1. Introduction
[1.1] In late fall of 2020 I logged back into my personal Tumblr account for the first time in over a year. The previous year's login was a blip in a similar hiatus, as was the one before that, and the one before that. While I call the nearly abandoned account my personal one, and its URL reflects my fandom username rather than the blog's content, it was rarely a record of my life. Rather, it once functioned as a prominent fan site for the DC comics character Talia al Ghul, with its main feature being an archive of Talia's many appearances in her then-forty-year history.
[1.2] The blog was not the first fan page devoted to the character, but in the early 2010s it quickly grew in popularity due to its historical approach. While some wikis contained lists of issues Talia appeared in, my fannish consumption of Talia's appearances showed me that these were not always accurate. My intention in creating the masterlist of my archive was to accurately catalog her transmedia appearances from a fannish perspective with a primary audience of fellow fans at the request of fellow fans. While I participated in discussions and the blogging/reblogging typical of Tumblr, I found a particular role within this niche fandom as a fan-archivist. The reciprocal relationship between fan and academic practices by fans, as documented by Hellekson (Jenkins, Rand, and Hellekson 2011), is evident in my own academic work on comics outside of Tumblr, which has emerged out of the same efforts as did my archive.
[1.3] Waysdorf (2020) notes several advantages and drawbacks to the acafan approach that feel particularly resonant with my attempt to first historicize Talia and then to historicize her Tumblr fandom at its height. Studies by acafans may avert the exploitative gaze of outsiders (Waysdorf 2020) and are indeed bolstered by insider knowledge of norms, vocabulary, and fan practices and relations (Cristofari and Guitton 2016). At the same time, studies by acafans on their own fan objects may be filtered through the lens of the writer's experience that is not necessarily reflective of the fandom for whom that writer speaks (Raw 2020; Waysdorf 2020). Shifts in a fandom, particularly in digital spaces in which artifacts may quickly disappear, present a similar paradox: the acafan serves as witness to such moments in a fandom's history, but the easy deletion and relocation of material may remove empirical proof of their claims. With many posts having been removed and accounts having been deactivated both on Tumblr and elsewhere, I can only support some claims by affirming that I was there. I am thus both a reliable narrator (or at least I hope so) and an unreliable narrator within the larger history of the fandom.
2. Fandom in/as history
[2.1] My 2020 return from hiatus has emphasized the sense of history—that is, history as a construct from which one feels separate, despite being part of it. Having stopped purchasing DC Comics several years ago for primarily financial reasons, I am no longer up to date on Talia al Ghul's storylines, especially since DC has since ended its controversial New 52 reboot universe. Indeed, at the time of my departure, she was dead. My personal collection of nearly every Talia appearance from 1971 to 2012 was a casualty in a life upheaval, and so I no longer have the primary source of my archive, leaving gaps in my memory that I can no longer easily fill (nor am I still able to produce scans from rare issues at other fans' request). The character has also appeared in the Arrowverse, a TV-based DC universe I never followed, and so the possible influence of this media on current fans is one currently beyond my understanding.
[2.2] More importantly, though, this sudden awareness of history within a fandom puts me at odds with my own former role in it. I have resumed building the fan archive but without key resources, and many active fans who have entered the fandom as it manifests on Tumblr are now in a younger age group. My archive and previous involvement are things of the past—or, more appropriately, a past, one of many within the larger DC fandom and one primarily situated within a specific digital space and during a particular time.
[2.3] The Tumblr fandom of Talia al Ghul of the early 2010s was expressed primarily through image-based posts, analytical discourse, fan art, and roleplaying blogs. Some users devoted separate blogs to separate purposes while others combined them, allowing their audiences to select which genre of content they wished to see using hashtags. For instance, a combined account might primarily function for roleplaying, while using #OOC or #mun (a clipping of "mundane") tags to categorize the roleplayer's personal thoughts or character analyses.
[2.4] Before my hiatus, I followed several hundred such Tumblr accounts, most related to DC fandom and only those that expressed pro-Talia views. Fewer than 150 remained when I returned from hiatus, and the vast majority of those have not been updated in well over a year. While some of these inactive accounts' posting histories ended with a formal farewell, many seemed to arrive at a gradual hiatus, with individual users expressing a growing sense of alienation. Review of these posts reveals a self-sustaining reaction within the fandom: after an initial departure of members from the fandom, the fandom noticeably shrank, severing social connections and inspiring a second wave of departures, resulting in further reduction and departures. The first wave of fan departures, of which I was a part, thus appears to have expedited the fandom's decline in this particular location.
[2.5] Tumblr's current Talia fandom is, from my perspective as a once-prominent fan-archivist, much smaller in spite of the character's return. Posts tagged for the character are conspicuously less frequent. While Talia was canonically established as the mother of Batman's son in 2006, many early 2010s fandom discussions of her still focused on her romantic relationships. In late 2020, however, most readily apparent discussions concern her motherhood. These discussions call for more compassionate views of the character, particularly with regard to her familial role, in stark contrast to her villainous characterization under Grant Morrison's tenure, and this is perhaps the greatest observable shift in the discourse. Roleplaying accounts are similarly fewer, or are at least less prominently traceable within general posts on the character herself.
