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thewhaleridingvulcan:

lizawithazed:

upallnightogetloki:

fanculturesfancreativity:

ofhouseadama:

A brief history of fandom, for the teenagers on here who somehow think tumblr invented fandom:

  • 1960s: with the advent of Star Trek, fandom moves into the public sphere for the first time with a television in almost every home, creating a large group of people all excited about one thing. Beforehand, fans mostly had relationships with the author, not with each other. Obviously there were groups and conventions, but Star Trek was the beginning of an independent, interactive, saturated fandom culture. 
  • This means in the coming years: conventions, mailing groups (both public and private), fan magazines, and fanfiction presses. 
  • Yeah this pretty much remains the deal until the internet gets put into every home in the 90s. 
  • EXAMPLES OF BIG FUCKING DEAL FANDOMS, 90s EDITION: X-Files, Xena, Star Trek, Star Wars, ASoIaF, The West Wing, Buffy
  • So with the internet, this really cool thing happened: Geocities. And then Yahoo groups. Early fanfiction archives. Back in the day, fandoms had to create their own private spaces. This made fandoms on the internet smaller and less accessible than fanzine operated ones. However, since fans on the internet didn’t have to pass through an editorial board to publish their fic, it was the beginning of the democratization of fandom. 
  • In 1998, fanfiction.net was launched to compete with the hundreds of independent, fandom-oriented fanfiction archives. More democratization, although fanfiction was marketed on how many reviews one had. You had to, like today, “break into the market.” 
  • In 1999, Livejournal was launched. Fans created communities and their own private journals which was like woah, we have our own places to store our own fic? And can cross-post them places? However, with Livejournal came the idea of the internet-based BNF: big name fan. Since communities had moderators and posts could be friend or community locked, people could easily gain social capital. 
  • See also: Cassie Claire and misscribe. 
  • On the other hand, authors like George RR Martin get Livejournals. 
  • Around this time was also the rise of forums. Again, moderators had a lot of power, as did certain users who would rise to the position of moderator. People rapidly gained and lost power, causing quick turnover in these parts of fandom. 
  • In 2002, due to legal concerns, fanfiction.net bans NC-17 fanfiction. 
  • Adultfanfiction.net is created to fill the void. For years, 13 year olds would pretend to be 18 to enter. Including myself. 
  • In 2005, fanfiction.net, again due to legal concerns, bans “choose your own adventure” and songfics. 
  • In 2007, Archive of Our Own is launched to further democratize fandom in response to fanfiction.net’s new stringent rules, offering writers a cleaner format, kudos, hit counters, and bookmarks. However, many older fandoms have not made the move. 
  • In 2007, tumblr is launched. It would take until 2010 for it to reach saturation on the internet, meaning that most fandoms which lived and died pre-2010 exist(ed) on Geocities, Yahoo Groups, independent archives, ff.net, etc. 
  • In 2009, Geocities is taken offline. Thousands mourn because they never backed up really old fic that they liked. 
  • In 2012, most major broadcasting companies have caught on to the fact that tumblr has democratized fandom to a degree of anarchy and mob mentality, and utilize it, since tumblr is unmoderated. 

And that’s what you missed on FANDOM EXISTED BEFORE TUMBLR, THANK YOU VERY MUCH. 

A useful overview. Worth remembering: astolat’s original post about needing an archive of our own was a response not just to ff.net’s changed rules but to FanLib, “a commercially-owned, for-profit multifandom fanfic archive” (see previous link) owned and run by a couple of dudes with no connection to fandom who just wanted to profit from fan fiction.

That’s also the reason while you’ll see many of us on here talking about Cassandra Clare being at it AGAIN. This ain’t her first Plagiarism Rodeo and it ain’t our first time at it either.

I was around for like 90% of this, feel free to ask question if you ever want to know what it was like in ye olden tymes

I feel really old suddenly

Anyone interested in fandom and fandom history should read the fabulous 

Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World by Anne Jamsion

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We didn’t start the fire, or we didn’t invent Johnlock

welovethebeekeeper:

It’s a rousing thought to believe we took a few veiled hints from the writers of BBC Sherlock, a few hidden clues, and created the Johnlock universe in our fictions, art works and on our blogs. We have created, exploded with our obsession, become more than we were, but to believe we emerged from a few scattered hints in a television show is to do disservice to the ones that went before us. If our history is ignored we lose validity. God knows, those outside our fandom try and rob us of our agency , we need a strong foundation to stand on, and we have one.

