Summary

From the webrings and blogs of the early '00s to the Discord servers of modern fandom, technology has been an invisible force in shaping communities and the way we interact online. CJ and mabbees talk on the creation, death and rebirth cycles of old fandoms and what we can learn from them. We made a Yesterweb Zine summary of this talk in August 2021.

Resource List

• Fanlore.org
• Fan is a Tool-Using Animal. Talk by Maciej Cegłowski, the founder of Pinboard, at the dConstruct conference.
• Pixel sprite credits to nostalgic.neocities.org
• All the extra examples and data that didn't fit into our talk we streamed on Twitch.
• FujoCoded - active community of fujoshi/fujin/fudanshi fan coders
• Resource list for fan coders and hackers

Transcript

This talk was given in 2021, but since then, some things mentioned in the talk have changed. There are notes below in parentheses () denoting notes made after the talk.

CJ (they/them): Good evening! Good afternoon to those of you who are in Asia.

mabbees (he/him): That's me!

CJ: My name is CJ, and this is mabbees. By day, I'm a software designer and design researcher who does ethnographic research into the way people use technology. And in the evening, I'm an indie game dev.

mabbees: And I'm three bunnies in a trenchcoat. For work, I mash buttons on keyboards and hope that it somehow turns into working code. It does, most of the time.

Slide: Four-up image of a Windows-XP inspired interface with blogs and chats and cool desktop backgrounds

CJ: The project that we're working on is Terranova, an interactive video game that takes place in the early 00's. In this game, you follow the lives of three fujoshis; EphemeralSmile, CherryGoRound as you chat them, befriend them, and discover yourself through a rich world of storytelling, love and friendship. You can check it out at playterranova.com. It's in beta right now, and it will be out this year (released in April 2022.)

So, why do a panel about history?

Slide: Understanding fandom through historical records and the tools people used

mabbees: As you can imagine from our retro-looking game, we've been very interested in what made the 2000's feel special and nostalgic. We've been taking a look at online history and the anthropology of fan culture around that time. What were the tools people were using online?

We don't have a definitive answer on what made the 2000s special, but we'd like to share some of our thoughts with you today.

Slide: Images of young people cosplaying (dressing up as a character), collapsed on the floor. Some scribbles on an arm that says, 'Michihiro Kuroda.'

CJ: In addition to being amateur historians, we actually lived through these times. It may not look like it now, but I'm the person cosplaying Ryuichi in this Gravitation group. Shoutout to the Gravitation panel that's happening later today (hosted by Carola).

Some of these people were folks that were hugely formative to my identity at the time. These are folks that I met at Otakon in 2004, and they are people I met online long before the convention. I still keep in touch with them today. Also, for some reason, I wrote the lead singer of Iceman (Mihihiro Kuroda)'s name on my arm...but anyway! I was sixteen.

mabbees: Nerrrrrd! (CJ laughs)

Slide: A timeline spanning from 1930's to 2020.

I'd like to start with a brief history of important events of fandom history in the United States. We can break this timeline into roughly three parts—the pre-internet days, the early internet up until about, say, 2007, and the the modern internet.

The reason why I like to take this zoomed out version of history is that it gives us a chance to notice patterns. Mostly today we'll be looking at the early internet, but let's take a look at the pre-internet fandom first.

Imagine you're a Star Trek fan in the 1970's. You've gone to your first Star Trek fan conventions and you've discovered there are people like you who "ship" Kirk and Spock. You get together and start writing this new, cool genre called slash. It was very novel at the time. You publish some fanzines, until one day, some of the other Star Trek fans start to notice. And some are really unhappy with you. In fact, even the show creators call you out.

"Gene and the executives at Paramount feel that slash is harmful to the Star Trek concepts as this was never the intention in creating this series."

Luckily, this story has a happy ending. In 1984, a group of slash writers got together and started their very own convention, IDICon. In a way, I think it's the precursor to FujoCon.

But we see this pattern happen in the early internet days as well; mostly on Geocities, LiveJournal and del.icio.us. Those aren't the only sites fans were using, but we feel they were a very influential part of the early fandom in the United States.

Slide: Lifecycle of a Fandom. A circular flow of 1. Finding a community, 2. Creative hacking, and 3. Resilience.

