Medium Dawn Felagund of the Fountain

I have been, as is the norm for me, up to my ears in Everything. Most of it is (as usual) work, but I've been up to some fannish stuff too that I'd love to share. So, first, some links!

• The Fading of the Elves: Techno-volunteerism and the Disappearance of Tolkien Fan Fiction Archives. I wrote this symposium article (on encouragement by Maria :) for the special Platforms edition of Transformative Works and Cultures. The crux of the article is the disappearance of single-fandom archives and what precipitates that. I argue that it's technology + volunteers ... techno-volunteerism, to use the term coined by Abigail De Kosnik! In short, people who are willing to volunteer their time time learn the technology needed to maintain an archive or other fannish platform. While viable options for doing so have dwindled in the wake of eFiction's demise, there has been a dearth too of education, support, and mentorship opportunities (although this does seem to be changing, I hope). Finally, the invisibility—an intentional choice on the part of those of us who do this work—can be grinding. Everyone else is hanging out, chatting, writing and reading stories, and you're updating software. Yet independent, small archives are a vital part of the fannish ecosystem, so what needs to change to make them a viable part again?



• Discord as a Fandom Platform: Locating a New Playground by Welmoed Fenna Wagenaar. This one is not mine, obviously, but it appears in the same special edition of TWC, and one of the two Discord servers discussed is the SWG! The author uses the lens of play to study how "users interact with and negotiate rule-based structures and designs" on a Discord server. The SWG functions in the article mostly as an example of a moderated space, but I'm okay with that. I'm proud of the work my comoderators do on the server to keep it a safe and friendly space!



• Ten Important Moments in Tolkien Fanfiction History. For February's Cultus Dispatches column, I thought I'd give myself an "easy month," which I think I defined at the time as "no data to crunch or graphics of said data to make," for the Organization for Transformative Works' challenge to write a "10 things" essay about fandom Ha. HA. This was not an easy article to write! In fact, I think it was my most challenging Cultus article to date. Not only did I have to choose ten things (which is very political and potentially fraught, as more than one person who clearly thought this was a bad idea pointed out), but I had to do enough research to speak with some authority on all of them. I quite liked the resulting article, though. It was worth the effort!



• Grief, Grieving, and Permission to Mourn in the Quenta Silmarillion (text, audio, and slideshow). This is my presentation for this year's Tolkien at UVM Conference. The theme was Tolkien and Psychology, and this was my attempt to achieve a tenuous connection to the theme while yattering on, yet again, about narrative bias with a hearty scoop of quantitative data. In this presentation, I look at the data not only on death in the Quenta Silmarillion (who dies? and how? ... other than "lots" and "violently," that is) but on grief and mourning. What I've discovered is, yet again, Tolkien has constructed a pseudohistorical text that shows clear narrative bias, this time using death and mourning rituals cast certain characters in politicized ways. In other words, some characters go conspicuously ungrieved and unmourned. Others receive more than their fair share, and very often, this seems to be motivated by a desire to distract from what they were up to when they died. (Fair warning that I knock a few heroes of The Silmarillion off of their tear-washed and haunted pedestals, including my own namesake!)

So Tolkien at UVM was this weekend. This is honestly one of my favorite weekends out of the year. Grundy comes up from Jersey, sian22redux comes down from Ontario, and we have a splendiferously nerdy weekend in Burlington, closing places down because we get so involved in talking (not just about Tolkien! but there's a bit of Tolkien stuff in there too!) that we tend to lose track of how late it is until we realize they are putting up the chairs around us ...

The conference itself is excellent every year. Vermont is a bit out of the way, and early April is not the best time to be in Vermont (it's usually rainy and cold, and it's mud season, though that's less noticeable in B-ton), but the conference itself is always warm and friendly and fun. (And Vermont any time of year is itself a friendly place with great food, minimal crowds, and cheap/free parking!) This year's presentations were excellent, as I have come to expect from many years now attending this conference; several of them got my brain turning in new ways, including about my own topic, which I might expand on for one of the hybrid conferences coming up this summer.

