#hockey rpf related
So,@rimouskis proposed a 20-years-of-hockey-slash-on-AO3 event based on the post date of this fic, and then I spent a truly atrocious amount of time on the Wayback Machine trying to find content from earlier than that. Enjoy the fruits of my labor thus far.
One of the hubs for the fandom seems to have been thehockey-dreams yahoo group, started November 28th, 2000. An archive was hostedhere, and the group appears to have dissolved somewhere between 2005 and 2005. There was also a hockey fanfiction webring established on May 15th, 2003. I’ve found mentions of a few different message boards, none of them archived - one belonged to Tammy.
Fanfiction.net had a category for sports before they removed RPF from the site, and the earliest archived version of the page shows nearly a dozen hockey fics. Notably, there are several fics from Julie H., who also wrote baseball slash - it’s very possible she wrote hockey slash prior to December 2001 that was lost in the RPF purge. I haven’t been able to find a personal site or someone else hosting her fics (yet !).
The page description for a personal site “Two Minutes for Slashing*” implies that the fandom on FF.net had been fairly robust prior to the September 2002 ban. They also link to the multi-fandom sportsslash group as a substitute for the FF.net community. Sportsslash had their own yahoo groupandarchive, which hosted some hockey fic.
So, what’s the oldest intact fic I’ve been able to find? It’s a bit hard to tell, considering the nature of the Wayback Machine, archives, and the lack of dating on personal sites. That said, here are a few things I’ve managed to definitively date to “earlier than New Years Eve 2001.”
- TwoRed Wings fics by almightychrissy that were posted prior to December 18th, 2001.
- The Toughest Year, a Red Wings fic by fedzgurl, is marked as being written in June 2001.
Less definitively, there is:
- At least one fic from SDQ that was written in 2001. None of the fics are dated, but the disclaimer on the site claims the stories are © 2001, 2002, and 2003.
- The site Valley of the Goons has a number of slash fics and essays uploaded already as of the earliest Wayback capture in March 2002. Since none of them are dated, I have no way of confirming which ones were written when. It seems likely, however, that at least a few were written in 2001 or earlier, considering the site author Kitkat had a hockey webring as far back as February 1999.
- Kitkat’s second site, Starry Starry Night, focuses on the Dallas Stars and hosts two fics written prior to February 2002. The fics in question are Listen to What the Fuzzy SaysandBirthday Tales.
- The author’s note for Life In A Nutshell, posted prior to December 18th 2001, mentions a previous fic written by “Alex,” presumably of the Half Truths and Gorilla Dust site. There is only one fic that isn’t archived on Alex’s slash page (Pride), but I have no way of confirming if it was the fic in question.
* Not to be confused with the Livejournal user 2min4slashing or the community 2mins4slashing.
This was actually really fun to compile - I love going through old personal sites on the Wayback Machine and seeing how fandom used to interact. I’ll likely make more posts like this in the future ! Also, if you had first-hand experience with the hockey slash fandom prior to 2004 or know someone who does, please hit up my ask box!
Bonus:have some vintage “goalies are fuckin weird” fic.
