Rare Fandom And Us
Happy November, my fellow Yuletiders. Soon we will enter into that festive mood of "well, I wrote my first sentence," and "this will seem easier once I drink heavily."
My issue is rare fandom, and the danger of using AO3 as the rubric by which we measure "rare." There is no time like the present, and I think this is big enough that it warrants discussion and reflection. I have also posted a barebones list where it should have been posted, in the admin list, but I think a more global discussion's needed as well.
What constitutes a rare/obscure/inactive fandom?, asked the bum. The FAQ says that they measure it, and it's not a science, by LJ, Yahoogroups and fiction archives. TV shows that were once active but went off ten years ago are eligible. Brand new shows may be eligible for at least a year.
AO3, LJ and Dreamwidth are islands, really. People left in droves for LJ off fanfiction.net back in the day -- and still do, disliking a one-size-fits-all policy, or the formatting, etc etc -- but once there, there seems to be this idea in some quarters that fandoms that didn't cross the border don't really have an audience. A lot of anime and video game fandoms, in fact, tended to stay on archives like FF.net (or in in-house archives) and didn't venture to LJ at all. This isn't true of all of them in any way -- One Piece, frinstance, has an enormous DW/LJ fandom base -- but the Final Fantasies on LJ always lived, as far as I can tell, with their feet dipped back in the FF.net pond. Nonetheless, they were alive and well and kicking -- and still are, even if their fandoms (in the case of 9 and 10) have laid a little low for the past 2-4 years.
So what am I getting at? There are fandoms in here that are not even a little bit rare. Is this bad? Yes, because with inflated requests and signups for these fandoms, they'll dominate the Yuletide lists and take both time and emphasis away from genuinely rare and obscure media. In my opinion, people don't naturally gravitate towards the obscure; one could easily fill more than one slot with a Hetalia request. End result: the world gets more Hetalia fanfic. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but not Yuletide.
Yuletide, to me, is the chance to get a story gifted or written that you really couldn't write anywhere else -- or if you did, you would be writing it for yourself, and though that is a noble goal is it lonely being in a fandom of one. Perhaps you couldn't even think of writing a story for this fandom, but you'd desperately want to see someone else do it, and you always have done. Or you didn't even realise anyone would be interested until you saw the list and thought, "My God, Heavenly Creatures! SIGN ME UP."
There's been a little back-and-forth as to the nature of dead fandom, or whether one should measure a fandom pulse by how much action it gets on DW/LJ/AO3. For the latter: it can't be done. Sailor Moon is incredibly obscure on DW, maybe, but to the rest of the internet it has 3094 stories on Mediaminer, 33,088 stories on FF.net (and the last one was posted yesterday) and the huge and famous Sailor Moon Romance archive for all your Sailor Moon needs. It has BNFs aplenty and famous stories galore. The story you've wanted is either already in here or has a better chance of being written than in, say, the aforementioned Heavenly Creatures.
I agree that there is definitely a place for long-dead fandoms. (My joke rule of thumb here is that if your fandom was ever confined to Usenet you get a look-in -- which also makes me wring my hands, though, because as much as I feel that Deep Space Nine should get a look-in because its heyday was what, 1999, it has a huge backlog of stories and it's still alive in heaps of places including FF.net. Augh. Decisions, decisions.) What constitutes 'long-dead fandom' needs careful examining and pruning, however. This must be left up to people who know the fandom. But we've also got to crunch the numbers on non-LJ/AO3/DW sources, because why don't they count? What makes them lesser? If there is no big AO3 presence for Mulan, is there a reason we're discounting fourteen pages of it on FF.net?
