Shout-out to my fellow Fandom Olds who lived through Strikethrough/Boldthrough on LJ and knew this day would eventually come here on Tumblr.com also
Especial shout-out to the heroes at AO3 who designed their whole operation knowing that every other platform fandom used would pull this bullshit sooner or later
Oh, just so folks know, that thing where some Homestuck character tags have randomly been assigned nsfw is also still a thing, with the current crop of Tumblr issues.
Currently you can’t use Tumblr search for Equius Zahhak, Aradia Megido, Signless, or Dualscar.
For Equius, Tumblr suggests “Homestuck Equius”. You can search Sufferer. No version of Aradia’s name is available at all.
Porrim Maryam and Horuss Zahhak are also right out.
Why them? Who knows. It used to be Kanaya Maryam was blocked. But now that you can’t fix it by turning safe mode off under most circumstances, it would seem that this site is of limited use to this fandom.
favorite thing about tolkien fans is how y’all are like “now this idea would’ve had the old professor tolkien absolutely foaming at the mouth in rage ….. which is exactly why i have written 200k words of it and made art for it and firmly hold it as canon”
y’alls tags only further convince me of this
a few more honorable mentions for your viewing pleasure
it’s not the trope itself that militant fandom antis get mad about. it’s the ship.
imagine that you’re in a fandom where characters A, B, and C are all protagonists with friendly canon interactions – not necessarily friends, but definitely not enemies.
For a variety of reasons, you don’t really like it when people ship A & B together romantically. maybe you like B/C better. maybe you just don’t like the dynamics of A/B shipping. maybe it reminds you of a relationship you had that ended badly. Whatever the reason: A/B bothers you, and you wish nobody shipped it.
Imaginary You decides to try to stop people from shipping A/B. You start by telling people that based on canon, shipping A/B is morally and socially objectionable. with the redefining of words like ‘pedophilia’, ‘incest’, and ‘abuse’, it’s easy to turn canon molehills into mountains: A few years age difference is now ‘pedophilia’. knowing each other from childhood is ‘incest’. an argument is ‘abuse’.
But not only do people keep shipping A/B: they keep shipping it even while following your rules about what’s okay to ship! They make AUs where A&B are the same age! They age A&B up! They write slow burns where A&B start out friends and become lovers!
When you said ‘don’t ship A/B’ and gave reasons why not to, you meant for people to stop shipping A/B, not to ship A/B a different way!
So you find yourself having to teach people that A/B is always bad. it doesn’t matter how you ship it: it doesn’t matter what tropes you use. Any use of the imagination to make A/B a safe, ‘healthy’ ship is off-limits. (maybe you suggest that if one has to go to such lengths to make A/B okay to ship, they should just switch to the already healthy ship, B/C? it’s just a coincidence that you like B/C better. or maybe you like B/C because B/C isn’t gross like A/B.)
and that’s how you’ll find people objecting to tropes like friends-to-lovers.
it’s all just a means to an end – which is attacking any and all iterations of shipping the ship they don’t like.
There’s something that I fundamentally don’t understand about Article 13.
It doesn’t simply protect copyrighted content, it will also absolutely impact the bottom line of these big businesses too. This is how I see it.
Here’s my current fandom:
How did I get into Kingsman? Was it because I saw a trailer for it on TV and thought, “Hey, I should see that.”
Nope. It was via online fandom content almost two years after Kingsman: The Secret Service was released. I never would’ve given it the time of day if not for gifsets and fanfic that I saw and read before I’d even seen the movie. But I saw those things first, so the movie then caught my interest, and I watched it. Legally. I ended up purchasing movie tickets for the sequel, I bought the movies on Blu-ray, I bought some official Kingsman merchandise (don’t judge me), and I even spent a little money on one of the official Kingsman mobile games (like 20 dolla, and I’m not proud of it).
I spend a significant part of my online time interacting in the orbit of the Kingsman fandom. I look forward to the third movie (the actual third movie, not this weird prequel thing…ugh). I will actively spend money on the movie and probably some official merchandise when it’s released too. I also have an interest in the actors from the movie and legally seek out their other work (even Robin Hood, haaaa). Meaning I intend to SPEND MONEY on things related to Kingsman because fandom content keeps my interest going long beyond its official release. Fandom content is often what will catch my interest in the first place.
