Welcome!
I've been talking about doing this for over a year, but now I've finally gotten around to starting.
This is the Matri-Thon, a ficathon to celebrate women the age of 40 or over. Rules and prompt requests will be in separate posts. This is the welcome post and general discussion thread.
Media, in general, tends to disappear women, and particularly women 40 or over. Fandom, despite being female-dominated (and some corners of it being full of women over 40), exacerbates this tendency; fanfic tends to concentrate on the hot guys, in part because they're the characters featured in the source material and in part because we're soaking in the same culture the media creators come from, where women middle-aged and older are ignored. The purpose of this ficathon is to push back against that, and highlight older women in our fanfic (or vids, or fanart, or whatever creative product we choose to make.)
Rather than doing this as a labor-intensive anonymous response to request type ficathon, this will be one of the more modern, looser prompt-based sorts. So there will be a post to solicit prompts. All fandoms are welcome, including RPF, because real life women get disappeared from popular culture right around the time they turn 40 even faster than in media.
Stories may be gen, het or femslash (m/m slash cannot be the point to a story about a woman, but can be background color in a story that is primarily about the older woman.) Pairings are not required, but are obviously allowed. All ratings are welcome, but the journal has been set to "no adult content" as a default so that casual browsers can read most of the posts, so any post with a rating of R or above should manually set the adult content setting appropriately.
This is the Matri-Thon, a ficathon to celebrate women the age of 40 or over. Rules and prompt requests will be in separate posts. This is the welcome post and general discussion thread.
Media, in general, tends to disappear women, and particularly women 40 or over. Fandom, despite being female-dominated (and some corners of it being full of women over 40), exacerbates this tendency; fanfic tends to concentrate on the hot guys, in part because they're the characters featured in the source material and in part because we're soaking in the same culture the media creators come from, where women middle-aged and older are ignored. The purpose of this ficathon is to push back against that, and highlight older women in our fanfic (or vids, or fanart, or whatever creative product we choose to make.)
Rather than doing this as a labor-intensive anonymous response to request type ficathon, this will be one of the more modern, looser prompt-based sorts. So there will be a post to solicit prompts. All fandoms are welcome, including RPF, because real life women get disappeared from popular culture right around the time they turn 40 even faster than in media.
Stories may be gen, het or femslash (m/m slash cannot be the point to a story about a woman, but can be background color in a story that is primarily about the older woman.) Pairings are not required, but are obviously allowed. All ratings are welcome, but the journal has been set to "no adult content" as a default so that casual browsers can read most of the posts, so any post with a rating of R or above should manually set the adult content setting appropriately.