July 2018

Fanlore Featured Article

otw-fanlore:

In the mid 90s, long-time Trekker Joan Marie Verba wrote a comprehensive guide to two decades of Star Trek fan and zine history. Boldly Writing: A Trekker Fan and Zine History, 1967 - 1987 is considered the most thorough guide the fandom had at the time. Share your own memories of Star Trek fandom by editing a Fanlore page today!

Not sure how to become an editor on Fanlore? Check out our wide variety of resources including tutorials or our new visitor portal. If you have any questions, you can also reach out to us directly by using the Ask feature on our Tumblr or email us. Happy editing!

reblog if you had a livejournal

olderthannetfic:

modmerseygirl:

cheynelightning:

sophia-helix:

altri-uccelli:

strangeetudes:

edwardspoonhands:

crazyloststar:

REPRESENT

PSH! #diaryland

Still do. Just about.

I still do but had to friends-lock it. But I miss it a lot. :(((

Haaaaad?

I don’t use it as much now because my friends are all in different fandoms, but if you joined fandom only in the Tumblr/Twitter era YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT YOU ARE MISSING.

1. Threaded comments that don’t have to be replied to with a whole separate post

2. Profile pages so you could find out about a person and also check out their followers to see if you know people in common/find other people into what you’re into

3. Communities for fic, and newsletter communities for fandoms that rounded up daily news (actor stuff, pics, videos, etc)

4. Much better signal to noise ratio (not seeing the same thing 15 times or having to install xkit just to make your dash readable and filter out fandoms you aren’t in)

5. Just a way, way more grounded sense of where and who people are, instead of shouting into a crowded room all the time

This is my third go-around with Tumblr and fandom, and it’s only manageable now because I’m following hardly anyone (sorry guys). I really cannot wait until somebody makes something that combines the ease of image-posting on Tumblr with the actual content of LJ, because I feel like this place encourages you to be silent.

Shhh, don’t make an original text post, no one wants to read that, especially if it’s just about your personal life (which you couldn’t lock/filter anyhow). Shhh, don’t add text to that reblog, just hide your comments down in the tags, where people have to scroll to see them. Shhh, all you can contribute is a picture of an actor that’s probably already been posted with six different edits to the tag. Just reblog, baby.

I love fandom and fans and it makes me so sad, too, to see what’s been my culture for going on 20 years now get eroded and lost. I don’t know where fandom will be in another 20 years but I’m guessing the history of my chunk of it (Usenet, mailing lists, personal websites, LJ) won’t get carried on.

All, all, all of this.  I still have my LJ, have a DW account, too, and use them every day.  TALKING - what is it?  Tumblr is for pretties, LJ is for conversation.

I was on LJ for about fifteen years (the journal I had the longest used the same name as this blog). I miss the days when it was active and I felt so connected. I loved being able to lock my posts down to friends only and pour out my heart. It was an important part of my twenties and thirties. I made some amazing friends there - some of them are on Tumblr, which makes me happy. :)

Tumblr’s chat function (as opposed to asks) has made such a difference to me, but yeah, there were some great things about LJ.

And I also have a dreamwidth

calling all fandom grandmas

elfwreck:

olderthannetfic:

saiyanshewolf:

I’m working on a project for a pretty broad-spectrum ‘women in history’ class, and I’ve decided that the subject of my final project is going to be women in fandom. I’ll narrow that down further as I go along, but I do need some primary sources to work with!

I’d really love to talk with some women in fandom who are old enough to remember mailing lists, dreamwidth/geocities (?) pages, yahoo groups, etc. - basically the period just before LiveJournal, although anyone who remembers the earliest days of LiveJournal would be great too, since I only got into it in the few years before everyone left for tumblr.

Ideally it would be great if I could get in contact with someone who received or even worked on some of the old fanzines from the 60′s/70′s/80′s (ie Vulcanalia, Spockanalia, Bags End Gazette) or anyone who participated in fandom culture pre-internet.

On the off chance that any of those zines have been posted online, please let me know where I can find them!

If you’re cool with chatting for a bit, you can send me an ask here, or contact me on Twitter (queenofsaiyansx), and we can go from there! Obviously any info that I use will be properly cited.

Please reblog this, just to spread it around? Thanks!

Sure thing. There are lots of us on here who were around pre-LJ. Every time somebody reminisces about alt.tv.x-files or other Usenet stuff, half my followers chime in.

There are definitely fans around who contributed to old zines. You might have more luck if you identified specific people and asked if anyone has their contact info. Fanlore is often pretty accurate about who’s still alive. A lot of older zine fandom people are on Facebook. Some are on Tumblr, but I wouldn’t rely on enough just seeing this post.

