memorizingthedigitsofpi | the passing down of fandom history

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the passing down of fandom history

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?

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Man, it always kind of strikes me as *wild* that so many people have no idea where AO3 came from, and why we have it.

Fandom history is such an interesting thing, but I have a hard time ever remembering all the interesting bits until someone asks a question or mentions something that jogs the thoughts.

I admit to still being fond of a lot of older fandom slang. Plot bunnies, the citrus scale, YKINMKATO ("kink tomato")...
Some of the big fandom dramas of yesteryear are interesting to look back on, though I think a lot of that has been well-documented, and isn't necessarily "educational", lol.

what do you wish your fellow fans knew about? > I wish people would click on the About page on AO3 more xD

I would love to see more people educated on the difference between "squick" and "trigger." "Squick" is such a helpful concept.

oh i've seen your tiktoks before i think, it's awesome you're teaching newer/younger fans how to use ao3, especially since the site is so intricate it can be a little daunting learning more about it besides the basics lol.

to answer the question: i wish more people knew about the "dead dove: do not eat" tag. i mean it seems pretty well known but i think the tag's nature of being named after an inside joke kind of makes that unclear. and it's an important tag since it basically summarizes "this is flat out what the tags say be careful" (or something along those lines lol) into a memorable phrase

I feel like I'm missing out on a lot of interesting stuff by not having tiktok xD.

When I think of old fandom stuff, the first thing that comes to mind is quizilla; it was my very first encounter with fan content. My memories of it are very vague, though I remember I had fun reading fics and doing quizzes for my favourite fandoms at the time; beyblade and hunterxhunter (two very similar things /j)

Seconded!

Sometimes I think about the fact that there's no one fandom history.

When AO3 was becoming a big thing, I was asianfanfics - which apparently was born from a similar situation. That took me until this year to learn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asianfanfics . So I guess I was there for a different slice of fandom's beginning.

On that is an entirely different branch from the Archive.

I'm not sure where I am going with this but I guess ....

While knowing fandom history is great, I wish people didn't treat it like a monolith. That the branch of history the Archive exists on should be the one people know. After all even now, the Archive is only one narrow slice of fannish activity.

I don't have an answer yet (it is very late and I am sleepy), but I've been on AO3 for 10 years and didn't have a clue until... Last year? Maybe the year before? Why it came about either. I somehow didn't know it was created by people *who write and publish fic* until it went around, I think, through a fandom history tumblr post.

Which is all to say, I think that's a really great video idea!

That particular one, about the beginning of AO3, does seem to need repeating to new audiences, especially those who call for more policing of the site's content.

I think it could also be useful to make Fanlore more widely known, although of course looking things up on there is a further step that not everyone will be likely to take, even if they know about it.

I *so* agree with this. My fandom trajectory was, in rough terms: lurking on harrypotterfanfiction.com and then posting some fics, (oh and I just found out by opening the link that HPFF is shutting down - but luckily, they're importing everything to AO3 - but I digress). Then I got into One Tree Hill and spent time on some forum (I honestly don't remember where) and then we migrated to a new forum that was specifically about OTH (whoever hosted all of this, you were amazing). After that - with a bit of overlap in 2008 - I started spending tons of time on fanforum, mostly in the House fandom. I went to LJ when I joined the Vampire Diaries fandom much later.

And like, from what I remember it - fanforum was HUGE? And we all talk about LJ all the time, especially on Tumblr and Dreamwidth (I don't do Twitter, so I have no idea what goes on there)

TLDR:

So many things get lost or seem to be getting lost? In your case, you talk about fic archives that aren't AO3 and their history, and I keep thinking about how I forget about forums, which I perceived as a huge deal back in the day. I mean, I spent at least a year really actively posting on fanforum, and I myself haven't thought about it in YEARS.

Let's not forget forums <3

I used to mod forums! And all the ones I used to be a part of are gone. Even the one that swore to stay up only as an archive after it disappeared is gone.

Forums still exist - but they're not the main thrust of the kind of fandom that engages in ship fic anymore.

I honestly think the expectation that things be pan fandom really hurt new forums from existing. That things have to be for everyone really hurts small archives or forums from springing up.

Forums still exist - but they're not the main thrust of the kind of fandom that engages in ship fic anymore.

oh yeah, of course you're right, forums still exist, look at ME now being tumblr/DW centric. I just spent some time looking things up, and as far as I can tell - fanforum.com is still up, but I couldn't find any of the other forums that I know I participated in.

I honestly think the expectation that things be pan fandom really hurt new forums from existing

OH yeah I can see how/why that might happen.

One of the forums I participated in was an OTH forum, but then some people started watching Grey's Anatomy, and then even more people started watching it (oh, the pleasures of like, having an actual community) and then it became both a OTH and GA forum. But, And people occasionally chatted about other stuff, ofc, in the designated places, but there was no necessity to accommodate for ALL possible things, or any kind of 'universality'.

