Tag: fanfiction

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Ancient Web: The LOTR Fanclub Scrapbook Preserved a Message Board After the Official Club Died

When an official fan community closes, the company usually keeps the trademarks and the fans keep whatever they remembered to save.

Visit the LOTR Fanclub Scrapbook

The LOTR Fanclub Scrapbook exists because volunteers decided the creative work surrounding Decipher’s Official Lord of the Rings Fan Club should not simply vanish with the old community.

Its submission pages describe a collection of original material inspired by Tolkien and contributed by members of that fan-club world. The archive includes poetry, fan fiction, essays, journals, parodies, songs, drabbles, recipes, Middle-earth reference material, and the deeply Internet-native category of Top Ten lists.

The site keeps the material family-friendly and identifies its volunteer maintainers as Amy and Jeff Buckles, known in the community as Primula and TrebleMaker.

Fandom after the host moves on

This is an important distinction in web preservation.

An official site documents what a company wanted to publish. A fan archive documents what the audience did with it.

The old LOTR community was not just reading announcements. People were writing stories, poems, jokes, commentary, recipes, and personal reflections. Those contributions formed a culture around the official product, but the culture itself belonged to thousands of individual participants.

Once the original club became defunct, a volunteer scrapbook became a practical preservation system.

The structure is simple because the job is simple: keep the work findable.

There are categories, contributor names, submission instructions, and long indexes rather than an algorithmic feed. A visitor can move sideways through a community’s interests instead of seeing only what happened to be popular during one week twenty years ago.

That persistence is one of the quiet strengths of hand-maintained fan sites. They can outlive the commercial infrastructure that originally gathered the audience.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes fan archives because old web history is not just the history of companies and software. It is also the work people made after logging in.

The official club ended.

The scrapbook kept the table scraps, which turned out to be the history.

Return to the LOTR Fanclub Scrapbook

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Ancient Web: The Starfleet Museum Treats Fan Fiction Like Naval History

The Starfleet Museum does not merely invent spaceships. It invents the museum that would eventually have to explain them.

Visit the Starfleet Museum

Masao Okazaki’s site presents itself as a historical institution founded in the year 2213 to preserve important Starfleet vessels. Its fictional Orbital Annex supposedly contains more than fifty ships, while the website lets present-day visitors tour the collection through timelines, technical articles, ship classes, war histories, and research notes.

The joke is maintained with impressive discipline.

Worldbuilding by pretending the paperwork survived

The archive covers United Earth and early Federation ships, Romulan War vessels, Klingon designs, matter/antimatter drive development, carriers, transports, stations, cruisers, and generations of fictional procurement decisions.

That last part is what makes it interesting.

Many fan sites describe a spaceship as an object. The Starfleet Museum treats spacecraft the way naval historians treat destroyer classes: what came before, why a new design was needed, what technologies changed, how doctrine evolved, what compromises were made, and what later classes inherited.

There are charts spanning decades of fictional fleet development. Individual ship classes receive silhouettes, specifications, development histories, and service context. The site openly identifies itself as non-commercial fan fiction and notes that its imagined history does not always align with later Star Trek productions.

In other words, it does not pretend to be canon.

It pretends to be scholarship from inside the universe.

That distinction gives the project its charm. The site is less interested in arguing about episodes than in asking what a believable institutional history might look like if Starfleet had actually spent a century designing hardware.

CacheRat’s Ancient Web research collection keeps finding sites where a narrow obsession becomes a complete information architecture. This may be one of the purest examples.

Some people write fan fiction.

Masao Okazaki built the archive a fictional historian would cite.

Return to the Starfleet Museum