Things I remember about fic reading and writing in the early 2000s (or, tales from the Inbetween Times)
| Meta | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Things I remember about fic reading and writing in the early 2000s (or, tales from the Inbetween Times) |
| Creator: | icouldwritebooks |
| Date(s): | February 17, 2017 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | Things I remember about fic reading and writing in the early 2000s (or, tales from the Inbetween Times), Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Things I remember about fic reading and writing in the early 2000s (or, tales from the Inbetween Times) is a 2017 essay by icouldwritebooks that was posted to Tumblr.
The Essay
I’m talking around 2000-2008 here, so fanfiction.net was established, livejournal came to be a thing, and it definitely wasn’t the olden days of zines or early Internet mailing lists, but it was different from today.
- fanfiction.net used to host a lot of things that it doesn’t host today, like RPF, original fiction, humor lists, NC-17 rated stuff, original poetry, etc. The original fiction hosting was nice, because you could put your original stuff under the same account as your fan fic, and sometimes people who liked your fan fic would go read it. Readership of original fiction dropped a ton when it moved over to fictionpress.com (and the loss of lists was genuinely upsetting).
- Geocities “shrines” were very much a thing! They were so terrible and so wonderful. I miss my like ten geocities pages. Even aside from geocities, having your own site to host your stuff on instead of just putting it on fanfiction.net or some kind of blogging platform was the epitome of Internet cool, and seemingly a lot easier to do than it is today.
- Archiving was a thing! Usually one would put a little note on the top of their fics about whether or not it was okay for people to archive them on their geocities sites or whatever.
- We wrote disclaimers on everything, but I think at this point people were also bored with disclaimers, because the disclaimers were ridiculous. Some of them were haikus. A lot of them were lengthy protestations about how very poor we were, filled with words of love for the specks of lint in our pockets that the powers that be were going to get if they sued us.
- Epic authors notes for everything.
- The whole debate over whether or not all slash needed to be rated NC17, which I think for a lot of authors led to the idea that if they were going to write slash, which was by necessity explicitly rated, then they better deliver the goods. As a kind of prudish kid, I was terrified of slash and would not open it, despite being a pretty outspoken baby lesbian.
- While we are on slash debates, I remember people discussing whether or not slash just meant having a character date someone of a gender they wouldn’t normally date, therefore if canonically gay characters were written as straight, that was also slash.
- Further adventures in slash debate - the ongoing discussions about whether or not it was realistic to have more than two gay characters in a story. Because statistics.
- Battles about the evil child corrupting nature of slash aside, it seems like nobody much questioned the morality of what you were writing. Rape fic? Go for it. Abusive relationships? Totally fun and edgy, right? Your would be slash stud has a canon female love interest?? Kill her. Or make her evil. eeeevil. Why would you not?? Also, don’t question how stereotypes and harmful social trends might be causing you to write a character the way you are. (Note: I overall think the way that fandom self regulates these days is mostly better).
- Remember that time a certain author of a certain series of popular vampire books started actually suing her fans, because I certainly do (note: it didn’t stop fanfiction).
- Lemons, limes, smut, pwp, drabbles (which had to be exactly 100 words, it was a rule), vignettes, squicks, flames…
- If you liked writing about musicals, there was just one section on fanfiction.net to cover all of musical theatre.
- Then there was livejournal, and the days when everything happened on livejournal. Those were fun days.
- Comments. Comments were long, and beautiful, and glorious. Of course, ficcers were still begging for more of them, but compared to today they were much more freely given. Constructive criticism was also a thing. I remember actually, a group of people debating about whether or not the kudos button being added on AO3 (it wasn’t always there) would bring about the death of comments. That was a bit extreme, but comments do happen less since that was added.
- Mary Sues, and the painstaking effort that went into not making your female characters Mary Sues. Glad fandom seems to be over that.
- No such things as headcanons. Those are a really cool thing that we didn’t have when I was a kid.
Some Fan Comments
[ireneadlercatwoman]: The Protectors of the Plot Continuum who would take apart Rica they perceived as bad, they introduced epic OC’s who were sometimes bordering on Mary Sea themselves. Also dales anyone remember tube Official Fanfiction University and its many ofshoots. - I remember going to the library to print fic out, this was before e readers and fanfic apps, I got into a lot of trouble at my high school library foe printing longer fic [1]
[lestrade-london]: No such things as tags. You got a one (maaaybe two or three) sentence description of the fic. Often, it was just a guessing game as to themes, content or triggers/squicks- unless it was slash, in which case you had to sign off that you were over 18 and understood what you were getting into. Even then, descriptions so vague! [2]