a clarification on genderbenders
we've had a couple of questions about genderbenders in the last few weeks, and as it's getting down to crunch time for sign ups we wanted to make a public post about the issue in case anyone was hesitating in signing up because of it.
there's been a lot of talk in the last few months about genderbenders/fucks and their place in femslash fandom. throughout the meta there seemed to be no real consensus on the issue, which is something we mods took into account as we discussed the genre's place in the thelittlebang.
just like femslash fandom at large, we had some differing opinions on the issue, but we were able to agree on one major thing: a main point of tlb is to celebrate the female characters of our beloved canons, both on their own standing and in relationships with one another. boys are great and awesome, and I do hope no one stoops into boy-bashing during the course of this challenge, but they're not our main interest or focus (and lets face it, they get quite a lot of attention from fandom as it is). and while writing canon-boys as girls can be a transformative and enlightening act, giving girls their due attention and love is the enlightening and transformative act we're after with thelittlebang.
so, in the interest of being fair and reducing any potential for wank, we've decided to discourage genderbenders of any sort, be they girl!boy or boy!girl. this is not a comment on the legitimacy of the genre or on the authors who write it, but rather an attempt to keep things at tlb simple and straight forward. we mods haven't completely closed ourselves off to the issue, and we reserve the right to readdress the issue during future rounds of tlb, but for this round we ask that you please not sign up to write genderbenders.
if genderbenders are your cuppa, and you'd be interested in writing them in long-form, word around fandom is that dragonsinger plans on running a Big Bang for the genre some time this year.
there's been a lot of talk in the last few months about genderbenders/fucks and their place in femslash fandom. throughout the meta there seemed to be no real consensus on the issue, which is something we mods took into account as we discussed the genre's place in the thelittlebang.
just like femslash fandom at large, we had some differing opinions on the issue, but we were able to agree on one major thing: a main point of tlb is to celebrate the female characters of our beloved canons, both on their own standing and in relationships with one another. boys are great and awesome, and I do hope no one stoops into boy-bashing during the course of this challenge, but they're not our main interest or focus (and lets face it, they get quite a lot of attention from fandom as it is). and while writing canon-boys as girls can be a transformative and enlightening act, giving girls their due attention and love is the enlightening and transformative act we're after with thelittlebang.
so, in the interest of being fair and reducing any potential for wank, we've decided to discourage genderbenders of any sort, be they girl!boy or boy!girl. this is not a comment on the legitimacy of the genre or on the authors who write it, but rather an attempt to keep things at tlb simple and straight forward. we mods haven't completely closed ourselves off to the issue, and we reserve the right to readdress the issue during future rounds of tlb, but for this round we ask that you please not sign up to write genderbenders.
if genderbenders are your cuppa, and you'd be interested in writing them in long-form, word around fandom is that dragonsinger plans on running a Big Bang for the genre some time this year.