May 2018

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webwych:

Celebrating a Bank Holiday weekend in suitable British fashion by having a clear out and look what I found in my loft …

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Early 2000′s Internet Fandom Gothic

nkjemisin:

marthawells:

irisbleufic:

saeto15:

actuallyclintbarton:

shithowdy:

  • Someone has been leaving increasingly bizarre messages on your guestbook.
  • You get a favorite on one of your drawings featuring a character’s death. You go to thank them, but have second thoughts when you see their page consists only of a bloated gallery of faves that are all about that one character dying.
  • Just who else is a sock puppet of that BNF?
  • Your favorite fansite still hasn’t come back from hiatus. Rumors swirl on the forums of a different site that the webmistress died, the broken banner on her splash page her online epitaph.
  • You swear you’ve read this songfic set to My Immortal before, but it’s the most recent submission. You couldn’t have. 
  • Your computer doesn’t support Japanese characters but that doesn’t stop you from trying to navigate your fandom’s doujin circles. You somehow stumble onto a page dedicated to lovingly-rendered anatomical dissections of every character.
  • Your favorite fanfiction is getting progressively weirder and more incoherent with every update. You hope the author is okay.
  • You get the feeling you shared this positive fanart of a female character with the wrong crowd.
  • There’s a new batch of icons posted on one of your LJ communities! None of them are loading. Everybody else is commenting on them; why are you the only one who can’t see them?
  • You make a new friend on a forum, and you exchange AIM handles. After a few days of chatting, she begins to tell you about her experiences in something called “the Astral Plane”.
  • This video is taking an eternity to buffer. 
  • DxHxR citrus, PWP, H/C, NC, CBT, WS, M/M, M/M/M, WAFF ^_^ WIP please R&R!!!
  • As you finally turn out the light and close your eyes to go to sleep, you swear you can hear it coming from outside: the dial-up noise.

I think the best part about this is it’s not even really meme-ified, this was LITERALLY what fandom was like.

That’s exactly what I was going to say. People who didn’t experience this probably think it sounds bizarre. No, that’s basically what it was like. Early internet fandom was a strange place.

If this era didn’t kill you, it only made you stronger.

Need to add the one about people emailing you to complain that the fanfic archive hasn’t been updated in THREE WHOLE DAYS and you need to tell the writers to get off their lazy butts and get back to work.

BAHAHAHAHA this was exactly what it was like.

The Nineties were worse.

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a comprehensive guide to mlm shipping habits in transformative fandom

freedom-of-fanfic:

yourshipisfine:

freedom-of-fanfic:

freedom-of-fanfic:

anonymous said:

Ok, this is going to be a controversial one, but her me out: do you think it’s a bit weird that so many women in the fandom (most of them straight or bi) only show interest in mlm ships? I know on a personal level everybody has their reasons and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with liking mlm in any sense, but for so many women to only relate to relationships where they aren’t represented is a bit… weird. Not to mention knee-jerk reactions to any mlf pairing 🤔

This is far from a controversial question. People have been mystified that transformative fandom - primarily made up of women* - is ‘only’ interested in mlm for as long as transformative fandom has been a recognized phenomenon.

A caveat for the terminology in this post: as society at large tends to forget/ignore/reject the gender spectrum and transgender people, ‘male/men’ = characters referred to with male pronouns in canon and ‘female/women’ = characters referred to with female pronouns. (NB/agender/genderqueer people don’t come up, unfortunately.)

So first let me point out that transformative fandom is not only on AO3/tumblr. AO3 stats in particular give a very skewed idea of what fandom focuses on. Both ff.net and wattpad - fanfic archives which dwarf AO3 - have far higher ratios of m/f (to m/m) fic than mlm-focused AO3: ff.net is about 50/50 and has more genfic (no pairings) while wattpad features lots of m/f fic, often in the form of (male)character/(female)reader stories.

In other words, Fanworks are NOT mostly mlm; it’s just likely that we tend to notice m/m more than m/f because m/f is the ‘default’ - unmarked, and thus overlooked.

secondly, while you’ve lumped straight and bisexual women together in your ask, if you separate straight and bisexual fandom participants you get an interesting picture in regards to the typical ‘straight women are the biggest m/m fans’ common wisdom:

Now with those caveats out of the way … why is mlm popular in a space that is primarily dominated by women**? I honestly don’t think this can be truly quantified. the reasons vary from person to person too greatly. But there’s a lot of theories and a lot of anecdotal evidence for those theories. Here’s some of them, in no particular order:

