#I got so many from that Livejournal comm

[not-poignant]

Out of curiosity, when did the, 'fanfic doesn't need to adhere to canon, everything is valid and good, don't give concrit unless specifically asked for' attitude become the norm? Genuine question.

I was active in fandom back in the LJ days, when sporkings and comms viciously mocking Mary Sues were the norm, but then I sort fell out of fandom spaces for the past (checks notes) fifteen years holy shit. The current attitude seems diametrically opposed to what I remember fandom being like (kinda shitty, it was 'cool' to be an asshole back then), and I'm just curious as to when and how the shift happened. I mean, I assume it was a gradual thing, but is there anything in particular that stick out to you?

(Also, because tone doesn't convey very well through ask, and I don't want to leave you with a poor impression-- this is by no means a defence of the 2000s attitudes, nor an aspersion on the current ones. I'm genuinely only curious about the evolution from one to the other; I hope that comes across.)

Hi anon!

TL;DR because my response got LONG -> Anon this existed before Livejournal as an attitude, in fact modern fandom was literally born out of being not canon compliant (*waves aggressively to Spirk shippers*) and this existed on Livejorunal too and there have always been big pockets of fandom that really frowned on sporking even there, like that was not cool when I was on LJ, unless you were a certain age, or in certain spaces in fandom.

But also AO3 was its kind of final death knell re: making it cool to bully 13-16 yo writers (who were largely the victims of sporking) and killing dreams, which was born out of meta happening on LJ and in other places about like... not trying to make people miserable for writing a free fic out of the love in their heart that someone else didn't like or think was good enough.

Anyway, the longer version of this under the read more!

(For everyone else, welcome to some of the uglier aspects of 00s fandom!)

So there was actually criticism around all the stuff you mention 15-20 years ago as well. I was also on Livejournal during that time and there was a pretty big proportion of people in certain fandoms who recognised even then that like... setting up communities to mock say, Mary Sue writers, was actually a pretty weirdly cruel thing to do to people who were providing free labour and the literal only 'payment' they could get in a kind of energy exchange was people just not being complete dickheads to them.

So things were already changing, especially in many LJ communities and awards communities. There were a lot of big debates over whether concrit should be asked for, and a growing movement of authors who said they welcomed constructive criticism for example, instead of assuming it should automatically apply. There was also a lot of meta around the function of fanfiction and whether it should even be 'good' by published standards if the author was just doing it for themselves, and for fun (esp if they were just going to get punished for it by folks who were elitist, judgemental, grammar purists etc.)

Things really changed around the time of AO3 (2009-2010 - literally around 14~ years ago, you may have just missed the big change anon!), Strikethrough and the Dreamwidth exodus. There was a massive swing away from leaving concrit unless the author specifically asked for it, and fandom became a lot more generally able to recognise that a lot of labour goes into fanart and fanfiction and that paying with public criticism is shitty actually. Also people were just more able to recognise that like most fanfiction writers aren't trying to become professional writers and many don't want to be.

(I would actually say things changed around the time of fanfiction.net too - rude comments there were definitely noticed and could create some pretty forward 'hey why are you doing this on something you literally don't have to read' responses from fellow readers - idk what fic sites you were on. The small indie fic sites where you could often only comment via email for example, definitely drew a lot more critical attention than sites that tended to have public comments).

The 'fanfic doesn't need to adhere to canon' literally exists since the very first Spirk slash fic in modern fanfiction in the last few decades. Literally, as soon as you write Kirk/Spock, you're not adhering to canon. Our fanfiction 'ancestors' literally paved the way for a legacy which is about not adhering to canon in order to see the world/s and thing/s you want to see, be entertained by, by turned on by, or enjoy, from the very beginning. You may not have been in slash circles anon, but the foundation of queer same sex fanfic is in many ways the foundation of fandom. But yeah, this is literally where fanfiction started! As soon as you're shipping characters that aren't canon for fun (or for whatever reason), you're making it pretty clear that you want stories different to canon, and you have to change things to often keep those characters in-character.

So yeah! That's been there for decades. Idk what circles you were in on that front! While it was fairly common for a while to criticise characters for being OOC (Out of Character), imho, a lot of folks started to recognise that they literally weren't paying for what they were criticising, and they could just walk away and potentially not like...blast the fanfic. Some folks started to recognise more that people were writing with ESL, or were teenagers (some 40 yos in fandom realised they were mocking literal 15 year olds in their proto-podcasts and websites and realised actually that's just...mean? Really mean? Not the way to nurture new generations of fanfiction writers. Definitely in no way encouraging), or were writing for themselves, or writing for like one other person, or writing for fun, or writing for free, or writing for personal reasons etc.

'Don't Like Don't Read' wasn't just about political stuff, it was also about just walking away if you feel the urge to slam a fanfic in the comments.

I've been in fandom for around 2.5 decades anon, and there were so many spaces that were not actually as shitty or mean-spirited as the ones you were in? Or ones that at least had a lot of different thoughts etc. Like, sporking (mocking/bullying badfics and sometimes the folks who wrote them) was disapproved of by a lot of people in fandom even while sporking was at the height of its popularity (the Fanlore page goes into more detail about this). It might have just been the fandoms you were in, or the people you were hanging out with (and that might have been dependent on your age or just if you were around people who wanted to be 'cool' back then - in the same way that being an 'anti' is cool among certain crowds today. It's possible to spend years in certain crowds and never get an image of broader fandom for example - we can all end up in spaces like that! I know I have.)

When I started writing fanfiction (which no one will EVER find lmao), generally giving positive comments was normal. Constructive criticism was actually pretty rare and there were already fanfiction aggregate sites that generally disapproved of it in their Rules of Conduct. People were encouraging and polite. And this was around 20 years ago on Livejournal and private indie fanfiction websites.

I would actually say there was never exactly an evolution from 'one to the other' because like thousands of people in fandom already believed this and argued in defense of supporting fanfiction and transformative works via accepting that people are labouring for free and that not everyone wants to become a 'better writer' etc. - the meta was there on Livejournal in the 00s. There were communities where sporking was seen as hip/fun, and communities where it was literally banned or at the very least, super frowned upon.

There were meta fandom communities where sporking was the subject of discussion and you know eventually in a lot of those meta communities, that's where a lot of folks decided actually that calling out the fanfiction of 16 yos as 'cringe' or 'badly done' maybe said more about us as human beings and what we wanted fandom to be, than it did about the actual fanfic itself. By the time AO3 came around, people built it with this in mind.

To this day on AO3 it's mostly considered appropriate to say you want concrit in your author's notes, and to otherwise assume as a reader it's never welcome if it's unsolicited. That started during the LJ era. And it was talked about at great length. There's obviously going to be people who disagree! But for the most part I'm a big believer in compassion and 'not everyone is here for the same reason' and 'they literally gave this to us for free and it's meant to be fun' (like yourself! What we do/think/argue 10 years ago on LJ is sometimes different to what we do 10 years later lol, I used to be against trigger warnings pre-AO3! Times change a lot :D )

So yeah, this was definitely something that was around before you and I came to fandom, and it was something that continued to grow as an attitude during, until finally it kind of won out on AO3. But yeah fandom as we know it was born in people literally not being canon compliant to make some gay dreams come true (Spirk shippers bless them all), at a time when there was no representation.

Even in the earliest days of fandom where comments could only happen via email, one of the earliest phrases authors used were things like 'flames will be used to roast marshmallows.' For those reading who don't know, flames are hate comments, critical 'this fic is bad because' comments etc. Except you emailed them directly to the author, because there was no place for comments on a fic.

And this started because authors in part got death threats for writing gay stuff.

So you know, from the very beginning, authors in fanfic have by and large had a very low tolerance for criticism / hate over something they're doing for free and making no profit out of, when they're changing/altering the canon as they please to create representation (or hotness lmao), that is literally a labour of love in a world of very little representation. From there, things have just grown. The whole 'flames will not be tolerated' existed even before Livejournal did.

Honestly there are still people who love sporking and you could probably find groups and Discords dedicated to that even now (actually you literally can, there's a Dreamwidth group for it), it's kind of wild but it started to get cool again. Just like 90s clothing :D (Which is also wild because I can just take that crap out of my closet and wear it again).

But yeah it also sounds like you may have been in some pretty crappy pockets of fandom! When I was on LJ in the 00s I avoided those places and still got to experience fandom across multiple fandoms (mostly NCIS, Captive Prince, HP, Profiler, The X-Files and some others) and communities.