Our fan communities in the early internet follow a similar pattern. They form a community, do something creative together, and eventually respond to challenges and regroup.

CJ: Imagine you're a person, much like myself, who grew up in a conservative town in the United States. You have some friends who like anime, but they say, "like the weird stuff."

You like the weird stuff.

And you think you're the only one. And one day, the internet arrives at your home, on a CD-ROM entitled, "Try AOL Online. Thirty days free." (Sound of a gritty dial up modem plays.)

Let's go back to 1997.

An important part of finding people like you is signaling, "hey! I like this thing. Does anyone want to join me in liking this thing?" Geocities and Angelfire were sites that allowed anyone to make their own, personal pages or shrines for things they liked. But because they were all separate sites, they needed a way to link to each other and form communities. So Geocities had neighborhoods that different communities could rally around. For instance, computers, video and roleplaying games were located in Times Square, so if your site covered any of those interests, your site would be in the "Times Square" neighborhood. You could find other people who had interests like you.

mabbees: Anime, and anything "Far East" related topics were in the "Tokyo" neighborhood. I think we've come a long way since 1997 around cultural awareness.

CJ: This allowed people to find each other's webpages and view websites of people they didn't even know and get to know them a little bit better. These neighborhoods eventually were discontinued, but the popularity of the link list remains. For instance, here at FujoCon people are sharing their recommendations on Google Docs or link lists on people's personal sites.

The concept of webrings has persisted into the modern age. Having a community around say, Sailor Moon or Gundam Wing where different sites link to one another.

Slide: Many different animated GIF icons of anime characters; pixel art and badges.

Does anyone remember these or had any of these on their sites?

These are pixel sprites that you could add to your personal site that signalled the things you were into or the type of fan you were. For instance, if I was into Sailor Moon or a specific character in Sailor Moon, I might put these Sailor Moon sprites on my site. Or these Gundam Wing sprites, which I'm pretty sure I had at least Trowa and Quatre on my site. I probably had all of them. (laughs)

Pocket Bishonen is a site where you can "catch" sexy men by answering three-question quizzes about them; you could also challenge gyms by trying a 12-question quiz about the series. You can still find them at pocketbishonen.com and I will say that mabbees and I successfully caught all four of these Pocket Bishonen ourselves. (Sho from Moonchild, Inu Yasha, Homurai from Saiyuki, and Yuki from Fruits Basket)

You could also signal what you believed in; for instance, there was a "hentai-free" movement where people could signal that they didn't believe in having hentai or erotica in fandom.

mabbees: Or my favorite, the "Hentai Free Free" movement, which was a counter-movement to show your support for erotica and disdain for censorship.

CJ: So you found your community. You're lonely no longer. Now...what's next?

mabbees: And everyone got together on their private Discord servers, wrote fanfic, and published it on AO3. Except they didn't, because none of those things existed yet! Instead, we had to make the best out of the tools that we had at our disposal. To get creative and get hacking.

In doing research for Terranova, something I've been inspired by is how creative and ingenious the fandom community has been when it comes to using the online tools that they had available. CJ already mentioned cool things like Geocities and Pocket Bishonen.

Around this time you start seeing fans doing online roleplay together, either on IM or forums, or by posting it to their blogs. In 2021, it's easy for us to take that for granted, but nothing like that really existed before. Nothing like that could exist in the same way. And the tools we were using, they weren't ever designed for writing collaborative fiction. But people used them that way.

One of my favorite examples, and this is from late 2008, is the "askverse" which started off as a LiveJournal blog called, Ask Captain Jack." This was from the Torchwood fandom, so Captain Jack Harness is a favorite and sexually lascivious character. One fan started a blog where fans could ask anonymous questions using LiveJournal's ask box feature, and they would respond entirely in character as Captain Jack.

From: Captain Jack Harness
To: All Staff
Priority: Very High to Extremely High
Subject: TWO THOUGHTS

Kids, I know you're all sexily shoveling the space-snow off the space-Plass, but pay attention to two things:
1) I need more egg nog, my mug is empty! Christ, don't make me nog my own eggs. :-(
2) Check out this weird reading! It blip-blooped up on the Rift monitor when you were struggling into your space-snowpants...

