A fakenews fandom LJ history June 8, 2017

I got asked a thing about Daily Show/Colbert Report fandom history, and ended up typing a couple hundred words. Figured I’d repost it here, for anyone else who came in late and wants backstory.

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In the beginning, before the Daily Show had any spinoffs, there was just tds_rps. Then the Colbert Report came along in 2005, and people started using “fake news” to refer to both shows together, in contrast to “real news” for the fans who wrote RPF about news anchors.

At that time Livejournal didn’t let you have tags on posts at all. When the option was introduced, that was one of the motivations for creating the fakenews_fanfic community — to create a place that had comprehensive tags from the beginning.

Anyone can start a new LJ comm, so they weren’t centralized or organized in any logical way. If someone felt like there was a need that wasn’t being filled by the existing comms, they would make one. Like, for a while tds_rps was joined by tcr_fps, which was open to Report-specific fics. It had such a narrow focus, there was argument about whether Jon/”Stephen” fics should be allowed — because even though “Stephen” the character was in them, Jon wasn’t a fictional character, he was just himself.

You can see why a community like that would get a limited amount of traffic. People who liked writing “Stephen” fic usually also liked writing about Jon. And a lot of them liked writing about Stephen-the-actor too, and there was heavy crossover with fans of news RPF, and fans of Strangers With Candy (the comedy Stephen co-created, where he played a character who was a lot like “Stephen,” and the sense of humor was very similar), and so on and so forth….

So one of the reasons fakenews_fanfic rose to be the main fandom community was that it had a broad focus. People could post all their fake-news-related fic in the same place. Not every reader had exactly the same interests, but there was enough overlap that everyone would be interested in most of the fic posted. And the tags meant it was easy to go through and find exactly the things you liked.

For a long time there wasn’t a single kink meme, just people making “put your kink prompts here” posts in their personal journals. Eventually someone decided to be more organized, and created a dedicated community for it. I don’t actually know who! It was a personal project, not the official creation of any other community.

Fills from all the separate kink posts are bookmarked and tagged in one place. (I do know who handled that, because it was me.)