#fanforum and livejournal

[zenkindoflove]

I'm old so I remember fandom pre Tumblr. The days of making character or ship focused livejournal communities. Or fanforum and having your own fandom board or ship thread that you kept alive by renaming each new one with fun quotes about your ship after you reached 300 posts. There was a clear understanding of what was neutral fandom territory and what was not.

The point is is that Tumblr has never been a place that allows for fandoms and shippers to have proper boundaries. And much of the current toxicity in ship wars and character hate are amplified by the forced publicness that Tumblr, Twitter, and TikTok all have. It's not a bad thing to have negative opinions or vent frustrations. But the way that Tumblr puts all the onerousness on you as an individual to curate your experience definitely contributes to more "cross talk" than we used to have in fandoms. It can be done but you'll always have a few things you don't want to see slip through. That is the nature of using this platform. When those boundaries are fluid, so too do the social norms and rules about how to fandom become squishy, and people have a hard time understanding what belongs to them vs what is community space because Tumblr makes it so that it all bleeds together. Your blog is also a part of the community and vice versa.

I highly recommend to find yourself a private space with like minded fandom friends to get your aggression out. And to experience what unencumbered fangirling - both the highs and the lows - without the watchful eyes of others. It's freeing and it is good for the soul. It kind of makes you realize that not everything has to be shared on your blog. Or that you have to tell others how to use their blogs or tags. Because that fight is never going to be won. I haven't ever seen it since I started using this site in 2011, and this has been a part of the discourse in every fandom I've been in since I joined tumblr.

This is sort of an ode to the old internet. It was the wild west but we also had a much easier time making spaces for ourselves that didn't depend on social media or algorithms pushing content at you. The internet was what you made it and so too was fandom. We were less reliant on single websites. We were more dispersed but in some ways that at least allowed us to find the exact home we wanted. That internet doesn't really exist anymore unfortunately and a part of making friends to create your fandom space is having to roll around in the mud of these big platforms.

[kiss-my-freckle]

Something that I find unfortunate is that forums for Delena fans to talk about their ship are shut down or inactive. There was a site called ElenaDamon.com while TVD was airing that many Delena fans would post on for years but it shut down. Many of them used to post on Fanforum and Livejournal too. Mainstream TVD forums are filled with bitter fans who are mad their ship isn't endgame. When the show started there were many fans who shipped Damon and Stefan romantically lol but their romantic ship didn't become as popular as Dean and Sam's. Many fans also shipped Jeremy and Tyler, but Kevin said they would never go there.

I think they should've gone there with a gay couple, I mean, why not? But yeah, it's sad that these forums are shut down, especially for fans like me who didn't watch as it aired. When they show these shows on Netflix, people who never watched them before become new fans and miss out on all the old posts. It's like that for me with Hannibal too. I caught it on Netflix and was like damn... why didn't I know about this show? lol

[roughentumble]

the thing is that ive read probably two good yugioh fics based around the Ship I Like in my entire life. in fact i think one of them wasnt my fav ship, it was just like..... two of the three people, with enough wiggle room to comfortably envision the third person eventually getting pulled into the relationship

so uhhhhhhhhh i suffer folks

[demelzahcarne]

Apparently this blog has turned 10 today...10yrs ago I was watching misfits and now I am ranting about kdrama characters, not really sure if thats progress.

[sconesfortea]

It's wild that Fellowship of the Ring is 20 years old!

It was the first fandom I was ever in, the first time I went looking for like minded nerds online. I made real friends just deep diving into every aspect of the film(s), the cast & everything else lotr. I discovered fanfiction, I discovered fandom in general.

I spent so many hours on fanforum & livejournal, filled up hard drives with photos, fics & songs. And 20 years later I still love it completely!

Happy birthday Lord of the Rings!

[buckybarnesss]

here's the thing. 

i have been wanting to do a fanfic rec list for d/l fic for sometime and sort of gave up as i ran into a problem that problem being it's the year 2021 and csi ny has been off the air for almost a decade. 

to say there's little activity in the fandom is an understatement. many of the fan spaces are just gone. they are either lost to time or inactive memorials to a once thriving fandom. it's a true tragedy. i used to spend hours going through forums (i miss you dlchem) and reading fanfic when i was in high school. my senior year was survivable because i looked forward to every wednesday night. 

i may be doing the lord's work in generating a small csi ny renaissance in my little corner of the internet here on tumblr dot com but i cannot resurrect dead websites. 

but @dl-2021​ reminded me of how much i wanted to compile something. for posterity if anything. i was there when the deep magic was written after all.

so. this is not so much a fan fic rec list but rather a "here's stuff that still exists list" and yes it's centered around danny/lindsay because that's the circle i used to run and frankly i can't find much that has anything substantial.

csi files appears the last activity was in 2017. csi files was a news aggregate for all things csi and eventually other crime procedurals.

talkcsi the forum for csifiles. there seems to be recent posts as of 2020 but it seems quiet these days. but it's a good place to see what opinions and discussions were happening at the time when the shows were still airing. however, there was a lot of negativity towards anna belknap/lindsay. i rediscovered this while reading the old reviews of the episodes. i apparently had purged that from my memory.

tvtropes page for csi ny this still has a wealth of information about the show and it's fun to look through the tropes.

messermontana the og lj community. there's still a lot of great content here but it's livejournal so there's a lot of purged and deleted accounts and dead links but i think still worth a look.

the danny/lindsay fanforum i'm pretty sure there are multiple threads. makes me nostologic for early 2000′s webforums. 

fanfiction.net's csi ny page this is the largest collection of csi ny fics left on the internet.

ao3 there is an ao3 tag and it's somewhat active. well. more active than anywhere outside of tumblr.

[otterandterrier]

mozstermoments replied to your post “It is so disturbing that when I go into the Ron/Hermione pairing on...”

It does make me feel a bit sad that some of the Canon ship hangouts are no more -- there's great stuff archived at the Sugar Quill, but Checkmated and The Quidditch Pitch are fully offline these days. Loved reading all the great fic there in the early Noughties and having deep discussions about every nod, wink, comma and ellipsis!

tbh I wasn’t around until 2007 or so; my hangout was the Veritaserum forums and then I went on to LiveJournal. I joined the Checkmated forums briefly for a Christmas challenge and posted my fic there, on the forums... but the guidelines to get your work accepted for the site seemed too scary for me to even try. I posted my stuff in two RHr fic sites that were less strict. I think that’s what I miss the most and what I think a lot of people would benefit from: having a working RHr-only or canon-only fic site. But I also think that some of the most famous sites were quite elitist in the fics they accepted. There was even an “anti” Checkmated LJ where people commented the ridiculous reasons why their stuff had been rejected! I respect wanting to take care of the quality and having guidelines, but there are things that are very subjective and you can’t police that--a lot of the Classics I’ve read are garbage OOCness, imho 🙊 and there are a lot of current stuff I personally don’t like for whatever reason, but if I had a site, I would have to accept it because it’s not supposed to be about what I like, it’s supposed to be about creating a community.

Even so I still think it’s a shame sometimes that fandoms (not just HP) let fanforums and fic archives die and we all ended up in this hellsite where you'll only find a community of people if you’re lucky and you don’t give up trying to understand how it works (and it’s still not the same)

[agent-sarahwalker]

I spent time on livejournal and fanforum sites! 😬

ah yea fanfiction.net but also what else