My fandom before Kingsman?
When I got into Marvel/Captain America, how do you think that happened?
Did I see trailers before other movies? TV commercials? Was it because of people I knew in real life who enjoyed it? Nope. I rarely see any promotional material for things because I don’t normally take in content in the traditional way (the same as most other Millennials and Gen Z, I’d wager). I knew of them, obviously, because they’re insanely popular. But I didn’t give a shit.
I didn’t give a lick about Marvel and it wasn’t until I saw some fan commentary and gifsets on Tumblr/in fan spaces of Captain America: The Winter Soldier that I was like, “Oooh, this sounds interesting. I need to watch this.”
And I watched it. Legally. And I bought it. Legally. And I went out and legally watched everything else Marvel. I bought legal/licensed Marvel merchandise. I bought Marvel comics, ffs. Do you think I cared about comics before that? At this point, I’ve probably spent a good few hundred dollars on Marvel related content. Probably closer to $1000 than $100. And that’s mild compared to some people!
Do you think I would’ve done any of that if I hadn’t first seen fan created content that technically uses copyrighted material?
I sure the fuck would not. I would’ve gone on not caring about it at all.
My point is, Article 13 is so fucking short-sighted. Fandom and creative content made by people not associated with these businesses often makes or breaks that content. How many people do you think got into Marvel the same way I did? How many millions of dollars have people spent on Marvel related merchandise because fandom content fostered their interest way beyond “See it in the movie theatre, then go home and forget about it?”
Here’s another example for the other end of the spectrum:
Avatar. The James Cameron movie. It made $2.7 billion at the box office worldwide. That’s nice. But does anyone really give a shit about it? I’ve never seen it. Don’t have any desire to see it or the supposed upcoming sequels. The only online content I see about it? Mocks it. There is no fandom.
To compare fandoms on Ao3:
No one gives a shit. No one is looking for Avatar. Maybe the sequels will do well, I’m not a psychic. I have no idea. But my point is, there is no longevity there. No one is looking for official Avatar merchandise. No one is creating works about it that keeps interest going years after it was released. And continued interest means continued profit.
So Avatar did really, really well at the box office. Exceptionally well. And then?
Are people buying Avatar clothing? Books? Mugs, tchotchkes, spending thousands of dollars to meet the cast and creators at conventions? Special editions of the movies? Collector’s items?
Google “Avatar pop” and what do you think comes up? Pop! figures for the Avatar movie? Nope. There aren’t any. Are there Pop! figures for Avatar: The Last Airbender, which has a healthy online fandom presence? Yep.
Supernatural is an excellent example as well. A small show on a struggling network. Isn’t it on season 247 at this point? What do you think helped it last as long as it has? All that sweet network promo? The A-List status of its stars (hahahaha)?
HAAAAA! NO! It’s the fucking fan content! All the fanvids, fanfic, artwork, gifsets, commentary, discussions, meta, and beyond. All those creations get seen by hundreds, thousands of people who may have never heard of it before. But it’s that kind of content that sparks an interest. If you’re in that fandom, think of the coolest piece of art (or the best fanfic), that’s what inspires people to seek something out. That’s what cultivates an interest for years, including purchasing god knows what for god knows how much money. Terribly photoshopped ~official~ promo pictures and a couple commercials ain’t gonna do it.
Does the below image make me go “LOL WHAT? wats happening? wats going on? wat is this????”
Ya. Dark, morbid, funny. Sounds interesting…
Does the below official image make me go, “Oooh, gotta watch whatever that is!”
It sure the fuck does not. Sorry Jensen Ackles, you’re good looking and all, but nah. Can’t say I have any interest in whatever that is. WHY ARE YOU IN A CAGE? WHAT IS THAT CHAIN FOR? help me i’m scared
ANYWAY. Which content style above is going to inspire and cultivate enough of a longterm interest that people are willing to buy board games, clothing, jewelry, DVD sets, magazines, go to conventions, buy god knows what else, and spread the word about the show? For over a decade? It ain’t the second picture, I can tell you that much.
