[ 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)]

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)]

...the statement that was objected to is "Internet fandom as it currently exists can be traced, in a very real way, to a mailing list". That does not imply it was the only source or even the largest source (or even say anything about Harry Potter fandom as a whole! A lot of people on that list were in a lot of fandoms!)

Stop hiding the goalposts behind your back and claiming somebody else must have moved them.

[(Anonymous)]

Another NAYRT

Nobody is moving the goal posts, you just have abysmal reading comprehension.

[(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)]

Original anon: it's not an archive, it's a mailing list.

I didn't claim it started any trends.

I claimed a lot of things we take for granted in modern internet fandom as a whole can be traced back to interaction between people who were members of that list (Many of whom started in Trek or Highlander or Star Wars fandom! Or X-men or Buffy or anime!) It was a place where older fans, many of whom had already been in other fandoms but were getting into Harry Potter, took refuge from the kid-majority spaces elsewhere, so it became a mixing point for all sorts of trends that had happened in other fandoms. And created a core group of fans (well, several core groups really, different friend groups went in different directions after) of a certain generation, many of whom stayed in fandom after leaving Harry Potter and built on the things and friend networks that started there. In that specific mailing list, not "harry potter fandom" as an abstract thing.

I promise I wasn't trying to claim Harry Potter was the only important fandom! I was calling out a specific cabal of SMOFs, many of whom met on that list (many of whom are still busily SMOF'ing along), in passing while trying to make a point about adult fans making themselves spaces in kid-heavy fandoms and how universal that is in all fandoms.

[(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)]

Totally random but, where I live Fushigi Yuugi was the big one among "otaku" .

[(Anonymous)]

da who has been in internet fandom since the 90s and yeah, Fushigi Yuugi, Gundam Wing, and Ronin Warriors were huge on the internet back in the day, along with Sailor Moon.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT was thinking of Gundam Wing too.

[moonsweet]

Don't forget Inuyasha!

I wonder what it says that I've been rewatching Wing recently, did a Sailor Moon rewatch a few years ago, and plan on binging Inuyasha soon because of the new show? Aside from 'massive nostalgia kick' anyway.

[(Anonymous)]

Fushigi Yuugi was a bit later than Ranma, at least in my region - didn't get an official English release until 1999, which was past peak for Ranma. I was neck-deep in webcomics fandom instead by thst point and mostly missed it. (Gundam Wing was earlier, it was old and uncool by the time I discovered Ranma.)

[(Anonymous)]

It might just be where you live, but it’s odd to me that Gundam Wing, which came out in 1995, was old and uncool by the time you got into the much more in style Rannma. Which started in 1987, and went on to the early 90s, with the anime starting in 1989 and doing the same in the 90s. It’s not just odd because of the release dates, which can definitely be explained by what gets brought over and when. It’s really only odd because things that look older and have more degradation than modern film and animation don’t usually catch on much when they’re brought over somewhere as they would if they were brought there sooner. That’s been the experience with my anime fandoms at least, although my experiences observing that reaction aren’t universal, and I should have realized that. I wish my anime fandoms could have been more accepting of older anime, I’m still mad City Hunter didn’t get popular when it was finally localized here in the early 2000s!

[(Anonymous)]

Huh, that is weird! I am almost certainly getting Gundam Wing confused with the older Mobile Suit Gundam shows, and possibly the old uncoolness of those carried over to the new show with the people I was getting my anime through - I was never really into the mecha stuff generally.

(None of us were really very online at that point, we were passing around VHS tapes hand-to-hand and through cons, some of them fansubbed or bootlegged or not translated at all.)

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, okay, that is definitely understandable!

[(Anonymous)]

(Secret OP who also happens to be the author of some of the replies above) Makes sense. I was into Sailor Moon and not into mecha myself but pretty sure that the "crazy yaoi & bishounen loving crowd" (that's what I thought of 'em, how fast the night changes, etc) was into Gundam Wing. And Fushigi Yuugi felt like "Sailor Moon for older preteens" to me at least. And Ranma felt like something that had always existed. Like Video Girl Ai.

But I do think that popular anime fandoms would differ a lot based on where you lived or, in other words, what would air in your local TV. I wonder about English-speaking fandom. Of course, yeah, Sailor Moon and DBZ were huge everywhere but I don't think it's accurate to say that "self-ID otaku people" weren't into them. I think they were, just like "everyone" would be into the Big Three years later (this I remember clearly).

But I don't think anime ever had the same kind of reach as Harry Potter or even LotR (unless we're talking Pokemon which is something else but Pokemon *fandom* has always been that weird furry beast).

[(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.