A second example, and this comes from the late 00's, comes from the Warrior Cats fandom. If you're not in the know, Warrior Cats were a series of young adult novels and they had a really interesting and ingenious fan following—on the nook store.

Imagine you were a bored teen in the suburbs with nothing but books for entertainment. You're really into Warrior Cats. And you're not reading paperbacks, you're reading on your nook e-reader. Until one day, you realize you're not just holding a book, you're holding a roleplaying device. You check the Warrior Cats reviews and see roleplay happening there. You decide to respond. And they respond to you.

You're using an e-reader not how it was intended; it was intended for reading books and writing reviews—and it's not an elegant solution for what you're trying to do. A lot of the reviews end up being posted anonymously; you can't reply to them directly, your messages might get jumbled or out of order, but you go for it anyway. Because...

Slide: A sexy photo of Jeff Goldblum reclining with his shirt off; text says, "Fandom Finds a Way."

Fandom finds a way.

Third and final example of fan ingenuity comes from a site called del.icio.us. This was a site for tagging and bookmarking other websites. It was also one of the first social websites because you could make your tags public so that other users who followed you could see them; and you, in turn, could see other people's tags.

Slide: a simple bookmarking site, del.icio.us used tags like chekhov/sulu to denote pairings, D/s to denotate kink, chapters-read:12 to mark your place in the fanfic, and ^allthefeels for tagging "vibes" of a fanwork.

So fandom got real creative and in depth in how they used del.icio.us to tag things online. They started doing things like tagging bookmarks for fanfics or fanart using pairings like "harry/draco" or "chekhov/sulu." They also started tagging for content, for bookmarking, and tagging things with a comment or other things you want to say about a fic.

And what's cool about del.icio.us is that if you started typing in the search box, you could get auto suggest results. So if you started typing

pairing:

you could see

pairing:kirk/spock

or

pairing:harry/draco

and such, you could browse different pairings freely.

So it may not have been ideal but with the tools you have at your disposal you've hacked together a cool online fandom, you've found ways to make it work, and the fandom is flowing and you're jamming with your community until...

CJ: ...until shit goes down.

Eventually fan communities have to deal with some kind of reckoning. Two common sources of this tension are between 1) fan communities and the corporations that own the online spaces they use and 2) bad faith actors against those communities, or what you might call in modern parlance trolls.

So let's go back to the del.icio.us example. As we mentioned before, del.icio.us had a a lot of ways to tag content. In 2010 del.icio.us was purchased by the founders of YouTube and they made a change to del.icio.us that had monumental implications for the fandom. They got rid of a lot of features without bothering to see if people were using them as a way of renewing the service for "new users" and making it easy to use.

Be aware that a lot of the internet in this way has been gentrified (CJ Note: I initially used the word "gentrified" but a more accurate term is "dumbed down for scalability") for ease of use. The straw that broke the camel's back was that they got rid of the ability to type the slash character into the search box along...along with a bunch of other special characters that were really useful in the ways the fandom community had been tagging.

And how can you search for slash fiction if you don't have the slash key?

Slide: a gigantic Google spreadsheet entitled, "The Great Del.icio.us Migration"

Does anyone know what this is?

This is a testament to the resilience of fandom. When del.icio.us went down, the fan community got their spreadsheets and got to work. This is a broad list of different folks within the community posting where they're going to be going to next so that them and their friends will know where to move their links, or what sites are being migrated to where, and what some handle they're using on those sites.

The independent site Pinboard actually capitalized on this incident and poached fans. They reminded people, "hey, we still have the slash key." They also asked fans to contribute to a Google Document for feature requests...

mabbees: ...and boy did they.

CJ: A 50 page long list of feature requests. At some point Google Docs broke down because of the load of people editing the document. Fans created Pinboard and del.icio.us fan fiction which you can find on AO3.

Slide: a badge with text that reads, "I survived the LiveJournal Strikethrough of 2007."

Another example is the Strikethrough Incident on LiveJournal.

LiveJournal was a popular blogging site used largely within the early 2000's. I used it a lot; I was part of a big roleplay community on LiveJournal. This strikethrough incident in 2007 affected both me and lots of my friends. LiveJournal decided to update its Terms Of Service abruptly and to crack down on a number of blogs that it deemed "inappropriate."

