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he's having a normal one
You keep talking about the origins of AO3 as this group effort by an actual group of people who were friends and who spent time discussing this with each other in person. It's kind of blowing my mind. Is there a post or a journal somewhere that specifically keeps record of this?
--
I'm dying.
Nonnie, seriously?
No, that's mean, I know you're serious. It's just flabbergasting how much fandom has expanded and how much there isn't a direct link to the past.
Astolat and Cesperanza floated the idea at Vividcon and various places, I think, though I wasn't going to cons in that era. We were all on LJ in those days, and Astolat made a big post nailing her theses to the door. Discussion in the comments was instant and prolonged.
A LJ com was set up to discuss. It was later renamed to otw_news, but if you go all the way back to the beginning, you can see brainstorming mess instead of official news posts.
Fanlore page linking to Astolat's post and giving a little context.
Early brainstorming: https://otw-news.livejournal.com/2007/05/
For example, here I am collecting links to older archives to look at for research when designing AO3.
Fun fact, we never intended to call it AO3. There was a whole call for name suggestions, but nothing was as evocative as astolat's original post title referencing Virginia Woolf. (For those who haven't thought about it, AO3's name is a reference to A Room of One's Own.)
Here's the name discussion
Here's the poll that came out of it
But also notice how many people voted: 562.
That's how many people cared at the time: a few hundred. Maybe a thousand if you count lurkers, but frankly, that community was not as lurkery as now. It wasn't just ten friends. It was a community effort. But what "our" community looked like at the time was vastly different. It was six degrees of Kevin Bacon astolat, not a vast sea of strangers like fic fandom on AO3 is now.
Here's an early post suggesting we ban the under 18s from the site entirely. Pity we didn't do so, given the rise of antis.
Here's the invite to a fundraising party at astolat's in NYC that following Halloween. I dressed as Amanda from Highlander, not very well.
You can tell we knew each other by looking at those comments on astolat's initial post. You can also tell how discussion-based that part of fandom was back in 2007.
The way my tumblr is now with a ton of text, back and forth, and hopping around between threads of conversation, all featuring a consistent set of faces, is very much like LJ. Most of tumblr is not.
This is important info to put out there, and I constantly forget that "fandom" as it is now is nothing like the community we had then. This is a good resource for understanding what was going on with the creation of AO3 in particular, but it's also a great example of why older fans say that we miss the Livejournal era of fandom so much.
AO3 is the result of long discussions, hard work, and a dedicated community of fans. Though it isn't is a social media site (and it was never intended to be), it is the only place now that sometimes feels like how the fannish community used to be on LJ--when a good discussion gets going in the comments on a story. But AO3 is for fanfiction et al, and therefore is limited in discussion subjects.
(The ads you'll encounter if you follow those links, though? Did not exist when we were there and were one of the reasons we abandoned the site--not the most important reasons by a long shot as you'll understand if you read more about why AO3 was created, but they were a factor.)
We were a collection of communities, with some-to-significant overlap in members. Fanfiction writers were not "content creators," and people who didn't write fanfiction were not "the lucky audience who should be soooooooooooo grateful that writers deigned to gift us with their incredible talent." We knew each other. Many of us met each other IRL after meeting through fandom (once fandom shifted to the internet there was some hesitancy at first about meeting "online" friends, but that was quickly gotten over). We went to conventions together. We had lunch and dinner and parties and meet-ups IRL outside of conventions.
If you take a wander around from even just that one LJ community (click on a username to check out their personal LJ), you can see how discussions would branch off without excluding anyone the way they do on Tumblr. If you wanted to share something you saw on someone else's LJ, you just linked to it, and people followed the link to read it and join in the discussion (or just lurk). The force of Tumblr splintering is an active barrier to creating real communities.
I really miss LJ. I miss the connection I felt to my community there.
#fandom is supposed to be a community -- not a two-tiered system of sellers and buyers
Yup.
I miss LJ *so much*. Set up my first one in 2001 at an Internet cafe near where I was renting a room in London (which, amusingly, is just round the corner from where I live now).
LJ got me into fandoms (Torchwood - the origin of my username!), got me writing fic, helped me start running SPN fan meetups... It was such a great site and I still have friends I met on there, including one of my best friends! It was so much easier to start chatting with someone - I just feel too shy to talk to people on here most of the time.
Then the Great Strike through happened followed by it being sold to a Russian company, so here we are.
I really miss LJ though 😕
Same, Li Sheng. Same.
I love how so many characters in Wuxia stories fight with beautiful musical instruments like flutes and guqin...
The British version would probably be walking up to someone and decking them with a recorder or a tambourine.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: 山河令 | Word of Honor (TV 2021) Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Wen Kexing/Zhou Zishu Characters: Wen Kexing, Zhou Zishu, Zhou Zishu's Parents, Wen Kexing's Parents Additional Tags: Reincarnated life, Second Chance Summary:
In which Wen KeXing makes a bad decision and Zhou ZiShu saves him. Again.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: 山河令 | Word of Honor (TV 2021) Rating: Explicit Warnings: Major Character Death Relationships: Wen Kexing/Zhou Zishu Characters: Wen Kexing, Zhou Zishu, Ye Baiyi Additional Tags: Suicide, no way out, Blood, Poisoning, Death, angst overload, consequences of poor communication again Summary:
Wen KeXing thought he had planned for everything...
He hadn't planned for this.
Please tell me I’m not the only one who can never remember character’s names? I just started watching Legend of Fei which has Wang Yibo in and was trying to tell a friend about it, but I suddenly couldn’t remember Lan Wangji’s name (forgive me, fandom!) so I called him...
That man with the face 😅
So I finished watching Who Rules the World (which is pretty much a het WoH with a fraction of the angst *lol*).
I did enjoy it though, especially all the amazing outfits.
Did anyone else watch Alchemy of Souls? Cause I can’t stop thinking about it….
Anywho… please don’t repost my art thnx
I love these 500%
It took me a year to get into the right headspace to finish Word of Honor, and about 3/4 of the way in I started watching Alchemy of Souls as a kind of counterpoint to the trauma. That didn’t really work out as planned *lol*
I just wanted to share that I have been writing Guardian fic for a whole year now! 😅
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
When shared names across two different shows make for some very amusing scenes 🤣
Most recent ep of Rookie Historian is like 😱
It makes you feel the way you think you should feel but you can't...