Fan content creates new fans and cultivates longterm interest which earns big businesses more money.
That is one of many reasons why Article 13 is shit. For fan content creators and for big business. It’s not a threat to the big business bottom line, it’s free promotion.
I BEG YOU. DO NOT SCROLL PAST THIS.
Need the EU’s Directive on Copyright
Article 13 explained to you or a friend in a different way you might get? READ OP’s post now and pass it on!
my favorite kind of fanfics are “canon divergence” because it’s always like handing back a reviewed essay with comments like “I enjoyed the strong beginning but here is where you lost me, I’ve made some notes”
Speaking as the author of several, this combination of helpful, academic, and petty is exactly my motivation.
SO. IF YOU KNOW YOUR FANDOM HISTORY, YOU CAN SEE THE WRITING ON THE WALL RIGHT NOW.
AND IN CASE YOU DON’T, I will tell you a story.
I don’t know if Yahoo as a corporate entity hates fandom, or if it LOVES fandom in the way a flame longs to wrap its embrace around a forest. Or maybe it’s just that fandom is an enticingly big and active userbase; but just by the nature of our enterprise, we are extremely difficult to monetize.
It doesn’t matter.
Once upon a time – in the era before anyone had heard of google – if you wanted to post fandom (or really, ANY) content, you made your own webpage out of nested frames and midi files. And you hosted it on GeoCities.
GeoCities was free and… there. If the internet of today is facebook and tumblr and twitter, the internet of the late 90s WAS GeoCities.
And then Yahoo bought GeoCities for way too much money and immediately made some, let’s say, User Outreach Errors. And anyway, the internet was getting more varied all the time, fandom mostly moved on – it wasn’t painful. GeoCities was free hosting, not a community space – but the 90s/early 00s internet was still there, preserved as if in amber, at GeoCities.com.
Until 2009, when Yahoo killed it. 15 years of early-internet history – a monument to humanity’s masses first testing the potential of the internet, and realizing they could build anything they wanted… And what they wanted to build was shines to Angel from BtVS with 20 pages of pictures that were too big to wait for on a 56k modem, interspersed with MS Word clipart and paragraphs of REALLY BIG flashing fushia letters that scrolled L to R across the page. And also your cursor would become a different MS Word clipart, with sparkles.
(So basically nothing has changed, except you don’t have to personally hardcode every entry in your tumblr anymore. Progress!)
And it was all wiped out, just like that. Gone. (except on the wayback machine, an important project, but they didn’t get everything) The weight of that loss still hurts. The sheer magnitude…
Imagine a library stocked with hundreds of thousands of personal journals, letters, family photographs, eulogies, novels, etc. dated from a revolutionary period in history, and each one its only copy. And then one day, its librarians become tired of maintaining it, so they set the library and all its contents on fire.
And watch as the flames take everything.
Brush the ash from their hands.
Walk away.
Once upon a time – in the era after everyone had heard of google, but still mostly believed them about “Don’t be evil” – fandom had a pretty great collective memory. If someone posted a good fic, or meta, or art, or conversation relevant to your interests? Anywhere? (This was before the AO3, after all.) You could know p much as soon – or as many years late – as you wanted to.
Because there was a tagging site – del.icio.us – that fandom-as-a-whole used; it was simple, functional, free, and there. Yahoo bought it in 2005. Yahoo announced they were closing it in 2010.
They ended up selling it instead, but not all the data went with it – many users didn’t opt to the migration. And even then, the new version was busted. Basically unusable for fannish searching or tagging purposes. This is the lure and the danger of centralization, I guess.
It is like fandom suffered – collectively – a brain injury. Memories are irrevocably lost, or else they are not retrievable without struggle. New ones aren’t getting formed. There is no consensus replacement.
We have never yet recovered.
Once upon a time… Yahoo bought tumblr.
I don’t know how you celebrated the event, but I spent it backing up as much as I could, because Yahoo’s hobby is collecting the platforms that fandom relies on and destroying them.
I do not think Yahoo is “bad” – I am criticizing them on their own site, after all, and I don’t expect any retribution. I genuinely hope they sort out their difficulties.
But they are, historically, bad for US.
