Tag: Fanfiction

This Week in Fandom

This Week In Fandom, Volume 132

Silas ONeill Leave a comment

Hello and welcome to This Week in Fandom, the OTW’s roundup of things that are happening. It’s Copyright Week and appropriately enough, we have several stories for you that all operate at the intersection between fanfiction and traditional publishing. Buckle up!

First off, an article by Sian Cain for the Guardian on how Fifty Shades of Grey “changed our sex lives”. Focusing on EL James’s native country, the UK, Cain explores the ongoing legacy of James’s trilogy, ‘the runaway bestselling books’ of the 2010s. Cain’s account traces ripple effects across the publishing industry, the BDSM scene, and even the law. She gives space to the criticisms leveled at James’s work by ‘BDSM practitioners and domestic abuse campaigners’ and acknowledges its problematic effects, but she also finds some positive consequences from the international obsession with Grey’s story and sexual behaviors. In any case, it’s a thoroughly-researched insight into what is still online fanfiction’s most famous mainstream success. Read More

Spotlight on Open Doors title banner by Erin featuring spotlight with OTW logo

Watchmen Kinkmeme is Moving to the AO3

Jess Hindes Leave a comment

Watchmen Kinkmeme, a Watchmen fanfiction archive, is being imported to the Archive of Our Own (AO3).

In this post:

Background explanation

Watchmen Kinkmeme is a fanfiction archive for the film/comic Watchmen hosted on LiveJournal. Beginning in 2008, the archive was initially for anonymous kink-based fiction, but has grown to include all genres of Watchmen fanfiction. While the original archive will not close, The Watchmen Kinkmeme is being imported to AO3 by the moderator, Sail, for its preservation and to organize the archive and lend better searchability.

Open Doors will be working with Sail to import Watchmen Kinkmeme into a separate, searchable collection on the Archive of Our Own. As part of preserving the archive in its entirety, all fanfiction currently in the Watchmen Kinkmeme will be hosted on the OTW’s servers, and embedded in their own AO3 work pages.

We will begin importing works from Watchmen Kinkmeme to the AO3 after January.

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This Week In Fandom

This Week In Fandom, Volume 131

Silas ONeill Leave a comment

Hello and welcome to This Week in Fandom, the OTW’s roundup of things that are happening. Before we start, the Oscar nominations were released yesterday. What do you make of them? Let us know in the comments!

Our ‘OTW in the news’ radar was set off this week by Kaitlyn Tiffany’s charming piece in The Atlantic, ‘The Early Internet, Explained by One Weird Celine Dion Fan Site’. Tiffany interviews Yury Toroptsov, the creator of Celine Dreams, a website which ran from 2001 to 2011 and on which Toroptsov encouraged fellow fans to submit their dreams about Dion for his (public) interpretation. At Celine Dreams’ peak, Toroptsov was a BNF in online Celine Dion fandom; but the piece is more than a portrait of his particular experience. Instead, it takes the website as the jumping-off point for an exploration of online fandom culture’s transient quality. Tiffany mentions the Yahoo Groups closure, points out that Celine Dreams is only available via the Wayback Machine’s limited record, and gives a shoutout to the OTW’s efforts to preserve fan culture. She reminds us that Tumblr, a key fan platform through the 2000s and 2010s, ‘did not start collecting and collating data about fandom’ until 2013. This is important, Tiffany argues, despite the apparent triviality of the subject matter: ‘By itself, a website devoted to (possibly fake) dreams about Celine Dion is perhaps not our most urgent archival task. But in aggregate, fan sites like Toroptsov’s provide a valuable history of the ways web 1.0 users exercised fandom to provide their daily lives with context and color.’ The history of fandom and the history of the internet are closely entwined; we should do what we can to preserve them both. Read More