Wednesday, July 19, 2006
General
thecaelum: Fandom Composition Poll Roughly a year ago, the composition of fans on my friends list/reading list was 95% Smallville, with a mixture of DC and other interests. Today, the composition leads strongly with SGA, with the remainder carrying a mixture of DC, SPN, Rome, anime, a few other subjects of interest, and the occasional Smallville. This led to an interesting series of discussions on who went to which fandoms, and why they might have gone. I've noticed a few interesting trends. [poll]
smirnoffmule in slashphilosophy: [untitled] Is this a fair generalization? "There are heterosexual femmeslash fans, but F/F is more usually written by women who identify as gay or bisexual."
kyuuketsukirui: Comfort stuff As I'm sure I've mentioned before, the whole comfort [food/reading/watching] thing just baffles me completely. I just really, really don't get it.
ratcreature: does fandom make you like some characters more? I've been curious how common it is that fandom makes us come to like characters we initially didn't really care for just based on the source.
shiroi_chi: donning the hermit crab gear I just--don't you hate when you watch a new show, and it's brand new in that maybe you picked it up because it's required viewing in your circles, or you'd vaguely heard good things about it, but no one had actually detailed their views on it to you--and for however long it takes you to finish the first binge, there's only your interpretation and you think, wow, they really were right, this is amazing....And then your joy is cruelly ruined or at least diluted by the fandom! Okay, that's too harsh. But, I mean, you read a few recced fics, check out some meta, and come to the conclusion that these people don't love the same characters you do.
skelkins: Paranoia in Online Fandom: CMC, Girls' Aggression, and Overanalyzing the Texts Lately I seem to be thinking a great deal about the particular type of paranoiac thinking that often seems to characterize fandom interactions, and which most particularly seems always to rear its head whenever people become involved in on-line kerfuffles or disputes. ... It seems to me that fandom both valorizes and demands certain ways of interacting with source texts which may be inherently psychologically problematic once they are also extended to apply to the "text" of fandom and its participants, or to the "text" of the real world.
clex_monkie89: You have *got* to be shitting me. How the fuck did PB beat SPN for first 'cest wank? ... I honestly don't see what's so unreasonable about wanting all parts of the fandom represented. I get that some people don't like incest fic, that's understandable. I personally don't like het.
eeyore9990: I know I'm going to regret this post.... [O]ur journals are ours. They are places where we can let our hair down, post whatever shit we want, and no one can tell us what to post because it’s OURS. The person who is posting reviews, she has every right to post them. They are for HER, she says so quite plainly all over her journal....She did not invite this wank, nor did the people who responded to her reviews. ...Now, I’ve seen several posts around fandom about all this foolishness, and here is my advice.
campfollower: The Oulangi Thing-- People shouldn't snark/mock. They have a right to. And everyone should deal with it and move on. But it would be better if people didn't snark.
ilithiana: *settles self into rocking chair, props cane across lap, arranges shawl, & prepares to pontificate* I am struck by the extent to which many of my students and most currently my mother tend to "read" all internet sites as the same thing, are unable to distinguish between very different types of sites, purposes, rhetorics, spaces, visuals, etc....Off the recent pages of fandom_wank, the issue of readers and writers (false dichotomy yet again) with much of the wank based on the idea that there is only one way to write about fan fiction and one reason to write and one audience: "positive helpful commentary for the writers."
International Blog Against Racism Week
rilina: International Blog Against Racism Week Link Roundup Please comment with any links to IBARW posts, and I'll add them to the list below. Links will be annotated if the post title doesn't make the subject self-evident.
rachelmanija: IBAR Week: Some Approaches to Multicultural Casting This post is about multicultural casting in general, by which I mean both the issue of writing roles for and casting minorities (as opposed to not writing about and casting them), and how doing so may or may not be done in a stereotypical manner.
fabu: International Blog Against Racism Week I'd like to see people of good will discussing these issues thoughtfully and kindly, and more importantly listening to one another and thinking about what we hear. Assuming that those who disagree with you (or with whom you disagree) are acting in good faith is an important step towards dialogue.
Specific fandom meta
thelastgoodname: Race and the Slayer As yet another character that showed up in only one episode, I find Dana a fascinating commentary on the role of race in Buffy fandom (and Buffy canon. And Joss' head): why is Dana's insanity, Slayerness, and gender never put in frame with her ethnicity?
