[FFML] An old fart mumbles incoherently about anime fandom (Was Re: Fic archiving and FF.net)

[Joseph Palmer]

Sorry for the long email. I didn't have time to craft a short one.

>> That would be awfully nice.  But I suspect that, in the era of FF.net 
>> and its ilk, RAAC is losing relevance.  We seem to have a new 
>> generation of authors who aren't even aware of its existence.

I'd have to say that RAAC has already lost its relevance, which is too
bad as it seed to engender higher quality work than the usual on FF.net.

But times change.

I was reading rec.arts.anime.(mumble) before I ever saw NCSA Mosaic.
Before Netscape.
Before Google.
Before Yahoo.

Back then there was no real guarantee that articles posted to newsgroups
would be publicly archived. I recall it was a very big that that Deja 
News was
purchased by  Google, with the intention to open the archives for general
open browsing, (Except, of course the alt.pictures.(mumble) which was
described in one book about Usenet as "Contains Copyright Violations"

RAAC worked pretty well in it's day. A few hundred posts a month, 
moderated by
a handful of volunteers. Everyone had passing knowledge of pretty much
each of the dozen popular series, [BGC],[SM],[Ranma],[KOR] etc.

Maybe there would have been a way for it to evolve into a system that could
handle hundreds of series, and thousands of submissions per week, but 
the richer
experience of the WWW was just too great a draw.

For myself, I stopped posting the RAAC after investing a great deal of 
energy,
emotion, and time to finish a story a couple days early for the 
quarterly contest,
only to find that the moderator assigned to me didn't get to my story in 
time.
The moderation system got between me and the readers. That was the push.
 
The pull was the ability to gather readership statistics, and present my 
stories
in a format more closely related to the typeset page than plain text. I 
did fanfic
related art, and audio recordings, and for a time, links to pages that 
linked me.
I'd been researching the legalities of fanfiction, and wanted to be in a 
position
to yank my stories should I receive a legal warning. In the meantime, 
the number
of ISPs offering Usenet access dwindled, and maybe it was just the general
suckyness of my fics, but as the number of fanfictions increased, the number
of email from readers dropped. That and the apparent gaming and eventual
dropping of the fanfic contests pretty much left me feeling It wasn't 
worth the
effort anymore. It doesn't help that the only series I've felt the urge 
to write
for first aired long before most of the kids I've seen at anime conventions
were even born.

As anime became mainstream, there was just a lot more for the fan base to
consume. The average otaku way back when ran out of things to watch or
read, and were drawn to fanfiction. These days otaku have access to hundreds
of series, dubbed and subed, with translated manga on the side, With a fat
data pipe, and a willingness to watch fansubs, there's more anime to watch
than there are hours in the day.

Anyway, I'm rambling.

I miss the good old days, (jeez I'm old!) but it's pretty clear to me that
RAAC was the right place, at the right time, but its time has past, and
anime fandom has outgrown the limitations of that medium.


J.

P.S. If anyone knows of a Fanfiction community that might revive my
comatose muse, let me know.

My stories, as always, are at: 
http://www.josephpalmer.com/fanfic/fanfic.shtml