Took so long to get this far

[flambeau]

merryish is a kind, kind person, especially for editing remix stuff for me and keeping me awake till it was all done. Now I'm typing in the beginning of my Howie/Justin story for allecto's crossover challenge, which I wrote in a notebook during the past week. Maybe I shouldn't have used the purple gel pen. Practically every word makes me cringe. I don't know if

Comments

[cereta]

You know, it's funny you should bring up labels. We're having Yet Another Labelling Discussion on FCA-L right now, and I gotta say that as much as some of the warnings people have wanted over the years are just loopy, I'll never understand people who expect readers to select fan fiction for reading with absolutely no information beyond maybe the source (if that's not, you know, giving away too much). I mean, who chooses what they read/watch/rent/listen to outside of fandom with that little information?

[flambeau]

Well, definitely not me. *g* My latest theory, now, is that people who don't like to use genre labels are often single-fandom writers who would like those closed-minded gen/het/slash fans to read a bit of slash/het/gen for a change and appreciate a good story about the characters for what it is. I'm not basing this off anything other than myself about five or six years ago, though, so it's quite likely to be wrong.

[manna]

Warnings and labels are two sides of the same coin. For every reader who is looking for 'BDSM', 'death story' and 'rape' labels so they can avoid the stories, there's another reader hunting them down because he or she *loves* that kind of fiction.

[flambeau]

Very true. One person will call it a spoiler, another will call it a warning, a third will call it a reason to read the story.

Another, similar, point of view

[bard_mercutio]

I have to agree that a certain amount of information is absolutely necessary. A story ought to, at a bare minimum, have the information for author, title, fandom, pairing and a summary. I can't even keep my own stories straight -- finding a story I once enjoyed off of a jumbled page of entries with just titles is almost impossible, especially when a lot of good stories have less than revealing titles

Re: Another, similar, point of view

[flambeau]

I guess I think of slash, het, gen etc as genres, not warnings (although for people who really hate one of them, I suppose it would be a warning). It's true that some stuff overlaps, and that happens with other non-fanfic genres, too (it's a Regency mystery! a hard-boiled comedy of errors!), but it's useful to have the genres to start with for some form of classification - at least if one reads across fandoms. Pairings are pretty much a clue, though.

I've grown to be oddly fond of the wacky pairing names in popslash. Not fond enough to use them myself, though. Clarity wins out over charm. But Timbertrick, you know, it's just a really neat word. :-)

Re: Another, similar, point of view

[merryish]

Kittentrick is a good word, too. And I'm still lobbying for Dixiekitten...

ANYway. Now you've made me go look at my site and see if I'm guilty of lack of labeling. Or, made me feel like I need to, as I haven't actually gone yet. I suspect I'm guilty -- not out of any agenda, though, just out of tunnel vision. I know what it is, so obviously everyone else should know, too. I probably do a better job of labeling once something is on my site than when I first announce it in LJ.

Off to test that theory. =)

Re: Another, similar, point of view

[flambeau]

I didn't mean for you to feel guilty just because I have trouble with labels! *g* I think ideally I'd like to just post a story with a summary, and say what fandom it is, and for people to be vaguely aware that I write mostly slash but sometimes gen... since I have no reason to believe in readers who are also mind-readers, though, maybe I should say that somewhere on the site.

But Dixiekitten, no. :-)

[jamjar]

suggested meme for essayists/ranters:

Go through old essays and rants (from at least a year back). Find one that, if someone posted it on a ml now, would make you:

rethink your current position

start a flame war by violently disagreeing with it (not that you'd flame them, exactly, just that you'd respond, and someone would take umbrage with it and...)

feel nostalgic for the days of your youth, when you were young and carefree and everything was so much simpler...

agree with it completely

and last,
one where you agree, but for different reasons (or at least think you should have said it a different way, used different arguments). Essay Remix!

[flambeau]

Ooh, interesting idea. I'm largely leaning towards nostalgia right now, with a side order of partial disagreement - not complete disagreement, mostly, well, I wouldn't put it quite like that now. I'm definitely going to have to sort through my old stuff and think about it for a while.

[linbot]

One thing I've noticed is that the level of warning is very much dependant on the fandom. Moving into anime fandoms has been interesting because they have a completely different slash jargon to other media fandoms I've read.

One of the things about anime fandom I would change if I could (heheh. Yeah. Right. 8) ) is the habit of labelling individual chapters for sexual content.

Part one.
Part two. (Lime!)
Part three.
Part four. (LEMON!)
Part five.

Is this so that readers can skip those chapters? Is it to enable readers to skip straight *to* those chapters? Is it so the reader can gird their mental loins against the horrors of explicit sexual content?

Or is there another reason that doesn't seem completely to work against the reader's enjoyment of the story?

*climbs off soapbox*.

This rant brought to you by the letters N & C and the number 17.

8)

Linda.

[flambeau]

Rediscovering unanswered comments from five months back! The fun never stops around here. :) I completely agree with you re anime chapter warnings. Weirdest thing ever. "In this chapter, there's plot! In this chapter, they get together!" I don't know if the individual-chapter rating system grows out of the posting-WIPs-in-chapters culture, or what.