General Fandom Meta

carlanime - Just walk away... - if one of the bits of information floating around about the canon-under-consideration includes "the author hates fanfic" or "the producer sneers at fans during interviews," I ditch it and look for a more welcoming source text. It's hardly even a conscious choice, most of the time. It's not as calculated as, say, agreeing to boycott something, although it does have an element of "Pay money for that? I wouldn't give that guy the time of day, let alone a cut of the cover price."

commodorified - 'tis not so deep as a well, nor so broad as a church - or, 14 [various people have pointed out reasons I ought to have included, so now it's 18 19 and counting] Reasons to be polite and decent to other people in online fandom, none of which have anything whatsoever to do with BNFs, Niceness, or Censorship.

alixtii - Gen, Slash, and Het: Warnings or Genres? - After--what? a week? a week and a half?--of the gen vs. ship debates (cf. metafandom), I've finally come to a conclusion. They--with "they" being pretty much everyone with whom I disagree, on every side of the table--don't want genre labels. They want warning labels.

the_shoshanna - Sexuality and slash fandom - Or, from "We're Not Gay, We Just Love Each Other" to "For reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture, Fraser is sucking Ray's cock."

marginaliana - [untitled] - So, um, how do you guys feel about serious fan poetry?

kalpurna - When you're in someone else's home... - Hey: commenting unenthusiastically on squee posts, or combatively on meta posts. What's the deal with that? Why does it annoy me SO VERY MUCH? Don't I encourage free and open public debate on my LJ? // No, actually. If you're going to come into my journal, my semi-private space, and leave a comment, I would very much prefer that you tread carefully. I am extremely unlikely to bite anyone's head off no matter how rude she is, because that's not how I roll, and I am generally welcoming and interested in meeting new people. Comment on my post! I will almost certainly be thrilled to meet you! But to me, a personal LJ is not the same thing as a public debate forum.

etrangere - Yet another post about the whole gen issue - The more I think about, the more I think that the categories of het, slash and gen, as categories, are mostly useless.

vescoiya - Meta- Mary Sue - So I was doing so musing on the concept of a Mary-Sue the other day. Trying to understand why I dislike them so intensely I shy away from any fic with OC mentioned in the pairing index and normally also if it is included in the summary.

musesfool - in a black and white picture, there's a lot of gritty bunk - If I post a picture of Random Hot Actor A, and gush over how hot he is and all the things I'd like to do with him in the privacy of my own home (and elsewhere), what on earth makes someone feel the need to say, "Meh. He does nothing for me. I don't find him attractive at all."?

alias_sqbr - Why I like Gen - The reason I wrote this post is that people seem to be trying to come up with one single reason for reading gen, and on the whole they don't apply to me becuase I read it for multiple reasons., many of which seem to be misunderstood/misrepresented. And hey, there's so many "Why we slash" posts, why not a couple more "why we gen"s :)

gmth - The accidental fan - I'm very much a same old, same old kind of person. When I find something I like to watch, read, or listen to, I watch, read, or listen to it over and over and OVER again. I don't experiment much anymore.

alixtii - Meta: Gazes in/and/of Criticism - This post is a response to melannen's much-recced (and deservedly so) post on the slasher's gaze, but more directly a response to a couple of responses to her post, namelyithiliana when she says, "I'm going to immediately complicate it by asking about 'the femslash gaze' (because although people are convincing me that slash can be f/f as well as m/m, her meta seems to focus on the male object of slash gaze…..)," and kyuuketsukirui when she asks "The very fact that there are two men involved means there will be men doing the looking and men being looked at. This applies for gay porn, lit, even real life. How can it be something specifically slashy/the defining characteristic of slash?" To respond to both of these points, however, I think requires a deeper engagement with the original post that prompted these responses. In particular, I want to use lots of examples, because that is that for which Grace (=kyuuketsukirui, but easier to type) asked.

thelastgoodname - "What's so fascinating about fandom?" (Part I) - First, fandom is to me the thing itself, the object of one's fanning. The show, the books, the musical production, the sports team. Without that object, there is no fandom, and in a number of ways, fandom is an object-based process. We are fans of something; without the something, we are not fans. So as above, when that something that we are fans of begins to fade in our own estimation, there is no fascination anymore. // But fandom is also the community, the group of fans coming together to be fannish (both the collectivity and the action of fanning together are equally important, in my mind).

Fandom-Specific Meta

fabu - Squees, rants and everything in between - jlh points out that a common cultural assumption is that those who like something have a less examined, less thought-through reaction than those who don't like it. As someone who tends to focus my analysis and thought on things I *like* (if I don't like something, I mostly just lose interest, so I don't spend a lot of time analyzing why it didn't work for me), this assumption really gets my goat. [PoTC]

emmagrant01 - I have a confession to make. - Last night, I did a little experiment. I made a post that contained some data about the differences between the British and American versions of the HP books, and intentionally said nothing about what I thought fanfic writers should take from that. I hit post, and then watched to see what would happen. I guess you can say I wasn't surprised by the response, though I will admit to being a little disappointed. [HP]