  • it’s male privilege (sexism/misogyny). 
    • Male privilege: Male societal privilege and and bias feeds into media bias. media is heavily male-dominated (more male characters, usually played by cis men where actors are called for, with more central/leading roles and more screentime). Even conversations between female characters tend to focus on the male characters. The media bias then itself contributes back to societal bias - and fandom bias - towards seeing men/male characters as more interesting, more dynamic, and more varied than women/female characters.
    • Flip side: societal bias towards men leads directly to a relative lack of interest in women/female characters. they have less screentime, less interaction with one another, and are less centralized by the plot. Their stories are more likely to revolve around a male character in the cast. And when they do get the same treatment as male characters, audiences are very hard on them.
  • it’s simply a function of statistics. the overrepresentation of male characters compared to female characters has a natural consequence. If you do the math, that exponentially increases the odds of a mlm ship being fanned over compared to an m/f or wlw ship.
  • in addition to having more roles, relationships between masc characters are often where the emotional heart of a story lies. people tend to ping on that in and create fan content for it.
  • it’s because fanworks are a function of wish fulfillment, taking various forms:
    • straight women, being sexually attracted to men, consume mlm (nsfw) fanworks for the same reason straight men might consume wlw porn: double the eye candy. (the fact that straight women are actually less likely to consume or create mlm fanfic than non-straight women suggests this may not be as prevalent as often assumed.)
    • non-straight characters are still incredibly uncommon in mass media; transformative fandom, which is mostly non-straight, creates their own representation (perhaps with bias towards the characters with more emotional connection in canon.)
    • non-straight relationships are even less common than non-straight characters, and are unlikely to get much canon focus if they do exist. fandom fills this gap. (conversely, m/f pairings are far more likely to receive canon fulfillment and canon focus, so there’s less need to create fan content for it.)
  • (white cis) male bodies are both more common in (western) mass media and ‘unmarked’. like m/f pairings, white cis males are perceived as ‘default’ due to white/cis/male privilege. If racism, transphobia, and sexism weren’t enough on their own to increase content about pairings between characters of that description, that privilege also means that fictional characters of this description are the least likely to be seen as needing protection by policing elements in fandom, increasing the free rein on content creation. thus: fandom produces more mlm fanworks despite being fannish over m/f and f/f ships as well, which increases content obscurity, which increases free rein, which increases content creation, etc.
  • relatedly: women’s stories/sexuality is too fraught. male privilege/internalized misogyny leads directly to women’s stories and afab bodies being politicized.   some afab people have hangups about fictional representations of themselves in nsfw content, being uncomfortable with portrayals of people like themselves in fiction, and even sickened by depictions of pleasure experienced by bodies with vaginas (particularly in f/f works). mlm stories create enough distance for women to enjoy it without distraction by concerns of misogyny or fear of something hitting too close to home in the experience (and cis mlm nsfw content in particular provides a safe space for afab people who are bothered by depictions of afab pleasure for whatever reason). 
  • it’s an outlet for afab people discovering they are not straight or not cis. they may still identify as a ‘cishet woman’, but they are consuming mlm works because it resonates with a part of them that they haven’t consciously recognized.

In conclusion: at first glance it might seem weird that fandom seems to spend a lot of time on mlm, but this is both not entirely true and (where it is true) there are many, many reasons for it.

I’ve spent 8 hours compiling links and piecing together this post now so that you can have a comprehensive guide to the reasons that parts of fandom seem to be dominated by mlm stories, so I’m going to wrap up now. For more fanwork statistics, try these links:

For more analysis on why mlm is popular (and wlw not so much), try these links:

and this essay briefly sums up the migration of online transformative fandom over the last 15 years or so, giving context to AO3 fic stats.

One final note: the comparative prevalence of mlm to wlw would suggest that male privilege and bias is primary motivation for its popularity, but wlw was not always so scarce as it seems to be now. Just as you might expect, shows with a mostly-female cast had massive amounts of wlw content: sailor moon, utena, etc. But there’s reason to believe that purity culture has stifled wlw popularity, and that’s a damn shame.

*The largest fandom demographic survey from a reputable source (that I am aware of) was based on AO3 users, advertised primarily via Tumblr, and analyzed by @centrumlumina​ in 2013. I’m pulling my stats from this survey, but be aware it has significant limitations.

**in my personal experience, many of those in fandom who identify as women are cis women, but also many of those in fandom who do not identify as women are afab/were socialized as a woman before identifying differently. However, I don’t currently have survey data to back this up.

wow, tumblr completely fucked up the points on this post. it’s been edited now; if you reblogged this, please check the original post again! ( @shironeedshisspace @apples-and-pie )

“Ok, this is going to be a controversial one, but her me out: do you think it’s a bit weird that so many women in the fandom (most of them straight or bi) only show interest in mlm ships?”

It’s 2017 and people are still going ‘but WHY do women like slash? It’s so weird! We need an explanation!’

This discussion has been going since before AO3 was even in a glint in Astolat’s et al eye.

Fanlore has an interesting article on Why Slash? with some of the meta going back to the late 90s. I’m sure that meta writers from the 1980s wrote ‘but why slash?’ in fanzines, and that there was Why Slash meta on Usenet.

One thing that bothers me about the Why Slash? question and how it keeps popping up is the following:

Why is it never the other way around?

How much has been written about why straight guys like girl-on-girl porn? How many people go ‘Wow, it’s so weird that straight guys like girl-on-girl porn, it would make much more sense for them to be into guy-on-girl porn! Why should they be into relationships where they aren’t represented?’

No, we just accept that a lot straight guys who like watching porn are likely to be into girl-on-girl porn. We accept that a lot of straight guys find the idea of a girl kissing another girl to be hot.

So, next time anyone’s wondering about why women like slash, do yourself a favour and a) use google and fanlore and fanhistory to find the shitloads of meta that has been written about it already and b) wonder why you care so much.

(Also, if you feel that everyone hates M/F ships and is only into M/M, consider that MAYBE that has to do with the fandoms you hang out in and your own fandom friends! There are plenty of fandoms that are dominated by M/F fics, and indeed fandoms dominated by F/F fics.)

More good points.

Here’s the thing: I went through the trouble of spending 8 hours compiling links and explaining reasons for this because this question and phenomenon is well-documented … and there’s danger we’ll forget the answers that already exist.

We’re currently seeing a trend towards calling women/afab fans of fictional mlm ‘fujoshi’ as an insult. saying they’re ‘fetishizing mlm’. complaints that they want it ‘too heteronormative’ (echoing m/f dynamics). that it’s purely misogynistic self-hate and compulsive heterosexuality that’s driving the interest. That they want to punish gay men with darkfic about them. That it’s purely masturbatipn material (and that’s bad). That mlm fandom is harmful to both real mlm and the women who consume it.

These are severe, self-flogging misrepresentations of fandom mlm and this post was written to act as a counterpoint to the nasty things that are being said about non-male mlm fans.

