A Timeline of Tolkien Fanfiction Archives (WiP)

[dawn_felagund]

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:

• The saddest for me: Tolkien-specific archives are all but gone, at least as far as use goes. Several still exist but no one is using them. The only two that exist and are being used are the Silmarillion Writers' Guild and Stories of Arda (with the former the more active of the two ... and believe me, that scares the hell out of me that this thing I built and continue to run is the best bulwark at the moment against the extinction of an entire mode of sharing Tolkien-based fanfiction).



• De Kosnik writes of the different eras of archive development. In the late '90s to early 2000s, the first multifandom archives (what she classifies as "universal archives") and social networks (often leveraged as fanfiction archives, though not intended to be used as such) appeared. By the mid-2000s, you have see a burgeoning in Tolkien-specific archives built by fans (versus coopted from space on other, larger websites). De Kosnik calls these community archives because they are almost always associated with a group on a social network, such as a Yahoo! mailing list. The first social media sites begin to arise here too, but they aren't utilized by fans until the last decade or so, when they—plus AO3—shift into the primary mode by which people share fanfiction. What's cool to me is that you can see these "eras" represented in the timeline.



• You can also see waves of archive closures. And this is totally new to me. I'd never detected patterns in this before, but what I notice first and foremost is that waves of closures follow the ends of film releases. When the third film in a trilogy leaves theaters, in the years that follow, fanfiction archives will close. You see it following the ends of both trilogies, in 2004 and 2015.



• But that's not the full story. Recent years have been devastating, and I don't think that's an overdramatic choice of words, nor is putting it in italics overkill either. So many archives have closed ... and why?
  
  I think this is a combination of things. First, is technological rot. eFiction stopped being updated in 2015. We first started noticing problems on the SWG several years ago (I do need to find the exact year for this—note to self) as the code became deprecated. This predicated, for us, our investigation into options and our move to Drupal ... but this was a HUGE endeavor. If I had another type of HTML tag to signal that, I'd plunk it in there. It took years of research, learning, and experimentation, then the better part of a year (much of it during lockdown, when time at home was in abundance! else it would have taken much longer!) to actually build the thing and migrate the existing stories onto it. We have an active archive, so it was worth the effort. For sites that have seen interest in them dwindling? It wouldn't be.
  
  I think the shift to AO3—plus the availability of Open Doors—is part of it too. AO3 has become, for better or worse, the default and the norm, even in Tolkien fandom. And if you're an archive owner watching your archive slowly die from deprecating code and waning interest, the option to avail yourself of the default via Open Doors is a very reasonable solution. It saves the stories and also saves you from the herculean task of migrating to a finicky new software system.
  
  Of course, anyone who knows me and my writing/thinking on archives knows that I don't think that shift is a total good. I included AO3-bound archives separate from other rescue projects (like those dedicated to Yahoo! Groups) in part to illustrate how much of Tolkien fanfiction is shifting onto this single platform. Open Doors is a very good thing. But it is worth thinking about what we lose when most of our fanworks exist on AO3 and whether we are content to let there be just two active Tolkien-specific archives out there‐or whether the next hypothetical wave of archive-building should restore our community archives.

Comments

[krait]

That's what I was thinking about, too. There's a lot that goes into it, from corporate policy to public school curriculum planning, but the younger generation is a lot less tech-savvy than mine. Most of them cannot type on a keyboard! Which is a thing I learned in high school, so it was something that was generally accepted as a skill every student needed to know - those priorities have changed over the years, and now it's either not considered an essential skill, or has been removed from the curriculum for other reasons. (Assumptions that, as computer ownership rose, it would be learned at home? If so, an assumption not corrected as people moved toward non-keyboard devices.) Corporations have also been steadily pushing 'black box' models of technology, because users who can do repairs or modify the product will buy less of it. (And are less likely to accept bizarre and abusive terms of service?)

We've seen it happen with cars already: repairing cars used to be something anyone could do with a toolbox and a manual, and now it requires proprietary chip readers and access to computer software that isn't sold to the public. Other tech is heading the same way; I can remember putting a neverending stream of batteries into my boom box as a young teen... and compare that to my first iPod, which told me that so much as opening the battery compartment would void the warranty.

Likewise, on social media control has been steadily taken away from users; privacy settings and control of the audience don't benefit companies, so companies have taken control of them. LJ gave us a panoply of ways to limit your audience and control who saw what you posted; but Twitter doesn't care if your post gets positive or negative engagement (up to and including actual harrassment), as long as it gets engagement, because that's revenue for Twitter.

Internet browsers provide too much control to the user, so more and more companies are pushing mobile apps, because apps give the user zero control over privacy or advertising or algorithms. You've already waived all your rights not to be tracked or marketed to on your mobile device, so companies would much rather you use that than a computer browser where you still have rights and options.

Newer tech users often don't have an instinctive 'this is something I should be able to fix' reaction when they encounter something unpleasant, because they've never had the ability to fix or modify their tech, and are frequently using a device that's been specifically designed not to allow it. My immediate first thought upon being hit with creepy tracking tech is, "I don't have to allow this! So how do I get around it?" But for many people, that's just a standard part of being online; it doesn't strike them as something unjust, or as something they have a right to opt out of, even if they dislike it.

[dawn_felagund]

Yes, this is exactly it! I remember a time when you had some kind of rudimentary social network: say, Yahoo! Groups or LiveJournal. And people took the array of basic features they offered, configured and utilized them in different combinations, and came up with functional fandom spaces. They were not as slick and user-friendly as sites and apps today, but they got the job done.

But they required a level of problem-solving to repurpose them from their intended use to turn them into fandom archives, events, and projects. And people got pretty innovative in what they were able to do with a bare minimum of simple tools, and once you saw someone do something on their list or LJ, suddenly you knew it was possible to do on yours, and you dove under the hood to figure out how (or just asked ... so much of my knowledge has come from teaching myself, experimenting, or mentorship from more experienced people, and as archives are disappearing, so are the people who very visibly have those skills, and I worry the mentorship opportunities are fading as well and will make it harder to reestablish community archives, even if that is something people want).

With that, though, users also knew that they'd have to take the time to learn not just the rules but the culture of specific places, and as tech becomes user-friendly to the point that you expect to open a site or app and be able to use it without having to consult any directions or help files, the expectation that a new user learn how to use a particular community (or the culture of that community ... our number-one issue on the SWG's Discord, for instance, is people who rampage in like the proverbial bull in a china shop, treating the community like Tumblr or Twitter when we have very intentionally spent 17 years cultivating the exact opposite culture ... but gods help us if we have to sit back and take a few minutes to notice how things are done before plunging in!)