coaltide | Morbane's coal

Morbane's coal

In quantum wankchanics, Morbane's coal is a thought experiment, sometimes described as a paradox, of quantum wankerposition. In the thought experiment, a hypothetical gift may be considered simultaneously both the fic of your dreams (TFOYD) and coal, while it is unread state, as a result of its fate being linked to a random subatomic event that may or may not occur.

The Coaltide interpretation implies that, after a while, the gift is simultaneously TFOYD and coal. Yet, when a coalie clicks on their gift, the coalie sees the gift either TFOYD or coal, not both TFOYD and coal. This poses the question of when exactly quantum wankerposition ends and reality resolves into one possibility or the other.

Madness Opens: Tuesday 26 December
Author Reveals: Monday 1 January

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NC

I can only speak for myself but the older I get the more picky I am about the stuff I read. When I started doing Yuletide in 2004 I used to give lots of fic with different ships or gen fic a try, but my tastes have narrowed down drastically in terms of what kinds of ships and trope I enjoy.

cyrt

Thinking about it, I'm feeling like the answer is probably just volume. When fandom was smaller, we all read more widely because that's what there was, but now we have more choice we stick to our tastes (and what's popular is what's popular, can't argue with that). I suspect the same is happening in genre profic now too (which is why I have a harder time finding sf/f books I enjoy, everyone is narrowing to specific audiences).

DC

Tagging is probably a factor as well. It's just easier to stick to reading only the very specific things that you want when fics are tagged in detail with the various tropes, kinks and everything else they contain. Back when I started out reading fic in the days of personal websites, about all that was guaranteed was a one-line summary, and maybe if you were lucky they might bother to mention a pairing or if there was adult content. (Did the old Yuletide Treasure archive even give you any more details than the fandom and title? I can't remember.) Even after labelling did start to get a bit more fine-grained I think for a while people were probably still just more in the habit of expecting trying fics to be a complete crapshoot. Nowadays there's probably less chance-taking on fics that don't immediately sound like your thing, but then also less of that experience of clicking on a fic where all you have to go on is "Character A wakes up to a big surprise" and discovering it's A/B crossover wingfic with bonus enema kink that ends in endgame A/C after B dies of cancer. (Though, fandom being fandom, still a non-zero chance.)

DC

Yuletide treasure also allowed you a summary. My fic one year was immortalized with a summary typo I could never fix unless I wanted to email the mods about it.

Ah, the good old days.

I super don't miss that site.

cyrt

Yeah and I’m weird because I rarely do more than glance at tags, if that. When I’m reading on AO3 it’s usually sorted by pairing if it’s a big enough fandom, and then I go by whether summaries sound competent (the premise doesn’t even have to particularly grab me, it just needs to sound like something by a good writer). Obviously if the summary makes me go “wait is this a modern coffee shop AU” I’ll check the tags but otherwise I’m just looking for the stories that look like they’re by an author who knows what they’re doing.

CYRT

Yeah, I'm much the same, especially since I'm mostly in smaller fandoms with slim pickings and generally just after fic with good characterisation of my fave rather than particularly caring about the pairing or wanting a specific trope. I tend to find summaries a much more helpful indicator of whether I'm going to get on with a fic than the tags, so I pretty much just trawl through everything and try anything I don't outright bounce off of. (And no doubt I frustrate other people with my minimalist tagging, since I only tend to include freeform tags I would personally find useful for filtering, which is mostly just setting information like "pre-series" and occasionally a single central trope like "time travel".)

cyrt

Samesies! I always struggle to tag beyond a really basic genre one, but I've tried to train myself into adding a few conversational/informal ones because in my experience it does help you stand out in bigger fandoms. Hate having to self promo, sigh.

And you know what I mean about competent summaries! It can be an excerpt or an actual summary, but you can just tell when they're by a writer who can write.

I'm the opposite, I barely even look at the summary, I just check whether at the tags list tropes, kinks and elements I like.

CYRT

I don't think fandom was necessarily smaller (in terms of volume) 15 or 20 years ago. I was just younger and had much more spare time and willingness to compromise. And there was also a lot of... trial and error? I remember I holed myself up for two days and read 100-150 fics and there was usually at least 20 or so that I liked, but that also meant I spent a lot of time reading fic I didn't enjoy. I just don't have the patience and energy for that anymore. (And I agree with the other coalie that tagging is a part of it, as in it helps me make a preselection I couldn't make on the old Yuletide archive.)

Fandom was definitely smaller then. There were just fewer people who knew about it and could access it. And what existed was way less connected- the largest archives in 2004 had tens of thousands of fic (maybe a couple hundred thousand for Gossamer and FA and ff.net which were way larger than the rest.) AO3 has 12 million.