I won’t go into our genesis as Johnlockers here, just a brief reminder that our birth was written into the canon in such things as the flight of Holmes and Watson during the ‘Invert Stings’ of 1895, Holmes dislike of women’s company, Watson’s abandonment of his wife in favour of Holmes, the frequenting of Turkish bath houses, and the sheer desolation of Holmes on Watson’s engagement. Our Victorian counterparts whispered the anathema idea of the true nature of these two men, the homosexual Victorian subculture found solace in the subtext, and Doyle kept delivering, even as he was denied his seat in The House of Lords due to his sympathy for homosexuals. The Holmes and Watson Romantic School of Thiught, underground, grew throughout the early 1900s, cresting with Rex Stout and his essay ‘Was Watson a Woman’. Johnlockers continued to be black balled from the Holmesian Societies, even as writers began to surface the idea in publications such as The Baker Street Journal, until in the 1970s Billy Wilder attempted to free John and Sherlock from the closet. He regretted not being more overt in his film, he bowed to pressures at the time, but we did get some precious glimpses of a gay Holmes. Granada took up the mantle in the 1980s and decided to ignore Watson’s marriage, they gave us a married same sex couple solving crimes. The fanzines and online forums ignited with creativity, Johnlockers began to emerge from their clusters and we became a subsection of a fandom. Finally two men, talking on a train, had the idea to modernise Sherlock Holmes and fix the wrongs done over the past 135 years.

Moffat and Gatiss had a plan and it was taken up by the BBC, it was timely, meeting an agenda, the project orchestrated and with ASiP the Johnlock community erupted on line. Our creativity stoaked by the show, in its visual tropes, it’s obvious direction, the brilliant casting of the two leads, the costuming and hair of a Byronic Sherlock, the music and the hints of suggestion by a well run PR campaign. We were led by the nose. We didn’t create Johnlock, it had been there all along, only now two of our members were in control of the project, had an international forum, and were challenging us to create. And create we did, aided by technology, we expanded with every episode. Anyone who thinks we are just going on vague hints and wishful thinking doesn’t truly understand the art of manipulation. Manipulation in a good way. We are being led and always have been, from Doyle to Moffat and Gatiss, we are willing fulfilling the agenda.

I knew Johnlockers who lived and loved Sherlock and John in the 1950s, they were as obsessed and creative as we are, they just didn’t have our outlets. Don’t rob those before us of their contribution.

Posted on

wintersoldierfell:

the deeper i get into fandom the weirder it is to me that Whedon-style nerdboys ever managed to convince people that the True Fans™ are the people who memorize shit and lord their knowledge over other people. like ok you know the exact dimensions of Batman’s cave penny. sure. but did you survive the HP ship wars? do you know how to customize your Ao3 search to filter out all the creepy and/or poorly tagged shit in the massive fandoms? have you ever gotten in a fight over SuperWhoLock? would you last more than ten seconds on _coal or FFA? have you felt the burning pain in your fingers as you scramble to bang out just a hundred more words before the exchange deadline comes down? can you do research to make your in-universe artifacts accurate? can you vid? can you edit .gifs? can you sew costumes and do makeup? like yeah ok you love Jace Beleren enough to know his backstory and all his stats but i’m sorry did you personally stitch what looks like over two hundred eyelets onto your stockings so you could cosplay Liliana Vess? fake geek girls my ass. get back to me when you can do something with the worlds you love other than memorize them.  