Not all fandoms are created equal. Certainly numbers aren't just the thing, and some fandoms in Yuletide are going to be much less obscure than others. There's been a little more of a loving fanfic presence for St. Clare's than there has been for Octavian Nothing, but nobody would ever question that both of them deserve to be in there. I would like to be audacious and make a list that, to me after research, consists of fandoms that I think have big enough outside numbers to sustain them:
Azumanga Daioh
Batman Beyond
Beauty and the Beast (1991)
Ben 10
Blood+
Cardcaptor Sakura
Codename Sailor V
Cowboy Bebop
CSI: NY
Daria
Dark Angel
Darren Shan, Cirque du Freak
Degrassi High
Degrassi: The Next Generation
Detective Conan/Case Closed
Devil May Cry
Artemis Fowl
ER
Eyeshield 21
Final Fantasy IV
Final Fantasy IX
Final Fantasy VI
Final Fantasy X
Final Fantasy X-2
Fire Emblem: Rekka no Ken
Friends
Fruits Basket
Gargoyles
George R R Martin - A Song of Ice and Fire series
GetBackers
Golden Sun
Gravitation
Harvest Moon
Hercules
Hetalia Axis Powers
Hey! Arnold!
High School Musical
Hikaru no Go
Hunter x Hunter
iCarly
Invader Zim
JRR Tolkien - The Silmarillion
JAG
Jak and Daxter
KA Applegate - Animorphs series
Kyo Kara Maoh
LJ Smith - Night World
Law and Order (original)
Law and Order: Criminal Intent
Law and Order: SVU
Left 4 Dead
Magic Knight Rayearth (anime
Magic Knight Rayearth (manga)
Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha
Mahou Sensei Negima! (manga)
Mai-HiME (anime)
MASH (tv)
Mighty Morphin Power Rangers
Moulin Rouge
Neon Genesis Evangelion
Neopets
One Tree Hill
Ouran High School Host Club
Percy Jackson and the Olympians
His Dark Materials
Phoenix Wright (game)
Pokemon (anime)
Prison Break
Ranma 1/2 (anime or manga)
Resident Evil (game)
Rick Riordan - Percy Jackson series (duplicate of Percy Jackson)
Robert Jordan - The Wheel of Time series
Ronin Warriors
Rurouni Kenshin
Sailor Moon (anime or manga)
Sailor Moon (live action) -- my mistake, absolutely eligible
Saint Seiya
Samurai Champloo
Samurai Jack
Shoujo Kakumei Utena (anime)
Silent Hill (game)
Sky High (2005)
Soul Eater
South Park
Spirited Away
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Super Mario Galaxy I and II
Super Mario RPG Legend of the Seven Stars
Teen Titans
Tekken
Tenchi Muyo! Ryo-Ohki
The Fast and The Furious
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
The Lion King
The Matrix series (movie)
The Mummy series (movie)
The O.C.
The Phantom of the Opera (all)
The Vision of Escaflowne
The World Ends With You
Titanic (1997)
Transformers: Animated
Transformers: Animated
Transformers: Armada
Trigun (anime or manga)
True Blood
Tsubasa: Resevoir Chronicles
Ugly Betty
Warcraft
Wicked (musical)
WITCH (book or comic)
Witch Hunter Robin
Xena: Warrior Princess
Xiaolin Showdown
xxxHolic
Yami no Matsuei
Zoids: Chaotic Century
Every fandom I have listed above, after checking Mediaminer, FF.net, LJ and Google, has over a thousand stories listed for it, and I think "over a thousand" is a pretty generous measuring stick considering a great many fandoms in Yuletide have numbers like "forty."
Some salient, clear discussions on the subject:
started by puella_nerdii
started by evilprodigy
started by birchsalt (I know it seems terrible to pimp one's own thread, but I can assure you there are other comments in there, made by smart persons)
And:
A detailed list of anime fandom numbers by the hardworking ambientlight
This list is as exhaustive as personal fandom knowledge, Google, FF.net and other large fandom archives can make it. There may be people who can tell me why a fandom listed above DOES qualify as rare; there may be ones that I've missed in my research into the list.
But: I would like to moot these fandoms be deleted from Yuletide eligibility this year. Because I think it is wrong to have them in accordance with the spirit Yuletide has been in, if they've been allowed in previously or not. And because: Hetalia oh my goodness come on
(ETA: just shutting up shop, guys! Mods are freezing so I imagine there will be a mod note soon re: this issue. Locking the thread.)
