Fandom Meta

mofic - 9/11 Approaching I remember being so touched on 9/11 and in the days afterwards by the response of other X-Men fans. I hadn't been in fandom long (started writing the previous fall) and was just overwhelmed by the letters from readers of my stories and from fellow fans all over the world. I got a number of letters from China, translated and forwarded by the same kind fan who had translated my stories. There was something surreal about well-wishes from the other side of the world in the midst of that tragedy.

liz_marcs - I Remember Townsend... It's incumbent upon us as citizens to get it right, and you can't get it right if you're selective with the facts. The only way to get the facts is to listen and investigate. We as a nation have yet to do either in any satisfactory way.

Will we ever get our hands on all of the truth? No. Probably not. But we can get close enough to see the details in the picture and, as far as I can see, we're not even close to that point yet.

All we have right now is all we're getting: Entertainment, propaganda, and other lies. Dress it up however you want. Call it a "dramatization." Call it a "docu-drama." Call it "historical fiction." But it still boils down to the same thing.

twistedchick - [untitled] Truth, or the lack of it, is at the center of the discussion of ABC's impending show about 9/11. It's being criticized as inaccurate and biased, and as 'something out of fantasy land', except by those who reserve harsher words for it

quixoticimpulse - Oh yeah, my 9/11 Blurb The one thing that keeps reoccuring to me is that this year, enough time went by for "the forces that be" to create not one, but two films on September 11th.

Like..live action movies.

With actors and actresses.

iansmomesq - 9/11/06 Perhaps a poem or a story, but poetry about 9/11 to me -- especially from me always sounds trite. I'm not worthy a poet enough to handle the topic in the way it should be handled. A story, same thing. It's too honorable a topic for me to toy with.

xandri - gays in scifi Science fiction has a history of breaking boundaries and making bold leaps, as far as film and television go. There is, nowadays, quite a lot of character diversity. (Representation of religious minorities aside, because most science fiction deals with fictitious religions.) However, scifi seems to be lacking any strong gay characters.

emrinalexander - Aunt Lavinia Is Having A Brain Aneurysm Dear People:

It was really nice and wonderful of David Hewlett to not only create his own website, but to be over on it interacting with people. Heck, there are forums and everything!

Before we further impress Mr. Hewlett with the fact that, apparently, more than a handfull of us are, it would appear, batshit insane whackjobs with the appropriateness-filters of a diseased cherrystone clam, let's try to remember a couple of things:

spubba - CAPSLOCK KEY YOU ARE MY BEST FRIEND TONIGHT I MAY BE A GODLESS, DESPICABLE GAY PORNOGRAPHER BUT AT LEAST I KNOW BETTER THAN TO INLINE POST NUDE PHOTOGRAPHS ON DAVID HEWLETT'S PERSONAL WEBSITE FORUM

karamarie_mckay - [untitled] Folks, I’d like to remind you that we are not friends with the actors and actresses of whom we’re fans. Our perceptions of these people are based more on what we’d like them to be than on what they are. This is not because we are all a bunch of delusional lunatics, but because our knowledge of them is based on limited information. Some actors and actresses are more forthcoming than others are, but regardless of their degree of openness, we cannot assume a level of camaraderie that doesn’t exist.

arlessiar - Thoughts about fandom: The forum at David Hewlett's website Fandom can be a scary place. It can be scary just for the daily silliness in there, because people behave differently than they do in their real lives. The giggle, they drool, they say crazy things. It can get scary because not every actor knows how to deal with seeing masses of screencaps or squeeing fans, reading or talking about fanfics or seeing photomanips. And nota bene, there are several degrees to all these things, from harmless to really hard stuff. But it gets even scarier when fans cross the unwritten lines and ask/show inappropriate stuff or do weird things like kiss actors unasked or stalk them or whatever.

wordplay - So, really, would it be so BAD if we had the fandom police? emrinalexander made a very nice post encouraging people to cool it and stop making a collective ass out of the entire SGA fandom over on the forums at David Hewlett's new website. To be perfectly honest, I can't even go OVER to the forums to have a looksee - I am too anxious about what I'll find and can imagine only too well. *winces*

tikiberry - because i am *that* ornery... When I get blasted by everyone on what not to do?*

I now want to take a picture of myself naked and post it to dgeek.

