madmaudlingoes:

ledamemangociana:

heymarauders:

livejournal, fanfiction.net and ao3
which one were you?

I HAVE LITERALLY LIVED THROUGH ALL OF THEM WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT SAY ABOUT ME

Oh bb there is so much more to it than that.

First there were zines, lovingly mimeographed and stapled by our fandom foreparents, and those who remain to us from the Zine Age are powerful and wise.

Then there was Usenet, where formatting went to die. You know not the strength it takes to read 60k fics entirely in Courier New, or the pleasure of a really artistic looking section break marker composed of ASCII characters.

Then there was the Great Schism, as fandoms spread far and wide across the Web, and basic HTML was the whole of the law. Many of us lied our way into private “18+” listservs, and roamed the webrings, lamps aloft, in search of one virtuous author (or at least somebody else who shipped the thing).

From this dark age rose FF.net, that pit of voles from whose bourn many a hungry reader has returned, starved for citrus and heartsick from the cutesy author notes.

And FF.net begat Livejournal, which allowed easy archiving, threaded comments, flocked posts and invite-only communities. And it was Livejournal, in its death throes, that begat AO3, which once seemed like only a utopian vision and now bestrides the world like a Colossus.