You keep talking about the origins of AO3 as this group effort by an actual group of people who were friends and who spent time discussing this with each other in person. It's kind of blowing my mind. Is there a post or a journal somewhere that specifically keeps record of this?
No, that’s mean, I know you’re serious. It’s just flabbergasting how much fandom has expanded and how much there isn’t a direct link to the past.
Astolat and Cesperanza floated the idea at Vividcon and various places, I think, though I wasn’t going to cons in that era. We were all on LJ in those days, and Astolat made a big post nailing her theses to the door. Discussion in the comments was instant and prolonged.
A LJ com was set up to discuss. It was later renamed to otw_news, but if you go all the way back to the beginning, you can see brainstorming mess instead of official news posts.
Fun fact, we never intended to call it AO3. There was a whole call for name suggestions, but nothing was as evocative as astolat’s original post title referencing Virginia Woolf. (For those who haven’t thought about it, AO3’s name is a reference to A Room of One’s Own.)
That’s how many people cared at the time: a few hundred. Maybe a thousand if you count lurkers, but frankly, that community was not as lurkery as now. It wasn’t just ten friends. It was a community effort. But what “our” community looked like at the time was vastly different. It was six degrees of Kevin Bacon astolat, not a vast sea of strangers like fic fandom on AO3 is now.
Here’s an early post suggesting we ban the under 18s from the site entirely. Pity we didn’t do so, given the rise of antis.
Here’s the invite to a fundraising party at astolat’s in NYC that following Halloween. I dressed as Amanda from Highlander, not very well.
You can tell we knew each other by looking at those comments on astolat’s initial post. You can also tell how discussion-based that part of fandom was back in 2007.
The way my tumblr is now with a ton of text, back and forth, and hopping around between threads of conversation, all featuring a consistent set of faces, is very much like LJ. Most of tumblr is not.
This is important info to put out there, and I constantly forget that “fandom” as it is now is nothing like the community we had then. This is a good resource for understanding what was going on with the creation of AO3 in particular, but it’s also a great example of why older fans say that we miss the Livejournal era of fandom so much.
AO3 is the result of long discussions, hard work, and a dedicated community of fans. Though it isn’t is a social media site (and it was never intended to be), it is the only place now that sometimes feels like how the fannish community used to be on LJ–when a good discussion gets going in the comments on a story. But AO3 is for fanfiction et al, and therefore is limited in discussion subjects.
(The ads you’ll encounter if you follow those links, though? Did not exist when we were there and were one of the reasons we abandoned the site–not the most important reasons by a long shot as you’ll understand if you read more about why AO3 was created, but they were a factor.)
We were a collection of communities, with some-to-significant overlap in members. Fanfiction writers were not “content creators,” and people who didn’t write fanfiction were not “the lucky audience who should be soooooooooooo grateful that writers deigned to gift us with their incredible talent.” We knew each other. Many of us met each other IRL after meeting through fandom (once fandom shifted to the internet there was some hesitancy at first about meeting “online” friends, but that was quickly gotten over). We went to conventions together. We had lunch and dinner and parties and meet-ups IRL outside of conventions.
If you take a wander around from even just that one LJ community (click on a username to check out their personal LJ), you can see how discussions would branch off without excluding anyone the way they do on Tumblr. If you wanted to share something you saw on someone else’s LJ, you just linked to it, and people followed the link to read it and join in the discussion (or just lurk). The force of Tumblr splintering is an active barrier to creating real communities.
I really miss LJ. I miss the connection I felt to my community there.
#fandom is supposed to be a community – not a two-tiered system of sellers and buyers
’24 sprints over to another shelf where he begins pulling ammunition from boxes and lining it on the shelf in straight, precise lines. His attention to detail is quite similar to ‘67’s, only his comes from an eagerness to assist in any way he can and not cos of fear.
Cody’s new to this whole Marshal Commander idea, and he’s not even sure if he wants the title—a series of glimpses that made Cody want to be Commander and a few that didn’t.
Cody sets down his helmet with a muted thud wincing as it pierces the quiet quarters. Day one has already brought far more responsibility than he ever foresaw and he wonders if someone else should be in charge.
Summary: Eleven years after the rise of the Empire, a favor to a friend sends Obi-Wan traveling through the multiverse. He encounters different versions of the galaxy and of himself—including one in which Anakin never turned to the dark side.
Obi-Wan and this Light Anakin are forced to work together to stop the creation of a disastrous Empire weapon. But as they move through different versions of reality, the timelines become more and more twisted—and the harder it is to distinguish who they are from who they might have been.
A story that explores the relationship between Obi-Wan and Satine; the choices they made, how those affected their lives, and the reassurance they give themselves that they did the right thing.
Decided to do some reading today and picked up this off Comixology:
Since DC has decided fleecing customers is the way to make $$$ (I pay $7.99 a month for DC Universe Infinite but now they want $115 right up front for Ultra to access comics like this and no, not in my budget)
You don’t own fanfics. They’re inherently public domain because they aren’t your IP. Agree or disagree with AI, there are no grounds for “protection” from AI because it isn’t your IP to begin with. That’s what you chose when you chose this medium
Okay, you get an answer, because at least you took the effort to write your ask out properly, even if you are hiding behind the grey, sunglassed circle.
Do I, or any fanfic author for that matter, have any legal claims to our work? No, not really, no. (Although if someone took a fic, filed off the serial number–deleted the fandom specific elements–, and then had it published for financial gain, yeah, that would be a case.)
BUT
Fandoms are built on a social contract that says we respect each others work, the effort people put into their art. We don’t steal or disrespect the work of our peers. By feeding people’s fanworks to AI you both steal and disprect it, and we need to make people realize that before it’s too late–before fandom falls apart, because there will be no more real, actual fanworks.
Troll Slayer, Color Pencil Addict, Servant to a House of Furry Overlords, Annoying Untalented Cunt who writes fanfiction and draws whatever shit she chooses
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