And right now is a good time to look at what you’ve accumulated during your career on this platform, and start deciding what you want to pack and what can be left behind to become ruins. And ash.
…On a cheerier note, wherever we settle next will probably be much better! This was never a good place to build a city.
i forgot that yahoo was the one that destroyed both de.li.cious and geocities too, dang. But yes – tumblr is a loss and the writing is on the wall. Yahoo won’t run this site purely for charity reasons, so unless something wildly changes, tumblr’s days are numbered.
(Maybe now is a good time to check out pillowfort.io …)
I have been involved in online fandom since AOL was new, and yes, I witnessed the destruction when Geocities went dark. It was a real loss. The Wayback Machine saved some pages, but not all.
But I think it’s wrong to blame Yahoo. They weren’t the only ones. And they won’t be the last. It might seem like Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter are here to stay, but that once seemed true of AOL, Geocities, MySpace, etc. If it stops being profitable, it goes away…or becomes a useless shadow of what it used to be.
AOL still exists as a company, but the fannish message boards, filled with discussion and fanfic, are gone forever. So are all the personal webpages where fans used to archive their stories. Free mailing lists at Yahoogroups, Onelist, and Egroups were once the heart of fandom – where people posted discussion and fanfic, and expected them to be archived forever. Yahoogroups ended up absorbing the rest, then put Draconian limits on posting and archiving that basically made the mailing lists useless for fannish purposes.
Usenet is still around, but the archiving services (Remarq, DejaNews, etc.) mostly went away. Because of the nature of Usenet, it was pretty useless without multiple archives (posts tended to get lost, they were only available for a couple of weeks, and you couldn’t depend on one ISP or one archive to get them all – a pain if you were trying to read a 30-part story).
So, I am wondering how long Tumblr will be a viable platform for fandom. Yahoo recently sold off Flickr, and the new owner is making huge changes. You used to get 1 terabyte of space for photos; now you only get 1,000 photos, no matter what size they are. If you don’t buy a membership for $50/year, they will start deleting your photos until you are under the limit, oldest first. If they decide to sell Tumblr as well, who knows what the new rules will be.
Many Flickr users are upset at the changes. They expected their photos to be archived there forever. Now that won’t be the case, even if they pay – since once you die and stop paying the fee, your photos will be deleted.
I fear that applies to fannish works as well. Switching to Pillowfort.io or Dreamwidth isn’t really a solution. They are likely to face the same pressures Yahoo, etc. faced. Any commercial service can’t be relied on.
I’m reminded of something a biographer of Steve Jobs said. He writes a lot of biographies, and said Jobs was difficult, because his early journals were on magnetic tape and other obsolete media, written with software that is no longer readily available. Leonardo da Vinci was easier, because his handwritten notebooks can still be read. I guess there’s something to be said for dead-tree fanzines.
A good post to revive!
I don’t think it’s the commercial nature of a site by itself that’s the issue. DW never really took off like a lot of us hoped and never created that second era of LJ-style fandom, but it has been chugging happily along ever since. Its ambitions were modest and its business plan sound.
The problem is that most commercial sites are venture capital startup nonsense that does not have a clear business plan that will be sustainable in the long run. The aim is to drive users to the site in such numbers that they feel unable to abandon it, then inflict advertising or new fees on them after they’re stuck. “We’ll figure it out later” is a key feature of all of these, but the assumption that lots of users mean lots of ways to monetize isn’t always valid.
Squidge-style sites also don’t usually have good long-term plans. (IDK about Squidge in particular though.) The ones that last are the ones run by fans with deep pockets and good offline fannish support networks. Many others die when the owner forgets to renew the domain name or gets tired of paying or can’t pay any longer.
Look at the Smallville Slash Archive: it was one of many fannish sites that Minotaur hosted. When he died unexpectedly, his many fannish friends stepped in to save his work. SSA ultimately got imported to AO3 to preserve it. This worked because he had plenty of actual friends in fandom–people he saw offline at cons too–and not just casual acquaintances who followed him on social media. It’s true that donation drives can be signal boosted on social media, but all of the liking and goodwill in the world won’t do jack if nobody has access to the hosting/business side of a site to use those donations to keep it open.
