Small fandom things.
Signed up for yuletide yesterday! Wow, that was an hour and a half of hell. I ended up offering a lot fewer fandoms than I was going to, just because waiting two minutes for the autocomplete gets really tedious after about fifty fandoms. (I know I could have tried copy/paste, but considering they weren't really clear on how to do it in the first place - the only way to get the instructions is a video with no transcript, really, yuletide, really? - I didn't want to take the risk of doing that and having it come out wrong and having to start over.)
On the upside, you can now edit your signup without having to start over! So I might add some back if they come up needy. And the if summary page ever starts working again. 6_6 I have to say, it is hard to imagine that the old site could have been more broken than this... Also, this really pointed out that there's something seriously borken about AO3's autocomplete. I mean, not just it being slow, the ways in which it responded to being slow made it clear that the thing is not very smart compared to every other autocomplete I've used, which is probably part of why it's slow. Surely they didn't have to program the thing from scratch?
I suppose I should write my dear yuletide letter already. And update my journal tags, since I linked to the tags instead of a placeholder post in my sign-up. In the meantime, though, I went and tortured the AO3 more by uploading two other recent fest fics I've done:
Title: All We Know
Author:![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
melannen
Prompt: Leonard Neeble walks into a bar and meets ... Jeremy Clarkson!
Fandoms: Top Gear UK, Daniel Pinkwaterverse (Alan Mendelsohn the Boy From Mars)
Word Count: 3200
Content Notes: G, gen with background pairing. Possibly contains spoilers for recent events involving the Stig.
Summary:Apparently being married to the Deputy High Commissioner for Extra-Martian Transport means, like it or not, that Leonard is the go-to guy for all the assorted fugitives, refugees, entrepreneurs, castaways, and very lost tourists that wind up stranded on Earth.
Read at All We Know at intoabar
Read at All We Know at AO3
Title:Within, Enemy (The Breathe Through Me remix)
Author:Melannen
Remix of: Within Enemy byastrogirl
Characters:Ainley!Master, Four, Tremas, with Doctor/Master and Doctor/Tremas heavily implied
Categories: PG-ish, slashy gen, 1100 words
Notes: This story is about the Master, and what he did with Tremas's body, so while there is no sexual content in it, there is, sort of inherently, severe violation of bodily autonomy.
Summary:This is what happened, the time the Master tried to steal himself a body, the time it actually worked.
Read Within Enemy at doctor-and-master with bonus meta
Read Within Enemy at AO3
One thing that crossposting those to communities pointed out to me was that the one thing that makes AO3 home to me, above all, is that AO3 takes everything. AO3 lets you design your own categories, and choose how to use theirs. Every time I post fic somewhere other than AO3, I have to spend precious cycles trying to figure out how to label it.
I mean, the![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
intoabar story, while it had a (very background) non-canon slash pairing, was mostly gen? Yet all the Top Gear communities where I might post it are technically slash communities - they explicitly accept gen and crack and canon het and basically everything except OFC het, but they're set up as slash comm, which by default expect you to be able to label romantic pairings, and that the pairings will be the important thing in the story. And that sort of thing just doesn't happen in my fic.
And then I went to post theremixduello story to doctor_and_master, which is a pairing community but pretty laid-back about what constitutes "pairing". (And I'm incapable of writing about the Master without laying the slash on thick, so that for once wasn't the problem.) No, the only rule that mod feels very strongly about in "non-con"- she doesn't like it. She says if you're writing fic with rape in it, then label it rape. Which, fine, if I ever post fic there where somebody is subjected to sexual contact after explictly saying "no", I will label it rape anyway, because it is.
But of course the first fic I have that I could maybe post there is a fic about possession and body-theft*, with no explicit sexual content but a constant sub-theme of bodily autonomy and using attraction under false pretenses and whatever. Damn it, most of the people I know who write about consent are most interested in the edge cases - that's why we have the non-con and dub-con labels, because I don't want to water down the actual word 'rape' and yet you want to be able to say that this story is about those issues, that sometimes consent isn't wholehearted and clearheaded, that sometimes consent isn't about sex, that sometimes consent in that sense is so far beyond where we've gone that you can't even bring it up. But I understand why some people don't like non-con as a term, so I had to sit there staring going "do I just not label? do I bother the mod who is already sensitive about this stuff? do I just not post the story? do I add a rambling paragraph going into detail?" (Well, you know me, you can probably guess which one I went with. But the angst!)
Not that the Archive is perfect on this - I noticed filling in my yuletide sign-up that they know let you specify an (optional) m/m, m/f, f/f, gen, multi, other on your requests. And that for two of the three fandoms where I might have wanted to specify something like that, it was *useless*, because there was no way to say "I'd like a story that involves pairing combinations and numbers other than m/f/s" or "I'd like a story exploring genderedness and sexual orientation inside relationships in this fandom.". Even "other" wouldn't have worked, because that implicitly excludes het and basic slash, and for both those worlds, m/f is deeply, deeply queer. (yes, out of seven fandoms for which I specified details, two of them were set in worlds without a male/female gender binary. I have themes, okay?)
