Gather around, children. I’m about to tell you a story of ye olde fandom. (Real life fandom friends, I’m sorry. You’ve heard this story a thousand times, I know.)
Long before Disney bought Star Wars, long before the new trilogy, before even the prequels, and themselves predating the “remastered” versions of the original trilogy, Star Wars experienced it’s second renaissance in novel form. And comic book form. Skim the pages of the dozens upon dozens of Expanded Universe (”EU”) novels and you’ll find lots of foundations for the things you see on screen these days. Ben Solo, for sure, has his origins there.
But it was also a different era for the fandom. The 90′s saw the transition from fanzine culture to online fan fiction archives. The programming ability and computing power you needed to make a fan fiction archive that the authors could edit themselves did not yet exist in an accessible way. Series based archives popped up, mostly hand curated by webmasters posting .txt files of chapters and stories that they’d received from authors via email. Or usenet. Or mailinglists. I spent many of my teen years on Gossamer, the X-Files archive, and Fanfix.com, my favorite Star Wars archive. I remember haunting a Babylon 5 archive at the time, too, but it’s lost to history.
I read everything. Everything. But, by far my favorite fan fiction of all time was, and I will always remember this, “As Simple and as Complicated as All That” by Xia Sang Li. It was epic. Four novels. NOVELS. Dozens of chapters. Hundreds and hundreds of pages. It follows Luke Skywalker’s decision to finally throw caution to the wind and fall into bed, and in love, with Mara Jade. Written in the sweet spot after her character was introduced and explored, but before permission was given to the licensed authors to marry Luke off, it was an amazing indulgence. And, it was epic in scale and scope. The great plot twist in book one was that, spoiler alert, when Gaeriel Captison died, leaving Luke to look after her orphaned daughter, she didn’t tell the whole story. You see, Luke and Mara had indulged each other before, had a secret love child, and this brief period of time was erased or minimized in their memories. Slowly, the two come to realize, through their haze of lust and passion, that something is conspiring to keep them apart, and that this little girl isn’t who she seemed. Themes of family, and duty, and passion, and trauma. Force visions, original characters, and sex sex sex. It was amazing.
Epic right??? Right?? Wanna read it??
It’s impossible. The Fanfix.com archive zipped the textfiles, so the Wayback Machine hasn’t archived them. The Geocities page went down before the Geocities archive was published after its closure. And, the original author’s blog, not updated in a decade, features only a few chapters of a rewrite, an AU of her original epic.
But it’s not dead.
Starting in 1998, my teenage self printed the whole fucking epic. I did one chapter at a time. It took more than a year. I had it all saved, too, on a 3 ½ inch floppy that got destroyed. Beyond the author’s own hard drive somewhere on this green earth, I think this might be the only copy.
Every few years, when nostalgia overtakes me, I reread it, from front to back. The gender politics are very different. The interpretation of Luke, too, vastly different from modern fandom’s take. Sometimes I wish I could find the author, buy her dinner, and tell her how important her work was to me. But, that’s probably impossible. Sometimes I think about re-digitizing it and, like a different kind of pirate, putting it back into circulation. But, that’s just a wish. A whimsical dream. The notebook is at least 3 inches thick, with front to back printed pages of text. It would take… years. Certainly it took years to write. But, it was part of the floating world of fandom. And, it faded away. Stuff like this should never fade away.
Fan fic authors… I implore you. Never delete your work.
You can’t know the impact you make. You might think it not good, embarrassing, or irrelevant. It’s not. Not to someone. Not to me.
Seriously. You have no idea how many fanfics I had wanted to print and bind just so that I can keep it in my personal library to read. Some fics are so damn GOOD that they deserve to exist binded as a physical copy. Save them please!!! All fics matter to someone
PUT THAT BOOK IN A SAFE BOX OR A MUSEUM (is there a fandom museum? we should make one)
It’s not quite a museum, but there is the Fan Culture Preservation Project, which is a join venture between the OTW and the Special Collections department at the University of Iowa Libraries. It’s a place to preserve hard copies of fanworks and fandom memorabilia.
(Though it seems likely that @mizunocaitlin would like to keep a beloved fanfic.)
wait a fucking second you actually have a copy of that??? i was suggested it so many times in my early years of reading fanfiction but couls never find it
Tumblr, your lack of threading is such a time waster. Still thrilled that I took the time to scroll through past reblogs to find out that the story has been scanned.
Gather around, children. I’m about to tell you a story of ye olde fandom. (Real life fandom friends, I’m sorry. You’ve heard this story a thousand times, I know.)
Long before Disney bought Star Wars, long before the new trilogy, before even the prequels, and themselves predating the “remastered” versions of the original trilogy, Star Wars experienced it’s second renaissance in novel form. And comic book form. Skim the pages of the dozens upon dozens of Expanded Universe (”EU”) novels and you’ll find lots of foundations for the things you see on screen these days. Ben Solo, for sure, has his origins there.
But it was also a different era for the fandom. The 90′s saw the transition from fanzine culture to online fan fiction archives. The programming ability and computing power you needed to make a fan fiction archive that the authors could edit themselves did not yet exist in an accessible way. Series based archives popped up, mostly hand curated by webmasters posting .txt files of chapters and stories that they’d received from authors via email. Or usenet. Or mailinglists. I spent many of my teen years on Gossamer, the X-Files archive, and Fanfix.com, my favorite Star Wars archive. I remember haunting a Babylon 5 archive at the time, too, but it’s lost to history.
I read everything. Everything. But, by far my favorite fan fiction of all time was, and I will always remember this, “As Simple and as Complicated as All That” by Xia Sang Li. It was epic. Four novels. NOVELS. Dozens of chapters. Hundreds and hundreds of pages. It follows Luke Skywalker’s decision to finally throw caution to the wind and fall into bed, and in love, with Mara Jade. Written in the sweet spot after her character was introduced and explored, but before permission was given to the licensed authors to marry Luke off, it was an amazing indulgence. And, it was epic in scale and scope. The great plot twist in book one was that, spoiler alert, when Gaeriel Captison died, leaving Luke to look after her orphaned daughter, she didn’t tell the whole story. You see, Luke and Mara had indulged each other before, had a secret love child, and this brief period of time was erased or minimized in their memories. Slowly, the two come to realize, through their haze of lust and passion, that something is conspiring to keep them apart, and that this little girl isn’t who she seemed. Themes of family, and duty, and passion, and trauma. Force visions, original characters, and sex sex sex. It was amazing.
Epic right??? Right?? Wanna read it??
It’s impossible. The Fanfix.com archive zipped the textfiles, so the Wayback Machine hasn’t archived them. The Geocities page went down before the Geocities archive was published after its closure. And, the original author’s blog, not updated in a decade, features only a few chapters of a rewrite, an AU of her original epic.
But it’s not dead.
Starting in 1998, my teenage self printed the whole fucking epic. I did one chapter at a time. It took more than a year. I had it all saved, too, on a 3 ½ inch floppy that got destroyed. Beyond the author’s own hard drive somewhere on this green earth, I think this might be the only copy.