I do want this post spread. I want people to know. I want them to see the major mlm fanwork talking points of just 4 years ago, in 2013, and use them as a reference point, as the voices of those above rise in pitch and volume.

You’re allowed to like fictional mlm even if you are not mlm yourself, and your reasons are your own.

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How was squick used? Like would you tag something you didn't want to see or comment "X is my squick because of Y"?

olderthannetfic:

thesaltofcarthage:

ghostcat3000:

ibroketuesday:

#the beauty of squick was that it offered no moral judgement#merely a statement of personal taste#and let you estate when something just wasn’t your cup of tea#without having to justify it#plenty of things squick me out in fic which are absolutely not triggers#but now there’s a real culture of having to justify not liking stuff on a moral basis (via clarias)

the culture of justifying dislike on an ideological/moral basis in part one: chapter one of my novel, Let Me Show You My Issues With Tumblr Fandom. the requirement for ideological purity has become so impossibly strict, and is valued so highly, that tearing the thing you dislike from an ideological standpoint is the quickest way to shut it down. it’s a cheap, disingenuous shortcut that exploits social justice language for personal leverage. it’s not like we were free of wankery and ship wars back in ye olde lj days, god, far from it, but at least the insults we flung at each other were subjective: A is so bad for B and if you can’t see that you’re an idiot!!! B/C OTP!!! (i should also disclaim that we did have moral policing as well, it was just FAR less extensive.) leveraging social justice concepts is an attempt to gain a kind of objective superiority. “they’re a dark ship and i don’t like that” holds little power; “they’re abusive and you support abuse by shipping this” is a trump card to shut down the content you don’t like and the people who fan it. that kind of rhetoric is all over the damn place and it continues to be propagated because it works and it has created a culture from which a variety of problems like the trigger issue explained above consistently arise. 

…i would go into further chapters on my novel but i am tired now

laylainalaska:

ibroketuesday:

desert-neon:

For the original ask, requesting the definition of squick, please see this post.

Squick is a fun term that was often used as both a noun and a verb. Either X was one of your squicks, or X squicked you, or squicked you out, or squicked you hard.

It was often used in fic exchanges. They would ask for a list of your squicks so that the gifting author would know not to include any hint of them. It was also used in casual conversation with fandom friends, authors, artists, etc. It could be left in comments, or as a reason you just didn’t read your best fandom friend’s latest fic. “Sorry, bff, you know I love your writing, but you have X tagged at the top, and that just squicks me out.” “Hey, no worries, best reader friend! I totally get it. Give this one a pass, but I’ll send you a note when I post my next one! I promise it will be totally X-free!”

Here’s the thing though. In your example, you explain why X is your squick with Y. But the beauty of squick was that (at least in my experience) no explanation was necessary. Not only was it not necessary, it was rarely asked for. A squick is a squick, and there doesn’t have to be any rhyme or reason. In fact, why would you have a rational, bullet-pointed, well-thought-out argument as to why something squicked you out? Very often it’s a visceral reaction, and if you don’t like the thing, you’re likely not going to sit and do deep meditation on why not.

Squicks were respected by fandom. You don’t like the thing, okay, we will tag the thing appropriately, you do not have to read the thing, no judgments on either side. There was no fandom policing, only respect.

And this, I think, is super important, because fandom policing is a problem, especially when it comes to triggers. “Trigger” has become so overused, so all-encompassing, that people feel they have to defend their legitimate triggers. If X triggers you, it triggers you, and you DO NOT need to provide an explanation. But because “trigger” is so often used in place of “squick,” some people feel they have the right to “call out” those who use the word. They want explanations, they want you to tell them what that triggering concept does to you, so they can call bullshit and feel superior. You don’t have to explain either your squicks or your triggers, but using the correct word stops the fandom police from feeling as though they have the right to ask.

Bring “squick” back, people. Don’t devalue triggers, which are horrible, nasty, dangerous things.

#the beauty of squick was that it offered no moral judgement#merely a statement of personal taste#and let you estate when something just wasn’t your cup of tea#without having to justify it#plenty of things squick me out in fic which are absolutely not triggers#but now there’s a real culture of having to justify not liking stuff on a moral basis (via clarias)

the culture of justifying dislike on an ideological/moral basis in part one: chapter one of my novel, Let Me Show You My Issues With Tumblr Fandom. the requirement for ideological purity has become so impossibly strict, and is valued so highly, that tearing the thing you dislike from an ideological standpoint is the quickest way to shut it down. it’s a cheap, disingenuous shortcut that exploits social justice language for personal leverage. it’s not like we were free of wankery and ship wars back in ye olde lj days, god, far from it, but at least the insults we flung at each other were subjective: A is so bad for B and if you can’t see that you’re an idiot!!! B/C OTP!!! (i should also disclaim that we did have moral policing as well, it was just FAR less extensive.) leveraging social justice concepts is an attempt to gain a kind of objective superiority. “they’re a dark ship and i don’t like that” holds little power; “they’re abusive and you support abuse by shipping this” is a trump card to shut down the content you don’t like and the people who fan it. that kind of rhetoric is all over the damn place and it continues to be propagated because it works and it has created a culture from which a variety of problems like the trigger issue explained above consistently arise. 

…i would go into further chapters on my novel but i am tired now

…

I can’t really think of any other words we have for the same concept that aren’t judgmental to some extent. Anything I can think of to try to define “squick” using non-slangy words (disgusting, unpleasant, etc) have a judgy sort of vibe. And we really do need a word to talk about tropes and kinks in the same kind of way we can talk about how you like that ship and I like this ship but that doesn’t make your ship bad.

