General Meta
cathexys: SUNDAY META REVISITED: ON FANON - I think to me, fanon can be a marvelous shorthand when it is accepted within one's interpretive community, when you and everyone else is playing by the same rules and from the same handbook. It gets problematic when it loses connection to the text, misreads its potential audience (or is read by the wrong audience!), and when it's not a conscious citation of tropes circulating within one's community but a lazy copout.

elspethdixon: Because I take comics characters way too seriously - I think it's because it's part of a larger pattern of non-acknowledgement/belittleing of characters' mental illnesses that also kind of bothers me.* Probably because I tend to view fictional characters from a Watsonian perspective rather than a Doylist one (i.e. think of them as real people with their own independant existance, rather than artificial constructs), and take my escapist reading material Way Too Seriously.

kyuuketsukirui: What is gen? - I think people who have slash goggles (or het goggles) and see subtext in every word or look tend to forget that not everyone watches a show or reads a book looking for pairings, that some people don't even notice pairings until they are made explicit by the text. Whether you want to call it gen goggles or just the absence of subtext goggles, unless there are very obvious, deliberate clues that X and Y are going to get together or are together, then I don't see it.

narahttbbs: Fanfic questions and little_details - Intuitively, I felt that I would get different answers by introducing my question with "two female FBI agents are on a road trip with a twelve-year-old boy..." than I would have done if I had said "I'm working on an alternate universe X-Files fic where FBI agents Samantha Mulder and Dana Scully are taking a twelve-year old clone of Fox Mulder on a drive cross-country."

galadhir: Squee and Anti-Squee: a clash of unwritten expectations. - Now I find that the prevailing opinion out there is that I am doing this entirely to spoil other people's enjoyment - out of a mean and petty impulse to stamp on other people's joy. The thing is that I *know* why I'm doing it, and that is not the reason at all.
What occurs to me is that this is all caused by differences in unwritten expectations between the squee'ers and the anti-squee'ers, and could be quite easily solved if we turned those unwritten expectations into written ones.

witchqueen: That Gen discussion what has been going around - What I care about is that Het and Slash should be reserved for stories about the romantic or sexual relationship between opposite-sex and same-sex characters respectively. It should not be stories which include romantic/sexual relationships, but stories which are about romantic/sexual relationships.

sarah_frost: [untitled] - Except we fans are getting so much out of it, taking it more seriously than the writer possibly did, spending time thinking and dreaming and writing while the original writer's Moved On to Greater Things--and I'm wondering, is that creepy? Is it possibly threatening, someone going over your work again and again with a fine-toothed comb almost as though they're delving into you?

niannah: A Question of Theory - on LJ, I tend to get into discussions without knowing what kind of theoretical common ground I have with other people and sometimes I find it difficult to navigate the discussion for this reason. For example, regarding the Death of the Author: sometimes I still get blindsided by someone who says "that's all very well, but the author/director/whoever didn't intend that reading," because clearly we're coming at the text from completely different directions.

saeva: Narrative Function; Or Why I Should Learn To Tell Myself To Stop - What's important about this is that besides possessing certain definitions, then, each of these functions exist outside of gender. While traditionally each of these functions has a gender to the characters which inhabit them, the definitions do not by necessity required them to have such. And this essentially means that the classification of a female anti-hero is, by definition, unworkable. A character is either an anti-hero or not an anti-hero.

mip_fic: Meta: Disabling Comments on Fic Posts - There was a recent discussion about ways to determine a fic's quality on lj. The obvious answer would be to look at the number of comments a fics has, but this makes the mistake of equating popularity with quality. A fic with more comments isn't necessarily better, it just received more attention or engendered more response (consider: all those comments aren't necessarily positive). There were mentions of various factors involved, including the popularity of the writer, cycles of internet interests, threads spawning their own comments threads and the fact that many people seem to choose whether or not to read a fic based on the number of comments it has received.

musesfool: it's all about the way you do the things you do - Like, saying, "Oh, yeah, I read fanfic, but not the badly written stuff on Ff.net/Mpreg/wingfic/high school AU"? which is saying, in essence, "I'm a fan, but I'm not as big as loser as *those fans over there*."
Identifying by exclusion again? This is a typically fannish habit - most of us do it, and I don't think we recognize we're doing it until someone else points it out.

Polls 'n Things
bethbethbeth: FIAWOL and Not-FIAWOL: An All-Fandoms Poll - FIAWOL, as many of you know, stands for "Fandom is a Way of Life." The acronym originated in SF/F fandom, but it's just as relevant in our particular meta-writing/vid-making/fanfic-reading/art-creating corner of media fandom...
...or at least it is for some of us.

marginaliana: fandom poetry - But then I wrote some. I was going to actually write a fic, but I was working from a poem and using it as a lens for the HP canon and all of a sudden I was writing a poem instead. And it's VERY character study, which is outside my usual writing style (for fanfic, and also for my poetic style - my original poetry tends to be more abstract and doesn't usually have characters).
I don't know if it's any good. I kind of want to hear some other thoughts on the whole idea before I consider posting it. Have any of you guys written fan poetry?