A Very Brief and Very Sectional Look At Fandom History With Reguards to Central Archiving With TK
Fact 1: We're starting with a time in fandom when I was 8 or 9
Fact 2: There are some amazing, extrmely well fact checked fandom histories already out there
Fact 3: The internet is forever and so are all your fandom sins.
Pre FF.N days were weird and rough. Star Trek had been the predominate fandom through the 70s, though fandom goes back hundreds of years (see: Sherlock Holmes). Pre 90s was the time of zines and cons and letters. Mid 90s, thanks to the now-much more common place home internet fandoms like DragonRiders of Pern flourished.
In the beginning, creators tried to be very involved in their fandom. Some, like Tamora Pierce were on the peripheral due to their fears of copyright issues (ie they'd accidentally borrow an idea from fans and then somehow need to credi them) and others, like Anne McCaffrey and Anne Rice were significantly more involved.
Redwall was my first fandom. While now I would never say there was a safe space for kids in the single digits to hang around online in, this was actually true statement then. Jaques had safe sites listed on his website and the fandom was a strong one. ITW (rip :(((() was still the primary message board system and most sites were hosted on netscape or angelfire. The death knoll for this fandom was the fall of ITW, there was just too much lore lost when it went down.
As Redwall waned, Anne Rice was cooking up her bullshit. There's some really well done Anne Rice Bullshit fanlore histories, but basically she used actual lawyers to send fans writing fanfic C&D letters and went after websites and fan content. It was horrifc. Some amazing people fled fandom forever, starting in about 1995. This picked up steam in 2000 when she absolutely wrecked her way through her own fandom.
Anne McCaffrey was, at the same time, on some other bullshit. She approved of and liked her fandom, but she was horrifically homophobic and if there was even a hint of gay anything, she'd throw a fit. She also didn't want anyone writing or RPing women in leadership roles (Bronze and Brown riders for those who read the books) and at some point in… 1999? She put a ban on it and would attempt to get your website taken down if they were rolled.
FFN started in 1998, which feels like it was late to the party. It started as an 18+ archive but by 2002 when the greatbreak happened (your sister is your aunt, hey fam) some ⅓ of their accounts self IDd as under 18. At some point they lowered their age to 13+ which is inline with industry standards.
Before FFN central archiving was done fandom by fandom. FFN didn't take this away. Some of these (SG1, LOTR, HP) were hosted on their own domains, but many were hosted on sites like Geocities (rip). Every time a service like ITW or geocities went down, a ton of fandom was lost forever. This was a high flux time, when fandom archives for even huge fandoms like HP were coming and going faster than you could upload your fics and each archive had it's own politics. What ships did they allow, what genres, what ratings… It varied based on who paid the bills.
FFN was a novel concept, and many fans flocked to it. Having a central archive? For all our fandoms? Glorious.
But what one must remember is that this was also a very weird time for media and the portrayal of gay people (mostly men). Anything involving a m/m relationship was basically two ratings higher than it would have been listed if the couple was het. Entire archives banned it (there was an epic two year long fandom battle in the HP fandom about including m/m relationships in archives not explicitly for m/m relationships).
Which of course led to most m/m fics having explicit or at least an R rating.
Several things happened in a quick timeline in the fandom world in the early 2000s.
1) LOTR came out and took over the known universe. And because there weren't a lot of women in LOTR, there were a lot more m/m fics suddenly. And movie studios were seeing that fandom was Big and Exciting and that Geeks Can Make Us Money. They attempted to put up a monetized website run by the studio to host fanfiction but once added to it, you lost all rights to your work and they could republish it, edit it, or utilize the idea however they wished without crediting you.
Needless to say, this went over like a lead balloon and their submissions were…. Choice.
2) FFN got sued or something and all of the sudden Xi cared A LOT about the content of their site. In september of 2202 they pulled all NC17 fics from their site, all RPS, and most m/m content. The NC17 and RPS stuff was sudden, just entire sections gone, but the m/m stuff was slower and more insidious. They had mods of a sort reading through fandoms looking for "violations" and pulling down fics, and the general public could flag your fic and have it yanked without review.
You can imagine how fandom used this exactly as intended and never used it against people they didn't agree with or pairings they didn't like. Somewhere in there FictionPress also started and all original stuff got yeeted to a new home. Adultff.n came into existence around the same time, but was not run by Xi, had the world's shittiest layout, and required archival permission at one point, meaning you submitted stuff for approval. It wasn't great.
Also let us not forget the MPAA sued them because their ratings are proprietary. Yeeeep.
(also note that search functions within categories didn't exist on FFN at the time, not even based on completion status, word count, or pairing)
This was the birth of AO3. I don't remember where the OG idea came about, but there was a whole lot talk about this idea on LJ. At some point, Brad sold us out to the Russians to Six Apart and LJ was lost, and while many platforms tried to capture the soul of LJ, it just never managed to do so. DreamWidth, Tumblr, JournalFen, etc.
Another thing to remember, is that fandom had been predominately male, even on IIRC days, but FFN and LJ fandom had become a predominately female fandom space. There was an absolute ton of back and forth about this, written by a lot of people who were way more eloquent than I was in 2005, but there is a lot to be said about the regulation and pushback against spaces where men have to ask for a seat at the table, instead of being offered one. Remember that, for good or for bad, slash fanfic is predominately written by and consumed by female fans.
Which is where we come to today and the central archive we know and love that is AO3. And why when asked by AO3 allows ANYTHING GOES on their website, up to and including things you personally find immoral and DEAD DOVE, we have to recall that AO3 was built as we were being censored and fandom was being ripped from our hands. We have to remember that, at one point, just your basic slash pairing was being pulled down from sites because whoever hosted it didn't like The Gays.
We have a decently detailed history of all fandom kerfluffles from 2002-2015, many of which these incidents were involved in, on FandomWank. Many FandomWank details have been archived in wikis and other timelines. Some have not. Wild Award Mentions go to: LimeyBean, MrsScribe, HP Shipper Wars, WIKTT's Pawn2Queen wars, and anytime SPN ever got mentioned ever. But none are as great and incredible as the saga of Limeybean.