Are you specifically looking for people who edited letterzines? Gen zines? Any media fandom zine? The older zines that I recall seeing posted online are mostly fic ones and mostly slash at that.

“Old enough to remember mailing lists/Geocities”… heh. Some of us remember when you had to ask for the slash zines behind the table that were only sold to people who already knew to ask for them.

@meeedeee needs to see this. 

I sent them a message via tumblr.

olderthannetfic:

haedonists:

alarajrogers:

roxolotl:

luvuv:

weequaypirates:

tinyrats:

the original reason why people were making fun of “fandom moms” on this site wasnt because theyre misogynistic and hate women in their late 20s-30s its cuz on this site specifically, like this specific platform of blogging and socially interacting with people online, there has been set a precedent of older women quite literally preying on younger children under the guise of guiding and befriending them and using fandom to groom them sexually by sharing inappropriate content and rping with them. like it sucks that there are dumbasses who have warped this beyond repair for the sake of dumb jokes and women can and should be encouraged to pursue their interests without facing inane backlash but thats why people were wary of Fandom Moms for a good like. year on tumblr. thats it

lol let’s not pretend that a really significant number posts about ‘fandom moms’ that are 90% about being repulsed by older (and by older i mean like… 26) women doing innocuous but Embarrassing things with like, some perfunctory reference to actually heinous behavior to justify everything being said about a huge ### of women who are not all necessarily predators just because they like, read erotic fanfiction or whatever

it’s not missing the point or being dumb to point out that it’s necessarily to actually focus on the wrongness of predatory behavior on here because it’s predatory rather than using that as a bad faith pretense to couch petty misogyny, and it doesn’t just incidentally ‘suck’ that oops, apparently using sexual repulsion towards the concept of a woman existing after an arbitrary online cutoff date as a way to convince people that pedophilia is wrong has somehow, totally independent of anyone’s intentions, turned into counterproductive misogyny that doesnt actually protect anyone or deal with the actual issue

like just because the original reason had a good intention doesn’t mean it’s derailing or irrelevant or insidious to criticize the actual practice

Also acting like random innocuous shit is a red flag for pedophilia is like…. not doing anybody a favor. You’ll get already traumatized kids feeling further isolated because they think random adults are out to get them, adult child abuse survivors being portrayed as predatory for engaging in fandom, and it’s not going to make anything safer for anybody. If anything it could further obfuscate actual predatory behavior, which absolutely happens on here and is not at all a thing of the past btw. So with the extent that ppl on here really seem to be dedicated to defending their right to make and propagate these posts, you’d think that there would actually be a positive effect to them, but no. Like, I’d see the point if these posts actually pointed out abuse tactics or anything, but they’re literally just lists of traits that people find laughable in women once they’re over 18.

Yup thank you. I made a post about this that got popular and I think people are assuming I’m in favor of adults acting inappropriate around minors. As someone who has had adults act inappropriately around me when I was a minor, both online and irl, of course I think adults should watch how they interact with those who are underage. I just think “adults who try to roleplay smut with minors are creepy” and “adult women who like to wear pigtails are creepy” are two completely different statements

I think also context is necessary.

- on the Internet, no one knows you’re a kid unless you say so

- what qualifies as “roleplaying smut” may vary from person to person

I was once chiming in on an RP thread, in character. A person playing a character who’s canonically an enemy of the protagonists had made a threat toward the protagonists. I was playing a chaotic neutral kind of character who considers the protagonists to be their property and therefore no one else is allowed to hurt them. This character is also sarcastic and flippant. I made a comment about the enemy character needing to back off before I had to spank them.

I literally meant this in the context of “you are being bad and I will have to punish you”, said in character. It never occurred to me that anyone would take it as intended sexually until someone PM’d me to say the person playing the enemy character is a minor and was made very uncomfortable by the comment.

OK… the RP blog did not state in its about that the owner of the blog was a minor, and I had had no sexual intent behind the comment whatsoever, and part of me kind of felt like, if you are going to RP online as adult characters, you’re going to get comments that make you uncomfortable and honestly maybe you need to stick to RP’ing only with people you know rather than popping in on a general thread if you’re going to be bothered by such things. But at the same time, I also felt really guilty, because I don’t want to make kids feel like I’m making skeevy sexual comments at their expense… and I felt like I couldn’t continue to take the risk of participating in general RPs with that character, because to be in character, I’d have to say flippant and cruel things and I don’t want kids who haven’t declared themselves to be kids thinking I’m some kind of would-be child molester.