I am a very introverted person and usually have to be coaxed into socializing. (Once I'm with my friends, I have a good time. But I rarely look forward to hanging out with people beyond a very small circle.) And the past five years have hacked away at me until I feel like I have no soft edges left; i.e., I am sometimes a crabby person. I am very often in the role these days of "advocate," which means I don't get to go with the flow, and I say "fuck" a lot. But I do look forward to this weekend so much each year and cracking out of my shell, and I'm actually feeling sad right now that it's over.

About a week ago, Simon J. Cook published a piece on the SWG, via our column A Sense of History, called Fawlty Towers. This article is the latest in a series Simon is doing for the column that looks at the analogy of the tower in Tolkien's lecture-turned-essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics." In this particular piece, he challenges Tom Shippey's reading of the analogy. When we first discussed this series, Simon asked me if I was comfortable with publishing articles that were critical of major Tolkien scholars, such as Shippey, and how they read the analogy.

I am not, as people reading here know, an academic, nor am I interested in becoming one. Since I am an independent scholar, friends sometimes ask, "Why don't you teach college?" and my answer amounts to, "LOL I LIKE TO EAT." But in reality, I have little interest in teaching at that level, namely because I am very good at teaching at the level I do (early adolescence) and believe I make the most difference there, when students are first beginning to deeply engage with history and literature. And the openness of my two areas of interest—Tolkien studies and fan studies—to independent scholarship means I don't have to join the ranks of academia to do the research I love. All this adds up to: I am not an academic.

So perhaps naively, my response to Simon was along the lines of, "Why would I care if you criticize the ideas of major Tolkien scholars??" I assumed that scholars of Professor Shippey's caliber can and have surely weathered criticisms of their ideas far worse than Simon was posing as part of the newsletter on a small Tolkien fan site. I honestly did not even believe they'd notice, as they have never noticed us before.

Simon has more experience with academia than me, as his question reveals. So that I cannot be charged with telling Professor Shippey what he really thinks, I will say that, in the wake of Simon's "Fawlty Towers," he appears to be pissed. Quite pissed. Simon's article was published Saturday afternoon; by Monday morning, Professor Shippey had posted a retort on Academia.edu.

Professor Shippey makes some fair points that I have taken on as the editor to the piece. Discrepancy of dates is likely due to the Works Cited being finished by me, not Simon. Perhaps, too, I should have pushed more on Simon's inferences about Professor Shippey's beliefs. However, the tone of Professor Shippey's reply is combative, to be polite about it. In a footnote, responding to Simon's author bio that states he is "coming in peace"—a reference to his status as a Third Age expert posting on a Silmarillion website—Professor Shippey responds with something that is hard not to read as a threat: "Actually, I would quite like to meet him. I’m pretty good at dealing with aggression face-to-face, but even aged 80 I don’t seem to meet much of it, outside the safe space of the internet."

WHAT.

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The independent archive survey ran from 23 June through 7 July 2023. Eighty-two respondents took the survey during that time. The survey asked about interest in independent archives and included a section for participants interested in building or volunteering for an independent archive. The survey was open to all creators and readers/viewers of fanworks.

What is an independent archive?

The survey defined an independent archive as "a website where creators can share their fanworks. What makes it 'independent' is that it is run by fans but unaffiliated with any for-profit or nonprofit corporations or organizations. Historically, independent archives have grown out of fan communities that create fanworks."

On Tumblr, I am using the tag #independent archives for survey results and ongoing work to restore independent archives to fandoms that want them. This master post will collect data as they become available. I will post twice per day to Tumblr, so it is very likely that, during that time, this post will have data not yet available there.

How you can use these data

I welcome sharing and discussing the data here. Please credit me as Dawn Felagund with a link to this post. You do not need to ask for permission. I am giving permission right now.