I was super active in some fandom communities and saw a lot of meta happening, and my view during the early and late 00s was that sporking was largely pretty frowned upon after a very brief (like 3-6 month) era where it was cool for only some folks, and then everyone (including some - but not all - of those folks) was like 'heyyyyyyy hang on a minute.' It was something that the bullies did, and enjoyed, and otherwise folks kind of stayed away from it, especially once they learned people were becoming too scared to write fics, which is the inevitable outcome of mocking/bullying folks and fics that have been made purely out of love for something.

Like, publicly making a spectacle out of what a 13 yo (they were often teens - and it's kind of sad how many 40 yo women were doing the sporking :/ ) wrote out of love, just for fun/clout was not considered cool by everyone even back then, because like, a lot of us saw that as killing new generations of fandom (some folks who sporked considered it a win if a fic or account got deleted, this is not based behaviour), not actually creating good writing, internalised misogyny (Mary Sue hatred and self insert hatred), etc. It's hard to explain because I do really think we were in different corners of fandom at the time, but I don't know anyone personally from my time on Livejournal who actually liked sporking as an idea or enjoyed it or enjoyed listening to it or reading articles mocking fic.

I knew about it from very lively 'is this okay' 'actually no it's not even if it's just for fun this is trying to hurt people and saying 'it's just the fic' is not going to be the bandaid a teenager needs to understand why older folks (generally) in fandom are mocking them for being new at a skill' discussions on LJ in meta fandom communities. So this is how much I could be in fandom and not be a part of it and also have like a wildly different experience to your LJ experience!

I think if I'd been a teenager during that era it would have seemed a lot more appealing (in the same way that many teens are antis now before they grow out of it), and fuck it if I was a more bitter person who was just around people who liked to make fun of what other people created, perhaps I would have enjoyed it too, I can see a lot of reasons why a person would fall into that in LJ -> but I was an adult on LJ trying not to be mean to people or what they were creating, so yeah I was maybe just in very different spaces! (Don't get me wrong, I have my giant fucking character flaws, but I was very scared of people hating me so like I didn't want to do things that would make that happen, lol, and also I was scared to put up fic myself during the era of active sporking. I know for myself that sporkers didn't just scare away writers of 'badfic' - they...intimidated a LOT of people).

Before AO3 I was on FF.net, posting fics on LJ, posting on Schnoogle, gossamer, and a couple of other archives. So I don't think my experience was that 'narrow,' I just think I wasn't around like... anime at that time or other places where it might have been happening. I also avoided like...Draco/Malfoy where CC drama was happening and I know sporking was popular in that specific arena / pairing for a while as well (er, as well as anything to do with Mary Sues).

So yeah! That's about where that is. Generally gatekeeping fandom is just seen as not a great thing to do to people, and that creates other kind of beliefs that are generally upheld as being more inviting/nurturing. After all, if someone truly wants to get better at writing, they can ask, or do courses, but as we all know, everyone has to write some bad stuff to get good at it, but not everyone wants to be good. Folks are in fandom for different reasons. I'm rambling now so I'm going to finish my lunch! :D

[unspeakablehorror]

Where to Find Me

Date Created: 7/20/2023 Last Update: 9/1/2023

Edit on 9/1/2023: Added a link to my personal website to the Fanworks section as well, since my fanfic can be found there.

Edit on 8/7/2023: Added a second website that's for archiving fanworks and other stuff I like to 'My Websites'.

EDIT on 7/21/2023: The @ symbol was automatically redirecting (or attempting to redirect) the second part of the pillowfort, dreamwidth, and cohost urls to tumblr accounts, so I got rid of these in all the links.

NOTE: I HAVE STOPPED REGULARLY CHECKING TUMBLR.

The interface of this site has become nearly intolerable for me, and it's become clear to me over the intervening years that Mullenweg is committed to making it progressively worse. So if you've wondered if the reason I've stopped commenting on your posts has anything to do with you, let me assure you, it's not. It's not you. It's not me, either. It's Tumblr. I logged out like maybe a week ago? And it's been amazing? I can live my life again? Miss you all, though.

So anyone who knows me (or has looked through this blog carefully enough) knows I haven't been on here since 2018. But it's been a few years, so now it's time to update my 'Where to Find Me' post! Since there have been several notable changes, and because I wanted to change how this post was structured a bit, it felt easier to me to just make a new post rather than editing the old.

My Websites

Unspeakablehorror's Site - I'll be keeping copies of my fanfic here, recipes, assorted essays, and other things of interest to me here. I will also archive select works from others on this site (with the creator's permission).

New Old Web - This is my website where I talk about how the web is crashing and burning and think about how we can make it not crash and burn. I'm still building it up, but I hope I can add lots more thoughts here.

Main Social Media

I currently feel that I use Pillowfort the most and Dreamwidth the second most. Something my main social media sites both have in common? They don't take venture capital. They're also great for longform writing and conversations.

unspeakablehorror at Pillowfort - Like if Tumblr and LiveJournal had a baby. I love the way this site handles commenting, reblogs, post edits, and privacy. And I love the communities feature. I'm the mod of 3 different Star Wars comms on here: Andor, Sith Empire, and Star Wars-The Sacred Texts.

unspeakablehorror at Dreamwidth - LiveJournal but better. Interface is a bit retro but I absolutely love the tag cloud. Every social media should have tag clouds. Dreamwidth has so many customization features. Also this site has my favorite setup for privacy options. And I love the communities feature on here. I'm the mod of the Sith of Korriban comm here.

Secondary Social Media

unspeakablehorror at Mastodon (fandom.ink instance) - I am on Mastodon, too, which is similar to Twitter with respect to the character count limitations, but has many exciting ideas, like using a protocol for social media that allows accounts on different servers to seamlessly interact with each other (as long as the server isn’t blocked for incompatible rules). It also incorporates the idea of decentralization in a very intriguing way and is entirely non-profit.

unspeakablehorror at cohost.org - Yeah, I'm here too. I don't currently use this account as much, but I do check the site from time to time and I've made a few posts here. I'd be here more often if any of my friends used this platform, but I don't prefer the interface, which is too much like Tumblr for my taste. Basically this is Tumblr if the interface wasn't total garbage, lol. I think I clash with some of the core principles of this site somewhat, and the only way to delete your page is by emailing the site owners, but at least it doesn't have ads or take venture capital. This site is what happens when some furries with coding and design skills are given a bunch of $$$ to make a social media site.

You can also PM me if you want to inquire about other ways to contact me or discuss anything else. I might be a little slow to answer Tumblr PMs, but I'll try to log in from time to time to check for them. Hopefully Tumblr doesn't end up breaking that, too, lol.

Fanworks

I am actually in the process of decentralizing my fic storage! Currently using a combination of social media posts for my oneshots and external storage links to store pdfs and epubs of my longfic. These can be found by examining my 'About me' in my bio on Pillowfort and my profile on Dreamwidth. My eventual goal is to also have my own website to store my fic on.

Unspeakablehorror's Site - I'll be keeping copies of my fanfic here, among other things.

Fanfic on Pillowfort - Access all my fic from Pillowfort!

Fanfic on Dreamwidth - Access all my fic from Dreamwidth!

unspeakablehorror at AO3 - Ah, I hope AO3 can work out their, uh, severe organizational issues, but in the meantime, I'm uncertain how much presence I'm going to have on this site.

unspeakablehorror at ffnet - This site is awful. The ads alone cause me psychological damage. Probably going to have to phase out posting here.

Well, that's all. Time for me to take my leave of this ball pit!

[brehaaorgana]

The thing is, websites being slowly destroyed because of capitalist greed is bad in general for many reasons, but I would like to point out that one of those reasons is that not every social website is built to handle the same kinds of engagement in the same ways, and this destroys spaces that can't simply be ported elsewhere because they are symbiotic to their origins.

You destroy specific kinds of communities and communication styles that rely on the uniqueness of individual platforms. You can't move that to somewhere else with a different structure without fundamentally changing something.

This has always been true, but I feel like not everyone is fully...aware or familiar with how this happens. It's not even entirely a Gen Z thing either - there are plenty of Millennials/Xers and older generations who did not have a ton of internet access in the early-mid 2000's and so don't necessarily have familiarity with what vanished. Internet access has only recently been "expected," for more people across the class spectrum.

As a Millennial(TM) who has been connected to the internet basically since infancy (my dad did IT/software engineer management stuff and would literally sit me on his lap while he was on the computer as a baby), I am keenly aware of a) the fact that there are entire internet social communities which I didn't engage with but are now gone and b) that there are ones I did engage in and are lost or no longer really the same because of capitalism.

