treks” by Wiley Hall 3rd
In this episode guest Peter Balestrieri brings us a letter from Ursula LeGuin in 1972 that he found tucked inside of a recently acquired copy of “The Farthest Shore.”
The years roll by…your local TV critic Dick changes newspaper columns and starts to write about sports. And your TV show slowly creeps off the TV page and starts showing up on pages 1-4, appears in casual mentions, in ads, blurbs about conventions with thousands of fans, and finally full page articles…..
A year passed and it is 1973. Your favorite TV show, Star Trek, is still off the air. And your local TV columnist “Dick” who never liked your show, is still taking potshots at Trek fans.
But in these pre-Twitter days there is no reason to let Dicks be dicks. So you send him letters. And letters. And letters.
The year is 1972 and your favorite TV show, Star Trek, has been off the air for years. Even worse, your local TV columnist “Dick” never liked your show, but now that it is finally being offered again in rerun, he’s started up again.
So what to you when your local TV columnist is being a dick in those pre-Twitter days? You send him letters.
The year is 1972 and your favorite TV show, Star Trek, has been off the air for years. Even worse, your local TV columnist “Dick” never liked your show, but now that it is finally being offered again in rerun, he’s started up again.
So what to you when your local TV columnist is being a dick in those pre-Twitter days? You send him letters.
I have to admit I'm really jealous of your life. You probably think it's nothing spectacular, but as someone newer to star trek, I know that I won't get to have those kinds of awesome experiences you had with a sore that's important to me. Thank you for sharing your memories with us.
Hi, Sweetie. I’m sorry it has taken me so long to answer you, but it’s in part because I’ve been thinking quite hard about what to say. You are right that I don’t think my life has been spectacular, not by any means; yet I do realize that I lived at a unique time in fandom that can never be repeated. And trust me, I feel very fortunate and deeply grateful about this!
I know this probably won’t help, but I’m going to say it anyway:
There are several aspects of modern fandom that I envy you for. We were so starved for anything Star Trek-related in those early years, I think you can hardly imagine. We had one series, 79 episodes, and the only way we could see them is when our local TV station happened to air them. You’ve got wall-to-wall Star Trek, with 24/7 access, and even a current series putting out new episodes as we speak. We waited ten years after TOS was cancelled to see any new Star Trek (except the very brief animated series).
Your on-line access to an ever-expanding body of fandom art and writing? In the early days, I know I would have given a body part to have had such riches! And if you are an artist or writer, the ability to share your work with an audience without taking out a second mortgage on your home in order to produce a fanzine… believe me, I envy you that as well.
I’m not dismissing how you feel, but I really hope you can see that we both have had benefits – different benefits – by coming into fandom when we did.
LLAP, dear heart. I’m glad we are in this fandom together now.
Hi! Have you ever heard of Julia Ecklar? She sang a lot of sci-fi songs, including some Star Trek ones; I think you might like some of her songs if you haven't heard them already!
I have heard of Julia Ecklar! Thank you for mentioning her, though; I would have wanted to hear about her if I hadn’t yet.
You probably know all about this, @i-like-pirates , but I think there are current fans who might not be familiar with filk songs, which I’ve best heard described by the old saying “Science fiction and folk music had a baby, and they named it Filk.”
In the mid- to late-70s, filk singing was a very popular part of conventions. If you’ve seen convention photos from that era, you’ve probably seen a group of people gathered around someone with a guitar. The words to filk songs were published in some zines, and certain fans were almost celebrities in their own right as filk writers and filk singers.
What happened is less that filk died out and more that it increasingly separated itself from general fandom. It has its own conventions, its own awards, and yes, its own celebrities. Still very much alive, it’s just that filk doesn’t mix in with the rest of fandom as much - every year it seems, there are fewer people dabbling in filk and more dedicated filkers.
Our state’s annual science fiction convention is an old fashioned sort of event where there are fewer signings and no professional cosplayers, more panels and workshops for writers, half the reason for picking up the big program is for the free short stories, and if you really want, you can dive into the music track for the whole weekend and just not come out except for meal breaks.
Thank you for this info @teasugarsalt and others who added comments. You all just taught me something. I’ve been away from conventions for years, and I had no idea filking was still going strong.
Also, @teasugarsalt your state’s annual science fiction convention sounds fabulous: an event without the slick packaging and commercialism that has overtaken most modern cons. Hearing this makes me interested in attending a con again — a smaller old fashioned one where fans can truly participate.
Hi guys, Dee’s son here again. Wanted you to know that my sisters and I have been blown away, just blown away by the response to the news of her passing. We have been reading your messages and posts aloud to each other. Thank you for loving her so much. Your words have brought lots of tears. But in the best of ways.
She loved you guys too. She fretted about how, when and if if she should tell you she was dying. She worried about leaving you without a word. She worried about you so much that I won’t lie, I was almost annoyed that she was using up her energy on people online. I didn’t get it. I underestimated you, I’m sorry.
She had beaten cancer before so we all thought she would do it again. Especially her. But it became clear a couple months ago she wouldn’t this time.
By your request we won’t delete her site. I don’t know if we should do this but she had quite a few things she was working on but had not posted. If you want to see them we will put them up here. We will put up her letter to you regardless.
Thanks again for loving our mom.
- Zachary
This is incredibly sad news. I loved her posts about Star Trek history and how supportive she was of our various fandom history projects, including the most recent one we started Zinedom.