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( Do you currently post/share your fanworks on any sites or archives other than AO3, Fanfiction.net, or Wattpad? )

( If an independent archive existed that accepted some or all of your fanworks, and where you were comfortable with its policies, governance, etc, would you consider posting there? )

( What types of fanworks would you consider posting to an independent archive? )

( If an independent archive existed that accepted fanworks you were interested in reading or viewing, would you consider reading or viewing fanworks there? )

( Would you consider building or otherwise volunteering for an independent archive )

( How interested are you in building or running your own independent archive? )

( Which of the following would interest you as options for building an independent archive? )

( What would worry you about starting an independent archive? )

( What skills do you already have in web design, web development, or site-building? )

( How would you prefer to learn new skills to build an independent archive? )

( In what other ways might you be interested in volunteering for an independent archive? )

( What concerns about independent archives do you have? )

( What concerns about OTW/AO3 do you have? )

( Free response field )

Hoo boy, the OTW has had a rough couple of weeks. Can I first confess a teeeensy bit of schadenfreude, because some of what I've been waving my hands around all Cassandra-like about for years now it turns out is actually coming to pass (The code is a mess! The organization is in shambles!) when it felt like people looked for every opportunity to label on their fingers the reasons why AO3 was superior to any independent site a stupid fan (like me!) might want to set up because of its institutional heft. I said this, not even six months ago: "But I am most comfortable with governance that takes into account local needs and culture. I also think it is downright empowering to take care of yourself and your community rather than relying on someone else, no matter how benevolent they are ... or seem." Seem! Heh. But that aside.

To sum up the OTW's very bad no-good month: There was the whole AI kerfuffle that I wrote about in my last post. From May 17-30, End OTW Racism waged a campaign (which seems to have been pretty successful) to call attention to the fact that the OTW has gone three years without doing much of anything toward fulfilling their promises to address racism within the OTW. Then there's the former volunteer who spoke out about problems on the Policy & Abuse committee and has subsequently been vaguely accused by the Legal team to have attacked hundreds of volunteers with CSEM. Combined, this all seems to have had the effect of exposing multiple problems with how the OTW is run and governed.

Truly, I want the OTW/AO3 to be successful. It would be a disaster (and I don't think that's too strong a word) if AO3 in particular were to fail. My gripe isn't with OTW/AO3 (which has been consistently clear across the years that they do not wish to centralize fandom unto themselves) but with the people who worship at the altar of OTW/AO3 to the extent that they think there should be no god archive but theirs. I'm hoping that whatever shit needs to be gotten together at the OTW can be gotten together for them to pull out of this funk they're in.

Because I'm interested in fanworks archives generally, I've been following everything that's going on with growing interest, and of course lots of people are expressing what they'd hope to see change. But some of those things would make the OTW ... not the OTW. By which I mean that the core purpose of the organization would be changed.

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ithiliana sent me a link to a kickstarter for a project that seems really cool and is very much under the banner of Things Dawn Beats the Drum and Yells About Occasionally: the fan-built web.

Remember this thing? When every other person had a Geocities (or Angelfire or ...) site, or ran a forum or eFiction archive (or both!) for a character, or owned a Yahoo! group or LJ comm for some niche fannish interest? There is lately a lot of nostalgia for these days and what fandom was like then. It certainly wasn't perfect, but I think many of us are emerging from the increasing consolidation and corporatization of the fannish web in the past several years and going, "Waaaaait ..." like when you're sledding down a hill as a kid and suddenly realize you might smash painfully into that thing that looked so impossibly small from the hilltop.

As someone who does still run an independent fandom website, I think often about where we are now and where we were then and how we can empower fans to take back their own spaces. And it's tough. More than eighteen years (dear god) of running the SWG and I know it's not for the faint of heart, and a big part of that is because of the knowledge it takes to set up and run an archive or another fannish web project. We're no longer in the days when being able to creatively wield the <font> and <marquee> tags and copy-pasting some webring code was enough to muddle through making a respectable site, but I've gone nose-first into a brick wall in trying to learn what I needed to build and improve the SWG more times than I can count because it is hard to find information about site building and development that is at the just-right level for someone who is not a professional (me). For example, I've tried to learn about Composer so many times now that when I begin to type "compo ..." into Google, it autosuggests "this again??"

So I very much support endeavors to provide technical training to fans who want to learn the skills needed to build their own websites. To that end, I have outlined (and, this summer, will hopefully record) a tutorial about using Drupal to build a fanworks archive, but I am still not a professional, FAR from perfect in my own knowledge, and Drupal will not be the right fit for every project.

