A Guided Tour of the Maximum Ride Forums

[too_much_in_the_sun]

This will probably be the first in a series of posts, but I can't make any promises about how many or when I'll post them. Sorry.

Between 2006 and 2013, I was extremely active in the fandom for James Patterson's YA series, Maximum Ride. It is still very close to my heart, but its popularity was transient, and the major fan forums that once existed are all gone.

However, I have access to archive.org and no self-control. So let's have a look around.

First, a very quick primer, though I'll talk more about this later. The MR fandom drifted from site to site for many years, but there were three main fan forums:

1. maximumride.com / maximumrideforum.com - April 2005 - September 2007

2. Maximum Ride UK - popular 2007 - 2008

3. Maximum-X / Max-Dan-Wiz - November 2008 - 2011

All three of these were officially sanctioned; there were also fan-organized forums on fanfiction.net and, I'm sure, other places.

Today we'll be looking at the first and earliest of these forums, and specifically at fan speculation about future books in the series. This is a good chance to look around a mid-2000s web forum and see what the forum looked like and what posting norms existed. We'll also see in passing some names that may come up again later, if I write more posts.

Reminder: archive.org links load slowly, and many images are broken. This is normal. I had persistent issues getting links on the forum proper to work at all, but using TinyURL seems to have fixed them. 

Let's start with a look at the main page of the forums. As you can see, there were a lot of subforums! Role Playing, Fan Fiction, and General Discussion: Assorted Topics were far and away the most popular, but the others were still reasonably active. You can also see that there were, when this capture was taken in summer 2006, just over 8000 registered users (and more guests).

Now let's read a thread: "next one" was posted in late April 2005. Fans discuss the prospect of a sequel to The Angel Experiment, and end up getting sidetracked by Harry Potter, which was then still in progress.

In May / June of that year, discussion is ongoing in "will there be another?" One user speculates that the next book will be called Maximum Ride: The Search for Truth. Titles changing before the book hit the shelves was a recurring thing in this fandom - a later book changed titles from Water Wings to MAX.

A third thread in August 2005 makes another guess: the next book will be called Maximum Ride: School's Out Forever. This poster turned out to be correct.

Let's look at speculation on other topics, like predictions of future plot twists.

"Powers". Here we see then-BNF, later forum mod, jemofgod post "i think the voice that you may be talking about with max has something to do with the chip in her arm". She was right. The poster above her theorizing that a stuffed teddy bear would later be important turned out to be wrong.

In "happy ending?", posters make their best guesses at how the series will end. Not all guesses were right, though - the two characters that one poster thinks have "only a .01% chance" of being related did turn out to be related. These are just forum posters, I remind you; it's not like they're reading Patterson's notes. The guessing is half the fun, and they're all there to discuss the books.

OK, OK, none of this has much impact if you weren't there and didn't read the books. So let's wrap up with the one forum project I remember: an Alternate Reality Game that didn't get very far.

In June 2005, a poster found a website that seemed to be related to the book, and made a thread about it. The website they found, instituteforhigherliving.com, popped up a login form requesting username and password. Attempts to use usernames / passwords based on the book failed. The website no longer exists - you used to be able to buy it, assuming you have 10,000 USD lying around - and backups of it don't reflect this, so you'll just have to trust me.

By August, the thread has become an impromptu roleplay session. But the last post on the page reveals something: someone crossposted the link to unfiction.com, then the premiere ARG-solving community. If the MR.com forums couldn't crack this case, could unfiction?

Unfiction thread. They don't get very far, but someone on the second page does turn up whois data to find out who owns instituteforhigherliving.com...

Surprise! It's an ad agency! (Also visible in the slideshow: content they created for the main maximumride.com site.) I'm not sure if this news ever percolated back to the MR.com forums - unless someone else has backups, or was there and remembers how things went, this is where the trail ends.

Or does it? wingkidsarereal.com was also a topic of discussion around this time, and while its text makes me suspect it was also professionally made as part of an ad campaign, I can't be unequivocably sure. It's definitely part of the MR universe and explicitly references events in the books.

This leads back to the reason I wrote this post. Yes, I was a lot younger when all of this was happening. But I like to think that the structure of the sites I used contributed a lot to the sense I had of the Internet as a place where I could find anything, do anything.

I've tried to show you, through these selected posts, a forum of primarily teenagers on summer vacation, putting their heads together to think critically about the media they're consuming. Here are the weird little microsites they turn up - what do they mean? Where did they come from? How much can you find out about them? There's a sense of joy in the posting here that I remember feeling then as well.

That's the thing that keeps me coming back to fandom spaces, in the long run: that feeling of happy collaboration. It's a nice thing to see.

This is a very niche topic, so I apologize if you're here for things that are not deep dives into obscure fan forums. Fandom history fascinates me, and since I hadn't seen anyone else posting about the history of the Maximum Ride fandom, I decided to take it upon myself.