yes i have a thing for self-loathing fictional characters being loved and in the process learning to love themselves and no that does not imply anything about me personally as a person i swear
Gather around, children. I’m about to tell you a story of ye olde fandom. (Real life fandom friends, I’m sorry. You’ve heard this story a thousand times, I know.)
Long before Disney bought Star Wars, long before the new trilogy, before even the prequels, and themselves predating the “remastered” versions of the original trilogy, Star Wars experienced it’s second renaissance in novel form. And comic book form. Skim the pages of the dozens upon dozens of Expanded Universe (”EU”) novels and you’ll find lots of foundations for the things you see on screen these days. Ben Solo, for sure, has his origins there.
But it was also a different era for the fandom. The 90′s saw the transition from fanzine culture to online fan fiction archives. The programming ability and computing power you needed to make a fan fiction archive that the authors could edit themselves did not yet exist in an accessible way. Series based archives popped up, mostly hand curated by webmasters posting .txt files of chapters and stories that they’d received from authors via email. Or usenet. Or mailinglists. I spent many of my teen years on Gossamer, the X-Files archive, and Fanfix.com, my favorite Star Wars archive. I remember haunting a Babylon 5 archive at the time, too, but it’s lost to history.
I read everything. Everything. But, by far my favorite fan fiction of all time was, and I will always remember this, “As Simple and as Complicated as All That” by Xia Sang Li. It was epic. Four novels. NOVELS. Dozens of chapters. Hundreds and hundreds of pages. It follows Luke Skywalker’s decision to finally throw caution to the wind and fall into bed, and in love, with Mara Jade. Written in the sweet spot after her character was introduced and explored, but before permission was given to the licensed authors to marry Luke off, it was an amazing indulgence. And, it was epic in scale and scope. The great plot twist in book one was that, spoiler alert, when Gaeriel Captison died, leaving Luke to look after her orphaned daughter, she didn’t tell the whole story. You see, Luke and Mara had indulged each other before, had a secret love child, and this brief period of time was erased or minimized in their memories. Slowly, the two come to realize, through their haze of lust and passion, that something is conspiring to keep them apart, and that this little girl isn’t who she seemed. Themes of family, and duty, and passion, and trauma. Force visions, original characters, and sex sex sex. It was amazing.
It’s impossible. The Fanfix.com archive zipped the textfiles, so the Wayback Machine hasn’t archived them. The Geocities page went down before the Geocities archive was published after its closure. And, the original author’s blog, not updated in a decade, features only a few chapters of a rewrite, an AU of her original epic.
But it’s not dead.
Starting in 1998, my teenage self printed the whole fucking epic. I did one chapter at a time. It took more than a year. I had it all saved, too, on a 3 ½ inch floppy that got destroyed. Beyond the author’s own hard drive somewhere on this green earth, I think this might be the only copy.
Every few years, when nostalgia overtakes me, I reread it, from front to back. The gender politics are very different. The interpretation of Luke, too, vastly different from modern fandom’s take. Sometimes I wish I could find the author, buy her dinner, and tell her how important her work was to me. But, that’s probably impossible. Sometimes I think about re-digitizing it and, like a different kind of pirate, putting it back into circulation. But, that’s just a wish. A whimsical dream. The notebook is at least 3 inches thick, with front to back printed pages of text. It would take… years. Certainly it took years to write. But, it was part of the floating world of fandom. And, it faded away. Stuff like this should never fade away.
Fan fic authors… I implore you. Never delete your work.
You can’t know the impact you make. You might think it not good, embarrassing, or irrelevant. It’s not. Not to someone. Not to me.
Seriously. You have no idea how many fanfics I had wanted to print and bind just so that I can keep it in my personal library to read. Some fics are so damn GOOD that they deserve to exist binded as a physical copy. Save them please!!! All fics matter to someone
PUT THAT BOOK IN A SAFE BOX OR A MUSEUM (is there a fandom museum? we should make one)
It’s not quite a museum, but there is the Fan Culture Preservation Project, which is a join venture between the OTW and the Special Collections department at the University of Iowa Libraries. It’s a place to preserve hard copies of fanworks and fandom memorabilia.
(Though it seems likely that @mizunocaitlin would like to keep a beloved fanfic.)
Dear fic readers: Save it before you lose it!
authors have pleanty of reason to delete their shit, sad as it is, but you can still have it!! do what that person did, use https://www.lulu.com/ like i did for my faves stuff (tho already archived on gdrive by someone else), but find a way to PRINT IT OUT if you love it so much. dont just rely on digital copies because shit happens.
This is my current printed library of fanfics. This way works best for fanfics up to 20000 words, but I’m learning basic bookbinding for the longer ones (an experiment of that can be seen in the right side of the picture - “This, You Protect” by Owlet), because I LOVE HOLDING THEM WHEN I READ THEM and also, what will I read if the power goes down? Exactly.
If someone could tag that person who did the gorgeous binding of @senlinyu‘s magnificent Manacled… I mean the book is awesome, and the book binding ? Gives it justice. Also I think that the person who did the binding has made / is making other bindings? Maybe? I can’t quite remember?
I feel so vindicated in seeing this post, and knowing I’m not the only one who has “probably-the-only-extant-copy” fanfics from the late 90s in binders.
I took probably the most ridiculous and difficult route, hand bookbinding. Here’s an example of an earlier-era fic I’ve bound for archival purposes.
And some Bookbinding resources if anyone wants to join in the efforts! Rock on, fanfic hamsters!
as an archivist (a real one!) and a fanfic author, this post speaks so hard to me. SAVE YOUR STUFF, AUTHORS
In high school my best friend and I were known as the book printers. At the time neither of us had access to the internet beyond school so we did the only thing that made sense, printed everything. We would spend as much time as we could after school, usually on fridays, huddled around the library computers printing fics we wanted to read. The librarians didn’t mind, one of them actually thought it was charming and christened us her book printers.
I owe so much to authors, the early ones who showed me that it was ok to think up grand worlds and fill them with my favorite characters as well as characters of my own creation, and especially the new authors who quickly became my found family and have taught me that finding yourself through your writing is perfectly acceptable, and losing yourself to an indulgent plot line is fine too.
If I’ve learned anything in the decades since I offered to pay the school for the gross amount of paper we used, it’s that you should never forget your roots, and always remember you might just be the one creating fertile grounds for others to put down roots of their own.
If you ever have the chance, do it, print the pages and bind them. The story already holds a special place in your heart, isn’t it only fair that you hold it close as well?
i’ve been contacted a few times by people who have bound my fanfic into print: it never stops being a delight and an honor to see that some stuff i wrote for online consumption meant enough to someone that they wanted to keep it in their actual home, on their actual bookshelf.