Every few years, when nostalgia overtakes me, I reread it, from front to back. The gender politics are very different. The interpretation of Luke, too, vastly different from modern fandom’s take. Sometimes I wish I could find the author, buy her dinner, and tell her how important her work was to me. But, that’s probably impossible. Sometimes I think about re-digitizing it and, like a different kind of pirate, putting it back into circulation. But, that’s just a wish. A whimsical dream. The notebook is at least 3 inches thick, with front to back printed pages of text. It would take… years. Certainly it took years to write. But, it was part of the floating world of fandom. And, it faded away. Stuff like this should never fade away.
Fan fic authors… I implore you. Never delete your work.
You can’t know the impact you make. You might think it not good, embarrassing, or irrelevant. It’s not. Not to someone. Not to me.
Seriously. You have no idea how many fanfics I had wanted to print and bind just so that I can keep it in my personal library to read. Some fics are so damn GOOD that they deserve to exist binded as a physical copy. Save them please!!! All fics matter to someone
PUT THAT BOOK IN A SAFE BOX OR A MUSEUM (is there a fandom museum? we should make one)
It’s not quite a museum, but there is the Fan Culture Preservation Project, which is a join venture between the OTW and the Special Collections department at the University of Iowa Libraries. It’s a place to preserve hard copies of fanworks and fandom memorabilia.
(Though it seems likely that @mizunocaitlin would like to keep a beloved fanfic.)
Dear fic readers: Save it before you lose it!
authors have pleanty of reason to delete their shit, sad as it is, but you can still have it!! do what that person did, use https://www.lulu.com/ like i did for my faves stuff (tho already archived on gdrive by someone else), but find a way to PRINT IT OUT if you love it so much. dont just rely on digital copies because shit happens.
This is my current printed library of fanfics. This way works best for fanfics up to 20000 words, but I’m learning basic bookbinding for the longer ones (an experiment of that can be seen in the right side of the picture - “This, You Protect” by Owlet), because I LOVE HOLDING THEM WHEN I READ THEM and also, what will I read if the power goes down? Exactly.
I don’t think @fanfictionrecommendations-comis right about fanfic dying. It’s doing fine. But they link to some interesting stats, that I want to blather on about examine in more depth.
If you are anything like most fanfiction readers, you spent a large portion of 2010 on Fanfiction.net, browsing, reading your favorite fics, writing or dreaming of writing. And like most people, you never noticed that with each passing year the world of fanfiction was shrinking.
Well, I, personally was not spending any time at Fanfiction.net in 2010, and neither were most of my fan friends. I was more or less on hiatus from fandom then, but even if I weren’t, FF.net wasn’t where I’d be looking for fanfic. I abandoned that site when they banned NC-17 stories in 2002. I have an account there, with what stories of mine remained after they deleted the adult ones, but haven’t been back since the 2002 purge. I am not planning to ever return. The interface is clunky, the stories don’t display correctly in my version of Firefox, and it’s just not terribly inviting, even without the limitations on content.
12% of all accounts on [Fanfiction.net] have at least one published story and are actively engaged in fandom activity. 88% of members on Fanfiction.net are currently not shaping any fandom.
This doesn’t surprise me. It’s pretty typical of online forums in general. Heck, of life in general. Far more people read stuff than write it.
Even if you have written a story, it is most probable that you will not be on [Fanfiction.net] longer than six months .
That’s interesting, but hardly shocking. Online communities of all sorts tend to have a high churn rate. Easy in, easy out. FF.net’s might be higher than most, because of their demographics, and leaving FF.net doesn’t mean they’re leaving fandom.
There were more fandoms being idle [on Fanfiction.net] in every category than becoming active in 2010.
This does not surprise me, either. It’s the nature of fandom, and was even in the days of fanzines. Fans tend to move from fandom to fandom, and old fandoms tend to die off if there’s nothing to feed them. And FanFiction.net has been around since 1998. That’s a lot of time for abandoned fandoms to accumulate. Not to mention all the “orphan fandoms” that were never popular to begin with.
The happier thought comes quick: maybe our beloved fanficcers have just found other places to write, places where we have to follow? Archive of Our Own prompted a mass migration, of course. But Archive still doesn’t have half the population Fanfiction.net did - and it has its fair share of dead accounts too.
I think they are too quick to dismiss the exodus to AO3. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that FF.net’s decline began when AO3 took off. AO3 might not have the population FF.net has, but FF.net has several years’ head start, and they are getting more traffic than FF.net is now, according to Alexa.
The Toasty Stats post linked to has some interesting graphs. Nothing unexpected, but it’s nice to see it laid out graphically. The canon matters. Without new material, fanfic will decline. Not necessarily to zero, but it will decline. This is the fate of all fandoms eventually.
Toasty Stats agrees that AO3 is the reason FF.net is declining:
After a long period of growth – fic creation roughly doubled from 2006 to 2012 – FFN seems at last to be in decline. By all appearances, the site peaked in 2012 and has slowly been fading ever since. Even with new features like pairing labels, people are posting fewer stories every year. True, 2014 still averaged over 2,600 new fics a day (and about as many new users!), including fics since deleted, but that’s down from over 3,100 a day in 2012. It’s got a lot of life in it still, but barring major changes, it looks like its busiest days are over.
Why? The growing popularity of AO3 surely has something to do with it. FanFiction.Net users have long been frustrated with the site’s lack of features and moderation policy, not to mention the “War on Punctuation”, all issues AO3 was designed to address. The sudden removal of thousands of M-rated fics late in May 2012, what one commentator called “The Book Burning That Wasn’t”, may simply have been the last straw, and there does seem to have been a mass migration to AO3 at the time. Could be other causes, too – goodness knows the people in charge at FFN have never been the most receptive to user concerns.
Whatever the reason, FanFiction.Net activity as a whole is declining.
The only thing that surprises me is that it took so long. “Adult” works in fandom have been a bone of contention since the beginning, and IME, smut always wins. Seems to be what fans want. I know I always get more hits on my explicit stories than on my gen stories.
This graph might be skewed by teens being more willing to give their ages, but if it’s anything close to accurate…FF.net is basically a teen site, with an average age of 15. (And a lot of kids too young to be there, lying about their ages.) If that’s true, it’s no surprise that many of them don’t stick around long. They grow up and get other interests…or maintain the same interests, at more adult-oriented sites. I don’t see any reason to panic in these numbers.
(It might also explain why FF.net has made the decisions they’ve made with respect to adult content. Though I guess it’s hard to untangle cause and effect.)
I can understand why some want to raise the profile of fanfic. But I’m not sure it’s a good idea. There’s a reason for the “tabooness” of fanfic. It exists because the copyright holders allow it to exist. That could change, if it becomes too prominent. And fanfic is doing fine, even if you can’t win a Hugo for writing it.
What was this mess of S10 that people keep talking about? I didn't live watch back then because I joined this fandom recently but SERIOUSLY, what happened during S10 that was SO BAD that people rage quit and meta writers didn't see a twist coming like they usually do. I'm just trying to understand and this is no way meant as hate and I'm sorry if it sounds that way.
I joined during S12. I knew about SPN and Destiel from Tumblr but I didn’t necessarily ship it because I prefer to judge for myself. What is bothering me is the S9-S10 “painfest” people claim. I admit it got a bit boring (and repetitive) for me MAINLY cuz of no Cas in S7 but otherwise I didn’t want to stop? I mean sure MOC was pretty angsty but a story is a story. I’m just trying to understand why people burned out during S9-S10? Why people thought it was “repetitive”? (I’m a hypocrite I know)
OK so I got both of these asks because I have been talking about season 10 lately and the mass exodus of fandom at the time.