Like...forums are just not as popular anymore as they used to be. They still exist, but it's harder to find them and they usually see way less activity than other platforms. And we lose so much knowledge/advice/engagement without them. Things like: I turned around one day and found a digital art forum I used to lurk on was totally gone, along with all the inspiration, tutorials, and tips. I remember one thread was this one guy wanting to learn to draw, and it was basically just his progress journal of learning to draw. It went over the course of YEARS of progress from like, stick figures to beautifully rendered art. Shit inspired me so much, and I think it just...vanished?

But then there's things like, entire social norms, jokes, and kinds of engagement that also vanishes or becomes a graveyard. Forums usually have karma systems (which reddit apes, sort of) and that could tell you a lot about an account lol.

Look at the slow death of livejournal! Dreamwidth sort of...tried to fill the gap but there's so many platform specific expectations and experiences that Livejournal had:

Icons that you change based on: interests, content or intent of your post/comment, that you can create and have others use and which change often.

Related: icons and graphics communities.

CAPSLOCK COMMUNITIES WHERE YOU DON'T LAPSLOCK EVER!! EVERYONE TALKS LIKE THIS

Locked communities (especially age based!) Or dedicated communities with moderation and agreed upon rules unique to that comm. Tumblr literally can't recreate that. It doesn't port to how Tumblr specifically works.

Comms like ONTD, stupid_free, or comedy shit like weepingcock, - or even like, scanlations comms. Shit that just doesn't translate to tumblr's style, especially without optional anonymous engagement and nested conversations. There's no such thing as FFAF on Tumblr. It doesn't work. You don't break the internet here the same way ONTD did when Michael Jackson died.

Dedicated fandom/ship comms. As someone who was quite literally harassed on Tumblr for years because I didn't like a specific non-canon ship between a literal teenaged child and an adult and talked about it without tagging it (and even censored it when just words suddenly showed in tags!) I miss dedicated fandom comms so much. Because I had way more control over who engaged with me on my personal LJ and NEVER would've bothered people on a comm about a ship I hated because it's shitty behavior and because people who do that got banned! Shared communities with moderation and better blocking settings were benefits I didn't have on Tumblr.

Just...it doesn't translate to Tumblr and now it's just a tiny space on DW and the zombie of LJ.

Similarly I don't think AITA translates very well to Tumblr because Tumblr doesn't:

Have nested comments/comment threads that can be collected all on one central page

Have easy to make throwaway accounts

Allow for anon responses to posts directly (it's only asks! They can't reblog anonymously!)

Have an upvote system

Have a "sort by most popular" or "sort by oldest."

Have autoretention/bot capture of the original submission.

A way to click through to someone's comments in other communities, or see what their responses to the thread as the op easily.

A collection of moderators and standardized community rules and community ability to report trolling/spam/fiction/shit posts.

Call me a killjoy but AITA won't fully translate to Tumblr for the same reason why ONTD isn't translated to Tumblr, and even a similar concept to ONTD looks totally different on reddit (see: deuxmoi). It will look different, it won't have the same community or feel simply because the platform itself is different enough that it inherently changes how we engage, what that engagement looks like, and what can even feasibly be done.

When a website dies, the unique communities and communication styles of that platform also start to die.

[wolf359]

Caution, rambling sentence construction ahead, but just to clear up confusion... I'm occasionally shocked by how many people are following me, with very little overlap with who I am following, and relatively little creative output on my part. I think the main cause is that people might think I am affiliated with the Wolf 359 podcast. I am not, but I was here first. My social internet presence as wolf359 started back in 2001 with my university email account. I chose the name from a list of stars in an old astronomy textbook. It was not intended as a Star Trek or an Outer Limits reference, and was meant to be as obscure as possible while keeping with the theme that I like spacey things, astronomy, radio comms, and wolves (furry??). I wanted to develop my own brand, so to speak. It was a catch-22 since I had to choose a username in the first place before I could access the campus network to confirm that the name I chose was quite obscure. I was confident enough and quite happy enough with the name that I didn't research further once I had net access. Among other website accounts before and since, with this or smilar naming, I created this tumblog back in 2008 with the taglines 'Radio' and 'Output', to blog keyboard banging shitpost nonsense, some of it inspired by things I heard on shortwave radio and C-band satellite "wild feeds" (unedited news truck reporter-to-studio links and the like). It was also about that time that people started saying things like "Cool Star Trek reference.", and I was like "???", because although I am a casual fan of the show, I hadn't watched that much yet and had just not encountered that plotline. Starting in the early 2000's I wanted to create a pod/webcast, but was always too busy earning tuition, and witt classes and family matters, and I was satisifed enough with usual blogging (livejournal, myspace, tumblr, ricedoutyugo, facebook, etc). For the last half of my time at uni, I was General Manager at the campus radio station. That was a whole other adventure, but I got my start running a webcast from there. Working in IT, in 2010 I had to build a icecast server for a company project. After the project ended, the webcast fell into my personal use for a few years. Random music, whatever youtube videos I happened to be watching, Casio keyboard banging, etc. Then in 2019 it had to go back into service as part of a local radio station's Studio-to-Transmitter link. Finally, in this last month, I've got my webcast back again! I'm keeping it obscure for now (Currently 0 listeners), and playing stuff like old KIPM shortwave pirate shows, PR-GNUS of the World, and DJ sets from my time at the campus station. Here's where my concern lies. I have heard a little bit of the Wolf 359 podcast and I intend to listen to it all, and I have been listening to WTNV since CecilSweep. I love them both, but I feel a sense of resentment, like the ideas and aesthetics that I might have wanted to explore have now already been covered. And now that if I finally try to develop some sort of audio production, or otherwise be more actively creative, the identity I've held for over two decades may be struck as trademark infringement and plaigerism. I ain't got the spoons for that shit, I still need to do the dishes and vacuum the floor.

[thesilversun]

As it looks like more people are moving over to tumblr or moving back, and I’ve had a few new people follow me here, I guess I should put up a ‘who is silver sun’ post.

I am I guess a fandom old now as I’m a few years into my 40s.

All my fic (and old art, I don’t really do any anymore) can be found on ao3 here

silver sun is the name I’ve participated in fandom with since 2006.

I’d lurked and read fandom stuff from about 2000 onwards - mainly Highlander: the series.

In 2006 series one of Torchwood aired, and before the series was even half way I’d posted my first fic.

All this was on live journal - in the days before AO3 existed and html coding your fics so the formatting worked and you could use bold or italics in your posts was a thing.

Torchwood was my fandom home for pretty much the next 8 years. Including running comms and a couple of big bangs on livejournal after the fandom imploded after Children of Earth.

Other fandoms I’ve written in are: Primeval, Doctor Who, Being Human, Rivers of London, Johnathan Strange and Mr Norrell, and Good Omens.

Currently, since about September ‘19 my fandom had been MDZS - this is the first time I’ve been in a not British sci-fi/fantasy fandom (I’m in the UK and I never really got into much in the way of US tv)

Netflix kept recommending The Untamed to me. But I didn’t have time to watch. So I found the Exiled Rebels translation and spent many commutes to and from work on the bus reading it. It did then watch the Untamed.

MDZS has led me to watch/read a number of other shows including Daomu Biji and sleuth of the Ming dynasty - and because it was on the same app, Beyond Evil.

I’ve read fic in all these, but haven’t yet got anything I’ve written finished and posted for these.

For pretty much all fandoms I’ve been in I ship quite a few different pairings, ranging from the popular to the ‘there��s literally only 1 person in the fandom who writes it’

I tend to read the same kind of things as I write - canon (or canon divergent) setting, hurt/comfort and case fic. I been known to write kink fic too - but I’ve not written any for years at this point - all of it was in Torchwood & Primeval fandoms.

I’m planning on being around the MDZS fandom for quite a while longer - I’ve got plenty of things I want to write (time to do it is what’s lacking)

So that’s me.

I occasionally post a bit of irl stuff here - cooking or camping photos mostly.

I don’t have any side blogs, all my stuff on tumblr is all on this.

[funnuraba]

Quick guide to SAVING LIVEJOURNAL/OTHER FAN CONTENT with THE WAYBACK MACHINE:

(quick note: Tumblr content is honestly much more at risk, so if you have the stomach to try finding things on Tumblr, you can also use this method on that and do some good work)

Uhhh this got long, so look for the bolded parts if you’re not here for a long read lol.

Okay so, at some point, LJ is going under. Or at least all the gay stuff they can find on there. More to the point, PHOTOBUCKET, TINYPIC, IMAGESHACK.... all of those have left huge scars in the records of LJ fandom. So I’ve been using the fact that the Wayback Machine lets you save outlinks if you sign up with the Internet Archive! (Free!)

There’s a Save Page Now function! Good places to use it on include:

Rec lists

People’s masterlists of their own fics/art/meta

Somebody’s well-organized LJ Memories (the page you save needs to contain direct links to the posts you want to save, so if there are sublevels in the Memories you need to go as deep as possible)

community profiles

Every page of a community, if you really feel like it--I’ve been doing this with some small comms, but it’s.... less than feasible with big communities.