(Er, ideally we’d be able to talk about ships that way, obviously, in a perfect world … XD)

I was also thinking about how the original ask implies a very modern fannish mindset that’s just … not there, in the original fandom milieu that the squick concept came out of. Not that I’m saying fandom was better in the old days or anything, god no. But trying to explain why you have a squick, or asking someone else why they have theirs, is just not a thing you’d generally do. Squicks are irrational; that’s baked into the meaning of the word. Squicks aren’t something you explain. They just are. I mean, you could obviously try to figure it out, just like you can try to figure out why you have a particular kink, but in both cases, you don’t have to explain or justify it in order for other people to accept it as valid. I don’t need to explain that I like h/c for X and Y reasons in order to request it in an exchange. And squick functions the same way.

All of which makes it a very useful word for talking about fandom concepts without implying that someone else’s tastes make them a bad person!

I think the thing I love most about the term squick is that it’s not meant to be judgmental to either party. It’s a respectful acknowledgement of non-negotiable dislikes. It doesn’t question why someone likes things anymore than it questions why someone doesn’t like the same thing. It’s not about quality. It says, simply: some of my preferences aren’t discourse-fodder, they are what they are and don’t need to be explained. I hope you can respect that.

If you recommend a fic that has a non-canon pet death* in it and I tell you, I don’t like that because I think it’s manipulative or maybe I don’t think the writer can write the scenario believably etc… then we’re having a discussion. If I tell you I’m squicked by pet death in fics, then we’re not having a discussion. I shouldn’t have to explain to you why I’m squicked by non-canon pet death in fic. Saying that’s my squick is enough.

By that same token, I don’t need to know why you love something that squicks me, though I understand the impulse to want to justify that love. It’s natural to think: I love this and I want to tell you about it. And this is why we have tumblrs, no? To share our loves. But it’s important to keep in mind that it’s personal to the person who is squicked and has nothing to do with you or your taste. It’s not about you at all.

If you want to write or read about something but it’s my squick, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t, just that it’s not for me–this shouldn’t be a deterrent to creating fanwork or enjoying it. There are plenty of other fanworks out there that we can discuss that don’t come close to being squick.


*This is just a random example, not an actual squick or an actual fic.

and since I didn’t see this mentioned anywhere: So far as I know, the etymology of squick is “things that make you SQUirm and go ICK.” 

That’s one theory of the etymology, but it could also be a back-formation. The word was popularized as onomatopoeia for skullfucking. (Yes, I know, ew. Thanks, alt.tasteless!)

If this etymology is correct, then the original usage, aside from skullfucking, is something like ‘stuff that pokes you in the brain in a bad way’.

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In the 1990s a brave group of Star Wars fans decided to ignore Lucasfilm’s ban on same sex fan fiction, and began publishing Han/Luke fiction. Some of the most beautiful writing and art came from the publisher of the Elusive Lover fanzine series. The zines were hard to get (published in Europe). Some of the fic ended up in the Elusive Lover fanfic archive online, but that website too went offline.

The publisher is now working with Open Doors to import the online fic to AO3. And today, her package of the original fanzine print masters arrived. We will be scanning them and the scans - and the originals - will be donated to the two main fanzine special collections in the US: University of Iowa (originals) and Texas A&M University (scans)

(links go to Fanlore, the fan run wiki about media fandom history)

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Fanfiction resources- Help!

b-ellatores:

I’ve been asked to help with a seminar about fanfic at a university, and I know  a lot of you must know some great resources, can anyone add to my list?

This is what I have so far, I’ve grouped them roughly by topic- (I’m assuming that the seminar is going to come from a ‘has heard of fanfiction but doesn’t know a lot about it’ angle)

The history of fanfiction/the legitimacy of fanfiction/hasn’t fanfiction been around forever?

Helpful terms/what is shipping?

Academic resources

Fanfiction and sex [explicit], demographics of fanfiction authors

Places to publish/read fic/that support transformative works/challenges to get you started

Resources/tips for fanfic writers

Podfic

Miscellaneous

Why write fanfic? What are the benefits? (I would love if anyone is willing to share their experiences, either here or by sending them to me and I’ll send them to the person giving the class anonymously)

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Dear Diary: What is it with Star Trek creators and strippers?

From Gene Roddenberry’s original pitch for Star Trek: TOS

https://web.archive.org/web/20160320054948/http://www.laurajsweeney.com/ST-PhilesIssueOneRoddenberrysOrginalStoryConcept%20_NEW.pdf

“The Captain’s Yeoman. With a strip-queen figure even a uniform can’t hide, "Colt” serves as the Captain’s secretary, reporter, bookkeeper – with surprising efficiency. She undoubtedly dreams of serving Robert April [Kirk’s name in the proposal] with equal efficiency in more personal departments.“

From the original pitch for Star Trek: TNG in 1987, printed in an issue of Comlink, and other places:

Captain Julian Piccard – a caucasian man in his fifties who is very youthful and in prime physical condition. Born in Paris, his Gallic accent appears only when deep emotions are triggered. He is definitely a romantic and believes strongly in concepts like honor and duty. 
Number One (aka William Ryker) – 30-35 years old caucasian born in Alaska. Number One, as he is usually called, is second-in-command of the Enterprise and has a very strong, solid relationship with the Captain. 
Lt. Commander Data – He is an android who has the appearance of a man in his mid-30s. Data should have exotic features.  
Lt. Macha Hernandez – 26-year old woman of unspecified Latin descent who serves as the ship’s security chief. Macha has an almost obsessive devotion to protecting the ship and its crew and treats Capt Picard and Number One as if they were saints. 
Lt. Deanna Troi – An alien woman who is tall, about 30 years old and quite beautiful. She serves as the starship’s Chief Psychologist. She and Number One are romantically involved.  
Wesley Crusher – An appealing 15-year old caucasian boy. His remarkable mind and photographic memory make it seem likely for him to become, at 15, a Starfleet acting-ensign. Otherwise, he is a normal teenager. 
Beverly Crusher – Wesley’s 35-year old mother. She serves as the Chief Medical Officer. If it were not for her intelligence, personality, and beauty, and the fact that she has the natural walk of a striptease queen, Capt Picard might not have agreed to her request that Wesley observe bridge activities, therefore letting her son’s intelligence carry events further. 
Lt. Geordi LaForge – a 20-25-year old black man, blind from birth. With the help of a special prosthetic device he wears, his vision far surpassed anything the human eye can see. Although young, he is quite mature and best friends with Data.