My issue is rare fandom, and the danger of using AO3 as the rubric by which we measure "rare." There is no time like the present, and I think this is big enough that it warrants discussion and reflection. I have also posted a barebones list where it should have been posted, in the admin list, but I think a more global discussion's needed as well.
What constitutes a rare/obscure/inactive fandom?, asked the bum. The FAQ says that they measure it, and it's not a science, by LJ, Yahoogroups and fiction archives. TV shows that were once active but went off ten years ago are eligible. Brand new shows may be eligible for at least a year.
AO3, LJ and Dreamwidth are islands, really. People left in droves for LJ off fanfiction.net back in the day -- and still do, disliking a one-size-fits-all policy, or the formatting, etc etc -- but once there, there seems to be this idea in some quarters that fandoms that didn't cross the border don't really have an audience. A lot of anime and video game fandoms, in fact, tended to stay on archives like FF.net (or in in-house archives) and didn't venture to LJ at all. This isn't true of all of them in any way -- One Piece, frinstance, has an enormous DW/LJ fandom base -- but the Final Fantasies on LJ always lived, as far as I can tell, with their feet dipped back in the FF.net pond. Nonetheless, they were alive and well and kicking -- and still are, even if their fandoms (in the case of 9 and 10) have laid a little low for the past 2-4 years.
So what am I getting at? There are fandoms in here that are not even a little bit rare. Is this bad? Yes, because with inflated requests and signups for these fandoms, they'll dominate the Yuletide lists and take both time and emphasis away from genuinely rare and obscure media. In my opinion, people don't naturally gravitate towards the obscure; one could easily fill more than one slot with a Hetalia request. End result: the world gets more Hetalia fanfic. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but not Yuletide.
Yuletide, to me, is the chance to get a story gifted or written that you really couldn't write anywhere else -- or if you did, you would be writing it for yourself, and though that is a noble goal is it lonely being in a fandom of one. Perhaps you couldn't even think of writing a story for this fandom, but you'd desperately want to see someone else do it, and you always have done. Or you didn't even realise anyone would be interested until you saw the list and thought, "My God, Heavenly Creatures! SIGN ME UP."
There's been a little back-and-forth as to the nature of dead fandom, or whether one should measure a fandom pulse by how much action it gets on DW/LJ/AO3. For the latter: it can't be done. Sailor Moon is incredibly obscure on DW, maybe, but to the rest of the internet it has 3094 stories on Mediaminer, 33,088 stories on FF.net (and the last one was posted yesterday) and the huge and famous Sailor Moon Romance archive for all your Sailor Moon needs. It has BNFs aplenty and famous stories galore. The story you've wanted is either already in here or has a better chance of being written than in, say, the aforementioned Heavenly Creatures.
I agree that there is definitely a place for long-dead fandoms. (My joke rule of thumb here is that if your fandom was ever confined to Usenet you get a look-in -- which also makes me wring my hands, though, because as much as I feel that Deep Space Nine should get a look-in because its heyday was what, 1999, it has a huge backlog of stories and it's still alive in heaps of places including FF.net. Augh. Decisions, decisions.) What constitutes 'long-dead fandom' needs careful examining and pruning, however. This must be left up to people who know the fandom. But we've also got to crunch the numbers on non-LJ/AO3/DW sources, because why don't they count? What makes them lesser? If there is no big AO3 presence for Mulan, is there a reason we're discounting fourteen pages of it on FF.net?
