metafandom is looking for a new compiler to replace me, as I've taken on a fanfic recs column in JACK, a new homoerotic fiction e-zine, and will not have the time to do compilations from now on. Email metafandom @ gmail.com if you're interested in compiling.

Thanks to all my other compilers at metafandom, and I'll be playing along from home!


Fandom Meta

rpf_manifesto: Brief Overview of RPF Theory and Debates — Topics covered include: History; Ethical and Legal Objections; Fiction, Reality, and Collaborative Fantasy Spaces; Canon and Its Consensual Creation; Bodies, Virtual, Real, and Imaginary; Alternate Universes, Casting Fic, and Playing Roles; LJ, Slashing the Slasher, and Performing Identities. "While this essay is supposed to encompass het and gen real people fiction as well as slash, most of my personal experience has been with slash as has most discussion I have encountered. Also, all of these opinions are clearly my own."

halegirl in fanthropology: The Zine Explosion, F_W, Meta, 1968, RPF — "But up until 1975, I'm really not comfortable with what I've written, nor with my approach. Blah. Lack of information sucks. I know the Sherlock Holmes stuff trundled right along but I can't find much in what I have looked at giving a detailed history of it. I can just find a consistent zine publication history of a large volume of amateur, quasi-professional, professional, comic patisches... and yeah. Rather frustrating. I went through several academic sources again looking for it. I also went looking for discussions and patterns historically."

suelac: Newsflash! Does Pop Culture Make Us Smarter? — " Relevant to yesterday's post on the value associated with fannish activity, here's a sequence of articles about Stephen Johnson's new book Everything Bad is Good for You. This is an excerpt, talking about television programming specifically, and how the complexity of the new long-form story arcs is better for our brains than the old one-off episode structure."

executrix: Down These Mean Threads — " This stems from intensive work-avoidance via Metafandom, especially Julad's Warm Fuzzies/Cold Pricklies, Idlerat's Fannish Misc. thread, and Wemblee about expectations. I realize that my expectation that All Threads Are Linked relates to intensive early exposure to hard-boiled PI thrillers, where the disparate cases always are."


Specific Fandom Meta

thepouncer: Atlantis Redux: Underground [SG:A] — Episode commentary, with notes on military v. humanitarian priorities, noegotiation, and non-verbal communication. "I love this episode, not only for introducing the Genii, but also for the non-stop Sheppard/McKay banter and Weir’s reaction to their hijinks."

nostalgia_lj in curse_of_meta: Dr. Who meta [Dr. Who] — "While we're recovering from his sexuality, I risk re-ignition by asking: how is he gendered on the show? (And is this differently done in books/audios/whatever?) Because I had a vague twitch at the back of me mind that "sexualising" the Doctor upsets some folk because it pins a gender on him to some extent and makes folk Worry about how far he fails to fit into the male stereotype."


Fan Creation Meta

mofic: Beyond Mary Sue - Writing Credible Original Characters — "sometimes... an author needs something to happen and there's no canonical character available that works. Sometimes an author wants to expand on the character set to introduce new elements, new complexity, new relationships to the story. Sometimes an author just needs an original character and plunges ahead, braving the potential cries of "Mary Sue!""

kattahj: The Preacher or the most annoying not-Sue known to... well...me. — "She was quite right, actually. The character wasn't a Mary Sue. But he did show traces of being another type of annoying character that can be harder to find than the Mary Sue, since it's not as well know. It can show up in the stories of very good writers (I'm quite often guilty of it myself, which may be why I'm so quick to reject it in others) and is a result of the writer Having Something To Say. Since I didn't have a name for this type of character, I decided to call him (or her) The Preacher. Because that's what s/he does. Preaches. When you reach the end of a Preacher story (assuming you can get that far) you never look back and wonder, "What was that character's opinions on Issue X again?" You'll know."

coreopsis: prattling on about voices — "Voice, OTOH, is more than a character's accent. Voice is cadence--rhythm, repetition, pauses, and even sentence structure and length. Voice is also word choice--both vocabulary and preferences for certain turns of phrase, whether the person tends to be casual or formal in certain situations. So two characters with the same bland TV accent (or lack of one to North American ears) may sound quite different when you actually get down to it. Unfortunately, cadence and word choice are not as obvious as accent unless you're specifically looking for them and they're also open to more interpretation, I think."


Other

makesmewannadie: Rec the Reccers updated! (And a reccing poll). — Poll on what information readers like to see in recs, with discussion of ratings in comments.

miriam_heddy: Slash Kissing Poll You Really Really Need to Answer. — Silly/fun poll on kissing.

fabu: Performing friendship on lj — "Lately I've been thinking about the performative aspects of lj, and the ways in which, because we create this world with our words, things aren't "real" unless we post about them ... I've especially been thinking about this in regard to our friendships."

welshwitch: you got some 'splainin' to do... — "What I've been wondering idly about, though, is how does what we perform on LJ affect our real-life interactions with other LJers? How much of this world are we bringing out into RL, especially in terms of friendslists/filters? Honestly, it makes me curious. If you lock a real-life friend out of posts on your journal, be they personal or political or for whatever reason, does your interaction with that person in RL not necessarily take on that extra dimension of separation? What if you give someone access to your journal, or they give you access to theirs - do you then see this person automatically as more open to you?"

fabu: Defamation, lj personas, and reputation — "I've been doing some investigation on lj's abuse policies, and I've discovered that no matter what someone says about you, it's only considered harrasment if that person uses details that could identify you in RL (e.g., your real name, address, or phone number); I can defame people left and right, and so long as I only identify them by their lj names, lj abuse won't do anything to stop me."