Meta (Again?)
2008-10-26 02:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rodoLately I have been unable to find any new fics I want to read. So I decided to look up all the fics I stored on my computer before I could spend all my time online. They are mostly from 2004 and before, and my archive is in pretty bad shape. I'm trying to make them look presentable, but it takes ages *sigh*.
I'm currently working on a fic that was never finished, written for a source text nobody but me seems to remember and there were only ever a handful of fics online when I looked for them. Said source text is The Heroic Legend of Arislan, and as it happens it was the first source ever that I watched in English, back when my English was very bad. I think it was when I was in 9th grade, back when there were only four current manga series being published in Germany, and they were mainly for an adult audience. I don't know why I got the idea to import the three videos, but I did. And I fell in love with the series. I actually own a manga (number four) and the first of the novels now, and I'm thinking about translating the novel if I ever find the time. Anybody interested?
The fanfic I'm talking about is called Coronation by Sahari, a really popular writer back in the day. I think she had to stop publishing and to take down her site because of a stalker who claimed Sahari's fics had ruined her daughter's morals. Or something. I wasn't very involved in English fandom back then and much less interested in anything but the fic reading part of fandom. Anyway, her's wasn't the only fic I recently researched. It's the third I am working on. The first one is another WIP that has been abandoned, even though the author still writes. She's just interested in other stuff now, which is sad, because I still think that the abandoned story is her best. The next story has been abandoned as well, and even though it's still online, the writer seems to have disappeared (animexx.de automatically deletes your account if you haven't been logged in for half a year), the story is orphaned. And I think this might be true for most of my archive, at least for those fics I started reading before I stuck to completed stories. Most of my personal archive (about 75%, I'd guess) consists of abandoned WIPs.
I also tried to find new fics to read via rec-lists, and more often than not I ended up following a dead link. Websites vanish or aren't updated, and that makes me feel as if fandom is like Venice with its dead-ends and canals and narrow streets. Just without the signs that make Venice less of a maze.
And while I think that the abundance of WIPs is sad because many of these stories were awesome, many of them are at least still online, possibly because the authors never bothered to delete anything. The case of Sahari is a different one. Her site disappeared, even though a lot of people liked it. It's a great loss, in my opinion, because said website was part of our collective history. And that is what bugs me about authors taking down their works because they don't want to be associated with them any longer. I understand that, but I would really love it if it was still possible for others to distribute the works they love so much without fear. I'd love it if there was some place where authors could leave these works online. A place for these stories to become sort of the fanfic equivalent of a public domain (in this case: stories without authors attached to them), because in my mind, these stories belong to us in a way, they shaped fandom as we know it and thus are a part of it.
But this might just be the tired me speaking who would love not to have to keep a personal archive of fics. Most of them are internet formatted and look just awful in any other context. Lately, there have been a few authors who put their finished works up as a PDF, something that is very convenient for the readers. I really think this is a great idea and want to encourage others to do the same. It saves me hours of work trying to fix the screwed up format, at least.
I'm currently working on a fic that was never finished, written for a source text nobody but me seems to remember and there were only ever a handful of fics online when I looked for them. Said source text is The Heroic Legend of Arislan, and as it happens it was the first source ever that I watched in English, back when my English was very bad. I think it was when I was in 9th grade, back when there were only four current manga series being published in Germany, and they were mainly for an adult audience. I don't know why I got the idea to import the three videos, but I did. And I fell in love with the series. I actually own a manga (number four) and the first of the novels now, and I'm thinking about translating the novel if I ever find the time. Anybody interested?
The fanfic I'm talking about is called Coronation by Sahari, a really popular writer back in the day. I think she had to stop publishing and to take down her site because of a stalker who claimed Sahari's fics had ruined her daughter's morals. Or something. I wasn't very involved in English fandom back then and much less interested in anything but the fic reading part of fandom. Anyway, her's wasn't the only fic I recently researched. It's the third I am working on. The first one is another WIP that has been abandoned, even though the author still writes. She's just interested in other stuff now, which is sad, because I still think that the abandoned story is her best. The next story has been abandoned as well, and even though it's still online, the writer seems to have disappeared (animexx.de automatically deletes your account if you haven't been logged in for half a year), the story is orphaned. And I think this might be true for most of my archive, at least for those fics I started reading before I stuck to completed stories. Most of my personal archive (about 75%, I'd guess) consists of abandoned WIPs.
I also tried to find new fics to read via rec-lists, and more often than not I ended up following a dead link. Websites vanish or aren't updated, and that makes me feel as if fandom is like Venice with its dead-ends and canals and narrow streets. Just without the signs that make Venice less of a maze.
And while I think that the abundance of WIPs is sad because many of these stories were awesome, many of them are at least still online, possibly because the authors never bothered to delete anything. The case of Sahari is a different one. Her site disappeared, even though a lot of people liked it. It's a great loss, in my opinion, because said website was part of our collective history. And that is what bugs me about authors taking down their works because they don't want to be associated with them any longer. I understand that, but I would really love it if it was still possible for others to distribute the works they love so much without fear. I'd love it if there was some place where authors could leave these works online. A place for these stories to become sort of the fanfic equivalent of a public domain (in this case: stories without authors attached to them), because in my mind, these stories belong to us in a way, they shaped fandom as we know it and thus are a part of it.
But this might just be the tired me speaking who would love not to have to keep a personal archive of fics. Most of them are internet formatted and look just awful in any other context. Lately, there have been a few authors who put their finished works up as a PDF, something that is very convenient for the readers. I really think this is a great idea and want to encourage others to do the same. It saves me hours of work trying to fix the screwed up format, at least.
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Date: 2008-10-26 02:02 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2008-10-28 08:08 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2008-10-31 07:33 am (UTC)Yeah, but why should a writer bother to keep their website up and running if they never hear from anyone about it? I have a fic website which I don't bother to update any more because it's too much trouble for too little return: as far as I can tell from feedback, I get one reader a year.
Livejournal is a site where you can post a story and get instafeedback - but conversely, it makes it so easy for fans to leave feedback that anything more difficult just gets left out. Most fans these days won't even be arsed to write an e-mail if they like a story. Then they complain that websites aren't maintained any more. Not that I'm saying you do this, I'm saying that feedback is the only way fans have of knowing their stories are actually being read, and the only motivation they have for keeping a fanfic archive live and maintained is that the stories are being read from it. If no one's reading (as far as the author can tell) why bother keeping the site up to date?
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Date: 2008-10-31 11:09 am (UTC)Websites vanish or aren't updated, and that makes me feel as if fandom is like Venice with its dead-ends and canals and narrow streets. Just without the signs that make Venice less of a maze.
I love websites and I do wish more people used them. I used to use Angelfire's free site before I bought my own and I kept templates for the html needed on every page so I could just copy and paste.
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