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A couple years ago, I decided to stop doing Fandom Snowflake (![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
snowflake_challenge) because many of the prompts, while awesome, repeated from year to year, and I'd just gotten all I could from them. But this year, they are killing it with the prompts. Four have been posted, and I want to do them all. (Yes, this is a plug to go check them out if you are not familiar with them or if you, like me, stepped away at some point!)
I'm doing Day Three: Scream into the Void here:
So I'm going to go all deprived-toddler-in-the-candy-aisle about Tolkien fanfic fandom's disappearing archives. I want to clarify at the outset that I am not screaming about archivists who gave up or even "abandoned" their archives, even those who are popularly looked at kinda like >.> for doing so. Rather, I'd like to pound my tiny fists about the forces of fandom and the internet and, what the hell, the whole goddamn universe that have landed us where we are.
And where is that, exactly?? I was able to find three Tolkien-specific fanfiction archives that had five or more stories posted to them in the year 2022: the Silmarillion Writers' Guild, Stories of Arda, and the Valar Guild. Three. THREE. Tolkien Fanfiction and Open Scrolls Archive at least had a story posted to them in 2022, and nine sites remain available online but haven't had anything new for at least a year. Kudos on them for staying open but that's also pretty fucking sad that no one sees them as more than artifacts.
Back in October, I posted a preliminary archive timeline that was part of a roundtable I presented on at the Fan Studies Network North America conference. The original timeline included only the archives that were a part of the Tolkien Fanfiction Survey. Over December break, I much expanded this timeline to include all of the English-language Tolkien-specific archives currently listed on Fanlore for which I could find complete information, as well as fact-checking more thoroughly the information in the original graphic. It's currently part of an article under consideration for publication; the publication is open-source, so I'm not sure the etiquette of sharing the graphic now, so I'm going to not post it for now (if the article's accepted, I'll ask then because I want to share it ... like I'm itching to share it!) but will happily share it privately with anyone who's interested. (It's also a spreadsheet to make it easier to cluster data and see trends.) It took a lot of time to research and make, and I think it's pretty cool. The data from it are above: three active archives (5+ stories in 2022), two semi-active sites (something posted in 2022), and nine inactive sites, down from fifty-nine listed in the graphic/spreadsheet.
Anyone who knows me knows that I have a strong penchant for self-sufficiency and local control in all areas of my life, not just fandom. I am not wild about large entities of any type telling me what to do. In some cases, I go along for the greater good. (I am a political progressive, after all.) 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.
I have been making the case for years now that the Tolkienfic fandom does not, as a general rule, fit tidily into what fic fandoms generally are assumed to be or look like. This makes sense: Most fandoms are media fandoms and Tolkien is a literary fandom. The fandoms that most resemble us (based on the scholarship, not personal experience, as I am monofandom) are Jane Austen, Harry Potter, and the Sherlockians ... as in the book, not the TV series. If I knew more about other book fandoms, I'd probably include them as well. We focus on canon and the "collection" of canon much more than many media fandoms do, and this produces sites, archives, and cultures that heavily incorporate that element.
The loss of small, independent archives has been a loss of that culture. I have documented already how each of the major Tolkienfic archives had its own culture and rarely targeted the same subset of fans. And this goes beyond the obvious differing interest in characters or character groups (e.g., a Legolas/Aragorn site vs. a site about Hobbits). It even goes beyond the oft-cited gen/slash/het divide of the 2000s. Tolkien Fanfic Survey data shows that participants on the various sites had different views of Tolkien's authority, the role his beliefs should play in fanfiction, and the use of fanfiction as a vehicle for criticism of his world (with social justice-oriented criticism a subset of that). These are more settled issues elsewhere in fandom (at least according to the scholarship ... again, monofandom!) but they are not for us. Fans have wildly divergent views on them, and they co-occur in ways that often defy expectations. Then there were cultural values around quality vs. inclusivity and other issues around "doing fandom" in the way that best honors both Tolkien and each other. Going back through Wayback captures of dead archives, these cultural distinctions loom forth from long-dead Rules and Submissions and About pages.
And they're gone. Lost.
This is the nature of the internet, though, right? The competing views that "the internet is forever" and "the internet is ephemeral and frail." Both are true. And yes, there will be loss, but what makes me scream into the void is that those sites that die of natural causes are not being replaced. Instead, Fandom has decided to consolidate onto AO3 and Tumblr, and this sucks, and it's perilous (all the eggs in one basket!), but most importantly to me, this creates a loss of culture and community and the relationships that both foster.