thecaelum - Discussion: Fandom's influence on real world opinions One of the interesting things about fandom is that it is a community of shared fantasy that can and often does impact reality. Very often, your fannish experiences have an impact on your opinions. I'm very interested in this, especially as it relates to fannish opinions on sexuality and social issues versus real-life opinions on same. One does not necessarily equal the other.

rosiew - A Fangirl NEEDS TO KNOW What makes you prefer a certain couple to another in a fandom? How do you choose your 'ships? In everyone of your fandoms is there something, a character trait, a certain reaction, that will make you look at the couple with interest? Do you always go for the same type of couple? The forever kind, the destructive kind, the love/hate kind, the obsessive kind. What makes you like what you like?

ethrosdemon - On the sense of community in fandom, fannish entitlement, the shift in fannish behavior since lj and "rabid fans" The bottomline is that there are people who are just here for the porn, but there are people here who are here for the porn and are unsocialized, people who are not at all here for the porn, and people who are here because aliens told them porn is bad, and there is no real way to know one from another AND by just assuming we're all here for the porn, we set ourselves up again and again to be blind-sided by all the other folks.

swythyv - Wizarding Use of Stolen Technology There has only been a "muggle world" from which to steal technology since the wizarding world separated itself from muggle affairs in 1692. By my reckoning, technology predating the 1692 split is neither muggle nor stolen: it's a heritage of shared development. And it's a heritage that has shaped wizarding thinking, attitudes, and traditions.

gunderpants - Shakespearean anti-heroes and Snape - the breakfast of champions I totally love the whole aspect of fulfilling prophecies and semi-altruistic assassination plots that turn awry as evident in both HP and Shakespeare's work. In the "Interview O' Doom" last year, JKR said that one issue about the prophecy as revealed in OotP and HBP was that like with the witches' prophecy in Macbeth, the course of events in the HP universe were altered with Harry, Snape and Voldemort learning of the prophecy.

This theory is totally crack and 99% unlikely to happen in the books, but wouldn't it be totally boss if Voldemort wasn't killed by Harry at the end of the novel, but by Snape during the build-up of the novel?

chrysantza - Tonks/Remus as a feminist statement The wizarding world has, in my view, always been ahead of the Muggle one when it comes to women and their rights - witches have been Ministers of Magic, and Hogwarts headmistresses, and Quidditch captains, when Muggle European women were still the inferior property of their husbands and barred from much of public life. But if we look at the little Muggle girls and boys who are the audience for JKR's books, what they are seeing in the Tonks/Remus romance is an independent woman who has chosen to be with an impoverished outcast for love. Because she can.

rashaka - I CALL BOYCOTT. at least until we get a fucking opt-out feature. At the moment there is no opt-out feature available to the tracking, and it's making me decidedly uncomfortable. I can't force you guys not to track me (why oh why isn't there an opt-out?) but I'm asking you in good faith not to. It's an honor thing. It's a boycott thing.

bexone - The new notification system? Do us all a favor and actually test the feature to see how it works before you start flailing about how it's TEH END OF TEH WORLD AND ALL PRIVACY EVERYWHERE OH NOES.

Probably 80% of the flailing that's going on is because people are insisting that the system does things that it just flat-out does not do. An additional 10% is people using LJ features in ways they were not meant to be used, without taking into consideration the limitations of the system as coded; a further 5% is knee-jerk "I hate change" reactions.

On Reading and Writing

clotho123 - A bit of personal rambling The whole of surviving Greek Tragedy is written on the principles of fanfic (except for The Persians, which is more Real Person Fic). Shakespeare stole plots from anyone who left them lying around. Thomas Malory just rewrote every Arthurian story he’d ever heard of, and Edmund Spenser fanficced the result. Now I’m not claiming my writing is anywhere near the standard of these people. But they should make the point that incapacity in the plot department makes you less a bad writer, than a not commercially viable (in *this* age) writer. Not at least if you happen to get chiefly inspired by works which are still in copyright.

romanticide_shu - FanNonFiction: Realism in FanFiction I try not to write huge rants that I know will offend a lot of people, but I couldn't sit by and not write this one because it was irritating me. One thing that I almost can't stand when I write a fanfic is people being super nitpicky about the facts. I'm serious, that drives me crazy. I'm going to go through and say why.

Links, Polls, Questions, etc

copperbadge - [untitled] If someone you didn't know asked if they could lift maybe 500 words from a 5000-word fic you'd written, to use in their own fic with credit to you, what would you say? And why?