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I would like to know how some things shown on Star Trek work. Could you send me details on the schematics of the ship, and computers. I would like to build some things that were used on the Enterprise. I am very good at electronics and I think it would be cool to build some of those things.

From “

All About Star Trek Fan Clubs #5″ (1977) on Fanlore

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Old Fanfic Tropes

ironborealis:

When you’ve been reading fanfic as long as I have (as in, before that hive of scum and villany that is fanfiction.net), you’ve seen some shit. 

I write this not to shit on those days – because I wrote these fics, I read these fics, I. LOVED. THESE. FICS.  Every generation thinks they invented the wheel or whatever, but man, I just want to reminisce with you all for awhile, so sit down and listen.

Here are some old tropes I remember:

1.  High School Musical! Performance:  Not that Disney TV shit – Naw kid, we’re going to drag out Les Miserables and Phantom of the Opera and maybe if they’re heathens it’s Beauty and The Beast. Then there are those artsy wankers who dust off their LP of Chess: The Musical.   Are the characters putting on a show to save the theater or little Timmy from the well?  No.  The reasons they are going through this hell are unimportant – the important part is forcing your OTP into roles that will make them discover their ~*~*~FEELINGS~*~*~ for one another.  Your OTP isn’t hetero? No problem.  Introducing Harry Potter as Cossette, Draco Malfoy as Marius, and you damn well skippy better believe that Sirius is Jean Valjean and Snape as Javert.  Because why not shove in some additional UST while you’re at it?  

2. Ice Skating!AU:  This is a special AU that seems to occur only in Winter Olympic Years.  Two people who hate the fuck out of each other are now pairs skaters fighting. for. the. gold.  Lots of lifts, intense music, touching, and eventually love.

Oddly enough, there doesn’t seem to ever be any Summer Olympic equivalent – even though most of the athletes are way less covered.  Ice dancing / skating is easy, I get it, you can describe passionate dancing –

but picture this – synchronized diving!AU.  Your favs in tight speedos, learning to be ~*~*~ONE~*~*~ with each other as they fall off a diving platform. Or shit, make male rhythmic gymnastics a thing. Or, you know, watch some Olympic wrestling.  So much just left there on the table to rot as we wait for winter.

3.  Strawberry Kisses by Jack Off Jill:  it was a thing, I can’t even really explain it, but your fanfic fandom was ~*~*~NOT~*~*~ complete until someone wrote a songfic involving self-harm referencing Strawberry Kisses by Jack Off Jill. 

Back in the day there’s no YouTube for you to look up the artist and actually listen to it – naw, if you’re incredibly lucky, the web page might autoplay a midi on loop for you to enjoy while you read.  Ahh the joys of listening to your computer basically play a recorder.  You’re pretty much left to guess what the song actually sounds like unless you go out, find the album, and actually listen to it –

Which I finally did as I wrote this – turns out, song’s not Strawberry Kisses but Strawberry Gashes.  Strawberry Kisses seems to involve a preteen girl and lots of old-school CGI that probably looked state of the art back in the day.  I’ve been mandela’d. 

4.  Mpreg fics AKA the precursor to all this Alpha/Omega Dom/Sub stuff that is au currant or whatever.   No one bothered to explain the biology – no world-building, no societal castes.  Just two pretty boys makin the sex (or infamously ugly boys) and accidentally getting pregnant.  Swear to god no one knew men could get pregnant until that ONE boy did, and then suddenly everyone else remembered that ~*~*~oH YeAAaHHh~*~*~ that’s a thing that happens sometimes.  Insert angst, handwave delivery, et voila cute baby and your OTP playing happy families.

5.  The Say Anything AU AKA Let Me Explain My Feelings To You In A Song; Not One That I Wrote, But One That I Will Play You A Recording Of Now:  Your OTPs are going through a rough time.  One of them is inevitably bad at communication.  They will sit their love down in a room, and say “Please listen to this song, it explains how I feel” – this may or may not be literal here.  Cue the author’s favorite song, with the lyrics written in italics, and the lover immediately understands, they kiss, they maybe sex, and end scene.

Now, again, you’re running into the Strawberry Kisses / Gashes problem here, where unless the audience knows the song, they’ve got no clue what is going on.  So generally, you’re running into your typical angsty songs of the last ten years.  

Which is fine, when your fandom is set in present times.  But Kira Nerys rocking out to Elton John on Deep Space Nine?  Don’t get me wrong, I love me some Elton John, I’ve seen him in concert with a series of Windows 98 screensavers behind him and ate it right up – but Candle In The Wind is no Beethoven’s Fifth my dudes.

So there you have it, a short, terribly incomplete, history of fanfic tropes pre 2010s.  Thank you.

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“You Are Receiving This Zine Because...”

zinedom:

In science fiction fanzines in the ‘50s and ‘60s, it wasn’t uncommon for small zines to come with a loose sheet of paper headed, You are receiving this zine because.

At first, the reasons were basic (“You tribbed,” “You typed,” “You edited,” “You traded your zine for it”). Gradually the list of possibilities grew sillier, containing many in-jokes and shout outs to specific fans or fannish memories. (x)

An example from the Star Trek TOS fanzine Out of Bounds headed “I Bought This Zine Because” included the options:

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king0fcrows:

I love reading entries on Fanlore.

