General Fandom Meta

tayefeth - [untitled] - I followed a link and found someone claiming that slash fanfic is not about gay men, but instead about women. Um, reality check, please? This is the twenty-first century. If we want to write about women, we can, oddly enough, write female characters doing anything we want them to. Including having orgasms.

alchemia - [untitled] - I am not a woman writing, nor a man writing. I am not writing for an audience of women, nor of men. I do not write slash (or femslash or het). I do not write female avatars. Nor do I write male avatars. I won't write to ‛improve' men or women by cutting them down, emasculating them, defeminising them, denying them of their gender roles or identity. I will not devalue the reasons others have for being in fandom because they don't share my gender, sex, sexuality, culture, opinions, etc.. I dont expect fandom to shape itself to me, but I do expect to be recognised as a part of it's shape.

yourlibrarian in fanthropology - RPF and RPGs - Given the tension that often seems to exist in fan fic groups regarding RPF, I thought it was interesting the take this article had on it, only it focuses on RPGs and seems to believe (incorrectly) that RPF doesn't exist.

lizzypaul - Fandom Poll - I was curious about why people have OTPs and favorite characters, so I thought I'd make up a poll on the subject while I still have the ability to do so.

heartofslash - *puts on reading glasses and gets all thoughtful* - And I think the notion of LJ or a fandom on LJ as a community is sound. Kind of like high school.

thaliachaunacy - 6 Signs You're About to Wank All Over Your F-List - I've been in this fandom for a long time (three and a half years, but who's counting) and have seen my fair share of wank. And whaddya know, there are patterns. And while free speech is right and good, and necessary in many situations, sometimes it a good idea to keep your trap shut.

rivkat - Help me, Obi-Fan! - Chander & Sunder argue that fan fiction allows marginalized groups to insert themselves in the text or reorganize the narrative around themselves, and couple that with discussion of the underrepresentation/misrepresentation of characters of color in TV/movies, but how often does that happen with race? We have plenty of gender-swaps; does anyone know of a race-swap story? Any good discussion of Teyla and Ronon as characters of color in SGA fanfic?

triple7lies in fanthropology - Alternative Lifestyles in Fandom: Thoughts - For those of you that live or are interested in alternative lifestyles (fetishism, BDSM, polyamory), do you find you're able, if you choose to, to express this aspect of yourself in your fandom works (art, fic, etc.), and have acceptance among your fellow fans? Do you feel that the works you do find in your fandom (if they exist at all) are representative of what you consider to be a 'normal' expression of these interests (or do you feel that most of these are written/made for aesthetics rather than personal expression?)

mmichelle - fandom ramblings - I've finally figured out why the bad_penny community on JournalFen bothers me. I mean, I respect the right of the people over there to write what they want, and I do read a lot of it, regardless of whether or not I agree with the argument being made, but it's always made me a bit uneasy. And today, I realized that this uneasiness comes from purely selfish reasons: it just reminds me of what a brat I've been in fandom from time to time.

ausmac - a question about reviews - Firstly, do you think that you tend to give more leeway to fiction written by people you know or whose past work you have enjoyed? None of us can actively turn off our memories - but do you feel that when you recognise the writer's name, you have preconceptions that could affect how you respond to it? Or do you perhaps try to approach every story the same way, irregardless of who wrote it?

coffeeandink - Fandom genealogy - Feral fandoms; or, A highly subjective account of the history of fan fiction [expanded from previous post]

tellitslant - is it just "where the women are"? - So interestingly enough, someone who hadn't run across any of the recent femslash discussion asked me yesterday why Doctor Who femslash was so much better - bigger, easier to find, etc - than Stargate. I don't necessarily agree with the statement, but I understand where the perception comes from, and that is really making me think about femslash in general.

fox1013 - meta (do you know what you're missing) - But the thing is, the more we discuss why femslash is so much smaller, we... isolate ourselves, maybe? And what's more, others isolate us.

trancer21 - Meta: Femslash - Readers, Writers and LJ - While there are new femslash fandoms being created specifically on Livejournal. It leaves me scratching my head as to why the numbers are so anemic compared to their mailing list companions.

thelastgoodname - RANT: It's just because I like ticky boxes, isn't it? - A while ago, I took a poll about... something. One of the questions — well, three of the questions — were about whether someone read and wrote f/f, f/m, or m/m, and there were radio options running from always to never, including rarely and often. // Out of the more than 250 people who responded to the poll by the time the data were collected, I was the only one who responded that I often read f/f and only rarely read f/m or m/m. That is, I was the only one who was primarily interested in f/f.

