How to find fanfic from the olden days
So you’ve discovered some old 90’s show and damn, you so want to read the fic for that, but you can’t find it. It’s from The Olden Days before Tumblr, before AO3, and in some cases, even before Livejournal and fanfiction.net. It was in the days of Geocities. It was NOT in the days of yahoo groups because even I don’t know how to take you back in time that far. But I did recently go and dig up all the old Star Trek: Voyager fic so let me show you how to proceed. Here be dragons, of course. Also vampire slayers. Warrior princesses. The smoking dude from the X-Files, whatever his name. And lots and lots and lots of Star Trek.
You’ll probably already have checked out AO3 and come up mostly empty. However, if you’re the kind of person who browses AO3 by filtering for tags or warnings, or by entering complex keyword chains into the search bar, take the following into account: When AO3 first came about, a lot of writers uploaded back-ups of their fic. However, in those days, there was a heated fandom debate on about whether or not you should use warnings – this is the direct origin of AO3’s “Author chose not to use warnings,” as it is. So a lot of people either chose that option or just didn’t tag warnings. Also the AO3 tag pool was still empty. A lot of those fics aren’t tagged at all, or not in the way you would expect. So keep in mind that that perfect fic tailored to your wishes just didn’t show up in your search. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Once done on AO3, you migrate to Livejournal. LJ is hard to navigate if you’ve never used it. But the first place you want to go is crack_van. For years, crack_van was the ultimate multi-fandom fic rec community. Being recced there was a little bit like winning an Emmy. If there’s any olden fic for your fandom at all, you will find it in the tag list on the left.
tvtropes.org often has fic rec lists for featured fandoms, too, often very good ones. That’s also a great way for discovering new fic in current fandoms, incidentally.
The further you go back, the more often you will click on fic links and find them dead, the stories long gone. If the link would have led you to a story posted on an LJ blog, but it was deleted, see below. If the link lead you off-site, you can attempt to conjure the story back up by way of the Wayback Machine. Enter the URL in the search bar and the WBM will either directly lead you to an archived copy of the page or show you a selection of all the time stamps when a copy was made. So you can try looking at the page in 2011, 2006 etc. and make your way to what you’re looking for that way. Keep in mind that links on those archived pages don’t always work, you’ll have to save that link and reenter it in the WBM search bar sometimes to reach other sub pages, like the next part of the fic.
If the WBM fails you or the story linked to a deleted page on a platform like LJ to begin with, search on Google for the fic name and author. It’s very likely you’ll find that the author crossposted the fic to another site at one point. The fic might be in the search results or you might find another rec that linked to the alternative page. If that link is dead, too, again you can go through the WBM.
Of course when you find an author you like you can check out their other fic and, in some cases, their rec lists to find more of the good stuff. There were a lot more rec lists then. You might also discover old archives centered specifically around a character or a ship. So you can search those. When you do that, you might find that fic terms aren’t used the way you’d assume now. Just yesterday I browsed an archive that used “gen” to refer to straight pairings. The terms just weren’t fully established yet.
Finally, it always pays to google “fandom + character + fanfic recs” and see what comes up. Don’t bother searching for ships. We didn’t use fandom mush names much (those only became really popular when Tumblr tags couldn’t parse slashes) and pattern searching for slashes (”Tom/Mary”) often doesn’t yield effective results.
Your last option is always going to fanfiction.net and browsing the fandom there. I’m saying last option because Fanfiction.net has it ALL, the good and the bad and the ugly. Especially the ugly. Or well, that’s not quite true, because as it is, it doesn’t feature any explicit porn. Try AdultFanfiction.org for that. It also is hard to filter. Keep in mind: Standard search doesn’t include erotica (Rated: M, the almost-porn) unless you include it manually. It includes all languages automatically, though, so narrow it down to yours and save yourself the headache – some of those fandoms were really big in languages other than English. Almost all fandoms started out without (complete) character listings, so the early stuff can’t be found that way. Just click on the last page of the fic list and check out whether there are any characters listed on the fics. If no, all you can do is look through those manually. Also the “Complete / In-Progress” tag didn’t exist in the beginning so keep that in mind when you use search filters.
Lastly, remember that fandom was dominated by straight white women for a long time and the earlier you go, the more infuriated you’ll probably be by depictions of POC and queer folk. Keep in mind that a lot of the fic was written while the show or book series was still ongoing, so sometimes big revelations etc. will not be featured. Sometimes, new versions of canon didn’t exist yet - for example, LotR fic was solely book fandom fic before the movies.
Respect your elders when you encounter weird fandom quirks of those days. This is free fic archived for your pleasure, don’t be a dick about it.