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a-forger-and-a-point-man:

ghostrepeater:

kate2kat:

kanga-ruth:

havingbeenbreathedout:

redrackham87:

does anyone else think about how fandoms are like cities?

you got your big, bustling ones that are really diverse and busy, maybe a little hard to navigate and full of crime, good areas and bad areas. the locals know the hot spots and how to get around

then the mid-range towns with big city attitudes even though they’re not big cities, a few local hubs of activity, the crazy dude ranting about stuff on the street corner who makes people uncomfortable

and then the small spot towns where everybody knows everybody, you can’t go out without seeing somebody you know, and there’s only one grocery store

#fandom life #sherlock fandom is a big city #with gangs #who will jump you for wearing the wrong colors #and tell you to stay in your lane #i try to stick to the bohemian neighborhoods #where people are friendly and don’t preach at you #there are fanatic preachers in sherlock fandom too #promising hellfire and damnation to the unbelievers #and im a heretic (via @anarfea)

@fizzygins and I are the witchy spinsters holed up in the abandoned distillery down by the river, venturing out only rarely to argue at length with our neighbors, and generally to be found obsessively redecorating our small but meticulously repurposed lair to accommodate ever more reference books, obscure sex toys, and memento mori paintings

This is one of the reasons I love Inception fandom. It’s like a little village where you probably recognise everyone, even if you don’t know them well. @inceptiversarysocial is the village hall where we hang out. @a-forger-and-a-point-man is the real estate agent trying to get people to buy houses here and running the @inceptionkitties cat shelter in her spare time. She’s organised a successful twinning operation with the 00q and London Spy towns.

Perfect, @kanga-ruth! It’s a great village to move to from a bigger, dangerous city (as many of us have done). Long-term residents are very welcoming. There’s a fantastic @bookshop where you can get really good reading suggestions. @earlgreytea68 is like a town ambassador, pointing out the special features and drawing new residents over. And there’s not just a cat shelter, there’s a whole zoo of exotic animals and birds.

and every week on the village green, we set up a big sheet and projector and have movie night. 

@kate2kat runs the local animal sanctuary and @involuntaryorange operates a sex toy shop and @ladyprydian has a cute independent yarn store where she takes knitting orders

all three of them are also the town bakers

Then there’s the Superwood village that has like fifteen people but we all get along even if we occasionally have a random sheep wandering through the village green.

Posted on

amireal2u:

jaqofspades:

phantomwise:

You know reading fanfic (and being kind of a porn aficionado myself) it’s interesting how different fandoms have certain porn trends. Like yeah the usual gamut of kink always exists to varying degrees, some more obvious than others – teen wolf used to be heavy on the knotting for obvious reasons while anything in dragon age involving the iron bull is gonna be an ode to size kink. But there are also subtler trends, like fandoms where no one ever forgets the condom, or every fic has some element of bdsm, or every fic has a warning for rimming. You can actually tell a lot about the fandom discourse™ just from reading its porn.

And now I feel the need to write meta comparing the porn trends within and across my fandoms dammit.  This is such an interesting observation.  I have a mental picture of a huge, elaborate set of Venn diagrams, charting the various fandoms and their crossover points by kink, ship etc.  Someone who understands statistics needs to get on that right away 😛

I’ve often felt like an anthropologist/sociologist when I fall into an older, mostly defunct fandom. I can trace a lot of the discourse through the types of fic (and porn) I run into. I sometimes line the timeline up with where I was in fandom at the time and it often sheds even more light. Lots of things change depending on national public discourse, major fandom platform, and for a long time, the biggest fandom_wank post of the month.

It’s always kinda fun for me b/c I feel like I’m totally knowledgable about something for once and like, I can pretend to be that weird specialist that’s brought in once a season on some procedural show that slowly gets a cult following.

Posted on

quirkette100:

so-caffeinated:

jsevick:

so-caffeinated:

jsevick:

so-caffeinated:

jsevick:

so-caffeinated:

andyouweremine:

jsevick:

When you find your OTP…

Originally posted by dreeanastasiya

When it sinks…

When it fades to black for a commercial at the worst possible moment

Originally posted by whedonversegifs

When the show runners promise a dramatic cliffhanger… 

Originally posted by sssssssim

After the cliffhanger airs and you have six weeks to four months to wait to find out how it all ends…

Originally posted by thats-just-my-game

When the show runners decide to break them up for “conflict”…

Originally posted by star-lord-hijacked-serenity

Your reaction to the show-runners when half your OTP dies so the other half can ~grow~

Originally posted by undisturbed-tranquility

When someone tells you to stop shipping fictional characters and get a life…

Originally posted by badchoices-adigitalmemoir

When you decide canon can go screw itself because your OTP is way more important than what supposedly actually happened

Originally posted by nacheeto

ALL OF THIS MAGNIFICENT SHINY POST!!!

