Fandom Meta

sentraaquila - Online Tolerance OMG! Seriously, there is a civil war going on in LJ that has spawned from BSG fanfic disagreements to an onslaught of all literature. Frankly who cares?!?! If someone flames you, delete their post or keep it there. There is absolutely no reason to respond to flamers...that's what they want you to do.

projectjulie - technologies of fandom MT was also telling us about collaboratively authoring his forthcoming book. they used a wiki, and he says "in the end I couldn't point to a single paragraph and say whether she or I wrote it." I've never written collaboratively, but I've always been fascinated by the phenomenon (I like to imagine Deleuze and Guattari sitting at a desk together, cackling maniacally). those of you who collaborate: how does it work? I've heard reports of a certain division of labor: one person writes the plot, another the smut, for example. or there's round-robin style -- like this comment porn I read today, and on a grander scale in RPGs (as far as I understand them). do any of you have ways to intertwine even further?

dispassion in fanficrants - Thoughts on "Don't Like, Don't Read" Okay, so we all agree that "don't like it, don't read it" is a horrible fangirl defense and all that, right? I mean, how can you tell if you're going to like a fic unless you read it? Right? Well, what if the fic is clearly labeled? I'm tired of getting people dissing me for stories that were clearly labeled as such. In fact I'm getting rather tired of people throwing conniptions about labeled fics.

lizzypaul in fanthropology - Chan "Chan" fanfiction. Some people are violently opposed, some people love it. My question is not about morfanthropologyality of the genre (if fanfiction can have morality) but about the classification itself.

executrix - What Does Fanfic Replace? [I]n some cases, of course, especially after a show ends, fanfic replaces the show itself (or fills in between books for people who wish there would be a new HP book every month instead of in alternate years). And for that application, what matters is making it as much like the source text as possible--creating some problems for showfans that don't exist for bookfans, of course. We can write screenplays, and sometimes do, but usually don't even for heavily visual stories simply because most people find it annoying to read things in screenplay form. By and large, however, I think that fanfic, and especially gen, replaces the kind of short stories that used to appear in magazines and even in newspapers.

twinkledru - I'm cynically certain this is going to end badly, but eh. [S]omeone asked the question of why it even matters to me if fandom is sexist – someone even suggested that by worrying about it in fandom, I'm belittling feminism. The brutal honesty meme, in which a couple of people expressed the opinion that I get worked up over unimportant things, reminded me of this, and, well, it all got me thinking. . . . Sexism will rarely come out and hit you over the head with a blunt object painted a bright neon color. To me, sexism that I see in fandom – it does matter. No, of course it doesn't matter as much as more overt displays of sexism in the mass media do, which in turn don't matter as much as violence towards women in the US and the greater world do. It's a sign of the problem, though, and it's a manifestation of the disturbing backwards slide I've seen in American culture in recent years with regards to women's rights – it may be a relatively benign manifestation, yes, but a relatively benign manifestation is a manifestation nonetheless. It's not the big problem, but it's a face of the big problem, a part of the big problem.

Specific Fandom Meta

( Cut for possible Spoilers for the Fandoms: BtVS, ST )

On Reading and Writing and Vidding

cupiscent - Vid babble I keep thinking that I should start my vid-shaping before I edit the music. Y'know, I should go, "In the solo section I want to explore Obi-Wan's navel lint, and I totally don't need four bars to do that, so I'll halve it." As it is, I sit down with the music and a notepad and make a note of everywhere I think I can shorten it. And then, pretty much, I do. I think about it - Does this make the arc of the music lop-sided? (my main counterargument to "just cut the music" is that music - good music - has an arc like a story or a movie, and to brutalise that is not a good beginning to a creative endeavour) Does a listener have enough time to recover from the chorus before the next verse? - but mostly, I just cut out everything I can. Or, to put it in a positive way, I tighten the music as much as I can. I reduce instrumental bridges, I halve the number of repetitions of something, I condense intros and outros.

resonant8 - How to write a sex scene, part 1 I told neery and chopchica that I kept drafting posts on "how to write a sex scene" and then deleting them because they translated to "how to write stuff that Res finds hot." And they both basically gave me permission to wallow in my self-indulgence. So I'm going to do it. I've got four tips, and since I'd be interested in seeing discussion on each one, I'm going to post them separately.

resonant8 - How to write a sex scene, part 2 I forgot to mention yesterday that obviously Rule 1 ought to be: Get great betas, train them to be very very picky, and train yourself to listen to them and not take it personally.

macteague - Web distribution and author/reader rights. So I recently encountered a situation where an author was upset that people were making copies of her stories to their personal computers. I went back and read the profile page of the livejournal, and sure enough, there was a request for people not to. I hadn't even noticed it when I found the livejournal originally, it was such a non-issue to me.