Fandom History - Tumblr Posts

People used to comment on web comics.

People used to comment on fanfiction.

People used to comment on fanart.

People used to comment on OCs.

I hate "content" culture.

I hate "consuming content" and scrolling immediately to the next thing.

People used to be excited about the art that other people created.

People used to want to share that excitement with creators.

I hate this future.

I feel like I want to explain to young tumblr users who weren't born yet that MulderxScully was a revolutionary ship. No, it was not queer but that is not the only way to be revolutionary.

In the 90s when The X Files was airing, media was like misogyny soup. Yes, there were exceptions. But casual sexism was so ubiquitous it was like we were all frogs simmering in it and if you dared to say, hey, uh, isn't this joke a little shitty to the wife? Or maybe this female character could do something other than pose and ask questions so the male lead can answer them? Then you were a hairy feminist outcast loser.

Scully was a lot of things but she was not that. All the "You're not going to believe this, Scully!" memes are based on the fact that Mulder, an attractive white dude, wanted nothing more in his entire life than to share his passions with this tiny redhead. Was he nuts? Yes. But on many other shows, he would have talked down to her, would've ignored her, would've mocked her. He didn't.

When you go back and watch The X Files, there's these moments where Mulder and Scully look at each other like, "wait did Jack Black really just say that" and the significance to fan history isn't just the sexual tension. It's that, yeah, and the origin of the word ship, and the 'will-they-won't-they'. But the most important thing about those looks is how they told the audience that Mulder was looking to Scully for something. A man was looking at a woman and asking with his eyes "what do you think about this?" Was he also saying "and do you want to bone about it?" Yeah, yeah he was. But the first thing was sexy as hell.

Respecting a woman's expertise and folding information she provided into his worldview was a revolutionary thing for a man to do on television at the time. Thank you for coming to my MSR ted talk.

Fanfic evolution, history, context, noodling, AUs and the Omegaverse

I've had a lousy few health days and ended up listening to a long, slow-burn, characterisation-rich Omegaverse fanfic in between sleeps. I've wanted to get my head properly around the A/B/O AU concept for ages (I'm feeling my fannish-elder age and thinking a lot about our evolution as a creative community after we got online, about the gamechangers like Buffy, Harry Potter, X-Files, and Supernatural) but never found one that was this much in-character to keep me engaged for the duration of a long read. I've only finished reading smutty shorts before.

I mean, I'm so broad-minded about fictional content that I have trouble fitting my mind inside my actual skull (my joke excuse for chronic migraine!), but I'm basically here to read about the characters I already love being recognisably themselves in some way, even in the most extreme AU setting. I wander off quickly with a 'meh' if that's missing, as I tend to do with original works/characters unless the writing is next-level extraordinary (Wolf Hall, Dresden Files, Titus Groan/Gormenghast, most of Terry Pratchett) and don't have two fucks to rub together about the kink side of fanfiction. I'll read it if it's there in an otherwise engaging piece, but it's never a draw for me.

I'm trying not to get all analytical until I finish hearing/reading this fanfic, but my brain-spider's groping as far back as Kirk/Spock and Amok Time for context and history, here. And I wouldn't say the same about mpreg, which I've tended to view as an evolution of smarm (The Sentinel fandom's 1990s flavour of it in particular) and soft whump, more than of graphic, romantic slash like K/S - yet I thought all this time that mpreg and the Omegaverse shared a common ancestry. Innteresssting.

I had the vague thought as I listened that some of the best AU fanfic I ever consumed came from the Star Wars: TPM/Jedi Apprentice fandom - the Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan pairing stuff on the Master Apprentice mailing list and archive. Soaring AUs and worldbuilding, yet deeply grounded in what little we then knew of those two characters. And there was so little to go on - I mean, Lucas' prequels were, to put it politely, heavily stylised rather than emotionally deep. That fandom had epic AU/AR fics that took my breath away with their character-richness, with their emotional beats, and had me going, "How?!?!" with writerly awe at a time when I was no slouch myself in the writing department. I need to find the energy to get myself up to date with the Disney!Star Wars content explosion and pay another visit.

Can you remember the first femmeslash fanfiction you ever read or heard about back in the day?