A lot of what made some of these sites culturally unique are not present on AO3 and Tumblr (to say nothing of the vast troves of resources that support the canon-centric "affirmational" fannish tendencies of Tolkien fandom more generally). One could say, well, those kinds of places don't exist because those kinds of fans don't exist anymore. The culture, in other words, died, and the site followed. Except I don't think that is true, at least not entirely. I know many of those fans remained and imagine they feel like they no longer have any place to go. It's hard to know. Their home is gone; they can't be found.
I tend to be harsh on AO3 around this issue and, truly, I am disappointed because I remember this issue (the survival of independent archives once there was a large, snazzy "universal archive" to use) was raised when AO3 was being planned, and the solution was that the code would be open-source and so would support the creation of independent archives. But then, just a few years ago, I saw someone affiliated with AO3 bragging about how hard that software is to use. They were making the case for AO3's achievement, which is valid, but it felt like a punch in the gut to me: a freezing out of archivists who were beginners, holding websites and archives out of reach of everyone but the technologically elite. That was me at one point.
But this isn't about AO3 (for once, some of you might legitimately say). I always say and truly do mean that I think AO3 is a net good. A huge one. It is more a railing against those forces even bigger than AO3 that have shuttered archives and shuttled fans toward consolidation. These are things possibly Too Big to Fix, but isn't that the point of shouting into the void? Letting my fingers fly over these grievances that I usually withhold because they're vague and not at all productive?
There's the loss of eFiction, which did make setting up an archive attainable for just about everyone. But I'm not mad that eFiction has been neglected, even abandoned at times. (It is again under a new owner who has ideas for it that could make it even more attainable than it used to be. But he's finding a familiar lack of support despite claiming that the software is still downloaded regularly.) I recently emailed with nearly all the eFiction developers, and a theme I heard (and which seems to be an issue for Tyler too, the current developer) is the vast mismatch between user demands and willingness to help. The two past developers I talked to (Rebecca and Artphilia) both identified feeling overwhelmed as reasons they eventually passed on the project. I couldn't locate Tammy, but I was active on the eFiction forum in Tammy's day and remember the constant demands for help and her signature line that said that if you wanted personal help, she'd charge her professional rate, and feeling intimidated and awed by her. But I also wondered how she managed what she did on her own, and the state eFiction in the 2010s is probably an answer unto itself. I am lucky on the SWG that the demands are few and people are generally kind and appreciative, and I have a phenomenal mod team, but beyond them, the help sure isn't there either; there are volunteer positions I've been asking for since the new site opened and still haven't filled. I'm going to be asking soon for help getting some of our historical documents and pages back on the site, and imagine people will be glad to see if happen, and no one will step up to help. Very few mods do most of the work. So I don't blame anyone who doesn't want to take on running an archive, much less developing the software for one. It's lonely and underappreciated. (Incidentally, the fan studies scholar Abigail De Kosnik cites in her book Rogue Archives that AO3 developers burn out at a high rate too. Jeezum crow, I'm sure they do.)
Part of this too is a general lack of inventiveness. You used to get online, as a fan, and know you'd have to roll up your sleeves and get to work in order to see what you wanted, but now? You arrive online and IT'S THERE! And it's shiny and fancy and usually works how you want it to (unlike in the past where people were totally cool with some weird-ass workarounds in order to repurpose sites and platforms for fannish purposes) and there is IMMEDIATE GRATIFICATION. No more waiting for the "list mom" to come home from work to approve your account. And it's all in one place. You can go to Facebook and buy a used lawnmower, connect with your best friend from middle school, read the latest on McCarthy's 592nd bid for House speaker, RSVP for your cousin's baby shower, wish your grandmother a happy birthday (no more pesky phone call! that old lady can ramble!), and set up a page for your home business making Tolkien-themed macrame, all in one place. All of this is easy, and this easiness (vs. expecting you'll need to do the work to see your community survive) produces a kind of complacency. Let someone else do it. I'm here like Supermarket Sweep and ready to grab All the Things.