Enter The Fujoshi Guide to Web Development. In their own words:

Jokes aside (though, really, there's no joke), despite the many complaints about the disappearance of old "GeoCities-like" websites, there's a dire lack of accessible guides made for busy everyday netizens of modest ambition. Indeed, while educational content on web development is available in many forms, it tends to fall into two categories: heavy, sometimes-jargony material targeted to those who want to make web development their full-time job, and oversimplified, nostalgia-driven tutorials that forgo modern techniques to focus on simple but outdated approaches.

Instead, this project aims to create educational material for web development that puts modern tools and techniques in the hands of a fannish, non-technical public, and which speaks to their needs without talking down to them. Our guides start from the belief that, given the right encouragement and support, people can master the best professional tools that will allow them to quickly achieve their website-building goals. We believe that, while some of these tools might require a bit of initial effort, they will eventually help people fully focus on the fun and creative parts of development without getting bogged down by unnecessary, obsolete complexities.

These are the same people behind Fandom Coders (which I also found through this project!) and they are seeking to raise money through Kickstarter to produce a series of illustrated zines/books teaching web development topics aimed specifically at a fannish audience. The illustrations and concept are themselves very fannish ... I'm not even going to attempt to describe them. Just go look at the link. This doesn't even look remotely like my fandom but I think it's adorable, and even if the aesthetic isn't your thing ... well, the information is still there.

Why does this "fan-built web" even matter?

Whenever I rant about the fan-built web, I piss someone off who thinks I'm anti-AO3/anti-OTW. I am neither. I think the OTW and its various projects have been essential to the growth of fandom. I am glad that they exist. Now that that's out of the way ...

I am concerned that a single organization is increasingly the only fan-run organization/location where most fanworks can be found. This is a problem. The biggest reason is the eggs-in-one-basket issue. Having dropped a basket of actual eggs, that saying came from truth because it makes a big fucking mess that, even as a grown-ass woman, you want to cry over when it happens. Imagine even a day's worth of data lost from AO3 and you'd have a lot of grown-ass humans bawling. Digital data is fragile, and if you think it's impossible that AO3 could suffer a data loss or be targeted by any number of individuals/entities hostile to their mission or even, gods forbid, close someday ... well. Running a website is not easy and, especially at the scale of AO3, it is not cheap. It is hard to find people to do anything, much less the specialized technical tasks that are required to run any site but, again, especially one of that scale. Right now, we can't imagine not wanting an archive for fanfiction, but in 2003, we couldn't imagine not wanting mailing lists either and the LJ homepage still featured Frank the Goat. I am less concerned that AO3's servers will be annihilated by a meteorite than I am that fans will move on to some future way of doing fandom that we currently can't even imagine, and AO3 will lack the people or the funds or both to continue.

As for for-profit sites/platforms used for fandom, if the last two decades have shown us anything, it is that no matter how fandom-friendly they seem, they will eventually gravitate toward a corporate-friendly stance on copyright and censorship, which will never be in fans' favor.

Then there is the simple desirability of more diverse options for the fannish web. There are advantages to being able to find everything in one place, but there are disadvantages too. I used to roll my eyes at the people who couldn't stand [whatever] to the extent that they couldn't even behave civilly on a website that included it, but the fact of the matter is, when these folks could self-select into their own spaces with their own likeminded people, that wasn't entirely a bad thing.

There are lots of reasons why people want to set up their own spaces beyond that, though. AO3, after all, has its own mission (creating a site where any fannish content is allowed) that doesn't necessarily align with what fans want/need out of fandom. Needs that come immediately to mind: the ability to create 18+ fannish spaces and the ability to curate content to create sites that prioritize the needs of BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and other fans from groups who have historically put up with a lot of shit and wouldn't mind a break from it when reading fic for fun.

Then sometimes people want their own space just to have a space to be mindlessly, squeefully fannish without the worry that they're interrupting or detracting or getting in the way of other fans who aren't as into their favorite as they are. This was the motive behind me starting the SWG. There were plenty of Tolkien fanfiction archives and lists and groups—we certainly didn't need another one—but I wanted a space just for nerding about the Silm.

