General Fandom Meta

fairestcat - Fanfic as a shortcut to romance - Well, the realization I had last night was that I am much less picky about romantic fic then I am about romantic novels and I think I figured out why. In fic, at least most of it, half the work's already been done for me before the author gets there. I ALREADY find the characters and the setting compelling and interesting, that's why I'm looking for fic about them.

nostalgia_lj - [untitled] - One of the nice things about het is the opportunity to "redeem" some of the very shallow heterosexuality TV throws at us, and to beef up the role of the woman in it. Sometimes it's just a matter of adding some more convincing sexuality, which series telly can be a bit scared of. Even in film because, dude, Anakin/Amidala should be interesting (and frankly they're both very pretty people so there's the pr0n angle there as well). Hetfic is cool and interesting because het in our canons very often isn't.

aingeal8c - Slash Crossover Poll - This has led me to wonder about the elements to crossovers that involve slash. Is one fandom slash and the other not? Is it just a way of getting different slash pairings to interact? Are ther het parings involved? I know some people only write crossovers is slash a big element for them? // These questions have led to the following poll:

koimistress - iconic female characters -- still working up to the slash - I'm speaking in generalities here, but we tend not to have the sort of female protagonist who appeals to me in genre fiction and drama; the damaged hero, the one with great gifts who's seen life and fought the good fight while struggling with some affliction that will never go away. It's a romance trope I fall for every time, but apparently women are not as attractive to men in this role as men are to women.

amatia - whoever adjusts the fastest is the winner, I think... - Often, when one's OTP is "ruined" by canon (biggest example, Sirius dies and Remus hooks up with Tonks), there's this crazymajor backlash of people downright hating on the creator. And I wonder: have some of these fans ever been in a television fandom, where canon changes every WEEK and something can go from A to Z and then halfway back again just during SWEEPS? But this happens in television fandoms, too: something changes and people stop being so emotionally involved in the show. (I know I had a hard time with XF once it moved to California dropped the same character formula that had been there for six seasons.) [...] Is this a fannish entitlement thing? Like, we fork over the cash so we then feel like investors, versus plain old consumers? I understand that when something changes in canon it's a lot easier to just be angry at the person behind that change, instead of trying to broaden our thinking about

Fandom-Specific Meta( Cut for possible spoilers in HP, PoTC and BSG )

On Writing/Creating

rynne - dialogue formatting tutorial - Ah, the dreaded dialogue formatting—something that many people get right, but many more get wrong. Where do you use a comma and where a period? What should be capitalized and what shouldn’t? And why? Dialogue formatting isn’t easy to get right, and it’s easy to forget the rules, especially when published authors do it too.