Fandom Meta:

yourlibrarian: Vid and Fic Categories — "It’s probably a professional tendency but I like to categorize, contextualize and devise labels for things. And lately as I’ve been working on video recs I find that I’m curious about how evaluating vids and fic overlap, and what it is that makes something stand out for me."

copracat: I never died, said he — "Recently I've read producers described as fanboys. I've said it myself. If Whedon and Lucas and Strazinsky et al are fanboys then does the TPTB/Fan divide hold?"

musesfool: "You said I'd better know what I was doing." — "Here's the thing for me, in the end, what I want when I read and what I hope for when I write. Know what you're doing. And own what you're doing."

carlanime: Writing RPS/RPF: Some Side Effects — "And since then I’ve noticed something else. Writing, even writing something as casual and ephemeral as a drabble, requires either some effort to make things just a teensy bit believable, or some awareness of why what you’re writing isn’t believable so you can use that to comic effect. It requires, in other words, that you get inside the character’s head. So I found myself listening to things this person said, and instead of just dismissing his opinions I was trying to understand them—-why he thought that, what he was trying to accomplish, what motivated him."

mad_maudlin: Geek alert: WC versus the Beta — "The premise of my paper (which, against my better judgement, I have webbed here) was that beta reading stands as proof that people can discuss writing over the Internet and the world won't end. Quite a few professional people are deeply suspicious of email conferencing, and I thought, "Beta reading is done almost exclusively over the internet. It works. Why can't OWLs, theoretically, work too?""

arcian in fanficrants: Now that's something everyone can enjoy! — [humor] " If there's one thing that's common to almost every fandom under the sun, it's shipping (aka. pairing up characters who may or may not actually have romantic interaction in canon). If there's another thing that's common to every fandom under the sun, it's arguing about shipping. So far, there are no surprises here, right? Not every pairing in a fandom is going to be well-liked, for any number of reasons."

monimala: Is Pink the New Orange and is Het the New Slash? — " Is het the new slash? Meaning, is it the new subversive genre, the murky Other, the redheaded stepchild of an increasingly slash/incest/pedophilia-yay driven fandom? And, no, by lumping those three things together, I am not personally equating them with each other."

sockkpuppett: Work avoidance, fannish-identification thoughts, wanking — "Fannishly identifying myself. I'm not sure where I fall. I've been a "fan" all of my life. It's a sort of behavior, I think, that manifests itself very early in life, and with proper nurturing, can turn into full-blown FAN by the time a person enters puberty."

sisabet: My Fandom — "sockkpuppett posted a bit yesterday about vidding as a fandom and so my thinking is kind of pointed in that direction. I say this a lot, now - that vidding is my primary fandom, because people always want to know "what is your primary fandom?" - it is like asking someone in college what their major is, it is just that ubiquitous question that hangs over us all at the Panfandom Social Mixer.


Specific Fandom Meta:

nifra_idril: for fox1013: You gotta have Faith -- or why I'd like to have Faith, at any rate. Thoughts on Faith/Buffy, too. [Buffy & AtS] — "What it is, I think, is that there are so many specialists. Which is silly, when you think about it, because that's true of everybody who's fandom monogamous -- they're specialists in certain characters, certain shows, they've got the whoel atmosphere down COLD, you know? But for whatever reason BtVS and AtS and even Firefly (to an extent) feel to me like it's filled with people who live in the skin of the characters, and do so in a really vehement way, and like, make a fandom life of it. I feel like I have to apologize because I dabble."

out_there: Desperate Housewives, etc. [DH] — " So, I went to the Desperate Housewives thingy last night ... and heard the critique that the show perpetuates the myth of female beauty (that women should always be attractive and beautiful naturally -- ie. without visible effort; that only beautiful/thin/young looking women are interesting/worth getting to know). The basic idea was that the main girls are *always* shown at their best and are never shown actually *doing* anything to look that way. They're never seen putting on makeup, or going through any kind of skin routines. They never discuss insecurities about looks and body-shape/size. "

House and Misogyny:

elynross: House/Wilson and/or House/Cameron, or: How House stole my slash goggles and gave me slash corneas [spoilers] — "I've always... eh, not prided myself, but quite happily been able to juggle both textual and subtextual readings of a given text in my head, keeping them separate, even when mutually contradictory. That is, I've always felt that no matter how much I love my own subtextual reading, it was just a reading, and I didn't delude myself that it was textual -- I didn't confuse or conflate the two (ignoring here the rumored cases of confirmation of intentional homoerotic subtext in various shows, because... I'd actually rather not know). This is where House has broken me."

miriam_heddy: House--In defense of Criticizing Female Characters. — "When I say that Cameron's ticking me off for this or that reason, I'm not complaining about a woman named Cameron, I'm complaining about a character, acted by a woman, yes, but one who is speaking lines written by a man (and there's apparently, acc. to imdb, only one woman writer for the show), produced by a man, directed by a man, etc. by a man, in a--what's the word I'm looking for again? Oh yeah... PATRIARCHY."

bethbethbeth: House - More Post-"Kids" rambling, now with added multi-fannish meta — "The whole issue of text/subtext and canon/fanfiction as elynross processes it in her post is *very* interesting to me because one of the things I'm coming to realize is that I'm having an increasingly difficult time making these kinds of distinctions when it comes to characters and their relationships in canonical sources (although this is true for t.v./movies much more than for book sources)."


Writing/Vidding/etc.:

cupidsbow: Happy Endings? — " I've been thinking a lot about my Works in Progress lately, and have come to several conclusion about why I tend to write series that stop one episode short of the conclusion. The thing is, I have a real problem with the two main ways of ending romances in western literature: "happily ever after" and "woman dies tragically". They just don't work well for me, from a feminist perspective. So I've been asking myself, how do I write a romance story that doesn't fall into these ideological traps? I yearn for romance stories that don't go to those places."

executrix: That Snerp Has a Vicious Streak a Mile Wide (Familiarization and Defamiliarization) — "Although, as I've said, I don't particularly care for science fiction in the current timeline, I did have a science fiction stage (...I was late, I was about 14...) and I still remember a review in Fantasy and Science Fiction that referred to bad world-building as "calling a rabbit a snerp." A lot of times, I do the opposite, because I figure people will react to flying spaceships pretty much the way they will to driving cars."

commodorified: Now we're getting somewhere (maybe) — "I'm trying to engage your hormones for the same reason I want to catch your heart, delight your mind, engage your senses; the deeper into a story the reader gets, the more pleasure and enjoyment they get from it. This all seems terribly simple to me, and yet I spend a lot of time (not so much in fandom, but in the larger world of cultural production) feeling like a voice in the wilderness. This attempt to engage the body and emotions is, in fact, one of the pillars of most definitions of obscenity: it goes by the unlovely name of 'appeal to prurient interests'. You can write explicitly about sex all you like, as long as you're not trying to turn anyone on. You can try to turn people on all you like as long as you're coy about it, as long as you don't actually deliver."


Other (links, polls, etc.):

nestra: Interesting interview with Henry Jenkins on the subject of Star Wars fan activities. — Link and quotes from article.

caras_galadhon: [Poll] RPF & FPF Pairing Preferences in Related Fandoms — "The point of this poll is to look at preferences of fans who play in both RPF and FPF fandoms. If you are involved in one but not the other, the entirety of this poll does not apply to you."

elke_tanzer: Curiouser and curiouser: LJ RPG poll — LJ Role-Playing Games Poll