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]

There are many Tolkien Discords. I only have time for the SWG's Discord, but we are a very active space. If you want an invite, let me know!

I would say convenience is just as much—maybe more—for authors as readers.

I get the ease of a single space (being an author myself!) You don't have to learn different rules and tech and cultures for different archives or groups. There's far less an investment of time and energy and opportunity cost to post in one place that four or five, as was not uncommon in the early-mid 2000s.

Where I'd push back is that "convenient" and "easy" should be the only consideration or even the most important consideration. (Which, to be clear, is not what I think you're saying, but as a small archive owner who has been, for years now, pushing back on the idea that a single "universal archive" is the ideal we should be working toward, I think a lot of people do assume that easy/convenient automatically equals good.)

This is why the Walmart analogy works for me. I live in northeastern Vermont where small, independently owned businesses are still the norm—though we do have a Walmart too! We shop locally whenever we can. It is not the easiest or the most convenient, but we do, and we've strengthened our ties with our community by doing so. We also shop at Walmart but only when we must (or when the only other choice is Amazon!)

Just over a year ago, we lost our house in a fire. Our community came together for us. There were times when those small businesses we'd been shopping at loyally for the six years we've lived here would comp our bill. Where we buy our ag supplies, the owner handed us a card with $100 in it. When we'd go to the diner where we eat breakfast almost every weekend, people paid our bill for us.

When we went to Walmart? Well ... it was the same Walmart it always was.

Likewise, I lost my entire non-insignificant Tolkien book collection in the fire, and SWG members rallied to gather their extras or find secondhand copies to send to me. They replaced my entire Tolkien library, which incidentally allowed me to continue writing and publishing even while I was displaced and was a huge comfort and allowed one aspect of my everyday existence to continue at least.

But AO3? Still just AO3.

I think in many human-to-human transactions/interactions, we trade community for convenience because taking the time to build those connections with others does take time and effort. And for some people, that tradeoff works, they just want to get their work out there and quickly find fanworks to "consume," and that's fine. But in talking with fan creators, I so often hear a longing for community ... but then these same fans are posting entirely on AO3 and Tumblr, neither of which are designed or intended to offer that. But where are the other options? They're increasingly hard to find, much less build.