Check the “Save Outlinks” button, and the WB will also save links from the page you enter! You can get a lot of stuff at once. Unfortunately there’s a limit on the number of links it’ll grab, but it’s better than nothing. You’ll also see a lot of ERROR!s and it’s annoying. When it’s a Job Failed you can try the page again later.

I don’t know yet how it picks the outlinks to save, so maybe it’s random and you could eventually get all of them by Saving repeatedly??? I’m pretty sure it tries to start at the top, though, because communities with a huge list of tags in their layout are probably not worth your time: I’ve been trying to get stuff from the KKM Fanfic Challenge comm, but.... well, look at it. Trying to save any page with outlinks just picks up a whooooole bunch of those tags on the sidebar, and barely any actual posts. No matter what kind of URL you put in, that sidebar’s always there. You’d have to save each post individually to get every fic. Hope LJ’s not going anywhere fast!

Community profiles are among the most important, because that gives us a lot of info like how many members are left (after years of bleeding users) and how many comments and posts there were in the community! Unfortunately this method is REALLY BAD for art and icons--lots of them are just gone with tinypic and people’s personal LJ albums. Also the WB isn’t good with images in general and there’s no real alternative. But the profiles of icon communities, plus fanfics, meta, stuff like that: a lot of it left to be grabbed! Big main community profiles are best, because they often listed other smaller communities for the same fandom. Saving the big profile with Outlinks will pick up the profile links of all those smaller communities!

Sometimes the big community profiles will just make you sad. Try to soldier on. (If you’re really committing to this, don’t forget that smaller comms will also have even smaller comms listed as affiliates that never made it into the Big Fandom Community’s profile. You can come back later and Save their profiles directly. Sometimes they also have links to fanlistings and other rare things that are also useful to have saved!)

If you can think of a small community, you can also use the method of saving every page, which takes some work and time: you have to save the skip=10 URL, and after that skip=30, skip=50, etc. Then come back later and do skip=20, skip=40, skip=60, etc. The reason for this is that the Wayback Machine will only save one single URL every 30 minutes. So if you’re saving outlinks from skip=30, you’ll also get an incomplete snapshot of skip=20 and skip=40, minus all the important links on skip=20 and skip=40. Obviously, this isn’t much fun and works only with small comms. But it does save a lot of text.

Here’s the type of stuff you’ll get:

a saved PROFILE url: This is good! It saves info about how active a user or community was. In this case it was a user, but the profile is info they chose to put front and center, and the WB isn’t gonna crawl any deeper and grab personal posts from 2004 or anything. (You’ll get a lot of user profiles that aren’t really necessary when using this method.)

a modified POST url: Also good, but you’re gonna get a ton of duplicates on these due to how many different ways LJ would link to a single post. The style=mine doesn’t alter the content. You’ll also see lots of “#cutid1″, which of course is the link left by an LJ-cut. That’s fine, it gets the post. The content of posts 82379 is safe! (but NOT all the nested comments!)

a comment link (in this case dreamwidth which isn’t in danger, but the same format): This saved both the post itself (79392) and a comment thread (131360). You probably can’t get every comment thread just because the WB is bad at unfolding LJ threads, but this does contain the post itself. If you don’t see the plain post URL itself in the list of saved URLS once WB is done saving outlinks, but you do see a comment link: that comment link also has the original post! You don’t need to keep trying!

a journal’s tag link: This is less useful. It saves a snapshot of the tag page itself, but nothing deeper. Any content under an LJ cut or in the comments is not saved. There’s no way to keep these from saving, though. Just keep in mind, that tag in the picture doesn’t mean that the fics this person linked to have been saved. You’ll have to enter the tag link URL itself into the Wayback Machine’s SAVE page for that.

ERROR! JOB FAILED.: These are annoying! Most likely nothing was saved. Unless a comment link was successfully saved, you’ll have to copy-paste the URL that failed and put it into the SAVE page.

LIVE PAGE IS NOT AVAILABLE: There’s nothing you can do unless this URL was already saved somewhere.

BUT WHAT ABOUT IMAGES????

The passage of time means it’s probably too late. Imageshack and Tinypic took out a huge chunk of images on LJ, and PhotoBucket tried to make people pay them by putting big ol’ watermarks on all pictures except those hosted by premium users. It didn’t work and they said sorry, but the watermarks are still there. Lol. If you right-click +Open image in new tab, the watermark goes away, but who wants to do that with every single image? Also, the Wayback Machine sucks with big images and there’s no alternative at the moment.

If you’re lucky enough to find some holy grail like a big post of 1000 icons hosted on someone’s premium Photobucket, you could save a snapshot of the page. Wayback Machine lets you check that as an option, but IF YOU SAVE A SNAPSHOT WITH A TOOL LIKE “GoFullPage”: I find that GoFullPage, at least, will save you a big long image with no Photobucket watermarks! But you’ll have to save that image yourself, or store it somewhere, so keep that in mind.

Also, the snapshot means no animated gifs--although if you want to save those, they’ll be tiny little LJ icon gifs, so pretty easy to store on your own computer.

[mahou-queen]

⋆ ˚｡⋆୨୧˚lolita fashion then vs now: how the fashion has changed over the last decade ˚୨୧⋆｡˚ ⋆

I started getting into lolita fashion in 2010 and so much has changed in the fashion since then. Trends, websites, community opinions, etc. So I thought we should take a look into the past and reminisce about lolita fashion since 2010~~

Everything below is based on my personal experience and perceptions in the egl community. These are not necessarily facts, and other lolitas may not agree or relate to everything stated below. 

⋆ ˚｡⋆୨୧˚˚୨୧⋆｡˚ ⋆

✿❀Rectangle headdresses:

At the height of 2010-2012 sweet these types of headdresses were not in style. They were considered ita and absolutely taboo for new lolitas. At the time the community was trying really hard to separate themselves from lolita cosplay and maid cosplay which were both really popular at the time especially at cons where a lot of lolitas would also be. In recent years with the resurgence of old school lolita, rectangle headdresses are back in style and I personally couldn't be happier as I have always liked them. 

✿❀Animal ears:

Also considered ita and taboo for its associations with cosplay. Today we see a lot of animal ears, particularly bear and bunny, sometimes cat but not as much. Even big brands like angelic pretty are releasing animal ears regularly. While they can definitely still be ita if they are costume quality or irrelevant to a coord, they are definitely back in style and looking very cute

✿❀Chiffon half blouses:

The 2010 sweet era was all about cotton blouses. And while cotton blouses are still alive and well, these days we have the wonderful chiffon half blouse. Very comfortable, more size inclusive, light and pretty. These were not in style/ not widely available when i first got into lolita. 

✿❀Low collar blouses:

Absolutely existed, but were not as in as they are now. Peter pan collars and high necks were all the rage, these days with the prevalence of chiffon blouses, we are seeing a lot of slightly lower neck lines.

✿❀Chocolate explosion:

Around 2013, it seemed like every release was chocolate themed. All these chocolate prints came out in 2013:

Angelic Pretty started transitioning into “sweet classic” around 2014 which was when I took a break from the fashion. 

✿❀Split wigs:

Split wigs were super popular in the early 2010s both in natural and unnatural color varieties. These day some people would say they’re ita but I think the fashion has come to a really nice place of balancing old and new styles so many loltias still wear split wigs and wear them well. 

✿❀Circle lenses:

When i got into lolita it seemed like circle lenses were almost mandatory. They were a part of every makeup tutorial, every popular lolitas coord, circle lenses were everywhere. I could never wear them due to my astigmatism so I was always upset about circle lenses. I am glad to see they have not been prominent in recent years.

✿❀Replicas:

It seemed like replicas were everywhere, everyone had one, they were generally accepted, and promoted by other lolitas. Dream of lolita was making replicas of all the major AP prints and filled the pages at clobbaonline, oo jia was a facebook based brand that made the most convincing replicas available. Replicas still exist but since 2011 major bans have been placed on reselling them and reputable resellers stopped carrying them for the most part. They are not celebrated and most lolitas are against them now. 

