#lj I assume is livejournal

[vimbry]

if you're reading alt.music.tmbg I'd like to say that user "bibliophilia" is probably my favorite poster there. What prompts someone to type sentences like that

oh you're right these sure are something

[conundrumoftime]

Was discussing the pre-AO3 days of fandom earlier today, mostly in the context of dead archives and creators sending C&D letters to fan sites (funnnn times). And I went to look at my old fanfiction.net stories to see the kind of disclaimers I put on fic, and… I made that in 2005. 2005! It’s 19 years old! Goodness.

I mostly lurked and read in Tolkien fandom back then although I have a couple of stories from ff.net and LJ from 2004/5. I remember it being an intimidating fandom, or it felt like it to me; I remember we were all very worked up over Mary Sues (why? WHY did we care?) and I remember endless discussions about whether slash should be rated higher than het on ff.net’s new rating system (sigh); I remember the citrus scale.

But I also remember it as being such fun, as being the first fandom that took something I had loved since I was a child and said “hey, you can look at it this other way too”. I remember the delight of actually getting to read what other people thought happened on the Helcaraxë. I remember some of the absolute crackfic LiveJournal RP, too. And the people I met then, and the character songlists we swapped.

I hope you’re doing okay out there, fellow early-mid 2000s fandom people! And never assume you’re out for good - I had an 18-year gap in writing Tolkien fics but the elves have pulled me back in once again :)

[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

[argyleheir]

not sure if you knew but 'the winter of banked fires' (assuming you mean the one by yahtzee) is still up on livejournal! i have a link if you want ❤️

??????

Yes! I originally read it on LJ :) Thank you @glorious-spoon 👌

[ekaterin1701]

I got very confused earlier today because I went to the last page of the Sam Carter/ Jack O’Neill tag on AO3 and saw that the earliest story was dated April 1999. At first I thought that AO3 had been launched much, much, earlier than I’d thought, googled it to check, and found it was launched in 2009.

Another search then confirmed that you can change the date of a fic after it was uploaded , so I assumed the authors have backdated their stories to their original publication date. But I had a very confused five minutes!

I checked the dates of the earliest fics because I’m still working my way through that 400-page Gateworld forum thread of Sam/ Jack fic recs, and I’m up to Sept 2010 but haven’t found any recs of fics on AO3 - it’s Heliopolis, SamandJack.net, LiveJournal, and FFNet, and there’s still an air than moving fics over to FFNet is new.

Today I did find another author that I recognised from AO3. There was a link to an author called Artaxastra on LJ, and I’d already read two of the stories on AO3, where the author is Avia Isadora. Interestingly, she hasn’t posted all her stories from LJ onto AO3 when she transferred them over (I’ve found at least one other Stargate author who did the same), and I wonder why they decided not to post certain fics to AO3.

In other news, I’m full of cold and stressed about work, so delving into old SJ fic and wondering about the archives to LJ to FFN to AO3 migration keeps me distracted.

Edit: I’ve just spotted that one of the regular posters on the thread has a link to her AO3 profile in her signature, as well as her FFN profile (a writer called Kate1013). The post is from October 2010. First AO3 sighting on this long discussion/ story rec thread!

[aloysiavirgata]

Hi there!

May I ask a few writing questions (which, might sound like I’m actually trying to demand more Henry fics, but I swear are genuine questions, although I would always welcome more Henry fic):

(1) Creatively, what inspires you to create a universe with full storylines from beginning to end (like, say, the Dryad fics, or Waters of Babylon/Petrichor/Singing of Mount Abora VERSUS creating a universe (like with the Henry universe) and keeping it to out-of-order ficlets? Is it the different categories that inspire you differently (Dryad is family fic, Waters of Babylon through Abora are UST to RST, Henry are Scully/Other)? Is it because of the labor involved?

(2) In stories like the Henry stories, do you have a timeline set in your mind of where each ficlet takes place, or do you write without a timeline in your mind? Is it easier or harder to write without a timeline in mind? I have a Master document where I try and place your ficlets (both Henry and non-Henry) where they might sort of fit based on the details you provide but there are some where I just don’t know and just organize them by dates of publication, but it kills me when I don’t know what YOU, the author, intended when it’s your universe/your mind I’m eagerly entering and it made me wonder how/if dates/eras/season timelines, etc ever float around in your mind? Or, the decision-making process for why to sometimes include them, and sometimes not.

