I'm with the fans

Fanatic, from Latin fanaticus "mad, enthusiastic, inspired by a god."

these are the truest fucking tags.

I have asked this myself in the past and never gotten an answer.

It became pretty standard jargon, as I understand, to disambiguate when writing to other humans. First phys!Steve vs the Steve right next to you, just like you were taking to the machine, then getting looser (as jargon does) to reference, say, bearded!Steve vs bald!Steve.

OH BOY AND HOW. So I am not So Much Of An Old that I was around when print zines were the thing. I got into fanfic-type fandom through the internet. But here are some changes from the late 90s to today:

- In slash fandom, there were a lot fewer main characters written as expressly queer. There was a lot of (in retrospect) very teeth grindingly annoying “We’re not gay we just love each other” type romances. 

- Fic was mostly distributed via mailing lists (email), not by web archives, although some mailing lists also would web archive their stuff. People tended to be more monofannish because you would just participate in the list — people are more multifannish now because we follow specific people through their blogs and get introduced to their other interests, but this didn’t happen as much back in the day. People were definitely still multifannish, though. I’ve always fandom hopped.

- The aesthetic was very different. A lot of older fanfic reads in ways that were more influenced by profic romance novels, whereas modern fanfic has sort of its own, more realist style. (TBH there are also a lot more realistic/pomo style romance novels these days as well.) The stuff from the early 2000s, in comparison to 90s and earlier fic, and in comparison to modern fic, tended to be more experimental stylistically. Overall, fic tended to be longer, but also more uniformly long. There weren’t really many of those 200k monsters either.

- Not a lot of postmodern type fic conceits (i.e. stuff like the one where steve and bucky watch all the movies made about captain america while steve was in the ice, or SGA fic told through excerpts from academic papers, etc.) Early 2000s fandom went through this weird magical realism phase, also.

- In our headers, we used to measure story length in file-size, not in word length. I think this change came about in the early 2000s.

oh and then along the same lines you had guys running out to try and have sex with women and fail, or have sex with women but find it so unsatisfying, before ultimately admitting that they wanted this particular dick. also, considering the prevalence of WNGWJLEO, it was oddly mandatory to point out at great length how much each character never really loved his previous female partners.

basically fandom now, at least the well-written part of it, is a million times less homophobic and biphobic and, believe it or not, misogynist. obviously there were always exceptions, especially with the really good writers, and especially as you move into the late nineties. but as a rule, so much improvement.

oh, and every love confession required a full name. Firstname Middlename Lastname, I love you. where does that even come from, seriously?

i will give them this—there was a lot less badfic that was technically bad, like, unreadable and full of errors. shit got edited back in the day. someone was gonna pay money to print five hundred copies of that and they did not want your terrible spelling to fuck it up.

- elaborate ascii headers/footers/dividers on fic, which were mostly txt files (or bare-bones text-only pages to save archive space) I think?

- faking ages to get access to the adult stuff (which could get complicated depending on what country you were from and what country the admin(s) were from). This sometimes involved emailing an age statement to the owner of a mailing list and them deciding whether or not to trust you (or how much they actually gave a fuck) before giving you the password to an archive or authenticating your whatever to access the whosit, I wasn’t entirely sure how it worked.  Because I was fifteen at the time. Of course.

- There were people who were very adamantly ‘gay stuff is okay in fanfic but immoral IRL.’  Don’t ask me how that worked out logically, but it was a thing.

- DO NOT FORGET THE BEFORE-TIMES when there was no google and there were scattered archives everywhere, from ‘archive of [specific mailing list]’ to authors’ personal archives to pairing- or fandom-specific archives and the way you found a lot of them was like hoping aol or yahoo search would turn up something new?  But on the other hand you had a fair number of folks who were twitchy about having webcrawlies being able to find their porn because fanfic was already kind of side-eyed and porny stuff even moreso.

- there were archivists who actively trawled mailing lists and authors archives and such to compile their own interest-specific archives, sometimes asking the authors if they could host a fic… and sometimes NOT asking.  Cue: wank.