✿❀RTBU:

Refuse to be usual was a taobao reseller on ebay in the early 2010s. Idk if they are still around but i know they up-charged more than twice the price of the item. Secret shop tea parties were going for $95 on rtbu. They had hit or miss reviews and a lot of people didn't trust them. I never bought from them but i did window-shop

✿❀The only real resellers were clobbaonline and qutieland:

Clobba did not have a full website, only a gallery where you had to place your inquiry and order via email. These days clobba has a fully functional website with a wishlist and shopping cart feature. Qutieland no longer exists. These days we have seemingly endless taobao reseller options of varying quality

✿❀Egl comm sales:

I never figure out how this worked because lacemarket took over not too long after i got into the fashion. But it was an entire second hand market being run out of livejournal. It seemed very Intricate

✿❀Bodyline:

Ohhh bodyline in the early 2010s. The lace monsters, mr yan, the sundries department, the items never restocked, good times. I have 3 bodyline main pieces these days and I love them and plan to keep them for as long as i'm in the fashion because they are cute, comfortable, and the prints look good. There was a time in the mid 2010s where bodyline and people who wore bodyline were scoffed at and everyone who had only burandoo thought they were better than everyone else. But these days with the booming lolita industry in china (on taobao) and even western brands getting bigger, the emphasis on brand is becoming less and less and what makes good lolita is based more upon actual quality and coordination skills and less on the tag. 

✿❀My old dream dress list:

I never got any of these and many of them would never fit me anyway. I did get sweetie violet but in lavender as I no longer like the sax colorway and I don't know why I ever did.

My favorite lolita online at the time was @herajika-blog

✿❀bonus:

Sweetrococo.com, does anyone remember this place? You could allegedly design a lolita dress yourself with any colors/prints/images from the internet and they would make it for you. I remember designing a my little pony skirt on the site for fun and not getting it because it was $200 LOL. I swear that site was a fever dream. 

⋆ ˚｡⋆୨୧˚as we can see a lot had changed in the lolita fashion community and trends over the last decade. Do you remember any of these things? What is your experience? I really enjoyed this trip through memory lane. And while sometimes i miss the times when i was just starting out, these days the lolita community is so much more accepting, more accessible, and more experimental. It doesnt even seem like there are trends right now, just that any trends are ok as long as theyre lolita. What do you think?˚୨୧⋆｡˚ ⋆

[wipbigbang]

How to Post

Posting is starting very soon! I am so so excited by how many of you have participated and how many amazing stories we’re going to be reading soon. All of you had stories that had been sitting around for who knows how long and now YOU HAVE COMPLETE STORIES. At least mostly. Hopefully. You are all fantastic, authors and artists alike, and I am so proud of you :) So how's this going to go, you ask? I've got my story online or mostly online and it'll be posted by the date I claimed, but how will everybody know I've completed it? Well, friend, do I have just the thing for you. Here on the WIP Big Bang comm, we're doing what we call Bragging Rights. That's right, you get an entire post on the comm to shout to the world how awesome you are.* In this post, you can share things like: Story Title: Fandom: Link: Summary: Warnings: Characters: Pairings: When I Started**: How I Lost My Shit**: How I Finished My Shit**: You can submit your post to the comm as early as you like (but LJ will only allow you to have one post in the queue at a time, so be aware if you have multiple posts to make!) and we'll queue it to post on the date you've claimed. Don't worry about tagging posts; we will use a system we've determined. And don't worry, artists, we've got you covered, too! You get your own separate post, though you are welcome to just have your author post your art on their post if you want. If you don't plan on making your own separate post to the comm, you still must do the check in below. In this post, you can share things like: Art Title: Fandom: Link: (or you can post the art here, too!) Warnings: Bragging Rights: Your posting day is all about you. So celebrate! Don't be modest! Shout it to the world! We all come from so many fandoms, but we all came together to finish our shit, and that's something to shed a proud tear over. You may post to Livejournal, Dreamwidth, and/or Tumblr, whichever you prefer. As well as your bragging rights, you are welcome to post to the WIP Big Bang 2020 collection on AO3. We are also requiring a google forms check in to make it easier for mods to track posts. To fill out the check in form, you will need the email and check in ID you used to sign up, as well as a link to your bragging rights post. You should have received an autogenerated confirmation of your sign up with your check in ID if you need to double check what you used, but if you didn't or lost it, please email us at wipbigbang@gmail.com and we'll find that info for you. Please fill out a different form for each fic/art you post.

Click here to check in.

You must post to the comm and check in by the end of the posting period or you may be banned. If you have any questions, feel free to send the mods an email! *If for some reason, you can't post this yourself, you can always email this information to the mods, and we'll post it for you. You can also post via proxy, just let us know that you will be doing so. **When I Started, How I Lost My Shit, How I Finished My Shit are all optional, but we would prefer you fill out the rest of the categories.

[panharmonium]

just some thinky thoughts about fandom platforms and community that i didn’t know what to do with, so i wrote them down.

[tl;dr - tumblr is weird, pan misses (certain aspects of) Ye Olde Days]

tumblr is such a weird platform.

like.  i love my blog as a personal repository of stuff i enjoy, and i’m definitely thrilled to have met the people i’ve met on here - some of them have even become my friends outside the internet, and that’s been absolutely lovely.  but in terms of actual functionality when it comes to trying to engage in a fandom...it’s still weird.

i know people will probably get tired of all the “BACK IN MY DAY” fandom analysis posts that float around on this website, but even having been here for years now, it is still really hard for me to adjust to a place that makes it so impossible to find any kind of actual fandom community spaces.

for me, i didn’t even start using tumblr until i was in my mid-twenties, and that was only because tumblr was where most people from LJ had migrated.  i’d been Doing Fandom for over a decade prior to that, on other platforms (fandom specific sites/archives and then LJ), so i ended up here kind of out of necessity - the great fandom migration was already mostly complete, by the time i moved.  

so i got here, and i got settled, but fandom on tumblr has been so different from fandom as i experienced it anywhere else, and that’s not the fault of any of its users; it’s just an inevitable function of the way this site is structured.

it is SO HARD for us to connect with people on here!

just, as an example from my own more recent life - i’ve been doing a lot of merlin stuff lately, right?  that’s where my head is at and that’s what i’m having the most fun with and i would love to be more interactive with people about it, like - to have folks to geek out with about it, you know, to do the things that fandom is for - and if i were on, say, livejournal, back in the day, i would know where to go to do those things.  there would be specific spaces built for just that purpose.  LJ comms were places where everybody who was interested in a particular thing could go for the express purpose of posting and discussing and interacting about that thing!  people still maintained their own personal blogs, but they also belonged to whichever LJ communities reflected their interests.  LJ comms and fandom-specific sites were fandom hubs - it was so easy to find what you were looking for.

this functionality doesn’t exist in any meaningful way on tumblr.  big, moderated groups/communities aren’t a thing tumblr truly supports.  there’s no way for me to go join the “merlin” comm and just be in community with a large group of people who just wanna talk about merlin.  the limited “group blog” functionality on tumblr is so non-conducive to actual usage that community spaces like those just don’t really exist, not like Back In The Day.

fandom on tumblr is so very decentralized.  the way things are set up here forces all of us to just make posts on our individual blogs, which then might get picked up and put on other people’s individual blogs, maybe.  you can’t like...make something (X) Fandom related and drop it in the (X) Fandom LJ Comm like “hey look, something fun to talk about!”  you could put it in “The Tag,” but anyone who’s been here for any length of time knows how useful doing that actually is.  and you could post it on your individual blog, but it won’t necessarily reach anybody who might want to geek out with you, not if you’re not already followed by someone in that fandom.  

and the only other option is to invite yourself onto someone else’s individual blog, which is a) inefficient, when you’re looking for wider community, and b) not something a Painfully Reserved Person is wont to do.

the analogy that works best for me is this: pre-tumblr, fandom hangouts were community spaces.  they were cafés with a sign hanging out front saying “star wars here!” or “kanan/hera here!” or “X here!”  if you wanted to geek out about a particular thing, you would go to the café and meet a bunch of other people there.

nowadays, if you want to geek out about a particular thing, you have to barge into a stranger’s house.  and not everyone is comfortable with that.

.

the lack of real, threaded comments is also just...i don’t know how to express how detrimental this is to communication and community.  i mean, i understand that tumblr’s entire “reblog” system doesn’t really allow it to be a thing, but tumblr’s entire mechanic as a fandom platform has to be questioned, in that case.

how impossible is it to have a conversation on here, the way tumblr is set up right now?  i mean - let’s say you make a post, right?  one person reblogs it and adds their own text to it; another person reblogs the original version, but says something different in the tags.  a third person doesn’t reblog it at all, but hits “reply” on your original post.  a fourth person “replies” also, but to the second person’s reblog, in response to the additional content.  

NONE OF YOU ARE HAVING THE SAME CONVERSATION.  none of you are even aware that the other conversations are happening.  the idea of trying to build an actual cohesive fandom community like that is just...impossible.  it can’t happen.

when i reblog posts on tumblr, i feel like i’m a dragon collecting a little hoard of shiny things she likes, only i never actually see another person, because i live in a cave.

everybody here lives in a cave.

