Fandom Meta

fabu - Thoughts on darkfic, with a brief segue into DMC Each character is going to respond to these extreme situations differently. The way Will breaks isn't going to be the way James breaks, which is totally different from the way Xander (from BtVS) would go dark. There are situations in which I could imagine all three of these characters raping or torturing someone, but it would take different things to get them there and how they would respond, in the moment and afterwards would still be very different. It has to be grounded in who the characters are - that makes the difference between a story that seems implausible at best, and one that rings painfully true.

vegetariansushi - [on darkfic] What about fic that puts people in the worst possible situation and ends without a magical last minute save? I mean, what if Serenity's engine goes down and nobody comes to save them? What if Sam gets posessed by a demon and Dean has to kill him? What if Sheppard goes all martyr and there's no Daedalus to beam him out away from the imminent doom? Are these last three more acceptable than the previous scenarios because they're closer to something that could canonically happen? I mean, it seems like just about everyone's been in a fandom where you're sure that character Y is going to live, there'll be a last minute rescue, everything's fine -- and then they're run through with a metal piling or vamped or eaten by a tar monster. Is it more acceptable to have character death (in fanfic) occur within the confines of ways that people generally die in canon? Is it still darkfic?

pretentioustfu in fanthropology - Heteronormativity and the Weepy Uke - xposted from fanficrants The idea that an uke/bottom/catcher/sub is "female" is incredibly heteronormative, and another heteronormative idea is above (that men and women must have certain, fixed lifestyle roles out of the bedroom), and an uke/bottom/catcher/sub MUST be "female," and that said "femininity" entails mental instability and illness, frailty, helplessness, virginity, inability to make decisions, obsession with appearance, prowess at homemaking, the desire to give birth to a child to find meaning, and all of the other gender baggage that has been (mostly falsely) attributed by Western and Eastern society both, to those of us born as women.

rushin_doll - Considering canon While canon is still expanding fandoms based in that canon tend to be more vital. This has always slightly mystified me, but I think I'm starting to get a handle on why this is true. It has to do with the cultural (or sub-cultural) authority that canon has combined with the hope that things will shift your way. // "Canon" is used as a method of social coersion. I think it works in ways similar to the "art"/"not-art" or "high art"/"low art" dichotemies from cultural theories of art. Declaring something "canonical" is a way of suggesting it is valuable while declaring it "non-canonical" is a way of attacking it. Within most (all?) fandoms being canonical is inherently good and being non-canonical is inherently bad. Generally I see it used as a stick: declaring things a reader doesn't like as non-canonical. // Canon acts as as an explicit shared social core. It provides a basic context for all participants in the fandom: whatever else they might be, all of the fans are the sort of people who like the things in the canon. Maybe they like them for different reasons, but there's still a shared core.

Specific Fandom Meta

( Cut for possible Spoilers for the Fandoms: AtS, BSG, XF, SGA, HP )

On Reading and Writing

synecdochic - My Humble Opinions On Good Vidding My Humble Opinions On Good Vidding, or, I Was Watching A Lot Of Vids Tonight And Have Harkened Back To My Anime Music Vid Days. As always, this is my opinion and I'm not talking to anyone in particular -- I've seen fantastic vids that break nearly all of these rules (well, okay, I'm kind of fanatical about 1-4, but). I am by no means the most practiced or technically adept vidder, but I've been doing this haphazardly for a really long time (yeah, you guys have only seen my SG-1 vids, but I've been vidding on and off since '99 or so) and watching vids for longer, and I've picked up a few things about composition and aesthetics from seeing what really works in a vid and what doesn't. None of this is new -- you will find this advice (or debates on whether people should be given this advice) in pretty much every vidding community you ever participate in. But I'm writing it down for me anyway. :)

cupidsbow - Writing Weaknesses One of the things I've been struggling with for a while now is how to keep the momentum going on stories that go over the 10,000 word mark. This is a real issue for me, as the stories I want to tell most are novel-length inside my head, but I can think them up so much faster than I can write them down, and once I've resolved the tension in the planning stage, it's hard to keep slogging away at the writing.

nico1908 in writing_sex - Sex scene puns/cliches What lines/puns/quips do you think are overused? Which cliches peeve you the most?

Links, Polls, etc

masterofmercury - [POLL] You know, I CAN do serious too. Yeah. I hereby present you a poll about fic translation. It's muiltifandom poll, so EVERYONE have to take this! Indulge me! Plz. [POLL]