- OR you navigated WEBRINGS (which are like tumblr ‘networks’ I think? I don’t grok tumblr networks but ya’ll have fun with them, I’ll be over here in my rocking chair mmk) where there was essentially a master list of websites catering to a specific interest, sometimes with details but sometimes it was just a name and a link so you had no idea what you were clicking on half the time, you just knew it fell under category [thing the webring was about].

(…tbh, this was probably how I found out about slash, because of some X-Files or Pretender or maybe early SG1 webring, I don’t even know. I just saw “[fandomname] slash archive” and was desperate for new fic in [fandom] and hey presto “boys?? kissing?? GIRLS? KISSING?!! YOU CAN DO THAT? Ship things that don’t match what canon would expect you to ship?? oops now I have an exponentially greater amount of ships than I did before”)(given that description, it was probably stargate because there was a LOT of pretty to go around okay)

- let me TELL you about the recurring firestorm of wank that would rush through every goddamned fandom for at least a 5- to 10-year period there where someone would be like “all same-gender shippy stuff needs an NC-17 warning because that stuff is not okay for kids” and other folks would be like “can we not equate handholding to explicit PIV intercourse solely based on the genders of the participants” and holy jesus it was the EXACT same ugly nausea-inducing merry-go-round in at least six of my fandoms, which is why I am zero percent impressed with ‘family’ networks caving to that bullpockey because My People already hashed that out, get with the times, thanks.

- fanfic archives without search functions, where everything was just listed by date posted and sorted by pairing IF YOU WERE LUCKY.  One sentence summaries with no tags, no warnings, sometimes no ratings.  Sometimes no lengths (see above regarding length measured by filesize).  Because everything was coded in early html and some folks just didn’t want to (or knew how to) code all that.  This is why I give money to ao3, people.  I REMEMBER THE BEFORETIMES.

- oh, and finding That Reccer whose tastes ran similar to your own and posted like 10+ recs a week?  Like Santa and Baby Jesus came down from on high and showered glitter all over you before kissing you gently on the forehead and then disappearing in a double rainbow.  (You think recs help you filter wheat from chaff NOW, it was all the moreso when you had to do all this hunting just to find stuff TO sort though)

- yes this was also before lj and wordpress and basically any kind of rich text editor-enabled blogging platform.  Hand-coded html pages hosted on geocities with terrible font color choices and pixellated blinky tiled gif backgrounds, aw yus.

Femslash Can Save the World If We Let It

Lonely Weirdo Hearts

When I was 13 years old, my parents decided that our house would get dial-up Internet.

This was probably the second most influential thing to happen in my pre-adult life, the first being that girls got really pretty in late adolescence. On the Internet, albeit an Internet where it took a solid ten minutes to download a single image file and the sheer concept of streaming a…

Is that an accusation? It sounds like an accusation, and a slightly aggressive one because you’re anon. I presume you’re talking about this post. I’m not sure what you mean by giving the fandom “too much credit.” Credit for what, exactly? And exactly how am I short-changing Steven Moffat, Mark Gatiss, and Steve Thompson? 

To invoke a meme I (so, so very ironically) unintentionally started, I don’t worship the Author-Gods. To put it another way, I think auteur theory is a bunch of hooey. I’ll let wikipedia help us out here:

In film criticism, auteur theory holds that a director’s film reflects the director’s personal creative vision, as if they were the primary “auteur” (the French word for “author”). In spite of—and sometimes even because of—the production of the film as part of an industrial process, the auteur’s creative voice is distinct enough to shine through studio interference and the collective process.

In the 1960’s a bunch of white French dudes who worked on a film magazine together decided that a movie’s director (NOT the screenwriter mind you) was the most important person in the cinematic creative process and that the end product, the film, (if it was “good”) was the product of the genius director’s vision. People speak reverently of Orson Welles to this day as if he were a creative island. (Just watch how he’ll be lionized when his lost film is released soon.)

People like to credit white guys (especially dead ones) with all kinds of magical powers. 

Auterism was a very influential ideology (and remains so to this day) even though so many critics poked holes in it immediately.  The gloriously opinionated Pauline Kael, famously, had none of it. She pointed out that credit for the greatness of Welles’ film Citizen Kane should be shared by the film’s screenwriter as well as the cinematographer. She also thought Welles’s later films suffered as his directorial ego swelled exponentially. 

