On The Invisibility of Fanzine Fic and The Loneliness of the FanFic Reccer

[morgandawn]

A Fanlore volunteer is adding comments from crack van (the fanfic rec community that recently shut down). Her focus is on fanfic that was originally published in fanzines. She shared some of her observations with me....

"I'm filling in zined story comments on Fanlore with comments from Crack Van.

First, the recs themselves are good, but there is almost nothing of value in the comments to them. Lack of substantial online comments, the pithy "that's hot" or "thanks for reccing it" seem to be something that went along with the online journal culture, even early on. I don't generally read comments at AO3, but I wonder if they (overall) have more meat to them?

Second, it's no wonder many, many fans don't know what zines were or what role they played in early fanfic, as the reccers very rarely listed the zine the stories were originally published in. Starksy and Hutch reccers were better than most, but more often that not (talking about older fandoms here), the zines are not even mentioned. It's like the stories popped out of nowhere.

Third, regarding zines: when the story was posted online by the author, there is often no mentioned that it was in a zine first, or it it is mentioned, they don't name the zine by title. No wonder zines are such a mystery to many.

Finally, reccing at Crack Van was a thankless task, no matter the fandom, no matter the year. It was lucky a rec got even a single comment, and when it did it was an aforementioned pithy thing, or a complaint that the link to the story was broken. Demoralizing. I'm amazed that people stuck with reccing there all those years...."

Comments

[montanaharper]

Of course all this is secondary to the other observation that fanzine fic was/is invisible in recs. Kinda meta, eh?

I wonder if that's a function of expecting the rec'd stories to be available in the same medium as the recs? If you're rec'ing stories online, you link to them, and if they're not available online you merely mention the name of the story, because things from a different medium are secondary? If that makes sense. It's less about the fanzines themselves than about the medium you're currently interacting via?

Of course, I started out as an online fan in the mid 1990s and only ended up reading zines incidentally, when I fell into fandoms (Pros, in particular) that still existed primarily in zines, so my perspective is going to be different than that of someone who started out in zine-based fandom.

[morgandawn]

I think that the zine stories that were being recced at crack van were online - and what makes/made it odd is that when some stories were posted online, the authors themselves did not mention they had once appeared in zines. So if what you say is true - that the medium controls, then you would not mention the zines in the rec - just link to the online story. But I am not certain why the authors would not mention the zines when they first uploaded them. I wonder if there was an impression that zine fic was "old" fic so better not mention it? (pure speculation)

Of course many authors did mention their zine origins and the Pros Circuit Archive went to great effort to mention the zines. But stories posted to the Pros circuit archive were done through a moderator who controlled what info was included. When I went looking for zine fic on A03 we found that many authors were not mentioning the zine origins.

In the end though, I think the lack of zine mentions does play a role as to why zines and zine fic is (and remains) invisible.

[montanaharper]

In the end though, I think the lack of zine mentions does play a role as to why zines and zine fic is (and remains) invisible.

Oh, I totally agree with that. I was just theorizing on why the lack of zine mentions happened.