#i miss the site i miss the ffn forums i miss the books being in stores...

[snixx]

the 39 clues girlies are having a field day in the notes of a post I made months ago and all I can do is gaze upon them fondly as I remember the most passionate late lover of my life

[thedistantdusk]

Please explain to a youngster what the Three Year summer is?? (I think that’s what that was that you mentioned). I am young and dumb and have only really been in fandom since 2012

Ooo boy, Nonny, pull up a seat — but for starters, I’m sure you’re not dumb! You just experience fandom a different way because of your age, and I will happily explain what I mean.

Let’s hop in a time machine to the early 2000s. OotP hasn’t been released. There are no smartphones. Dial-up isn’t unheard of, DSL is preferred, and WiFi is but a distant dream. Apart from a few small, local events, our only access to fandom is through desktop computer.

Tumblr and AO3 do not exist. FFN and a few smaller fanfic sites provide all content, and the latter is usually organized by shipping preference. If you liked the OBHWF dynamic, you typically went Checkmated, SugarQuill, Gryffindor Tower, or SIYE (and I’m sure I’m missing a few, but these were my favorites). If you preferred pairings that would later become non-canon, you’re looking at sites like Ashwinder, Portkey, Azkaban’s Lair, etc.

In short? Back then, everything was different. We consumed fic in a completely different way, and tbh I think a lot of our lingering debate (especially on things like concrit and shipping etiquette) boils down to how you experienced fandom the first time.

((And as an aside, during this time period, it was the norm to provide lengthy, detailed concrit to stories. The series wasn’t over, and almost every author’s goal was to provide approximations of canon elements (even if they preferred AU storylines). As authors, we valued that type of feedback because it meant people cared a lot about both the source content and the material you’d written — and also, keep in mind that when you were on dial-up, providing that kind of feedback took a lot of time. You had to spend a while in front of a slow computer, you had to gain access to certain sites, and you couldn’t just read something on the go. Concrit, regardless of source, implied an automatic appreciation for both the series and your story because the reviewer wanted to help you match canon parts as much as possible.))

That being said, I personally believe there are really two separate HP fandoms. We have the group that was around to watch each book/movie come out, and the group that’s only known a world in which all the questions of the series were answered. (And no, I’m not gatekeeping anything or passing judgement on the value of either. I’m stating facts on how we consumed fic and participated in fandom prior to the release of all the books/movies.)

I was roughly Harry’s canon age when the final two books were released, so I participated in the former group. The Three Year Summer was a period of time (three years, as I’m sure you gathered) in between the releases of GoF and OotP. It’s called the “summer” because the books were each released in the summer months during massive, ridiculous midnight release parties at bookstores.

If you were a teen/an active participant during this time period, you probably:

Had a crush on Emerson Spartz

Made your own Harry Potter t-shirts/paraphernalia (stuff wasn’t really mass-produced yet)

Spent a lot of time huddled over in class reading printed fanfic (remember, no smart phones)

Hoodwinked your way into an adults-only fanfic archive, and the site you picked varied depending on your ship preference. (Personally, I was a Checkmated girl, which is how I read all of @jenoramaca’s stories when I was super young)

This time period also resulted in lots of fan theories, fanfic, and epic, epic shipping wars on many popular forums. I don’t really feel like rehashing all of it, but I will say that some legitimately nasty things were tossed around on the daily, and one such place for this debate was a fansite called Chamber of Secrets that had a forum called the LoveThreads.

At the time, I was just a teen lying about my age, but I’ll fully admit that everyone involved in the LoveThreads contributed to some degree of toxicity — myself included. My participation was mostly limited to defending Ron and Ginny (who were almost universally loathed by people who didn’t like OBHWF), but I definitely didn’t help things or call people out as much as I should have. There was a lot of homophobia associated with hating on same-sex pairings, and a lot of sexism/slut-shaming surrounding Ginny, in general (yes, even when she was canonically like 13). I never participated in that sort of discussion, but in retrospect — even though I was a teen arguing with grown-ass adults — I could have done more to refute it.

Annnnyway, the early 2000s were a much different time, and I’m glad they’re behind us. (And yes, I have a different handle now, so you probably won’t find me, even with the WayBack Machine😉) The Three Year Summer ended when OotP came out... but unfortunately, things only got more toxic and confusing. Unless you read between the lines, there isn’t a clear indication of Harry “picking” (and yes, I hate that word) either Ginny or Hermione. It wasn’t until HBP that things became clearer but this was also a dumpster fire because of the Spartz/Anelli/JKR interview post HBP, and if you don’t know what I mean, I beg you to look that up on your own.

