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Run Away! Run Away!
Area 52, the Stargate Slash Archive.
I've had the "Recent Stories" page bookmarked for eons, and I check it often. It's just been redesigned, and I do not have the words to express my horror. How many more unnecessary, irrelevant, unreadable, color-challenged and distracting elements can they put on that page?
And if that weren't bad enough . . . a few notable entries aside, the sheer awfulness of most of what's shown up there lately is serious cause for despair. The latest outrage, as framed by the most recent iteration of the page: two different authors, one of whom has definitely been around long enough to know better, who have failed to grasp the notion that British English and American English are not the same, and that Americans do not wear singlets, or speak of their arse, or use biros. (And there's no such thing as a "postrate gland"--yes, spelled the same way twice--but that's a different rant.)
I would give up on the site were it not for the fact that occasionally I do find a decent story there that doesn't show up in any other venue.
Topic for discussion, should you so choose: is the story quality at Area 52 declining, or is it just that I'm getting pickier?
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I came to fandom in general during the golden age of Star Trek Original Series (I was a fan of the show when it first aired in the '60s. My advancing age and increasing decrepitude, let me show you it), and I've been witness to the decades of good writing and awful writing and everything in between that The Original Series (TOS) has generated.
At first glance, the very fact that there were so many years during which we saw the full spectrum of writing in TOS, stellar to pure crap, would seem to disprove your theory--but TOS is unique in a number of ways. It had a short original run of three seasons, but those three seasons generated 79 episodes, providing such a large and rich canon that writers had seemingly endless opportunities to expand, debate, reimagine, and spackle plot holes (of which there were many). This kept everyone busy for years, and just as things might have died down and the split between good and awful fic might have happened (and perhaps some would say that it did happen, but that it was swallowed up in future events--but I digress), we got the first movie, which was not very good in the opinion of most fans, but even so, another wave of writing came along to expand/debate/reimagine/spackle the movie, as well as to rework prior canon in the light of it. And this happened over and over, every time another one of the 5 movies that followed was released.
TOS fandom has also ridden the wave of changing technologies, as it came into being pre-Internet (pre-computer, even. Wow.) and thus the fiction originally was entirely paper-fanzine based. It was reinvigorated with the advent of newsgroups and listservs and then once again during the golden age of the Yahoo Group. Every time the technology changed, it seemed there was a new crop of writers who embraced that technology, perhaps even were inspired by it and by the new ways in which it enabled them to create and share their work.
TOS canon has been closed for some time now, but it took a fairly long time post-closing for the split to become evident. Now, actually, there isn't much new fic of any kind around. I think the fandom has existed so long, and there's such a HUGE body of work already created, that there just isn't all that much ground left to explore. What I have seen of the more recent fic definitely falls into your "really truly awful" vs. "really excellent" split--with the majority being on the awful side. TOS doesn't seem to have survived the LJ transition very well. I do see some former TOS writers on LJ but they're either writing in other fandoms, or they've stopped writing fic altogether.
Joining you in the baseless sociological nattering . . . although I see we haven't talked at all about gen vs. het vs. slash and whether splitting occurs differently in these different categories. But that's a discussion for another time! :)
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I wouldn't know. I certainly *read* gen and het, but I don't seem to be involved in any particular community structure on that side- I certainly couldn't say "I'm a het fan, I can talk about het fandom" the way I can fairly confidently say "I'm a slash fan, I can talk about (current) slash fandom." so god knows.
Actually, the on-LJ/off-LJ split was, I think, the more accurate and well-founded bit of that sociological nattering...
But yours is interesting! I'm not sure you can talk about TOS fitting into any kind of pattern just because it was *so* foundational. The patterns happened later, no? But what you say about not surviving the jump to LJ-based fandom is interesting. I've seen plenty of what I consider old-school fandom on LJ (The Sentinel, Starsky&Hutch...) but no TOS at all. Not that I've been looking. Why some fandoms make the jump across technological shifts and others don't... interesting question. Does the failure to make a jump like that cause the end of good fic production (and just leave the bad fic by people who fail to find mainstream fandom?). Have other fandoms failed to make jumps like that? (Was that what killed Blake's 7? I never did figure that out)
Er. Watch us babble! *blush*
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I s'pose if I looked really, really hard I might find some TOS on LJ. There are a few communities, I think, and I did poke around a little bit a month or so ago in a fruitless search for something I could latch on to . . . maybe I just wasn't diligent enough.
Your comment on Starsky & Hutch is very encouraging since this is a pairing that I love, and the few archives I know of don't seem to be very active anymore.
Beats me why some fandoms have made the jump to LJ while others haven't. I've yet to look for an X-Files presence on LJ, because I suspect I'll be depressed by what I find, or, rather, what I don't find. XF fandom seemed to crap out, with a few notable exceptions, almost immediately after the show was cancelled. Certainly both my preferred pairing (Mulder/Skinner), and my preferred threesome (Mulder/Scully/Skinner), have passed beyond endangered and can safely be said to have entered the realm of extinction. An online M/Sk fanzine, to which I contributed a story, was published a couple of years ago, and that was pretty much the last gasp for that pairing. As for the threesome, I think only two or three writers wrote for that particular combo--and I was one of them. (Who knows, maybe I will be again. I do have a WIP on my hard drive.)
Not sure what killed Blake's 7, as I never saw the show and never got involved in the fandom or the fic. It would be interesting if someone with an analytical bent and a whole lot of free time (or a pop culture doctoral dissertation to pursue ::grin::) would do a comparative study of the waxing and waning of fandoms, including their transition into and out of various media. I wonder, for instance, if the patterns for SF-based fandoms like Stargate and Trek are different than those for dramas like The West Wing or fantasies like Harry Potter.
Good grief, how I have gone on! And it's well past dinnertime, as my stomach is noisily reminding me . . .