The main reason people rage quit the show at the end of season 10 was because of the (horrific, stupid, unnecessary, cruel, disgusting, and to this day completely wrong) choice to kill off Charlie Bradbury in 10x21.
Season 10 was the first season I watched live. I followed a lot of meta writers on tumblr at the time with a skeleton blog and was the very definition of a lurker on tumblr. I followed ALL THE META and consumed it and it was the season 10 meta that inspired me to start writing my own in season 11 - even AFTER the wankfest. Season 10 was not painful to watch live going though it, I actually really enjoyed it at the time. It was after 10x21 that everything changed. Those last three episodes of season 10 are the biggest pile of shit SPN has come out with in a few years - even though 10x22 did redeem itself with a few scenes.
Before 10x21 it was actually pretty fucking epic to follow the fandom content and the excited shippers who were slowly becoming more and more convinced that season 10 would end with something huge.
It all started with this:
Now over the s9/s10 hiatus everyone was SUPER excited about Demon!Dean. Because a lot of people theorised that Demon!Dean would not be so extremely repressed as regular Dean and therefore we should get some fucking quality content and an insight into Dean’s emotions that we wouldn’t usually see.
Well, we did. Sort of. I think there are still meta writers today that can’t quite believe Drowley was a thing and wonder if the whole implication of Drowley was in fact just some shared online fever dream. I still grumble about it in disbelief tbh. So OF COURSE Drowley gets us excited because the implication in the subtext was that Demon!Dean was totally cool with hooking up with guys. There are probably thousands and thousands of words written about Dean, Crowley, and the Triplets (who were definitely all male) and the loose implication in CANON that Dean has been part of an all male five-way is still something I can’t quite get over.
So to the title card. EVEN BEFORE this season had aired people were getting excited about it, because this very much looks like angel grace casting out demon smoke. VERY MUCH SO.
So right away people were putting theories around that Cas would be the one to cure Dean. Now remember that this was shortly after season 9 when Cas became human, he only took on the stolen grace out of duty and wanting to be useful to the action, that he had to be ready. Season 10 then explored Cas’s feelings towards “who he is” even more heavily and for the first 3 episodes it really seemed like they were building on a story that would end with Cas giving up his grace again, but this time by choice. This was implied over and over again throughout season 10 in mirrors, in his interactions with Hannah, and in his love for humanity and human things.
On top of all that we get the moment in 10x03 where Cas is able to stop Dean from attacking Sam and his eyes glow blue whilst Dean’s turn black. This was considered foreshadowing.
The season then goes on and continues to explore the effects of the Mark of Cain on Dean - constantly framing it as an internal conflict and corruption of his soul. The darkness inside him and the question addressed throughout the season of what makes a monster?Sam is insistent that he will save Dean, we get amazing moments like Dean’s confession in 10x16 which once again seems to reinforce the reading that he is bisexual (still what I consider to be the closest moment to Dean being outed so far) and Cas exploring his humanity further by reaching out to Claire Novak and then pursuing Metatron (who always was the best character for calling Cas out on the things Cas has struggled to understand about himself).
On top of all this we have the freaking Cain/Colette parallel which again, strongly implied that love would be the cure… and well…
Add it up:
- Angel grace burns out demon smoke in the title card
- Cain/Colette show that love can stop the mark
- Dean spends the season exploring his inner self, and the things he represses, and desires.
- Cas spends the season questioning his place as an angel and what he truly desires.
It all seemed to be building to something spectacular. Something like for instance Cas choosing to give up his grace to cure Dean of the Mark of Cain - and by doing so, proving that the Power of Love is the most “powerful force” in the universe (interestingly enough Cas used this exact phrase when talking about how to cure the Mark in 10x10).
The thing is, throughout the whole season there were these breadcrumbs and elements which all seemed to imply that the mark would be cured by love, even if it wasn’t romantic love, love seemed to be the obvious cure. It also seemed pretty obvious that the mark was nothing more than a corruption of the soul. A completely internal force.
Then the wank storm happens. 10x21, Charlie is butchered and fridged, by freaking nazis who have such a stupid story line that I still cringe when I think about them. 10x22, Dean beats Cas to a pulp and doesn’t seem to show any *obvious* regret in the finale, 10x23, the whole idea of the mark being an internal corruption is flipped on its head - turns out the bloody thing was an external force all along. It wasn’t anything to do with Dean’s soul, it was some primordial Goddess of Darkness - who later turns out to be God’s bloody sister.
The kicker was that it literally took a pretty simple spell to remove the damn thing. With the primary ingredient being “the thing the spell caster loves most”. Well that made me flip my shit even if no one else did. WHY would the spell ingredient be for the spell CASTER. Wouldn’t it make more sense for that ingredient to be something that the SUFFERER of the Mark had a connection to instead?
It’s like they took those elements that they had been playing with all season, about love being the cure, and decided to just fob it off on Rowena - write in a random character for her to love - who has never been heard of before or mentioned since - and be done with it.
It literally felt like Carver got to a point in this story, and just chickened out, so instead wrote some bullshit last minute to cover himself. 10x23 was such a poor quality finale. I was just confused through most of it. Nothing made sense, it really did seem like Carver had typed it out in one crazy night a few nights before they were due to film whilst surviving on nothing but coffee and hot dogs like poor Kevin in season 8…
Everything else in season 10 seemed to be building to something wonderful. We all felt like Carver knew what he was doing, but it really does seem like he just changed his mind last minute. The last three episodes of season 10 are awful compared to the rest of the season and none of the themes or mirrors or subtext that was included throughout the season came to ANYTHING.
Alot of people rage quit after Charlie, but a lot more gave up after 10x23 it seemed because it all just fell apart. Nothing made sense and it seemed like all the meta, all the speculation, all the build up, was just lost. it was a huge missed opportunity for the show. They could have ended that season spectacularly, but Carver lost the plot… literally… maybe his dog chewed up his original script I dunno.
Anyway, this is all my interpretation based on memory alone of course. Other meta writers who were around back then may say something completely different, but all this is based on my own experience and the huge amount of meta and speculation I consumed during that season.
This is why there are so many canon!verse fanfics on AO3 set after season 10 or set just before the final few episodes of season 10 where Cas cures Dean with his grace (and also confesses his love) if nothing else, the season spurned a huge amount of fix-it fics which were pretty awesome to read, all with their own different versions of how Cas would heal Dean.
This is also why I am still weary about getting to ahead of ourselves with speculation now. Because in a lot of ways season 13 seems very similar to season 10 in the themes it is exploring and how it all seems like there is a clear path here to the finale at least regarding Dean and his choices. We all expect a confession of some kind from him… but we have to remember that this show rarely does things the obvious way, and it has burned us a lot in the past. The meta and the analysis all seem to point to a certain conclusion, but we have first hand experience of a time where the meta failed us, and the show swapped out logic for a story that made no sense. Perhaps in hindsight better meta writers than me have been able to find a way to explain season 10 so that it all makes sense in its entirety - season finale included. But for me it still just reads as one big WTF moment.
