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

[dawn_felagund]

Yes! I read the first half of the article (will come back later and finish it), and I definitely think it is in the same ballpark of what I've noticed (and which krait's reply to you gets into as well).

Everything is so user-friendly now that it allows us to bypass understanding even at the most basic level of how things work. I'm 41, so I remember when, if you didn't know where you saved a file, you had to hunt around until you found it. Now, 99% of my curriculum is on Google Drive, and I've gotten so used to just beginning to type the name of the file in the browser bar when I need it ... and I get a little irritated when enough time has passed since I last opened it that I have to actually go to my Drive and search for it! (And I do keep my files organized.)

By the same token, I remember well the mindset (employed by me many times and observed in others running fannish things online) of, "Well, I have this site/platform/tool ... it's not intended for fandom or fanworks, but if I arrange the settings just so and repurpose this feature like that, then I actually have a functioning archive/award/event/challenge/whatever." Part of that working, too, was users' willingness to go along: "I will have to learn the headers this group uses or how they structure their tags, but it is worth it for the audience and interaction my fanwork will receive" (or whatever the person hoped to get out of their participation on that particular project ... but it seems most often to be a community element).

Whereas now I get things like "But I have to scroll through a list of characters on the SWG where I can just start typing the name on AO3," and I'm like :^|

[sauronnaise]

Now, 99% of my curriculum is on Google Drive, and I've gotten so used to just beginning to type the name of the file in the browser bar when I need it
I can't believe I was tonight old when I discovered you could do that. And I'm soon-to-be 25 🤡 (who avoids Drive whenever possible, except for team projects. I have files like a big boy on my computer, all nice and tidy)

But yes, with Gen Z, I'd say older Gen Z (pre-2000 Gen Z) may be more resourceful when it comes to basics, less so the younger ones because technology had time to improve a whole lot before they were born. When I tell my teenage students Windows XP was peak technology to me because we used to have Windows 2000 at home until the end of 2009, but it was Windows XP at school, they look at me like I'm an artifact at the museum. In result, knowledge is more specialised. Interestingly, an online friend of mine is a med student and she has coding classes, so does my brother who studies civil engineering. He also helds a degree in architecture and knows well the softwares of the field (that my father, a mecaninal engineer, would be a total noob). Some of my students know a bit of coding (not all the languages, of course, even my friend who's a programmer don't know them all), but it comes from personal interest. The others know how to use Google Classroom like champions, but aren't technology-versed in other spheres.

Whereas now I get things like "But I have to scroll through a list of characters on the SWG where I can just start typing the name on AO3," and I'm like :^|
I had fun messing up with the Zoom of the screen until I figured what was the right buttons to press, still, nothing compared to trying to battle with Microsoft Office (even my uni's IT is defeated!). Those people are lazy.