Iris: Wisdom and Hope

[binary_sunset]

This week's prompt for Sunshine Challenge is Iris, which can represent wisdom and hope, among other things.

In this vein, I've migrated some of my fics from 2012 onto AO3. They are for a fandom that I haven't thought about in years and is very heavily associated with that era of the Internet. I won't be linking them here because I've anonymised them (they are VERY embarrassing nowadays), but it did get me reflecting a bit on where my fandom journey started and where I've ended up.

I was recently reading a fic published to FFn (which I have since archived due to how difficult it is to access these days), and I have no idea how anyone took it seriously as a fan fic site. Not only did it not trust you to use your own HTML, it erased any words that had special characters in them, and you couldn't even tag pairings until, like, 2015! And if something inspired you or you wanted to link off-site to fan art, you had to space out the url so the almighty FFn filter didn't delete them. All this to prevent spam links from being posted.

There's also the fact that you can't copy/paste from the site, which must have made reviewing a nightmare. Luckily, you actually can copy/paste if you use the mobile site, which is what I did to archive my old fics.

Anywho, it's stuff like AO3 and the OTW that gives me hope for the future of fandom. It's a space that we made for ourselves. We own the servers, and no one can tell us what we can and can't do on them (aside from, like... the law). We fund it ourselves, and we keep it afloat with our donations. I can't begin to tell you how much I love it. And yes, I know the OTW has been in hot water lately for being slow to react to concerns of its users of colour (and hopefully that can be sorted out quickly and efficiently), but considering where we started? It's such a gift. I appreciate it so much.

This time has also given me the opportunity to reflect on how I've grown as an author. These fics are... really bad. Baby Sunset couldn't keep track of a plotline to save his life! But they're also just really special. I used to just be able to sit around and frantically type out a fic on my iPod Touch and post it once I got home from school. (Side note: I actually used to email the entire fic to myself in order to post it on my family computer, since I didn't have my own laptop until I was in high school. I'd use FFn's shitty built-in rich text editor to make it work. It's honestly amazing anything I wrote made it to that site.)

I recently opened up to a good friend about how I was feeling a lot of shame around my fics. My 25th birthday is looming over the horizon, and I always thought that I'd have written something Big and Important by then. But the opposite of shame is pride. I am proud of how far I've gotten since 2012. I'm proud that I've continued doing something that I love. I'm proud that I've managed to make some really good friends from my time in fandom! And that pride is what's going to keep me going. You haven't seen the last of me!

Comments

[commanderbayban]

Your last paragraph resonated with me. If my younger self could see what I’m writing now, I think they would be exceedingly proud of how far I’ve come. All those “bad stories” written back in the day were stepping stones that led me to what I’m doing now.

Off-topic, but I saw that you’re thinking of making a Neocities! I’m using that site also. It’s fun to make your own space that can be customized however you want.

[binary_sunset]

Oh boy, I think baby me would've had his mind blown by what I'm writing now! Although, I wish I had his passion. One of the fics that I uploaded was written in an afternoon after seeing some fan art on tumblr. It's not... good, but I wrote it and writing it felt important at the time. It's about being honest with your sexuality and I was, uh, goin through it at the time.

And thanks for peeping that! I'd need to find some sort of HTML plug-in to avoid AI scraping. But so far, it seems to be okay with hosting NSFW material, so it's much better than most other platforms. I also just like making pretty websites lol. I re-did my tumblr blog, like, 20 times XD

[silverusagi]

Ah, FFN. I remember when it was the be all and end all of fanfic reading. But it did have limitations. I remember the trouble of trying to edit something I'd uploaded.

I didn't remember that you couldn't copy/paste. Maybe that's a newer thing? I know I've got a fic in a Word doc that I saved from there, and I can't think of any other way I could have done it.

[binary_sunset]

They must have added that recently, then. ("Recently" is relative, though, since I remember struggling with the same issue when I found a repost of Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder" for class back in 2016 and wanted to print it out). But it was a big barrier to getting my fics re-imported until I realised you can just use the mobile site XD

[vriddy]

The FFN user experience descriptions made me wince, haha. Not too long ago, I was trying to find the site of an author who had to post the rest of their fic off-site 15 years ago or something, and the URL is mangled so badly it was impossible to figure out where they might have moved to. So sad and frustrating!