To follow up on this post, I’ve found the main primary source that I was working off of when I wrote that part about 50 Shades. A year and a half ago this reddit comment was making the rounds through fandom, from a member of the Twilight fan community. It alleges that E. L. James (“Erika”) “ripped off” already very popular fandom tropes and stories, and identifiable stories in the fandom at that. The redditor wrote (emphasis mine):
Erika never looked back. She actually has blocked every single person I still know from fandom on her twitter account. She used the community to get her book (most ideas created by the community itself) to #1 then essentially shut the door on them all.
Pretty brilliant, really.
But then, that’s why she’s not putting out any new content, and why she probably never will. She is likely incapable of producing fiction without the use of existing characters and a collaborative community. Erika Leonard is not a creator, she is a marketer.
This is an interesting piece of history, which makes the ahistorical claim that the inability to “produce fiction without the use of existing characters and a collaborative community” is somehow a flaw and not the default mode of fic writing. Needless to say I don’t agree with a lot of what hurricangst wrote, so I quote this history not as wholehearted endorsement but because of what it records, which is partly sequence of events, and partly the language which fans did not yet have to express anger and sadness at the incursion capitalism into fandom.
In broad outlines the post (& many follow-ups) described a dysfunctional fandom community in which too much attention accrues to a few BNFs, who took financial advantage of the situation. Savvier writers devised ways to rack up high reviews counts and gain reputation, or wrote only stories formed with tropes they already knew would be a success. Eventually many writers published and pulled down their stories, inspiring much wank and unpleasantness. As I argued the last time, I think this was the case of authors claiming individual ownership on communal property (which all fanfics are), and bringing in capitalism where it didn’t belong.
These discussions, however, tend to devolve into referendums on the individual authors or fandoms–Is the Twilight fandom especially no-good-terrible because it’s Twilight? Was E. L. James an uncommonly successful scam artist who stole ideas from other fans? (If so I admire the hustle.) Sometimes the discussion turned to some historical precedent or another, and some folks here did manage to touch on the issue of fandom and profit, which is the actual, real, perennially open wound at the heart of, scientifically, 50% of all fandom angst. Repeat after me, hate the game, don’t hate the players.
The game is fandom and profit. Good lord, these fucking meta essays on fandom and profit have endlessly prattled on about what Being a Good Fan meant or to what exact degree the fan authors should bend their heads to beg for money, which is all comedies of manners, all of it. The language they used is one of admonishment for the people who dared to set a toe out of the unspoken bounds of fandom manners. Take this quote from an essay about that Buffy controversy, where an author asked fans to pay for WIP updates:
The biggest problem with cousinjean’s post, to my mind, is the arrogance of it.
L. O. L.
But despite the massive, collective angst, fandom remains vulnerable as ever to corporate takeover. Sure, fandom has repelled several attempts to commercialize fanfics, and revulsion to profit making runs deep, but it is mostly out of survival instinct. The language and reasoning used is never explicitly anticapitalist, never, because we don’t think of this problem as a systemic one, but a specifically fannish one. Do we really think that our anxiety about commodification has not been felt and replicated thousands of times over by writers and artists?
The ultimate fantasy of fandom is that we live in a separate world, that we can protect it, and tend it day by day, vigilant of the mainstream/market/corporate attempts to intrude. But that’s not quite true. We will keep having to fend off these attacks until we are no longer able, because we don’t engage with the world which produced them.
I really have not used the words “socialism” or “Marxism” here when I’m talking about fandom, partly because I didn’t think it was necessary to name the mode of analysis and partly because it would sound a little bit pretentious, but it is necessary here. We need more of this language and this mode of analysis in fandom so that we may understand the difference between compensation and profit, between the capitalist and the worker, so that we can name our enemies and not just kill ourselves. When people appeal to readers for rent and healthcare, we should be able to say, they deserve rent and healthcare, but not because they wrote a story I liked, but because they are human.
Such analyses force us to think beyond fandom. I know many of you probably already do reblog social justice stuff, but it’s not working, and this poverty of our analyses remains. Why do we so often stop short at critiquing commodification in the larger world but comfortably condemn it in within our own? Because we cannot imagine a different reality other than the one we have, and besides which we’re not quite ready to devise a resource distribution system which does not predicate on a “free” market.
I read this Jacobin article last year and I couldn’t put my finger on what troubled me about it, when I sympathized with so much of its sentiments. In it, Kate Robinson wrote that she was so disillusioned with the politics of fandom that she abandoned it altogether (”ditched the Snape wars”), in favor of socialist politics. The article suggested that socialism and fandom are somehow incompatible, or that if one wanted sound socialist politics one should look elsewhere, and I admit I’ve seen fewer socialists here than I would have expected of a place so overrun by academia, but that is not really the case. We can apply the Marxist lens anywhere (how? very carefully) and fandom seems in sore need of it. (Aca-fandom is a different matter.)
For precedence, we can look at the very substantial body of literature on the social history of art. They looked at art as an artifact of history, influenced by and influencing politics. They looked at what the artwork responded to, and how people responded to it, and they ask, how was the artwork produced, and how was it distributed, and in which ways did the meaning of it change when we understand more about the context for which it was meant? This kind of work doesn’t want to condemn, it wants to understand, and isn’t it the precise kind of approach that we as fans so often ask of outside journalists and commentators when they write about fandom?
“Lettercol is a section of the Spockanalia fanzine dedicated to displaying letters sent into the fanzine by readers.
This is one of the most significant ways in which fanzines influenced early modern fandom culture. Letter sections of fanzines were commonplace and not only shared information, but also shared the thoughts of readers, many of which were many miles apart. Due to the existence of letter sections, and the writings of avid fans, fanzines were the pre-internet forum of fandom, allowing fans to share thoughts and engage in discourse. Fanzines allowed fans to stay connected to Star Trek, and to each other, even over great distances.
This being siad, however, these two examples of early Lettercol both focus on letters sent to Spockanalia by high-profile readers. The Spockanalia #1Lettercol features a single letter, from Leonard Nimoy (Spock’s actor) wishing the editors well in their fanzine endeavors. Lettercol in Spockanalia #2 is much the same flavor, but multiplied. There are letters from Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek writer Dorothy Fontana, James Doohan (Scotty’s actor), Walter Koenig (Chekov’s actor), and even two in-character letters from Dr. McCoy (written by his actor DeForest Kelley), and a rebuttal from Mr. Spock (written of course by Leonard Nimoy).
“
Instead of Generations and the stupid Nexus why couldn’t we have the Enterprise going back in time to scoop up Freddie Mercury and bring him to the twenty-third century? Not only would they have benefited from his fashion sense, but surely if aliens were psyched about whale song they were also psyched about Queen, and there would be a probe headed for earth accidentally destroying everything in its path asking Why did Freddie stop singing?, and when the aliens found out why they would be like, “You shunned gays and blamed them for AIDS and didn’t try to cure it for the longest time? You morons you deserve to have your planet destroyed,” so yeah, once again we’d need the Enterprise crew to go back in time and save humanity from its own stupidity and also, you know Spock would secretly be so into Queen and try to hide it but Jim would find out and croon some lyrics from “Love of my Life” to Spock and how cute would that be?
It’s my pleasure, dear heart, and it is part of true Star Trek tradition. Do you know about the Star Trek Welcommittee? Founded in 1972 and run by volunteers until sometime after the internet came into existence, it’s a perfect example of the open-arms welcome that Trek fans have offered new fans since the very earliest days. Any “older” fan who treats newer fans with anything less than warmth, kindness and every attempt at assistance does not know their own fandom history and hallowed tradition!