When HBP came out, we had clearer answers. Most of the folks who didn’t like OBHWF packed up and left. I personally backed out for a few years during movie releases because I had no interest in what I felt had become a movie (not book) fandom. Around this time, I also started to see a resurgence in a specific anti-canon pairing mentality, which I didn’t care for either. To be honest, the concept of toxicity has never been limited to one side or the other, but since returning to HP, I’ve done my best to avoid it.

Here is a rule of thumb that helps me (with everything from shipping to politics): If a comment would seem immature/ill-conceived from the opposite perspective, it’s probably not worth adopting.

For example, if a story summary includes a warning like “Contains Harmony bashing,” some of you might be interested — but pretend that’s Hinny instead. Doesn’t that just seem lazy and off-putting?

Likewise, if a billboard said, “Trump is a fucking moron,” I’d be inclined to agree — but substitute that with Obama’s name. It feels like a cheap insult that could contain more validity with more mature language/more specific information.

So. Perhaps this rambling mess paints a fuller picture of what shaped early HP fandom experiences, and also explains why I’m personally just not too interested in debating the validity of different ships.

I hope this answers your question, Nonny... and consider yourself lucky that you missed this particular weirdness!

[biffelderberry]

so I recently applied to volunteer with AO3 and part of one of the questions was related to fandom and my history with fandom. I normally say I’ve been in fandom for 12 years. 12 years ago, I was bugging @voldiebuns before a color guard practice because I was boreed, and she handed me Loveless and told me to read it and leave her alone. So whatever, I read it, and from there got dragged into fandom. I’m not really sure how Loveless lead to FFn and fandom in general, but it’s definitely a marked point in time as when I really realized that there was this obsessive group on the internet. It’s also when I learned about Slash and Yaoi (which is what the cool kids called it back then.) 

I remember us getting our moms to drop us off at Borders (god I miss that store) and we would go through the manga section looking for manga. I remember binge watching 18 episodes of Kuroshitsuji while home alone and being afraid to turn around. I remember @voldiebuns,  @magickallity, and I  writing 20 minute fanfiction challenges. 

But none of that is even the point of all of this, because I also remember 2 years before reading Loveless, finding a little site called Quizilla. Quizilla was designed to be a quiz hosting site, as it’s name would suggest, but it had a thriving fanfiction corner. And the fanfictions were glorious, by the way, almost all of them were either Harry Potter self insert fic - where you could date either Harry, Draco, Fred, or George, vampire stories or gratuitous porn. And you think the porn on AO3 is bad? The porn on Quizilla was glorious. it probably shaped a lot of who I am today... which might be a bad thing? Most of it was either straight or lesbian, and it was all trashy and poorly written. One in particular I remember was a girl who in the previous story had had sex with her best friend at a slumber party, seducing the guy working in her parents back yard and having sex with him in the pool. He lined her up with the water jet and... yea. I read that 14 years ago. It made that much of an impression on me. 

Anyways, Quizilla had little user functionality built in, and it was certainly not designed to be a fanfiction archive. But there’s something about fandom that just builds itself in whatever corner of the web it can. And that’s something that I think a lot of the newbies in fandom don’t realize. We have something so great in AO3, it’s a space built for us, by us. Quizilla had a very shitty search function so really the only way to find even readable stories was to go through the top 10. Which was our version of reviews/rating. You wanted to be in the top whatever you could. 

There was a forum I was on, I don’t know if it was the official one. I hope it was deleted with quizilla in 2014, because I was a little shit at 13, as most people are, and there are things I know I said that I want to remain hidden.

OH I forgot the best part of Quizilla!! Banners. Banners were such a weird thing. Basically for your story to be a legitimate story you had to have a banner. I think it’s why I cringe when I see stories with banners on AO3. I just associate it with Quizilla and that part of my life. They would be images done up to look like the book cover for the story and they were... I mean it was early 2004, what do you expect from a bunch of teens and tweens? 

I just. When we talk about recent fandom history, we talk about FFn, and Adult Fanfiction, and LJ. But let’s bring Quizilla into the history of it all too.