[2.6] The norms of the Talia fandom appear similar, but there are many fewer publicly visible interactions between fans. This seeming reduction in active conversations has been the most surprising to me. Many posts at the time of my return that offer fan analysis do not seem to do so as part of a larger discussion among fans but rather as a discrete expression, with the exception of what appears to be one relatively small group. Intrafandom relationships are, therefore, now much more difficult to gauge.
[2.7] Fan archives challenge notions of intellectual property (Lothian 2012). Certainly, no original creative works on Talia belong to me nor do the fannish texts created through roleplaying, fan fiction, or fan art, though some archived fannish works on Tumblr contain shout-outs to me. The masterlist occupies a liminal space with regard to property: nothing on it is mine, yet the list itself is. The labor of discovering, confirming, and cataloging the character's appearances belong to me inasmuch as any fan labor belongs to that fan. While recognizing my lack of concrete ownership, I nonetheless feel some sense of it. Several times during my hiatus I've felt anxious that a new fan would take up where I left off or, less welcome, that a commercial site would appropriate the list as its own.
[2.8] In addition to the capital-driven, gendered complexities of fan ownership that Busse (2015) notes, introspection leads me to think that this anxiety stems from the degree to which my previous fan identity was built on an encyclopedic knowledge of a character who is now a stranger to me. On Tumblr of the early 2010s, I was a known fan-archivist; without that role, I am a nondescript fan who also likes a particular character. Although as an academic I can recognize such shifts as part of fandom's history on both macro and micro levels, there is an admitted feeling of loss in my role shift. It is with no small amount of humor that I realize I feel somewhat stung by the consequences of my hiatus, as I find myself no longer in a place of being cited as an authority in the fandom. Yet fan relations to history may be partly rooted in nostalgia (Bennett 2017; Jenkins 2017) and fannish lists may be linked to a need for a sense of control (Booth 2015), and I'm aware that my own return may be out of desire for a time and social connections that seemed easier than my current circumstances, a longing for a point in my life history in which I could prioritize passion for a fictional character in a like-minded community.
[2.9] Yet I also see my Tumblr as an artifact of the larger fandom. Fan archives "provide contextualized access to objects of fandom" (Einwächter 2015). As my Tumblr came to serve as an informal database of the Talia fandom even outside of its archive page, its nonarchive posts and reblogs that were not deleted as I began my hiatus preserve old intrafandom conversations, artifacts such as fan art, and a look at the discourse of the early 2010s surrounding the character. For instance, during a period in which the comics visually emphasized her Chinese heritage, East Asian actresses were popular fan casts of the character, and the blog reflects that though it is at stark odds with current, and appropriate, contemporary calls for greater Arabic representation. These discussions were not handled with the nuance they would likely receive today. Similarly, as a much more experienced academic now, I find some old conversations about the ways in which different writers recreate existing characters less complex than they should be and thus somewhat problematic, but some of these, too, are preserved. Fannish works such as art and essays are still viewable on the blog even after their creators have gone inactive or have even deleted the original posts.
[2.10] The power dynamic between fan-archivist and fan object isn't neutral, nor are relationships between fan-archivists and other fans (Jansen 2020). My (white, queer, working class, once-rural) prior relationship to the character (Arabic-Chinese, heterosexual, wealthy, globally traveled) is one that contains more nuance with regard to power relations and identification with the fan object than I could have realized in 2010. My status as a known entity and archivist within the fandom also granted me a gatekeeper role that I did not realize until after my hiatus, when I discovered that my approval of specific fan artists' work was used offsite in other fans' art curations. Since I commissioned work from fan artists and often made a point to share the work of artists with whom I had the most personal contact, my blog may have unintentionally overlooked equally valuable fan works by fans further outside my social connections. My preference at the time for fan art over fan fiction may have had similar results, a risk that also occurs in academic treatments of fan artifacts (Hills 2012; Jenkins 2014).
[2.11] As I write this, I also wonder about the power dynamics of resuming social connections. I have made brief contact with some old fans who are still somewhat active, while others are no longer findable, and I am reluctant to reach out to old fans whom I've located on other social media who appear to have distanced themselves from fandom altogether. To any of these fellow former fans, initiating contact could be invasive or a reminder of unpleasant past experiences within the fandom.
[2.12] At the time of this writing, the future of my fan archive is uncertain. I intend to resume cataloging Talia's appearances but from the distance of a more casual fan who cannot actively consume media often. While I hope that the archive will continue to serve fans, continued migration away from Tumblr may lessen the archive's value or even its visibility. As current social media platforms inevitably yield to new ones (Fiesler and Dym 2020), my archive may need eventual relocation or may, in the event of an unvigilant hiatus, disappear altogether. In the meantime, however, it occupies a liminal space within a fandom's history in its own attempt at historical documentation.