I particularly like the entries “The Three Laws of Fandom” and “The Three Generations of Fanfic” (which has a quote from the Tumblr user madmaudlingoes that refers to the age before livejournal and fanfic.net (the later of which she refers to as “the pit of voles”) as The Great Schism. Her post is dramatic, funny, and knowledgeable.)

They’re really, really interesting. They are excellent in learning about the long history of fandom, it’s cyclical nature, and discovering there are terms/names for existing phenomena you’ve experienced but didn’t know had names.

But they also make me really nostalgic and kind of sad? But also kind of blasé?

Like, I remember me from 10 years ago. I never would have thought about seeing the death of sites like livejournal and fanfic.net, yet their times are long past. And now, I’m waiting for something new to surpass tumblr, especially since there seems to be an overall increasing dissatisfaction with the site as a fandom hub, but no better alternatives (as of yet).

And this disillusionment makes me feel jaded, like I’m dreaming of some kind of “golden age” that never really existed. Hell, my golden age was probably closer to early Tumblr. When it came to fanfic.net and livejournal, I was really on the fringes of those anyway.

(Probably because I never even really used my LJ account to search out individual authors, I just lurked around the communities. So there was always lots of fic but not any real personal connection to it. No real emotion experiences with other fans. It makes me feel like I missed out–and continue to miss out–on a sense of community livejournal provided that tumblr never did. But rationally I know that’s probably more my style of fangirling to blame than anything else. I’ve just always been more of a lurker than anything. Not because I’m shy, just because I don’t think I have anything original/interesting to really say.)

It also makes me feels strange to know that some would consider me an “old fan” for being almost 25, when there are fans twice my age alive and kicking.

And I love them for being kicking, since a good chunk of my fav writers and artist seem to be a good deal older than me. If they weren’t kicking I’d be out of some of my favorite works!

It’s comforting too. As I get older, I’m naturally seeking to interact with people closer to my own age–especially with the sudden unpleasant surge in the sentiment that fandom is somehow only for teens–and seeking to reaffirm there’s a space for me.

(And I want people to know the above two paragraphs are in no way a slam against younger content creators! Great creators come in all ages! It’s not even really about the actual fan content being made, it’s more about the actual experiences of being in fandom/online. I’m just in a very different place emotionally from someone 19/20–much less minors, who I don’t feel super comfortable knowingly following anymore, considering my age and blog content–and even the most awesome art in the world can’t really change that.)

I guess reading the fanlore pages reminds me I’m far from the first to experience this sensation of alienation from fandom, longing to reconnect to a different (in this case older) side of it.

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The Year is 1993....

“The first time I read about slash was quite awhile before that, in an old New Yorker article about Roberta Rogow. It briefly mentioned slash and the possibilities for B7 (the reigning passion of my life then as now) immediately leapt to mind. But I was so…innocent…ignorant…that the idea of fanzines for B7 didn’t. I had no idea there were so many other people hooked on this obscure (so I thought) series. Then, in rapid succession, I read Bacon-Smith’s article in the New York Times (by then several years old), and one of Penley’s essays, and e-mail entered my life (a white knight in armor fashioned of e-shaped links. Never mind). I signed onto Strek-L. Somebody mentioned K/S…and B/A. When I regained consciousness, I posted a request for addresses (I’d already written to Datazine because of Penley’s bibliography but received no answer). Several people answered. I mailed out my weight in SASEs. The first shipments of contraband arrived in December: Fire and Ice, Before and After, a few Resistances. I almost called into work the next day. …..

So, I owe it all to e-mail, academics, and people who were willing to share information with me although we’d never met. I would never have found fandom, let alone slash, without them. Of course…I’d have a lot more money now if it wasn’t for them… “

Source: Fanlore’s  Thank You to Acafans and Academic Fan Studies!

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From my chat with a journalist: part 1

spockslash:

Dee interview transcript, Jan. 24, 2018

[What is your very first memory of Star Trek? Was it love at first sight, or did it take you some time to get “into” it?]

I started out in science fiction, before Star Trek was ever on the air. And in 1966, I was living in Oregon and was part of a women’s writing group, a women’s science fiction group. We were all writing, wanting to write. Some of the members of our group had written professionally, and some were trying to get scripts into Hollywood and so on, but we were all focused on writing. Science fiction in the 1960s was not considered the purview of women.

When Star Trek came out, I imagine [my science fiction club] was how I first heard about it, because I didn’t watch a lot of TV. I had this little black-and-white, eight-inch screen with the bunny ears.

I don’t know why the first episode that aired [The Man Trap] is so disliked, because my memory of it was of just being fascinated. Science fiction … on TV was considered for children. And this was not for children. These were well-developed characters, real plots that you could get into, you could imagine their plight, Bones had a love interest. And there was this Vulcan, who was just a member of this rest of the crew. It was startling, and I was absolutely riveted from that very first day. I had my science fiction club where we would go and talk about it.

[Did your sci-fi group watch?]

We all watched it; we were all excited that something was coming out on TV. Everyone was married, had kids, it was hard to get away to meet, so we would get on the phone and one person would call another and they would call another and this phone chain would go around talking about the episode. I wouldn’t say it totally evolved into a Star Trek fanclub, but pretty close, and we were all fascinated by The Vulcan, by the fact that there was this character that was an alien but serving with a human crew. It almost turned into a Vulcan appreciation sci-fi group, and speculating about what would an alien species be like, working with humans, is what caught our attention.

And by the second year, one member got a color TV and — oh it was a very big deal. In the beginning, we didn’t know that the crew had different colored shirts, or that shirts were related to what job they had on the ship. I remember an early story I wrote where all their shirts were green.