Yes! WIth a bit of brain-scraping, yes I can. Both must've been around 1989/1990. Sadly, I don't remember the titles or the authors.

One was Blake's 7 pairing Cally with Jenna, sort of unrequited love/very requited smut. Not quite PWP, but not deep into the plotty side of B7 either. Not particularly explicit by today's AO3 rating standards, but properly raunchy space ladies doing ladies in space.

The other was Doctor Who - Ace and Karra from Survival, with flashbacks to Ace's friend who was burned in the racially-aggravated arson attack (was her name Manisha?) as a framing device. That one was gen- or teen- rated (or would be now - all slash was treated as risque and labelled as adult back then), but had lots of intense teen feels and self-discovery going on.

What I don't remember is where I found them. In print, because everything was at that time. A B7 newsletter for the Cally/Jenna, I'd guess, but I honestly don't remember anything 'shippy at all from a Doctor Who fanzine pre-internet-era.

Very little Doctor Who fanfiction of any kind came my way until the late 90s, well into the Wilderness Years and the New Adventures/Missing Adventures/EDAs, and what little fic there was never focused on character stuff before those novels came along. Lots of Ice Warrior worldbuilding nerdery and endless political Daleks, and nearly exclusively male writers in the zines I had access to - very different from my experience of Star Trek and Blake's 7 fanfiction. So that 'shippy DW piece I remember might've been something a friend/penpal wrote and shared?? Reading room at a con?

So I encountered femmeslash young, but then it was actually quite a while before I encountered any more. Maybe Buffy the Vampire Slayer's early years, my first couple of years online? Before Willow/Tara, definitely.

Happy birthday Castiel. You rocked an awful lot of socks that day.

I didn't watch Supernatural until this year and I spent all that time avoiding plot-significant spoilers like the plague, but two got through to me in real time in my other-fandoms bubble: 15x18 in 2020 when fandom convulsed in agony... and this unbelievably iconic 4x01 entrance back in 2008, when fandom gasped, then squeed its panties off at the smokin' chemistry of this scene. Spot the common denominator. ;)

Few scenes make fandom history all on their own, but this one did. Like... WOW, Supernatural. And this performance did. Like, wow, Misha Collins (and the genuinely-startled-looking Jensen Ackles oozing the "what the fuck?!" vibe of a lifetime!)

16 years ago today Supernatural peaked with the most iconic introduction in the history of television

Happy Sweet Sixteen to Castiel, the only character ever

Happy Birthday Ao3!!

Happy birthday to AO3 🎂🎉

purge of 2002? of 2012? what ARE those?

Oh, how quickly the past is forgotten. 

They are part of the reason A03 is a thing now. Not the whole reason, but part of it. 

The Great Purges of 2002 and 2012 are when ff.net got a wild hair up their ass about THINK OF THE CHILDREN and nuked any fic posted on there that was explicit. Thousands upon thousands of nc-17 smutfics were lost.

It’s what led to the creation of alternate hosting sites for smutty fic…AdultFanfiction was the one I went to…but thousands of fics would never be recovered. 

I fully empathise. I've been reading fic in this fandom for nearly 20 years, but a lot of that time was back on LiveJournal. I just didn't keep rec lists back then! Now so much has been lost to memory and LJ purges and deleted or locked accounts. Once that stopped being the home of fandom, I mostly read on AO3 but didn't actually sign up for an account until 2022, so my bookmarks are very sparse. I could kick myself for not being more diligent about keeping track of my faves.

But like you said, our fandom is absolutely blessed with talent, and also with people who will generously make time to share recommendations when asked, so it's not all lost. 🥰

Also, you're the sweetest and I'm a gooey little puddle over here. 🥹💖🥹

y'all the wincest hyperfixation has got to me again (summer RUINED.) please recommend your favourite ao3 authors 🙏 I can only reread applecrumbledore and candle_beck's whole body of work so many times

Index of Enhanced Edition Con Videos

I'll maintain this index in a pinned post for easy reference. Click the links to go to the YouTube videos, or click here for a more readable Google Docs table which includes these links plus a tab noting which events I skipped, temporarily or permanently, and why.

