hiii! i have a question i thought you might be able to answer: how did aftg originally get so popular? i know it was mostly word of mouth on tumblr (still is, i think) (who says this website is unmarketable!!) but what were the early days of the fandom like? personally i've "only" been here since 2016, and by then the series was already decently popular. i remember at that time that the fandom was really welcoming and kind in a way that felt really exceptional to me, and it definitely contributed to me picking up the books, which is the only explanation i can really think of for why it got a bigger following than some to other books which did receive a whole big-publisher marketing campaign aside from it just being well-written. do you have any theories for why it got so massive on here? and do you know how the first readers found it? i hope you don't mind me asking you this, but i remember your blog from wayyyy back when and thought that if anyone had the answer, it would probably be you :)
Hello! I always get so happy when I can talk about the early days of the fandom <3 Sit down here around the fire, let me tell you about this wondrous tale.
So, story time: it was spring 2013, I had just finished a thorough read of In The Company Of Shadows and I was starving for another black hole. It was automatic for me to look up the goodread lists ICoS was featured in, to see what other titles I could pick up, and ended up on the list called "Online M/M stories that deserve to be published". The Foxhole Court was right there (it's not anymore because it IS published <3), so I read it. That was the start of the end lmao
If I remember correctly I didn't wait too long before reading TRK, but TKM didn't come out until the end of the following year, so in the meantime I all but shelved it as something that had incredible potential but that was possibly doomed to never be completed. Fast forward I think the start of 2015 when I accidentally stumbled upon TKM and I couldn't believe I could finally know how the story ended. Nora had a blogspot where she talked about the books (including updates between TRK and TKM), and I remember trying to get as much info as I could on this series. And that was it. For a bit.
So, by the first half of 2015, the fandom was made by people commenting on her blogspot, on her livejournal, the book pages on goodreads, and Ao3 literally had 2 fics ( webarchive gives you what we saw - btw Don't Speak Against The Sun is FIRE and instantly became a new standard for f/f for me). You can still find all this content online. Tumblr had a handful of scattered posts about TFC, mostly Nora's mutuals/friends on tumblr, and a couple of readers screaming into the void with no one answering their call.
I was pretty active on here, especially in the bellarke fandom, and I engaged with mutuals and other blogs often enough that I knew if I talked about something, at least someone would reply. A mutual was reading The Raven Cycle and got me curious enough to liveblog it myself. Instant love, of course, and if you've read TRC you know how strong the found family vibe is. So at the end of my liveblog (we've reached July 2015) I threw out a comment where I recommended AFTG as another worthy title. With the first book being free while the other two were only a dollar each, it sounded a fairly easy commitment. One mutual decided to read it (if you're reading, hi!!!) and liveblog it, and that got the party started.
A party of 2, and I'm not kidding. While we chatted and made up headcanon after headcanon on the phone, the intention was to get others interested in this story. But they'd never do it if there wasn't enough content around to engage with and motivate them to blog themselves, so we started with quote posts, liveblog reactions, a few timid edits and poems. An important choice was figuring out which tag to use (at the time tumblr search only scrolled through tags, not post content): "all for the game" was an actual sports tag, "the raven king" was the title announced for the next TRC installment, "the king's men" was the last book of the trilogy and it wasn't even the free one, so we settled for "the foxhole court" which was an empty tag. Even now my blog content is organized around "tfc" because of it, even though we took over all the relevant tags. A couple other mutuals I had from bellarke fandom got curious as well, and now we could consider ourselves a proper group. We were so starved for fan content that whatever you put out would be automatically reblogged and enthusiastically engaged with. It was a happy little fandom bubble. Then Nora noticed us and started interacting with us, and you got the birth of what would become the extra content page as she replied to our questions.
I possibly had a little bit too much time on my hands because I appointed myself as fandom archivist and tour guide. I reblogged every single post I saw in the tags, and I started a welcome page where I could keep track of everyone announcing they were reading the series. It was meant as a way to find mutuals to interact with since tumblr hadn't yet "canonized" all the tags, and it was entirely possible to lose each other in dashboard chains. I used to reply to everyone reading the series by "officially" welcoming them into the fandom, linking them the page where they could find mutuals, Nora's blog, and the extra content present up to that point. Oh and there was a fictional exy team where you could choose your position and then put it in your blog for fun or roleplay it. I also used smashword's gift system to buy the series for whoever said they couldn't pay for it, just to try and avoid pirating the book (good for word of mouth, bad for sales). This was on my side, but this fandom had so many people pouring their entire heart out I still get emotional thinking about it.
Everyone (before January 2016) made as much content as they could, be it meta, fanart, fanfics, headcanons, edits, wikia pages etc. We had fandom challenges where we pronounced the names of the characters and aftg keywords with our native accent, others where we said our favorite scene. Every headcanon was the first headcanon ever seen in the fandom. The fun thing was that at the time there was a strong etiquette toward "if you have nothing nice to say then don't say anything" so fan content really went in all directions with basically no limits. We tagged for triggers and that was it, we had free reign. For those who were around at the time, the sin squad was a group of us fans churning out the saddest/filthiest/fluffiest/most problematic content we could think of.
Then we reached January 2016. We were around 300 in the fandom at that point (I know because I counted them, literally), it had been slow but constant growth where each new fan brought at least other two people with them, and we had around 20 posts per day in the main tag. Then someone bridged the gap between us and the TRC fandom. If you ask me how the fandom got really popular, that's it. The TRC fandom was stuck in hiatus waiting for The Raven King, and now you had 300 rabid foxes spamming aftg content on tumblr, using trk as tag, too. Popular fanartists that were active in that fandom helped making aftg known, and semi viral posts did the rest. We went from 300 to 700 people in a couple of months, and shortly after I had to stop adding people to the welcome page because the post broke. I didn't even know that could happen. It wasn't long after that we were featured in the tumblr end of year recap for book ships. We were so many it was suddenly possible to meet in real life! Cosplays, tattoos, merch. You name it, someone in the fandom did it.
But how did it feel when we were only 20 people and a cardboard dog cutout? It felt like the most chaotic book club ever, and every new fan was automatically a friend. Nostalgia is a lying bitch, but I really don't think I'm making shit up here. We had fun and made great memories.
By the way, if you want to see how things were in 2015, you can! Just go through my archive starting from July 2015 (I think 17th) and onward. You can also search my blog for the tags "fandom history" and "started from nothing and now we're here", whereas here you can find a list of aftg fandom tags I used.
Tl;dr We were starving for good content, we wanted to have fun together, and we were lucky enough to half-hijack a bigger fandom in hiatus. That was all the marketing AFTG needed on tumblr.
