[ SECRET POST #5659 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #5659 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 28 secrets from Secret Submission Post #810.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

There were no fandoms on the internet before Harry Potter, of course.

[(Anonymous)]

"Internet fandom as it presently exists can be traced back to a specific Harry Potter fangroup" is not incompatible with "Internet fandoms existed before Harry Potter".

[(Anonymous)]

The most factually provable portion of that statement being "nearly of the founders of AO3 were members of that list ten years earlier", if hp4gu hadn't existed AO3 if it existed at all would be very different.

(other reasons include 'hp4gu got lots of mainstream press coverage right when increased internet access meant ordinary people could see it in the news and be a member five minutes later, and was thus a starting point for many individual fans who would not have discovered organized fandom on their own and for the modern visibilty of fandom and all the changes it's brought".)

[(Anonymous)]

AO3 is not all of fandom, or even the majority of it. Or even a sizeable minority. You are dealing with a limited experience pool, and the AO3 echo chamber.

[(Anonymous)]

DA

What would you say is a larger influence that isn't an echo chamber? FF.net and Wattpad are big websites, sure, but they can't exactly be traced back to a single fandom the way AO3 can.

[(Anonymous)]

That's the point, there was no real single point that created modern internet fandom. In syncretised from many, many, many different sources.

[(Anonymous)]

X-Files newsgroups, the fix review mailing lists, and Gossamer.

God, millennials are more insufferable than boomers lol.

[(Anonymous)]

You think Gossamer had a bigger influence on modern fanfic culture than efiction did? Wow. Hate to tell you this but Gossamer didn't really lead to anything but Gossamer. If modern fic archives can be traced to Gossamer I'm afriad it's via it inspiring some of the HP archives. But there really was never another archive that did what Gossamer did.

(the invention of shipping on the xf lists obviously had a huge influence. But most of the terminology and stuff around modern shipping other than the word "shipping" developed post-HP or pre-xf.)

[(Anonymous)]

They’re really not, you’re just full of it. I say this as a Gen X’er: There’s nobody worse than Boomers. Definitely not Gen X’ers or Millennials.

[(Anonymous)]

You say that, but I get out of the AO3 echo chamber and keep running into AO3.

My paleontology podcast brings up AO3.

My UFO news site references AO3.

My extremely stuck-up Worldcon-attending Asimov-stanning SF lit blogs link me to AO3 fic.

My oldfandom independent archives are either talking to Open Doors or on Squidge, which is... running the AO3 software.

My current fandom was all Wattpad all the time two years ago but it has shifted over to AO3 as it's grown (and is now one of the biggest fandoms there.)

I want to live in a world where all of fandom isn't unduly influenced by AO3! That was not the point of AO3! I keep failing to find those parts you're talking about, though.

Except the bitter parts who constantly complain about the AO3 echo chamber and/or evil ficwriters, but they're also heavily shaped by AO3, as evidenced by the constant bitte4 complaining.

(But and I said above it's not just the archive, it's the way hp4gu, as the most visible part of hp online fandom when the HP obsession really hit the fan c. 2000, was the vanguard of the mainstreaming of fandom which really has changed literally everything in fandom even for people who've never heard of AO3 or HP.)

Harry Pottet isn't all of fandom and never will be but you can't deny the huge effect it's had on everything about how fandom happens without completely denying reality.

[(Anonymous)]

Totally random anon:

What's this AO3 echo chamber? Personally, it's where I find the most fic for most of my fandoms (outside of particular archives). Fanfic net was my first large archive, I've gotten on Wattpad recently (and it's full of youths having fun, which I won't shit on) but I find in terms of quality, (excluding ship specific archives) I find more (if only because there's so much available) on AO3. Tumblr is a bit wily to navigate and the long type of fics I like aren't usually there.

So just curious as to what that echo chamber is. This is the maximum amount of fandom chat I participate (on this site), so if there's something more on Twitter or Tumblr I wouldn't know. I will say I miss the LJ comms and challenges, but nobody's on there for my current fandoms/the reach isn't the same.

[(Anonymous)]

Seconding this question.

[(Anonymous)]

+1

[(Anonymous)]

You credit Potter with too great an influence.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think the scope and influence of Potter on early online fannishness can be overstated, TBH. It's right up there with 60's Housewise Trek Fans.

Cool as it is to hate JKR now, and rightly so, the impact her work had on fandom back when it was new was genuinely, non-hyperbolically game-changing.

[(Anonymous)]

Trek fandom was massive on the internet long before Potter too. And for the longest time the biggest fandoms on the internet, even during the Potter era, was fucking Ranma and Sailor goddamn Moon. At one point Potter was playing runner up to even Daria. I get that you probably came onto the internet with Potter, so it must seem very big and influential to you, but it played second fiddle for a long-long-long time and was influenced more by those fandoms than it did influencing on its own.