2007-11-11, Chicago - J2 Breakfast (00:23:42)

2007-11-11, Chicago - Jensen Solo (00:21:55)

2007-11-11, Chicago - Jared Solo (00:29:44)

2007-11-11, Chicago - J2 Main Panel (00:38:24)

2008-07-27, San Diego Comic Con - SPN Panel (00:50:52)

2008-11-16, Chicago - J2 Breakfast (00:26:16)

2008-11-16, Chicago - Jared Solo (00:26:20)

2008-11-16, Chicago - J2 Main Panel (00:35:04)

2008-11-16, Chicago - Jensen Solo (00:34:36)

2009-08-30, Vancouver - J3 Breakfast (00:31:53)

2009-08-30, Vancouver - Jensen Solo (00:27:17)

2009-08-30, Vancouver - J2 Main Panel (00:30:25)

I'm now working on the Breakfast panel from CHICON 2009.

Thank you to everyone who has shown an interest in these videos. The reblogs and likes all made me very happy, and I especially appreciated the kind comments some of you left in your reblog text and tags. I'm unsure of the proper Tumblr way to respond directly to that in a way that won't annoy people, but I've definitely noticed and appreciated it!

An explanation of this project and my tentative plans for it are listed below the break. A lot of it will be familiar if you've read my earlier posts, but it's more detailed -- and excessively long! There's also some info on how you can help, especially if you have any old videos or audio files that you'd be willing to contribute.

Why Do You Call These "Enhanced Editions"?

The videos I'm using are not my own, but I've spent many hours adding enhancements to them. My goal is to make these the most watchable and accessible versions of these older convention panels published to date. Credit and links to the original videos are in the video descriptions. These are the typical enhancements you'll see:

I'm upscaling the videos as best I can. It isn't remotely perfect, but it's a little more watchable than the originals. The videos I'm working with are very low quality by today's standards. and they were also recorded under difficult circumstances. Video taking wasn't permitted at most of the earlier cons, so the people who took them did so at the risk of getting kicked out. They couldn't exactly come waltzing in with a tripod, so the videos are shaky, they don't always have a clear view of the stage, and sometimes they cut off at unfortunate moments. They can be frustrating to watch, but we owe these people a debt of gratitude for capturing this footage because otherwise it would have been lost altogether.

When necessary, I'm correcting colors on the videos to try to make them look more natural and consistent. I'm very inexperienced in this area, and I don't consider it to be one of my strengths, but I'm learning.

The original videos are usually in multiple parts, but I'm editing them together into a single video as cohesively as possible. I may use videos from multiple sources to provide the most complete video possible, and I'll select the ones with the highest video quality and/or the best view of the action available. Sometimes I have to make difficult choices between the video with the best view (meaning a clear view of their actions and/or facial expressions) and the video with the best quality. I usually lean toward the one with the best view in those cases.

I'm adding extra content to help clarify references people make during the panels. The videos I've worked with so far don't take up the full width of a modern video frame, so I've taken advantage of that extra space to display the extra content to the side where it's less obtrusive. There are explanations for obscure references that are way funnier when you understand what they mean, plus episode references to help jog the memory for those of us who haven't rewatched the show a million times. In rare cases where I think it will enhance understanding, I'll insert brief episode clips that highlight what they're talking about.

I'm putting a LOT of time into adding good, color-coded English subtitles that can be turned on and off with YouTube's CC button. These videos can be frustrating to understand because the audience often drowns them out and Jared and Jensen tend to talk at the same time when they're together. I can't always figure everything out, but it's far better than the crazy, auto-generated nonsense that many videos have. YouTube can then translate my English subtitles into other languages, so this may improve accessibility for people who are less comfortable with English. The color-coding helps with telling who's saying what: red for Jared, blue for Jensen, green for the general audience, yellow for the current fan at the microphone, and white for other people such as staff.

If there's missing footage that I can't find anywhere, then if I can find a source that seems to have reliable details about what was discussed, I'll add static images with a brief summary and a link to my source in the video description.

What Conventions Do You Plan to Enhance?

I don't want to make grand promises that I'll enhance videos for every old convention, although I definitely love the idea of doing so. How far I go with this will depend on how much sustained interest there is from other people and how much spare time I have myself. My output speed will probably be erratic depending on what's going on in my life at the time.