In terms of Yuletide though - it was also more... Cohesive? Like in yt 2004 or 2005 I probably knew about half the nominated fandoms and was interested in half the rest; they were all from a similar culture (and the same kinds of fandoms that get rec'd a lot on the yt comm today.) YT is lately probably at least half fandoms that are really not coming out of that general fandom cultural space that still gets all the recs on the DW comm. (This is, let me establish, not a bad thing. Unless you wrote for one and are wondering where all your kudos are.)

As a data point, a story I published on ff.net in 2004 is numerically over two million. The last thing I published there was in 2020 and is numerically over thirteen million.

13 million what?

The stories are archived numerically like on AO3. Ex: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12345678. The newest fic is numbered over 14 million which means over 14 million fics have been posted to ff.net.

DA

I'm not sure what that kind of data proves? Especially since AFAIK the numbers are unique, so if a fic gets deleted, the number won't be reused.

Re: Losing Yuletide

(Anonymous) - 2024-01-01 17:27 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Losing Yuletide

(Anonymous) - 2024-01-01 17:29 (UTC) - Expand

AO3's work numbers don't count up directly anymore - they use a randomizing function that makes the work numbers about 4-5x as high as the total number of works. (It would have over 50,000,000 if we went by work numbers.)

It looks like ff.net, at least in the early days, did just count up? But the work number was still significantly higher than the number of works. The only stats on # of works on fanfiction.net I could find were from 2010 (when the site was pretty much at its peak of relevance) and showed that the number of works could be approximated to about 60% of the highest work number. So if you had a work at around 2 mill in 2004, there were probably something less than 1.5 millions works available. Still a lot higher than my estimate! Still about 1/10 of what's currently available just on AO3 (ff.net is currently at about 14 million in work numbers, and Wattpad makes stats even harder to get but it's within the same range as those two.) So I think it's still valid to say that there's something like 10x as much fic available as there was in 2004, and it's much easier to find.

I think "it's easier to find" only applies to people who aren't already into fandom and fic culture.

In the days of eGroups / YahooGroups, I didn't have to *find* fic, I got it all emailed right to my inbox. Today, I largely know where to look for it (though people are often posting exclusively to Tumblr/Discord/Patreon, so it's becoming less centralised and harder to find than it was 5-10 years ago), but it involves several more steps than I had to take then.

Is that a thing that people are really doing? Exclusively tumblr/discord/patreon fanfiction? Is it good? I guess, that fic that I've seen on tumblr has been...not great. (Kind of how I view wattpad fic, although I think that's a step above tumblr fic). I think that the best and brightest fandom fic writers are on ao3. Although, I'm really only on ao3, so maybe I'm missing out.

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But first you had to find the mailing list.

cyrt

Fandom was less public back then and more scattered, yes, with lots of smaller single-fandom and media type archives, but it's not like I had less fic to pick from in 1999 or 2004 and than I have in 2023. Though I suppose that depends on what kind of fandoms you're in.

Like in yt 2004 or 2005 I probably knew about half the nominated fandoms and was interested in half the rest

I think for me, the number of fandoms I knew stayed the same over the years. When I go through the fandom list, I still see lots of movies and books and some theatre and RPF where I have the same initial "oh, I'm familiar with that" reaction. The difference - and this is clearly very subjective - is that in 2004, this reaction was followed by "I'll check the fic out!" whereas now it's usually followed by "... but I don't feel fannish about it" and I scroll further. Mid-2000s me was committed reading everything in an exchange where I vaguely knew the canon. 2023 me doesn't have the time and energy anymore for anything that I don't already have a strong fannish investment in (fandoms, as well as ships and tropes).

I would say I definitely have more fic to pick from. Of course it does depend on fandoms a lot. Small fandoms are still small fandoms (there's just a lot more of them active now) and if you've been only in Highlander fandom the whole time things haven't changed much.

But the biggest fandoms these days routinely get hundreds of works posted a day, and the only thing that came close to that in ~2004 era was *maybe* HP on FA, but I think even then there's more HP fics posted on just AO3 (not even counting Wattpad and fanfiction.net) per day than there was per week on FictionAlley. (I was one of the pre-posting editors for a little while and we definitely weren't getting hundreds a day.)

NC

I feel like I've gotten pickier than I was in 2004, but in the opposite direction. I crave novelty and there are beloved Yuletide-sized fandoms that I click on now, look at the stories, and think oh, none of these are grabbing me, maybe I've already read everything I need to read for this fandom.

nc

yeah, there are fandoms where i'm like, i don't need yet another post-canon get-together fic that hits exactly the same notes as all the other ones. if it looks like it's doing something new, then i'll click.

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