.

and like...this is just philosophical, i guess, but.  tumblr’s focus on “follower count” and notes is also a thing i don’t really know how to handle.  

having people “follow” me makes me feel weird. seeing that people are “following” this blog exerts a bizarre external pressure, as if my little house here could ever be for anybody who isn’t me.  it prompts a tiny 'but should you?’ in the back of my head when i post about something that isn’t what all those people came here for, which is ridiculous, because this was never supposed to be a blog for any fandom in particular; it was just a blog for me.  i was the only one here when i started, and i literally never did anything to try and get people to come here and join me.  it happened accidentally, because bigger blogs than me picked up some star wars stuff i made and passed it around.

but of course, on tumblr, making connections gets conflated with follower/note count, and understandably so, because besides having a higher follower count (aka wider distribution), how are people ever going to reach the other people who are into the same thing they are?  

.

for instance.  let’s say you’re brand new to tumblr.  you want to get involved in X fandom.  there’s no community space here where a new blog with no followers can go and share their stuff with the right audience and meet all the other people who are also sharing their own work.  unless you start messaging strangers, your tumblr time is pretty isolated.

whereas - i remember on lj comms, back when people would post as a newcomer, it would be like, ‘hey i’m so-and-so and i love xyz and here’s a picture i drew of x character!!!!’ - and people would actually respond to that.  people responded to everything!  like.  tiny 400 word fics would have 30 comments, and all those people were talking with each other, not past each other, on the same page. 

.

just for fun, while i was typing this up, i went through a month’s worth of posts on an old lj comm i used to frequent.  not a single one of those posts was comment-less.  every single post, even the tiniest, most insignificant one-line musing, had some amount of discussion attached to it.  

whereas now - i don’t know if this is just confined to tumblr, or if it’s a general cultural shift, because even on AO3, i sometimes see people who have written massive sprawling epics and the comment field is just a desert.  i once saw the exact same fic posted on ff.net, where it had 20 comments - and then on AO3, where it had zero. 

and like, say what you will about ff.net (there’s...plenty to be said, certainly XD ) but commenting patterns were observably different there.  and that’s all part and parcel of a bigger discussion, which isn’t really within the scope of these notes, except to say that it’s probably the source of my forever grudge match with AO3���s kudos button, which i realize is an absurdly silly thing to say and i’m smiling at myself even as i type this, but - i gotta be honest - i hate that thing!  i can’t stand it!  XD  

i say that in the most good-natured way possible, obviously; this is fandom, after all, and it’s all for fun, and i love AO3 in every other way, so this is more a minor annoyance which makes me laugh at myself than anything else - but i say again - in the most fun-loving, self-deprecating way possible - that little button is my archnemesis.  XD  

i totally get why other people love it!  it’s a completely reasonable way to feel!  but for me, personally, coming out of an environment where the reward at the end of making something was getting to gush with somebody else, make a connection, talk about the thing that gave us So Many FEELS - the kudos button is so.  sterile.  and.  empty.  it doesn’t fulfill my urge to connect with people or share fannish enthusiasm in any way.  i’d almost rather not even see kudos on my account, honestly, because it makes me feel more disappointed than anything else - like, “oh, man.  look at all these missed fandom conversations we could have had.”

and obviously, this is in no way meant as disparaging to people who use the kudos button liberally.  it is ALWAYS lovely to show appreciation for someone who wrote something you liked, however which way you are able, if and only if you are so inclined.  nobody is obligated to leave feedback - lurkers are a perfectly accepted and long-celebrated fandom tradition; i belonged to that tradition myself, for most of my fandom life - so showing appreciation in any form is already going above and beyond.  nobody needs to be harangued with “YOU SHOULD’VE COMMENTED” or “YOU SHOULD’VE REBLOGGED” - none of that stuff is required to participate in fandom; nobody owes comments or reblogs, and creators have to be okay with that.  we can discuss and/or lament the structural factors that encourage or discourage participation, by all means, but ultimately we have to recognize that nobody is actually required to respond to things we make.  it’s fandom.  we’re all here by choice, and people’s participation levels are their own business. 

and anyway, i know that lots of authors actually love getting kudos on their work, so my experience isn’t universal, by any means.  it’s just a function of my own personal background, and the communities i used to run in - i speak for no one but myself and my own fannish life.

.

and besides, the entire debate about kudos/comments and like/reblog disparities doesn’t come anywhere near the underlying issues.  it’s sometimes framed as “people not participating in fandom appropriately” (and that’s completely unfair; there’s no wrong way to do fandom when you’re not hurting anybody) as opposed to “what is it about our platforms that encourages or discourages participatory fan culture.”  like - the only reason we even need to talk about the importance of reblogs vs. likes is because tumblr makes it so darn hard for a person’s stuff to be seen by the “right” people!  reblogs are the only way for someone’s work to spread, and even then it’s kind of like throwing a handful of darts at a board and praying one of them will land in a well-connected spot.  if a platform like tumblr were set up differently, we wouldn’t even need to have this conversation - there would be places to post your work where people would be specifically looking for content like what you were making.  you could make those fannish connections more easily.

*** important to note, too - it’s always worthwhile to remember when reading these “back in the old days” nostalgia posts that pre-tumblr spaces had drawbacks of their own.  livejournal was not some fannish utopia, by any means.  there were, however, a few structural things from that era that i think were helpful influences on fan culture, and their absence here makes me miss them.

but anyways.  those are just some thoughts.  and now i’m going back to my regularly scheduled posting, because i DO enjoy this place, even if the platform can be somewhat lacking sometimes - we still have to find a way to have fun, right?  that’s the entire point of being in fandom in the first place.

[king0fcrows]

I want to ask because I cannot remember : When did Ao3 get its filter sidebar? Did it always have it—but it use to have less features?

Also: I’m pushing 30 now but years ago when I jumped from FF.net to Ao3 in my late teens, I remember having a really hard time adjusting.

I actually have an extremely distinct memory of sitting in a rickety desk chair in my childhood bed room and just being overwhelmed because Ao3 was just this huge wall of text with SO MANY links—I had never experienced tags before!

I had seen tags on livejournal on individual blog posts, but I don’t think I really used them to navigate. I used the search bar to find comms of ships I liked—and just clicked through people’s Masterposts.

Mostly, I used FF.net where you searched by fandom, then genre and character, then just read summaries and kind of roll the dice.

So I was in completely new territory.

It didn’t help that everything seemed like it was same color and same size type. It was all just seemed “gray” with very little color to denote importance of “hey click this link first/this page is more important than the rest.”

I remember feeling like I couldn’t find a place to “start” from—I had trouble finding the main fandom page that lists all the fandoms because I was so distracted by the huge walls of texts everywhere (which were actually tags! Again, I didn’t really understand them—I was like “why does this weird random link exist? And go to stuff not of the same fandom?”)

Even when I found the fandoms page, I couldn’t figure out how to easily narrow it down to the ships I wanted—because again, I didn’t really understand tags yet. So I just got a feed of ALL the fics.

Obviously I found it out—I want to stay I ended up getting some help from livejournal or tumblr via a helpful “how to use Ao3” post that explained how to navigate the filters?—but yeah, it took some tinkering.

I honestly think this is just about impossible for most long-time AO3 users unless they spend a lot of time reading Wattpaders’ complaints or something.

AO3 is so incredibly intuitive to the specific community that built it that the un-obviousness of what the fandoms by media type index is is completely invisible.

People have either been on AO3 so long they’ve forgotten what it was like to be new or they were never new in that particular way in the first place.

[not-poignant]

Ooh, cool! Thank you so much for the long reply! A lot of this was genuinely completely new to me -- I'd never known there were ongoing discussions that early, but of course it makes complete sense there were, both on LJ and predating it. I think it also goes to show how well we could self-segregate on LJ, I think moreso than we can now.

I think, in retrospect, that a lot of my experiences with 2000s fandom can be summed up with, 'I was a teenager' and thus wanted to be 'cool'. There was a lot of 'not like other girls'-ism going on in those sporking and Mary Sue comms, and I always just assumed we were all teenagers -- it certainly felt that way. The few people I've kept in touch with from those days have largely grown out of it, though it doesn't surprise to hear there were (and probably still are) grown adults who shit on others' fanfics.

(As an addendum, I could add that slashfic and that sort of 'canon non-compliance' was completely okay in the fandom spaces I ran in back then, but people would get very upset about extremely arbitrary things-- 'transfer students' in HP, changing characters' ages, making up a minor oc side character for plot purposes because all ocs were apparently bad (and especially if female), etc. It was strange which hairs people decided to split.)

