was fanfic any different in the Olden Days
OH BOY AND HOW. So I am not So Much Of An Old that I was around when print zines were the thing. I got into fanfic-type fandom through the internet. But here are some changes from the late 90s to today:
- In slash fandom, there were a lot fewer main characters written as expressly queer. There was a lot of (in retrospect) very teeth grindingly annoying “We’re not gay we just love each other” type romances.
- Fic was mostly distributed via mailing lists (email), not by web archives, although some mailing lists also would web archive their stuff. People tended to be more monofannish because you would just participate in the list — people are more multifannish now because we follow specific people through their blogs and get introduced to their other interests, but this didn’t happen as much back in the day. People were definitely still multifannish, though. I’ve always fandom hopped.
- The aesthetic was very different. A lot of older fanfic reads in ways that were more influenced by profic romance novels, whereas modern fanfic has sort of its own, more realist style. (TBH there are also a lot more realistic/pomo style romance novels these days as well.) The stuff from the early 2000s, in comparison to 90s and earlier fic, and in comparison to modern fic, tended to be more experimental stylistically. Overall, fic tended to be longer, but also more uniformly long. There weren’t really many of those 200k monsters either.
- Not a lot of postmodern type fic conceits (i.e. stuff like the one where steve and bucky watch all the movies made about captain america while steve was in the ice, or SGA fic told through excerpts from academic papers, etc.) Early 2000s fandom went through this weird magical realism phase, also.
- In our headers, we used to measure story length in file-size, not in word length. I think this change came about in the early 2000s.
- Real Person Fic was like, not even discussed. It had its own mailing list where we kept basically all of it, and you didn’t mention it in polite company. Then suddenly in 2000-2001 all these legitimate people got into NSync fic. But before that, it was pretty taboo in a lot of fannish circles.
has anyone worked on an archive of fic zines, physical or digital? I’ve never even seen one (a fic zine) and it just seems so like, culturally important and also I would probably end up with a special interest in pre-00s fic zines if given the opportunity
A lot of zinefic is now up at AO3, the K/S Archive, the Starsky & Hutch archive, the Professionals fic archive etc.
But if you want to see zine fic in its original format, go to Fanlore which has a listing of most of the print fanzines made by media fans from the 1960s to present. You will find summaries, covers, sample art, and sometimes contemporaneous reviews. Here is the basic zine entry on Fanlore and then search under the fandom tag. Ex: http://fanlore.org/wiki/Category:Star_Trek_TOS_Zines
Displaying the entire zine raises other issues. There is a digitization effort underway at TAMU - (see the Sandy Hereld Memorial Digitized Fanzine Collection). For legal reasons the zines can only be accessed onsite, but they are hoping to be able to offer 10-15 complete zines online down the road (with publisher/artist/author permission).
And finally, physical copies of fanzines can be found in various special collections across the US - most of which are open to the public. The OTW’s Fan Culture Preservation Project has partnered with Iowa to assist fans in donating their fanzines to be preserved for later generations (Open Doors is the same group that helps import fic archives to the AO3).