Tag: fandom history

olderthannetfic:

cathexys:

olderthannetfic:

queerfandommiscellany:

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.

And because that was fucktastically long, I saved the Fanlore suggestions for this post:

If you want to document K/S–>AO3, there’s kind of a Canon of what that history looks like. It has been codified by academics and OTW, among others. Henry Jenkins et al. would be the place to look for that, and the same things are well documented on Fanlore.

This history comes up often on Tumblr because it’s the way people refute antis’ claims about what we should change on AO3. It’s my fandom history (well, aside from all my time in anime fandom). It’s a fandom history. It’s not the whole of fandom history, however.

If you want to do all of fandom history ever, you need a format like a wiki.

If you want to look at major historical trajectories that get left out of the K/S–>AO3, I would look at anime first of all. Second, I would look at fandoms that had very little m/m and big m/f or f/f juggernaut pairings. (The history of gen fic and the history of slash fic are closely entwined because both tend to be from mainstream media with lots of men bonding.) Third, I would look at what was going on on FFN after the LJ crowd jumped ship, what was going on on Quizilla, what is currently going on on Wattpad, etc.

I’d suggest Francesca Coppa’s “A Brief History of Fandom” (2006), which I can view in its entirety on Googlebooks (https://books.google.com/books?id=UgZsi_DOKoQC). If you can’t see it, send me an ask and I’m happy to send the PDF. It tells *a* history and it ends in the middle of LJ, but it’s brief and concise and mirrors (and has helped generate) much of the academics/OTW version of our history.

She also offers a great background to the creation of the OTW/AO3 in her “An Archive of Our Own! Fanfiction Writers Unite” (2013). I can’t get it upon Googlebooks (https://books.google.com/books?id=GBwVAgAAQBAJ), but again, happy to send the PDF if anyone wants it.

Seconded!