#fanlore log

Day 16: I was only going to put this in my private notes for the day, but I felt the need to share my thoughts in the public notes. I truly hope each writer I contact or read or discuss for the T50BTSFF Ao3 project truly knows how their work has affected people. These writers inspire and motivate others to write and create. Honestly I’ve put off researching on other authors until I read their fanfics so I don’t cloud my judgement or find something upsetting. As a member of the fanfiction community, I’ve seen many things. I experienced the Dirty Laundry Klance incident in 2016 firsthand and felt the after effects of the Hamilton cannibal mermaid incident. I’ve seen authors rise in popularity and get slashed down and harassed by those who though they were morally right. I have many fears when coming into this project, but I’ll only share one here. The rest are in my private notes, which will be publicly published in 5 years. I fear the truth. Some people, after they’ve written fanfiction, do not want to be found again or ever talk about their work again. I respect such, but I fear it. In this moment in time, it is one of the only moments I can be doing this. Many of the authors and readers from 2016-2017, which is where a majority of the T50 are from, could have moved on or are extremely hard to track down. Even in some of my notes, I am omitting information to protect the identities and my own private life. I am just an anonymous collector of information and I wish history to respect that. My analysis and documentation should be shared publicly if possible, but there’s a lot to respect and move on from. Personally, I find that I’m at the right place at the right time. We need to start documenting these fanfics now because if we wait any later, it’ll be too late. I’m already planning on releasing some essays and writing pieces about the BTS fanfiction culture, general fanfiction culture, and some of the commonalities in the T50BTSFF. Already, I’ve found that a majority of the fanfics are explicit. In the T50BTSFF Ao3 project, I’ll be including both complete and incomplete works. So in the end, I might not actually do only 50 fanfics.

Day 15 (Part 2): I’m reading tStS. I’m working on finishing it up soon. Currently on Chapter 19, it’s been fun. tStS is much more adventure fantasy while HoC was psychological gangster thriller. It’s interesting seeing the differences between the top 2 fanfics. The tattoo idea is quite interesting. I’m mostly wondering where Yoongi’s keeping his tattooing materials in the middle of sea. The whole tiger thing cements this fic as fantasy for me. What an interesting story element. Kind of random, but we’ve seen a lot of weird with this fic already. Oh to have such juvenile writing like tStS has~ It attempts to be a real book, but the amount of fanfic rhetoric slipping through is so pleasing. Authors never forget their roots whether it be in the common phrases or dialogue. tStS having cultural diversity and exploration of Indian culture, uncommon in a majority of fanfiction, is incredibly refreshing

Day 3: I just realized that while I’m documenting fandom history, I should probably document how I’m documenting that history. So hello world to my daily logs as I work on documenting the Top 50 Most Hit BTS Fanfiction on Archive of Our Own. The original House of Cards (BTS story) Fanlore was created by a user named Caessius. They haven’t been active since June 2020 and created HoC’s Fanlore page on January 2019. On their profile page, they said that they usually create stub pages and encourages people to contribute to pages. So, I decided why not? And why not make a project about it? I’ve always been passionate about documenting fandom history and I think this is the perfect way to do something productive during quarantine. Seeing the Fanlore page of HoC motivated me to start Fanlore, so here I am now. Today I added some Archive of Our Own comments to the page. It was pretty emotional while doing so. A lot of comments were from the last update of HoC on May 22nd, 2016. Getting to read these people’s reactions from 4 years ago is very meaningful. Fandom culture was a bit different in 2016, pre-Tumblr purge. I’ve read a lot of comments with people who’ve broken down the story and have shared how the author has inspired them. I’ll be honest: I cried a lot while reading through these people’s comments. I hope they’re doing well now. I finished reading HoC a while ago because I’ve only recently gotten into BTS, but I truly feel like I came at the right time to do this. I hope to keep documenting fandom history as best as I can. I’m still working on the HoC page though I hope to do the Top 50 Most Hit works for the BTS fandom by the end of 2021. That’s about one fanfic a week. It’ll probably be easier the lower I get because of a lack of information. I also hope to keep track of these pages and update them when I can

Day 15 (Part 1): Someone edited the Imprints and Magnitude Fanlore stub page I made and I am overwhelmed with emotion that they did that. I’m going to work on that page as a side project because Imprints and Magnitude by artic_gray means so much to me as a reader. It’ll be a side project from the T50BTSFF project. Maybe I’ll just document Namjin fanfiction there. There’s some that I really want to make sure get pages on Fanlore, especially Imprints and Magnitude plus landscapes like our hearts. They’re not read by many, but they hold immense meaning to me. And kind of selfishly, I want them to be documented and talked about more. They’re very meaningful works to me that encapsulate fanfiction so rawly and the Namjin dynamic so well.

Day 14: I sent the first interview email for the T50BTSFF project today. I’m still clearing my head for tStS. I need to start collecting data to make graphs appropriately

Day 13 (Part 1): I need to kind of reset and clear my mind before delving back into tStS. I’ve stopped researching and won’t continue until after I’ve read all of it as to not cloud my judgement. I’m not sure if the author is transphobic, has changed from such, or where the claims come from at all. I will know in due time, but until then I will try to read tStS as clearly as possible without judgement. I’m still enjoying it and taking notes about the writing of the story itself. I have these public diary format entires that you’re reading now on Twitter and Tumblr, but I’m going to start keeping private notes as well to document my struggles. I will release all of those notes once I am done with the T50BTSFF project in a mass note page. I’m beginning to contact more people for interviews now. I’ve gotten in contact with HoC’s author and I’m contacting fanfic authors and readers from 2016-2017 through Tumblr. I need to pick up on my reading more.