My general plan was to start with the oldest conventions and work my way forward. For now, I'm focusing on the panels with Jared and/or Jensen since they're my main interest. I may temporarily skip over conventions that they didn't both attend, but with the intent to go back and fill those in later. If I obtain any mostly-complete videos of Misha's solo panels that upscale well, I may also do his panel if I'm doing panels for Jared and Jensen from the same event.

One big constraint will be whether I can find enough videos to work with for a convention, and just how bad the quality is. I've found that some videos are too poor of a quality to upscale. Since these videos are painful to watch in their raw form, I suspect people will be less interested in watching "enhanced" videos that don't include at least some noticeable improvement in visual quality, but please do let me know if I'm wrong. For that reason, I'll probably skip past cons if I can't upscale the videos, at least for now.

As I work through the old conventions, I'll make a good attempt to upscale the available videos. If I don't have much success, then I'll skip over that convention with the hope that I might be able to get some video files that upscale better. (See the "Can I Help? section.) After I make it through all the low-hanging fruit, I want to come back to those problematic conventions and just create a cohesive edit with color corrections, special content, and subtitles even if I can't upscale the video.

These are just my general thoughts right now but the project is young, so my strategy may change.

Can I Help?

If you have any old convention videos or audio files that you're willing to contribute, please message me! Maybe I can use them, maybe I can't, but the more I have to work with, the better chance I have of creating something more complete. If I do use your material, I'll credit you in whatever manner you prefer.

Even if your videos are on YouTube, I've found that the original files may upscale much better than videos pulled off YouTube. I think the videos were degraded when they were uploaded to YouTube, at least back then. If you send me videos that I'm able to upscale, I'll happily send the upscaled versions back to you for your collection regardless of whether or not I use them. (If you have any videos you don't want me to use for this project, let me know and I'll respect your wishes.)

Even if your video looks terrible, you might just have a missing piece of footage that I couldn't find anywhere else, or your video might upscale more easily than another. If nothing else, I might be able to hear something in the audio that will help me fill in a subtitle I couldn't figure out.

Likewise, audio files can be helpful even without video. If nothing else, they may help me fill in some subtitles. If the audio file is consistently easier to understand than the audio on the videos I'm using, I can also substitute the audio from your file in place of the video's audio. If you have audio of sections of the panels for which no known videos exist, that could also help me fill in those gaps.

If you're watching my enhanced videos with the subtitles turned on, please do let me know if you catch any errors or if you can clearly understand something I marked as [inaudible]. I can't change the videos themselves on YouTube, not without breaking the links and causing confusion, but it's pretty easy to update the subtitles because they're a separate file. It's important to me to try not to put words in their mouths that they might not have said, so I'm trying not to guess purely based on context if I can't tell with confidence that they said what I think they probably said. However, there were times when I felt like I should have been able to understand what they said but I just couldn't manage it, and I'm sure someone with different ears may be able to figure out some of the parts I couldn't.

Do you think Naomi Novik ever looks at AO3

sees some incest mpreg

and whispers to herself “I never wanted this.”

Happy birthday to AO3 🎂🎉

People used to comment on web comics.

People used to comment on fanfiction.

People used to comment on fanart.

People used to comment on OCs.

I hate "content" culture.

I hate "consuming content" and scrolling immediately to the next thing.

People used to be excited about the art that other people created.

People used to want to share that excitement with creators.

I hate this future.

No hardcore fandom has ever died so quickly and so completely as Veronica Mars. This is the story of its murder.

They should study Veronica Mars in Hollywood. I’m serious. It’s an incredible story of how to go from “loud, passionate fanbase with its own fandom name that campaigns and advocates constantly for it” to “absolutely zero fucking interest” damn near OVERNIGHT with just ONE epically terri-bad decision.

If you weren’t there, you don’t understand: From 2007 to 2014, the fandom — the “Marshmallows,” as they called themselves — were everywhere in the Internet’s geek spaces, my friends. They routinely beat the drum about the series’ three seasons and its excellence, lamented its cancellation, pushed others to give the show a try, and always - ALWAYS - proudly and loudly called for the series to be revived.

