General Fandom Meta

yaoi_onna in fanficrants - Long...long ago - By then, the word plagiarism was on my mind. So I emailed admins of the list and explained the situation. I told them about how the stories [...] were similar, gave them the links to the Forever Knight and Buffy stories, and explained how I tried to contact both authors. A day later, I received a response. To paraphrase, the admin told me that they couldn't do anything because the original author had to bring the complaint to them. [...] A week passed and there was an announcement sent to the list. Buffy author's works were plagiarized. Their stories were being removed and the author was going to be banned. And in that mail, there was a special thank you to a BNF (who was a friend of the admins) for pointing this out to them.

sistermagpie - Job or Prometheus? - I really don't think I read fics hoping they will be IC. That is, of course you appreciate being able to recognize the characters you like, etc. A certain level of IC-ness is expected. But in some vague way I like feeling like I'm reading X's fic, and listening to what X has to say, rather than going for any sort of simulation of canon. It's not that I read fic for meta, exactly, but I feel like the fics I like best probably give me the feeling that author just knows his/her take on canon well enough and is now telling a story, as opposed to somebody who's really trying to fit itself into canon or fill a hole.

melyanna - The Great Fan Fiction Poll! - I'm also impressed that these guys knew enough about fandom culture to know one of the oddities of fandom: that it's dominated by women. And that women write slash. Even explicit slash. And that's just got me curious about fandom demographics in general. [Poll]

wordsofastory - Honest Discussion - Back in the day, I was on the Prospect-L maillist. [...] There's not really anything to replace it in my current fandoms. Sure, you'll get feedback when you post a fic, and if you're lucky you might even manage to spark a discussion or two about canon interpretation. [...] But there's not quite the same kind of sustained, detailed talking about either specific fics or general tendencies that I like, and there's certainly no central location where you can go if you want to talk about this type of thing.

miriam_heddy - If Rock Hudson were played by Jamie Foxx, and White fans talked about race - And I saw myself, a Writing Center person with a fairly sophisticated sense of language, still mentally correcting Morris Chestnut's subject-verb agreement, and inventorying his apartment, and not recognizing a single one of the songs used in the film, and recognizing that part of the oddness of online fandom is the way in which, being mostly written exchanges, fandom encourages us to write in "Standard" English, and to talk about many taboos (like incest) that have no daily bearing on our lives, but to almost never talk about race, which still has a helluva lot of impact on our lives, daily. So here I am, trying to talk about race--about racism--about this movie, and not sure how, though I could easily talk about the film's queerness.

mistakency - FREE MONEY! - I’m interested in learning about sources of character attachment. Specifically, I’m asking how large a role personal identification plays in creating character loyalty. Think about your favorite television characters ever and whether they relate to you.

fanaticalone in fanficrants - For all of us who have ever wished they could find a fic about something different. - I have seen quite a few complaints about things that they wish people would write in their particular fandoms more often, usually a pairing that isn't popular among the fandom, but sometimes a character or whatnot. And every time, someone almost immediately answers them with this question: "If you want to read about [whatever,] why don't you write it yourself?" // Speaking as someone who has "written it myself" on more than one occasion, my answer is this. Yes, "writing it yourself" is good. But it's not the same.

searose - television thoughts - the networks want to train consumers to think of TV shows as products that aren't free - and make the idea of on-demand ventures more palatable. [...] Paying. Per. Show. I can see what I think is almost like a comic book model. See, those things aren't free unless someone *ahems*, and if anyone looks at sales charts - it's gruesome. Slow to rapid attrition of paying readers unless [a miracle happens]. [...] Because, because we *pay* for the damn things. When the going gets lame, we *bolt*.

liviapenn - So what are some of your favorite crossovers? - Why do you like them? Why do you write them?

sidewinder - And away we go again... - I really do find myself wondering these days if the whole media-con (as in, 'zine-centric con) phenomenon is dying out: first we lost conneXions, next year E-con, the year after that Zebracon...Revelcon is hoping for a stronger rebirth next year and I hope they can pull it off, otherwise I could see that one dying out as well. Is medium fandom just too internet-centric any longer to keep up interest and motivation in keeping the convention community going? [...] And is it the same for the more traditional sci-fi conventions as well?

commodorified - Now and then we wonder who the real men are... - There's been lots of very cool and interesting meta going around about gender in fanfic and why various people find it sexist to refer to a character as 'feminised' when what they mean is 'this man has been magically transformed into a quivering bowl of pink fluffy dessert topping with a sex drive.' [...]// What we have here, I think, is a terminology problem.


