I've seen a lot of discussions of fandom as a \"safe space,\" and I think that's a lovely idea with some very problematic implications...different people want and need spaces safe from different and sometimes mutually exclusive things.

That covers the extent to which I believe we writers effect the real world, and my views as to my responsibility as a writer who acknowledges that we do effect the real world.

At least it's left me pondering what we actually mean when we call someone cool, and considering the ambivalent relationship that we as geeky fannish types have with the whole concept of coolness. ... Thoughts?

... about starting an archive for baseball fanfic ... I can't just file all the players under their team, since teams change regularly. ...Thoughts and suggestions on how to go about making the archive categories actually work are appreciated!

None of these things will be so on television. (Maybe on British television, where social class markers are much more openly portrayed...) It's awkward, trying to posit social reality in the face of details that will never be realistic.

The point here is that context, the situation that prompts someone to speak (I like the word \"exigency,\" myself; it just sounds nifty), is key to shaping the utterance and thus key to decoding it. In other words, you have to know what prompted something t

My thought was this: that the strongest concentration of traits from that particular \"Romance Heroine\" role grab-bag tends to cluster around the most popular fannish access character.

But my question for you is: what do you think someone's (fictional character) kink/vanilla preferences are, staying as close to canon as possible? That is - if the show were going to give us a real peek, what would make the most sense, based on everyythin

Both at my panel and in the SGA blowup, I saw two related and extremely annoying responses. ... In short, white people asked for a ghetto pass.

Russell T. Davies has pointed out that Primeval is too white:

I adore Rentboy!fic. I don't know why, I just do. Everything politically correct in me tells me I shouldn't. My own experiences with researching this essay tell me that there is not a lot of correlation between the real life sex industry and rentboy!fic.

... white people telling me that I’m imagining racism and racial issues feels much like a woman trying to discuss feminism with a man and the man asking if it’s her time of the month when she tries to explain, ...

One of the reasons that I see held up to why characters of color get written less than white characters is that, because of the racist nature of TV, movies, comics, etc, the characters of color we get in canon are less fleshed out ...

It may be that you think you don't like AUs - well come on in anyway, you might discover a type of AU that you actually do enjoy.... // (Let me state for the record, that this is not a re-hash of the SGA AU/racism debate.

I would be interested to know what people get out of the beta process. Go on, take out the last story you had beta'd and check out the comments. ... What overall did you learn... ?