I have a suspicion that a lot of what kids have interpreted as “older women being inappropriately sexual toward teenagers” is actually “older women being used to an environment in fandom where we don’t have to heavily police our own sexuality, and kids not declaring that they are kids, coming into spaces where adults are having a conversation, and expecting adults to cater to them and protect them from sexual implications.” Because I just don’t think there are enough female predators out to groom kids on the Internet to account for what seems to be a large enough phenomenon that people got freaked out about it. What seems far more likely to me is that women in fandom are used to being openly sexual with other members of their fandom (not like “I want you”, more like “I want {hot guy from fandom who is half of favored OTP}”), and this new thing where a. everything is mixed together and there are no boundaries because of the way Tumblr works and b. kids are all over the place but unless you actually go to their blog and read their about you have no way of knowing they are kids has done a lot of damage.

Also, what qualifies as sexual varies between people, judging from the number of antis who seem to have genuinely not known that “pee your pants” references the omorashi kink, as well as my experience above (I mean… yes, I knew spanking can be a kink, but in context it was supposed to be a flippant threat to harm the enemy character, not a sexually harassing comment.)

Thank you. This is a highly valuable addition, because it clarifies some things hidden or twisted by the miasma of disinformation and hyperbole that fandom is marinating in right now. I’ve been in fandoms since the year 1999, when I was eleven years old. You’d expect that I’d have seen ample proof with my own eyes, if fandom were as filled with dangerous women trying to prey on minors as some corners of Tumblr would have people think.

But no – in twenty years, I directly ran into two women who turned out to be grooming children through the net (and in both cases, alarms kept going off in my head, so I stayed clear). What was going on (and what the Tumblr-addled Twit Brigade calls ‘predatory’ behavior is… bog-standard fannish behavior, such as:

• adult women talking to each other about their sexual interests (and minors seeing this, on account of minors lying about their age in order to get into adult-majority spaces – I did this and so did nearly every teen of my generation)

• adult women squeeing about fandom faves they find attractive

• adult women writing fic with teenage characters who do more than hold hands (for example, adult anyone writing smut-fic for shounen anime, where the majority of the casts are in their teens – literally, if you’d told me ten years ago that we’d have a mass of people screaming at other fans for writing smut-fic of shounen anime, I’d have crossed myself and told you to lay off the damn drugs)

• as in the example above, adult women taking part in roleplay where some parties have lied about their age / didn’t disclose their age and left the group to assume ‘over 18′. I have to stress how ubiquitous it was (and likely still is) for people to make accounts with fake ages, in order to get around age-gates and into various communities. For my part, I never lied about my age for the sake of roleplay (too much of a risk of causing trouble for the other people, just because I was impatient to hit majority) and got around the risk of other people lying by only roleplaying with trusted friends / only roleplaying in moderated communities, where anyone found to be lying about their age was summarily booted.
  

Is there a chance that there are women who genuinely go after very young users online / are trying to groom and sexually abuse said users, through fandom? There’s a chance of that everywhere, not just online. The thing is that

a. the chance is far smaller than a lot of incredibly paranoid ‘see-molesters-everywhere’ people on here would have one believe and

b. they do more harm than good when they muddy the waters by positing standard fannish behavior as a sign of someone being a predator.

We’ve already had examples here on Tumblr, of predators who got close to minors because they specifically wanted to roleplay inappropriate things with said minors – and they gained the minors’ trust by howling from the rooftops against ‘gross women who write fic about anime teenagers, but I’m not like them, I’m a Trustworthy Person.’

That last point is really what it boils down to:

There are creepy people on here. They’re the ones who say: “Trust only me. Everyone else is dangerous.”

And big chunks of fandom validate that bullshit because it comes with a steaming pile of misogyny and hating the correct ships.

European Fans!

fangirl-star:

I don’t know how many websites Article 13 will affect if it comes into place.

I don’t know if it will affect our being able to see works.

But I do know that European creators and their consumers will need a way to publish and view if Article 13 does come into place.

That’s why I have an idea.

Fanzines.

That is how fandoms got their fill of art and fic before the internet was big.

So many shows and franchises had them. Here are examples of just a few:

(I included the Spirk art to give an example of slash fanzines)

We could do this. Fans in Europe could do this. We could gather together. Discuss how it would work. Who would put them together? Who would choose the submitted works? Who would mail the zines? 

It would take a while. It would take hard work. But we could do it. For ourselves, for our friends, for our fellows fans. 

We won’t know the decision until Wednesday.

But it can’t hurt to have a backup plan.

But just because we have a backup plan, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do anything.

Find petitions. Contact MPs. Do whatever you can to stop this from being needed!

All my love to the fandoms,

Ell