Fandom thoughts prompted by DCU but not like, actually about DCU

[superborb]

I'm going camping for the next week (Grand Tetons!), but I've been contemplating this for the last two weeks and maybe posting about it will either: make me stop spinning my wheels OR subsequent discussion will clarify my thoughts to a more interesting place. (Hm, though replies will be slow? May come next week?) So a bit of an X things make a post...

 

Anyway, context: I've been reading DCU fic for the last couple weeks; I was never in the fandom, but I had read fic sporadically in the past from reclists/pinboard.

 

1. I initially complained on mastodon that it was really hard to find fic on AO3; that sorting by bookmarks/kudos was useless, but pinboard (largely imported from delicious for the pre-AO3 stuff) generated many recs, at the cost of being less systematic than going through AO3. I really do feel like fandom lost something when delicious went down; bookmarks as a way to find fic is the best way I've used to backread the best of a fandom when you're not in it (either time separated or ...motivation separated). It just has the best discoverability in that situation. And AO3 bookmarks don't have the flexible tagging and pinboard isn't free so never got as widely adopted. 

 

2. I've always been interested in fandoms that have existed for a long time, and how they change over that time. Part of the difference between the post and pre AO3 stuff is just that once a fandom has gone on long enough, often characterizations calcify into fanon tropes. (That process may be accelerated by AO3's centralization.) But because of that noticeable cutoff, very anecdotally, it surprised me how different the fic felt. The long tropey epics weren't as visible as they are on AO3 (because they tend to pick up kudos/bookmarks vs only show up once per user on pinboard? or maybe there really are just more of them). 

 

3. I also noted on mastodon that I was surprised because the proportion of fic that made it (from LJ) in /some/ form is much, much higher than in anime fandom from a similar time period. Some combination of AO3 originating in / having earlier adoption in western media fandoms and other fandom cultural practices...? The fic websites also seem more likely to have been thoroughly crawled by web archive. I think this is a difference for all the old big Western media fandoms I've encountered, where there'll be things like the ficfinder comms that have alternate links or it'll be easy to track down the author on fanlore. (Though for even earlier anime and Western media fandoms, I think they're both really hard to track down old best-of recs in.) 

 

4. It was interesting how qualitatively different it felt to try and backread the (LJ era) fics in DCU now vs other big Western media fandoms a decade ago; I was never in e.g. SGA or The Sentinel, but somehow I remember it feeling easier to look for and find recs for them? Maybe it was just that the platforms hadn't changed yet, so linkrot wasn't as bad. Or maybe it was that people knew they'd have to curate recs to be able to find stuff themselves, and those curations are harder to find in the present day. I guess it could also be intrinsic to the fandom: DCU being a more scattered fandom or a smaller one than the juggernauts.

 

Now, to pack! 

Comments

[chestnut_pod]

Interesting musings; thank you for sharing. I definitely still mourn Delicious -- I remember the day it went down so sadly.

[superborb]

So much history went down with it!

[narie]

Oh gosh finding fic these days is so hard, yes. Recs are so hard to find, and even though DW has a few comms that aim to be the spiritual successor to crack_van, there's nothing really comparable.

Did you also notice the lack of the famed Ao3 house style in your deep dive?

[superborb]

I mean... I found LJ house style? *g*

[narie]

Hah is that better or worse?

[superborb]

It does feel a little dated now, but also different enough to be a change at least?

[vriddy]

Oooh that's super interesting!! Your point about anime fandoms really spoke to me. I'm told some of those anime fandoms existed on LJ but I never managed to find them, to me it seems like the fic always stayed on ff.net and there was no community elsewhere. (Maybe it was on forums, I remember being on a single-anime fandom around the same period. Not a fic-heavy fandom, though.) So I was struggling when I was both in Naruto and SG:A because LiveJournal made it really easy to surface to really excellent fic, usually written by adults, while it was a lot harder to find for Naruto and that eventually made me stop reading fic altogether.

