Our Fragile Fandom

Introductory note: some of you may wonder whether this post was inspired by a recent event involving a ponyfic author deleting their account – not just removing their stories but making it seem as though said account had never existed. The answer is: not really; I didn't know this author and have never reviewed one of their fics. Plus, I've been thinking about this post for a while. However, it was the aforementioned issue that prompted me to publish it now.

Fandoms are ephemeral, and online fandoms – which is most of them – even more so. In music, for example, MandoPony chose a while back to make some of his MLP tracks inaccessible – not merely unlisted, but privated/deleted entirely. Some are still available on his Bandcamp account, but others – one notable example being the villain!Sunset song "Shimmer On" – now only exist online because of unofficial reuploads by others.

I do understand that many artists have moved on from Pony by now, and that at least a few have found a YouTube account full of brony music a minus in the eyes of industry figures. I think it was Makkon – once a very prominent fandom musician but probably now barely known by most newer fans – who said that yes, this very thing had happened to him. He chose to put his old music into a couple of compilation videos (1, 2) but others have deleted such things entirely.

I support the right of artists to control what happens to their works online. Those works belong to them, not to us. And here in Europe, at least, the law is increasingly getting involved, with people now having a (qualified) "right to be forgotten" and new data protection rules imminent that will mean more such rights – for example, forums will not be able to refuse a request to delete a departing member's account without good reason.

But that doesn't mean I can't be sad about it. Imagine if Kkat chose to delete all traces of Fallout: Equestria, leaving only scattered unofficial copies, or if Forest Rain chose to block public access to "Great to be Different". These are works that have transcended their original purpose and become significant parts of brony cultural history. (A pompous phrase, I know.) So when we lose those, we lose a part of ourselves, too.

It's not all doom and gloom. A number of fan-made songs use Creative Commons licences, which are irrevocable. As such, people will always be able to redistribute Aviators' "Friendship" within the terms of CC by-nc-sa 3.0. Some DeviantArt pictures also use CC licenses, though I do wonder occasionally whether a few artists who do this truly appreciate that they can't then require people to ask permission before using them.

A tiny number of stories apart, Creative Commons releases don't really happen in ponyfic – perhaps because, for the most part, authors don't own the characters or settings they write about in the first place. (Mind you, that applies to fanart, too.) Together with the fact that the overwhelming majority are only publicly accessible on Fimfiction, this means that Pony fanfic may be the most vulnerable major area of all to loss in the future.

Imagine if Fimfiction suddenly went under, either because it couldn't make ends meet or just because knighty got fed up with it. We'd lose a great deal, very quickly, and most of it would never come back. (Yes, I know about the likes of Fimarchive and Fimfetch, but most casual fans don't.) I think about this and I wonder: for new G4 fans in 2028 or 2038 – and they will exist, just as new G1 fans do right now in 2018 – what shards of our extraordinary fandom will they find still accessible?

And now you can see why I used the "musing" tag on this, rather than "essay" – it wasn't exactly rigorously planned out!