Thank you for your kind interest, dear anon! I don’t have either of these associated with tumblr. I’m on Facebook, but like most grandmas I just use FB to post pictures of my grandkids and of cats :) I’ve written bits and pieces about myself in posts under the tags “star trek history” and “fandom grandma says.” Also, I’ve been interviewed for a newspaper article that is appearing in (I believe) April, and I will be posting bits of the interview transcription here in the near future. I talked about myself for almost two solid hours – that poor journalist! I will tag those posts with “interview,” so if you are still interested this long after you sent me this ask, look for those posts coming your way shortly…
LLAP, my friend
I just remembered something that i have not written about here and is essentially on-topic with this blog, and that I don’t mind sharing on a public platform. Personal story:
I was married twice. The first time, we were both under social and family pressure to get married – this was the 60s – but our hearts weren’t in it. He’s a good man and we are on good terms to this day, but we did not make a great married couple.
For years after we amicably divorced (and horrified our families), I thought I would never marry again. I liked being independent; “romance isn’t for me”… yada yada. And I meant it!
But then I met my Vulcan: outrageously intelligent, deep feelings hidden under an “unemotional” exterior, loyal and honorable and, yes, he had a nice butt.
All fine and good. I fell crazy in love but I still didn’t think i would marry him. I thought I was a failure at marriage and didn’t want to risk ruining our friendship. So I went around for months trying to hide the depth and nature of my feelings.
You know what changed my mind?
The way he looked at me. It was the way Jim and Spock look at each other. The first time he did it, I stopped in my tracks and literally looked over my shoulder to see who he was looking at. I hadn’t grown up seeing that sort of loving married relationship modeled around me – but I had just spent a decade shipping spirk and seeing their relationship as a beautiful, but unobtainable, ideal.
So I recognized that look. I recognized the respect and love behind it.
He only had to give me that look a couple of times before I asked him to marry me. He was surprised. I said sorry, I was impatient and didn’t know if he would ask. He raised an eyebrow (metaphorically speaking) and said yes. We were best friends until he passed away a few years ago.
When I pass away, our ashes will be mingled and mixed with soil, in which a tree will be planted. This tree will grow in the sun room that I am having added on to our family summer home, right now, even as I write. And the sun will be shining in on us through a stained glass window that I’ve commissioned from a renowned glass artist in England, depicting Jim and Spock in an embrace, made from original art by the incomparable @deheerkonijn.
My husband did not know this would be our final joint resting place, because he passed away before I got back into fandom. But if he knew, he would not be surprised. I told him many times during our marriage that he had Star Trek to thank for “us” happening. And I have no doubt he would say, as he said so often in life, that he was happy as long as I was happy.
Love is real, kids. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
I’m well aware I experienced only one or two sides of a multifaceted personality. Looking back with all I now know, I see him as neither hero nor villain, but as a very flawed person with an amazing vision, which I’m glad he passed on to the world. I’m glad I had a chance to know him.
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.
Need help testing out another transcription service for the fandom oral history interviews. The system is Temi, video below.
It
automatically transcribes the audio and then you use their web browser
to proofread. Since they posted video below in 2017, they have added more editing
tools, like highlighting questionable text for later review and a search
and replace.
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!
I would love to know more about when you first started thinking that there was more than friendship between Kirk and Spock and when fans first started talking about it. Was it Amok Time that first gave you the idea?
I started thinking about it before Amok Time aired.
In the summer of ‘67, watching the reruns of the first season, I very clearly remember a growing sense of, “They really love each other.” I did not jump to “they are in a romantic/sexual relationship,” but I was increasingly aware that there was love and devotion between them. I wrote a speculative essay about their platonic love in our summer fan club newsletter, which I remember being well-received.
With the start of Season 2, our whole fan club (and often others) watched the show together, at the house of the one person we knew with a color TV. The show was on Friday nights, so we would start the weekends by piling into her living room and watching “in living color” for the first time. Afterwords we would stay and discuss.
When Amok Time aired, we definitely had a lot to talk about. I am pretty sure no one suggested that they were gay – that would have been quite a scandalous suggestion at that time; and I don’t think I thought it myself. But we did have quite a discussion about how much Jim was willing to sacrifice for Spock, Spock’s reaction to seeing Jim alive, and what did Spock mean by “having not so pleasing a thing after all as wanting…?”
Did Spock … want Jim?
Two camps formed: one believing that Spock was in love with Jim and was pining for him, the other believing no way! that’s ridiculous!
Single copies of “Spock pines for Jim” stories started appearing and being circulated hand-to-hand. Two other women and I were doing most of the writing in my circle of fan friends, and because distribution was so difficult, we started having Thursday night gatherings. Anyone could come and we would read the latest installments in our Spock-loves-Jim stories out loud to the group.
Sometime between the second and third season, my primary writing mentor – an established, published sci-fi writer who was much older than me – told me in private conversation that she thought their love was mutual, quite possibly physical, and that she thought their relationship was worth exploring in writing.
She and I each started working on long pieces exploring the Kirk/Spock relationship, and it was the first time I had seriously entertained the idea that their love was also physical. That was a very secret project. We only ever shared our work with each other for comment / revision, and never mentioned it to anyone else at the time.
The first time I realized that the K/S relationship – which was called “The Premise” in those days – was being explored by other writers and even artists was in the summer of ‘69. Star Trek had been cancelled and I went to another state to meet with a handful of people who were forming a fan network to try to get Star Trek back on air. While there, a fellow fan showed me a set of drawings, all very tame by today’s standards, that depicted a physical relationship between Jim and Spock. I remember how shocked I was — not by the subject matter, but by the fact that someone had dared depict it.
Slash stayed very much underground until late 1974, when the first published K/S story used very coded language to suggest a love relationship between them.
Additional history note, for people who aren’t aware of it: In 1973, homosexuality was removed from the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder) as a mental illness. Before that time, it was officially listed as, and treated as, a psychiatric disorder, like schizophrenia: a condition that requires treatment, with the goal of removing it, or minimizing its effects if that wasn’t possible.
How happy someone was with it wasn’t important - it was considered a disease. Anyone who was happy being gay was considered to ill to realize how damaged they were.
Claiming that Kirk and Spock might have those feelings for each other was a hard clash against mainstream psychology. It was a very controversial opinion, because it meant not only looking at the series and saying, “I’m seeing a relationship that I’m pretty sure the writers didn’t consciously intend,” but also, “oh, and the entire AMA and the combined wisdom of its doctors are clueless about how human relationships work.”
Believing that two people of the same sex could have a healthy, loving relationship was an act of defiance all on its own.
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
Updated email address for the Kirk/Spock fanzine library
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)
This happened in ‘75 or ‘76. It was a small convention, the sort I always preferred because there could be a real group bond that formed, with harmless shenanigans and in-jokes and no sleep, and laughter all weekend long. It was like being in college again – except with your 50 best friends, and without classes or responsibilities.
I cannot remember the origin of Horny Spock, only that he was an 8-inch action figure that someone had glued a plastic Valkyrie hat onto, so that he had horns. At some point he also lost his clothes, and was wearing only his plastic molded briefs and his knee-high black boots.
