As online fanfiction proceeds into its third decade, numerous platform shifts have occurred. Tolkien-based fanfiction was some of the first fanfiction to be shared online in large quantities and, as such, provides an apt case study in how these shifts have impacted a fandom and its cultures.

Tolkien-based fanfiction began to be shared online in the late 1990s and continues to this day. In these early years, fans had to be inventive, often adapting rudimentary social media platforms (e.g., Yahoo! Groups) into fanfiction archives. In the early 2000s, fans began building websites specifically as fanfiction archives for multiple authors. Archive-building represented a form of fan creativity and fan labor that is often overlooked. The result was hundreds of options for posting and sharing Tolkien-based fanworks. This extreme fragmentation of the fandom fostered distinct fan cultures on different sites but also created a fandom with little sense of cohesion and, often, even less connection with the larger fanfiction world.

Since the rise of An Archive of Our Own (AO3), the pendulum has swung the other way, with increasing consolidation onto AO3 and cultural homogeneity in the Tolkien fanfiction community. Most Tolkien-specific archives have since closed. This presentation will consider the implications of this historical trajectory on the Tolkien fandom, including the opportunities and perils of various archive structures; the challenges faced by small archives; the loss of autonomy and technical creativity and knowledge when fans stop building their own archives; the reduced isolation of the Tolkien fandom as it consolidates onto AO3; and the loss of fan cultures that comes with that consolidation. Finally, I will consider the wider implications of a single-archive fandom and what is required to sustain smaller archives amid the challenges they face.

You know the scene-become-meme in The Fellowship of the Ring film, where Elrond intones to Gandalf, "I was there …"? That's the Tolkien fandom. We've not only been around for decades but were one of the pioneers of online fanfiction archives with the first documented Tolkien fanworks appearing in print in the late '50s and online in the late '90s. That makes Tolkien fanfiction an apt case study in how fanfiction archives have evolved over time.

In her book Rogue Archives, Abigail De Kosnik outlines how fanfiction archives changed from the late '90s until today, and the Tolkien fandom follows that trajectory. In the late '90s/early 2000s, the first social networks appeared, sites like Yahoo! Groups and LiveJournal. These were leveraged by fans for sharing and archiving fanfiction. Large "universal" archives like Fanfiction.net came on the scene then too. In the early-mid 2000s, what De Kosnik terms "community archives" sprang from social networks and served as a repository for not just a community's fanworks but its culture. In Tolkien fandom, this resulted in dozens of small archives, some of them highly specialized and nearly all of them with a mailing list, forum, or other social network behind them.

In 2015 and again in 2020, I ran a survey to measure values and behaviors among writers and readers of Tolkien fanfiction. In 2015, many of these small community archives were still operational, and what emerged from the results of the 2015 survey was the distinct culture of each. While other scholars had documented how Tolkien fanfic writers chose archives based on character or group (Elves or Hobbits, for example) or genre (such as gen, slash, or het fiction), my survey results showed that archive selection also involved values and preferences that ran much deeper than a writer's chosen subject matter. This resulted in online homes for people who took Tolkien's canon seriously and those who did not; those who felt his Catholic morality mattered and those who openly flaunted it; those who thought sex belonged in Tolkienfic and those who avoided it; and those who used fanfiction for criticism or fun or social justice or escape or varying combinations thereof.

The pendulum has now swung in the other direction. While these small archives—often run by one person and used by just a few—were always liable to close, as my handout shows, recent years have been devastating. Many archives have closed, and many more have become inactive. Only two Tolkien-specific archives—Stories of Arda and my archive, the Silmarillion Writers' Guild—remain both open and active as of 2022.

Past waves of closures correspond with declining excitement and activity after the two Jackson team film trilogies. This one does not. In fact, with Amazon's new Tolkien-based show now streaming, fandom activity can be predicted to increase, leaving a potential renewed role for some of the archives that closed. So what is going on?

Part can be explained by the discontinuation of development of the eFiction open-source software in 2015. Many archives used eFiction, including the Silmarillion Writers' Guild, and as the code aged, we saw increasing problems that drove us to a very labor-intensive migration to Drupal software instead. It is understandable that many groups will not want to undertake that same level of effort. Part of the issue, too, is the increased use of the Archive of Our Own (or AO3) among Tolkien writers. While about 70% of writers used AO3 in the 2015 survey, five years later, the number increased to about 85%: a 15% increase. Increasingly, I hear from authors that AO3 appeals to them because they can put everything there. Earlier this year, I caused a bit of a stir by calling AO3 fandom's Walmart: you can get your oil changed, buy a bag of salad mix and a bike helmet, and get a flu shot all in one trip. This time, I've settled on the less provocative ecumenopolis as my metaphor: an entire world in one city.

There is an appeal to a fanworks ecumenopolis, where everything and everyone can be found in one vast virtual city. I live in a place where, until the recent arrival of a Walmart (speaking of Walmart) you had to drive an hour to buy a pair of underwear. So I get it. It's the thrill I get when visiting New York City, where no matter what I want to eat or buy, I can probably acquire it in the same hour it used to take to buy undies in northeastern Vermont. The smattering of dozens of different archives was far from utopian and presented its share of problems, but putting everything in one place creates clear problems too. There is the increased risk of data loss, first and foremost, but all those unique archive cultures? Gone. Furthermore, I'd argue that the ability of a community to govern itself matters, as does its technical self-sufficiency, where members of the community have the technical skills and creativity to maintain their own spaces. The question I want to raise today is 1) whether those issues are compelling enough to make an active effort to retain, restore, and build new independent community archives apart from AO3 (since Open Doors—and therefore AO3—has absorbed many of the closed archives) and 2) what we need in order to do so.