General topics

vulgarweed: The Origin of Squickies Where are your squicks most likely to come from? [poll]

ani_bester: Fanartist Question I was wondering what is it about a show or a book that entices you to draw fanart adn what maybe keeps our artistic interest at bay no matter how much you love the show?

thefourthvine: My Fannish Evolution, Part One Recently, I experienced what was apparently a fever-related critical intelligence failure and imported all my bookmarks to del.icio.us.... // But this process, though apparently interminable, is also interesting, because I've realized that these bookmarks are my fannish history. Looking at them, I can see precisely where and how I started reading fan fiction (you don't want to know, and I don't want to tell you), how long it took me to find good fan fiction (so painfully long that I'm still not sure why I didn't give up), when fan fiction became an all-consuming hobby, displacing all my others (October, 2003).

rhap_chan: alternate pairings meta But how do slashers with unpopular pairings get any readers at all? How do you convince someone that your pairing is plausible unless they read it?

maygra: and now for something truly off the wall.... I'm not even going to try and figure this one out -- apparently there is an open and public MST3K comm for SGA bad fic. At least one of the maintainers has issues with people doing remixes without getting permission. // Yet apparently the comm participants post the MST3K stories without attribution of author or title or asking permission, and interjects their commentary not as themselves, but as character representations of SGA characters. // Which, uhm, is remixing a story without asking permission as far as I can tell.

hull1984: This just makes me feel sad. We've all been subjected to some pretty dire fanfiction - hell, most of us - if we're honest - have written some damn hideous stuff too - I definitely have (and continue to do so...I have no shame!!) but is it fair to use such attempts as an excuse to get a cheap laugh?

aithine: [untitled] I'm still trying to figure out how satirizing idiotic, ridiculous trends in bad fic using specific examples (kind of like critiques, satires, parodies and lots of other pursuits do) of the mistakes we see all over the place is such a terrible, world-ending thing.

amireal: PEOPLE MAKE MY BRAIN BLEED One more community with some permutation of the following line: // "I hope that I'm not breaking any rules by posting this here...if I am then I'm sorry and of course feel free to delete." // And I may possibly kill someone.

aubrem: Sending my pictures all over teh interwebs I don't like this assumption LJ is making that I want my journal advertised. Believe it or not, not all bloggers are attention-whores - we already have our own purpose and audience in blogging, we don't need LJ creating one for us.

synecdochic: why I hate the DMCA It's not an online service provider's problem to enforce fannish manners.

Specific fandom meta ( Dr. Who, Supernatural )

Reading, writing, creating and criticism

paradox_dragon: Story Types Part III: Character So, this is the third part in my series of posts on Orson Scott Card's 4 story types.

shetiger: I was up above it. Now I'm down in it. Some people hate PWPs, some won't read anything but. Some insist that good sex is absolutely about advancing characterization; others don't care. Others are bored. // Let's put all those things aside for now. What I've been thinking about a lot lately is reaching the point of believability for a pairing.

mskatej: Porn. I think… okay, porn is great and all, but not when it’s just a bunch of descriptions of sex acts...// There needs to be a reason for the sex, and it should cost the characters something. I want TENSION. I want it to be *difficult*.

paulasj in fanficpen: Reviews What makes you give a review? Does the story have to be well written? Or can a good storyline make up for most grammatical/writing mechanic deficiencies? Do you give constructive criticism?

cupidsbow: Discussion of Reccing Protocols So how do you approach reccing stories that provoke a mixed response? Do you avoid reccing those stories all together? Just link'n'quote? Something else? And what do you think about reccing with caveats, or criticism, or other forms of engaged response?