Horny Spock had many adventures at a couple of conventions I’m remembering, and a number of games grew up around him in an evolving, organic sort of way. At one point there was an elaborate tag game going, whereby you tried not to be “gifted” Horny Spock when you were not looking – in your purse, in your bed – because if you did you had to contribute to The Book of Horny Spock Chronicles (think Letters to Penthouse, Star Trek edition). Then word went round and you had to READ YOUR ENTRY ALOUD to the standing-room only crowd in the organizers room.
On the evening I’m remembering, there were a bunch of us in the organizers’ room when the person currently in posession of the doll stuck her head in and half-shouted over the din, “Has anyone seen Horny Spock? I think I left him in here.” And Jimmy Doohan – whom she hadn’t noticed – boomed back, in full Scotty brogue, “Have ye checked the captain’s room?”
“This spatial study is an attempt to demonstrate how Star Trek fanzines connected the fandom. The dataset used is derived from fanletters sent in to two Star Trek fanzines: Spockanalia (issues #1-5) and T-Negative (issues #1-20). The purpose of this study is to emphasize how fanzines helped create a highly connected fandom in the pre-internet era, and also to form a body of primary source documents for further scholrly inquiry.
Despite fanzines predating the Trekkies, it was within Star Trek fandom that the concept of a fanzine really thrived and gained traction beyond the insular science fiction fandom of the time. In a time before the internet and social media, fanzines allowed for the sharing of art and ideas across countries, oceans, and timezones. Thanks to fanzines, fans could share ideas across a far wider range than telephones or letters could handle.
Of even greater importance is fanzines were not simply regular publications containing art, stories, and articles; they were also a means of communication between fans on a large scale. Through fanzines fans could engage with other fans on more than a 1:1 ratio and over long distances. Any fan that read the fanzines, or sent in articles and stories effectively participated in interactions with other fans, but it is through the fanletters that fans most directly engaged with other members of the fandom.”
Well, I know you don’t actually give a shit, but let me explain for anyone else who may be side-eying that statement from the original Meta Monday post. And please, guys, if you have different thoughts, I’m genuinely interested!
1) In terms of numbers, yes, Destiel is the top ship on AO3. That is a fact.
2) In terms of numbers — still talking about numbers here — it might very well be the most popular ship of all time. I suspect it is, but this is literally impossible to quantify. Obviously, we can scrape data from AO3 or tumblr with a high confidence that we’re getting a realistic picture, while so much from usernets and zines is either lost or in paper form that isn’t going to quantify itself. But more than that, the barrier to enter fandom is so much lower now than it was even in 2000. We’ll never know how many people WOULD HAVE participated had they even known it was a thing, or how many people may have written fanfiction while thinking they were the only one. Here I should note I’m talking western fandom only.
3) I do not know another post-Spirk ship that has this level of popularity. If you do, please share! I considered a few. Buffy and X-Files were bigger fandoms than Supernatural, and they generated a lot of ship-related fanwork, but back to point number two on why I honestly doubt they generated AS MUCH fanwork as many modern fandoms have. Harry Potter/Drarry is the most obvious competition, I think. Again the fandom is bigger, but I don’t think Drarry is. Fewer fics on AO3, I thiiink more on FFN but that’s also a platform in decline. When I compare that to Destiel with its meet-ups and dominance at conventions, and even the frequency with which it appears on tumblr’s top 10, my gut tells me Destiel wins.
4) None of this means Destiel is as important as Spirk, or that anything can be as important as Spirk. Spirk is the Big Bang. It gave us fanfiction — I would argue earlier Sherlock Holmes fanfiction was not true fanfiction but I’ll spare you — it gave us slash, and community, and truly filthy drawings of space dicks that fill my heart with joy. And don’t even get me going about Killing Time! There will never be another ship that did so much (Ok, I see you, too, Man from U.N.C.L.E., I do, but…)
5) All that to say, I don’t really see anything objectionable here. Destiel isn’t my otp. I dig it, I think the meta and community is amazing, I hope it goes canon; but I didn’t have a secret Destiel agenda.
-
What do you guys think?
It also depends on what metrics you use.
I think it’s fair to say that the length of the show’s run will make a difference in how many fics will be produced and therefore help in determining it’s popularity. Besides that, there are also other ways to determine popularity besides fic; amount of money spent on merchandise, academic papers written, convention attendance, etc, etc.
Consider the length of time SPN has been running. It’s on season 13 now, yes? That’s twice as long as Buffy ran! I know we say it ran for 7 seasons, and technically that’s true, but season 1 was only 12 episodes. So if you are going by episode count, SPN has already lapped it. There is also an argument to be made that Angel’s run should be included in that count towards a total for the Buffyverse, which is where things get muddy but I’m not in the mood for math right now.
(As a counterpoint to my assertion that popularity could be linked
proportionally to length of episodic run, I should mention Sherlock.
Considering its popularity is in stark contrast to its lack of
episodes. There has always got to be a pesky outlier!)
Fandoms thrive while new content is created and the BtVS fandom managed to live on for years after Ats ended. The sheer number of separate forums and websites, fanfic archives and vidding databases, and conventions devoted to BtVS blows my mind. There was even a magazine that ran from 1999 to 2007, which I may or may not own a few boxes worth. James Marsters had his own little fandom that followed him wherever he went, which is how I met most of my friends. A quick look at the fanlore page of links just scratches the surface of what existed during the fandom’s heyday.
Unfortunately migrating from LJ and the rings of separate archives, to Tumblr and A03, occurred mostly post the
natural decline of BtVS in popularity. This means that tons of fanworks never
found their way to being uploaded to A03. Subsequently, a decade’s
worth of amazing meta and other fanworks, including fanvids that were
never uploaded to YT, are lost to the ether.
You’re right, it’s almost impossible to quantify something like this. Especially when the structures we use to determine popularity shift around us. We can really only quantify what we see on a moment by moment basis.
So trying to equate
fandoms from different eras within different technological frameworks,
plus varied lengths of runs, there is no sure way to know what would
come out on top. And each are important in their own ways. Star Trek and Spirk witnessed the birthing of fandom, while BtVS gave us the bridge between the pre internet fandom era and now.
All of that to say, in my heart of heats I have to believe that if all things being equal, I can’t imagine Spuffy wouldn’t come close or meet Destiel in popularity. That said, there really is no way of knowing without some kind of massive cross platform fandom data caching, which I am in no way suggesting someone should take on! Finally, obviously, I am of course totally biased and just enjoyed this as a fun mental walk down memory lane of fandom’s past.
I’m in heaven over your reply. I only saw the first line in my notes on mobile, and I thought it was an important point even on its own. But now seeing your full comments… This is excellent fandom meta regardless of the original question. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts!
Spuffy was probably the first popular ship I was even aware of, and that was back before I knew fanfiction was a thing. I remember the importance of being a Spike/Buffy fan versus an Angel/Buffy fan, how huge ‘Prophesy Girl’ was, and that doesn’t even get into Willow/Tara (my personal jam).
I agree with you entirely that Spuffy and BtVS are the bridge between Spirk and modern fandoms like Destiel. That’s far more accurate than the direct leap from Spirk to Destiel that I probably implied without meaning to. It belongs in the Major Ship Pantheon, to drop my royalty metaphor, both in numbers and historical significance. I know I’m oversimplifying here, but if Spirk was mimeographed zines and conventions, and Destiel is interactive websites and social media, then Buffy should be credited as pioneered popular internet fandom with forums and self-made archives. Not saying no one did it before Buffy, but I think it has to be one of if not the first fandoms/ships that really attracted a broader swath of people who might never have wanted to attend a convention or cared about ‘genre’ television before.