This is one reason a lot of older fans I know have started talking about fannish estate planning. All those paper zines are a better archival format than any computer drive, but they also often get thrown in the trash by clueless relatives. Out of an original print run of a couple hundred, how many are extant?
AO3 is distinctive in that it has an entire organization in place to make sure it continues. (So while nothing is forever, AO3 is about as solid as it gets.) But I’d probably trust DW second most, and I’d trust it over many single-owner not-for-profit fannish spaces.
Not to hijack the thread, but this is Walter from Squidge.org. Yes, we’re still out here, though we’re such a small part of fandom now as opposed to the early 90s when we started. Squidge has a future, I think, and I’m looking at replacing several of current sites (Peja’s WWOMB, NCISFiction.com, and a couple more eFiction sites) with a single AO3-based archive.
And as for the future, yes, we’re all getting older. I have a will that bequeaths Squidge.org fandom sites to the OTW (the folks that run AO3). My husband has instructions, and OTW has been told of my wishes.
Great to hear you’re around! I used to read WWOMB so often–and again whenever I get into a new-to-me old fandom. There are so many fics on older archives that aren’t crossposted anywhere else.
I’ve seen a lot of people on my dash who are justifiably upset with some of Tumblr’s recent changes (argh, reply function gone, argh argh) and talking about moving to another site. This is a good thing (and also more or less inevitable at some point; fandom activity never stays in one place forever, or else we’d all still be on like, Usenet*).
But one thing I will say, for those of you who have not lived through a fannish migration or six, is that fandoms don’t jump in an organized or coherent way. It tends to be a trickle, not a dam burst. So for instance, almost ten years ago now (yikes, can it really have been that long?) there was Strikethrough on Livejournal, which is a long story that doesn’t bear getting into right now but the short form is that LJ made enemies of a lot of fans. And there were various attempts to jump to InsaneJournal and GreatestJournal and a bunch of other LJ clones, but they mostly didn’t ‘take.’ Dreamwidth, when it came along a couple of years later, did better at attracting people (and does have a comparatively small but active user base–and specific communities, like certain RP comms, did make an organized jump, but they were actual communities and not an amorphous blob the way ‘Dragon Age fandom,’ say, is an amorphous blob), but the thing that actually finally dragged a ton of fannish activity away from LJ seems to have been Tumblr–not any of the “like LJ but different/better” alternatives that people were floating and promoting, but something entirely different.
The main thing is that communities or groups of friends may coordinate a move together, but fandoms in a larger sense are about as coordinate-able as a bunch of cats. And also, the place they end up going generally isn’t “like X but better” but a whole new Y (mailing lists to bboards to LJ to Tumblr, just to name a few–and each of those changed the “shape” of the fandoms within it quite a bit).
The reason I am saying this is not to discourage people from seeking out alternatives, but to say: fandom is going to move, if not now then at some point, but it ain’t going to happen in a way that necessarily makes a lot of sense from the outside. Like a bunch of cats, we’re going to wander around for a bit and then land somewhere and pretend we did it on purpose. And it’s easy to lose track of people when that happens. So my advice is: let people who you care about not losing track of know where to find you and how to keep up with you, whether it’s a new site or even just “hey, here’s my email, let’s stay in touch.” I have friends from old, old fannish days, who never ended up on Tumblr, but we still occasionally send each other a silly link or something… and who knows, maybe when fandom saunters catlike over to something new, we’ll reconnect there.
* – Inevitably when I say something like this someone feels obliged to note that they are still on, e.g., Usenet. And it’s true that Usenet still sees activity. But I think it’s safe to say that fannish activity is not there in the way that it was in, for instance, the early 90s.
This post was from 3 years ago, but it’s still holds true. I’ve managed to find many muturals after my old account was deleted, but not everyone, like smaller blogs in fandoms I don’t frequent often or ones with long, hard to pronounce names.
Get emails. Signal boost posts with people’s contact info so if the original blog goes dark that others can find them. There’s a good account called @find-me-at-x that’s doing the Good Fandom Lord’s work of boosting announcement posts and asks for missing blogs. I’d recommend following them if there’s someone you’re trying to find.
just moving along like everyone else 