FULL DISCLOSURE/CONFESSION: I’ve not even watched that much Veronica Mars, frankly… ? Yeah, I’m sorry! it does seem pretty good from like the four-or-five hours I’ve experienced firsthand. I just never took the time to sit down with it. Regardless, I find fandoms and their dynamics — both how they operate internally and how they display to others externally — deeply fascinating. And I honestly find them easier to study from the outside than the inside. Like, if I’m IN a fandom, I’m more likely to stay in my corner and ignore places that seem negative. But being on the outside lets me just… absorb what’s out there, looking into every forum without judgment. It’s like studying pop-culture sociology or something? And it helps that I’m very close to some serious(-ly burnt) Marshmallows. It makes it so much easier to find and absorb the gamut of the fandom.

Besides: There is NO fandom story I’ve ever seen that’s anything like what happened to Veronica Mars and the Marshmallows.

(Time to insert a brief explainer for the uninitiated: Veronica Mars was a TV series that aired from 2004-2007 on the now-deceased UPN network wherein Kristen Bell played the titular character, a high school girl whose single dad was a private detective in the fictional community of Neptune, California. She grew up working “unofficially” as his assistant, which meant that she herself was effectively a teenage private detective.

The three core elements of the series were: 1) Veronica investigating each week’s big mystery with plenty of quips and snark, 2) Watching Veronica’s various relationships develop and shift, with most of the focus given to a) her relationship to her father and b) Her romantic pursuits (which began as the Veronica/Duncan/Logan triangle before eventually becoming focused on the slow-burn, off-on Veronica/Logan love story), and 3) The gradual development of that season’s “mytharc” — the overarching BIG MYSTERY that doesn’t get resolved or wrapped until the season finale. So it went over the course of two seasons that took place in high school and the third, shorter season that was at the start of Veronica’s collegiate career.)

Just how big and how passionate were the Marshmallows? WELL! When series creator Rob Thomas (not the Matchbox 20 guy) and star Kristen Bell announced the Kickstarter campaign for the Veronica Mars movie in March 2013, it achieved its heretofore-unprecedented goal of TWO MILLION GODDAMN DOLLARS within less than 12 hours. At that time, it was the biggest Kickstarter goal to ever succeed — and certainly the fastest to reach that kind of height. Fans fell OVER themselves to pay out for it. Hell, my own significant other was DEEP in the tank for VM at the time and invested enough to get multiple t-shirts as backer rewards as well as a disk copy of the movie when it eventually came home.

And AFTER the movie hit in 2014? It was thankfully beloved and embraced! The once-teenage characters were adults who were actually out living on their own and working for a living, but the fandom had grown up with them, so it wasn’t like they were begging for them to stay young students. They embraced Adult Veronica and her new adventure. The fandom rejoiced loudly and continued to be all over the geek side of the Internet… where they, of course, still wanted more. Sure, there were new novels in the aftermath (which were written by the creator of the series), but most of the Marshmallows were calling for more movies or a streaming revival.

And then, at long last… season four was actually announced. And there was much (premature) rejoicing yet again.

Yes, Veronica Mars returned for a fourth season on Hulu in 2019. It was just eight episodes, and it was heavily centered on one season-long mystery instead of sprinkling that amongst a bunch of smaller ones, but it would still feature the same ol’ Veronica. They promised a new, more “adult” mystery/investigation plus a strong focus on Veronica and Logan’s love story.

New Hulu purchased the rights to the first three seasons and hyped up its presence on the platform while marketing the return for the new run. The marketing team played up the most popular quips from the show’s history plus put out TONS of stuff centered on the Logan/Veronica ship to pump up the fans.

The season was dropped all at once using the classic Netflix “binge” model in July 2019. And then… afterwards?

There was a brief explosion of LOUD RAGE from the Marshmallows at what series creator Rob Thomas had to done to burn and spite the fandom and ruin his own goodwill.