For younger fans, speaking as someone who used to read books about HTML in the library during lunch, so she could go home and work on her dorky fansites back before Buffy aired, it was not the cool kid pastime it is today. I was regarded as something between a level 20 nerd and a wizard. I wish both were actually true.
But anyway, is that fair to say? Anyone disagree? I feel like I never know enough about fandom, so I can’t say enough that I appreciate being corrected.
Now, coming back to the question of Spuffy versus Destiel… Honestly, I didn’t even consider the length of the show run, and now I can’t dismiss that. BtVS had 144 episodes over 7 seasons. As of April 12, Supernatural will have run 282 episodes and Thirteen seasons. I’m kind of amazed how close to perfectly double that is.
Sherlock, if you consider episode numbers, changes everything. Right this second, Johnlock has 56,783 fics on AO3, and Destiel has 72,089. That’s REAL close for such a big gap in original canon content. Just to make life easy, let’s assume every episode of Supernatural runs a full 45 minutes without commercials or 12,690 total minutes of canon content. Sherlock runs 90 minutes, and there are 13 episodes, so 1,170 minutes of canon content. This is bullshit math on many levels, I know, but just for a simple comparison, that means there are 5.7 Destiel fics per minute of their show versus 48.5 Johnlock fics per minute. On AO3 alone!
Again, warning for junk math, but with 52,354 fics currently on AO3 (it’s the third-ranked ship on those AO3 stats, btw, right after Destiel and Johnlock), the Sterek ratio is 698 fics per minute of screentime. I don’t have the energy to adjust the Johnlock and Destiel ratios to only include their screentime, nor would I even know where to start, but I doubt it’s that high. Destiel and Johnlock both spend far more time together than a mere 75 minutes. But I don’t know a single Sterek shipper, as passionate as we are, who would ever call it the “biggest ship.”
THAT makes me think of my other major Ship, Stony or Captain America/Iron Man, which is ranked #8 on AO3 at a current 22,719 fics. I can’t even begin to guess how many thousands upon thousands of comics they’ve appeared in together, and how many thousands upon thousands of comics they’ve appeared in separately. Their ratio would be so tiny even Ant-Man would be like “I don’t see it.”
And I’m still focusing on AO3 fics, which is questionable in and of itself. What about fanart? What about meta? Cosplay? Viewership of all those episodes or readership of those comics? Or, as you said, fanvids! Shit, the vidding and bootlegging done long before YouTube that we’ll never see…
I think all I did was confuse myself, really, and probably bore a lot of people talking to myself, but this is a really fun puzzle to think about, and I may have blown off the last few hours of work to think about it. Whoops…
YOU MATHED FOR ME! *excitedly flails in your direction*
THIS is why I love fandom meta! Even if it’s something we know we can never put a figure to, we will give it our best shot. WOW, that must have been a lot of work. Breaking down fics per ship by minutes of screen time? Dayum! Even if it is ‘junk math’ as you say, it’s fun to parse these things back and forth.
It was doubly a treat for me that you responded so enthusiastically to my small meta cause I’m such a fan of your blog. I liken it to the old style newsletters and digests that were common back in the day. A centralized location for fanwork recs and notices, which I feel is sorely lacking on this site. Probably due to Tumblr’s lack of ability to create community owned blogs.
Of course these types of blogs are massive undertakings so anyone who even tries should be seriously applauded. So thank you for all the work you do here! I know many of us really appreciate it.
It made me wonder about some of the old BtVS newsletters I used to follow and I found the SU_Herald is STILL ACTIVE! With tons of posts and links and my mind is totally blown. What I thought was a dormant fandom, is still very much alive!
This whole interaction has made me look back at how my fandom experience shaped me as a person, the lasting friendships I made, my world view in many ways. No matter how much anyone might try, they’d never be able to put a metric on that. Thanks for taking this walk down memory lane with me. :D
Whoa… that is so incredibly sweet of you to say. I’m a little overwhelmed, honestly. Your kind words mean a lot to me, thank you! And dude, I will flail down memory lane any time 😄
I know what you mean about how formative fandom is, and I love how you put that: “No matter how much anyone might try, they’d never be able to put a metric on that.” So true. Hell, I literally met my (still) best friend roleplaying on a smutty HP LiveJournal over 12 years ago. Got on a plane to visit a total stranger, because we both pretended to be wizards online, lol.
Also WHOA, I cannot believe SU_Herald is still going! My mind is blown. I think this means I’m gonna have to do a Buffy-themed Fic Rec Friday soon!
Ok, ok. I’m not going to write another novel-length post. I’m sure nobody needs that. But again, thank you!!!
I’m not sure that there ever were any Buffy fanzines, outside of maybe a few one-shots. I seem to recall somenone selling print copies of their fanfic on Ebay or something? It caused a big kerfuffle because Buffy fandom was full of newbies who had no idea print zines were even a thing. Fan fiction started moving to the internet in the 90s. When I got into online BtVS fandom in 2001, fanfic was just moving from being published on email mailing lists to being published on Livejournal and various web archives. Before that, it had been mainly found on Usenet. Web archives were generally either an archive for a specific mailing list, or the personal site of a particular author. There were also some curated sites, like All About Spike, Better Buffy Fics, Shrift’s Buffy Fiction Archive, and so on. They might be devoted to a particular character or pairing, or just general fiction. (And then there were huge multifandom archives like FF.net.)
The zines I was involved in were for a different fandom, (Elfquest) and by the time I clocked out of the zine game around 2003ish, my writing group was about the only one in that fandom still putting out a paper zine. All the other groups had gone virtual years before. In the heyday of EQ fandom back in the 80s and early 90s, there was an official fan club magazine that came out… quarterly, I think? It was advertised in the comic, and then all the various local fan clubs would advertise their fanzines in the official zine. So you’d peruse the list of fan clubs and the descriptions of their zines, and if one looked interesting you’d write them and send your ten bucks or whatever, and they’d mail you the zine. Most clubs had yearly subscriptions which would entitle you to four zines and the right to create one or more characters in the club setting. I believe this was actually a fairly unusual setup in that the creators of the comic were actively promoting fan fiction.
Other pre-internet fandoms I got zines for, like Doctor Who and Star Trek, if you put together a zine you could take boxes of them around to SF conventions and sell them in the dealer’s room, or you could advertise them in APAs (amateur press associations) devoted specifically to zines – basically, every month all the members of the APA would mail the coordinator of the APA like, thirty copies of their list o’ zines. The coordinator would collate all the contributions for the month, and then mail them out to all the members, with maybe an editorial or something attached.
You can see why the advent of the internet killed print zines – although the final product is very nice, producing one is an expensive pain in the ass. Most zine editors were lucky to break even.
Fanzine production continued well into the mid 2000s and they are still being produced in small quantities. You can read about the history here. .https://fanlore.org/wiki/Fanzines
@transcendental-is-em My circle of Star Trek friends, then as now, yearned for a world without racial or any other type of prejudice. The vision of a united Earth, and of a Starfleet where men, women and aliens all worked side-by-side, and each individual was valued and promoted for their abilities – not gender or race – was a weekly refuge from the awfulness of the world we were living in, from the ugliness that was tearing apart the county and our heightened fear of nuclear war. It was a vision of hope that honestly was necessary to our sanity sometimes. We wanted so badly to live in the world that Star Trek showed us every week.
