General Fandom Meta

painless_j - - A rant? Yes, a rant - I mean, it's a text that you read and don't know whether to laugh outloud or cry over it. Half the noun cases are wrong and half the commasare in the wrong places; there are expressions that make it leap from high style to a workman's humour and back in a blink of an eye. Thepoint gets lost in unnecessary repetitions. And so on. The effect isnothing like what the author wished. But the ideas are sound, original.It has real, deep thought. Only that thought barely pulses under allthat wordy rubbish, and you need to shovel aside all those wrong words, incorrect forms, and ridiculous expressions to get to it. But once youdo, the thought shines. You think about the author, 'My, you are anintelligent son of a bitch! Why do you hide it so?'

meddow - A Lack of Action - One thing that really saddens me is that in my little corner of fandom(fandom is so large I don’t even want to pretend I know what’s going onin some areas) there seems to be a lack of action/adventure fic. Now I know I’m a bit of an oddball, I am after all the girl who managed toget a discussion of Lancaster Bombers into a fic. But surely I can’t bethe only person who would list action/adventure as her favourite genre?

cofax7 - Lurkers! Colbert! Books! Random ST:TOS references! - The Guardian suggests that of 100 people online in a given community, only one will produce content.Ten will comment on it, and the other 89 will simply view it. This is,frankly, not my experience--but then, they're relying on Youtube tosupport the argument, and that comes bundled with a certain barrier toentry, after all.

My personal experience has been that in a given community 20% of the members participate actively, producing and commenting on content, and the rest simply receive it. I don't see the big distinction between producing and commenting, frankly, since most of the people I know online do both, moving back and forth freely. It's a bright-line distinction, one that draws a nice clear hierarchy between the producers and the audience, but I don't think it stands up.

bitofmagic - Fandom Wank Cassie Claire - I don't know wtf is wrong with BNFs but they should just SHUT UP and stop generating so much wank. I mean , it would be extremely nice, if the Harry Potter fandom could return to its state of cleanliness once more. We should write to JKR; 'dear Jo, see what some people turned the fandom into! Sucks, doesn't it?'

mskatej - Fandom... - Fandom has opened my mind up to all sorts of wacked out shit that a year ago would have made me nauseous. Fandom is great if you’re openminded and willing to be wrong. If you don’t mind changing your opinions and if you accept that other people’s opinions, whether they’re retarded or not, are essential to your learning experience. By which I mean, essential to your *life* experience. No one has it all figured out, right? We’re a community, we’re all different, we all like different kinds of people, different kinds of writing, different shows and films and boys and girls; we have different kinks, different expectations, we all take what we need and sometimes fandom delivers and sometimes it doesn’t. Just like in life.

shadsie - Homophobe is a serious accusation - Some people just don't like slash. Some people just don't like slash for some characters and pairings. It's not homophobia, it's preference.

I don't think it's fair, either, to brand someone a "homophobe" because they don't have "Slash Eye Syndrome," that is, they don't pickup on "subtext" and tend to see characters, who, in canon, haven't outright displayed interest in the same sex as striaght. I do not think it's *wrong* to "assume a specific character straight" in canon, and to prefer writing and reading het/gen only fanfiction for him or her.

harriet_spy - [untitled] - It struck me last night that I am far, far more tolerant of aggressive recontextualizing in vids than in texts. In my mind, you've got the music, you've got a bunch of footage, if you want to do a vid that depends intimately on canon, that's great--but if you want to do a vid that reworks the material into something else entirely and is at most a loose riff emotionally off canon, I'm equally happy with that.

Specific Fandom Meta

( Cut for posible spoilers for the fandoms Buffy, POTC2, SG1 )

On Reading and Writing

docmichelle - On doing the anon thing, pseudo-commentary on Depth of Need - I decided to do the anon thing on a lark. Despite the fact I had other commitments at the time, when the urge bit me in the ass I went ahead and signed up.

Why do it? Probably for the same reasons everybody does. Curiosity--do people regularly avoid my stuff for one reason or another? Or do I only have people comment because I have some really awesome friends who are willing to wade through my bs? Then there's the question of whether my style is recognizable. I've noticed that people don't do a lot of guessing on stargateanon,unlike the anonymous Christmas thing that was done last year, but there has been some. For me the question was one of whether I keep falling into the same writing traps, or whether I could write something that was different enough that people who read me wouldn't recognize me.

Links, Polls, etc...

sorchar - This is a discussion post - Think of your fandom. Now think of the worst possible scenario. Now, share it with me in the comments.