And of course there are individual fan websites, which used to be a thing but largely ended with the closure of Geocities! I have my own website, and while it is terribly out-of-date (due to the conundrum of webmasters everywhere, which is the same reason the cobbler's kids go barefoot), I do love that there is a space where I can put absolutely anything I make and can then point people toward. This would resolve the eggs-in-one-basket issue for people who are multifandom or otherwise not inclined to use smaller archives like the SWG but who want a place other than AO3 to host their work.

For those who, like me, are interested in making it easier for fan-run sites to exist, I thought this kickstarter and the larger Fandom Coders project might be of interest. Even if not ... it warms the cockles of my crabby-on-this-issue heart to feel less like I'm tilting at windmills and maybe like we might be making some progress.

I've done several of the Fandom Snowflakes and can do the rest to round out the challenge so far, so I'm documenting them here.

#5. Share 3 creative/fannish resources, spaces, or communities.
So! If you don't know, I run a blog on Tumblr called Tolkien Fandom History. I started it years ago, fell off on updating it, and am now trying to get it restarted again. I reblogged a post from Fanlore about the history of fanfiction, adding three Tolkien-specific fanfiction history resources. Here they are here as well to save y'all a click:

• Fanlore: Timeline of Tolkien Fandom
• Fanlore: Tolkien Fanfiction
• FellowsHub: A Tolkien Fanzine Project
• eFanzines: Tolkien Fandom Review by Sumner Gary Hunnewell

This is also a plea that, if you're on Tumblr and would be interested in reblogging fan history content on the Tolkien Fandom History blog, let me know; I'm terrible at social media, so I'm always looking for help. I'm especially looking for people who interact with the Tolkien fandom in areas outside of Tolkien fanfiction; all of the current people working for the blog are heavily oriented towards the fanworks side of the fandom. So if you or someone you know is into gaming or collecting or cosplay or any of the myriad ways Tolkien fans do fandom other than fanworks, I'd love to have the help!

On that note, I'm kind of cheating on #8 ...

#8. Create a quiz or a poll.
For this one, I'm going to point to a survey I already have going for the Silmarillion Writers' Guild. We asked at the end of 2021 what people would like to see us add to the site. In 2022, acting on the feedback we received, I added the ability to post a bunch of different fanwork types. People also showed interest in hosting events/challenges/fests/swaps/etc through the SWG site. This is what I'm working on in 2023, but I need feedback on what people want to see so that I know what direction to head. I have a survey about member-run events here.

#9. A boast.
For this one, the intent is to "celebrate a personal win from the past year." I did have a pretty rad 2022 in terms of fannish wins! And I was in hermit-mode during 2022 and never posted about it here when it happened, so I'll do it now. There was, of course, the aforementioned massive progress on expanding the SWG site to include more fanworks and creators. I've long wanted to transcend the "Writers" part of our name, and we succeeded in doing that. The SWG now accepts not just all types of writing but artwork, audio, link collections, playlists, videos, and multimedia fanworks that combine two or more of the other fanwork types into a single fanwork. We also added the Beyond the Silmarillion section so that members who post frequently with us can archive all of their Tolkien fanworks (not just Silmarillion-based) on the site. I was excited to make these changes happen.

But I also had chapters published in two books last summer, which I was pretty psyched about!

• "Roads Go Ever On and On: Fan Fiction and Archival Infrastructures as Markers of the Affirmational-Transformational Continuum in Tolkien Fandom" in Fandom: The Next Generation. This one I collaborated on with Maria K. Alberto. The book focuses on multigenerational fandoms, so Maria and I, of course, focused on the Tolkien fandom, specifically how fan approaches to gender and sexuality in fanfiction changed over time.


• "Cartography of a Character: On (Re)Writing Nerdanel" in Not the Fellowship. Dragons Welcome! This collection focuses on the minor characters in Tolkien's works. My essay was, of course, about Nerdanel and specifically about how she is rewritten: first by Christopher Tolkien in his compilation of the published Silmarillion and then again by countless fanworks creators. I make the point that Christopher reduces her role because he needs the narrative to move outward from Aman, toward Middle-earth, but fanworks creators can remain in place with her and develop her storyline in Aman, often using her story to reflect upon the conflicts they face as women themselves. The collection this essay was in was announced last week as nominated for the British Science Fiction Award for Best Non-Fiction. This essay was written while I was displaced after my house fire, so those of you who were so kind to help me replace my lost Tolkien library know that it was put to good use! This also makes its existence quite the personal triumph.

