General Fandom Meta

mistressmarilyn - S is for Subtext! - This got me to thinking about that age-old description of slash, what it is and where it comes from. For what's it's worth, I was around when it started, so I know. A better question is: When is slash not really slash? To me, it's not slash when it's canon.

guede_mazaka - Clive picspam! Also short meta-thought - Especially online, we tend to get into fandoms by way of pairings. Much of fandom springs forth from a pairing or pairings--even if we get into one by way of a single character, a lot of times we end up talking about them in terms of potential pairings. We're almost hardwiring ourselves to look at everything in terms of a sexualized interaction.

executrix - The Mad (Sorting) Hatter - The slippery slope for canon purists is the temptation to move from "I am a virtuous fan because I conform to the tenets of canon" to "It is incumbent upon TPTB to provide me with canon authority for my speculations and a marriage license for my OTP" to "Bad auteur! No biscuit!" Rather like the not-uncommon confusion between "prayer" and "issuing the Deity the To-Do list for today."

makesmewannadie - Porn, women's bodies, and slash fiction - It's interesting to me as a slasher, because I think that slash, paradoxically, allows us to reject the male gaze more than other genres can. Even writing femmeslash, if you've grown up in Western society, unless you're so Kinsey 6 that you never gave a flying fuck what any man saw when he looked at you, ever - then the male gaze is there, and you can react against it or with it, but you can't escape it. But if you write slash, you can escape it, at least as it's societally scripted. You take away the object and let two subjects interact.

nardasarmy - Random Fandom - Can you get bored with and outgrow fandom in general? Can you read so much fic that things start to run together, and you find yourself able to see the trends of certain styles and plot devices before they even hit your in-box? Can you find yourself so thoroughly saturated that the thought of reading one more story from or seeing one more icon for a fandom make you yawn? Can you become so bored with fandom in general, that it doesn't matter the subject, you just have had enough?

nostalgia_lj - [untitled] - Is fandom middle-class? Is it bourgeois to write porn all day? Is it bourgeois to write porn for half the day and then spend the rest of the day explaining how your porn is subversive? You could totally go on about the impact of affordable internet access on fandom.

jim_street - Rant? - The whole 'Can't we all just get along?' thing is hated in L.A., especially on the force, so I won't go there. I don't expect us to all get along, because people never will. But can't we get a little perspective? Even if we love writing fanfic, we didn't invent these characters, and if somebody else owns them, they might do something with them we fanfic authors (if you can call me that) don't like.

brn_gamble - Fandom Love? Why? - I'm split on the whole issue, I guess. On the one hand I think it's OK to get worked up and deeply involved in a fandom interest, while on the other hand I think it would be a good thing to be more moderate and controlled concerning it. Can you have both things?


Fandom-Specific Meta

pinkdormouse - Sticking up for JKR - I'm very interested in all the shipper reactions to HBP. My reaction on reading the various relationships developing, and in some cases ending, was 'good on you, Jo'. Finally we see people in the wizarding world having relationships that don't last forever, and these people are capable of moving on afterwards to have new relationships. [HP]

atalantapendrag - HP Essay - Ok, I know by some people's standards I'm easy to dismiss. I know I have serious personal issues, and HPB was a very triggering book for me. I'm asking you to listen to the words, not the speaker. It seems to me that JKR is presenting child abuse as justifiable. [HP]

annamilton - Harry Potter and the Jumping of the Shark, Part 1 - Time and time again we are told that the ethics of the HPverse operate through choice, that evil is a set of behaviours chosen by certain characters, that choices matter far more than one's abilities and only the antagonists and other reprehensible characters follow the ethos of blood primacy. We are told that even prophecies are not prescriptive, that one can chose to fulfil them or not. What we are shown, however, unmediated through the filter of one or more characters' dialogue and displayed through the sheer unvarnished facts of the narrative, is something altogether different. [HP]

copperbadge - [untitled] - A lot of people have been coming up with some surprisingly Occam's-Razor style stuff regarding Snape the Ethical versus Snape the Villainous. I really don't care too much at this point because I'm digging too hard on other parts of the book, but that's not to say it doesn't affect how I see Snape [HP]

aureliades - Why I love Fanon Harry more than Canon Harry - But what is it about fanon Harry that is so awesome for me that it doesn't even matter who he's shagging? It's that fanon authors sympathize with Harry in a way that JKR, by virtue of her chosen perspective (through Harry) can't. Whether Harry's evil, snarky, bitter, or a prissy golden boy fanon always approaches him with an air of "this is our guy, lets give him the benefit of the doubt". Whereas JKR always makes Harry look like an ass. [HP]

ajhalluk - The case against Fred and George - The pre-HBP case against Fred and George has been put so eloquently by pharnabazus than I can do no better than point you to his essay here . The post HBP case is even blacker against them. [HP]

idlerat - About all the wank - I feel like there are some very strange notions circulating right now about what fans should be like and what behavior should be expected of them. Isn't it normal to critique the source, to be disappointed by some developments, to let your wishes influence your interpretation? Isn't that quintessentially fannish? [HP]

mad_maudlin - [untitled] - Along with the rest of the fandom, I've always taken Dumbledore's lines from CoS as the moral of the books, such as it is: "It is our choices that define us." In spite of JKR's flirtation with prophecy, that message seems to resound all the way up to HBP. But in this book, we finally get a clear look at two factors that complicate the whole matter of choice a bit: the nature-versus-nurture debate. [HP]

