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Musings about printed fan fic
Mar. 4th, 2005 06:56 pmI'd been meaning to post about this for the past week or so but with Oscars, the increasing rollout of new SW merch, and trailer mania, it fell to the wayside.
I needed to use an old fanzine for my latest Saga Journal paper and that got me looking at some other more recent zines from the 1990s, including my Leia fan fic zine Snowfire. I was ecstatic to find one of my favorite fics, an Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon viggie (no, not slash) from 2000 that ran in a zine called I Care. It was called "Revelry" and it was sort of inspired by my annual trip to the Maryland Renaissance Festival in 1999. It was infused with the commonly-held fanon at the time that perhaps Quiggy was Corellian. The nutshell of it is Quiggy teaches Obi-Wan how to loosen up a little during some Harvest Festival on Corellia. I guess you could interpret it as the beginnings of Obi-Wan's affection for cantinas ;).
In any case, zines have all but disappeared except among some quarters in some fandoms and even so, most of their material is stuff that had been online. I'd known for a long time this would happen because the internet is cheaper and far more convenient than a yearly zine. Such is life. But the single advantage zines have is that they are time capsules, capturing what a fandom was like at a particular time. The zine I referenced for my paper was published in 1982. Just reading the ads at the back of the zine was revealing of what was popular among fen back in the day: Star Trek, Dr. Who, Buck Rogers. Most of the SW fic was of the gen variety. I flipped through my Leia zines (some of the stories are actually still good IMO) and saw what had changed by the mid '90s...fewer zines but with much nicer graphics. The variety of material in my zine was better than in the '82 one.
The internet is here to stay and it has truly democratized fan fiction (for better or worse), but it's more ephemeral. Sure there are online archives and the like, but an awful lot of what gets put on gets lost. It's also not all collected in one place.
I'm considering running some of my old and better fan fic here for you younguns, with a little of the Special Edition treatment, natch.
I needed to use an old fanzine for my latest Saga Journal paper and that got me looking at some other more recent zines from the 1990s, including my Leia fan fic zine Snowfire. I was ecstatic to find one of my favorite fics, an Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon viggie (no, not slash) from 2000 that ran in a zine called I Care. It was called "Revelry" and it was sort of inspired by my annual trip to the Maryland Renaissance Festival in 1999. It was infused with the commonly-held fanon at the time that perhaps Quiggy was Corellian. The nutshell of it is Quiggy teaches Obi-Wan how to loosen up a little during some Harvest Festival on Corellia. I guess you could interpret it as the beginnings of Obi-Wan's affection for cantinas ;).
In any case, zines have all but disappeared except among some quarters in some fandoms and even so, most of their material is stuff that had been online. I'd known for a long time this would happen because the internet is cheaper and far more convenient than a yearly zine. Such is life. But the single advantage zines have is that they are time capsules, capturing what a fandom was like at a particular time. The zine I referenced for my paper was published in 1982. Just reading the ads at the back of the zine was revealing of what was popular among fen back in the day: Star Trek, Dr. Who, Buck Rogers. Most of the SW fic was of the gen variety. I flipped through my Leia zines (some of the stories are actually still good IMO) and saw what had changed by the mid '90s...fewer zines but with much nicer graphics. The variety of material in my zine was better than in the '82 one.
The internet is here to stay and it has truly democratized fan fiction (for better or worse), but it's more ephemeral. Sure there are online archives and the like, but an awful lot of what gets put on gets lost. It's also not all collected in one place.
I'm considering running some of my old and better fan fic here for you younguns, with a little of the Special Edition treatment, natch.
