Nine Lives
| Archive | |
|---|---|
| Name: | Nine Lives |
| Date(s): | 2014 - present |
| Archivist: | Fairies Masquerade, Subversivegrrl, Ikkleosu, AlannasTara |
| Founder: | Ravenesque |
| Type: | fanfiction |
| Fandom: | The Walking Dead |
| URL: | ninelivesarchive |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Nine Lives: A Caryl Fanfiction Archive is an fanfiction archive solely focused on the pairing of Daryl Dixon/Carol Peletier, better known as Caryl, from The Walking Dead television fandom, and on the RPF pairing of Norman Reedus/Melissa McBride, also known as McReedus.
Fandom
History
As the amount of readers and writers grew, so did the desire to have a Caryl-only spot to read these glorious texts. This was especially true as other ships started to arise in the fandom; ships that a Caryl fan may accidentally stumble on whilst reading what they thought, or hoped, was a Caryl fic. Things got heated and many started to become discouraged. It was in order to prevent this happening, and to create a community and haven for the Caryl fans, that Megan (Ravenesque, formerly Peta2), Fairies Masquerade and Atoizzard got together to create Nine Lives[1]
Statistics
As of August 2024, Nine Lives has 323 contributing authors and 3036 stories posted.[2]
Categories
Nine Lives has a searchable ratings system, similar to multifandom archives, with General, Teen, Mature and Explicit ratings. Readers can also browse by other categories such as television season, alternative universe, crossovers, etc.
Challenges
Nine Lives also runs prompt challenges to encourage writers.
Controversy
In early September 2016 a story was posted on Nine Lives that caused great deal of discussion, discord and out right hatred within the Caryl fandom. The administrators outline the events within a September 10, 2016 Tumblr post:
A story was recently published by an author on Nine Lives. The story’s content includes a very controversial issue: rape. Specifically [spoiler alert], Carol is raped by Negan. The story in question was tagged with all of the appropriate warnings in accordance with the rules of Nine Lives: Violence, Adult Language, Sexual Situations, Carol/Other [Temp], Rape [Actual], Rape [Implied], Character Death. The story was rated ‘M’ (Mature). This was not the author’s first story on the Nine Lives archive and she was very aware of how the rules worked and behaved responsibly in tagging her fic appropriately.This is where things went sideways. Fairies Masquerade received a complaint from another member – not about the story’s content, but simply about the story’s rating being ‘M’ instead of ‘E’ (Explicit). We have the screencaps saved that show the complaint filed was due to the rating and not the content of the story itself. Not being the Writing Police, none of the admin staff had yet read the story in question. FM replied to the complaint with the following: “I have not yet read [story title]. Thank you for bringing this to my attention. I will review the story in question and speak to the author if necessary.”
To date, that is the ONLY actual complaint anyone on the administration team has received about this story. It was a complaint about the story’s rating, not about the content involved.
FM reviewed the story and determined that the complaint was accurate – the story definitely needed to be rated Explicit. She contacted the author, who instantly changed the rating without hesitation or complaint – in fact, the author agreed with FM and, after a discussion, prompted a revised explanation of the differences between the ratings for ‘M’ and ‘E’ to be posted on the archive to avoid future confusion.
Case closed, or so we thought.
What happened next was a rumbling about this story on various social media accounts – tumblr, Facebook and Twitter – that grew to epic proportions. The author was accused of being a closeted B3thyler, that the story wasn’t about Caryl but still being published on a Caryl-only archive, that the admins of Nine Lives were negligent in allowing what was clearly a “spam account from another fandom” to go unchecked. It also stirred up the debate about authors writing about rape (the comments “If you write rape, you’re sick just like a rapist” were an interesting touch) and the character of Negan being a rapist. None of these complaints or theories were brought to the Nine Lives admins on either the archive itself or any of the archive’s official social media accounts.[3]
Because of this controversy a lot of anonymous hatred was sent to the Tumblr account of one of the site's administrators, Fairies Masquerade, resulting in her shutting down all her social media accounts.