The State of Fanfiction(and Maybe Fandoms)

I’m not going to try and dig too much deeper than my own experience with fanfiction. I know it goes back further, and has it origins in fan zines from decades past. We’ve come a long way baby and all that. This is just more observations and musings on how it’s been going lately.

I remember when I first started reading Eva fanfics in college. Wow! Shit was weird. And just sprinkled all over the place too! Web rings (ahh, web rings, I miss those), and the days when the net was shiny and new and connection speeds were really starting to pick up. I still remember downloading music on a dial-up. And that sucked. But, back to the subject at hand. Finding fanfics to read was always an adventure. You had those authors you liked, you had those web rings, and eventually you had some archives. I was so happy the day my fanfic got accepted to one of those archives (I don’t even remember which one any more, wow). Fanfiction was like this weird, demented way of satisfying that primordial hunter-gather drive. And now, like so many other things that once fed the hunter-gatherer within, we have Fanfiction.net.

Now, don’t get me wrong, ff.n is great. They’ve done what they’ve had to over the years to stay active, keep sponsors and not turn into a hive of flame wars (forbidding adult rated stories and dropping the message boards/riding heard on comments is specifically what I’m thinking). I can log in and there is almost certainly going to be something new. Maybe not worth reading (and, by all the gods true and false there is a lot of garbage out there), but something new almost without fail. This is a great thing. Which is why EVERYONE uses it and is inadvertently leading to the death of some of what made the net so cool. Personal webpages, where you’d host your rant’s, your fan-whatever, your writings, your half crazed manifesto on student loans, etc, etc are disappearing. Facebook, ff.n, hulu, blog sites, and more are here to replace them. And as these growing companies gobble up other features, you can increasingly use one or two virtual identities to log into them all.

It’s the new face of the net. It’s all professionally done and comes complete with banner ads tailored to your unique profile and IP address (so customized dating site lies and ads for anime, comic book movies, and RPG’s in my case) and a slick interface that might as well plug into facebook or your twitter feed. Is this good or bad? I don’t know. However, I’m going to say I’m already curmudgeony enough to miss the “old days.”

At least the web is still stuffed full of porn.

But back to the fanfiction that roped you all in. Like I said, I love Fanfiction.net. I really do. But it’s full of crap. Some categories are more crap when treasure. At one time, it would have been stuck on poorly made personal websites, or simply never seen the light of day/the internet. Now though, anyone can post damn near anything online. And if there’s the sexing, that’s what Adult Fanfiction.Net is for, right? (So, so much porn...) Like so many other things, it feed into that sense of entitlement, and that we’re all perfect little snowflakes that can do no fucking wrong. Hey, I like nice reviews too, but if I could use some improvement, let me know dear readers.

And that’s all that’s left of fanfiction at the moment. A one size fits all website where critical review is discouraged by authors and might be considered “flames” by moderators. And, as much as I value DS as one of the alternatives clinging on and trying to find its place, it’s a bit of a relic. But, hey, I for one like relics. And I bet if enough of us pounded our heads against that wall, and helped LD plot a new course, Darkscribes could be something more dynamic, not only to the fandom’s here, but to fanfiction

as well.