...and then he said...

but lets talk about how rupert didnt realize there were steps and flung down them

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.

There is also a death for the immortal jellyfish. He is very bored.

Any of my followers into Stargate?  I took my website down but I’ve begun to put everything back up slowly.  Starting with my original fandom and with some of my own personal favorites.  The one above, for example can now be read here

First Published: February 17th, 2005 Rating: Adult Pairing: Jack/Daniel  Word Count: 32,177