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People have been tossing around terms like “Old School” vs. “New School,” and Warm & Fuzzy” vs. “Cold and Prickly” to attempt to describe the shift that seems to have occurred/be occurring in some segments of fandom.
From the grand Bitchy Old Fan wisdom generated by five years in fandom, with the aid of a friend who’s spent ten years in fandom, I present a slightly different categorising system.
First Wave Fandom: Fanfic what was in zines.
Second Wave Fandom: Fandom what was on mailing lists.
Third Wave Fandom: Fandom what is on livejournal.
These waves aren’t by any means mutually exclusive—zines and mailing lists are still around, as are many fans who got their starts in zines or listservs—but the way fanfic is shared and disseminated and the way people enter fandom has changed with each “new wave.”
Now, I’m about to go one about some fannish history that doesn’t always involve me, and start making sweeping generalisations, so be aware that I may be theorising with insufficient data.
Back in the days of zines, you had to be a seriously dedicated fan to even discover that fandom existed, let alone to write for it. And reader response was much slower and involved actual with-a-postage-stamp mail—and, due to the nature of zine publishing, long fics tended to be published in one piece, not serially. Zine fic, judging by the scads of old Starsky & Hutch and Real Ghostbusters fic I’ve read, leans heavily toward longer (30 pages or more) fics with either a classic slash first time plot, or an action gen plot (or an action plot and slash, something SH fic is particularly good at delivering). And hurt/comfort. I swear to God, every zine fic I’ve ever read that wasn’t a parody has involved some level of hurt/comfort. It’s glorious. And also All About The Character Squee, and the OTP, and the emotional gratification. People don’t go to the effort to produce and distribute a zine—much less shell out actual money for one—unless they’ve got a certain level of investment in the fandom, or in the kinks (like h/c) that first wave fandom catered to. And zine fandoms, as far as I can tell, seemed to have a very tightknit community, which only makes sense in a world where other fans need to know your physical mailing address.
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cschick's comment further down the thread: In between the zines and the mailing lists, there was usenet. From 1993-1996, I'd say, you'd have been almost guaranteed to find a newsgroup for your fandom--probably 2, one for discussion, one for fan fiction--but not necessarily a mailing list. Mailing lists were expensive propositions until 1996/1997--they required (a) owning a server and a pipe, (b) paying a ISP quite a bit of money for the list, or (c) being "in" at a university that had a server that provided free mailing lists. I remember some lists that existed pre-1997/1998 bouncing from server to server, searching for one that would continue to support them. Then came egroups.
Usenet had a different attitude than the mailing lists--they were more of a free-for-all, because you didn't have a list owner or server admin to answer to, especially in the alt.* hierarchy. Many people migrated to mailing lists when they became more widely available because they couldn't stand the attitude--the fact that there was no one in control--of usenet
With the advent of mailing lists [ETA: And newsgroups like alt.startrek.creative and that X-files one], fandom became more accessible, as well as faster (you can get feedback overnight, none of this Letter of Comment stuff!), and posting WIPs as they were being written became feasible—and hey, presto, reader response can begin actually shaping the creative process as a fic is being written (which I understand is what made some of the Sentinal smarm so over-the-top). Fandom also got a heavy influx of younger fans, since it was now online for free and you no longer had to travel to conventions and fork over cash to get fic. I’ve been on several mailing lists, and there were always several on-going “serial” fics being posted, again with scads of melodrama and action, if not always as much h/c as I could wish (except in Magnificent Seven Fandom. Mag7 has loads of h/c, lots of action-y gen plots, and is the best fandom on earth). And since many lists are character or pairing specific, there was also a heavy emphasis on OTPs and OTCs. Mailing lists and groups, as far as I am aware, are also the place where headers/labels were popularised. Zines have always had a certain level of content description, but I don’t remember seeing the sort of formal Title: Pairing: Warning: etc. format headers in older zines. And on a mailing list, which generally has a moderator, like most lj comms, there’s usually a set of rules one must conform to, or risk getting banned.
With lj, what fandom seems to me to have gained is connectedness—via friendslists and metafandom and fandonwank and a host of other multifandom forums, it’s now possible to be exposed to other people’s fandoms without going out and looking for them. There’s always been ties between various fandoms (multifandom conventions like MediaWest, multifandom zines put out in smaller fandoms, people who wrote for several tv shows…) but now it takes a lot less effort to be a fannish butterfly. When you subscribe to a yahoogroup, you aren’t always aware of what’s going on on other yahoogroups. Also, with speedy audience-response now an ingrained part of fandom, and with less effort involved in the posting/finding/reading of fic, shorter fics and ficlets have taken off.
