Fallout.

More than once I've said I was the inciting factor behind the splintering and shattering of a nearly twenty year old fandom community. More than once I've explained it, and at this point, I might as well write it up for posterity instead of going over it every time someone asks, no matter how much fun it is to get jaws to drop each time I talk about it.

I won't name names here, I won't cite specific dates without being certain about them, and there's parts I can only infer based on what happened after the fact.

In 2006, six people got together to found a pairing-focused archive for Spike/Buffy fics. It was both a repository and social network, with bookmarks as well as private messages. To balance things out, each of these people was responsible for a different part of the site - tech coding, policy enforcement, content moderation, that kind of labor division - to keep everyone from getting stretched thin.

One of these mods left early for real life reasons. When she came back, about 13 years later, the archive was still going strong - basically, it was the last of the pairing-focused fandom archives from the late 90s/early 2000s left hanging on, with only two of the original mods still there after various people rotated in and out of assorted positions. One of the ones who'd stayed on after rotating in was a fairly well-known personality in the small pond of the archive's social space, and becoming a mod took her from well-known to big name. The both of them were quite close before the first one returned to being a mod.

I wandered into the archive sometime in 2019, looked around at the offerings, and started writing fics nobody else has gotten around to yet. (It's a point of pride that I'm apparently, based on all evidence, the first person in the history of the fandom to write something where Buffy was old and not on her immediate deathbed - rather, an old woman who's enjoying life.)

( Cut to December of 2020... )