Discussion Post

[neurotoxia]

We'd like to put things up for discussion we received questions about in the last few days:

1) Do you consider the 250 fics rule (or 5% respectively) a fair way to judge character rarity? Should there be no rule at all and just leave it to the participants to nominate what they consider rare?Our personal thoughts on this matter are that a set

Comments

[flipflop_diva]

1) Do you consider the 250 fics rule (or 5% respectively) a fair way to judge character rarity? Should there be no rule at all and just leave it to the participants to nominate what they consider rare?

Since you allow people to argue their case, I think it's fair. Otherwise, what would stop people from nominating characters who are decidedly not rare and just being like 'Well, I think they are rare!'? There needs to be some guidelines.

2) Do you think we should accept fandoms that only have one nominated character at the end of the nomination period?

Yes. Sometimes you just really love one character. Especially since it needs to be rare characters, there isn't always multitudes you love. If it's an issue in terms of matching, maybe have a requirement that at least 2-3-however many of someone's offers need to be a multi-character nominated fandom.

3) How should we treat characters like 'XYZ's mother'? Should characters whose existence we can just conclude (like parents) be allowed? How should we treat quasi-OCs or 'fanon chracters'?

I think they should only be allowed if they are seen/heard/mentioned in canon (like Howard's mom in Big Bang Theory is only heard, but she's definitely a character). Otherwise, people can request their preferences in optional details. I think it gets tricky when you're basically allowing OCs in a fest since everyone has their own idea of what they want and it's a lot harder to ensure a receiver and an offerer's ideas match up.