musesfool, mhari, and gmth rock my world for saving me from the evil that is smart quotes and making it so that my html tags work. My gratitude is boundless.


Fandom meta:

danawoods: character/fic writer diversity - "There's this horrible connotation that comes to mind when you use the word "ignorance", but ignorance is not stupidity or intolerance. It's simply not knowing and not having been made to know. Treating ignorance like it implies intolerance is ridiculous. It's like saying that lack of knowledge makes a person stupid. Or that having knowledge makes a person smart. Knowledge and intelligence are two different things. So are ignorance and intolerance. The two are not intrinsically tied together"

halegirl in fanthropology: Gateways, Nostagalia, Fannish History - " In a discussion in my journal recently, I looked at some of the events in fan fiction history as a sort of ode to Yahoo's One Hundred Memorable Events in the last Ten Years. I thought of ten events I considered memorable in terms of having a large impact on fandom in the past ten years in both self referencing and non-self referencing.."

splix: clique, clique, clique - "It surprises me when I see people who've been in our fandom for two, three years complaining about "the old guard." Look. There's not a bloody one of us who came to fandom a big fat superstar with a metric fuckton of friends."

cereta: Crankiness below - Rant. "Really: we don't need to be reminded that it's not canon. Once again: we know that."

carlanime in fanthropology: Tribalism and fic-bashing, or, Why Does Fandom Eat Its Young? - "The permeable boundaries of self-identified membership make for a lot of border-patrol by those already "in" attempting to set standards that clarify who is "out." Wank is consistently generated about the opposite ends of the membership spectrum."

brynnmck: Men hand out cigars. Women 'hand out' babies. - "I started thinking about it, and at the moment, I can't think of any female characters with whom I actually identify--I admire Aeryn and Sydney and Scully and Ripley and Sarah Connor, but I don't see myself in them."

executrix: Representation and Its Discontents - "I can certainly imagine a liberal-and-leftward discomfort with writing about Characters of Color, in that when done badly it can result in cringeful awfulness akin to Angel trying to Get Down on the dance floor."

flambeau: first times, angst, Justin Timberlake (well, no, not really) - "I'm very drawn to first-time stories, but a story doesn't have to be about the literal first time for a pairing in order to have that charge, that tension, which pretty much defines the appeal of slash for me."

profshallowness: there are links on various schools of lit crit here - "Interesting too, as a writer, and as someone who reads (an unrepresentative sample of) other readers' responses to the same texts as me, via public feedback, to think about the difference between and interaction between the implied reader and the actual reader."

violet_quill: crossposting - "It always puts me off a little to see a fic posted to a comm that has a note at the bottom that says something like: x-posted to slashcomm, specificpairingcomm, charactercentriccomm, genericficcomm, weirdhpcomm, anotherrandomficcomm, yetanotherficcomm."

azdak:Funny syphilis – canon and comedy in BtVS and AtS - "In the discussion about "What is canon?" it became clear to me, largely thanks to executrix, that there are two main uses of the word "canon" in fandom."

dracschick: I wasn’t going to update my LJ but.... - "...fanfiction is very character-driven. So, I think that, in fanfic, the characters are more ‘fleshed-out’ than those in the popular romance novels. Usually, romance novels have ‘cookie-cutter’ characters that have very little side issues besides pursuing the man that they want romantically."

thebratqueen: Racism, sexism, homophobia - when did the Neo-Cons invade fandom? - "You see, the problem with saying that fandom doesn't write black characters because of some kind of racism is, in and of itself, a racist argument. It assumes the problem with the character was color, which thus reduces a human being to having worthiness only based upon his or her skin tone. On your behalf allow me to say: Oops."


Specific Fandom Meta:

herc_iolaus: First time or established relationship? - "...when reading or writing a Hercules/Iolaus story, I don't assume it will be a first time - I default to established relationship."

janedavitt: Where is the love? - "Is there a list of minor characters/pairings it's OK to write and those that'll get you shunned by all right-minded people ::cough:: Giles/Spike::cough::? Point me at it."

mimesere: musing and rantage - "Are there fewer characters of color? Why yes, in fact there are. Do they get less screen time? Sure. But you know what? More than half of the characters I named are people *in the credits*. And in Gunn's case, I'd like to point out that he gets *more screen time than Lindsey* and yet, no love for the black man. Bite me, people. Bite me *hard*."

tanacawyr: Hindsight ... - "BSG is the next hot new fandom. The production values, writing, acting, and characterization are top notch, leaving many other shows in the dust. Yet where's the slash?"

wisdomeagle: meta: metaphysics and Seers in the Jossverse - "I'd say that on Buffy, the metaphysics is pre-set by the Watchers' Council as handed on to the Scoobies by Giles, and the ethics is set by Buffy. On Angel, it's less clear. Angel provides the moral framework, but the metaphysics come from all over. I'd say a large part of the worldview was established by Doyle and never changes, but a lot of it comes from Wesley as well."


Writing, Vidding, Reccing, and other fan endeavors:

telesilla: Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar - "I'm a great fan of slang, casual words, and ungrammatical construction in dialog, provided it doesn't overwhelm the story. People simply don't speak perfectly all the time, and the more emotional they get, the more idiomatic they tend to get."

copperbadge: Long boring discussion of unimportant trivialities ahoy - "...when I read or write an intergenerational ship I need to see two things addressed: character interaction and status interaction. Normally status isn't such a big deal to me, but age differentials are almost always about status on some level."

mofic: How do we keep the sex scenes interesting? - "So, I've been thinking about sex in stories and how to make it feel compelling and not repetitive."

sisabet: Keanu Reeves is to Vidding as Patrick Swayze is to Collatin - "
There exists what I like to call the Keanu Reeves Factor in vidding. See, I like Sci-Fi/Fantasy movies with Keanu in them. I just do. His presence comforts and soothes me. Why?"

kalinalea: A question for the friends from the [Jane Austen] fandom... - "[I'm] curious about what is and isn’t considered acceptable among the writers or whether it's even been discussed. I’ve always been in the "laborious citation" camp myself, but I’ve never written in another fandom where the canon was in the public domain, or, frankly, where the authors borrowed so heavily from canon."


Other:

shaggirl: Stirring Elephant Shit - "So, am I alone in feeling like a twenty-ton elephant moved into HP fandom's living room yesterday? And that everyone’s doing their damnedest to pretend it isn’t there, hoping someone else will deal with it?"

lasultrix: We fans, we geeks...we band of buggered. - "I'm thinking the sci-fi and fantasy reader is like the fanfic reader. Both (or all three, since sci-fi and fantasy really shouldn't be conflated in the public mind as much as they are) seem to spend a lot of time wading through mediocrity and flat-out crap just because, dammit, this kind of stuff is their crack and they believe that one day, they will find it. The True Story."