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of our own
Oct. 9th, 2008 09:55 amI'm really damn excited about the Archive Of Our Own, which just went up in beta. It's pretty, incorporates a lot of the cool stuff like tagging and icons that I like from eljay, and is clearly written in fan language. As Speranza says, we own the goddamn servers. This is going to be so cool.
The one major downside of livejournal - beyond the political censorship hinkiness - is how decentralized it's made our fiction. Which is, historically speaking, kind of sad.
I'm at least a second, if not a third, generation fan. I wasn't old enough to watch the early seasons of Buffy on tv. Star Trek: Next Gen premiered the year after I was born. If we date media fandom back to K/S, that gives us a solid 40 years of history, cultural tradition, and text. As a younger fan, I've missed really a lot of the fandom greats. I was a kid when Buffy was on, when Xena was on, and Stargate Sg-1, and The Sentinel. I wasn't alive for Classic Trek, or Starsky and Hutch, or classic Battlestar Galactica. But I've come to really really like a good number of those shows as I've become a slash fan. And when I watch them for the first time, My fanbrain comes on, and I want fic, and I want fannish discussions, in the same way that I would want them for a show that I was watching as it aired.
In some cases, we're pretty lucky. The Trekiverse Archive contains all the fiction posted to Alt.StarTrek.Creative.Erotic.Moderated since 1991. The Sentinel has two archives that pretty much comprise the entire creative output of the fandom. Stargate has several massive archives. This allows me as a younger fan, as a fan who's about 5-10 years behind on the current fannish shiny things, to still access the fiction produced by those fandoms.
But when I get on a nostalgic bent and go looking for the Harry Potter fic that liked so much during the Three Year Summer, I can only find the stuff that I remember by name - and sometimes not even that. A lot of my old bookmarks have died. Harry Potter fandom is severely lacking in the cultural memory department. For that matter, while West of The Moon serves me pretty well as an archive for hobbit-centric LotR fic, there isn't as far as I know are more all-encompassing archive for the fandom. We're pretty splayed out - and that's how stuff gets lost. In ten years, in twenty, what will we have forgotten? How much of our work is just going to fade into obscurity?
So the Archive of Our Own is a great idea, in that it will hopefully help lengthen our collective memory. I'll be interested to see what kind of effect it has on fic posting habits - I think that right now, most of us post to our eljays, link or announce at a few relevant fic comms, maybe mirror our work over at ff.n, or eventually post it to a personal website. Will fic posting, reccing, and commenting mainly switch over to the Archive, with personal journals used only for the anounce? Or will the Archive be used more as a mirror, like a gigantic collective personal website, where we upload already-released work to be collected? What do people think? How will this change us?
The one major downside of livejournal - beyond the political censorship hinkiness - is how decentralized it's made our fiction. Which is, historically speaking, kind of sad.
I'm at least a second, if not a third, generation fan. I wasn't old enough to watch the early seasons of Buffy on tv. Star Trek: Next Gen premiered the year after I was born. If we date media fandom back to K/S, that gives us a solid 40 years of history, cultural tradition, and text. As a younger fan, I've missed really a lot of the fandom greats. I was a kid when Buffy was on, when Xena was on, and Stargate Sg-1, and The Sentinel. I wasn't alive for Classic Trek, or Starsky and Hutch, or classic Battlestar Galactica. But I've come to really really like a good number of those shows as I've become a slash fan. And when I watch them for the first time, My fanbrain comes on, and I want fic, and I want fannish discussions, in the same way that I would want them for a show that I was watching as it aired.
In some cases, we're pretty lucky. The Trekiverse Archive contains all the fiction posted to Alt.StarTrek.Creative.Erotic.Moderated since 1991. The Sentinel has two archives that pretty much comprise the entire creative output of the fandom. Stargate has several massive archives. This allows me as a younger fan, as a fan who's about 5-10 years behind on the current fannish shiny things, to still access the fiction produced by those fandoms.
But when I get on a nostalgic bent and go looking for the Harry Potter fic that liked so much during the Three Year Summer, I can only find the stuff that I remember by name - and sometimes not even that. A lot of my old bookmarks have died. Harry Potter fandom is severely lacking in the cultural memory department. For that matter, while West of The Moon serves me pretty well as an archive for hobbit-centric LotR fic, there isn't as far as I know are more all-encompassing archive for the fandom. We're pretty splayed out - and that's how stuff gets lost. In ten years, in twenty, what will we have forgotten? How much of our work is just going to fade into obscurity?
So the Archive of Our Own is a great idea, in that it will hopefully help lengthen our collective memory. I'll be interested to see what kind of effect it has on fic posting habits - I think that right now, most of us post to our eljays, link or announce at a few relevant fic comms, maybe mirror our work over at ff.n, or eventually post it to a personal website. Will fic posting, reccing, and commenting mainly switch over to the Archive, with personal journals used only for the anounce? Or will the Archive be used more as a mirror, like a gigantic collective personal website, where we upload already-released work to be collected? What do people think? How will this change us?