Slide: text that reads, "rape, incest, and child abuse"

They wanted to ban these - and even if the intention was to prevent harm, the execution ended up banning sexual assault survivor communities, erotica sites, and fan sites like pornish_pixies which were part of the Harry Potter fandom.

Slide: An illustration of Draco Malfoy in a corset and thigh-highs

So who was behind the strikethrough incident? Even though the LiveJournal Strikethrough Incident was executed on by the LiveJournal staff, it was supposedly linked back to a series of complaints they received from a group called the "Warriors of Innocence."

The Warriors of Innocence were a far-right conservative group whose argument was that children viewing these blogs were being influenced by immoral behavior, so they took their issues directly to LiveJournal's founders. LiveJournal's knee-jerk reaction was a blanket ban.

From someone who has grown up in the U.S.—this isn't something new. The U.S. has always had moral panics started by ultra-conservative groups who are "just thinking of the children," especially when it comes to mass-produced media.

Slide: An image of the book, "Seduction of the Innocent" by Fredric Wertham

In 1954 Fredric Wertham wrote a book called The Seduction of the Innocent in response to the rise of superhero comics. He wrote:

"The Batman type of story may stimulate children to homosexual fantasies, the nature of which they may be unconscious."

Slide: A topless and muscular Bruce Wayne drawn by a gay artist in response to Wertham's accusations.

Notice here the focus on "the children" and a blatantly homophobic statement. To Fredric Wertham I want to say...thank you. Because of this rise in homophobia in superhero comics, the backlash was gay artists creating sexualized pictures of superheroes. These were the beginnings of queer superhero stories told by queer artists. It was the 1950's version of the Hentai Free Free movement.

So this is the circle of life and death of fan communities. Every round we travel, some things are gained, and some are lost.

For instance, instead of pixel dolls, we use avatars, cover photos, and bio text on our Twitter profiles. We talk about the fandoms we're into, the languages we can speak. We talk about our identities. We use a lot of emoji as shorthand.

mabbees: So many emoji.

CJ: We have Archive of Our Own, or AO3, a site created by fans for fans that has a really robust tagging system that not only allows us to search for series and pairing, but kink, themes, feelings...

mabbees: And we see fans using the tagging system in new and unexpected ways. Like, tagging to show off your writing style even before people have read your work. "Allegories and metaphors in my porn? It's more likely than you think."

Slide: text that reads, "homosexuality, incest, and pedophilia," with the "homosexuality" crossed out and replaced by "fetishization."

CJ: As for threats, the rhetoric has changed somewhat. Instead of pushing back against these...we've kept two. Now that it's not cool to be homophobic anymore, bad actors have started to use the words, 'fetishizing' of gay relationships.

Trans-exclusionary radical feminism has teamed up with ultra-conservatism to produce a new breed of bad faith actors, also known as antis. They may not agree completely, but they share the same goal of "protecting" women and children in online spaces.

Today's modern platforms are centralized; that means that everyone uses the same technology to post content. This is the part where things get lost. It means that if one platform goes down, say, Tumblr or Twitter, the entire fandom's history, its works, and its conversations can be lost in the blink of an eye.

mabbees: We might think that in 2021, something like that couldn't happen. After all, we have backup copies and archives of things, don't we?

...don't we?

The danger is still there; especially when we put all of our content on one corporate platform. It could still be lost; it is still vulnerable.

CJ: You see things like this in The Great Tumblr Purge. Twitter recently started authorizing payments to take micropayments and the erotic zine community has started to wonder if Twitter will force them out due to the great restrictions on adult content payment processors have. The erotic fan community may soon become a danger to Twitter's corporate interests.

mabbees: Payment processors would rather that content not exist on platforms where they take payments.

CJ: Some folks have started a new movement, called the Yesterweb. It's lobbying for more decentralized spaces like Web 1.0 and user privacy. It has a sense of community and accountability that fan communities feel like they had in the early 00's. This is actually a zine that will be coming out sometime this year, collaboratively put together by people who are interested Yesterweb—me being one of those people.