I used to find YMMV (your mileage may vary) was a useful shorthand to let other fans know I didn't expect everybody to agree with me. It feels non-combative; a good way, perhaps, to ward off drama?

I think one of the things is that different areas of fandom have different cultures-- and that includes different areas of the same fandom. (I have a link to a paper presentation/blog post about that for Tolkien fandom if anyone's interested.) It's okay to take a few days to get a lay of the land before jumping in.

The second is related: how different sites are set up on an architectural level affects how cultures form there. For example, AO3 emphasizes romantic/sexual relationships; ff.net emphasizes characters and genres. So if you're a newcomer to a place (archive, Discord, forum, DW/LJ comm, etc.), just because it's set up differently than you're used to doesn't mean that's a flaw. Deliberate choices were made.

And specifically on a fandom history level: fandom existed before AO3 and Tumblr. Fandom exists elsewhere than AO3, Tumblr, and DW/LJ. Those sites did not invent fandom. It's utter arrogance to declare that Tumblr fandom invented fandom (which I saw people claim about my long-established fandom). Just because you didn't or don't know about it doesn't mean it didn't or doesn't exist. And that AO3 is not the culmination of fannish history. Not all roads actually lead there.

Thirded!

That things have to be for everyone really hurts small archives or forums from springing up.

Absolutely. One of my primary fandoms is Tolkien and pretty much only a handful of our archives are still around and an even smaller amount are active. I've seen, both openly and implied, the attitude that there is no point to posting on those archives because AO3 exists.

And yeah, my time in post-Prequels Star Wars was on a forum. It still exists-- it's connected to what once was the main fan site-- but it's dead quiet compared to what it used to be in the mid 2000s.

Not so much a specific thing as a general attitude: I've noticed a return to cloistering as one would have had in the mailing list days, and I'd be happy if we brought back more of a sense of fandom as a general culture beyond the single TV show or series of movies.

About a year ago, I started to hang out in a monofannish space that I quickly found out went beyond "we're here to talk about this one TV series, and maybe the spinoff sometimes" into "we don't know what Yuletide is." They legitimately hadn't heard of it. They'd never been in a space where it got talked about because they'd so effectively closed themselves off from everything that wasn't this one fandom. Not "this is a little space just for this thing as it was in the bygone days". Rather, "we're not leaving our bunker."

I get writing and reading pretty much exclusively in a single fandom. I don't get avoiding fandom as a whole. And I'd like people to find ways back to a larger sense of community. Beyond having the same handful of people all writing and beta-reading and commenting on each other's works, which leads to some unfortunate trends in the fic, fandom as a communal, common space is one of its joys, and I'm saddened they're deliberately cutting themselves off from it.

The copyright wars, and the legal history of fanworks. (US centric, I know.) It's just so common to run into younger fans who have no idea why they can't post solicitations for payment to AO3 and are genuinely angry about it.

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.

Yes, this!

Serious question, and I'm not trying to pick a fight: if they're that monofandom, why does it matter what other fandoms are doing? They're not going to be able to participate in any panfandom events requiring multiple fandoms if they only write for that one fandom. Also, the Internet is large, and so is fandom, and people can't know everything.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that there's a bit of an assumption that all fandom is one fandom when… it's specifically Western media slash fandom that started AO3, with Yuletide being a part of that fandom culture, and it's what a lot of people call "fandom." But it's not the default fandom. Tolkien fandom for many years was very much separated from Western media fandom and I honestly like that aspect; I think our fandom culture has suffered from being more drawn into that orbit (at the same time there are upsides to it). But Tolkien fandom is also significantly more monofandom than general fandom, so I guess I just don't understand the problem with not paying attention to things that are irrelevant.

Yes please! I think so much drama would be avoided if people really internalized that you don't have to justify disliking certain tropes. Like, I'm personally not a fan of a/b/o – it just doesn't float my boat – but I don't have to have a reason for that, or articulate a reason my dislike is somehow justified. I worry that there's a tendency for people to come up with criticisms of things they dislike because they feel they need a "reason" not to like them.

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.)

Agreed on some of the slang (is plot bunnies not a thing anymore?!), though I'm glad we're past the days of putting "Yaoi! Don't like, don't read!!!" in fic summaries like it's FFN in 2012.

Because for a lot of them, they've gone beyond monofannish to only engaging in the fandom by reading fic about one pairing. A few people have told me they won't even read gen on the principle that it doesn't include their pairing, or they'll only read their favorite pairing in certain kinds of stories - beyond excluding squicks and triggers, it has to be unabashedly one way or another or else they won't even consider giving it a try.

When Festivids landed, some of them said they wouldn't watch them because they didn't know the fandom. I had to explain the fandoms included non-fandom things like "marble racing" or "furniture restoration" for them to think about clicking on the link to the collections.

So it's less "all fandom is one fandom" and more it going beyond disinterest into hostile avoidance.

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