General
vito_excalibur - the who with the what now? - The f/sf feminist crowd probably already knows that juror badgerbag put a story called "Arcana" on the long list of Tiptree Award finalists. "Arcana", case you haven't heard of it, is an unfinished, work-in-progress CSI/Harry Potter crossover nonconsensual male/hermaphrodite pregnancy fanfic starring Severus Snape and Nick Stokes.

aubrem - fandom and my fantasy future - I was seriously ranting about this rip-off in which my fantasy future was traded for the big consumer lie when I discovered fandom. Fandom, it turns out, IS that fantasy future. What do we do in fandom but put all of our free time and energy into intellectual and artistic pursuits?

astolat - Tiptree thoughts - So, you know, a crackfic CSI/HP mpreg angst-heavy h/c crossover is not the poster child I would have picked, it's not a story I liked, it's not a kink I'm personally interested in, I don't think it's brilliantly written (though Em has written some brilliant things), but as a representative of the way we are getting down in the muck of the id with dirt under our fingernails over here, I'm not sure that it's wrong .

isiscolo - friends and lj-friends, monologue and dialogue, filters and f-lock I originally held to the belief that my "friendslist" was not a list of friends, but a list of the journals I wanted to read: a reading list. And functionally, that's what an lj-flist is, because it aggregates the journals on it into one page, for easy reading. I guess it still is, in a purely literal sense. But the nature of "what I want to read on my flist" has evolved over the 3+ years I've been on lj, for several reasons

medie - My thanks... - People in fandom don't get nearly enough appreciation. Some gets spread out but it tends to congregate and doesn't reach, often, the people that it should.

cesperanza - Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose - Welcome to 1974, people.

cesperanza - Hedonism, yay - Fandom for me is a place where we are defiantly unashamed of the things that bring us pleasure, which is why the notion of quality 'awards' in fandom makes me uncomfortable--my idea of an "award" is a "You made me shriek with pleasure" award. And it does seem that she was trying to acknowledge something that brought her pleasure, and her chocolate got into the peanut butter of someone else's "literary quality" award.

eolianbeck - When 'outsiders' read fanfiction - So while yes, it’s absolutely true that you cannot really judge a fannish work outside of its context, the truth is that people do. Every day, a portion of the hundreds and thousands of hits our stories get are first timers passing through.

hmpf - Vaguely off topic meta monster spawned by discussion in cathexys's lj - So, to get back to the argument about the necessity of considering the community context when thinking about fanfiction: I am not at all sure that fanfic is that fundamentally different from other types of fiction. For some people it is an intensely communal experience, true - but for just as many, and possibly more (who can count the lurkers?), I suspect it is not.

shayheyred - Transitions - I may well be a dinosaur myself, age-wise, but I cannot help but be attracted by the more dynamic, forward-moving aspects of fandom, the kind I find with more regularity on Live Journal, among people who are not satisfied with the status quo, who never default to we've never done it like that before, so it must be wrong.

copracat - Hi, Ranty McRantpants reporting for duty - Some genre award judge and her peers just said fan fiction is fiction. Fan fiction is fiction. It's not special, it's not different, it doesn't require a fannish decoder ring.

hth_the_first - okay, fine, the Tiptree thing - It seems like the argument I'm seeing most consistently aimed at people who are publically unhappy with "Arcana's" longlisting for the Tiptree Award goes a little something like this: Fandom is different from other people. We have certain standards and expectations and conventions and we judge quality differently from the way people who give out "literary awards" do, and therefore to talk about whether "Arcana" is up to standard misses and distorts the most important question, which is "Whose standards?" And this isn't an unreasonable thing to say. But I think it's fucking the debate on two different fronts.

marythefan - preparing to be run out on a rail ... - So, here's what's making me profoundly uncomfortable about the meta-conversation about Arcana and its position on the Tiptree longlist: I'm increasingly getting the feeling that I'm supposed to keep my mouth shut in pursuit of solidarity.

ethrosdemon - Untitled - Literary awards are popularity contests, the same in fandom as in the publishing world. We need to take a step back and rethink the premises here before engaging in debate about quality.

On Creating and Criticism
cereta - Audience, People! (I know, you're shocked) - In a culture that consistently assigns higher artistic value to works that appeal to a narrower audience over works that appeal to a broader audience, I'm always a little surprised that fandom has as much trouble as it does with the idea of writing to a narrow audience.

bethbethbeth - Too many thoughts on reccing - including the reccing (or not) of stories written by friends - I can only speak as one reccer, but...here are some thoughts.

icarusancalion - Love and fear in fanfiction. - I've told people that I love my stories. "Of course I do. I write what I want to read!" I declare. But that's not entirely true.