lysrouge - Stop the Commotion - What I really don't get is all the hate in fandom. [...] It is after all possible to critique a character without hating them. Really, it is. Not a single character in the Harry Potter series is flawless. And left and right I see character after character being hated for reason x, z, and y. And I just don't get it. I don't even waste my time hating actual people, let alone fictional characters. [HP]

telesilla - Let's talk RPS in open debate - So here you have Ruth's Top Five Reasons non-RPS people should embrace RPS. [RPS]

kyuuketsukirui - What I like about RPS - One of the main reasons why I like it is because I really like writing stories about ordinary guys in the real world, falling in love and having sex and being angsty and all that. It's very easy to do that with RPS. [...] RPS gives me the ability to write the sort of stories I want, with the bonus of a wider audience than I'd have for original fiction. [RPS]

kethylia BL's sites of identity and empathy. - This came up on one of my responses to miriald's miscellaneous boy's love rants, and I thought it would be worth repeating here, as I often see a couple of fundamental misconceptions about the Japanese uses of BL. [BL]

grapefruitjzzz - Community Promo - [Interesting discussion in comments about whether Russell T. Davies, the chief writer and show runner of the new Dr. Who, is the "anti-Joss".] [Dr. Who, Buffy/Angel]


On Reading/Writing/Creating

minisinoo - Style and Heart in Narrative - To me, attention to matters of style involves the entire shaping of a story from the actual wording itself to how a writer handles such matters as (et al.) chapter length and scene arrangement, use of parallels and patternings, approaches to description, point-of-view choice, linear versus thematic scenic movement, etc. In short, "style" includes all those technical aspects that an author uses to construct a story, and any author who's deliberate in the use of these things is a stylist.

gmth - Who says wank is always a bad thing? - So now I'm wondering: at what point has a fan fiction writer pushed past the "I'm ignoring canon in order to explore something that won't happen in the books" and gone straight over the line into "I really should acknowledge that I'm writing original fiction disguised as an exploration of a well-known universe"? Who gets to decide where that line is placed? And in the end are any of us really writing fan fiction?

flambeau - it ends with revelations - How about you: do you want to read the same kind of story you want to write, or something completely different?

matociquala - Conscious Incompetence - I suspect the arts (including the one I'm most familiar with, fiction writing) can be so frustrating because they are comprised of so many skills, and so many layers of skills. And some of the more advanced techniques are counterintuitive to what I thought I knew when I was learning more basic ways of doing things.

cofax7 - meta, fic, links - there are real concerns about using a tragedy just to give your entertainment some resonance. I remember just after 9/11 I got into a couple of conversations about the appropriateness of using the backdrop of the attacks for fic. I have a vivid recollection of a story I read a couple of years ago, where a massacre in a church was used as a means to get Mulder and Scully in bed together. I found it distasteful in the extreme, to be frank. On the other hand, these are things that do happen, and have importance in our lives; if we want to write stories with meaning and resonance, it makes sense that we use what affects us.

nicolae - [untitled] - If, on wmshakespeare.com, the Bard wrote that those who believed Hamlet loved Ophelia were "delusional," would that discredit centuries of scholarship? If he said those who saw Shylock as the victim of Merchant of Venice "worried" him, would Shakespearean scholarship be wrong?

violetsmiles - this is my brain on fic. any questions? - It's funny that I love writing so much. I mean, generally speaking, I tend to dislike things that complicate my life and frustrate me, but there's something about writing. There's something addictive in the sense of accomplishment I get when I write a line that I love, when I nail the characterization of a character that's hard for me to write, when I finish a fic, that's better than an artificial high.

alchemia - canon shipping - It’s also rather depressing for young book-loving queers to be unable to find someone ‘like them’ in books, unless it’s a specifically an angsty coming out gay book [...] Oh sure, we can always pretend, and come up with excuses, like the slash writers do, but its still excuses. [...] There’s still this undeniable reality behind what you have to ‘fix’ that is constantly there to remind you of ‘difference,’ and not just difference but ‘wrongness’ because if the stories are full of wizards and detectives and super heros and dark lords- why aren’t people ‘like me’ in these books. How do sociopathic mass-murdering darklords make it into countless books but I never knew one queer character in a book growing up?

brn_gamble - More Fandomish Thoughts - I'm not suggesting that characters need to be written as definatively gay, lesbian or bisexual, mind you. But it just seems like there should be room to be able to believe in the possibility that the child protagonist might be gay, lesbian or bi. What's the harm in that? [...] I guess in light of published authors feeling a need to 'pair off' their characters in heterosexual relationships, I feel an even greater need for fanfic authors to pick up the slack and write about less conventional relationships.


Miscellany

ataniell93 - Another Silly Poll - Which is more important to you--what you actually read in the pages of a book, or what the author says about it later in an interview or his/her web site? [Poll on Authorial Intent]

brn_gamble - Fandom Definitions, June 2005 - Several moderators from Yahoo! Groups (and various blog communities) came together to create this list of fandom definitions. Anyone is welcome to use this at a given public forum (lists, blogs, boards, etc.). [Compilation of definitions for common fannish terms]