(3) For people like you and the Penumbras, Prufrock’sLoves, of the world, etc — you’re clearly gifted at writing, and I assume writing is an outlet of a sort for you. How do you contain that, or give that gift an outlet, during periods where you step away from the fandom and not write for months/years? I ask this as someone who does not have a gift or anything I’m especially good at (which is fine! I lead a full life regardless). I mean, take Henry! The Henry universe haunts me (in good ways, of course). At any given time. During a meeting at work, or while shopping for something that triggers XF thoughts and then I wonder about whether Scully and Henry finally parted ways on the best of terms so that Scully and Mulder can get back to making love inside a car in the rain guilt-free. (haha) And this universe isn’t real! And I didn’t write it! And… it still takes up time sometimes in my head. Wouldn’t this haunting be multiplied in yours since you’ve created all these universes? Are they always in the background of your mind? Do you compartmentalize them? Do you know the ending of the Henry universe, etc?

Basically, what happens in the mind of creative people? How does your brain function?

Weird, super big question, I know, but MAN, I will forever be sorry I missed the ATXC days, or the Livejournal days where I can dig up author postings where they provide more details about their stories/processes.

I just have so many questions for you guys!

Thank you for alllllll you do for the fandom.

First of all, thank you so much for this ask. It still blows my mind that people receive happiness from a hobby that brings me so much joy and relaxation.

I miss the ATXC days as well, and especially LiveJournal. The PornBattles on LJ, ironically, taught me to write.

1 - It’s really hard to say. A lot of my fic is inspired by gaps or frustrations created by 1013. On the one hand Mulder and Scully are these deeply complex people with nuanced backstories and on the other hand…??? David’s wedding ring stunt or Gillian giving Scully an affair with a married professor. Dryad came from a frustrated place that is due in part to Chris seeming to think that you can either be a parent or a complex individual. Plus it was fun to write that autopsy.

Henry was created by an ask that I loved because Scully DOES deserve better but also I want her with Mulder and I wanted to explore that conflict and make a reader feel it.

2 - Oh my gosh that is an amazing compliment! I don’t really have a solid timeline, I’m afraid. I am truly, truly absolutely shit at the WIP life. 🙃.

3 - I remain blown away by this praise. My career shift has allowed me to have a lot more creativity, though not writing per se. Writing is my favorite thing to do. I am a scientist at heart and I love cooking and baking and animals and fashion and home decor but I am most myself when I am writing. I’m usually thinking about writing, even when I’m not actively doing it. And I confess sometimes it is very strange he to be a Serious Adult with a Serious Job who is also running an internal monologue like “would uni-era Mulder thing vagina or cunt or pussy or some secret fourth thing?”

How does it end with Henry? She stays with him. Of course she stays.

Thank you, kind and sweet anon. You are a gem.

[decepti-thots]

re: writing fandom meta and why there might be less of it recently - the fandom spaces I started out in ~15 years ago didn't have any meta, at least not in the way they have now, so the whole thing is comparably new to me. and then the meta I see always posts that seem to take SO MUCH of canon/background knowledge into account, so many things that I haven't even heard of. and there's so many posts criticizing (parts of) fanon and common fannish opinions, which I often understand, but which also feel a bit elitist and doesn't make me wanna try putting my thoughts on a piece of media into words just to get criticized. finally, I also don't know how to - last time I analyzed media was in school, and I was never good at it.

Thank you for this ask anon, first off! All of this is really interesting to hear, and a lot of it lines up with things people said in shorter responses directly on the post, so it looks like there's definitely some overlap in terms of common pain points in terms of this stuff. (And not just "pain" points, to be clear- folks also basically said that they preferred expressing their ideas through fiction, which is fair, and not really a thing that exists as something causing friction, per se, as much as an active enjoyment of fanfic as a way to express ideas.)