I'm with you on your thoughts about AO3 and the OTW... Clearly there's a lot that needs to improve right now, but when I remember what things were like and the spirit it was born out of... We need more of that. I'm still rooting for them to figure it out.

Congrats on everything you achieved since 2012, and to many many more happy years of fandom and fanfic! :)

[binary_sunset]

Argh! The worst! One of my works was inspired by a piece of fanart, and I didn't even try to link to it and now I can't find it!

And thank you for the encouragement! I hope you also have many happy years of fandom and fic!

[silveradept]

Sticking with it is excellent and it is sometimes very neat to have copies of your work from earlier, even if you think of them as "my, that's definitely my earlier work," for that very reason of being able to say "wow, I've come a long way since then, and I can see how well my craft has improved by doing all of this and practicing with all of these works that I've put out since."

The FFN experience sounds pretty difficult to have to navigate. And we hear you about the problems that AO3 and the OTW is having, but even then, they're still better than what has been in the past and the alternatives that are around. It would be much nicer if their code was easily replicable across the Internet, though, so that we could have AO3 and all of our other archives all around the Internet.

[binary_sunset]

Oh yeah, the stuff I made was absolutely awful. But if I hadn't made it, I wouldn't be where I am today! It's funny because some of my stories have gotten hits on AO3 in the last few days and I'm like... what are you people doing here???

No place is perfect, but we can always try to be better. We only got AO3 because people looked at FFn and said "yanno, these things kind of suck, actually." We can't grow if we don't know what to fix. And now we aren't in any danger of getting a Cease and Desist from Anne Rice without the OTW's lawyers looking at it first (I know she's dead now, but if anyone could send C&Ds from beyond the grave, it would be her.)

That being said, AO3's code is actually open source, so theoretically anyone can make a clone of it. But without owning the server space, it can't be anything more than a niche. Web servers that can host several decades worth of stories aren't exactly cheap and you'd need to dedicate a large amount of space to them.

[silveradept]

Anne Rice would absolutely try to send C&D letters from beyond the grave, and the OTW would try very hard to fight those.

Text hosting is relatively cheap, images and video much less so since they need more space and bandwidth. People can probably spin up a personal archive on a small amount of hosted space and be fine with that. AO3's code may or may not be overkill for that purpose.

[binary_sunset]

Hm, that's a good point. I wonder how much a web server would cost to run on a consumer level.

[silveradept]

As an approximate proxy, there are places offering to host Mastodon instances (which should be more than enough of CPU, bandwidth, and storage for a fic archive) for $6/month for their lowest tier plan. And Neocities' supporter plan is $5/month, so it's pretty cheap if all you're doing is archiving. Plus a domain registration cost, but those are not very expensive, either. You could get away with it for less than $100/year, definitely, unless you blew up and became a super popular person with lots of readers and comments.

[enemytosleep]

I don't know if this helps, but I didn't start creating fanworks until I was 23 (and that was 2008), so you have plenty of time to enjoy fandom and improve your craft. I was actually doing something the reverse recently and locking all of my AO3 up, even debating if I wanted to orphan or delete things. For now I've left them be, but yeah, the early stuff was especially BAD. xD

[binary_sunset]

Haha, it does actually! It's nice to know that other people don't just grow out of this hobby. In my generation, fan fiction is definitely seen as something frivolous that teenaged girls obsessed with boy bands write. Being neither a teenager nor a girl, it makes me a bit self-conscious.

You can choose to do whatever you want with your stories. However, I'd encourage you to give them a re-read rather than just orphan or delete them without checking. I wouldn't call any of my FFn fics "good," but there are a few that I've decided are just too awful to leave floating around the world. But you can't make that call without knowing what's there!

You can also move them to an anonymous collection, which is what I've done. I still want some control over these fics, but I really don't want them showing up on my profile, for example XD

[renfys]

I have no idea how we managed to use ff.net at all back in the day. I'm 40, I was around when it was first around. It was a mess. It still is a mess lol.

[binary_sunset]

Half the time it refuses to open these days! I'm gonna have to go through my old favs and archive them.