Not all fandoms are created equal. Certainly numbers aren't just the thing, and some fandoms in Yuletide are going to be much less obscure than others. There's been a little more of a loving fanfic presence for St. Clare's than there has been for Octavian Nothing, but nobody would ever question that both of them deserve to be in there. I would like to be audacious and make a list that, to me after research, consists of fandoms that I think have big enough outside numbers to sustain them:
Azumanga Daioh
Batman Beyond
Beauty and the Beast (1991)
Ben 10
Blood+
Cardcaptor Sakura
Codename Sailor V
Cowboy Bebop
CSI: NY
Daria
Dark Angel
Darren Shan, Cirque du Freak
Degrassi High
Degrassi: The Next Generation
Detective Conan/Case Closed
Devil May Cry
Artemis Fowl
ER
Eyeshield 21
Final Fantasy IV
Final Fantasy IX
Final Fantasy VI
Final Fantasy X
Final Fantasy X-2
Fire Emblem: Rekka no Ken
Friends
Fruits Basket
Gargoyles
George R R Martin - A Song of Ice and Fire series
GetBackers
Golden Sun
Gravitation
Harvest Moon
Hercules
Hetalia Axis Powers
Hey! Arnold!
High School Musical
Hikaru no Go
Hunter x Hunter
iCarly
Invader Zim
JRR Tolkien - The Silmarillion
JAG
Jak and Daxter
KA Applegate - Animorphs series
Kyo Kara Maoh
LJ Smith - Night World
Law and Order (original)
Law and Order: Criminal Intent
Law and Order: SVU
Left 4 Dead
Magic Knight Rayearth (anime
Magic Knight Rayearth (manga)
Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha
Mahou Sensei Negima! (manga)
Mai-HiME (anime)
MASH (tv)
Mighty Morphin Power Rangers
Moulin Rouge
Neon Genesis Evangelion
Neopets
One Tree Hill
Ouran High School Host Club
Percy Jackson and the Olympians
His Dark Materials
Phoenix Wright (game)
Pokemon (anime)
Prison Break
Ranma 1/2 (anime or manga)
Resident Evil (game)
Rick Riordan - Percy Jackson series (duplicate of Percy Jackson)
Robert Jordan - The Wheel of Time series
Ronin Warriors
Rurouni Kenshin
Sailor Moon (anime or manga)
Sailor Moon (live action) -- my mistake, absolutely eligible
Saint Seiya
Samurai Champloo
Samurai Jack
Shoujo Kakumei Utena (anime)
Silent Hill (game)
Sky High (2005)
Soul Eater
South Park
Spirited Away
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Super Mario Galaxy I and II
Super Mario RPG Legend of the Seven Stars
Teen Titans
Tekken
Tenchi Muyo! Ryo-Ohki
The Fast and The Furious
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
The Lion King
The Matrix series (movie)
The Mummy series (movie)
The O.C.
The Phantom of the Opera (all)
The Vision of Escaflowne
The World Ends With You
Titanic (1997)
Transformers: Animated
Transformers: Animated
Transformers: Armada
Trigun (anime or manga)
True Blood
Tsubasa: Resevoir Chronicles
Ugly Betty
Warcraft
Wicked (musical)
WITCH (book or comic)
Witch Hunter Robin
Xena: Warrior Princess
Xiaolin Showdown
xxxHolic
Yami no Matsuei
Zoids: Chaotic Century
Every fandom I have listed above, after checking Mediaminer, FF.net, LJ and Google, has over a thousand stories listed for it, and I think "over a thousand" is a pretty generous measuring stick considering a great many fandoms in Yuletide have numbers like "forty."
Some salient, clear discussions on the subject:
started by puella_nerdii
started by evilprodigy
started by birchsalt (I know it seems terrible to pimp one's own thread, but I can assure you there are other comments in there, made by smart persons)
And:
A detailed list of anime fandom numbers by the hardworking ambientlight
This list is as exhaustive as personal fandom knowledge, Google, FF.net and other large fandom archives can make it. There may be people who can tell me why a fandom listed above DOES qualify as rare; there may be ones that I've missed in my research into the list.
But: I would like to moot these fandoms be deleted from Yuletide eligibility this year. Because I think it is wrong to have them in accordance with the spirit Yuletide has been in, if they've been allowed in previously or not. And because: Hetalia oh my goodness come on
(ETA: just shutting up shop, guys! Mods are freezing so I imagine there will be a mod note soon re: this issue. Locking the thread.)