Feeling nostalgic for fandoms past... and vaguely concerned about the spread of AI generated "fan" works
Recently I was reminiscing with some friends in my current fandom about BBC Merlin - a show I greatly enjoyed to start with but never finished watching because (a) I heard the quality declined steeply, and (b) I didn't want to watch Arthur die. There was a stunning fanvid that gave me a lot of foreboding tragic Arthur feels, which coupled with all the great fic that that fandom produced, honestly probably greatly fed that desire to peace out before he met his tragic end. (I never wanna see my faves die. This is not the only show I never finished because of this aversion!).
I loved that vid and I wondered if it was still up anywhere. I managed to remember the name of the song and lo and behold, I found the vid! It's "Red" by obsessive24 from 2008, set to the song by Elbow and still embedded on livejournal and up on vimeo (password: merlin).
And despite the 2008-level video resolution - 360p! - it really holds up. A beautiful song with beautiful editing and effects. I dunno how many times I watched it back then. And I found an lj post from another fan who loved it so much they did a very in-depth review complete with timestamps and screenshots! One fan crafted the vid as a love letter to Arthur and his tragedy, and another fan wrote a detailed analysis as a love letter to the vid. I love fandom so much sometimes.
Scrolling through the vidder's youtube channel and looking at all the canons she's vidded, it really hit me what a golden era of fandom that late 2000s-early 2010s felt like to me, such a beautiful blossoming of communities and fanworks fertilised by improving technology and a diversity of fan cultures. Improved home computers, editing software, DVD ripping and torrents meant that more people could make vids; broadband internet and sites like youtube and vimeo enabled easy streaming and sharing (as opposed to downloading a whole vid to watch before you knew if you'd even like it!); portable mp3 players encouraged the proliferation of podfic and fandom podcasts (I loved hearing the diversity of accents of my fellow fans from all over), and themed playlists (I got so many amazing music recs from those things!); and tumblr boosted appreciation for beautiful and creative gifs and gifsets as well as other visual arts.
Seeing generative AI content spreading in fandom - AI-written fics are in my tiny fandoms on AO3 now and it makes me very sad - and having started writing my own fic recently (better late than never!), I've been thinking a lot about creativity and why we do what we do when sometimes it's really hard work. And it really does come down to love - for a canon, for a character or ship, for our fellow fans, for the sheer joy of creation.
I don't have many answers to how to discourage AI in "fanworks" (in quotes because if a fan didn't actually make it is it a fanwork? I think not!) but I really hope it doesn't become an entrenched norm. I would much rather read baby's actual first fanfic or a fic that is full of SPAG errors but is written from the heart by a fan who loves their canon - or got extremely pissed off at it and wrote the fic to right some wrongs - than perfect but soulless prose written by a machine that can only churn out what it does because other people stole fan- and published works and fed them to it.
Can fandom please keep on being creative and DIY? Don't make a computer program write your fic or make your edits, please. Fandom is about imperfect love for imperfect canons and people, not about churning out pixel-perfect content for the content gods.
Though that Merlin fanvid is pretty damn near perfect, despite the 360 pixellation.