(CJ note: mabbees and I left the Yesterweb a year later following a dispute about allowing discussions of any adult content or kinks in their space—which, as we've mentioned in this talk, is critical to having a thriving fan space. This work has now been picked up by the wonderful volunteers at BobaBoard and FujoCoded.)

As for us, we made a game. To remind people of what the internet used to be like. To inspire people like us to get in touch with their friends long ago. And, for other generations who don't remember this time to get involved and get inspired.

mabbees: We'd like to share a little bit of our game with you today.

[Demo of Terranova—it was in beta when we demoed it, but you can play the full game now!]

CJ: We hope that we captured the spirit of the early 00's in our game.

You can join our Discord or follow us on Twitter at @playterranova. I hope you found this talk interesting.

mabbees: So we're going to go to Q&A next, yeah?

CJ: Yeah.

mabbees: While you are thinking about your questions—for those of you who were around in the early 00's, what were some of your favorite sites?

CJ: Anipike...Neopets...Quizilla, yes! It's funny that you mention Quizilla, because mabbees had it in the presentation and I said, "you should probably cut it because we have too many examples."

mabbees: We had lots of wonderful things we wanted to cram into this talk, but we held back. (chuckles)

Q: What early experiences drove you to create Terranova?

CJ: I'm going to tell you a good story, and then I'll tell you a sad story. The good story is that I have kept in touch with some of the folks I mentioned before; the ones I met online and then later at Otakon in 2003. They were part a of a Gravitation roleplay community I was a part of called Faith in Gravity, or FiG. It was really fun for all of us. We formed a lot of great relationships.

One of the people who was in this photo has been a lifelong friend since I was sixteen years old. That was close to eighteen years ago.

mabbees: They also made art for us for Terranova.

CJ: They made the art for one of the avatars and Dominique that we use in the game.

I found an old hard drive that had a lot of my old roleplay logs, and decided I was masochistic enough to read through these old logs. It's really quite humbling to read your old writing because you realize what a shit writer you were.

Around that time, I'd completed National Novel Writing Month and I thought, "alright, I'm going to try to write a story that has some roleplay elements." That was one key experience.

The bad story is that one of my friends in the roleplaying community, um...passed away when she was 27, and I was 24. We had been really close—at some point we had dated, and the news of her passing hit me really hard because sometimes when you're a part of fandom, the "person" in that online space doesn't feel like they could die, but they're a living, breathing, mortal human just like you.

I was really struggling with my grief and denial. Grief can be a really powerful creative force, and it can be used to mend the heart. In the very early stages of writing Terranova, I wrote a roleplay scene between her and myself, just like the ones we used to roleplay together back in the day.

Through this roleplay, two characters started coming out, which were Dominique and Eytan. They were the inspiration for the characters you see in Terranova today.

I hope that this is some way a tribute to her and the way that she was in online spaces.

mabbees: For my part, I wasn't particularly involved in roleplay in the 00's, but we've been doing a lot of roleplay as part of our writing process for Terranova. So in a way I'm getting to experience nostalgia for a thing I didn't even experience. It's been a lot of fun.

CJ: It's been fun pulling you into a world that you weren't originally a part of but are now a welcome member.

Q: Is there an acceptance in the younger crowd in the Yesterweb movement?

CJ: Yeah, we've seen young people in the Yesterweb. From what I've observed—and I'm what they call a geriatric millennial—in the younger crowd, I see a lot of people tired of being disconnected. I also see them getting involved on an anti-capitalist angle. They find that they're more drawn to sites that are operating together with their users.

mabbees: It's nice to know that some of the new spaces we're building won't get the rug pulled out from underneath us.

Q: Which dead sites do you want to revive?

mabbees: Less of a fan site, and it still persists online, but Homestarrunner.com. With Flash being dead, the stuff they're posting to YouTube just doesn't feel quite right. And the other is Anilinks, which I'm happy to say, is on Neocities now. It's back, baby!

CJ: One of the people in the chat is the person who revived that, so you should thank them.

Q: I was curious about the settings—do you have the option to do XP in silver mode?

CJ: Currently, the settings we have are adjusting the text size and muting sound effects. We're actively asking folks in the Discord on what Settings they'd like to have. Later, we're talking about getting Terranova translated into Brazilian Portuguese for the Brazilian communities.