SPOILERS FOR SEASON 4: See, at the end of the movie, Veronica and Logan finally entered into a long-term relationship. In season four, they’ve been dating for years, and Logan proposes marriage. But of course there has to be drama/obstacles: In this case, Veronica isn’t sure she’s ready to marry… or capable of being in a marriage. Ah, but of course she eventually realizes how much Logan means to her. The two are married, and, in the season finale… Logan is killed by a car bomb in the penultimate scene. The final scene is a flashfoward to a year later, where Veronica leaves Neptune alone.

For most fandoms, that’d be a memorable point of pain. A big ol’ speed bump that ultimately throws some people off the bus, leaving only the die-hards. But the fact that fans had been invested in this relationship for literally 15 years and that Hulu (and creator Rob Thomas) had heavily marketed the new season as being a big romantic event for the ship… it was too much. Unlike the aftermath of the Star Wars sequels, there was no lingering group of die-hard fans who were open to whatever was next — at least no significant one. I did some Googling and could only find TWO people who still wanted another season.

Funnily enough? Critics LOVED this. Vanity Fair infamously penned an editorial about how Veronica Mars had “finally grown up” with the finale. (The same editorial also featured the author openly hating on Veronica ever being in a relationship because it causes “arrested development” and declaring that the movie – which was acclaimed by both critics AND fans alike, I remind you – was a lame dud. So. The writer must be a reeeaaaal fun person.)

But a series doesn’t live based on critical acclaim, as it turns out. The fandom was murdered overnight. “Marshmallows” stopped appearing in geek spaces online entirely. No one expressed interest in seeing the next season or the next movie. The constant flow of fan AMVs on YouTube and fanfics on AO3 dried up to nothing.

Since 2019 ? Nothing. Chirping crickets. An intensely dedicated fandom of 12 years was just… vaporized.

I’ve never seen anything like it before OR since.

That’s why it’s so fucking fascinating.

So what went wrong?

Creator Rob Thomas was adamant about two things: ONE, the series was intended to be a noir show, which meant there couldn’t be any happiness for its protagonist. And TWO, the death of Logan was necessary to evolve and grow the series.

Thomas thought that having Veronica in a relationship would be holding her back, and that a marriage would absolutely kill the series and leave her stagnant. It never even occurred to him that marriage isn’t the end of a character’s life and growth. It never occurred to him that plenty of drama can be had AFTER someone is married, or that development/growth could be that the characters mature enough to be capable of maintaining a committed relationship. Thomas’ view of his own universe was so myopic that he couldn’t conceive of any possible way that Veronica could still be a private detective involved in life-threatening investigations AND be married at the same time. Futhermore, he felt that fans just wanted Veronica to become a pregnant housewife, which is about as far from what Marshmallows were after as you can get without straight-up killing Veronica and/or Logan. He managed to do the only thing wronger than what he wrongly thought was their insistence.

On top of the above, Rob Thomas only viewed “noir” as a vehicle for total fatalism… despite the fact that many of the most famous noir stories are cynical and full of moral ambiguity, but they still feature a positive outcome. The Big Sleep still has the protagonist get the girl. The Set-Up arguably ends with the happiest possible ending in spite of the beating the hero receives.

Perhaps most importantly? Despite Thomas own insistence that Veronica Mars was always “noir,” the majority of both TV critics and fans did not think that designation ever truly applied. I suspect that’s the reason why Thomas decided to go as dark and fatalistic as possible: He wanted to be noir, and he was being told that he wasn’t. So he went so far into noir that he killed his own most popular property.

He was adamant that it was the only way for the series to grow. But as it turns out, it was instead the only way for the series to permanently end. Without that season four finale, a passionate group of fans would still be begging for more. With it? It’s over. Nobody fucking cares now.

That’s kind of amazing.

I don’t like wading into Ao3 debates, but I want to give my professional opinion on Ao3 with regard to archives vs. libraries.

I am a professional librarian (MSLS) and I have worked in both archives and public libraries and a lot of the confusion and concern I see surrounding Ao3 is a fundamental misunderstanding of How Archives Work.

An archive is a collection related to a subject. That subject is often a person but sometimes a field or concept or project. And the purpose of an archive is to keep everything. And I mean everything. I was going to say “short of biohazards” but since I know there’s a sealed R. Crumb Devil Gal chocolate bar in the UNC Chapel Hill archives, we really do mean everything.

