The thing about fanfiction communities is that when the Internet was new and people wanted to post their fanfiction about the leads of a show kissing, you had to go deep diving for a forum for that. Sometimes, you had to keep track of multiple websites for just one media because there wasn’t one singular fanfiction site. Additionally, people needed a backup just in case a site got scrubbed off the Internet for “inappropriate content” or whatever.
I was too young to know what it was like to participate in fandom through online forums. In my early teens, I was an avid user of places like Wattpad and Fanfiction.net (FFN). From what I’ve heard from older folks in the community, those kinds of sites were life-changing in the early late 2000s. They allowed for different fandom communities to thrive in the same place with a comprehensible cataloguing and filter system. The existence of a space where fans can just nerd out and write about their favorite characters isn’t new. It’s the fact that there were now dedicated websites that fans could trust wouldn’t go away or be erased.
The wonders of the archive
Then Archive of Our Own (Ao3) came along. What it did differently from its predecessors was that it allowed for more mature content to exist that Wattpad or FFN didn’t allow. It was open source, so volunteers were able to add mods to make the site more accessible to readers. It came with a better filtration and tagging system, and overall, it just looks and works way better. That, and it managed to stay free where some sites (cough Wattpad) installed monthly subscription programs.
McLuhan necessitates us to think about how the technology we create can affect our culture. Something like Ao3 being allowed to exist at all has an impact on fandom culture. And, maybe this is a reach or not, but feminism too.
Most of the fans who were writing fanfiction in the first place were women. Most people know this. The cultural idea of the “fangirl” seems to be a teenage girl who goes weird over fictional characters. A girl who’s lonely and introverted. So, God forbid a woman wants to join a stable community where she can post her stories without judgement and have other people like it too. With Ao3, it’s less about what the fanfic is, whether it’s completely depraved or not (who cares), and more about the fact that fans who want to form a community with other fans can finally have a safe space to read and write and be who they are.
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