The moment where my fandom life and university life intersect
Confession time.
I am a closet fanfic reader; have been since I was 12 and discovered that the Internet could do more than provide me with pictures of adorable kittens. My poisons of choice have included livejournal, fanfiction.net and, most recently, A03 (Archive Of Our Own). It’s funny how a little obsession/ stress reliever of mine can turn into source material through which I can actually understand Derrida, but really all the media platforms I just mentioned are forms of archives. Rather complex forms of archives, in fact.
At its most basic form, an archive is a place or arena in which data can be stored. Derrida takes it one step further in order to stress the importance of archives because they are the basis for what counts within society and ourselves. They constitute the most fundamental level of society and institutional practises; there is not a single major city or even a small country town that doesn’t have some form of an archive in the form of a records hall or local library.
Archives are able to decide what constitutes as inside and outside a culture, that is to say, what is considered a definitive point of a culture that needs to be preserved for future generations.
And that’s a scary thought isn’t it? The idea that one day all our little interactions and the things that we find significant to our lives might fade away. It’s logical to want to preserve them, right?
Enter the Archive Fever.
This is another one of Derrida’s ideas that explains that why we keep producing new archives that are constantly open for us to reshape:
“The archivst produces more archive and that is why the archive is never closed. It opens out of the future."
We are constantly able to retrieve information from these past archives, which enable us to create our very own archives that future generations might be able to access.
Take my little interest in fan fiction and the AO3 website as an example. I search the website based on tags for various fandoms, pairings and characters. Once I find something I like I bookmark it so that I can return to the story later if I like it. People who visit my homepage on the site will be able to see the stories I have bookmarked and explore them for themselves. Through this we create an archive within an archive.
But it can be dangerous. The constant drive to discover the depths of more and more archives can lead to a ‘biting off more than you can chew’ moment. This is known in the business as Archive Panic.
It’s a fandom term for when you discover a new webcomic or fanfic that’s been continuing for several months or years, giving it a rather large archive. The actual panic refers to the moment where you realise that you’re going to need to wade through this mass of information in order to understand what’s going on currently in the work, while it continues to update almost daily.
It’s a tough life being a fan.
I’m going to conclude with a brief mention to the last website I linked to, TV Tropes, which is possibly the bible for all things modern media. It contains thousands upon thousands of references and explanations of television shows, movies, comics, fanfic and books. It also happens to be the very definition of an archive fever. I invite you to check it out, but not first without the accompanying XKCD comic as a warning.
Happy hunting.