Play MiSTing For me: the lost art of the MiST.

Marissa Flores Picard everybody

There was a time long ago – okay, maybe ten years or less – where MST3K fans gathered together and created a form of fanfiction that is not only entirely unique to the genre, but one that spread throughout various fandoms and gave birth to sporking culture.

It started on Usenet, on the famous rec.arts.tv.mst3k newsgroup, where fans of the show congregated in the very earliest stages of mainstream internet existence.    Outside of episode discussions and battling trolls with episode quotes, fans of the show got together to exchange MISTings.

MISTings were a form of fanfiction for the show that featured line-by-line (or paragraph by paragraph) mocking or riffing of other fanfics.  The best of these fics usually included host segments just like the show’s that were a way for the author in question to show off their general skills as a ficcer. The best MiSTers, like Megane, combined an in-character reaction from Mike, Joel and the Robots to controversial fanfic with great host segments that felt like actual, missing chunks of the real show.

The format took off and skyrocketed in popularity, spreading to many fandoms – ones as diverse as pro wrestling and anime.  Large archives, such as the MiSTing Mine, Website Number 9 and Shinji’s Vault of Anime Mistings sprung up, each with their own culture and message boards.    MiSTers would even get together in large numbers to riff the scripts of famous movies.

The format made legends of several fanfic writers –some, like Dr. Thinker, who wrote playfully nonsensical Sailor Moon stories, embraced the culture.  Others, such as Oscar –author of the famous Oscarfic universe - would grow used to their infamy with rueful fondness. 

MiSTing was, for awhile, a problematic art.  Some writers chose not to request author permission, resulting in many angry confrontations between people who would MiST and the authors whose work they’d chosen to modify.  A general policy was soon instituted – authors were required to get permission from fanfic authors before they worked on them.  Many MiSters were happy to do so, though there were still hurt feelings, which was one of the things that contributed to the decline of the fandom.

What eventually killed MiSting as a genre?  The rise of Livejournal as the ultimate hub for fandom activity, for one.  As people moved on to Livejournal a different vesion of MiSTings – but sporkings, instead of being a playful form of fanfiction, were generally an angry form of reviewing that didn’t bother with anything other than pointing out what the author did wrong.  When Livejournal died, so did sporking as a culture and thus the last traces of the most prominent part of MiSTing fandom disappeared into the ether.  

Some purveyors of the culture still live on, though: The MiSTing Mine exists in archive form, and Megane continues to operate his own archive of MiSTings.  Take a hop by for a blast of nostalgia and you might be surprised to see how fandom has (and hasn’t) changed over time.