I wonder if a del.icio.us/pinboard competitor would do well today. It seems like people prefer to share fic links in ephemeral Discord channels or on their Twitter, and many people don't really mind that those get lost afterwards. I feel like preserving things (even fic threads!), and curation that is meant to last (as opposed to a Tumblr blog, which feels more ephemeral to me) isn't as prevalent nowadays (see also the decline of rec lists and such), though maybe it's just taking a form I don't see.

[superborb]

I recall that some people cross posted, but I don't think it was even the majority. Lots of stuff lost forever when people left LJ or flocked!

I do think the anime fandoms on LJ were smaller, which may have contributed to the difficulty, but I think a lot of it was cultural (or because the anime fandoms skewed younger). And I think it also depended on the specific fandom -- hikago was small and more centralized with a main community and fic exchange, and I remember tenipuri being much more scattered.

I wonder if it's partially that AO3 gives the illusion of easy searching, so people think that they don't really need to keep the links or something.

[adevyish]

i vaguely remember there being some mod drama that caused a tenipuri (and tenimyu) comm schism. lots of people xposted their fic to both comms though. there was also a big ship war ~2002 that likely lead to a bunch of ship-specific comms too.

[superborb]

Oh yeah, I vaguely remember that too, but I think that predated my tenipuri times, so I entered the fandom a bit-- touches dirt something happened here.

[adevyish]

I noticed that some of the more well-known writers in anime fandoms were on AO3 early but deliberately did not import their anime fics to AO3. Some of these fics managed to later make it to AO3 when mailing list-era archives went through the Open Doors process, but that tends to be earlier anime fandoms like Gundam Wing. (And even then a lot of mailing list archives have been lost as a lot of free webhosts have since shut down.)

As someone who still maintains a Pinboard, I’ve actually found linkrot to be worse on AO3 than on older sites. Sure, a lot of LJ fics were lost when people deleted their accounts, but that happened because of what happened to LJ. Whereas with AO3, sometimes I’ll bookmark a fic, come back a year later and find it, as well as the author’s account, has already been deleted.

[superborb]

Yeah, I feel like GW actually ended up better off than a lot of similar era anime fandoms? I wonder if it was because it had a few big cross-author archives that managed to be ported more easily, which I don't remember for like, Weiss Kreuz etc.

AGREE re: AO3 linkrot. Also it makes AO3 bookmarks even more useless; at least pinboard keeps the URL and doesn't pretend it'll keep the metadata.

[adevyish]

Yeah GW fandom did incredibly well at preservation for a fandom that old.

The major Weiss Kreuz cross-author archive I knew of only hosted one-shots, so it was good for author discovery but I’d have to head off to authors’ Angelfires to read their longfic. (This archive only recently went offline.)

(Impressively Noire Sensus is still kicking? omg)

YEAH it’s so frustrating to see a bookmark for a deleted fic and be like “I have no idea which one this was”. I only use it to maintain my reading list but still :/

[superborb]

Now that I think about it, most of my Inuyasha reading was probably on like, mediaminer and such, which I have no idea if it made it to web archive or is still up -- I've never checked. (This predates any kind of online bookmarking available to me, and I recall keeping a list of work IDs on an index card...)

[adevyish]

Mediaminer! I forgot about that! I had a plaintext doc in Yahoo Notes (rip) with all the fics, webcomics, and Quizilla origfic I was reading. (This later became a folder of HTML docs on my computer.) And some stuff in LJ memories.

[halfcactus]

Have fun with camping!!!

When I was still reading fic I did rely a lot on pinboard back in the day (after delicious died), and found tagging functional. Pinboard is also where kinkmemes were archived, and they were tagged so well, to my recollection! I've privated most of my own fic bookmarks now because my taste is no longer the same, and because I sometimes noted what I liked AND didn't like about the fic which I realized might be rude, lol.

And AO3 bookmarks were SO useful to me, the difficulty was in finding users. My starting point was usually the fic bookmarks of authors who wrote fic that I liked, haha.

[superborb]

I do the same with AO3 bookmarks. I guess you could theoretically go through the bookmarks of a fic you liked and see what those bookmarkers also bookmarked, but that seems like, exponentially more stuff to trawl through.