General Fandom Meta

ishie - we did not have the parts - Am I the only person who's sick to death of the "OMG HOW DARE S/HE LOOK AT ANOTHER PERSON OR BE ATTRACTED AT ALL" rabid shippers in every single fandom? Who are these people? First of all, your beloved UST OTP is, and let's emphasize this, unresolved. It says so right in the acronym! [contains spoilers for the latest episode of Dr. Who to air in the UK]

schemingreader - power of sexual healing in fan fiction - It's difficult to feel okay about eroticizing unequal relationships, even when they are supposedly consensual. I'm just a bit knee-jerk that way.

therosiergirl - Why we hate the wankers - Think about it. Fandom Wank is a defensive mechanism.

leadensky - Orphans and Lost Parents - Partly because I'm reading fairy tales right now, and partly for no reason what so ever, I've been thinking about lost children and orphans.

sopdetly - Spoilers, the Internets, and Cultural Literacy - What I find interesting is how those who complain about spoilers don't seem to understand the basic concept of Cultural Literacy. Now, this is something that has been drilled into my head for as long as I can remember by my parents, especially my dad, so maybe I'm just hyperaware of it. But there are things in our culture that pretty much every functioning member of a certain age are expected to know.

researchgrrrl = A Different Kind of Dirty: Gen Porn - One of my biggest kinks is The Tease, both when the characters are utterly clueless about the fact that what they're doing could be remotely considered hot and when they're perfectly aware that if anyone else happened by, they'd be totally accused of subtextual stuff. Love it. Seriously.

musesfool - Two cliches make us laugh. A hundred cliches move us. - So much of what I love about fanfiction is bound up in this - the play of stories against each other, the inverting or reimagining of old stories in new ways, the mashup of the familiar with the new, the archetypes mixed and matched to throw light on each other, exposing new and different patterns, the cliche done right (because something doesn't reach cliche status unless it works when done right) or twisted into something unexpected...

fictualities - Tourists: Fantasy/SF heroes and their places - I suppose even Harry Potter likes to travel, though in a more complicated way: he has to travel from the Durseleys' and towards various Wonders of Wizarding Britain. Interestingly Harry doesn't go very far, and I'll get to that in a moment. But he does have something important in common with Frodo, Captain Kirk, Dr. Who, and the Narnia children: to some extent he's the Hero As Tourist.

glitter_traces - Since People Have Asked - The fact that many gay/bisexual women will write male/male slash, as much, or more than they write female/female slash, also suggests that there is yet another element at work here - that of reclaiming the female body. Traditionally in pornography it is often the female body which is filmed and exploited, slash is a way for women to reclaim pornography and turn it so that the primary focus is on the male body, i.e. by writing slash about male homosexual pairings.

melty_girl - the difference between fanfic and biopics: funding & respectability - It's true, RPF fanfic often takes on real people as they're living their lives, often making very intimate suggestions about their sexual tastes and emotional natures. This is a tricky thing, and sometimes I feel a little weird about it. But I feel far more strongly that there really isn't much of a difference between fanfic and biopics besides funding and respectability. And the line between fiction and nonfiction is actually far clearer in RPF than it is in say, Walk the Line, which is intended to be taken as based strongly in fact.

scribbling_elf - Playing with the slash can o'worms - Some weeks ago I cam across a quote that got me both thinking and irritated: In fact, this riveting story works partly because it's told by a straight woman, and so isn't tainted by the faint self-justification of many gay authors' work. Though it was from an interview with the author Lionel Shriver describing the novel As Meat Loves Salt which I haven't read, I think this sentiment may apply to fanfiction or to certain attitudes toward slash fanfiction.

lazypadawan - A free market gal on fan fiction - People like Grossman or Henry Jenkins, author of "Textual Poachers," think fan fiction is all about sticking it to the Man. They say fan writers are "taking back" the grand tradition of storytelling from eeeville corporations and the eeevilles of capitalism.

isiscolo - things I unreasonably dislike in stories - Every once in a while people post about what makes them read a story (or hit the backbutton), and often their "ick" factors are things that have me (and I imagine, most people) nodding their heads in agreement: crying men, spelling errors, epithets a la "the blonde Slytherin," author's notes along the lines of, "written at 3 am in 15 min & didn't dare inflict this on my beta!" Well, of course I dislike these things, too. But I also have unreasonable dislikes - things that annoy me greatly in stories even though there's really no rational reason for my dislike.

lobelia321 - why do people dislike first person singular and present tense fic? - isiscolo posted a list of her personal unreasonable dislikes in fic. But what is even more interesting than her list is the thread the list has generated. Because while one list tells you something about that person and the idiosyncratic nature of personal taste and how nobody's predilections ever overlap 100 per cent with your own, a look at the thread reveals patterns.

musesfool - reflexes got the better of me - Can I just say, I fucking LOVE the English language. I love that words have so many different shades of meaning, that they can mean both a thing and its opposite at the same time, and that the ambiguity which sometimes makes me crazy with not quite understanding what exactly anyone else is ever saying is also brilliant and amazing and what makes this writing thing, this communicating thing, so interesting.

Fandom-Specific Meta

jenavira - Fandom Ethnography, Atlantis-style - A brief ethnography of Stargate: Atlantis fandom, focusing on how fandom interacts with canon. [PDF]

Polls, Questions, Miscellany

laceymcbain - Drabbling - A question for the masses - When you see a fic described as a drabble, what do you expect?