working my way through folks' recs...

[hradzka]

And it's interesting. A lot of stuff doesn't work for me, which is okay and was expected, but one reason I asked folks to provide current recs is because I wanted to see to what degree my sense of what fandom was writing was more or less representative. I was surprised to find that it was a lot more representative than I'd expected, in terms of the kind of things folks are writing. I didn't see any *kind* of fiction that struck me as really new. The surprise comes because, in my nineteen-odd years in fandom, I've seen fanfic change quite a bit. When I started, fanfic was mostly gen; you had slash and porn, but it was much less common and was confined to dedicated forums, which was still an increase for that stuff over earlier years. RPF used to be completely anathema, but then became accepted and wildly common (my sense is that it really took off with bandom, because it would be hard to write anything but, but I don't know LOTR fandom at all and I know RPF was *huge* over there, so that might've been where the change occurred -- timelines, anybody?). Fandoms used to start off writing the more gen stuff, and then start to collect more porn and slash as they grew older, whereas now folks come home from the theater and start a kink meme. Fandom used to just write about the pretty white boys, and now fandom still mostly writes about the pretty white boys but there are chromatic challenges and more calls for representation from fans of color. And so on.

Lately, though, I haven't seen fanfic change as much. The change I keep expecting to see is more female-character-focused fic, but while there's been more in recent years it's still lagged behind what I've been thinking I'd see, given feminist fandom's increasing activism. To me, the biggest change in recent years is the increasing prominence of flashfic, with kink memes. But that doesn't seem to have changed the type of things that folks are writing so much as it's changed length. The recent popularity of texting fic is interesting, but I don't know how much of a change it represents. With tumblr, fannish activity has changed -- the popularity of fannish memes is a new kind of fannish activity all its own -- but this still hasn't changed the kinds of stories folks seem to be writing. Fanfic is wildly popular, and it's in more places than ever, but I don't know if it's still changing. Or if it's on a path to being subsumed by something else.

So is fanfiction in stasis? What do y'all think?

Comments

[ivorygates]

No, fanfiction is in its usual state of wild ferment and evolution, honest. It's just hard to see from the middle of it. New, we're seeing fusion in addition to crossover, and there's a groundswell in the direction of sound editing. We don't see a lot of Machina at this end of fandom, but it's essentially a creation of new narrative in ways that can be indistinguishable from primary source. In vids, I see an upswing in willingness to use non-canonical elements, elements from other fandoms, and even elements outside of fandom to create vids that are not merely a dramatization of song lyrics, but a unique narrative with music. Some vidders have successfully vidded outlier fandom creations, such as the vid "Half Jack" which was a vidding of the fic "A Howling In The Factory Yard". And as fan-owned archives (or even *a* fan-owned archive) develops a more pervasive presence in pan-fannish life, I'm sure it will also drive additional change and possibly spark new forms. We're already seeing a resurgence of "drawn" illustration as opposed to manips, which I believe is partly due to having a safe place to put them [and to the new accessibility of scanning technology of course].

But the main thing I want to bring up, though I know it's a matter of debate in some circles, is my asseveration that fandom actually began with bandom RPF, so neither RPF or bandom is new. The fans who began publishing Star Trek fanzines in 1966 had spent the previous two years publishing Beatles fanzines that were specifically fic-driven. Those young women (their ages would have ranged from 18-25, as fandom used to skew not only entirely female but significantly older) would take the various skills they learned in what we can only now identify as the first bandom fandom and use it to create fandom itself...

[NOTE: In all uses of the word "fandom" in this post I am pretending that print media driven SF Fandom, or "trufandom", which dates from the 1920s, does not exist. It's easier that way.]