I got onto thinking about the origins of Kirk x Spock fanfic earlier and. It kinda blew my mind a little bit.
Like, here it is, 1967, 68, 70, whatever. Like PLAINLY before computers were anything more than warehouse-size tabulating machines. And these hundreds of people—mostly women—in high school, in college, pregnant newlyweds, married with children, whatever, take to their typewriters or just their notebooks and pencils, and they write. I mean, they WRITE. We all think of women from the '60s being either free-love hippies or pearl-clutching church ladies, but the stuff that came out of their hands was raunchy by even today's standards. Some of these girls and women even did their own illustrations, making what we would recognise today as "yaoi". It makes you realise that weird fangirls are absolutely timeless; like even Franz Liszt had to deal with groupies going through his bin while he was out of the room.
But like, these women in the late '60s laid the fundamental groundwork for projects like AO3 without generating a single byte of computerised data. They had newsletters, zines, fanclubs, everything that we would use a computer or a tablet for today, all achieved through terrestrial, pedestrian means. I am HUMBLED to think about someone sitting in this very same flat back in 1971, sitting at her formica card table with a Selectric, a stack of filler paper on one side, a stack of typed pages on the other, a pencil behind one ear, and a red pen behind the other. She's typing the RAUNCHIEST Spirk fic you've ever read and stopping every so often to... well, you know. But all of this without the aid of a computer. Even into the '80s, when 8-bit home computers came on the scene, there was still no internet, no way of automating anything, and for the money the best way to write fanfic was still a typewriter. It really wasn't until the mid-1990s that online fanfic sites happened at all.
It's important that we remember our roots, you know. Erotic fan-fiction didn't just appear overnight in 2010; our moms, grandmas, and aunties were writing this stuff on their Olivettis and Royals back in the '60s. Before then, even. After all, rule 34 is as old as writing. You think Johnlock shipping started when Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman took up the roles? Pfft, no.