How do you feel about the twitter clone mastodon? Do you feel like it can help fix the issues in fandom? I think it could provide a bit of a solution but I don’t see a lot of instances for it, at least in English
I’m not sure Mastodon’s gonna be the next big thing, although I have one and I’ve set up a script for it to mirror my Twitter account.
Honestly, at this point, I think we’re going to see a period of contraction and splintering in fandom, as people retreat into smaller, more closed-off communities. It’s happened before, in the wake of major purges and shakeups in fandom (or in any large community, really.) So in the short term, it’s kind of hard to say - I think Discord and locked Twitters are going to keep being big.
In the long term, new social media platforms are really, really, really hard to harness momentum on. I think that whatever comes next isn’t going to be a clone of anything, but something that fulfills a niche that none of the current options fill. Honestly, I’ve been waiting for the next Livejournal to take off - something that really allows both public and private interactions individually and with groups, but perhaps with better viral sharing capability (since viral sharing is what’s going to drive traffic to a platform). TBQH, Google+ has a lot of those hallmarks, and it’d be hilarious if they came from behind as a dark horse to take over the social media scene (I mean, everybody already has a google+ account, if you’ve ever signed in to youtube or gmail. I think they could harness those numbers if they played their cards right.)
If it is Google+, though, anonymity in fandom is going to keep getting harder and harder. That….. makes me nervous, but I guess there’s not really anything we can do except wait and see.
Thinking about the big fandom migrations I know about, yeah, we’ll hang on either till our current sites die or until something radically different comes along.
zines -> internet: Less time lag, less gatekeeping, more affordable for some, easier to find for some
Usenet -> mailing lists: Better ability to ban trolls, more privacy, better ability to create new groups quickly
mailing lists -> LJ: This was a switch from following topics to following people. Great for the multifannish and people leaving their first big fandom!
FFN -> LJ: FFN changed policies and deleted/banned fic.
FFN -> AO3: To the extent that people have made this switch, it’s because their entire fandom is content FFN bans (e.g. chatlogs).
forums -> anywhere else: Usually happened when the forum was deleted.
LJ -> DW: LJ became too broken to use. DW had its old features for RPing, anonmemes, etc. Generally a mandated move where a community mod announced that everyone was going whether they liked it or not.
LJ -> Tumblr: Pretty pictures!
We lost things in all of those moves. The big driving forces were the old thing becoming unusable and the new thing having one key feature people were ready for at the time.
The other big force is the new thing having more general audience: Tumblr already had an established fandom community by the time the LJ migration really kicked off. LJ, as a website in general, was already old news, while lots of new people were hearing about Tumblr for non-fandom reasons. This force has as much to do with the marketing team behind a new thing as it does fandom’s interest.
For fandom to move to Mastodon, Twitter (and possibly Tumblr) would need to become unusable. Twitter is constantly annoying its users, but it’s not unusable. LJ made a billion boneheaded moves over the years, and we didn’t budge.
We also tend to go to places where anyone can make an account or to small groups made up of people who were already friends. Last time someone sent me a link to check out Mastodon, I couldn’t make an account on that instance because it was too popular: the worst of both worlds.
In a startling twist of irony, it turns out that platforms
that excessively privilege fic writers over fan artists also do not survive.
To give a high-profile example, I’m given to understand that LiveJournal was the exact opposite of Tumblr. Because LiveJournal was set up as a blogging
site, text posts were the norm, and users had to pay a yearly fee to be able to
host images. Moreover, people who posted images were often bullied to hide them
under a cut, which meant that artists were often relegated to the filthy swamp of
DeviantArt. DeviantArt, being the cesspit that it was (and still somehow continues
to be), fostered an ecosystem of unfiltered nudes and pornography that understandably
made a lot of artists uncomfortable, and it didn’t help that their fanwork was
often appropriated by writers on LiveJournal and edited into icons, memes, and
smutty photomanips on anonymous kinkmemes.
Meanwhile, a number of professional writers who had not yet
gotten real-world famous (George RR Martin is a good example) managed to become BNFs on LiveJournal. These writers hated ship art (especially gay ship art with
hundreds of thousands of views) so much that they had their publishers issue
official statements about enforcing copyright law. This is part of the reason why
so many fic writers are still reluctant to connect their fic with their real
names and professional pen names, and it’s also part of the reason why so many
artists were desperate to go anywhere to escape the writers who controlled
large swaths of fandom at the time. It turns out that most people who get involved in fandom love fan
comics and fan art, so the gradual trickle of people moving away from LiveJournal ended up becoming a
mass exodus to Tumblr.
Basically I think that, if there isn’t a good balance between writers
and artists, things can get weird.
Eh. I don’t know if I’d look at it quite this way. There were a lot of people who liked the text-centric aspects of LJ, and they would have stayed there forever if LJ hadn’t done a whole series of dumb things to drive them away: deleting content, removing vital site features, having annoying outages.
Now that we’re over on Tumblr, some of those people have simply drifted away from fandom because there’s too much visual stuff here for their taste and not enough text. AO3 isn’t much good for art or vids, but it’s still massively popular. The platform shapes who “we” are.
Fandom’s tenure on LJ was something like 2002-2011. That’s eons in internet time. It’s rare for a site to remain popular that long regardless of how good it is. Tumblr is coming up on a decade or so of fandom popularity. (It was founded in 2007, but when did it first get big for fandom? It was within a couple of years, wasn’t it?) And here we are with people debating what’s next. It may be that a decade is about all we can expect.