I hope you don't mind if I use this response as a launching point to give a few of my personal thoughts on this, because you so happened to bring some stuff up I kind of wanted to give a perspective on anyway. Not necessarily as a direct response in all regards, but it seems as good a place as any to touch on my own feelings? (Under a cut, feel free to skip this, if you do then thanks again for responding!)

The point you make about how meta wasn't much a thing in fandom spaces you were in 15 years ago is interesting, because one of the things I always think when I see the argument there's universally "less meta" now than there used to be is: does at least some of this stem from the folks saying(/bemoaning) this come from them being in different fannish spaces that the ones they're in now and not realising? It's a similar thing to when people confidently assert "people comment less on fics than they used to", where I can't help but wonder how much of that is just that the fandoms they are in today have different ways of engaging with fanwork, or different expectations, or that the fandom spaces they used to be in commented a lot relatively speaking. 15 years ago, I was in fandoms mostly based around LiveJournal communities, which were often assumed to be the obvious "centre" of fandom activity by folks in said communities. (Incorrectly; LJ only looked like the "main hub" of all online fannishness if it was where you and your fandoms mostly clustered, IME.) A lot of those were media fandoms (though not all) and those tended to have a lot of meta, I would argue at least in part because LJ as a "format" encouraged the posting of long, pre-mediated posts that lent itself well to folks wanting to write meta. But some other fandoms (a lot of anglophone animanga fandoms come to mind) tended to not have nearly as much because people were mostly engaging with them in places and communities where those things didn't line up in a way that encouraged it. The move to Tumblr and even Twitter as big fannish platforms where things work differently is then probably also of note, idk!

(Sidenote: the AO3 meta wars when it launched are probably worth mentioning, since the push to allow fannish nonfiction on AO3 was in part a result of Tumblr seeming like a very bad replacement for LJ when it came to posting essays!)

Anyway, a really common thing that seems to be cropping up is the "if I post an opinion as meta, it opens me up to [potentially virulent, potentially bad-faith] criticism, and that sounds unfun" fear. Which on the one hand is not necessarily untrue because I think even now fannish norms around meta are just a little different than other forms of fanworks, yes. Meta is usually seen as, on some level, an invitation to discussion in a way that e.g. fanfic often isn't. What I do think is interesting to think about here is it seems like there's not a lot of faith that there could be productive, even fun disagreement on specifics and readings. I'm not saying that wariness is necessarily wrong, to be clear. (I have been on the receiving end of plenty of virulent, bad faith "criticism" in my fannish life, haha. Or just... like... bad criticism that is tiring and unproductive and unnecessary, lol.) I mention it more because it seems worth explicitly saying that the assumption that being contradicted, corrected and/or argued with is an inherently unpleasant or even disciplinary way to experience fandom is one that seems to be pretty deep-rooted in fandom right now, and it seems worth pointing that underlying principle out.

To bring that back a little to the "platform shapes the fandom engagement" thing, I do think the way Tumblr works contributes to that. Reblogging to add additions has a very different impact that replying to someone else's static blogpost, and reblogging is (as people do keep pointing out on viral posts, haha) the primary encouraged form of interaction on this site. It's different in multiple ways; a person reblogging something often feels like they are talking about your ideas in the abstract and not by talking to you as a person which can encourage a very different tone and approach on their part and make their addition read very differently. And it also means that your post may not just be contradicted, but the contradiction may wind up being exposed to huge numbers of people as the default way of seeing your post and opinions. That makes the idea of being subject to that disagreement higher stakes, I feel, and also the idea of productive back-and-forth functionally impossible a lot of the time. (It also means having a full conversation often requires constantly spamming your followers, let alone multiple convos.)

So I fully get it. But I do also think it's a shame that it can be really hard to imagine fannish communities where disagreeing back and forth on different ideas about a canon or text is... fun? I guess? I sometimes find that stuff fun, is the thing! When done in a good faith way and an environment it works in. You wind up with all these interesting perspectives that may run very contrary to your own but still have interesting ideas in them, and sometimes you wind up with opportunities to expand on ideas you had but hadn't yet found a way to articulate them. I don't think that's going to be fun for EVERYONE but I think it's a shame that it seems so universally... terrifying, for a lot of people? Fandom is a very good place, if nothing else, to practice getting comfortable with low-stakes intellectual disagreement. (Because for most things, it really is low-stakes as hell.)