Creating and criticism
blueraccoon: causality Sometimes you read fics that make you go "Oh. Wow. That's a story I wish I could have written." Or "That's a story that will stay with me." Or "Ow, can I get some aspirin for the sucker punch I got from reading this?" Or...well, you get the picture.
esorlehcar: [untitled] Last weekend there was a discussion on fandom_lounge about feedback, and a lot of the responses surprised me somewhat, mostly in that the main reason people gave for not leaving it was that they didn't get anything out of it. We heard "it's a waste of my time" and "I never leave feedback unless I catch a mistake the author made" and "I already do feedback as a beta, why would I bother saying anything to any other authors"? And that's so fundamentally different from the way I look at the feedback system that it kind of broke my brain.
lozenger8: Responding to non-existent feedback... As writers of fan fiction, it's very rare that you will find us writing without wanting other people to comment on our work....What do you do if you are left without that audience reaction? How do you respond to non-existent feedback?
schemingreader: fan fiction writers: regionalism and cliché? Here's my question: do you ever feel like you are writing in a more clichéd way as you attempt to ape the speech rhythms and mannerisms of your characters? I suppose this applies just as much to people from the US writing HP fic as it does to Brits writing fan fic for some American fandom.
agentotter: [untitled] I am curious, flist, about what you think of numbers in prose. I've been reading and sometimes editing several things lately that sort of made me wonder, because personally, I really hate numbers. I mean, I have a deep and abiding hatred of numbers and all of their math-related evil, but mostly I mean in works of fiction, I hate seeing numerals, for anything, ever.
afuna in fanficrants: Think of the periods! Being involved in an orgy saps a period's strength. Instead of bringing its sentence to a decisive stop or else allowing the sentence to trail off gracefully, the period becomes absorbed in the mass of other periods and the sentence stumbles to a stuttering halt.
emrinalexander: [untitled] [P]ut the goddamned warnings on your fics somewhere!
nestra: [untitled] I'm starting here with the assumption that people like to be recced....But if you love us and want to make our lives easier, here are a few guidelines.
liviapenn: Ummmmmmmm. I totally support vidders who want to use YouTube to post their own work, but it seems like this is a real problem, people putting *other* people's vids up without permission. And I also don't think this is the first time that Metafilter has linked to a fanvidder's work, but it's the combination of the two things (posting without permission, which leads to massive exposure) that could lead to total badness.
thecaelum: Fandom Composition Poll Roughly a year ago, the composition of fans on my friends list/reading list was 95% Smallville, with a mixture of DC and other interests. Today, the composition leads strongly with SGA, with the remainder carrying a mixture of DC, SPN, Rome, anime, a few other subjects of interest, and the occasional Smallville. This led to an interesting series of discussions on who went to which fandoms, and why they might have gone. I've noticed a few interesting trends. [poll]
smirnoffmule in slashphilosophy: [untitled] Is this a fair generalization? "There are heterosexual femmeslash fans, but F/F is more usually written by women who identify as gay or bisexual."
kyuuketsukirui: Comfort stuff As I'm sure I've mentioned before, the whole comfort [food/reading/watching] thing just baffles me completely. I just really, really don't get it.
ratcreature: does fandom make you like some characters more? I've been curious how common it is that fandom makes us come to like characters we initially didn't really care for just based on the source.
shiroi_chi: donning the hermit crab gear I just--don't you hate when you watch a new show, and it's brand new in that maybe you picked it up because it's required viewing in your circles, or you'd vaguely heard good things about it, but no one had actually detailed their views on it to you--and for however long it takes you to finish the first binge, there's only your interpretation and you think, wow, they really were right, this is amazing....And then your joy is cruelly ruined or at least diluted by the fandom! Okay, that's too harsh. But, I mean, you read a few recced fics, check out some meta, and come to the conclusion that these people don't love the same characters you do.
skelkins: Paranoia in Online Fandom: CMC, Girls' Aggression, and Overanalyzing the Texts Lately I seem to be thinking a great deal about the particular type of paranoiac thinking that often seems to characterize fandom interactions, and which most particularly seems always to rear its head whenever people become involved in on-line kerfuffles or disputes. ... It seems to me that fandom both valorizes and demands certain ways of interacting with source texts which may be inherently psychologically problematic once they are also extended to apply to the "text" of fandom and its participants, or to the "text" of the real world.
clex_monkie89: You have *got* to be shitting me. How the fuck did PB beat SPN for first 'cest wank? ... I honestly don't see what's so unreasonable about wanting all parts of the fandom represented. I get that some people don't like incest fic, that's understandable. I personally don't like het.
