1973
From Fan History Wiki
1973 is the year we met Mary Sue. While Star Trek fan fiction had a number of stories featuring this type of character, it was not until 1973 that a name was given to the annoying writing convention involving that ubiquitous original female character who became involved with one of men of Star Trek. She would be named by Paula Smith in the Star Trek fanzine Menagerie #2. The story was titled “A Trekkie’s Tale.” If you are interested in reading the story, it is reprinted in Verba’s Bold Writing. Paula Smith would go on to write several sequels to this story. This name and the character traits attributed to the character would stay with the fan fiction community for many years.
In addition to creating Mary Sue, the Star Trek community was doing a number of other things. Star Trek fans were still trying to get a fanzine nominated for a Hugo award. The World of Star Trek was published by David Gerrold. The release of this book would inform many Star Trek fen who were not aware of various fan based activities like fanzines, fan fiction and convention of these things. Fanzine directories were being released to help people keep track of what zines were being published and what was included in them. As Star Trek fans felt more comfortable with the various Star Trek fan activities, many started to lose sight of the fact that the community was founded as an off shoot of the science fiction fandom, drawing publishing experience and the running of conventions from those other, prior involvements.
M.E. Curtin wrote that in the period between 1967 and 1970, that 83% of the fan fiction community was composed of women. Demographics, terminology and patterns change. Similarly, Henry Jenkins cited this period in the early 1970s as having a slash fan fiction community with 90% female composition. This trend of females being the large majority of slash readers and writers would continue well up until the present time.
Other communities, such as the comic book community and Doctor Who were around and beginning to become more established. One such community was the comic book community, which has roots going back to at least 1964. Members of the comic book fan fiction community were writing The Fantastic Four fan fiction. Unlike their brethren writing fan fiction in prose form, comic book fen were writing their stories in comic form. It would be many years before this convention of comics as fics in the comic book fan fiction community would not be the norm.
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