Anyway! Thank you VERY much for such a long and in-depth reply! It's cool to see how these things have changed and developed, and I'm glad to see my experience wasn't emblematic of fandom as a whole.

Thanks for such a thought-provoking question! It really got me thinking about how Livejournal was really excellent at creating different sort of pockets of experiences, and in a while is really reflective as proto-social media of like, the big echo chambers we have happening now all across social media! That's really interesting to think about.

For me, it's funny, most of the fandom folks I knew were all older than me, many were in their 40s and 50s while I was in my 20s. Very few teens comparatively were attracted to certain fandoms like The X-Files and NCIS some of the other spaces I was in, so while there were definitely teens, it was like... a different feeling. Like, even these days I find it fascinating how there are 'younger' fandoms (in terms of how many younger folk are in it) and 'older' fandoms.

And yeah you're so right about people getting upset about arbitrary things! And also that um, 'not like other girls' which now itself is kind of mocked by fandom, so things really did come full circle on that front where now it's not cool to be one of the people who says that x.x

Honestly it's hard to be a teenager on the internet! All the things that play out like... all the dynamics, a lot just play out online instead, and they still exist. A person still wants to be cool and accepted and liked (and that's not age specific, like, most of us want a degree of at least some of these lol), and cliques can form very quickly. I remember how bad it felt back then even in my 20s when I got unfriended by a mutual who I thought was a really good friend, that stuff was devastating!

"making up a minor oc side character for plot purposes because all ocs were apparently bad"

Ahaha this is one of the reasons I still sometimes have like apologetic tones in some of my comments about the amount of OCs I add, because yeah that was really disapproved of! I remember that and I still have like... shades of that at times. I'm mostly over it now, but oof I remember the first time I did it and I was like 'is this okay *chews on fingernails* I bet people will hate this because of it.' (And then that turned into Fae Tales so).

The Mary Sue stuff was really aggressively unpacked, like in very popular kind of fandom-friendly journalism spaces at the time, I mean that's how we ended up with the journalism site 'The Mary Sue' in the first place. People really took a stand on that one. In a way, we were all kind of looking at our own attitudes, like, *why* is it bad to do this, or *what* does it mean that a girl feels like they can't be like other girls - is that internalised misogyny (and sometimes it was), and I miss that kind of meta discussion because I do feel it happens a little less now.

There was a time when I didn't like Mary Sues, no one did, though I think that was before I found my first meta community where it was like 'oh people are talking about EVERYTHING I thought was like universally accepted in fandom.' Though we never got that far on how racist fandom could be, which is still an issue, but one that does get talked about (it would just be nice if AO3 talked about it too).

I sadly think a lot of people in their 40s and 50s can act a lot like teenagers in fandom spaces sometimes, some of the antis in like teenage spaces today are like 40s kind of 'guiding them along' this path of moral puritanical righteousness and almost role-modelling how to bully others. And some of the folks running public Sporking blogs were like... older folks who fostered connections to younger folk.

LJ was wild tbh :D

Anyway, it's so interesting to think of all the different pockets we ended up in. I'm sure there's like countless more that we both have no experience of, where someone else would be like 'oh I was in LJ fandom what's a Mary Sue?' and that would be entirely legitimate too. Sometimes it's easy (I fall into this trap) to think of historical fandom as being one thing instead of like a thousand things. So yeah, this was cool! Thank you :D

[greaterspeed]

📝 + final fantasy :)

Send me a fandom and I’ll reply with a character I would RP meme

Ame you are cruel i've written so many ff characters and i love so many of them idk how i would even pick!!

Prompto holds a very special place in my heart and I would most likely default back to writing him. I wrote Cloud, Aerith and Squall a lot and man if you really trace my rping roots back you can find cases of me rping Selphie Tilmitt on some obscure livejournal rp comms in like 2008.

I've got a co-worker atm though who's just playing through World of Final Fantasy for the first time, got me itching to replay it myself and if I chase that then I get to a character I wanted to rp but never really got the chance during my years of loving ff... Which is Lann. He's definitely within the "Silvy's character type" bracket, so it's probably not much of a surprise. I had some pretty wild ideas about him and Tama back in the day that I never got to write up or explore.

At one point I believe I did have an rp blog for Relm created, but I never actually used it so I guess she could be another character.

... just wait until i've finally done the story in ff14 and i'm probably rping 2000000 characters from it. Or hanging out in the rp servers.

[harocat]

2, 3, 4, 16, 26

2- Talk about three of the most important ships throughout your life.: So I’m going to leave out Victuuri since it’s my current OTP. In that case, it’s probably: Zelgadis/Amelia (Slayers), Inuyasha/Kagome (Inuyasha), and USUK (Hetalia). I chose those because I spent the most time in those fandoms out of all of my fandoms, and because of that, they were all really, really influential to my experiences and preferences. I got into ZelAme in early 2000, and it was my first big ship period. I wrote a lot of (bad lol) fic for it, and I think it shaped many of my preferences from then on out. I actually got back into it in around 2013 out of the blue, and I was really active again in the (tiny by that time, of course), Slayers fandom on tumblr. I finally finished reading the novels and met a lot of really great people, most of them who I still talk to and follow. 

In fact, I also still talk to some of the people I met in the Slayers fandom in the early 2000s. Because it coincided with my first convention experiences, I met a lot of them in real life and am still in contact with them. 

After that, I got into Inuyasha like everyone else in the world and was super into InuKag. I did A LOT in this fandom and was really active in it for about six years. In the last few years I’d participate in other fandoms as well, but I always had one foot in the Inuyasha fandom. 

The Inuyasha fandom was my first time experiencing a really huge fandom. Though Slayers was decently big in the early 2000s, it had nothing on Inuyasha, which was ridiculously large. It was also, to this day, probably the most toxic fandom I’ve ever been in. The ship wars and character bashing were like nothing I’ve ever seen, and fans were constantly harassed and basically had the 2005 version of ‘doxxed’ done to them (including myself and some close friends). 

But I did love the series a lot (even when the manga started going downhill), and the dynamic of the pairing was very appealing to me. I think this is the first time I started really delving deep and analyzing a canon; characters, dynamics, etc. I wrote a loooot of meta for this series. 

I don’t still know as many people from the IY fandom, but I think it’s because it WAS so toxic. Also I was always so unnerved, even back then, by how many fans were so, so obsessed with Inuyasha and Kagome’s sex lives. They’re kids!! Yet half of fandom was adults who would just not shut up about it and about how sexy Inuyasha (who was fifteen before the end of the manga, mind), was. 

I do have several people I met through it though that I still talk to though, including @regularcelery who spends like a month visiting our place every year, and @of-rassilon who after fourteen years we are FINALLY going to meet later this year. 

Lastly is USUK from Hetalia. Believe it or not, despite the fandom’s bad reputation, this was so much more laid back an experience than Inuyasha. This was the fandom I was probably the closest to a BNF (lol) in. @abarero and I ran the livejournal community, which had upwards of about 8K members at its peak. We did a TON of projects, and one time the members of the comm were even sweet enough to organize this huge fan book full of fanart, fic, and letters from them and send it to us as a gift. We still have it and treasure it. 

I also wrote a very popular fic that I was quite fond of, called You Can’t Take the Sky from Me, which was wild to me because I’d only had one fic before that I would argue was legitimately popular, and it’s a fic I’d grown to hate pretty quickly after writing it (an Inuyasha fic, and not for any reason but… it was bad). It was nice to have people like something I worked hard on and that I also really loved. People were so good with feedback during the time LJ was really big, and they always gave such wonderful comments. 

Basically, even when the fandom was really rotten, there were a lot of very nice, supportive people there for us so we were okay. I’d never written near as much fic for a pairing as I did for them. 

USUK was the first m/m pairing I was ever really into. I don’t know exactly what drew me to them (the potential of their dynamic, the history between them, the way they really just… clicked?? IDK). I had shipped other m/m pairings before, but never to the point it was THE otp. 

So yeah, there’s that answer. 

3- What’s your current OTP?: VICTUURI of course. ❤️❤️

4- What’s your current NOTP?: Yuuri///Yurio and Victor///Yurio. 

16- Talk about a ship you initially disliked.: This is hard. I’m generally either neutral on a ship then start to like it, or I just dislike it/like it from early on. ‘Dislike’ might be a strong word, but I remember being really wary and having sort of negative feelings toward Mari/Moe in Samurai Flamenco at first. Moe was so devoted, but Mari was really flippant and rather uncaring, and it felt like a really unhealthy, unbalanced dynamic. But then the series had character arcs that actually addressed these issues and solved them, so yay for that. By the end of the series I really liked the ship. 

