tbh one of the biggest changes in fandom over the past 25 years has been the absolute SEA CHANGE towards paying money for fandom stuff

like, I started around the middle-ish of the beginning for online fandom — people were sometimes still dialing into bulletin board systems, but usenets were big. to give you an idea, there wasn’t even enough commercial porn on the internet for spam to be an issue

and for the first decade plus of my time in fandom, it was UNFORGIVABLE to charge money for fan works. like, if you put out a zine (hard copy fandom magazine that somebody had to stand in a copy shop manually photocopying and stapling and then people wrote in to a P.O. Box 2buy)

you could charge a couple bucks to cover your print and shipping costs, but the idea of being able to TURN A PROFIT from fandom activities was shit that would have gotten you excommunicated from the fandom circles I saw

In large part, it was because the noncommercial nature of fandom was a HUGE part of the argument for why it was okay to create unofficial, unlicensed content. we aren’t taking any money from the creators! we are encouraging people to buy the canon!

making a profit was seen as a direct threat on our ability to sit around and tell satisfying stories (and due to bandwidth, it was largely text on the internet in the beginning because it used to like 10 minutes to download one (1) decent sized picture on the internet)

so it was policed like fuck. one offense was PERMABAN on the first email fic list I ever managed to get on (people posted fic by emailing it to an addy, and that addy distributed to everybody, so you they could dl fic to avoid paying for internet by the minute)

Even a decade after that, there was a Huge FUCKING Scandal when a well-known fic author had her laptop stolen, and she posted an appeal to fans to give her money so she could finish the fic series she was writing

so what changed? I think fandom got younger, less middle class, and much, much, much bigger. It stopped being the province of middle class people and university-affiliated folks, people who could afford the luxury of separating out pleasure from money

nobody would fucking bat an eyebrow these days to a fan artist doing commissions to raise money for a new tablet, for example. a lot of people have a ko-fi

the other thing, I think, was that people who grew up in fandom went pro and the culture around fanwork went a huge change — it’s STARTLING for me to see actual authors participating in fandom exchanges under their pro names

like back in the bbs or Usenet says, you’d see the occasional person who was in the industry or whatever, but it was unusual. people lost their shit about rumors that a Real Author with a Published Book was among us, but like, I’m seeing lots of authors with author photos in cql

which is super cool! May we never fucking see a repeat of the 90’s and early aughts bullshit about authors who came out of collab storytelling and fandom shitting on people who continued to want to write fic!!!!

And I’m so glad that fandom is now, like, not under existential threat? That it’s no longer a rocket ticket to social ostracization if you say you did it? Like, my husband mentioned to some of his Ivy-league educated, highly successful friends that I wrote fanfic

Link us! Link us! Share [real life name]’s fic with us! And then he had to tell them that I’m oldschool fandom and a goddamn lich, with my fanfic as the unholy reliquary that houses my soul, so nobody gets both, okay, unless you come out of fandom and have opinions about a/b/o

One caveat before the end: this is me thinking about English-language fandom in the West. Anime/East Asian fandom has a TOTALLY different history and vibe and history arc, which I also saw in the 90’s and aughts but have not re-engaged with since geocities died the big one.

the end, off to keep eyerolling at the 16 year olds who want all 30 year olds out of fandom, fine, but we’re taking all the shit that we and our ancestors made like idk FIC and SLASH and AU’S and ARCHIVES