the passing down of fandom history

[memorizingthedigitsofpi]

I've got a tiktok account where I post videos about how to use AO3. It helps people who are new to the site learn how to navigate and search/filter etc. and I also get to teach people who've been around for a while some new tricks they might not otherwise know. 

Yesterday, I someone asked about the Citrus Scale, so I posted about that. Which lead to posting about the FFN purges of 2002 and 2012. Which led to posting a brief and incomplete timeline of fandom purges. 

And somewhere in there, someone left a comment that said, "Wow. I hope AO3 never purges adult content."

And that's when I realized that so many people who are either new to fandom or new to AO3 have no idea how it came to exist or why it is the way it is. 

So I guess I'll add that to my list of things to make videos about? 

Brainstorm time: what do you wish your fellow fans knew about? What are cool tags or tropes or traditions or history that you think would be interesting to share? 

Comments

[pauraque]

I'm glad you're making videos like that! Intergenerational loss of fandom knowledge is a problem, and not a new one. When I came to fandom in the '90s, it was in the midst of an enormous shift from being primarily in-person and paper-based (with fic being distributed in zines at conventions and through snail mail) to being primarily online. I learned a lot of that history from listening to older fans talk about their experiences in the '70s and '80s, and some of it is recorded on Fanlore now, but I'm sure there's plenty that's just lost forever because some of the older people didn't have online access or weren't interested in making the change.

Similarly, when a lot of fandom moved from LJ to Tumblr/Twitter in the 2010s, there was a gap, both because not everybody moved, and because younger people were coming directly to the "new" sites and knew nothing about the old. It feels wild to me that people who use AO3 wouldn't know the story behind how it came to be... but people currently in their twenties were children when that stuff happened. If nobody tells them, how are they supposed to know?

So I guess I wish younger fans had more of an awareness, at least on an overview level, of the trajectory of fandom history, from the rise of print zines, to the birth and popularization of slash, to fandom gaining a presence on the early internet and growing rapidly as the internet grew, and so on through LJ and the censorship incidents that led to AO3. I would love it if people had at least an idea of that history in the backs of their minds and didn't labor under the notion that fandom was invented ten years ago on Tumblr.

I also very much agree with those who pointed out that there is not one monolithic Fandom, and that the story I just summarized is largely the story of English-speaking Western fandom, and doesn't even begin to touch on the history of anime & manga fandoms, for example.

[ermingarden]

I second this, as someone in my twenties. I got interested in reading more about fandom history a few years ago after having some interactions on Tumblr with people even younger who had no idea what things were like even on, like, FFN in 2012. It got me wondering what things from older fandom I was totally ignorant of! (So, so grateful for Fanlore, lol.)

[pauraque]

Fanlore has some great material on early fandom and I'm so glad it's there, especially the quotes and links to primary sources. It's really eye-opening to see how much the culture and language of fandom has changed over time. I've seen some letters published in zines that I could barely decipher, between lacking context, missing in-jokes, and just not being familiar with the subcultural "dialect". (Fans from the zine era would probably be equally lost trying to read Tumblr posts.) We're going to need a whole discipline of fandom philology pretty soon. :)