General
fanaticalone - Petri dish fandoms - I guess that the thing that I'm trying to get a feel for is, how do you make a community grow if it hasn't already? That's not like bread mold. That's more like growing a culture in a petri dish - searching for other fans, trying to find a decent conversation about the source material or find someone who doesn't think that the idea of fanworks for it is laughable (yes, I've had this happen) and then trying to transplant these fans to the same place at approximately the same time, in the hopes that if they stick around and actually communicate, the community will stay alive. And maybe even grow, if one is really lucky.

sapphocles - fandom as a mediaeval society. - This place has its share of drama, sure, and sometimes it gets out of control (like when it bleeds onto metafilter and fark). But usually we take care of ourselves - a self-regulating society. In many ways, it's not unlike an anarcho-syndicalist commune early society.

melody_kitty - The Disadvantage - Even being a member of numerous fandom community and reading a huge amount of fandom blogs outside of LJ seems as though I've missed the party because I'm in a different timezone.

teh_no - Paging irony, paging irony... - A while ago, on Scans_Daily, I made a joke. This is not an uncommon occurrence. However, on this occasion, there was a great deal of freaking-out. You see, after I posted a number of scans of Ramba (who is, suffice to say, not a very nice person), I made a crack about how she was "everything girl-wonder.org is asking for in a female hero." To which there came a swift response.

simargl_wings - Warning: unintelligible rambling ahead. - I'm sort of come up with this theory that you can tell difference between sexual exploitation and erotica by empathising with the characters invovled. If it seems to you that the character wants sex and enjoys the idea of having sex, then it's erotica. If the character seems like they don't actually want to have sex but they are sexualized anyway, then it's exploitation.

lunacy - a bit of top, a bit of bottom, a bit of nothing at all... - If the characters are doing what the characters would do in your head, fine-- but sometimes it's just waaaaaay too obvious that the characters are doing what they are because they 'should' to fit the plot. And that? That is by default, not something I could ever find 'in character', even if at the surface their behavior seems to fit (until you think about their motivations).

kindkit - sex, history, and fanfic - Now, I'm a firm believer in taking history in account, and not giving characters in a historical setting inappropriately modern ideas. When we write, it's important to know that Greek man/boy relationships were typically expected to end when the boy reached adulthood, and that the Romans considered being penetrated to be unmanly and degrading, and that a man in 1950s Britain could be sentenced to chemical castration for having consensual, private sex with another man. (*weeps for Alan Turing*) // But it's also important to remember that people defy their societies' sexual ideologies all the time.

executrix - The Breastplate Curve - Writing in a historical fandom, I agree that it's a naive error to attribute 21st century attitudes of a particular sub-group to someone of a quite different background and century. But as a fiction writer, I'm always looking for credible conflicts between and within characters and credible obstacles for them to overcome.

jessicaqueen - Often Unnecessary Warnings (And How They Cause My Brain To Melt) - So is there a trend at the moment where the detail in the warnings is growing ever more excessive? Or did I just somehow miss all these strange warnings in the past?

rahirah - Noah's Arc - In the last week or so, I've happened upon several posts bringing up subjects upon which I am tempted to argue. Sometimes I've given in to the temptation; other times I've more wisely hit the back button and strolled away. And in every case I've asked myself "Why in the heck are you doing this? This equine is pushing up daisies! Kicked the bucket! Joined the choir invisible! This is a dead horse!" // And yet I'm irresistibly drawn to their fly-covered corpses.

princessofg - Construction of Fan Fiction Character Through Narrative by Deborah Kaplan - Being a chapter of Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, by Hellekson and Busse, 2006, McFarland, reviewed/commented on by me.

slytherincess - There She is Again . . . Like a Turd in the Fandom Pool . . . - Sometimes I wonder if I am the only person in fandom who emphatically does not believe that writing slash is somehow a political promotion of equality and acceptance for gays. I mean, how does writing porn about Harry Potter characters even remotely constitute advancing human rights for gays, lesbians, or the transgendered?

Polls, Questions, Other
skuf - Slash writers demographics: results - My main concern was to discredit the notion that the majority of slash writers should be middle-aged, strictly heterosexual, stay-at-home moms. Not that there is anything wrong with being any or all of those things, but at least in January, now February 2007, we are a much more diverse lot than that.