Then there's the loss of Yahoo! Groups and LiveJournal's shenanigans and the move to Tumblr. I haven't fully appreciated in the past (or adequately addressed in my work) the role of fandom communities as the origin and drivers of archives rather than ancillaries of them, but now that both are (in essence) gone, it probably makes sense that the archives that were created by these groups have atrophied too. I can certainly trace the demise of the MPTT archive as likely caused by the closure of the Yahoo! Group LOTR GFic Community; through the Y!G, people were at least periodically reminded that the site existed. Now there's really no way to reach the community anymore. But as I noted above, those fans were still around and still writing just a few years ago. I imagine they feel like fandom no longer has a place for them. Of course, all this came with the move to Tumblr: the site everyone hates and everyone uses. (I'm just as guilty! I just restarted Tolkien Fandom History there last week.) A lot can be said about Tumblr (good and bad), but what always looms largest to me is that there is no community function. There is no way for group of people to get together and do their thing, whatever that thing is. I've seen this spun as "well, LJ and Y!G were cliquish and produced exclusionary behavior," and that's not untrue, but they also produced communities of people who loved and cared for each other. Tumblr is like burning down the house to solve the ant infestation. Now no one can form cliques, apparently! (I guarantee you they still do because people are people, and there are always going to be people who derive their need for power from excluding others.) But people also can't gather in communities that then need archives for collecting their fanworks. And so those archives don't exist.
The bigger, scream-at-the-sky issue, for me, is that people are okay with this. Even defend it. Which I suppose signals I've entered the get-off-my-lawn phase of my life where I feel like what people want to do doesn't match with my middle-aged expectations of How Things Should Be Done. The idea of going into these enormous spaces and finding everything without a whit of culture or personality apparently is convenient enough to be appealing to many, but it represents a loss to me, possibly because, as I round out my second decade in Tolkien fandom, I find that the fanworks I made loom less large than the people who loved and cared for me when I needed it the most and really shaped me into the person I am today. And I think, if I was 23 now, the age I was when I started in fandom, I don't know that I would have the same experience.
There is some hope. Discord looks a lot like the Y!G and LJ communities of old. Will it eventually reach the point where archives spring from its communities? I don't know. And Tolkien Fan Fiction rose from the ashes and reopened (though it's mostly inactive), and I know of one other Tolkien-specific archive in the works. Maybe Tyler will have success with eFiction. He wants to offer hosted eFiction sites (similar to Wordpress and how you can download the software to run on your own domain or set up a blog on the Wordpress site itself and have much of the technical side of management done for you), which would lower the bar to creating archives considerably. BUT HE NEEDS HELP. And for my part, I have a 31-page document for a tutorial about making fanworks archives in Drupal that I plan to start recording this year. Will these things be enough to escape the inertia of fandom Walmart? We'll see.
snowflake_challenge) because many of the prompts, while awesome, repeated from year to year, and I'd just gotten all I could from them. But this year, they are killing it with the prompts. Four have been posted, and I want to do them all. (Yes, this is a plug to go check them out if you are not familiar with them or if you, like me, stepped away at some point!)I'm doing Day Three: Scream into the Void here:
I know Snowflake is sunshine and rainbows and singing from the rooftops all the lovely and brilliant that is being in a fandom. But, let’s be honest. Sometimes--like with other things--there are sucky parts, heartbreak parts and just plain UGH parts. Rather than holding onto those slights and resentments, or burying them and pretending they don’t exist, just to have them slowly and almost imperceptibly seep into the rest of the challenges this month, why don’t we just let it all out?
So I'm going to go all deprived-toddler-in-the-candy-aisle about Tolkien fanfic fandom's disappearing archives. I want to clarify at the outset that I am not screaming about archivists who gave up or even "abandoned" their archives, even those who are popularly looked at kinda like >.> for doing so. Rather, I'd like to pound my tiny fists about the forces of fandom and the internet and, what the hell, the whole goddamn universe that have landed us where we are.
And where is that, exactly?? I was able to find three Tolkien-specific fanfiction archives that had five or more stories posted to them in the year 2022: the Silmarillion Writers' Guild, Stories of Arda, and the Valar Guild. Three. THREE. Tolkien Fanfiction and Open Scrolls Archive at least had a story posted to them in 2022, and nine sites remain available online but haven't had anything new for at least a year. Kudos on them for staying open but that's also pretty fucking sad that no one sees them as more than artifacts.
Back in October, I posted a preliminary archive timeline that was part of a roundtable I presented on at the Fan Studies Network North America conference. The original timeline included only the archives that were a part of the Tolkien Fanfiction Survey. Over December break, I much expanded this timeline to include all of the English-language Tolkien-specific archives currently listed on Fanlore for which I could find complete information, as well as fact-checking more thoroughly the information in the original graphic. It's currently part of an article under consideration for publication; the publication is open-source, so I'm not sure the etiquette of sharing the graphic now, so I'm going to not post it for now (if the article's accepted, I'll ask then because I want to share it ... like I'm itching to share it!) but will happily share it privately with anyone who's interested. (It's also a spreadsheet to make it easier to cluster data and see trends.) It took a lot of time to research and make, and I think it's pretty cool. The data from it are above: three active archives (5+ stories in 2022), two semi-active sites (something posted in 2022), and nine inactive sites, down from fifty-nine listed in the graphic/spreadsheet.