What it’s lost, in some circles, is the sense of community that belonging to a mailing list—much less attending cons and knowing one another in person—can foster. There are people in fandom now who truly don’t view themselves as members of a community, and when they interact with people who do think of themselves as part of a fannish whole, misunderstandings occur (witness the debates over the need for warnings and pairing labels, with one side saying “but it’s only courteous, Ray,” and the other side saying “Fuck courtesy, Fraser. Let’s just kick them in the head.”). Also, I think there are a lot more of what I would call casual fans now; people who enjoy and appreciate fandom as a whole, but who may not have quite the same level of dedication to a particular fandom/set of characters that is needed in order to, say, write Man From Uncle fic for forty years after the show ended. People who are here more for the intellectual stimulation than the emotional gratification and squee (not that first and second wave fandom didn’t have intellectual fans, and not that there aren’t deeply emotionally invested third wave fans).
Also, with the advent of lj, where communities are still moderated and, well, communal, but one’s own lj is one’s own personal forum, people don’t have to follow the same sort of rules that mailing lists required (not that they always follow/followed them on yahoogroups or other lists, which have their own share of flame wars and wank). Some people may feel more able to share their opinions and thinky-thoughts, some may forget that other people are capable of seeing their non-locked posts and say things they probably shouldn’t have. And meta has really taken off and become popular and prevalent. Which I enjoy, being an English major at heart despite the History/MLS master degree I’m chasing.
I’m somewhere between a second and a third-wave fan, but as a hard-core h/c junkie (I had a h/c kink as far back as elementary school, when I was a wee little girl who hadn’t even begun to care about slash or het or sex of any sort), I really like the type of fic first wave fandom seems to have so frequently produced. I love 300k h/c epics. I like action-y gen plots. I adore happy endings and emotional catharsis and melodrama. God I love melodrama, whether it’s Captain Blood or Tosca or Flamingo’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” Depressing, “realist” stuff like Kat Alison’s “End of the Road,” or wacky, OOC SGA crackfic leaves me utterly cold, but characters dying in each other’s arms, Elizabeth kissing Jack and then chaining him to the Black Pearl’s mast, Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp striding toward the OK Corral with their coats flapping in the wind, Enjolras and Grantaire dying on the barricades, Sawyer trekking through the jungle with a septic shoulder wound, Kate shouting that she loves Sawyer to save him from torture, Wesley and Buttercup’s final kiss, torture, fighting, fencing, escapes, True Love, miracles… that’s what my fannish squee is all about (actually, that’s what I not so secretly think all fiction should be about). I could care less about streamlined, post-modern, “underwritten” stuff, regardless of how clever it is. Unless it’s written by Neil Gaiman, I’m unlikely to read that sort of thing more than once. For me, fiction is all about emotional gratification, whether it’s fanfic or 19th century novels or movies or opera, and I have no shame about it. This, I understand, makes me something of an anomaly among newer, third wave fans.
From the grand Bitchy Old Fan wisdom generated by five years in fandom, with the aid of a friend who’s spent ten years in fandom, I present a slightly different categorising system.
First Wave Fandom: Fanfic what was in zines.
Second Wave Fandom: Fandom what was on mailing lists.
Third Wave Fandom: Fandom what is on livejournal.
These waves aren’t by any means mutually exclusive—zines and mailing lists are still around, as are many fans who got their starts in zines or listservs—but the way fanfic is shared and disseminated and the way people enter fandom has changed with each “new wave.”
Now, I’m about to go one about some fannish history that doesn’t always involve me, and start making sweeping generalisations, so be aware that I may be theorising with insufficient data.
Back in the days of zines, you had to be a seriously dedicated fan to even discover that fandom existed, let alone to write for it. And reader response was much slower and involved actual with-a-postage-stamp mail—and, due to the nature of zine publishing, long fics tended to be published in one piece, not serially. Zine fic, judging by the scads of old Starsky & Hutch and Real Ghostbusters fic I’ve read, leans heavily toward longer (30 pages or more) fics with either a classic slash first time plot, or an action gen plot (or an action plot and slash, something SH fic is particularly good at delivering). And hurt/comfort. I swear to God, every zine fic I’ve ever read that wasn’t a parody has involved some level of hurt/comfort. It’s glorious. And also All About The Character Squee, and the OTP, and the emotional gratification. People don’t go to the effort to produce and distribute a zine—much less shell out actual money for one—unless they’ve got a certain level of investment in the fandom, or in the kinks (like h/c) that first wave fandom catered to. And zine fandoms, as far as I can tell, seemed to have a very tightknit community, which only makes sense in a world where other fans need to know your physical mailing address.