(Note: We released a One Year Anniversary Edition to Terranova that has Silver Mode, and as for the translation...well, let's just say if things go well, we'll have some good news in 2025.)

mabbees: One of the things that has been important to me in building Terranova is that I'd like it to be fully accessible by only mouse or only keyboard. It'd be great if people using screen reader software could play our game.

That being said, we need more QA testers for accessibility!

Q: Back in the day, I felt like anonymity and aliases were much more integral to the fandom experience. Do you think that those things are still primary parts of fan culture today? Would fandom improve with more or less of it?

CJ: It's funny that you mention that, because I just did a talk on how the Real Name Policy is something that indirectly hurts the LGBTQ community. Being part of the queer community, it can be used as a way of other people defining what other people can use "as a real name."

So, the purest definition of what your name could be is choosing a name for yourself. Really, there are many people online who I only call by their aliases.

mabbees: One of my favorite platforms is Discord for aliases because you don't even have to come up with a unique alias—even if someone already has your name, Discord adds numbers at the end so anyone can use any name.

(Discord discontinued the adding numbers at the end of usernames in 2023.)

CJ: The intent of taking away of anonymity from people was to improve the relationship between two people—but I'm going to be honest, I'm not sure if that experiment worked.

You can look at interactions online, and yes, perhaps people can be more hurtful if they are anonymous, but I've also seen some caustic Facebook comments with people's real names tied to them.

mabbees: Something with Terranova that we've been very intentional about is that all of the characters go by their AIM screen names. They don't call each other by their "real" names.

Q: What do you miss most from these earlier communities?

CJ: The serendipity of meeting people. I see that in Discord as well. I have the serendipity of meeting all of you at FujoCon, and I don't personally know any of you. You might see me as someone talkative, but I'm actually quite introverted. If you were to put me in a con or you saw me after a panel, I would probably be scared to talk with groups.

It's great to meet a friend of a friend of a friend, but I want to meet someone across the world from me. I want to meet someone who has different interests than me. Somebody who's different from me, because that's how I expand my worldview.

mabbees: I'm not sure what my answer would be to that. I'll move on to the next question.

Q: The presenters are terrific, will there be more upcoming speaking engagements from either?

mabbees: I don't know about FujoCon this year, but we may be back next year! (laughs) That would be great!

(We did come back next year with an interactive workshop called How to Tell Interactive Stories That Pack a Punch.)

Both of us do public speaking engagements when we feel called to, not just on fandom but on design and software development and whatever else. I gave a talk on music theory. That was fun.

Also, because we didn't say so before...thank you very much, I'm so flattered!

CJ: Yeah, seriously!

Q: Is there anything about modern fandom you'd say is better?

mabbees: There's a few things that fandom is no longer hung up on that I'm happy about. Like, "do you think fanfiction is legal? Is what we're doing okay? Is it immoral?" I'm not a lawyer, but I believe the legal answer to that question is that fanwork is transformative and even if you're using characters and settings that someone else created, your work is still your own. I think it's cool that we've generally moved on from that.

(CJ Note: At the time of this talk, we hadn't familiarized ourselves with the definition and nuance of "transformative" works. I don't think this previous statement is true; or rather, it is a murky water and gets murkier when something is monetized.)

CJ: It's cool to see people who are so strongly declaring they like what they like. It's an inspiration to see there are spaces for that. The hyperconnectivity of the modern world meant that we found the first FujoCon on Twitter even though we're not in the States.

We would have never known that had it not been for our connectedness.

mabbees: Something that's better than it was back in the day is fanart, and especially digital art. We had oekaki boards, and some people were real into that and did really cool drawings with their mouses or Wacom tablets, but the stuff I see today on Tumblr or Pixiv just blows me away.

CJ: Clip Studio and the flood of affordable digital tools for artists has allowed a lot more people to make fanart.

mabbees: Still, we know that there are platforms that one day might slam the door in your face, so there's room for improvement there.

CJ: Any other questions? ..no? Okay. Thank you everyone for attending FujoCon and our session. It's always an honor to see everyone posting and engaging in the chat and everything. This is why we love speaking. Thank you to FujoCon for having us.

Resources are listed above. You can find more info on Terranova at playterranova.com.