General Fandom Meta

caras_galadhon - [Insert obligatory "Jack" joke here]-- - ["Jack" a new homoerotic ezine featuring original content from fanfiction authors has come under attack on the blog of anti-fanfic writer Lee Goldberg.] but still, JACK has been dubbed "bizarre," and written by "lazy, clueless thieves" who "steal other writers' work," and "pervert the intent of the story." Seriously, if that won't get you to read JACK, I don't know what short of my coming to your house, tying you to a chair and propping your eyelids open with toothpicks will.

st_salieri - on fanfic - I guess my issue is mostly one of...surprise. Mostly surprise at myself, that I seem to be lacking a part of my moral makeup. I'd like to think that I'm a fairly decent person. I feel guilty about breaking any of the standards of what we'd call basic human morality. And yet I feel a complete and utter lack of guilt about fanfic.

isiscolo - why publish for pennies? - Last week I read a really great original story [...] When I finished it, I thought, "That was publishable! Why didn't he submit it somewhere so he could get paid for it, instead of posting it on the net?" And then I clicked the little clicky and sent feedback, and realized, hey, maybe this is why.

executrix - Some IP Issues For Fandom - Intellectual Property Issues Involving Harry Potter Fanworks [...] It occurs to me that this is actually relevant to some of the ongoing discussions. It's about 14 single-spaced pages of popularized legal writing, but still, you know, LEGAL WRITING. Concentrating on HP but relevant to other fandoms as well.

executrix - Round 8,439: A Personal View - This is in response to the meta flying around now, overlain on the meta that's been flying around as long as I've been in fandom (which is, I guess, about five years), and is about trends I've seen rather than any specific individual.

butterfly - Spinning in Circles... - I'm tired of the cyclic fandom discussions. Feminism, racism, sexism, real person fic, slash. It all goes round and round and never stops. Part of the problem is that the observer affects the observed. We tend to collect evidence that favors the way that we already think and throw out the things that disagree.

emmagrant01 - What makes someone a BNF? - But that begs the question, where is the line above which one is considered a BNF? What are the qualifications? Why is it such a politically charged label? And how is it that one actually becomes a BNF?

ataniell93 - Fantasy/SF Swears and Slurs - Do you say 'frak'? And mean it? [A discussion of fictional swear words and their uses]

penknife - In which Penknife gets her rant on about "canonical heterosexuality" - I don't understand why people insist that characters' sexual orientations are canon, because most of the time they aren't. We can make guesses based on what we see, but we can't be sure, any more than we can be about the sexual orientations of our real-life acquaintances or of people in history

mofic - Presumptions of Heterosexuality - So, penknife was talking about canonical heterosexuality [...] This got me thinking a little more about the presumption of heterosexuality - in canon, in fanfic and in society in general.


Fandom-Specific Meta

brodeurbunny30 - so, a little meta it seems.... - But upon reading pages and pages and *PAGES* of WWE slash, i found myself more and more confused about how i would go about writing it. WWE slash isn't like any of the steady, structured, and normal slash medias and fandoms that we write and love on a daily basis. It's been an interesting study though, because the more i read.. the more i couldn't really categorize this kind of slash. [WWE]

fairestcat - First Age of Sail Love - I'm curious. What was your first Age of Sail love? [...] What was that first moment when you knew you wanted to learn more, read more, see more about this time? [Age of Sail Fandoms]

londonkds - Star Trek: Voyager - Watching Blake's 7 and Firefly lately has helped me work out why I completely lost interest in Star Trek:Voyager some time through, oh, probably the second season. Certainly before 7 of 9 was introduced.

roo2 - Ponderings on rape in the Buffyverse - And we have to deal with the knowledge that Spike is capable of attempting to rape someone he claimed to love. That's canon. It's part of his personality and emotional makeup. Just like we know that Willow has a hunger for power that can be overwhelming and that Dawn needs lots of attention. [Buffy]


On Reading/Writing/Creating

thefourthvine - Rant: In Which I Seriously Lose My Shit and Piss off a Lot of People in the Process - Why am I losing my shit and finding a new faith? I am so glad you asked that. I am losing my shit because I am surrounded by people who disregard the basic laws that hold society together. So I have cobbled together a new religion, one that may just save my sanity. But only if people follow the commandments of sex, and writing, and especially writing about sex, which were handed down to me just minutes ago on a kind of - well, parchment-y thing.

tartanshell in vidding - On POV and context of clips - From what I've read in some of the memories for this community, it sounds like a lot of people think vids should be from a particular character's point of view, and that, as in good writing, you should stay tightly to your POV character and not jump into someone else's head. [...] But. In writing, POV shifts can and often are pulled off well by writers who make the conscious choice to shift from one viewpoint character to another. Can the same be done in vidding?

permetaform - vidding and POV - Is it really necessary? (regaring the use of it by a vidder in the process of constructing a vid) 'Cause yanno, everyone makes POV out to be a big deal and yet if you ask audiences I bet that about 50% of the time more or less they get it wrong anyways, and yet the vid *still* works.

limyaael - Limitations on magic rant - While I don’t think every magical system needs 100 pages of breathlessly complicated rules that would make a Rosicrucian happy, I want limitations. Those are different from sheer “rules.” Rules for magic show the effort the author’s put into worldbuilding. Limitations on magic prevent the author from using too little effort, and trying to pass moldy toilet paper off as a story.

raptorscribe in fanficrants - [no subject] - You know, I'm getting tired of seeing pairing fan-fics where, when one of the characters is involved in a relationship canonically with someone else, that other person has done something horrible to end the relationship.

kaliscoo - What's new, Buenos Aires? - I don't get it. I love crack!pairings [...] and I think that's the absolute-ness for fanfiction - doing completely off-the-wall things, but taking it seriously. I never understand why people seem so surprised when something like that works.

viciouswishes - [no subject] - I was wondering the ethics behind putting some sort of poll after your fic. Has someone tried it? (I'm going to assume yes, since there are no original ideas.) It was definitely a thought coming off of the rating stars on auto-fanfic archives. What are the ethics?

rilina - Writing about winter - My fictional universes frequently have gray skies, biting winds, long nights. Even my longer works, which take place over a span of weeks/months/years, all seem to start or peak on very blustery days. I suppose this obsession with winter is understandable nine months of the year, given that I live in Boston; real life does tend to creep into stories, even when they aren't at all autobiographical. But in the first week of July? Bit odd. Does anyone else find themselves writing a disproportionate number of stories set in one season?


Miscellany

aithine - Fanfic recommendations poll - If you could have your way and make everybody write recommendations the way that would give you all of the information you like to know about a story before reading it, what would you like to know? [Poll]