So she had a color TV and we started all watching at her house. And there were a lot of machinations that had to happen because everyone had families, everyone had kids. So one week we’d start planning for the next week. Who’s going take care of the kids, we need a babysitter. We need to collect money to pay the babysitter, and what are we going to do with our husbands? And we didn’t have access to our own money. We couldn’t get money out of our bank accounts without our husbands’ permission, so I remember looking under cushions to get change so that we could send our husbands out to go bowling or something so we could watch and not be disturbed.

It was so exciting. And to see the episodes where Kirk says “She’s a crewman” and where Uhura is working in “Who Mourns for Adonis?” under her communications panel and the way Spock talks to her [“I can think no one better equipped to handle it, Miss Uhura.”]. I can’t tell you. We were just electrified, because that was not the world we were living in, and that was the world we wanted to live in.

What was it like to be a female Star Trek fan in the 1960s with children:

“So [my friend] had a color TV and we started all watching at her house. And there were a lot of machinations that had to happen because everyone had families, everyone had kids. So one week we’d start planning for the next week. Who’s going take care of the kids, we need a babysitter. We need to collect money to pay the babysitter, and what are we going to do with our husbands? And we didn’t have access to our own money. We couldn’t get money out of our bank accounts without our husbands’ permission, so I remember looking under cushions to get change so that we could send our husbands out to go bowling or something so we could watch and not be disturbed. “

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The Post Awful

zinedom:

Fans had a love/hate relationship to the postal service. On one hand, it brought all sort of goodies like fanzines to the mailbox. On the other hand, despite the fact it provided a valuable service and often very well, fans frequently derided the very organization that provided their main method of communication. (x)

“So many zines got lost in the mail if sent via 3rd class mail. People didn’t necessarily want to pay extra for 1st class. 4th class (book rate) was pretty reliable, but back then it could be iffy because if a zine was numbered, if the post office did an inspection it would categorize a zine as a periodical, not a book. In that case it could not go via 4th class. 3rd class was for packages and was most frequently used, but it was very slow and not reliable. Packages could take anywhere from two weeks to a month - or longer - to be delivered.” - catalenamara, (x).

Much like current fans referring to ffn.net as “the pit” and tumblr as a “hellsite,” pre-internet fans referred to the postal service with many derogatory nicknames like “The Pest Office/Post Awful/Post Offal/U.S. Snail/Postal Disservice/U.S. Maul/CENSORED!” (x)

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@everyone

interropunct:

hey if you’ve seen posts talking about “old school” fandom (whatever that may mean for a specific post) and/or comparing past fandom practices with current fandom practices I’d REALLY appreciate if you sent it my way! I’m writing a paper on the changing attitudes in fandom (turning towards social justice, joking about “surviving” old fan practices, other trends) and I could really use your help!!

reblogs appreciated as well!

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How long do you think it took for people to decide which direction the k/s portmanteau should go

olderthannetfic:

meeedeee:

What do you mean by deciding “which direction the k/s portmanteau should go”?

As in, why did people collectively settle on the boring ‘spirk’ instead of the far more hilarious ‘kock’ or ‘spork’?

You’d probably have to search k/s-related tumblr posts from around the time the reboot movies started, I suppose.

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An open Tumblr letter to younger fans, from a 77-year-old TOS fangirl

spockslash:

* 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 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. “

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fanfichasruinedmylife:

So I’ve been seeing posts about people reporting AO3 to the FBI

First, let me laugh at you. I know people who have to look at horrible, hideous images all day long just so they can catch a very small percentage of the child pornographers out there today. Reading a story on AO3? Completely a waste of their time. Because regardless of how disgusting that fic might be, no children are actually being harmed, and that’s the core of what theses agents care about.

But let’s say this complaint reaches some upper echelon bureaucrat who got kicked upstairs because he was screwing up too many cases. (Sadly, this happens.) He takes it on as a crusade, and because no one at the Bureau cares so long as he’s not messing with any real investigations, AO3 gets taken down.

What will we be left with then, I wonder?

LJ? Nope. We’d always be fearing another event like Strikethrough.

Fanfiction.net? Nope. We’d always be fearing another Purge.

Dreamwidth? Nope. Nothing against Dreamwidth, but for some reason, it hasn’t caught on as a Fandom Home. Maybe because it was too much like LJ for too many people, and that brought back painful memories.

Tumblr? Maybe a little bit. But eventually someone here will complain about the lack of tagging and warning on certain fics and that will go away too.

A new site like AO3? Nope. Why in Fandom’s name would anyone put in the kind of time and money a site like that would require after seeing what happened to AO3?

Individual sites for individual authors? Yeah. I think we’d be looking at that. Only this time they’re all going to be gateposted with those lovely messages that we all loved so much back in the day: “You must send me an email swearing that you are 18 before I’ll send you the link for the actual fics.” You know, the ones that didn’t actually keep kids from reading porn, but covered the site owner’s ass so they felt somewhat safe about posting their fic.

Yeah, this is exactly what I can see happening. A return to the days when you needed your own web site in order to write and post fic. And you had to wait at least a day before you could take a chance that you might like somebody else’s fic.

What’s that line from Santayana? Those who can not remember the past are condemned to repeat it?

Like I said above, I doubt that any of this could ever truly happen. But if it does, we might be in for a major wake-up call, George Santayana style.

●

So the time has come to find a home for some of the many works of  fan art that I have been lucky enough to acquire (or been gifted) over the years. This one is my favorite and we have “the” (or perhaps “an” original). We’re mulling over the various university special collections trying to decide which one would actually display it.