Yeah, ok. She’s right. Give the writer and the cinematographer their due. I’m especially keen on the importance of Sherlock's cinematography myself. I give a lot of credit, though, to the show’s below the line crew. Somebody has to push the dolly and turn on the lights. The physical labor that goes into making Sherlock episodes mean things is utterly invisible to consumer-viewers. 

This weird mashed-up mythical fandom-generated creature called Mofftiss performs all kinds of functions. For example, sometimes Mofftiss is seen as a mad (mendacious) genius who gleefully plants homoerotic clues everywhere in the show (including things they literally never touch or bother themselves with like wallpaper, and light gels) and lies about it. For some, Mofftiss are/is (a) queer-baiting arsehole(s). Whatever its role in fandom lore/wank/discourse/canons/etc. Mofftiss (sometimes incarnated in the singular as Godtiss) rules our emotions. Sometimes the name is used in jest. Sometimes with reverence. Could be all in good fun, or… not.

When I summon this genie, I tend to think of the entire trinity. I do give the writers LOTS of credit. I enlcude Thompson, too. So I usually say Mofftisson. That hasn’t caught on even though he’s responsible for writing the train wreck that is TBB, the feelz destroying TRF, and part of whatever you want to call TSo3. (A wedding video?) Note that Moffat didn’t even thank Thompson when he fetched his Emmy. So Moffat and Gatiss themselves as “show runners” tend to take credit along with Sue and Beryl— so they always link their power to Hartswood, the production company, who has as much power as ANY individual on the set. We don’t talk about that. [Interestingly, when Martin Freeman won his BAFTA he thanked: Mark and Steven; Beryl and Sue Vertue; Benedict; Paul McGuigan and Euros Lyn (the directors); and cinematographer Steve Lawes (“a fantastic DoP who managed to light me well”); Amanda and his family. HE knows no “supporting” actor is an island.]

I happen to believe that light plays as big a role in telling a story as words do (I’m writing a book about that) and that a silent look or gesture usually means even more (though what that meaning could be is highly subjective and one fan certainly influences another in interpreting it). There’s that famous story about how Martin will look at scripts and offer to do away with several lines by using one look, one gesture. When Martin’s face is half-lit and the camera tracks around his head and zooms in ever so slightly and the movement is made conscious to the viewer by the intrusion into the frame of the dim bokeh in the background— well we fans read defiance, pain, menace into John’s face.  

We make Martin into John simply by suspending our disbelief. Mofftiss can’t do that for us. It’s the single most important action in the making of meaning and WE fans do it. We see that John is having exactly NONE of Mycroft’s bullshit. We see him acting loyal to Sherlock after having known the freak for mere hours. In that fact, most of us see a deep attraction between them— some see platonic love, some see erotic love, some see a burgeoning romance. Many of us see that attraction poignantly and comically emphasized over and over.

What does THIS look say?

Feelz! It’s at THAT point where I say it’s the viewers, we the fans who make Sherlock's meaning. We see the result of the labor of scores and scores of people- some with more power on the set than others— but everyone plays a part to bring those looks to us.

Now. To my mind Gatiss writes the best scripts, Paul McGuigan is the best director, Steve Lawes is the best cinematographer, Martin Freeman is the best actor, but none of them is responsible for this:

or this

We made Johnlock (with a little help from our frenemy Mofftiss.) That’s OUR genius. 

We fans brilliantly read our desires into Sherlock and we do it expansively, magnificently, lovingly, and we’ve done it for YEARS. We made the hiatus a fertile fallow period. We think more about Sherlock and what it means than “Mofftiss” do by a landslide. Many of us have clocked more hours into “deciphering” the show (which is to say making meaning of it) than all those people and entities expended collectively while creating it for us.

The script, indeed the final show, is just the tip of the iceberg. The fandom makes it profound, sees depths of meaning under the surface. That’s OURS. So yes, I believe the credit for making this silly show into something beloved, into ART is mainly OURS.

Kudos to the brilliant fan who made a single picture say 1,000,000 words!