General Fandom Meta

fairestcat - A Gift to Fandom: Doylist and Watsonian Explanations - There was a lot of discussion all over SGA fandom of last week's episode, Critical Mass (which I am NOT going to discuss in this post which I'd like to keep as spoiler-free as possible), some of it rather contentious. And at some point I realized that I was hindered in my attempts to weigh in because the terms I wanted to use were not ones normally used in the fandom. I was frustrated, because it would have been really useful to have these terms to refer to, as a shorthand for what I was having trouble saying in a longhand manner. And it occurred to me that actually, the terms I wanted would be incredibly useful in fic fandom in general and wouldn't it be great if they got adopted for meta and post episode discussion all over lj.

cereta - Another one of those annoying entries where Lucy asks, "What is X?" - What does "OTP" mean to you? // I don't just mean what does it stand for (although we're all in agreement that it's "One True Pairing," right? I just saw another meaning put forth last night and was kinda boggled). I mean, when you say "A/B is my OTP," what do you mean? Only pairing you're interested in at all? Only pairing in that fandom? That you only want to see those two together? that you prefer those two together? Whatwhat?

thete1 - Fantasy, fannishness, OTPs, self-awareness, etc. - Do you ever fantasize situations where you -- or some version of you -- are interacting with fictional characters? (In any way. Coffee with Babs, wild sex with Faith, attending a symposium with Snape, whatever.)

thelastgoodname - On Timing and Response - I saw someone wonder about the nature of metafandom conversations; in particular, why people are more likely not to comment (for the first time) on something that is more than a week old, even when linked to it by metafandom. The corollary to this is when people wonder why, when the same subjects regularly come around again as they always do, no one bothers to read what I wrote about that topic six months ago. It seems fairly evident that it's because of the immediacy of livejournal, where something that happened last week is not particularly worth noting anymore, and something that happened six months ago (on livejournal as a closed community) is ancient history.

thete1 - Sometimes, I 'ship fans. - Not with other fans -- unless there's a profound need for yenta-ing among the shifting Venn diagrams of my fannish connections -- but, well, with fandoms. // Or perhaps it would be better to say this: // Sometimes, I think fans do a terrible job at picking their fandoms, and it leads to the precise sort of trainwreck as would happen if, say, I decided to date a mundane who hated porn of all kinds.

emmagrant01 - Random quote - Do you prefer to read/write about realistically depicted gay characters, or do you think slash isn't about characters being GLBT? (I don't mean that the focus of the stories is on GLBT issues, but that the characters are assumed to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, etc., as opposed to... well, I'm not sure what. But I know I've heard people talk about slash not being about GLBT characters; I just can't remember what they said.)

fungus_files - Meta: Objective thought or "just your opinion" - Reading through the comments on the wankable post, I found it really interesting that some people were differentiating between Good Meta's supposed objectivity vs. postings that were "just" someone's opinion (Bad Meta, I presume?). I was taken aback by this because isn't all meta only someone's opinion?

valis2 - Characterization and Reader Empathy - What does the character have to do to break with the reader's empathy? Obviously, each reader has her own personal limit, a point past which she stops relating to the character and becomes repulsed instead. But sometimes we are so psychologically invested in the characters that we are carried past our usual limit, the limit that we would tolerate in everyday life, because we "understand" and see where the action came from.

Fandom-Specific Meta( cut for possible spoilers in HP )

On Writing/Creating

commodorified - The Monster Under The Bedtime Story - We all have them. Things we're more terrified of, or attracted to, or fascinated by than is remotely reasonable. Things we pull out and fondle, or poke at, when nobody can see us. // I call them The Monsters, or the Junk Drawer

guede_mazaka - Grammatically-incorrect characters: some observations - So I often choose to characterize characters through their speech/thought patterns, and more specifically by deliberately violating certain rules of grammar. I base how I do this on a couple purely empirical observations I've seen/heard over the years. My experience comes from playing editor to my parents, who both have perfect speaking English but are not native speakers, from interacting with a wide range of people who have varying degrees of command of the English language (my major attracts a lot of international students), and from interacting with a range of people who speak different dialect versions of English. This is what I've noticed, and I'm aware that my geographical and economic situation affects my experiences to a large degree.