Anyone who knows me knows that I have a strong penchant for self-sufficiency and local control in all areas of my life, not just fandom. I am not wild about large entities of any type telling me what to do. In some cases, I go along for the greater good. (I am a political progressive, after all.) 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.
I have been making the case for years now that the Tolkienfic fandom does not, as a general rule, fit tidily into what fic fandoms generally are assumed to be or look like. This makes sense: Most fandoms are media fandoms and Tolkien is a literary fandom. The fandoms that most resemble us (based on the scholarship, not personal experience, as I am monofandom) are Jane Austen, Harry Potter, and the Sherlockians ... as in the book, not the TV series. If I knew more about other book fandoms, I'd probably include them as well. We focus on canon and the "collection" of canon much more than many media fandoms do, and this produces sites, archives, and cultures that heavily incorporate that element.
The loss of small, independent archives has been a loss of that culture. I have documented already how each of the major Tolkienfic archives had its own culture and rarely targeted the same subset of fans. And this goes beyond the obvious differing interest in characters or character groups (e.g., a Legolas/Aragorn site vs. a site about Hobbits). It even goes beyond the oft-cited gen/slash/het divide of the 2000s. Tolkien Fanfic Survey data shows that participants on the various sites had different views of Tolkien's authority, the role his beliefs should play in fanfiction, and the use of fanfiction as a vehicle for criticism of his world (with social justice-oriented criticism a subset of that). These are more settled issues elsewhere in fandom (at least according to the scholarship ... again, monofandom!) but they are not for us. Fans have wildly divergent views on them, and they co-occur in ways that often defy expectations. Then there were cultural values around quality vs. inclusivity and other issues around "doing fandom" in the way that best honors both Tolkien and each other. Going back through Wayback captures of dead archives, these cultural distinctions loom forth from long-dead Rules and Submissions and About pages.
And they're gone. Lost.
This is the nature of the internet, though, right? The competing views that "the internet is forever" and "the internet is ephemeral and frail." Both are true. And yes, there will be loss, but what makes me scream into the void is that those sites that die of natural causes are not being replaced. Instead, Fandom has decided to consolidate onto AO3 and Tumblr, and this sucks, and it's perilous (all the eggs in one basket!), but most importantly to me, this creates a loss of culture and community and the relationships that both foster.
A lot of what made some of these sites culturally unique are not present on AO3 and Tumblr (to say nothing of the vast troves of resources that support the canon-centric "affirmational" fannish tendencies of Tolkien fandom more generally). One could say, well, those kinds of places don't exist because those kinds of fans don't exist anymore. The culture, in other words, died, and the site followed. Except I don't think that is true, at least not entirely. I know many of those fans remained and imagine they feel like they no longer have any place to go. It's hard to know. Their home is gone; they can't be found.
I tend to be harsh on AO3 around this issue and, truly, I am disappointed because I remember this issue (the survival of independent archives once there was a large, snazzy "universal archive" to use) was raised when AO3 was being planned, and the solution was that the code would be open-source and so would support the creation of independent archives. But then, just a few years ago, I saw someone affiliated with AO3 bragging about how hard that software is to use. They were making the case for AO3's achievement, which is valid, but it felt like a punch in the gut to me: a freezing out of archivists who were beginners, holding websites and archives out of reach of everyone but the technologically elite. That was me at one point.
But this isn't about AO3 (for once, some of you might legitimately say). I always say and truly do mean that I think AO3 is a net good. A huge one. It is more a railing against those forces even bigger than AO3 that have shuttered archives and shuttled fans toward consolidation. These are things possibly Too Big to Fix, but isn't that the point of shouting into the void? Letting my fingers fly over these grievances that I usually withhold because they're vague and not at all productive?