When a collection of materials–which are usually unique and original and can be photos, manuscripts, letters, recordings (audio and/or visual), notes and notebooks, objects, published books, whatever–on and/or from the subject arrive at the archive, they are examined, preserved for longevity, accessioned and cataloged (added to the archive’s records), and added to the archive. You measure collections in linear feet. As in, once it’s all preserved and boxed and secure, you note how many feet of shelf space it takes up. And some of y'all on Ao3 have a lot of linear feet to your name (and I’m proud of you).

This is an archive: it is designed to preserve the original materials related to a subject. That is its purpose. Archives are how we have the original scroll manuscript of On the Road, for example, or the Lomax recordings of American folksongs, or Tijuana Bibles, or James Joyce’s loveletters to Nora.

Now you, a member of the public, can access some archives. Some are easier to access than others. The one I worked in was open to the public; good luck getting into the British Archives without a good reason.

So now apply this to Ao3–which is an archive both in name and in purpose. It is intended to preserve fan-created content long term. And this means everything, whether you personally like the materials or not. It is a repository for as much as possible.

And the “whether you personally like the materials or not” is important, hence why I mentioned Jim’s loveletters and Tijuana Bibles in particular. (RIP Jim, you would have loved pegging.)

If it’s made by fans and it exists, we should keep it to document the history and progression of fandom. That is the point. We have lost enough materials related to the subject of fans of media and we don’t need to lose any more.

The fact of the matter is that Ao3 is only one facet of the OTW, which preserves other fan-related materials (convention booklets and zines, for example). Somehow Ao3, an archive on the subject of fanfiction, has been divorced from the rest of the project, mostly by way of “purity culture” and panic over “dangerous” fiction.

The fact that you can go through an archive and find interesting information is the other side of archives. No, they shouldn’t be like the banker’s box of old letters stuffed in my closet. Yes, they should be organized and as accessible as is appropriate for the state of the materials.

It’s really, really cool to find stuff in an archive, I’m not even going to lie. I have done it before and I will do it again. And yet there are other items in an archive that I might not want or need or be interested in at all–but they’re still there. That’s the cataloging and accessioning: to keep up with what’s there, to stay “on topic” with collecting, and to be able to find things in that archive. Bless the tag wranglers who are doing the cataloging at Ao3.

The pearl clutching seems to come from 1. the creation of “dangerous” fanworks and 2. public access to those “dangerous” fanworks. These are issues of “purity culture” and opinions on censorship and should not involve Ao3.

Ao3, under the umbrella of the OTW, is a documentation and preservation project first and foremost.

You keep talking about the origins of AO3 as this group effort by an actual group of people who were friends and who spent time discussing this with each other in person. It's kind of blowing my mind. Is there a post or a journal somewhere that specifically keeps record of this?

--

I'm dying.

Nonnie, seriously?

No, that's mean, I know you're serious. It's just flabbergasting how much fandom has expanded and how much there isn't a direct link to the past.

Astolat and Cesperanza floated the idea at Vividcon and various places, I think, though I wasn't going to cons in that era. We were all on LJ in those days, and Astolat made a big post nailing her theses to the door. Discussion in the comments was instant and prolonged.

A LJ com was set up to discuss. It was later renamed to otw_news, but if you go all the way back to the beginning, you can see brainstorming mess instead of official news posts.

Fanlore page linking to Astolat's post and giving a little context.

Early brainstorming: https://otw-news.livejournal.com/2007/05/

For example, here I am collecting links to older archives to look at for research when designing AO3.

Fun fact, we never intended to call it AO3. There was a whole call for name suggestions, but nothing was as evocative as astolat's original post title referencing Virginia Woolf. (For those who haven't thought about it, AO3's name is a reference to A Room of One's Own.)

Here's the name discussion

Here's the poll that came out of it

But also notice how many people voted: 562.

That's how many people cared at the time: a few hundred. Maybe a thousand if you count lurkers, but frankly, that community was not as lurkery as now. It wasn't just ten friends. It was a community effort. But what "our" community looked like at the time was vastly different. It was six degrees of Kevin Bacon astolat, not a vast sea of strangers like fic fandom on AO3 is now.