Responses to cereta's post

elynross - Sometimes, really cool things happen - So, awhile back, scarfe posted to scans_daily with something that set off a big kerfuffle [...]// But wait, this isn't a "pile on the guy" post. Because scarfe has done what I think is a strong, incredible thing. Not only did he apparently listen to the reactions he engendered (um. So to speak), but he thought about them, and what they possibly said with regards to the way he reacted out of his culture, as opposed to how he thought of himself...

nos4a2no9 in fanficrants - On Chicks, Dudes and Fandom - The disgust/confusion I've encountered regarding slash in fandom from external sources seems to stem from people who are hostile to female fandom in general, and slash provides a good scapegoat for their disgust. "This is what's wrong with what you do," they seem to say, pointing to Batman/Robin stories or strange, obscure stuff like Bible slash and RP slash pairings

wight1984 - Gender issues in Fan Fiction and a response - It’s interesting in what you were saying about female-only spaces. I guess some resentment could be explained quasi-rationally by noting how so many male-only spaces are under attack these days. Traditionally male spaces are becoming available for women, and organisations like ‘Working men’s clubs’ come under increasing pressure to let in women. [...] Of course, there is an appreciable difference between such places. A lot of aforementioned male-only spaces were male-only by way of oppression. Obviously, there’s no similarity between a females-only recreational organisation and a male-only workplace.

vassilissa - I want to cry. - Once some slash fans wanted a place to squee about comics. So they made one, and it was good. Het and gen fans could come play too, fine, so long as no one disrespected anyone else's fannish enthusiasms. This was written into the community rules. And the community prospered, and there were lots of members, and it was very good. [...] But more and more shitheads kept coming, especially as the community's profile rose. And then one of them said this: I know it started this way. But is it anymore? Has the community changed, and is there a way for everyone to be cool with that and it can all be OK and peaceful once more? I don't think of this as a slash community.

telophase - The essay making the rounds today... - A year and a half ago, I was in the artists' alley at an anime convention, with my prints spread out on the table. Approximately one-third of them had women in them, the rest are of men in various poses, none over a PG rating (the occasional bare torso; that sort of thing). A fanboy walks by, surveys my wares, and says "Oh you're one of those people." Note that none of the pictures of men had more than one character in them - nothing even hinting at yaoi. [...] However, it seems that if I draw a man as a sexual object, even if there are no other men in the picture, I'm a yaoi fangirl.

bastmoon - [untitled] - I think this essay touched something in me, b/c I'm always apologizing, at work or in social circles -- "Sorry, I'm weird, I write fan fiction. Sorry, I am a yaoi fangirl. I'm a slasher, sorry. I know you're gonna think I'm a freak, but I like the idea of two guys." I think I'm done apologizing about anything that truly doesn't hurt someone else. I never realized how conditioned I was to try and make guys feel comfortable around me, so that they wouldn't think I'm a Bitch.

babyofthegroup - [untitled] - I keep seeing the link to the essay on male privilege in fandom, so I went and read it. Eh. "Men have all the advantages in the world!" Color me unsurprised. Nobody's going to call me a raging anti-feminist, but I'm getting tired of seeing tiny disclaimers saying "we don't hate all men, honest!" and then this huge MEN ARE EVIL OMG OPPRESSIVE AND HOW HAVE WE DEALT WITH THEM FOR SO LONG AND WHY WON'T THEY STAY OUT OF FANDOM, RAAAAAAAHR! rant. And I'm all ::headdesk:: because if women wanted fandom to be a female-only safe space, writing about men screwing men is the wrong way to go about it -- at the very least you're going to attract the literarily-inclined male like myself.

shorelle - OMG UTERII!!! - And funnily enough, contrary to one of the entries linked in that rant, inaccurate female-bashing seems far more prevalent and uglier, which really is funny (not in the haha way) in fandoms primarily made up of women. Maybe it's an offshoot of silly fangirling? [...] But then in fandoms with more guys, like much of WoT fandom, it's still the female characters who cop a disproportionate amount of flack. Does this mean that people are more critical (or more likely to voice their criticism) of female characters, or that authors write more crappy females in their stories?


Fandom-Specific Meta( Cut for possible spoilers in Dr. Who, SGA and BSG )

On Writing/Creating

ursulav - Smashing Plates - Pottery taught me that failure was inevitable, and that merely because I created it did not make it worth keeping, that hours spent trying to torture out art did not, in and of themselves, convey any particular grace. It taught me that no one painting, no one story, no one creative act is, itself, all that important. What matters is doing it over and over, until you get good. And then continuing to do it over and over. And that even when you're good, you fail at least one pot out of ten.

glossing - [unfic] a few thoughts/things - My beef with fanon isn't really that it's a communally-accepted interpretation - that can be a lot of fun, and I've written in shared universes, too - so much as that it has the potential to become a shortcut. And shortcuts tend to cheat the reader (ie, *me*, since it's AAM) of character development and insight.