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omorkaWhich active ficcing fandoms are the oldest?
We know what the archetype fandom is; it's the Trekkies. Trek fandom has pretty much shaped what the US culture of fandom looks like. When non-fen think about what an SF convention looks like, they imagine people in Spock ears. It's very difficult to be part of SF fandom, or spec-fic fandom in a more general sense, without at least being aware of the basics of Star Trek. Even people who hate it are familiar with it; even negatively, it shapes their fandom. (I'm thinking particularly of the Star Wars fandom, which is the second thing non-fen think of when they think about SF fandom.)
But it's not the oldest. Hell, Doctor Who debuted in 1963. The Lord of the Rings was published in 1955. I think I could make a case that there's a long-standing tradition of Arthurian derivative works that are practically, albeit not legally, fanfic, and since it almost always uses Lancelot and Galahad, it's based on Morte d'Arthur, a published work, not the oral tales (oral cultural elaboration being another legal and practical matter entirely, although not, I think, a fundamentally different process from fanfic in most of the important ways).
All of which ends up not 'counting' in the official history of fanfic. Most people trace the history of fanfic to the Trek fanzines that began appearing in 1967. Does anyone know of any fan-published works for other fandoms that predate that? There's poetry that uses Tolkenian characters, settings, and imagery that predates that, but that's not exactly fiction. (And most of it that I can find is hopelessly mashed up with Arthurian imagery, which would have annoyed the crap out of ol' JRRT, but eh. Early crossovers?)
Usenet appeared in the very early '80s, and seems to have contained fic archive groups from early on. The, for lack of a better word, jargon of fanfic on Usenet seems to have been almost entirely derived from, again, the Trek fandom's conventions. In particular, the "/" that slashfic is named after originally appeared between "Kirk" and "Spock". However, there were also significant fandoms with Usenet presences as well, many of which had some overlap with the Trekkies; Doctor Who was one of these. There were also fanzines still being published, and the advent of the Mac and desktop publishing in general made these significantly easier to produce than previously. The original Battlestar Galactica and Blake's 7 had multiple fanzines with fic, in addition to the previously mentioned fandoms and a number of non-spec-fic fandoms (does Knight Rider count as SF? KITT was the only real SF-ish element), during the mid- to late '80s. Another fandom that crops up around this time, according to Wikipedia at least, is "Japanimation;" ah, a real blast from the past, that word, eh? Not even individual series; just animation from Japan as a lump. A couple of web sources claim that the drabble was invented in the late '80s, and originated in the Doctor Who fandom, not the Trek fandom, for once.
And then 1992-1994 were the Years That Changed Everything. The World Wide Web was invented, followed by graphical browsers, and the paper fanzine became obsolete. The amount of fanfic being written may or may not have changed; no one seems to know. I suspect that the change wasn't more than a single order of magnitude. The difference was that stories that previously had sat in teenaged girls' diaries and the backs of their English notebooks, never polished enough suddenly were out there where anyone could read them, and comment on them. As near as I can tell, the term "beta reader," later shortened to "beta," dates from the advent of the Web fanfic communities, but if anyone knows of it being used in the older 'zine or Usenet communities, please correct me.
Two big things happened later in the fanfic communities' adoption of Web-space. One was the Potterfandom. Published fanfic had always skewed female, but now it skewed young. The 'zine and Usenet communities always seemed to be college-aged, with some people older than that but fewer high-school-aged members, largely because they wouldn't have access to Usenet or to publication equipment. A home computer, or even a high school computer lab, is sufficient for Web access. Many of these fans had been, legitimately, children when the first book came out, and were in their teens during the gap between GoF and OotP; filling that gap with their own speculations was only natural, and now there were virtual spaces where they could do this as groups. Unlike some of the older fandoms, who - because of the nature of Usenet - were all aware of each other, there were also a number of young women who belonged only to the Potterfandom, without participating in fantasy fandom in general. (Some of these had their horizons broadened by the LotR films - ah, there's that fandom again - but the number of Potterfen who have only the one fandom still startles me.)
The other was the explosion of anime fandoms. Fanfic has a long tradition in Japanese manga, in the form of doujinshi (which, ironically enough, really can be translated as "fanzine," although almost no one does - I believe the -shi part is even a shortening analogous to -zine). A number of USian fans thus became aware of the genre conventions and jargon of doujinshi rather than the mostly Trek-derived conventions and jargon of North American fanfic (side note: I have not seen any evidence that the UK fic traditions are significantly different from the US ones, except that there seem to have been fewer fanzines during the '80s, which might just have been because of the smaller market). This has left the current Web fic community with an interesting set of doublings - yaoi vs. slash, yuri vs. femslash, lemon vs. PWP. It is somewhat amusing to me that the doujinshi community is also majority-female, like the USian fanfic community. Anyway, I suspect that the manga/anime fandom influence is one reason why most illustrated fanfic available on the Web looks like it does - either explicitly in manga style, or in what I have been referring to as the CLAMP/Bluth hybrid style. Very few graphic fanfics seem to draw from the US comic book/graphic novel traditions, unless one is ficcing from them directly, and even then an awful lot of X-Men fancomics look manga-y.
So, anyway. Trekkie fanfic is, if not the prototype, the archetype in the Western tradition. Who-fic is probably about as old, if not a few years older, but significantly less popular in the US until the '80s, when the show was more consistently imported. (Does anyone know of any fic-containing early Who 'zines in Great Britain?) Online fic communities go back to the early '80s; Web fic communities go back to pretty much the public discovery of the Web. The Web allowed hybridization with Japanese fanfic communities. And teenaged girls love Harry Potter.