eeyore9990: I know I'm going to regret this post.... [O]ur journals are ours. They are places where we can let our hair down, post whatever shit we want, and no one can tell us what to post because it’s OURS. The person who is posting reviews, she has every right to post them. They are for HER, she says so quite plainly all over her journal....She did not invite this wank, nor did the people who responded to her reviews. ...Now, I’ve seen several posts around fandom about all this foolishness, and here is my advice.
campfollower: The Oulangi Thing-- People shouldn't snark/mock. They have a right to. And everyone should deal with it and move on. But it would be better if people didn't snark.
ilithiana: *settles self into rocking chair, props cane across lap, arranges shawl, & prepares to pontificate* I am struck by the extent to which many of my students and most currently my mother tend to "read" all internet sites as the same thing, are unable to distinguish between very different types of sites, purposes, rhetorics, spaces, visuals, etc....Off the recent pages of fandom_wank, the issue of readers and writers (false dichotomy yet again) with much of the wank based on the idea that there is only one way to write about fan fiction and one reason to write and one audience: "positive helpful commentary for the writers."
International Blog Against Racism Week
rilina: International Blog Against Racism Week Link Roundup Please comment with any links to IBARW posts, and I'll add them to the list below. Links will be annotated if the post title doesn't make the subject self-evident.
rachelmanija: IBAR Week: Some Approaches to Multicultural Casting This post is about multicultural casting in general, by which I mean both the issue of writing roles for and casting minorities (as opposed to not writing about and casting them), and how doing so may or may not be done in a stereotypical manner.
fabu: International Blog Against Racism Week I'd like to see people of good will discussing these issues thoughtfully and kindly, and more importantly listening to one another and thinking about what we hear. Assuming that those who disagree with you (or with whom you disagree) are acting in good faith is an important step towards dialogue.
Specific fandom meta
thelastgoodname: Race and the Slayer As yet another character that showed up in only one episode, I find Dana a fascinating commentary on the role of race in Buffy fandom (and Buffy canon. And Joss' head): why is Dana's insanity, Slayerness, and gender never put in frame with her ethnicity?
Creating and criticism
blueraccoon: causality Sometimes you read fics that make you go "Oh. Wow. That's a story I wish I could have written." Or "That's a story that will stay with me." Or "Ow, can I get some aspirin for the sucker punch I got from reading this?" Or...well, you get the picture.
esorlehcar: [untitled] Last weekend there was a discussion on fandom_lounge about feedback, and a lot of the responses surprised me somewhat, mostly in that the main reason people gave for not leaving it was that they didn't get anything out of it. We heard "it's a waste of my time" and "I never leave feedback unless I catch a mistake the author made" and "I already do feedback as a beta, why would I bother saying anything to any other authors"? And that's so fundamentally different from the way I look at the feedback system that it kind of broke my brain.
lozenger8: Responding to non-existent feedback... As writers of fan fiction, it's very rare that you will find us writing without wanting other people to comment on our work....What do you do if you are left without that audience reaction? How do you respond to non-existent feedback?
schemingreader: fan fiction writers: regionalism and cliché? Here's my question: do you ever feel like you are writing in a more clichéd way as you attempt to ape the speech rhythms and mannerisms of your characters? I suppose this applies just as much to people from the US writing HP fic as it does to Brits writing fan fic for some American fandom.
agentotter: [untitled] I am curious, flist, about what you think of numbers in prose. I've been reading and sometimes editing several things lately that sort of made me wonder, because personally, I really hate numbers. I mean, I have a deep and abiding hatred of numbers and all of their math-related evil, but mostly I mean in works of fiction, I hate seeing numerals, for anything, ever.
afuna in fanficrants: Think of the periods! Being involved in an orgy saps a period's strength. Instead of bringing its sentence to a decisive stop or else allowing the sentence to trail off gracefully, the period becomes absorbed in the mass of other periods and the sentence stumbles to a stuttering halt.
emrinalexander: [untitled] [P]ut the goddamned warnings on your fics somewhere!
nestra: [untitled] I'm starting here with the assumption that people like to be recced....But if you love us and want to make our lives easier, here are a few guidelines.
liviapenn: Ummmmmmmm. I totally support vidders who want to use YouTube to post their own work, but it seems like this is a real problem, people putting *other* people's vids up without permission. And I also don't think this is the first time that Metafilter has linked to a fanvidder's work, but it's the combination of the two things (posting without permission, which leads to massive exposure) that could lead to total badness.