26- Have you noticed a pattern in your shipping? Is there a romantic dynamic you’re more drawn to?: I think I definitely have things that ping me, but they tend to be more in characters than ships. That being said, ‘home as a person, not a place’, is something that ALWAYS gets me in ships. Bickering to a degree can be cute, but sometimes a ship is so combative that it’s hard to see any actual fondness between the two, and that’s a turnoff for me. It’s vague, but I just like chemistry and compatibility and pairings where I think the two will be genuinely happy together. /shrug 

[theteablogger]

Hey, I read all of the DAYDverse years ago and was really touched by them. Just a few days ago I was reminded of them and wanted to reread and I read DAYD but then wanted to read the short stories too and I can't find them anywhere? 20 Random Facts Series, Underpinnings, etc... When I was looking it up it led me to your blog because you've talked on the topic. Do you know of anywhere to find the rest of his DAYDverse fiction? I couldn't find it on the livejournal either :(

Ijust asked you something about the deleted fics. just a follow up. I never wasin the community and all this abuse and stuff is awful, I was oblivious to allthat which is terrible. I’m only catching up now sadly. I didn’t mean to offendwith my question. 

That’s okay; I’m not offended. Ithink the vast majority of people who read DAYD didn’t know anything about whatwas going on with the DAYDians. And as much as I object to certain aspects ofAndy’s fic, I also understand that a lot of people enjoyed it. Even for thosewho didn’t, it’s helpful to have it available for reference and context. Iactually have all of Andy’s DAYDverse writings saved for that reason, but I’mnot going to post them because I don’t want to get TOSed. He has said that hedoesn’t mind people saving copies for themselves, though.

You can find the side stories, 20Random Facts, etc. that Andy wrote here, on theDAYDverse LJ community. Not all of them were posted directly on the comm (someonly have links to Andy’s old LJ or fanfiction.net), but I believe the majorityare there. Fics by other DAYDians are here. 

I don’t judge anyone for likingAndy’s fic. I mean, that was the point–it filled an important niche post-Deathly Hallows, itwas pretty good compared to a lot of other fanfiction, and it elicited extremeemotional responses from many readers. That’s why it got to people; that’s whyanyone who read it ever made contact Andy in the first place. 

But I do think it’s a good idea for casual fans of theDAYDverse to do at least a little reading about who Andy is and what he’s done,in part because there is so much of him in the fic. This is one instance inwhich the concept of “the death of the author” cannot be applied. I mean, thisguy deliberately made himself the center of “[his] own subfandom” andtried to control how everyone related to his work, even years after the fact.He wrote 90% of the DAYDverse meta himself. He outright told people how thingsought to be interpreted and understood. He claimed (falsely) that many elementsof Sluagh were drawn from his personal experience. He “channeled” thecharacters, claiming that they were all real in a parallel universe that he’dinadvertently tapped into somehow, and had them carry on conversations withpeople. He used the community and chat room to gather personal informationabout members and forcibly insert himself into some of their lives. Basically,Andy used his fic and art as tools in his manipulation and abuse of hisso-called friends, and I think it’s important to be aware of that, even if youstill enjoy his writing.

(I can’t speak for the formerDAYDians, of course, and their opinions may differ from mine.)

[inevitably-johnlocked]

Johnlock friends.

Hey Steph! I’m the nonny that sent you an ask a little while ago regarding a fandom project I was considering and was sourcing some feedback for. Well after seeing you receive another ask that relates to the project I’m considering I decided to bite the bullet and come off anon and put my idea out there. Yikes, this is a bit scary haha.

Anyway I’ve noticed that a few of the bigger name people/blogs that I follow or check in with regularly often get anon asks from people who are feeling lonely in fandom or who are new and looking for some more friends and it got me thinking about how back when fandom was centred around livejournal; comms regularly did “friending memes” which were such a great and easy way to make new fandom friends. I won’t lie- this is a somewhat selfish endeavour because I find fandom kind of lonely, but as I mentioned I’m obviously not the only one who has trouble de-lurking and breaking the ice. Especially given that fandom often seems very cliquey and established and, in the wake of s4, very divided. So yeah basically I’m considering a blog for people to make johnlock friends! I would post a template for people to fill out and submit with sections such as a basic get-to-know-me type questions, a why-I-love-johnlock section, as well as a blog warnings/deal breakers type section so that if people want to avoid s4 content or moftiss saltiness or whatever they can do that. But as previously mentioned I’m a bit of a nobody so I’m hopeful you can help me out by posting this so I could get some feedback. Specifically- is this something people would actually want? And if it is something people would want are there any suggestions for things that they feel should be included? People could respond to this post or send me an ask/message if they prefer.

Anyway this might be a stupid idea, or possibly something like this already exists and I just haven’t noticed (and I definitely don’t wish to step on anyones toes if it does), and it may not even get off the ground as I work full time and fandom is my stress relief/chill time but well I thought I’d just take a chance and put this out there. I hope its ok for me to have submitted this to you, please delete if it’s inappropriate or if I’m being rude by asking this of you. Thanks for your time Steph <3

(submitted by starlitsecrets)

(I think referencing this post here)

Hi Lovely!

WOW what an ambitious and amazing project idea! I think you should go for it, especially since some of our newer fans feel a bit lost and lonely since many people who were long time fans left after S4. I think it’s a great idea! 

Anyone have any suggestions for @starlitsecrets for this project? Plus, I’m sure they would appreciate any help maintaining content or suggestions on how to do it! <3

[rupertgayesarchive]

5, 13, 16, 19, 30, 33, and 48.

5.     How much writing do you get done on an average day?I don’t think I have much of an ‘average’ day of writing - sometimes I write, sometimes I don’t, and there’s a plethora of mitigating factors that can affect my output. But when I’m in the midst of working one or more active WIPs, my output is probably between two and four thousand words a day. More often than not I’m surprised by how much I can write in one sitting. 

13.  Describe your writing process from idea to polished1. Get an idea. This is the easiest step because, honestly, ideas are a dime a dozen. Usually I get them by seeing a post on tumblr, scrolling through my /tagged/ideas, getting a really good prompt in my ask box, or, most common, talking with some good friends. As an example, I can talk about how I recently finished this fic, here. I got a prompt on tumblr asking for a monster!Ryan/human!Michael, but with  the monster being more sweet and submissive to his human lover, and really liked the concept.2. Try to outline the idea, or, if the idea was just a particular scene, try to find out how to ‘dress’ or set up the scene, how to get the characters in that scenario. In this case, I figured out the setting (magic/fantasy au with a vague, old timey setting) characters (michael as an up and coming wizard, ryan as a strange incubus) and the general plot of the story (Michael summons Ryan, Ryan keeps showing up, Michael decides to house Ryan, Ryan falls in love with Michael, they have sex, and some cute domestic ending).3. Start writing the thing. I try to start at the beginning more often than not, but I pretty much always have chunks or segments of any story, even if it’s just a oneshot, so I may skip around to the different chunks as I go. 4. Realize I need to rewrite/totally change something/add more scenes or something. This usually forks off into two directions: either I get frustrated and the project is never completed, or I take a break from it, or I end up tripling the word count. Originally that prompt was going to be a short fic, maybe 1 - 2k or so, but then it grew to 8k.4. Edit, revise, edit, revise, ad nauseum. Go back to add more detail to scenes, try to proofread best you can. I don’t really use a beta reader or anything. I should go back and read the Elements of Style though because I feel like I’m getting too creative with my grammar, haha.5. Post!

16.  How many drafts do you need until you’re satisfied with a project?I don’t really have solid ‘drafts’, I never used them in school or anything. I just start a project, and edit as I go (which is probably a no-no) but my aim is that, by the time I’ve reached the ‘end’ of whatever I’m writing, all I have to do is cycle back and check for spelling, continuity errors, grammar, rewording some stuff, etc. I might try to do that ‘write everything really fast and never go back’ one day, but I guess my writing style has always been one messy draft that is continuously polished until it shines.

19.  How do you keep yourself motivated?Imagining the feedback I’ll get on the story once it’s posted - or wanting to see that idea come to fruition, which is especially potent when writing a rare pair, because if you don’t write it, who will?

30.  Favorite idea you haven’t started on yetAlready answered this one :)33.  Have you ever killed a main character?Probably on some old RvB fics on an LiveJournal comm in like 2009.

48.  What’s the most self-insert character/scene you’ve ever written?Again, probably something I attempted in 2009. I don’t really do much self inserts nowadays, I don’t have OCs or anything, but I write what I want to see - I think my tendency towards gentle, fluffy, sweet topics, funny, chatty banter, and maybe focusing on Michael’s hair is pretty evident of my own interests.