What I Did In Quarantine

I've been working on a fandom history thing, and it's finally ready to show off:

The Maximum Ride fandom archive.

What?

Maximum Ride is a YA series by James Patterson. I was very active in the fandom between approximately 2006 and 2013, and am still active in the small Tumblr community that's sprung up. I don't think it was ever a huge fandom, and it was mostly teenagers at its height. As far as I can tell, no one else on the Internet is writing about its history - OK, not like fandom history is a hugely popular topic, but still.

A funny thing happens when you're in a fandom for a long time... history starts to happen around you, and things vanish if you don't make a point of saving them. I kept finding myself saying "Oh, I'm sure I saved that on my Tumblr somewhere" when in search of an old image or fic, or trying to recount something that had happened. And then, well, I lost my job in March, and found myself with a lot of free time.

So I made a website and started writing things up.

What's on it?

A lot of things! The main theme of the site as a whole is that... it's a one-person personal project, so it's a big collection of things I remember. 

There's a big central page of official content of various kinds - material that appears only in certain editions of the books, promotional videos, images that were almost lost to link rot, and more.

(If you want to see specifically some of the things one particular ad agency created, there's a page for that!)

There's another page just about the official websites that I know existed, and the kind of material they featured. There was an AIM bot you could talk to at one point!

There's a page just for the forums that existed at various points -- both the official ones, and a small number of fan forums that I remember.

Of course there's a page for fanfic and fanart -- both things I personally liked, and authors I remember being popular. It turns out I saved a lot of fanart back in the day.

My favorite page, however, is about a big collaborative fan project that I loved working on: the ARG I helped run in early 2011, prior to the release of Angel, the seventh book in the series. Together, we created images and sound files to tell the story of the rise of Itex, a megacorporation that played an important role in the backstory of the series.

There's still more stuff I want to do, but I've been working on this since April and I'm so, so excited to show it off. I hope you enjoy it.