#6. Post the results of your fandom scavenger hunt.
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This is my interpretation of snowflake_challenge's prompt for Day 2: Write a Fandom Manifesto:

Seems like we all spend a considerable chunk of our fandom time trying to convince loved ones, friends and total randos alike that our fave is in fact the best. This can take shape of anything from watch parties/read-alongs to capslock squee in DMs to relentless gifsets to PhD dissertations.

One of my favourite forms of this is the "fandom manifesto" or "fandom primer," wherein one writes up an outline of what their fave is, why it's great, and links to where one can find more (with more or less detail and formality, depending on the venue).

This isn't about the typical character, pairing, or fandom, and it's more aimed at existing Tolkien fans than people who have never heard of Tolkien or the fandom, but I think it's close enough in spirit to count so here goes.

Why Tolkien Fandom History Matters

I spend a lot of time on fandom history. If I start typing "fa" in my browser, it doesn't suggest "facebook.com" but "fanlore.org." The universe as it should be!

This might seem an odd thing to spend time on. I don't write a lot of fanfiction anymore, and wouldn't this be a better contribution? Certainly more entertaining! Who even cares about "fan history" (whatever that is!)

I think it's perilously easy, in the moment, to think that what you're doing every day, what is important to your life, won't matter long-term. Or, it will be around and like this forever. Fandom, especially, can feel frivolous. It's a hobby for nearly everyone. It's often very personal. It's often, let's face it, very silly—by design.

I think it's the opposite. I think it's part of a moment—and an important part of that moment—similar to when cultures transition from oral to written traditions, or when cultures that have developed writing transition between scribal and print production. ( Read more... )

I have lately been diving back into Tolkien Fanfic Survey data, as well as reading Abigail De Kosnik's Rogue Archives, and the combined endeavor has made me eager to visualize some of the data on how fanfiction archive use has changed over the years in the Tolkien fandom. Hence, the above. As the title to this post suggests, it is not complete. The archives listed are those that Maria and I included in the 2020 Tolkien Fanfic Survey, and Fanlore has expanded its offerings in this area since then, and I hope to add those in to the graph as well. But this is a start.

( Some Takeaways ... )

First and foremost, I am writing an tribute to the Library of Moria for Cultus Dispatches. As some of you may know, the LoM is closing its doors and moving its fanworks to AO3 via the Open Doors project. The site existed as an independent archive for twenty years. TWENTY YEARS. That's an amazing accomplishment and service to the Tolkien fanworks community.

I've been in touch with the mods, but I'd love to hear too from people who used and loved the Library of Moria in any capacity (even if it was "just" to read and enjoy the fanworks--fanworks and not fic because they were accepting artwork long before the rest of us got around to making that happen). If you would like to share your experiences and memories with the LoM, comment here with the best way to get in touch with you, DM me through this site (or any of my other social sites!), or email me at DawnFelagund@gmail.com.

That means that the SWG is in an increasingly dwindling pool of independent Tolkien fanworks archives. This gives me Big Feelings, obviously. ( Possibly contentious Big Feelings. Oh well. )

Bobby and I just finished the new Danish-language Netflix series Nisser (Elves) last night. It is a Christmas-themed horror series about a family taking a Christmas vacation on a remote island with a populations of ravenous elves walled behind a sinister fence. These are not curly-toed Christmas elves; they're not even hack-happy Noldorin Elves. No, these are the old-school creepy-as-fuck elves of Nordic tradition.

There was a lot I liked about the series. (Which I suspect Bobby suggested specifically for me and as a kinda-sorta-homeopathy for the seasonal affective disorder that is raging through my brain right now. I do love dark fiction, whereas the spun-sugar pop cultural confections of this time of year, perhaps counterintuitively, often make me feel like I have a sliver lodged in my corpus callosum.) ( Cut for Spoilers )