General

femmenerd: Who's a woobie? "Woobie" is one of the most often used, idiosyncratic fandom words. It's used so frequently that people hardly ever seem to feel the need to define it. Here's my definition: a character who is a) attractive b)snarky/cocky and c)wounded on the inside. And they are always charismatic, and usually male....Now, my question is: why are woobies so often male, to the degree that the standard seems to be male?

kangeiko: Archetypes in the arcana discourses - first part Where single-person narratives dominate the folktale, the montage of characters now has strength in pop-culture. We have multi-character shows and tales, where it is unclear where our loyalties are expected to lie.

carenejeans: Where the Boys Aren't (Warning: Meta) I've finally figured out why I like m/m slash so much: It's because there are men in it.... I've been reading a lot of heterosexual erotica of the sort found in the ubiquitous Year's Best Erotica anthologies, web fiction of the sort found at Nerve.com, romance novels in various categories from Harlequin Presents to Ellora's Cave, excerpts of sexy bits from mainstream fiction and literature, and het fanfiction. And you know what? There aren't any men in it.

hth_the_first: The Hth Field Guide to Slash & Other Assorted Strange Attractors In my ongoing bafflement as to why I’m apparently the only person on earth who doesn’t think Sheppard and McKay are particularly slashy, I was of course taken back to ye age-olde question, What exactly *does* it take to be slashy?

Reading, Writing, Creating

oxoniensis: Being John Multifandom One of the biggest problems about being multifannish is that there is so much new fiction to read each day. And I only have time to read a tiny fraction of it. I mean, where do I start?...And, out of curiosity, how do you chose which stories to read? What are the most important things for you – fandom, pairing, rating, author, genre, something else altogether?

minisinoo: The Question of Fanon Ownership: the logical vs. the specific This is a (somewhat belated) response to mofic's interesting entry "Beyond Plagiarism". She talks there about inspiration for ideas in fanfiction and legitimate borrowing....When it comes to Things Borrowed, I see them as falling into two broad categories: the logical, and the specific.

dmitchell1985 in hp_essays: When Writing Sex Do your own personal experiences help you write smut, or do they keep you from doing so, feeling that it would be too personal?

vegetariansushi: On Writing Do y'all frequently find yourselves writing for a specific person or group? You don't have to name names or anything, but do you find yourself writing for your best friend? Your beta? The 23 people in your favourite Harry/Squid/Whomping Willow community? Further, would you (or, um, do you, if I mentioned you up there) find it creepy that people might (do) write with you in mind?

nostalgia_lj: [untitled] how normal is it to have characters that you just won't touch in fanfic because you think they'd be too easy to Sueify? Ones that you just like too much or empathise with or whatever and you just don't think you could pull it off without making them saintly or getting into apologetics?

Polls, Other

thefourthvine: Poll: Vid Permissions Recently, I have been doing some codeine-enhanced pondering of vids - specifically, linking to them or recommending them, and how we do that, and how we get permission to do that....Because in media fandom, my understanding is that fannish etiquette requires you to ask permission before you link to or recommend a vid. [poll for vidders only]

rahaeli in lj_biz: Don't Panic! So, tomorrow you might load LiveJournal and say "...wait, what the heck?" We'll be launching our new global navigation scheme, which is out of beta and has now been officially named Horizon. Tomorrow, everyone who's not logged in while browsing the site will start seeing LiveJournal in the new Horizon scheme, and in a few weeks, anyone who hasn't explicitly chosen one of our other site schemes will probably also get changed over.