On Plagiarism and Copyright Infringement

liviapenn - Fictional vampire lore question - see, this is why we need intellectual property to eventually lapse into the public domain, you know? We need toys in the toybox. Right now, vampires, and *specifically* Bram Stoker's idea of vampires-- they're free game. Warren Ellis can play with Mina Harker and Hugh Jackman can play Van Helsing, we can have Blacula and Count Duckula and Sherlock Holmes-Dracula crossovers and even direct sequels to the book. Anyone can write that, because Dracula belongs to *everyone* now-- that story, those characters, they belong to us.

theregoesyamum - Intertextuality and Plagiarism: yes, there is a difference - Incorporating jokes or references from other pop culture sources can be really fun, and can make your fic much richer. But when you need to rely on the work of others to fill in the blanks in your text without a reason for this other writing to be included, that's plagiarism because you're cheating people into thinking that you wrote this text.

coffeeandink - Why fanfic writers are upset about plagiarism - Apparently people have been writing John Scalzi and [info]wicked_wish about Cassandra Claire, which frankly I think is dirty pool; if you're going to notify anyone outside fandom, it ought to be the writers who were plagiarized or, in several cases, their estates. Scalzi says: As evidence of this I was presented with a whole bunch of links that turned out to be really tremendously not useful because nearly all of them were like dropping in on a heated argument that had a subtext one could learn nothing about, and anyway the argument was in Albanian, so all you knew was there was a lot of yelling and shouting. // Here is my attempt at a relatively brief translation from the Albanian.

inthesewalls - a question! or, uh, seventy-three. - In your opinion, what, exactly, merits being credited to the original author in a fic?

mofic - Beyond Plagiarism: Where Do You Get Your Ideas? - I’m following some of the meta about plagiarism and fanfic and it’s sparking some other ideas for me. I’d like to talk about inspiration rather than about plagiarism, about how ideas get originated by one person and spread throughout a fandom in an organic – and, to me, really delightful - way.

liviapenn - Happy birthday to *you*, Mr. President. - It's kind of annoying to realize that a lot of actual *professional* authors don't know the difference between fanfiction and plagiarism. // "But, if you use someone else's characters or world without their permission it's plagiarism, right?" No. If you use someone else's characters without their permission it's copyright infringement (and in the case of a parody or transformative work, it might not even be that.)

pandarus - Cassie Claire and all that jazz - a much better question than 'Why is CC's magpie approach to fanfic bad when it's okay for Tom Stoppard to use quotations in R&GAD' would have been 'Why is CC's magpie approach to fanfic bad when it's okay for TS Eliot to do the same damn thing in The Wasteland or The Four Quartets?'

sparkly_stuff - Keeping you informed. Because I have nothing better t - No, plagiarism and copyright infringement are not the same thing. However, they can go hand in hand, as they are both considered stealing and punishable offenses.

On Writing/Creating

executrix - Pinch Hitters: The Vampires of Fandom! - But, whether I'm deluding myself or not, I feel that a pinch hit always gets a kinder reception than the originally scheduled fic, just because everybody's glad that *something* got done. As Angel said about being a vampire, "No responsibility...no conscience...it's an easy way to live."

minisinoo - Crafting the Hook: a pragmatic writer's guide to snaring reader interest - One of the biggest problems that beginning (and even intermediate) writers face is WHERE to start a story. They often start stories too early. Many years ago, a friend-mentor of mine (not so) jokingly told me that most beginning writers can write the first chapter of their novel to get themselves started, then throw it away. // She was exaggerating only a little bit. :-D

limyaael - Writing sex scenes - 1) Overcome your own embarrassment. Yes, this comes even before point 2, because without it, the writer can’t achieve point 2 anyway. If you find yourself regularly squirming before the prospect of writing sex scenes, or tempted to be giggly about it, you’re not going to write them in-character for anyone who’s not squirmy or giggly.

penknife - Thoughts on conflict in fanfiction romance - So, you're writing romance. That is, your main plot or a major subplot is about the development of a romantic relationship, or how that relationship evolves, or is threatened, or leads to changes in the characters' lives. One of the things your story needs is conflict. "They met and immediately fell in love and had hot sex and/or got married, the end" may be a PWP (or the taffeta-and-wedding-cake equivalent), but it isn't a romance with a plot.

Questions, Polls, Miscellany

thelastgoodname - On recs, "Even if it's not your Thing" - So what are people trying to say when they say, "Read this, even if it's not your thing"?

lothy - [untitled] - What's your pet peeve when you read fanfiction (of any fandom)?

scatteredlogic - "Do you think I meant country matters?"* - With a great deal of help from friends (and literally relying on the kindness of strangers,) we've managed to collect 120 terms for vagina and 15 for clitoris. Some of the words and phrases are misogynistic, some are childish, and others are just plain silly, but they're all words that people have actually heard or seen used, and I didn't edit or delete any suggested words.

nemo_gravis - From the blank page to the web page, questions answered - I've been asked for some details about making the leap from writing a story to posting it on the web. I guess after a while, we forget how hermetic it might seem to the people who read our fics. We talk about all the word processors we use to write with and the software we use to format LJ posts and so on and completely forget that it's not as clear for everyone as it is for us.