Safeguarding TMNT fic from 1990-2015 primarily from Geocities, Tripod, Angelfire, sundry lost personal websites, deceased creators, LiveJournal and FanFiction.net.
The goal is preservation and proper credit/context. No efforts to edit or 'fix' any works presented here were made; they are offered in their exact original condition. Creators who would like to add or remove their historical works from this collection can request to have changes made [gmail minkersmoo]. No one is collecting money or comments or credit. This is a curated look at early internet Ninja Turtles fandom at the turn of the century.
At the start of the period, the 1990s, the only TMNT materials available were the Mirage comics, the 1987 cartoons, and the recently premiered live action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies. The internet had only just been made available to the public via dialup connections. Early fans built custom websites very similar to this one using basic HTML coding and text. Those websites, hosted places like Geocities, Tripod, and Angelfire were deleted as the internet became more commercial. Large sections of fiction and early fandom were lost.
By asking fandom elders for their original files, by using the Internet Way Back Machine, and by collecting fic from dying archives like LiveJournal and Fanfiction.net, we're curating a broad sample of our earliest days online. You can see how the characterizations of our beloved turtles changed as more TV shows and movies were added to canon throughout the early 2000s. You can see the roots of fandom assumptions and the earliest trends in online storytelling, from self-inserts to song-fics and poetry.
Early TMNT fan fiction authors typically only warned for sexual content. In that spirit, this archive will use 🍋 lemon emojis 🍋 to indicate works with spicier adult content. Please consider that means there are no warnings for character death, violence, underaged content, non-consensual sex, or any other taboos or emotionally distressing topics. Unless warned in the author's original summary, you will experience this fiction as an early fandom reader would have. Surprises abound.
Please enjoy these works from the dawn of our internet era, listed by credited username and linked by chapter. If the creator still has an active archive of works posted elsewhere, it will be linked by their username so you can leave comments where they might see them.
Please help us identify these creators
This site is a work in progress, with hundreds of stories to be added representing more than 180 creators' efforts. Latest update 6/22/23.