I do want to touch on the elitism comment though. I find that... a strange perspective tbh? It's true that doing analysis generally holds a baseline expectation of familiarity with the canon, but I can't really see how that can reasonably be called "elitist". Similarly I think there's a sense where someone will sometimes see people strongly dislike a thing they enjoy and feel the need to argue why that person is "wrong", such as when folks defend their fave fanon against folks who find it tiring/uninspired/etc. I think this post really sums my thoughts on that up, tbh. Sometimes what can kneejerk feel like a person passing judgement on you is actually them being a bit bitchy in their own space knowing full well they're talking about their own taste and nothing more. IDK.

[saucerfulofsins]

Are you okay with minors interacting with your blog? Asking because I don't want to violate your boundaries by accident.

Hi! Thank you so much for your message 😊

Before I answer, I want to talk about some stuff.

I was 14 when I first entered the magical realms of fandom. This must have been around 2005 or 2006, I don't remember exactly when. It wasn't on a site dedicated to fic, but a forum that was entirely dedicated to talking about Paul McCartney. The thing is, this meant there were people of all ages on that forum. The median age was probably around 40 and while cis women probably made up the largest number of users, a fair amount of users were cis het men. Regardless, no one was ever creepy or weird or gross to me; the most they did was be a little bit annoyed by me and some other teens occasionally spamming discussion topics with emojis (which was definitely in part because my English wasn't that good at the time and using it cost a lot of extra energy).

The forum allowed some gen-rated het fic, which gave me the information I needed to discover m/m fic on LiveJournal (yeah, John Lennon/Paul McCartney). I was 15 by then. Fandom wasn't as mainstream at the time (and less so in non-English speaking countries), it definitely wasn't on any Massively Popular Websites or Out In The Open. The fourth wall was very much still in place, and the group of people who were writing stories on LJ was fairly small (especially compared to some of the big big fandoms nowadays).

Guess what, though? I talked to many people, and the majority of them were adults. Some of them had children older than me! There was never any discussion around whether that was improper or not, because everyone was treated equally. Of course age factored in to some extent in personal conversations... but in fandom takes? Why should it?

For me, I was always grateful there were people older than me, with more life experience than me. Their fics were awesome, although I didn't read everything. Why I didn't? Because I was 15 and entirely aware that not everything was for me. I didn't enjoy reading anal sex... so I didn't. I usually shied away from NC-17 (/Explicit), not so much because the rating implies 17+ but because I just... didn't want to read it. I knew people my age and younger who did read those stories because they wanted to and were okay with it. I don't think I've seen anyone ever throw a fit over reading something that upset them, and blame the author for posting it in a space minors could see. At most, people lied about their age so they could get access to some stories (because LJ would block explicit stories for minors... I think. Don't quote me on the details, things are a little fuzzy).

So no. I don't mind minors interacting with my blog, because I once was a minor directly interacting with many of the adults in the fandom I was in. Being taken seriously by them was actually really important in how I came to see myself as a fandom member and as a fic author. I especially don't mind a minor who asks me about my comfort interacting with my content, which is less about me and more of a sign I am willing to bet you're equally or more aware of your own boundaries and willing to assume responsibility... which reminds me of myself when I was a minor.

I don't mind minors interacting with my blog, because I think perspectives from people with a different age than you are very important (I have flatmates that are 25 years older than me!). Simultaneously, I know teens who want to read smut will find their way there. Who am I to stop them? All I can advocate for is to stick to your own boundaries, and take care of yourself, and to read stories and interact with blogs (however you shape that interaction) as long as you feel your boundaries are respected.

To close: I know the internet now isn't the internet it was 15 years ago, and I know that was a vastly different internet from the web in the early 90s. So again: no, I don't mind minors following me for the above reasons, and I don't need to be asked. I also don't mind adults curating their online presence by including a DNI in their profile.

Sorry, that was a bit of a rant. I just carry a great fondness in my heart for the many "fandom aunties" who took me under their wing, way back when, and I'm sad that the format of Tumblr discourages the same types of interaction that shaped my experience and view of fannish culture.

