General Fandom

icarusancalion: There's Nothing Wrong With Fandom That Getting Rid Of All The People Won't Fix — "Fandom is like a Rorschach test. It's a map of our own personal issues whether we're aware of them or not. Have a hair-trigger temper? Oddly enough, something in fandom will set it off. Have a lingering issue with relationships? How dare all those people talk about marriage as if it's a good thing! As it happens, Yoda was right: What's in fandom? 'Only what you bring with you.'"

juleskicks: Tips (don't think it's sour grapes but you're all a bunch of apes) — "May I present LiveJournal: Being an Humble Treatise on which behaviors are thereon Acceptable and which are Not, and some General Meditations upon how to make one's Experience in the Realm of Live Journal more Enriching, or by the which one may at least Minimize one's chances of being Pwned."

bethbethbeth: Not My Fandom: A Question of Selective Memory — "The thing, though, is that shows/books/movies which are Not My Fandom don't lodge in my brain in any meaningful kind of way, no matter how much I may want them to. Just as I can't remember the names of planets in SGA, I can't remember which X-man is which or what any of the Smallville episodes are called."

slippyslope: Dead horse, with bonus tl;dr — "If I thought about Indiana Jones kissing Marion, I wasn't imagining myself in Marion's shoes; I was looking at it from Indy's POV. And when Marion was gone and that horrible blond lady showed up in the second movie, well…Marcus started to look pretty good. Slash wasn't a mechanism for putting myself in the picture; it was an outcome of having to put myself in the picture by a male proxy."

lobelia321: RPS Characters Are Empty Signifiers — "Fps characters come to us already full. They are replete signs. When we turn them into signifiers for purposes of slashy twisty-turning, we give them new signifieds. The already replete sign becomes the signifier for our new signifieds. Rps characters come to us, I would argue, empty."

isiscolo: The Rec and Not The Story of the Rec — "Am I the only person who doesn't see the point of the proposed masterlists of HP recs? It seems to me that this sort of wide-open rec list, where the only criterion is that 5 people who care enough about the project like the story, both defeats the purpose of recs as a discriminatory tool, and falls into the trap that ausmac describes in her post about fan awards by popular vote. The result is going to be a huge pool of the most popular stories. "All the HP stories that people can remember!" Um, so what?"

petronelle: DC Comics Needs Genetic Diversity: Comics Vids — "Vids that rely on readers' canon knowledge are no better nor worse than stories that rely on that same knowledge. All fanfiction does it to one degree or another, but it feels to me as though comics vids go another step further, in that they not only require knowledge of context to bring meaning to a static picture, but also the context necessary to identify any character who happens to be out of uniform."

Specific Fandom Meta
( Cut for spoilers in the following fandoms: Pirates of the Caribbean )