There's the loss of eFiction, which did make setting up an archive attainable for just about everyone. But I'm not mad that eFiction has been neglected, even abandoned at times. (It is again under a new owner who has ideas for it that could make it even more attainable than it used to be. But he's finding a familiar lack of support despite claiming that the software is still downloaded regularly.) I recently emailed with nearly all the eFiction developers, and a theme I heard (and which seems to be an issue for Tyler too, the current developer) is the vast mismatch between user demands and willingness to help. The two past developers I talked to (Rebecca and Artphilia) both identified feeling overwhelmed as reasons they eventually passed on the project. I couldn't locate Tammy, but I was active on the eFiction forum in Tammy's day and remember the constant demands for help and her signature line that said that if you wanted personal help, she'd charge her professional rate, and feeling intimidated and awed by her. But I also wondered how she managed what she did on her own, and the state eFiction in the 2010s is probably an answer unto itself. I am lucky on the SWG that the demands are few and people are generally kind and appreciative, and I have a phenomenal mod team, but beyond them, the help sure isn't there either; there are volunteer positions I've been asking for since the new site opened and still haven't filled. I'm going to be asking soon for help getting some of our historical documents and pages back on the site, and imagine people will be glad to see if happen, and no one will step up to help. Very few mods do most of the work. So I don't blame anyone who doesn't want to take on running an archive, much less developing the software for one. It's lonely and underappreciated. (Incidentally, the fan studies scholar Abigail De Kosnik cites in her book Rogue Archives that AO3 developers burn out at a high rate too. Jeezum crow, I'm sure they do.)
Part of this too is a general lack of inventiveness. You used to get online, as a fan, and know you'd have to roll up your sleeves and get to work in order to see what you wanted, but now? You arrive online and IT'S THERE! And it's shiny and fancy and usually works how you want it to (unlike in the past where people were totally cool with some weird-ass workarounds in order to repurpose sites and platforms for fannish purposes) and there is IMMEDIATE GRATIFICATION. No more waiting for the "list mom" to come home from work to approve your account. And it's all in one place. You can go to Facebook and buy a used lawnmower, connect with your best friend from middle school, read the latest on McCarthy's 592nd bid for House speaker, RSVP for your cousin's baby shower, wish your grandmother a happy birthday (no more pesky phone call! that old lady can ramble!), and set up a page for your home business making Tolkien-themed macrame, all in one place. All of this is easy, and this easiness (vs. expecting you'll need to do the work to see your community survive) produces a kind of complacency. Let someone else do it. I'm here like Supermarket Sweep and ready to grab All the Things.
Then there's the loss of Yahoo! Groups and LiveJournal's shenanigans and the move to Tumblr. I haven't fully appreciated in the past (or adequately addressed in my work) the role of fandom communities as the origin and drivers of archives rather than ancillaries of them, but now that both are (in essence) gone, it probably makes sense that the archives that were created by these groups have atrophied too. I can certainly trace the demise of the MPTT archive as likely caused by the closure of the Yahoo! Group LOTR GFic Community; through the Y!G, people were at least periodically reminded that the site existed. Now there's really no way to reach the community anymore. But as I noted above, those fans were still around and still writing just a few years ago. I imagine they feel like fandom no longer has a place for them. Of course, all this came with the move to Tumblr: the site everyone hates and everyone uses. (I'm just as guilty! I just restarted Tolkien Fandom History there last week.) A lot can be said about Tumblr (good and bad), but what always looms largest to me is that there is no community function. There is no way for group of people to get together and do their thing, whatever that thing is. I've seen this spun as "well, LJ and Y!G were cliquish and produced exclusionary behavior," and that's not untrue, but they also produced communities of people who loved and cared for each other. Tumblr is like burning down the house to solve the ant infestation. Now no one can form cliques, apparently! (I guarantee you they still do because people are people, and there are always going to be people who derive their need for power from excluding others.) But people also can't gather in communities that then need archives for collecting their fanworks. And so those archives don't exist.
The bigger, scream-at-the-sky issue, for me, is that people are okay with this. Even defend it. Which I suppose signals I've entered the get-off-my-lawn phase of my life where I feel like what people want to do doesn't match with my middle-aged expectations of How Things Should Be Done. The idea of going into these enormous spaces and finding everything without a whit of culture or personality apparently is convenient enough to be appealing to many, but it represents a loss to me, possibly because, as I round out my second decade in Tolkien fandom, I find that the fanworks I made loom less large than the people who loved and cared for me when I needed it the most and really shaped me into the person I am today. And I think, if I was 23 now, the age I was when I started in fandom, I don't know that I would have the same experience.
There is some hope. Discord looks a lot like the Y!G and LJ communities of old. Will it eventually reach the point where archives spring from its communities? I don't know. And Tolkien Fan Fiction rose from the ashes and reopened (though it's mostly inactive), and I know of one other Tolkien-specific archive in the works. Maybe Tyler will have success with eFiction. He wants to offer hosted eFiction sites (similar to Wordpress and how you can download the software to run on your own domain or set up a blog on the Wordpress site itself and have much of the technical side of management done for you), which would lower the bar to creating archives considerably. BUT HE NEEDS HELP. And for my part, I have a 31-page document for a tutorial about making fanworks archives in Drupal that I plan to start recording this year. Will these things be enough to escape the inertia of fandom Walmart? We'll see.
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