>>149439287
You see a lot of underlying "Asshole meritocracy" here and goal focused writing. Plots exist, stories are dissected, experimented with, people. It's primitive, and usually has a dozen cults of personality at any given time, but there is actual thought going into this even if it's just "This would be cool."
The culture is a lot more willing to critique itself. Characterized by the fact that most complaints about fanfiction stems from this era even as it willingly indulges in harems and so on. Which is a notable difference, even relationship shit in this era usually has a desire to have an actual plot beyond that.
This is pretty different from the current era culturally.
The big change is that AO3 became majority dominant in fanfiction despite a terrible interface, boosting itself with the promise of essentially "no moderation", and got artificially signal boosted by a rash of news articles.
Increases in the centralization of the internet also saw it hooked into twitter and tumblr. This is pretty notable.
Eternal September events are when a community is flooded beyond its ability to initiate and process and self moderate. What *normally* happens with major platform shifts is they get flooded by users of the prior central platform, usually hybridizing their cultures. Instead, though, Tumblr and Twitter's cultural overlap immunized AO3 from an eternal september event and heavily politicized how it approaches fandom.
This era is characterized by lower effort fanfiction with writers that think more highly of themselves than the prior era, but who are far less ambitious. Fanfiction has no central function in fandom outside of a social talking point or short term work akin to masturbatory porn fics in prior eras, save for rare examples meant to be used for social clout long term or to provide replacement dopamine hits.
This is pretty notable because of how it impacts the way fandoms behave.
Cont.2