The murder of Dr. King in April of 1968 was both devastating and terrifying; we feared for the future of civil rights. We feared civil war in our country. So when in November of that same year, the kiss between Kirk and Uhura was shown on TV, it was a very big deal! It was deeply controversial, and not just in the South – although many places in the south were vocal about banning Star Trek because of it.
I can remember it being discussed on the radio and at work, and
how in my not-southern town, many people reacted with anger and disgust. For my friends and I, it felt incredibly brave, and we were tearful with pride that OUR SHOW would dare to go there. As often happened when we watched a new Trek episode, our commitment to fighting for civil rights was invigorated.
These days, Plato’s Stepchildren is not one of my favorite episodes. I squirm at how the Enterprise crew are forced to act against their will, at the violation of it. I regret that thatwas the story line that showed the first interracial kiss. But I remember the emotional impact it had at the time, and I value the episode within its historical context.
You didn’t ask about this, but I think anyone who reads my blog already knows what a fan I am of the Culber/Stamets kiss. I’m proud that Star Trek, 49 years after Plato’s Stepchildren, is still daring to show a vision of a world that you and I want to live in.
I’m reblogging this because I forgot to mention the important fact that until just one year before Plato’s Stepchildren aired it was against the law in nearly 1/3 of the United States for a Black person to be married to a white person. Or date a white person. Or live with a white person. Or have a sexual relationship with a white person.
During the whole first year that Star Trek was on the air, there was a battle going through the courts that ended in the Supreme Court forcing the south to end it’s “anti-miscegenation” laws. And the south was not happy. So when Plato’s Stepchildren aired, it was tapping into a very raw nerve of the times.
Pre-internet era: You walk into a room and sit down at a table. Someone brings you a turkey sandwich, a bag of potato chips, and a soda. Perhaps you are a vegetarian, or gluten-free. Doesn’t matter; you get a turkey sandwich, a bag of potato chips, and a soda.
Usenet era: You walk into a room and sit down to your turkey sandwich, a bag of potato chips, and a soda. Someone tells you that over at the University they are also serving BLTs, pizza, coffee, and beer.
Web 1.0 (aka The Great Schism): You walk into a room. The room is lined with 50 unmarked doors. Someone tells you, “We have enough food to feed you and a hundred more…but we’ve scattered it behind these fifty doors. Good luck!”
Web 2.0 (present): You walk into a room. Someone points at the buffet and says, “Enjoy!” You turn to see a 100-foot-long buffet table, piled high with every kind of food imaginable. To be fair, some of the food is durian, head cheese, and chilled monkey brains, but that’s cool, some people are into those…and trust me, they are even more psyched to be here than you are.
remember, i told you that i found an advisor to mentor me as i write my thesis on fanficiton? so, i’m gathering the source material, giving him the main subjects i could explore, stuff like that, you know?
and i’m sitting here, with my tumblr open at the ‘fan studies’ tag and going through it because it’s my object of study and i’m so overwhelmed by it, to the point i’m on the verge of tears???
sounds stupid as fuck, but listen, i’m going to study fanfiction.
i repeat: i’m going to studyfanfiction.
and maybe you’re reading it and going: so what? many people do, it’s not that special.
but it is.
it is to me.
listen, i’ve spent the last 13 years of my life reading fanfiction just because i love it. i’ve put so much energy reading, writing and participating in fandom, making friends, making maybe enemies too (it’s part of fandom life y’all), i’ve loved, i’ve cried, i’ve fallen in love, i’ve fallen out of love, i’ve been furious to the point i ranted with tears down my face (looking at marvel and the fucking nazi steven storyline).
shit, i’ve felt so many emotions and i’ve gone through so many experiences and so many times, when non-fandom people, learned about this immense part of my life, they’d look down at it and not get it. not even understand what drove me into it in the first place. most of people believe it’s a waste of time and energy and…well, if you’re a fangirl, you know what i’m talking about.
but now i’m studying it. now it seems like all those things i lived serve me for a tangible thing now - not that it didn’t before, it’s just that now seems to be legitimate in a way. like for everyone who questioned me about it, i can say ‘well, that stupid thing? got me another bachelor degree, bitch’ and if i’m lucky enough maybe a masters and a doctorate too.
so, it’s exhilarating as fuck, to be sitting here, bringing my world into real life as a object of my research instead of using it to escape another research that doesn’t speak to me in a spiritual level like this one does.
shit, i’m offering a piece of my soul to the academic world to see
if that isn’t the most rad thing i’ve ever done, not sure what will be
One of our longstanding volunteers has had to bow out of The Media Fandom Oral History Project. During her years, she transcribed dozens of interviews with early women of fandom. So we’re looking for a few more fans interested in transcribing audio interviews. They run around 1 hr each and you can work at your own pace.
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
I recently bought three Stingray fanzines from Dr. Beth and can recommend her if you’re looking to buy. I’m probably gonna re-sell them eventually after reading them a bunch of times more, because it would be a shame if they gathered dust. Those are some seriously good stories in there. That kind of fic is not in style right now - gen plotfic that could double as an episode - but it has always been my favorite kind of fic, and those fanzines are a goldmine for those.
I’ve always wondered about copyright issues on these. Do authors still have any kind of copyright? Because if not, I can’t understand why these things aren’t being scanned and preserved online. There was a mega- fanzine archive of fantastic Star Wars fics online that died out before the prequels could rejuvenate it, and it was such a damn pity. But indont think it would happen now that the Net has grown so large.
There are several layers to the question of copyrights in connection with fanzines. The first applies to all special collections that are working on historical preservation. US law has a fluid definition of fair use that many universities and archives believe gives them latitude to digitize for preservation purposes. One example is UCLA, which undertook a project to digitize early Mexican music stored on 78 RPM records. Because these recordings were often made in pop-up studios with uncredited artists, the copyrights and ownership could never be resolved. UCLA decided that fair use allowed them to digitize , as long as they kept access to the collection limited for educational and research purposes. Fair use has allowed additional preservation projects to be undertaken across the US even when the identities and owners of the underlying copyrights are known (ex The HaithiTrust project or the Rusty Hevelin fanzine digitization project at University of Iowa). TAMU has taken the extra step of reaching out to fanzine publishers because they want this to be a fandom history project that has support from the community. When it comes to broader distribution, however, there is less consensus as to whether fair use can extend that far. As for your second question, whether the fan creators have a copyright in their works, that is a much more complex question. Putting aside the argument that fanworks are transformative works vs the underlying copyrights are still owned by the studios , if the work was published prior to 1989 without a very specifically formatted copyright notification, the fanworks may now be in the public domain. After 1989, all works are considered automatically copyrighted even if they don’t contain the notice. Complicating matters of course is that this is specific to the USA …copyright laws are much different in other countries. So you can understand why digitization with public distribution is daunting. Several fanzine publishers have digitized their publications and are posting them online. The biggest one to date is Scotpress, which is a Star Trek fanzine publisher based in Scotland.
Ship Sunday: Yuri Katsuki/Victor Nikiforov (commonly referred to as Victuuri) is a canon slash ship from Yuri!!! on Ice. Please add your favorite fanwork recs, tropes, and history of this ship by clicking the image.
