I’m not exactly new to fandom.
But I’m not an ancient either. A lot of fandom debates, I’ve noticed, are made a lot more complete and a lot less polarized with the addition of actual context–but from what I’ve seen, unless we’ve lived through said context, most of us just don’t know it exists. For example, I came into fandom shortly after LJ stopped being a big hub, so I never knew about the strikethroughs and boldthroughs until very, very recently. Knowing about them paints things like ao3 in a whole new light. History is important.
First of all, I’ve done some searching in the hopes of finding a relatively centralized thing with an overview of general fandom history. The closest I could find was a couple fanlore pages on the history of specific fandoms. If somebody *does* have a centralized something, that would be wonderful and it would also be super cool if it could be copied somewhere visible for newer fans, in the interest of spreading our history and culture. I would be happy to help edit it if you want?
If not, I would be glad to help compile something, but again: I don’t have the full story.
If anybody would be willing to help me with this project, whether by talking about the old days or pointing me to existing resources, or volunteering to help write stuff up, please, *please* message me
I understand that research like this can be a lot of work, but your contribution doesn’t have to be much. I can find literally nothing, for the most part, beyond the basic Sherlock, Star Trek, and Tolkien founders of fandom story, and certainly nothing about modern fandom as a whole. Even a brief sentence telling me what events specifically to google would help.
History is important.
I want to learn about our history, and I want to enable other people to do so too.
Ooh, a brief history of all fandom everywhere! That should go well! ;D
I joke. I joke.
Basically, I would lay it out like this:
In the 19thC, there arose some very popular novels with super invested fans. People who study media and fan behavior are interested in these (gothic novels, sensation novels, Dickens, etc.). Sherlock Holmes is a major milestone for public drama like wearing armbands when he died. Later, Holmes pastiche becomes one of the more visible modern fanfic precursors. Academics and Holmes fans care about this stuff. It’s not necessarily where I would start a “How we got AO3″ history post.
In the early 20thC, you have the roots of literary SF fandom (called “fandom” by the Worldcon crowd).
Star Trek airs in the 60s. It splits SF fandom into intellectuals who like books and dirty fujos who like TV shows. (Okay, okay, nobody called them that then, but it was the standard man=intellectual, woman=vagina stuff.) “Media Fandom” splits off from “SF Fandom”. Media Fandom doesn’t just mean dirty Kirk/Spock fanfic zines, but it’s the start of the sort of Grand History Of Fandom Everywhere that we retell now on Tumblr or AO3.
In the 1970s, Starsky & Hutch (a 100% mainstream cop show with no sff) puts the final touches on the Media Fandom/SF Fandom split.
In the 1980s, cheap photocopying becomes a thing. Zines proliferate, and you can have small fandom zines. Slash really comes into its own because it’s easier to make a niche, controversial zine.
In the 1990s, people get online. Usenet, and then mailing lists are full of fanfic and all kinds of fandoms, large and small. Gatekeeping and content controls quickly go out the window. All hail the weird porn!
Fanfiction.net gets big. It bans porn. Ye Olde K/S type fandom runs off to Livejournal for the 00s. Fan studies picks up in a major way.
LJ fucks up a lot, fanfic gets more mainstream, and OTW gets founded. Lots of us wander over to tumblr.
That’s the basic history of “fandom” if you mean K/S zine–>Destiel fic on AO3.
The big pieces that fans commonly complain are left out or underrepresented on fanlore and in this kind of fandom history article are:
- US-centric, English-language anime fandom (Got big online in the 90s and thereafter, stayed on FFN more, also used Media Miner, took a while to get on AO3)
- European and Latin American anime fandom (earlier than US, more older stuff available, some big, non-English archives for anime fic and/or other fic)
- Fanworks in Japan/China/Korea
- Other country-specific fandom histories, like Karl May fandom in Germany (which may or may not be fanfic fandoms per se)
- Music RPF, starting with professional Mary Sue/band guy stories in magazines in… the 60s? (Not my area) Popslash in the 90s leading into LOTR and later SPN popping a lot of people’s RPF cherries.
- Other types of entry points from which people joined “mainstream” fandom (e.g. Quizilla, Twilight fandom being off on its own doing its own thing)
- Femslash history! There just isn’t much in ye olde zines. It’s not because slashers are meanies and are obscuring the history. We’ve looked and there isn’t much to be found until we get to Xena, patron saint of sexual awakenings in the 90s. (Woof!) Femslash fans were often doing their own thing on specialist archives, and the canons that are good for f/f (at least in live action Western media) aren’t necessarily what’s big for m/m or m/f, so it’s easy for this history to get overlooked in generalist articles.
- Fan art history, fanvid/amv/etc. history, other fanworks history
I don’t think Tolkien is that important to a broad understanding of AO3-ish fanfiction history. LOTR was a big fandom when those movies came out, and Tolkien getting rediscovered in the 60s is important to SF fandom history, but overall, the impact of Tolkien’s works on fanfiction isn’t that big.
Holmes’ importance depends on whether you’re an academic and how strict you’re being about your definitions. Holmes fandom at large is very interesting but also kind of its own beast. Do all those decades of pastiches count as “fic” in a posted-to-AO3 sense? Sherlock fandom, now, that’s a different story, but I still wouldn’t say it’s a trendsetter or seminal turning point amongst fanfic fandoms. It’s just a very, very big one that’s still very relevant on tumblr right now.
I think it’s more helpful to think of fandom history as a big river with different tributaries feeding into it, some of which branch off and come back again. That’s if we’re talking about the history of AO3-ish stuff.
If we’re taking an academic view, then all kinds of broadly similar fan activities become relevant, but many of them don’t belong in a genealogy of AO3-ish fanfic.
I was in online anime fandom since around 2001 and remember Media Miner. A lot of anime fans cross posted there so their work wouldn’t be lost during the occasional FFN sweeps of deleting adult works. These were based solely on reports, and, while a lot of deleted fics were breaking the rules… some that were targeted weren’t. I recall quite a few writers up-rating their stories just in case during this time. There was a particularly bad purge in the Inuyasha section around 2003-04 (can’t remember exact dates) in which several popular ongoing works were deleted without warning, so those readers and writers moved to follow their favs. Since Media Miner allowed G-thru-Explicit ratings, a writer could host all their fics there. It was a much more practical solution than spliting your works between FFN and AdultFFN. I feel like this might be the reason certain anime fandoms took a while to move onto AO3. Media Miner served that purpose… until around 2010, when the mods stopped maintaining the site and formatting became a nightmare. That’s about the time I stopped using the site myself and drifted over to AO3.
Oh yeah. MM was big for a while. Until the site became completely broken, I still sometimes got a comment on my old Rurouni Kenshin fic.
I think the switch to AO3 was partly that and partly had to wait till there were some big, popular, post-AO3 anime. Old fandoms don’t move easily, but when a new fandom is just starting up, it will often go to a newer platform.