Posted on

scifrey:

shiftingpath:

mr-mercutio:

sagedarkwoods:

copperbadge:

jujubiest:

I weirdly love that there are crotchety fandom elders around who say shit like “in my day, (insert fandom term) meant this specifically, but now you kids just use it to mean any old thing.”

It seriously gives fandom such a sense of heritage and family, like yes grandma, tell me more about how you had to write fic uphill both ways in the snow when you were my age.

When I joined fandom in 1993 most fanfic was posted to the usenet, which had a 72-characters-a-line limit. If you posted using certain clients, at 72 characters a short sequence of gibberish would occur before it broke to the next line, making for an “interesting” reading experience. 

Imagine writing your fanfic and then going back through and making sure no single line was longer than 72 characters. Without Microsoft Word. 

When I joined fandom in the early to mid-90s, very few of my friend-group had the internet at home, and could only access it in the (very Catholic) school library. We made fan comics in Chemistry class and traded them between periods. Illicit, racy, and frequently lesbian Sailor Moon and Xena fanfic was printed on actual paper, and traded like one would trade contraband. Mama Sage has some stories, younglings.

When I first started participating in fandom stuff, it was the very beginning of widespread Internet use at home. Very slow dial-up modems, AOL floppy disks, the works. I was part of several ancient Yahoo groups and owned three (THREE) geocities pages dedicated to Dragonlance. I was also emailed very racy fanart of Raistlin Majere, which fuelled my burgeoning gayness like whoa. 

This was also the period in which I was introduced to anime that wasn’t on YTV. I was in love with Gravitation, but had never actually seen a damn episode of it because you could NOT easily download videos at this time. It would take many hours upon hours of eating up your entire bandwidth, and if the download was interrupted even once, it ruined the entire download and you had to start again. This on a dial-up modem which would boot you off the Internet if someone called the house. So I had a very nice friend in Toronto who MAILED ME CDs with episodes of Gravitation and Weiss Kreuz burned onto them. EACH CD HELD MAYBE 2 or 3 EPISODES. For years I treasured my album of 30 shitty quality anime cds. Bless.

This is true; I remember those spindles of shitty anime cds from our old apartment. I’m glad you finally had the courage to throw them out.

I still have a few binders of those shitty CDs. I still have my Gravitation, and the whole run of Inu Yasha. I keep meaning to BUY a box set of the shows, but there’s something nostalgic about loading up the crappy disc. I do occasionally rewatch them (though I wrote my undergrad thesis on IY so sometimes rewatching it gives me angry-professor-flashbacks)

In my day, there were no internet shops or create-run shops like Etsy and StoreEnvy where you could buy cosplay-accurate contact lenses, wigs, or accessories. You had to source them yourself from your local party store, raid the supplies when Halloween popups arrived at malls, or take your luck with eBay.

We poured over images of the characters we downloaded to floppy discs, printed using the school library printer, begged overseas fans to scan or send copies of Cosmode to us, and spent hours in Value Village searching for clothing that could be altered to resemble a character’s costume in FabricLand, pouring over patterns that could be altered. And Simplicity hadn’t cottoned on to the fact that we were using their patterns yet – there were some wizard and princess patterns, but not the wide variety of options there are now.

There were also much fewer tutorials on how to make/paint/style/create things. I remember Fimo, but I’d never heard of ModgePodge before, had no idea what to do with or where to acquire lightweight crafters foam, and had no idea what resin was and how to use it. There was no Facebook groups, so you had to find a Yahoo Cosplay Group that would let you join so you could ask for tips and tutorials and help.

Cosplay was, in some ways, just giving it a good try and showing off to everyone at the con that you Love This Thing – to wear your heart on your sleeve, literally. There were no TV competitions, and little of this weird new flamming-shaming if you didn’t look ENOUGH like the character or weren’t “hot enough” to be cosplaying, WTF that means. (Though I recall that horrible website that collected and displayed galleries of “ugly people in ugly cosplays” What an arse.)