The People I Like Most Are Dead

Obama inherited Bush 43's subprime hellscape.

Biden inherited Trump’s shitshow.

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I'm dying.

Nonnie, seriously?

No, that's mean, I know you're serious. It's just flabbergasting how much fandom has expanded and how much there isn't a direct link to the past.

Astolat and Cesperanza floated the idea at Vividcon and various places, I think, though I wasn't going to cons in that era. We were all on LJ in those days, and Astolat made a big post nailing her theses to the door. Discussion in the comments was instant and prolonged.

A LJ com was set up to discuss. It was later renamed to otw_news, but if you go all the way back to the beginning, you can see brainstorming mess instead of official news posts.

Fanlore page linking to Astolat's post and giving a little context.

Early brainstorming: https://otw-news.livejournal.com/2007/05/

For example, here I am collecting links to older archives to look at for research when designing AO3.

Fun fact, we never intended to call it AO3. There was a whole call for name suggestions, but nothing was as evocative as astolat's original post title referencing Virginia Woolf. (For those who haven't thought about it, AO3's name is a reference to A Room of One's Own.)

Here's the name discussion

Here's the poll that came out of it

But also notice how many people voted: 562.

That's how many people cared at the time: a few hundred. Maybe a thousand if you count lurkers, but frankly, that community was not as lurkery as now. It wasn't just ten friends. It was a community effort. But what "our" community looked like at the time was vastly different. It was six degrees of Kevin Bacon astolat, not a vast sea of strangers like fic fandom on AO3 is now.

Here's an early post suggesting we ban the under 18s from the site entirely. Pity we didn't do so, given the rise of antis.

Here's the invite to a fundraising party at astolat's in NYC that following Halloween. I dressed as Amanda from Highlander, not very well.

You can tell we knew each other by looking at those comments on astolat's initial post. You can also tell how discussion-based that part of fandom was back in 2007.

AO3 is the result of long discussions, hard work, and a dedicated community of fans. Though it isn't is a social media site (and it was never intended to be), it is the only place now that sometimes feels like how the fannish community used to be on LJ--when a good discussion gets going in the comments on a story. But AO3 is for fanfiction et al, and therefore is limited in discussion subjects.

(The ads you'll encounter if you follow those links, though? Did not exist when we were there and were one of the reasons we abandoned the site--not the most important reasons by a long shot as you'll understand if you read more about why AO3 was created, but they were a factor.)

We were a collection of communities, with some-to-significant overlap in members. Fanfiction writers were not "content creators," and people who didn't write fanfiction were not "the lucky audience who should be soooooooooooo grateful that writers deigned to gift us with their incredible talent." We knew each other. Many of us met each other IRL after meeting through fandom (once fandom shifted to the internet there was some hesitancy at first about meeting "online" friends, but that was quickly gotten over). We went to conventions together. We had lunch and dinner and parties and meet-ups IRL outside of conventions.

If you take a wander around from even just that one LJ community (click on a username to check out their personal LJ), you can see how discussions would branch off without excluding anyone the way they do on Tumblr. If you wanted to share something you saw on someone else's LJ, you just linked to it, and people followed the link to read it and join in the discussion (or just lurk). The force of Tumblr splintering is an active barrier to creating real communities.

Now she's got this girl who just bursts into her room talking about rashes when she wants to go make out and takes her to "secret" spots that everyone else knows about and somehow discovers a gay bar when she didn't even know places like that existed. She's falling for this girl who gets excited about everything because she's just discovering this whole new world. And she's so desperate to keep Carson safe, she probably feels like she's got an untrained puppy off it's leash that she's gotta constantly chase down the street so it doesn't get lost or hurt.

No wonder they fell asleep in Greta's bed.

@USERGIF​ BACK TO COOL EVENT ☆ challenge #3 - layout or transition

I’M A LEO! PEOPLE LOVE MY ENERGY!

I love them so much 🤧

segregation and racism was rampant, and they never pull some “oh but max can be on the peaches for this weird and historically inaccurate reason,” we instead see her happiness and community within the black community and friendships with specific white characters in which she forces them to acknowledge that they didn’t help her but doesn’t hold them to the standards of today

we don’t get a “homophobia doesn’t exist actually” or a “random nice police officer for some reason lets them all go,” but we do get to see the underground bar and how it provided a safe haven alongside bert’s private parties

jess was fined for wearing pants and that rule was never changed throughout the whole show, but being given back the fines afterwards was a period consistent way of showing how someone might have shown support and solidarity then