Last names
From Fan History Wiki
The use of last names and real names in fandom depend on which community a person was a member of and when they were a member. Verba's Boldly Writing has a load of real names. At a guess, with out doing any sort of statistical analysis, that two thirds of the people in the Star Trek fan fiction community were using real names in the period between 1967 and 1987. A lot of Usenet posts dating back to the mid 1980s to mid 1990s also seem to use real names. The Blake's 7 mailing list archive also seemed to have probably at least fifty percent of people using real names. The Babylon 5 fan fiction community during the mid 1990s also had a number of people using real names.
The places where there was active use of psuedonames was Blake's 7 saffic community because zine editors thought that a female name would sell better than a male name for that f/f material. Anime fandom also seemed to have a large percentage of people using pseudonyms. So it probably comes down to different fan cultures behaving differently at different points in time.
[edit] Sources
- http://www.livejournal.com/users/accioslash/33580.html#cutid1
- Verba, Joan Marie. Boldly Writing.