[unholyverse]

do u have any panic fic recs

you're gonna make me regress...but ok. for you anon (even tho most panic fics have been purged especially on livejournal). keep in mind i've been reading panic fic since i was like 13 and i don't remember most of these in detail bc it's been years since then and i haven't read any of these in a long time.

the heart rate of a mouse - a 1970s au revolving mainly around rryan ross. yeah just get it over with i don't care that it's a trilogy almost as long as war and peace it's a rite of passage at this point. notorious and a little problematic but what else do you expect from a panic at the disco fic.

back to the place - a post cabin era fic about returning to the cabin and self discovery and all that. you may ask why this is a wattpad link and i unfortunately have to answer it's because the lj was purged a couple years back. good fic. if you wonder why i like the piano piece, la campanella it is literally because of this fic

in case the scene gets nasty - a high school love story about two pathetic boys that get in fights because of their troubled home lives. ok admittedly it's not the best but also it's iconic. if you like character study type of stuff you'll like this.

the black rose season - ryan uncovers the mystery of a supposed secret society at his college. yeah i had to put a google drive link for this bc it's also purged we all gotta do what we gotta do. some parts make it so obvious of how dated this is and how british the author actually is but i think the mystery and romance make up for it

anything by ao3 user segs - all of these are one shots under 20k words but after reading some of these it makes you wanna sit down and contemplate life for a while. this author is so good i can't emphasize that enough

are you there god, it's me brendon? - a boarding school au. i don't remember this one but it was in my bookmarks so i'm assuming it was good

pink glitter - ryan is the older brother to a student of brendon's kindergarten class. shenanigans ensue when ryan has to come in for career day when his dad can't. it's cute. what else is there to say.

oh doctor doctor - a hospital au. i don't remember this one but i DO remember having this in my bookmarks before the author purged everything

made of silver, not of clay - a semi apocalyptic au. brendon wakes up and the world is mostly devoid of people

[gaypiratebrainrot]

Heeey, so, you blew my mind on your post responding to the "where did you find fanfic" poll because you mentioned tds_rpf. I have to ask...what was your username on livejournal? You totally don't have to tell me, but I was DEEP in the TDS/TCR RPF community there, and I just have to ask. My username was shoebox_addict.

omg--ok, so i genuinely do not remember my lj username from that time, i had a couple different ones over my lj time and my tds_rpf era would have been my earliest one when i was like 14/15 i think (although...now that i'm thinking about it, i must have been reading fic in that broader community thru at least 2008 when i was 19, bc i wrote a NaNoWriMo in '08 that featured anderson cooper and keith olberman and jake shears, but that definitely never made it onto the internet), but i was almost definitely just a lurker and didn't participate beyond reading.

BUT i'm assuming you are shoebox_addict on ao3, and i have definitely noticed when you comment on my fic that your username/maybe pfp is very familiar to me, in that niggling "i know you from somewhere" kinda way, and i'd just assumed it was prob from my sherlock days cause that's where i recognize most fandom folks from (my longest/deepest fandom experience), but i just clicked on your ao3, and no sherlock, but your old fake news rpf has paul dinello and denis leary which is a BLAST FROM THE PAST. i don't remember that specific fic but that is almost definitely where i recognize you from, which is WILD! HELLO!

[kcscribbler]

Orchid and papyrus 🎶

Full Ask List

orchid ⇢ what’s a song you consider to be perfect?

Oof. Definitely have to think about this one. As a musician myself, I like a variety of genres, and usually like them because of the music/rhythm vs liking them for the lyrics. So I don't think of songs as 'good' or 'bad,' just 'oh yeah I feel this' or 'yeah no this is boring me in three different ways right now'.

If we're talking emotional impact, I Forgot That You Existed is one of the very few songs that actually impacted me when I needed it, after exiting an abusive relationship a couple of years prior and still feeling like I would never be able to get my abuser out of my head. It's pretty perfect, I think.

papyrus ⇢ if you put your ‘on repeat’ playlist on shuffle, what’s the first song that comes up? what do you like about it / associate it with?

