General Fandom Meta

amireal - So you want to be constaff... - Someone asked what it was like to work a con. // Here's the answer: // It's fun. Really. I mean that with all my heart. // Then someone notices you and the fact that you have a brain and the ability to think on you feet. // And suddenly it's Sunday and you have a hangover and have slept maybe 5 hours the whole weekend, stumbling around attempting to find the staff meeting at some ungodly hour in the morning, but you can't look straight at the room numbers because the lights! They burn! // It's still fun.

jadelennox - children's / literature - So I'd really love to start a community for people who are interested in both children's literature and slash. Or, for that matter, fanfic in general. Not for people interested in slashing children's literature characters; while there's a place for that in this world, it's generally far away from me[1]. But I find myself more and more thinking about fanfiction with my children's literature analysis brain, and thinking about children's literature with my slash analysis brain.

cereta - [untitled] - I'm thankful for fandom. // I'm thankful for this weird, wonderful activity that lets me bring everything from my academic background to my love of angsty people in spandex to a table full of other people who share them.

fernwithy - Character depth - We've all come across reviews, both of fanfic and of professional work, where the critic rants about the "one-dimensional characters." It's an easy thing to say, and in some cases, it's an easy thing to see--the character who has no life, implied or otherwise, whatsoever outside of the story events is safely categorized as "one-dimensional" every time. [...] But it's slippery, because then you start walking into places where people just gape at one another in confusion, and a character one person thought was quite deep, another decrees to be impossibly shallow and unworthy of attention.

thelastgoodname - On offense, offensive material, context, and legitimacy - There's a strange wank on at fandom_wank right now regarding the question, "without context, is it reasonable to find something offensive?" [...] Regardless of what you think about the potentially offensive thing, including whether you think it might be offensive or not, the initial (if poorly phrased) query still stands: // How much does context matter? // How much should context matter?

fabu - Some things you do, you just don't understand - As many people have pointed out, fanfic is close to the id. It's fantasy wish-fulfillment, and as such, our preferences in fanfic reading can be difficult to explain, just as it's difficult to explain why we're straight or gay. I agree that it's not as simple as "straight women prefer boyslash to femslash because they like men," but I do think that preferences and kinks are formed very early, and that they can be as deeply ingrained as sexual preference [...] And like sexual preference, fanfic preferences seem to be more flexible for some people than for others - some of us only want to read boyslash (or femslash or het), others can read a little bit of everything.

lunacy - (...why no) woe? - You know, it just struck me that I've yet to find a fic or manga that has anything I could term 'bisexual angst'. I mean, there's 'omg, no, I'm gay and I like someone I could never have' angst and there's the regular old 'omg boys/girls drive me INSANE yet I like one, woe!' angst... well, there's a bunch of variants, but. Point being, bisexuals always seem to be portrayed as being free spirits for whom gender doesn't matter-- either in a slutty way or just in a really 'enlightened' way, and that sort of... annoys me, actually.

Fandom-Specific Meta( Cut for possible spoilers in Buffy/AtS, HP, Supernatural, Firefly/Serenity, Chronicles of Narnia )

On Writing/Vidding/Creating

birgitm in vidding - Google PSA - Apparently, Google is Beta-testing a system allowing people to actually physically upload videos to their server then streamed from them. // I was alterted by a fellow livejournal user to the fact that someone uploaded one of my vids without my permission