[(Anonymous)]

NAYRT

Not to be a pedant here, but the claim is not that Harry Potter was the first fandom on the Internet, the claim is that Harry Potter fandom was influential on subsequent Internet fandoms (presumably meaning shippy-fanwork-fandom specifically) in a way that Star Trek, Ranma and Sailor Moon fandoms weren't.

You can agree with that or disagree with that, but the fact that Ranma and Sailor Moon are older doesn't really address the point. If you think that Ranma and Sailor Moon influenced HP fandom - how so? In what specific ways did it influence them?

[(Anonymous)]

If you are gonna keep shifting the goal posts everytime it is pointed out fandom comes from many sources, then yeah okay. You win, fella.

[(Anonymous)]

And I absolutely fucking disagree with this entire argument because I was active in internet fandom before Harry Potter was even published. The first real influences were usenet newsgroups, and the megafandom presence was Trek first, then Star Wars blew up around the release of the Special Editions prior to Epsiode 1. In slash terms, though, the juggernauts that took irl slash fan behavior and dialed it up to 11 were Highlander, and then Sentinal. Babylon 5 was mostly meta-rehashers, though there was some pretty good fic floating around too. It skewed more toward meta compared to the absolute batshittery of Highlander slash.

What I want to know is just what "modern internet fandom" trends the original anon claims were started by this HP archive and I'm bettin dollars to doughnuts I can point to the exact shrine sites, communities, and mailing lists that predated it that were already doing those trends. If you don't know about the drama in the Master/Apprentice archive or the flame wars on alt.trek then that's fine, but don't make a claim that your pet archive/shrine/zine of choice was the one that started the fire.

[(Anonymous)]

DA

Sailor Moon I can believe, but could you point me toward evidence that Ranma and Daria were comparable to Harry Potter in terms of online presence? I came to fandom with HP, so I'm aware of my own biases, but I've also been a huge anime fan to the point of watching practically every show that came out around the same time as HP craze, and the only ones which came close to HP would be The Big Three (Naruto, Bleach and One Piece) and Pokemon. Ranma was merely a blip on the radar by this time, it wasn't even the most popular show by Rumiko Takahashi. Are you sure that you're not the one who is biased and locked in an echo chamber?

[(Anonymous)]

I would believe there was a time when both Ranma and Daria were bigger than HP, because they hit their prime right about when the first HP book came out, so they would have been huge (for the time) when HP was just starting to grow. Ranma was definitely the most popular anime among non-casuals when I was in high school, Inuyasha was only just starting. (Dragonball and Sailor Moon were bigger generally but not among people who ID'd as otaku.)

It's really hard to provide evidence for that though because the big archives in those fandoms completely disappeared long ago (since back then we didn't have all the fannish infrastructure-building that was... led by a lot of those hp4gu people, long before AO3...)

[(Anonymous)]

DA Don't know about Daria, but Ranma was huge just pre-Potter, and so was Gundam Wing a few years before that. I wasn't even in those fandoms and I know a surprising amount about them.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think anyone is claiming HP was the only influence or that no other fandoms mattered or whatever else you're hearing. I came up via Ranma fandom! But HP absolutely changed everything in a way other fandoms didn't. Star Trek in the early 70s is really the closest comparison to a fandom that invented nothing but changed everything. Maybe Sherlock Holmes.

I could also maybe point to Buffy fandom as having a similar influence, positioned at a similar time re: the internet, but even it didn't really change the mainstream discourse.

Definitely 90s anime/manga fandom had a probably bigger influence on the shape and direction of, let's say, geekery as a whole. That also changed everything. But even then I'd argue in terms of modern internet fandom specifically HP is at least as important. And there's certainly no specific group of online anime fans I can point to as important as the hp4gu alums were (many of whom were in other fandoms before! one thing it did was bring those worlds together!) Most of the huge infrastructural influence I see from 90s anime fandom is actually cons. Where it is still probably the hugest influence (and I'm two degrees separation from a lot of those early conrunners too actually. Most of whom have AO3 accounts btw.)

[(Anonymous)]

Hmm, I wasn't part of it either (didn't speak English at the time) but when I think of 90s anime fandom I think of huge webrings before anything else. Pretty sure there was at least one community revolving around websites like animewallpapers, otakuworld or ANN (forums? Yahoo mailing lists? Oekaki?? Pretty sure Gendou.com invites were handed out *somewhere*) even though I wasn't part of it. In short, I know there was *something* big before the Gaia vs 4chan early 00s days but I can't remember what it was.

[(Anonymous)]

I mean, it had a massive impact on online fandom, but online fandom was not new. I'd been online for maybe six years by 2000, and was in fandom the whole time.