Via Amazon Year in Review, it looks like Crash and Burn, by Savage Garden. I am cliche AF, apparently.

I have a rare soft spot for the lyrics in this one, actually. The first time I heard it was on a fanvid for a fandom I was into at the time, like 15 years ago, so it brings back good memories.

Assuming these were all one, anon. :)

edelweiss ⇢ how’d you think of your url/username? what’s it associated with to you?

Yeah...it's not earth-shatteringly clever. I was one of those newbies who just tossed my initials into the username registration on ff.net for my first-ever fanfics decades ago, and by the time I realized internet people actually were going to read what I wrote and use my username, it was a little late to change it.

KCS was (obviously) too short for a LiveJournal handle, and so I switched to that back in the day as a half-assed attempt at the aforementioned cleverness, since my LJ was just my pre-AO3 fic archive. I don't think I've ever given out my real name anywhere in any fandom, so there's your only clue.

I've thought about choosing something different over the years, but figured it would just make stuff harder to find. That's assuming anyone rereads my scribblings. :)

(You can find me sporadically on Pokemon GO as 'Bellatwix', because I was on a HP kick and was eating a candy bar when I registered.)

Thanks so much for the asks!

[fivestoriesfallingg]

hii hello (wes xhotmessx here) :] i have seen yr gabeposting recently i <3 u sourcing images is the work of angels .. i have in my free time been going thru cobra lj pages chronologically and i have like . So Many live photos from it .. so i was gonna post them but am . umm i think i had this qyestion formed better in my head earlier . like have u also done this and have/are going to post these images ? i guess . i mean we can just ;ut gabe everywhere also . i am not home rn but i will be home 2mrw afternoon and thats when i was gonna go thru the images ive got so far theyre mostlyyy 2006 and 2007 . is this a question im unsure at this point . .. what ever send ask xx

hiiii i think i get what ur asking ! i haven’t personally dug through cobra’s livejournal much, almost all of the pictures i have are from flickr/photographer’s personal websites etc etc. so i don’t know if any of the stuff i have queued for dailygabe is stuff that’s been on their lj (assuming that’s the question you were going for?) you can just post your images, you don’t need my permission or anything, if there ends up being duplicates on dailygabe i’ll just take em out of the queue it’s no big deal !! there’s currently like 50ish pictures queued up over there it’s really not a problem

[filet-o-feelings]

Writer Bingo

Thanks for the tags @hippolotamus @flowertrigger @tyfinn @a-noble-dragon @mallpretzles and @mammameesh sorry if I missed anyone and sorry this took me so long!

Okay so I guess I don't really do much keysmashing these days but in my head I'm absolutely screaming and keysmashing as I type 'I love this!' Or something along those lines, but also I absolutely used to scream in my comments back in the LJ/FD.net days so I'm counting it.

Maybe I should have counted the multiple kudos because I have certainly tried to!

As for being a professional writer... it's something I've always thought I wanted so I counted it, but honestly I think I'm happy for now just writing fic. Trying to do this professionally seems way too stressful (but it's still the dream)

And I was in a roleplay community on livejournal forever ago lol we had AIM conversations as our characters to give you an idea of the time 😆

These tags have been flowing in for days so I'm assuming everyone has been tagged by now, but if not please consider this your tag if you want to play!

[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

[gatalentan]

this is so niche to elder millenial gays but does anyone else remember an account on livejournal that was run by a lesbian couple called something like hires_women or hires_scans something like that, hires something or hq, and the uploaded anachronistically high resolution photos (for the time, i'm talking about like, 2002/3/4 when we hadn't invented HD yet lol ) of actresses and so on that the two ops liked, usually w a snippet or two of funny/thirsty commentary. like they'd hunt down the highest q scans of rare photoshoots and things like that. the only thing i remember is they really liked chloe sevigny and i think gillian anderson? and the cast of desperate housewives? but they posted all kinds of female celebs, usually magazine photoshoots and red carpets. and i think when tumblr started taking over from lj, they moved over here, but i can't for the life of me remember their @. they were a minor queer bnf account over on lj just because nobody else was doing what they were doing - which is, i assume, paying for licences from Getty and so on? and sharing it with the wider queer fandom. because the images at the quality they had just weren't available to us as the time even on fansites. i keep thinking about them and wondering what happened to them. that account was sooooo influential to me as a little 13 year old queer. i used to read that blog like a frickin' newspaper.

