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

[starwatcher]

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what I find interesting is the blogging focus in this thread- many older stories are posted in archives and websites where discussion is not possible or manageable

Ooh, excellent point -- and one I hadn't even noticed. But maybe the question helps determine the viewpoint. She wondered why there is no discussion, and we're accustomed to the idea that discussion can't happen in an archive or website, so we automatically start considering the question as it pertains to places it can occur.

In the end, I mourn the long comments that fans used to make in LoCs. I miss substance and conversation.

I agree; although I seldom participated, my mental outlook was expanded by reading different viewpoints. But that, too, happened in blogs or mailing lists, so we get right back to talking about "discussions" only as they pertain to those platforms.

blogging mindset as to when and what we can discuss would be as alien to someone coming from a LOC background. Or a mailing list background.

I'm a bit confused -- "coming from a LOC background" suggests private email between author and reader, but "long comments in LOCs" suggests comments in LJ (or similar). I saw a fair bit of discussion in mailing lists, though more about the show and characters than individual stories; I think I found fandom as the heyday of story discussion (like in Prospect-L) was winding down.

And I suppose that's the basis of the changes -- fans who think "this" is the way things are done disperse to various new fandoms, and they're not numerous enough to hold the standard of doing things "this" way against the greater numbers of new fans who don't have that experience or expectations.
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[morgandawn]

LOCs were often published in letterzines so they formed part of the public back and forth. an LOC could also be a private letter mailed to the author or publisher - however many of those LOCs would be printed in the next issue of the zine for other readers to see and comment. A lot of this paper discussion took place before I entered fandom - it is only through the Fanlore and the Sandy Hereld memorial project that I've been able to access to and read some of these older zines. I entered fandom in the Usenet (and then mailing list) days of the early 1990s.