General Fandom Meta

isiscolo - isiscolo: reading habits (poll) - I'm trying to put together a big long thinky post in which I muse about reccing, but right now I am thinking about reading, and I'm curious about the rest of you. So, poll.

zoesque - lights that lead the way - Is there some sort of unwritten fandom law that states that some incarnation of the song "Wonderwall" must be used in relation to said fandom's prime OTP, through fic/vid/meta/etc, at least once? This is eerily similar to the already-proven unwritten fandom law that states that the song "In The End" must be used in relation to said fandom's prime source of angst (or fanon angst), through angsty fic/vid/meta, at least eighteen million times.

thefourthvine - Rant: Is There a DSM-IV Category for Fan Fiction Induced Insanity - I haven't been sleeping much lately. This means I've been reading a lot of FF. (Yes, even more than usual. But, on the bright side, not quite enough to qualify me for an intervention at the Fan Mental Health Clinic.) Which means that it's time for another damn rant. (If you're new here: in rants, the cut tag indicates mean-spiritedness and general pedantry. Click at your own risk.) // I swear that I will get back to recommending actual FF very, very soon. And it will be even sooner if we could all attend to a few small matters before I lose my mind.

worldserpent - whither the seme/uke wars - When people write anti-seme/uke rants, what they are most often (really) complaining about is when people write one of the characters almost as the sub in a bdsm relationship, or make them weepy and such when they are not that way in canon. (Obviously no one will complain if the character is already that way) However, many of the anti group are irritated that people seem to be writing uke--> thus weepy, but of course having 'fixed' preferences doesn't mean that you need to write the uke weepy. However, people with fixed preferences have them, obviously, because they believe certain emotional characteristics-->uke. There must be a reason why people can agree or disagree that such and such character is seme or uke, right? So seme and uke are thus associated with personality traits in the minds of the preferers,

Fandom-Specific Meta( Cut for possible spoilers in the following fandoms: BSG, HP )

On Reading/Writing

thelana - Theories on why people write Hurt/Comfort Fic - I got inspired by this post on metafandom about h/c and misogyny in Master/Apprentice respectively age difference pairings. Which got me thinking about the different reasons why people write Hurt/Comfort. To me H/C is pretty much everything which features a main character getting hurt as *the* central plot point and trigger of events. So, I made a list. Because I love lists. Long preferably pretty exhaustive lists.

fabularasa - Homeric penises - If I have a pet peeve, it is penis size. Nothing throws me out of a fic like a description of the item in question.

riverlight - thoughts on writing - What struck me most about this essay was the series of questions near the end: It's hard to imagine (I'm quoting now) that Fraser ironed his boxers while on patrol in the Yukon so, as a writer, I want to know why he does it now. Is he bored in Chicago? Unhappy? And then he unrolls a whole series of things Fraser might end up doing to combat that boredom, all of them good sources for a story. when I read that, it was a real epiphany moment, for some reason. Whoa, I thought, look at how other writers tease out these things from canon!

laurus_nobilis - Musings on writers and characters - You know, now that I'm getting addicted to interested in fandom communities, I've seen a lot of people writing Very Serious Posts about how difficult it is to write characters who are from a different gender/age/sexual orientation/race/whatever than the author. [...] // Seriously, people, what happened to getting the characters in character? That's all you need to care about. I know you want to be accurate, I know you want to research (if I'm writing about someone from Japan, it *is* useful to know the basics about their culture, of course), but in the end it comes to the character. If I write about Touya, I'm going to pay attention to what Touya would think or do, not what Japanesebisexualteenageboy would do.