[lazaefair]

Nope. You don’t get to bake a bunch of community and social functions into your website from the beginning and then wash your hands of responsibility by claiming you’re juuuust annnnn archiiiiiiiive when people inevitably clash using those functions. Archives don’t have public anonymous comment sections. Archives don’t offer direct, unmonitored lines of communication that any drive-by yahoo can use to get access to the creator of an archived item. Like, I was around on Livejournal when they were proposing and building AO3, and anyone who's spent any time on LJ will instantly recognize a bunch of things on AO3 as improved versions of functions offered in Livejournal communities. Because the intent from the beginning was to port over the best parts of the communal infrastructures that fandom had built over the years on other platforms, which include hosting and archiving, but also include avenues for sustaining the communities that were being driven off or exploited by aforementioned platforms. Which by definition involves interpersonal interactions. Which is awesome! That is why I love it so much! And that’s why it’s disappointing to see this revisionist history going around - I’m going to assume good faith on your part, OP, but I’ve seen plenty others use it specifically to “defend” the site against efforts to address legitimate criticisms. (Let’s be blunt: I’m talking about fandom racism and the violent harassment that accompanies it, including among AO3 staff and volunteers.)

AO3 does, in fact, practice content moderation. You repeatedly state that they do in your post. It’s right there in the TOS - no non-fannish works, no illegal material, no CSAM, etc. And thanks to those social and community functions I was talking about, it’s right there in the need for the existence of an Abuse team. Every day there are humans making judgment calls about content on that website, and like all human judgment calls, they have biases, blind spots, and compromises over capacity and time to deal with problems. That's not a criticism of them - that's just the nature of group projects - but it is manifestly untrue that there is 0 content moderation and that there is 0 improvement to be made in moderation standards and practices. Hell, all archives of anything have to, by definition, curate their holdings. I don't see y'all going after random museums for making judgment calls on what artifacts they acquire.

There are a lot of arguments you can make countering the claims of anti-AO3/purity culture folks and a lot of debunking you can do. But "it's just an archive" is not one of them.

Periodic reminder that Archive of Our Own was created to be a repository for all written fanworks without regard to inherent worth, morality, ethicality, artistic merit, or intelligibility. As long as the posting of the work does not violate US law, falls within fair use standards, and does not directly harass individuals, it can be posted on Archive of Our Own.

Efforts to further limit the scope of what can be posted and stored on Archive of Our Own will fail, because Archive of Our Own is a repository much like the internet or the Library of Congress pre-21st century (back when it kept a copy of every publication printed in the United States). As long as you are able to find objectionable material on the internet or in a library, you will be able to find objectionable material in Archive of Our Own.

People get upset with the lack of moderation on Archive of Our Own because they view it as "the place to go to read fanfic." But when it was created, there was no goal for Archive of Our Own to be a destination fanfic reading website. Most people who first used it would publish on other sites (LiveJournal, fanfic.net, message boards, and various fandom-specific sites) to be read and commented on, and add a backup copy to Archive of Our Own so that it would be preserved in case it was ever removed from the original website/the original website went down. In other words, it was used as an archive, just like in the name.

AO3 can still be used this way! You can do your primary fanfic reading and writing on other sites, then back up your own works to AO3 for safekeeping.

Even better, if you object to the content that you find on AO3 and don't want to use it to find fanfic, or don't want to post there because you feel that posting there would be tantamount to endorsing AO3's mission, Archive of Our Own will hand you the tools you need to create your own site with more restrictive guidelines!

How? The software Archive of Our Own runs on is open source and the entire code is posted on github, along with advice for implementation.

Not everyone is comfortable searching for fanfic on Archive of Our Own for fear of encountering triggering or objectionable content. By creating more fanfic sites and repositories with their own focuses and guidelines, we can create the safe spaces in fandom that people are looking for without endangering the archival mission of Archive of Our Own.