From
cschick's comment further down the thread: In between the zines and the mailing lists, there was usenet. From 1993-1996, I'd say, you'd have been almost guaranteed to find a newsgroup for your fandom--probably 2, one for discussion, one for fan fiction--but not necessarily a mailing list. Mailing lists were expensive propositions until 1996/1997--they required (a) owning a server and a pipe, (b) paying a ISP quite a bit of money for the list, or (c) being "in" at a university that had a server that provided free mailing lists. I remember some lists that existed pre-1997/1998 bouncing from server to server, searching for one that would continue to support them. Then came egroups.Usenet had a different attitude than the mailing lists--they were more of a free-for-all, because you didn't have a list owner or server admin to answer to, especially in the alt.* hierarchy. Many people migrated to mailing lists when they became more widely available because they couldn't stand the attitude--the fact that there was no one in control--of usenet
With the advent of mailing lists [ETA: And newsgroups like alt.startrek.creative and that X-files one], fandom became more accessible, as well as faster (you can get feedback overnight, none of this Letter of Comment stuff!), and posting WIPs as they were being written became feasible—and hey, presto, reader response can begin actually shaping the creative process as a fic is being written (which I understand is what made some of the Sentinal smarm so over-the-top). Fandom also got a heavy influx of younger fans, since it was now online for free and you no longer had to travel to conventions and fork over cash to get fic. I’ve been on several mailing lists, and there were always several on-going “serial” fics being posted, again with scads of melodrama and action, if not always as much h/c as I could wish (except in Magnificent Seven Fandom. Mag7 has loads of h/c, lots of action-y gen plots, and is the best fandom on earth). And since many lists are character or pairing specific, there was also a heavy emphasis on OTPs and OTCs. Mailing lists and groups, as far as I am aware, are also the place where headers/labels were popularised. Zines have always had a certain level of content description, but I don’t remember seeing the sort of formal Title: Pairing: Warning: etc. format headers in older zines. And on a mailing list, which generally has a moderator, like most lj comms, there’s usually a set of rules one must conform to, or risk getting banned.
With lj, what fandom seems to me to have gained is connectedness—via friendslists and metafandom and fandonwank and a host of other multifandom forums, it’s now possible to be exposed to other people’s fandoms without going out and looking for them. There’s always been ties between various fandoms (multifandom conventions like MediaWest, multifandom zines put out in smaller fandoms, people who wrote for several tv shows…) but now it takes a lot less effort to be a fannish butterfly. When you subscribe to a yahoogroup, you aren’t always aware of what’s going on on other yahoogroups. Also, with speedy audience-response now an ingrained part of fandom, and with less effort involved in the posting/finding/reading of fic, shorter fics and ficlets have taken off.
What it’s lost, in some circles, is the sense of community that belonging to a mailing list—much less attending cons and knowing one another in person—can foster. There are people in fandom now who truly don’t view themselves as members of a community, and when they interact with people who do think of themselves as part of a fannish whole, misunderstandings occur (witness the debates over the need for warnings and pairing labels, with one side saying “but it’s only courteous, Ray,” and the other side saying “Fuck courtesy, Fraser. Let’s just kick them in the head.”). Also, I think there are a lot more of what I would call casual fans now; people who enjoy and appreciate fandom as a whole, but who may not have quite the same level of dedication to a particular fandom/set of characters that is needed in order to, say, write Man From Uncle fic for forty years after the show ended. People who are here more for the intellectual stimulation than the emotional gratification and squee (not that first and second wave fandom didn’t have intellectual fans, and not that there aren’t deeply emotionally invested third wave fans).
Also, with the advent of lj, where communities are still moderated and, well, communal, but one’s own lj is one’s own personal forum, people don’t have to follow the same sort of rules that mailing lists required (not that they always follow/followed them on yahoogroups or other lists, which have their own share of flame wars and wank). Some people may feel more able to share their opinions and thinky-thoughts, some may forget that other people are capable of seeing their non-locked posts and say things they probably shouldn’t have. And meta has really taken off and become popular and prevalent. Which I enjoy, being an English major at heart despite the History/MLS master degree I’m chasing.
I’m somewhere between a second and a third-wave fan, but as a hard-core h/c junkie (I had a h/c kink as far back as elementary school, when I was a wee little girl who hadn’t even begun to care about slash or het or sex of any sort), I really like the type of fic first wave fandom seems to have so frequently produced. I love 300k h/c epics. I like action-y gen plots. I adore happy endings and emotional catharsis and melodrama. God I love melodrama, whether it’s Captain Blood or Tosca or Flamingo’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” Depressing, “realist” stuff like Kat Alison’s “End of the Road,” or wacky, OOC SGA crackfic leaves me utterly cold, but characters dying in each other’s arms, Elizabeth kissing Jack and then chaining him to the Black Pearl’s mast, Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp striding toward the OK Corral with their coats flapping in the wind, Enjolras and Grantaire dying on the barricades, Sawyer trekking through the jungle with a septic shoulder wound, Kate shouting that she loves Sawyer to save him from torture, Wesley and Buttercup’s final kiss, torture, fighting, fencing, escapes, True Love, miracles… that’s what my fannish squee is all about (actually, that’s what I not so secretly think all fiction should be about). I could care less about streamlined, post-modern, “underwritten” stuff, regardless of how clever it is. Unless it’s written by Neil Gaiman, I’m unlikely to read that sort of thing more than once. For me, fiction is all about emotional gratification, whether it’s fanfic or 19th century novels or movies or opera, and I have no shame about it. This, I understand, makes me something of an anomaly among newer, third wave fans.
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