Info about the artist

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I saw a comment about people *recommending fic* like “that would be so incredible” but then dismissed it like it was a Herculean task and I just…“recommending” fic used to be a fundamental fandom activity. Rec culture was a big part of the mid-ground between “creator” and “lurker” imho: it helped develop relationships, get creators’ work out there (& hold it out there longer than 5 minutes), and foster discussions.  It was a HUGE part of fandom pre-tumblr.

linzee (2018)

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ech0winchester:

I wonder what the first spn fanfic was.

I wonder what the first spn AU was, and what inspired it.

I wonder what the first episode was where people realized Dean and Cass had chemestry.

I wonder what was the first spn crack video.

I wonder how much footage there is of the first spn convention.

Honestly, I think about these things a LOT and it bothers me that I don’t know…

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How long do you think it took for people to decide which direction the k/s portmanteau should go

What do you mean by deciding “which direction the k/s portmanteau should go”?

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Fandom mom, give me wisdom. I can’t imagine a future in which I continue to be involved in fandom but also put enough effort into my real life to be happy with it. How do you manage it?

There is no one true path to being a fan. You are a fan the moment you turn on the TV or open a book  and fall in love with the story and characters. You are “involved in fandom” even if you don’t participate or produce  or contribute. You will be a fan until the day you die (sorry to bust anyone’s bubble there, there is no escape).

In the past few years I’ve spoken with fandom grandmas who, at some point in time, have wandered away from being “in fandom” to deal with real life…but they always say the same thing: the love they have for fandom and the people remains.

If the question is how to be “active” in fandom when real life is dragging you out the door…well, active means many things. Sometimes just occasionally following a fandom tumblr is enough.   I have had to reinvent my fandom self several times due to life’s realities (disability being the latest one). I cannot  keep up with all the TV shows or movies, but I can watch a few on Netflix, wander online for a few hours and “be part” of fandom life.  On healthier days I work on fandom history projects - mainly because they are self-paced with no deadlines. And on the bad days, I spend time thinking about fandom. The key is adjusting your expectations of what is is to be “involved in fandom” and then being kind and patient with yourself. 

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Watching young (ostensibly liberal) bloggers and fans take up the deeply conservative rhetoric and moral crusading of the right wing and evangelical groups from the 90s has been both fascinating from an anthropological perspective, and fucking horrifying for someone who lived through this time period and the death of LJ.

centaurianthropology

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A fan contacted us and asked for help donating her fanzines to a Special Collections. We picked them up, boxed them for her and now they are on their way to a farm where they will be able to run and play with all the other zines. Sniff.

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Letterzines

zinedom:

Letterzines were non-fiction zines that allowed discussion and chat among groups of fans in the days before email and mailing lists. These zines printed “letters of comment” (called LOCs) from subscribers so they could carry out meta discussions, conversations, and even flame wars, as well as news about the source text and the fan community. 

It was standard practice for many letterzines to include a Topic of the Month in each issue, to focus discussion in the next issue. Publication might be monthly, bimonthly, or quarterly…

When the latest issue of a letterzine arrived, the deadline for the next issue was weeks (or months) away. There was time to read, reread, digest all the letters and topics raised, discuss them with fan friends, and then sit down to pen or type a response for the next issue. Writing LoCs was a more involved process then, with no way to make corrections easily, to revise, edit, cut and paste quotes, etc., as is possible on a computer and with email. Even the mechanics of submitting LoCs—addressing and stamping envelopes, taking them to the mailbox or post office—required more than simply hitting “send.” As a result, fans generally wrote when they felt they had something significant to say. And, although letterzines certainly have had their share of heated debates, disagreements, and even feuds (such is human nature, within fandom or without), the publication deadlines allowed everyone more time for reflection and exercise of temperance before responding to a volatile issue.

- K. Langley, quoted on fanlore.org

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nooneknowiblogthis:

I’ve gotta say, as someone old enough to remember how many rules there were around being an active part of the Dragonriders of Pern fandom, it’s surreal seeing people posting Pern crossover fics with gay pairings in them.

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alia-andreth:

I would take a harder stance on Problematic ™ fanfic and fanart if I wasn’t old enough to remember Strikethrough, when people declared stuff to be problematic and deleted it off LiveJournal pretty much at will. Or if I didn’t ship an unpopular het pairing (BuckyNat) that often gets slammed for being homophobic because it’s a rival to a popular slash pairing (Stucky).

The thing is, when you start cracking down on the bad stuff, the good stuff tends to go with it, and you wind up with fan communities so sanitized that they basically die out because nothing interesting can get written.

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alia-andreth:

Sometimes the younger generation of fans sets my teeth on edge.

Yeah, fandom produces some messed-up shit and when you first see it, you think, “people shouldn’t be allowed to write this. It’s gross.” But how you deal with that is by not interacting with the gross stuff. In the 2000s this was frequenting communities that specialized in a certain kind of content that you wanted. Now it means unfollowing, blocking, using the filters on AO3, tagging things properly, and using the warning. Not by trying to get this stuff (provided that no real people are being hurt) ejected from the internet.

I remember a time when writing same-sex pairings was controversial. Not incest pairings, not adult/child, not even necessarily smut, just writing characters who were of the same gender and in a relationship. Heck, sometimes writing m/f pairings provoked moral outrage if it was graphic. “Ship and let ship” was how you got by because depending on your fandom (certainly mine–the Tolkien fandom) you could get hate if you wrote a man kissing another man.

When we say, “ship and let ship” it’s not because we all want to write parent-child omega-verse slavery au incest and we’re playing the victim by hiding behind the Purity Police boogeyman. We’re doing that because we remember that in 2007 in an effort to crack down on child p/orn, LiveJournal started suspending user’s accounts without their knowledge. Fan communities were particularly hard hit, people fled the site, and that is why I’m writing this now on Tumblr and not LiveJournal. Point is, even those who weren’t writing squicky material were affected and the community died as a result.