Fandom Meta

andrastewhite: Everything I Know About Fandom — "...the distilled wisdom of the ages in dot points. Ways I wish I had not screwed up, ways I've watched other people screw up, often repeatedly. Things that make you fannish life easier and more pleasant if you stick with them."

kaiz: Let's Talk About Kinks, Baby! — "What do all these discussions have in common? They all talk about, in some manner or other, the collision between one group of people who really love some activity or type of fiction and another group of people who don't--and who sometimes feel infringed upon because other people are "cluttering up" the fandom with the stuff."

caras_galadhon: On Fandom and Cultural Colonization — "The fact is a fandom is not a country where there is land that you can stand on or buildings you can point to as proof of one nationality. A fandom is made up entirely of the people involved, and the only nationality is some level of interest in the shared source text. And yet it's so very, VERY common for an assumption to be laid down in meta posts about fannish culture that American culture is the backdrop." With footnotes.

executrix: Barcelona — "The canon vs. AU-AR debate comes down to what the rules of the game are. That's a commonplace phrase, I know, but in many ways I think that fanfiction requires different analytical tools than litfic. Not because fanfic is necessarily bad fiction--very often, it's excellent (and plenty of profic and litfic sucks), but because what readers and commentators expect is so different."

eibii in fanthropology: Fandom Closets - watch for falling shoes — "Do you closet your fandom and fannish tendencies when cornered in conversation, or prodded to explain?"

kindkit: huh — "My sense is that TV writers and producers are, in fact, deliberately putting in male/male subtext to please a certain contingent of fans, knowing that it can readily be ignored by the other fans who aren't into it. And that subtext can be a problem if it becomes another excuse for not having actual gay/bi characters."

hippediva: Who is that Chicken running around w/out a head? — "Why, then, does fandom descend into wank? Why are people incapable of cutting one another some slack?"


Specfic Fandom Meta

furiosity: Most schizophrenic fandom entry. Ever. — (1) "JKR, Genetics, and Squibbery AKA Towards a Unified Theory of Homozygous Dominance in Magical Persons" and (2) "Death Eaters, Voldemort, Muggle versus wizard mentality."

rahirah: Musings on House — Everyone's got fictional archetypes they like to read or write. And then we have these characters from books or movies or TV, whom we also like, who may or may not fit those archetypes very well."

cereta: That DC/Marvel thing — "Good comics are good comics. Depriving yourself of good stories because you feel the need to stay loyal to one company, or somehow treating who puts them out as the ultimate determiner of quality...Dude, that is so 1970's."

azdak: Not Our Sort, Dear — "I think it’s fairly striking in BtVS that the Scoobies assign a different value to those in their own inner ring than they do to people outside it. To put it bluntly, the Scoobies are more important than the people they’re protecting."

st_crispins: Fantasy, Moral Complexity and Contempt for Characters — A MFUNCLE response to azdak's post: "People talk about reader “turn-offs” all the time. I realized that the biggest turn-off for me is when I detect a sense of contempt for one or more of the three groups of characters in a story."

themonkeycabal in bsg_creative: Battlestar Galactica - some info, some suggestions... — "...what we want to do here is open up a sort of informative post about what's going on with SCI FI and SkyOne and NBC/Uni, the crazy that is the TV industry, how it relates to this show we love, and how a proactive fan community can make sure that their support is counted."


On Reading, Writing, Vidding, etc.

secondverse: Amoeba: Everyone’s in the Details — "Details bring your story to life. Details illuminate your characters. A detail, used and then forgotten, becomes a loose string, a minor irritant that the reader remembers once the story is over. That same detail, carefully planted and then reiterated at the end of your story to bring home a plot point, creates the “Aha!” moment."

zana16: Homoerotic Literature and a Rant on Classifying Sexuality, Seguing into Writing — The title pretty much sums up, but here's a quote: "I guess what I love about literature is that I can learn life lessons and not have to go through it all myself. That's what I like about writing, too: I've learned more about the inside of my mind from my characters than I have in all my long years of therapy."

minisinoo: Being Subversive -- Good Girls and Good Boys (older post recently re-linked) — "...at a writers' conference I just returned from, we got into a discussion of 'good girls' versus 'bad girls' in fiction -- and how ironic such a division is, perhaps even antithetical to good writing."

marythefan: performance anxiety — Reflections on the LJ medium and theferret's posts: "I think about all y'all watching me and suddenly I'm at the point of OMG WHERE ARE MY PANTS?"

janni: The Society for the Rescue of Fictional Characters — "most writers choose to kill characters for good reasons, and bringing them back--whether the author or a fanfic writer does it--often seems to me to directly undercut the story. And yet ... that impulse to want to orchestrate a rescue is still there, I think, for many of us as readers."

resonant8: Smut pet peeve: First times that aren't — "A first-time story is a particular kind of pleasure. A fuckbuddies-turn-to-something-deeper story and an established-relationship story are different pleasures -- and while they can be done well, to my mind they're generally lesser pleasures."


Other

jadelennox in virgule: academic paper-a-thon — "The purpose of this paper-a-thon is to create an initial sounding board for papers about fandom. There are two guidelines: 1. This is for drafts of papers you intend to present or publish ... 2. The papers need to be about any aspect of media fandom ..."

sisabet: PRIMAL SCREEEEEAAAAAMM!! — Someone was hotlinking vids without authorization. Site is now down, but there is discussion of the phenomenon in comments.

amelia_eve: Six Degrees of Reality — A classification system for reality TV shows.