Here's an early post suggesting we ban the under 18s from the site entirely. Pity we didn't do so, given the rise of antis.

Here's the invite to a fundraising party at astolat's in NYC that following Halloween. I dressed as Amanda from Highlander, not very well.

You can tell we knew each other by looking at those comments on astolat's initial post. You can also tell how discussion-based that part of fandom was back in 2007.

The way my tumblr is now with a ton of text, back and forth, and hopping around between threads of conversation, all featuring a consistent set of faces, is very much like LJ. Most of tumblr is not.

Fanfolks today need to remember how important The Premise was.

Y'all have heard of The Premise, right?

See, historically there have always been people who saw an extra layer of gayness on certain pairs of fictional people (you just thought of several), and people Back Then even wrote their own fanfic (or as they were called at the time, "pastiches"), but the first widespread queer fanwork to really define the fanfiction genre was KIRK AND SPOCK. Kirk/Spock. K/S. The very first slashfics.

Why this work was vastly, overwhelmingly written by straight women is a discussion for another time, but it was, so that's the main perspective I'm gonna consider here.

How do you - a statistically middle-class, 30+, stay-at-home wife and mother - how do you write slashfic ao3-style in the 1960's before the internet?

Carefully.

Through letters with friends, phone calls, pen pals, and sometimes - sometimes - clandestine meetings of small groups. Whole novels were written communally, round-robin style, by sending typed or handwritten additions chapter by chapter to each other. These were all underground, some deep underground; even the early Trekkie fanzines of the time wouldn't touch them.

And keep in mind, few of these stories were explicitly even sexual! But they were all about a very, very close relationship between two men. In the 1960's.

Guess how cool everyone else was about this.

Actually, for their part, Gene Rodenberry and the other writers were fine with it, saying that they had deliberately written the characters to be two halves of a whole, and if you wanna read it that way, yeah sure, go right ahead. Shatner and Nimoy took it all in good humor, and seemingly still do, each guy basically gesturing to the other and chuckling "I mean, who wouldn't?"

But elsewhere there was vicious backlash against The Premise, and not just within the fandom. This was still at a time in the US and UK when various "sodomy" and "decency" laws made no distinction between homosexual sex acts and just, like, directly lighting another man's cigarette with your cigarette in public. (That, sadly, is not a fucking joke.)

It was probably the closest some suburban cishet women came to understanding the pain of being in the closet. They had to protect this secret from their friends and family at all cost. There were cases of divorces where women lost custody of their children because their writing had come to light.

Can you imagine having such a burning desire to write for your OTP that you were willing to lose everything over it? Even if you were never caught, you still had to be willing to wait weeks, months, to receive a letter in the mail that you had to carefully intercept, read in secret, and then add your own chapter t, also in secret, and then send off, perhaps never to be seen again.

These people were goddamn heroes, and they laid the foundation for the world we live in today. A world where we can read, write, comment on, or share - in a matter of seconds! - literature about two background characters from two different franchises enjoying a really specific kink involving vacuums or something. And that's objectively amazing.

Raise a toast to our fanfiction elders, who simped in the darkness so we could simp in the light of day.

idk if I count as an elder, i'm in my early 20s, but I've been reading fanfiction for over a decade

I know "60s housewives who invented slash fanfiction" has taken on a life of its own as a phrase, but Kirk/Spock didn't really exist until the 70s and THOSE WOMEN HAD JOBS. They were teachers and librarians and bookkeepers and scientists and they damn well spent their own money going to conventions, printing zines, buying fanart and making fandom happen. Put some respect on their names.

Happy International Whump Day!!!!

On September 12, 1997 Daniel Jackson died for the first time (in the show lol) leading to a fanbase coining the term "whump" to describe their favorite archaeologist in pain.

Today our community has grown and expanded so much and I'm so happy to be a part of it!

Have a great day everyone and I hope you all enjoy some good whump today ❤

People used to comment on web comics.

People used to comment on fanfiction.

People used to comment on fanart.

People used to comment on OCs.

I hate "content" culture.

I hate "consuming content" and scrolling immediately to the next thing.

People used to be excited about the art that other people created.

People used to want to share that excitement with creators.

I hate this future.