Twisting the Hellmouth
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Contents |
[edit] Introduction
Twisting the Hellmouth is an English language fanfiction archive site focused on crossover stories between Buffy the Vampire Slayer and other fandoms. It is commonly abbreviated to TtH when referenced in the fan fiction community. As of 1 January 2007, it holds 7,600 crossover stories from 8,200 total stories, and has crossovers with over 575 different fandoms.[1]
During 2006, 25 million chapters were read from the site, and it received 100,000 visitors a month.[2]
[edit] Fandoms
Twisting the Hellmouth hosts crossovers between Buffy the Vampire Slayer / Angel and other television shows, movies, anime, books and comics. Stories that feature characters from both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel but no other fandoms are not considered crossover stories. The most popular categories are crossovers with Anita Blake, Charmed, CSI, Firefly, Harry Potter, Highlander, Lord of the Rings, Smallville, Stargate, Supernatural and X-Men with over 100 stories in each category. However, there are many more obscure fandoms represented on the site.
Approximately 10% of stories on the site are not Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Angel crossovers. These include pure Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Angel stories that do not involve a crossover, pure stories from another fandom, or crossovers between two fandoms other than Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.
The site does accept adult and slash stories, but does not permit stories involving real people without permission from the person(s) involved. It also does not accept original works.
[edit] Story Styles
The majority of stories on the site are focused on action or comedy themes often combining the efforts of heroic characters from the different fandoms represented in defeating a common enemy. Stories about relationships usually involve two (or more) characters from different fandoms, so the community is a lot less shipper focused than most fan fiction sites as there are a vast number of possible pairings. Stories that blend the universes from the different fandoms in a believable manner with characters behaving "in character" usually receive the best reception from reviewers. The length of story ranges from the minimum allowed 100 word drabble to 480,000 words.
The site also hosts crossover Fan Art works under the same terms as stories, but requires the author to host the images at a 3rd party site.
[edit] Submissions
The site is an auto-archive permitting authors to upload their own work chapter by chapter. Stories are immediately made available to readers, and are vetted by a moderating team after they are submitted. Submissions are quarantined for the author to revise, or deleted if they do not meet the site rules. Approximately one in four stories submitted are removed either by the author or by moderators because they do not meet the required criteria, or exhibit poor spelling or grammar. The most common reason is that an author posts a story that does not crossover Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Angel without posting sufficient crossover works to the site first.
[edit] Feedback
Readers can submit feedback to the author in the form of public or private reviews and the author may respond with comments on the review. Feed back levels are relatively high with an average 5,000 reviews being posted per month in 2006.[3] The overall average is 13 reviews per story. Reviewers are encouraged to give a balanced critical opinion of the story and the site does not permit authors to delete bad reviews. Whilst both criticism and praise of the story are welcomed, personal abuse aimed at the author or reviewer is not tolerated and moderators remove abusive reviews or abusive comments from authors.
[edit] Timeline
- 3 Jan 2003 - The site was launched using the Storyline auto-archiving software from IO designs under the domain tth.moonlitpaths.com.
- 12 Dec 2003 - The site was moved from shared hosting to a dedicated server and the domain name changed to tthfanfic.com.
- 25 Aug 2003 - The Crossing Over Awards sister site was launched as a manually maintained site allowing the public to submit stories for several categories and vote for a winner via email. These awards were not repeated until October 2006.
- 28 Nov 2004 - The Fic-For-All initiative was launched.[4] Initially a christmas themed event, the aim was to write a short story using a unique pairing of crossover characters. For each story written the author was allowed to request another pairing.
- 1 Oct 2005 - Stories from over 1,000 authors are hosted on the site.
- 7 Nov 2005 - Wrestlers were deemed to be real people, resulting in the removal of over 250 WWE stories.[5]
- 20 Dec 2005 - A major redesign of the site was made to improved usability, improve performance and provide support for mobile devices. The reader recommendations system from storyline was overhauled so that it powered a "People who like this story also like..." style means of recommending similar works. Also, the Fic-For-All was made a permanent and fully integrated part of the site.
- 27 Jul 2006 - A 2nd major overhaul was made to the site adding support for grouping stories in series and allowing readers to track which stories they had read or partially read. Detailed statistics and graphs were made available on each story, each author's works and the entire site going back to 1 Jan 2006.
- 1 Oct 2006 - The Crossing Over Awards sister site was relaunched, this time with automated processes allowing site members to nominate and vote on awards for any stories hosted on Twisting the Hellmouth. This event attracted nominations for 522 works, and 21,856 votes.[6]
- 29 May 2007 - The total number of hits to all stories hosted on the site reaches 50 million.
- 21 Sep 2008 - The primary domain name for the site was changed to tthfanfic.org.