Although. There is a lot of griping about AO3 coming out lately, and especially with it being so broken due to yuletide, I agree with it. It's ugly, the tagging system is baroque at best, the filters don't behave logically, search is non-intuitive, author pages are unhelpful and cluttered-- but what it's really, really great at is people who don't write normal fic in normal fandoms in normal categories. That is, me.
I counted down and out of fifty stories I now have up, 27 of them include at least one yuletide-qualifying fandom. And AO3 gives me a place where those stories feel at home, and even get found - yes, it's a bit comical to watch the AO3 people turning in circles trying to claim that the archive doesn't give yuletide special treatment, but I don't mind that. Because it means there's an archive where a significant fraction of the stories are in one- or two-story fandoms. Where those stories get found. Where small fandom stories actually have a significantly better hit-to-feedback ratio than large fandoms. So you can complain all you like about AO3 not being a great place for SPN or Naruto fans, but I am going to keep making it my main home for Pinkwater fanfic.
And, hey! 27 out of 50 stories! You know what? You don't have to play in yuletide to write in small fandoms! No, really you don't! You don't have to wait for yuletide to 'come round, either! I mean, a lot of us look forward to yuletide because we know it's the only time most of fandom *does* - the fest was originally started to remedy that lack, after all - but when people talk about saving their small fandom love all year for yuletide, or talk like there is nothing beyond the one fest, it makes me sad.
One thing that frequently annoys me when I'm posting small fandom fic in spaces that aren't explicitly set up for tiny fandoms (like, say,intoabar, apparently) is that I will inevitably get the comment that says, "Oh, wow! I didn't know people wrote fic for that!"
As if somewhere there is a man with a long white beard who keeps an official list of "Things People Write Fic About" and you have to check the list before you can write. I mean, I get being surprised and happy that you have found fic for a fandom you loved when not expecting it! I am happy for you too! (And this is not aimed at anyone in particular who might have left me a comment like that recently, btw, ♥ you all). Somehow, "Wow, I didn't know there was any fic for this!" or "Wow, I can't believe you wrote fic for this!" both make me much happier than the man-with-a-long-beard version. I usually respond to it as if they had given one of the first two - thanks, shared squee, and a short precis of other fic in the fandom - but I wish there wasn't this idea that there are Things People Write Fic About and Things People Don't Write Fic about. You can be the first! No really! There is no enforcement team! even if that does carry a slight risk that a heretofore unficced author will notice you and go O.o at you.
Anyway, the other interesting thing I noticed in doing the crossposting: I treat DW communities much differently from LJ ones. In that I'm much more comfortable posting to them. Maybe because, for some reason, I feel a greater sense of ownership of them here? I dunno, but I'm not the only one -intobar had an lj and a dw mirror, and looking down the masterlist, on the lj side, 29 out of 40 people chose to post to a personal journal rather than an external archive or directly to the community. On the DW side, only 9 out of 38 did. Which is an interesting commentary on the perception that DW is all about personal journals.
...which immediately brings up the question of whether I want to repeat last year's statistical analysis of yuletide letter hosts. Hmm. Have a while to decide, anyway.
29/40
On the upside, you can now edit your signup without having to start over! So I might add some back if they come up needy. And the if summary page ever starts working again. 6_6 I have to say, it is hard to imagine that the old site could have been more broken than this... Also, this really pointed out that there's something seriously borken about AO3's autocomplete. I mean, not just it being slow, the ways in which it responded to being slow made it clear that the thing is not very smart compared to every other autocomplete I've used, which is probably part of why it's slow. Surely they didn't have to program the thing from scratch?
I suppose I should write my dear yuletide letter already. And update my journal tags, since I linked to the tags instead of a placeholder post in my sign-up. In the meantime, though, I went and tortured the AO3 more by uploading two other recent fest fics I've done:
Title: All We Know
Author:
melannenPrompt: Leonard Neeble walks into a bar and meets ... Jeremy Clarkson!
Fandoms: Top Gear UK, Daniel Pinkwaterverse (Alan Mendelsohn the Boy From Mars)
Word Count: 3200
Content Notes: G, gen with background pairing. Possibly contains spoilers for recent events involving the Stig.
Summary:Apparently being married to the Deputy High Commissioner for Extra-Martian Transport means, like it or not, that Leonard is the go-to guy for all the assorted fugitives, refugees, entrepreneurs, castaways, and very lost tourists that wind up stranded on Earth.
Read at All We Know at intoabar
Read at All We Know at AO3
Title:Within, Enemy (The Breathe Through Me remix)
Author:Melannen
Remix of: Within Enemy by
astrogirlCharacters:Ainley!Master, Four, Tremas, with Doctor/Master and Doctor/Tremas heavily implied
Categories: PG-ish, slashy gen, 1100 words
Notes: This story is about the Master, and what he did with Tremas's body, so while there is no sexual content in it, there is, sort of inherently, severe violation of bodily autonomy.
Summary:This is what happened, the time the Master tried to steal himself a body, the time it actually worked.
Read Within Enemy at doctor-and-master with bonus meta
Read Within Enemy at AO3
One thing that crossposting those to communities pointed out to me was that the one thing that makes AO3 home to me, above all, is that AO3 takes everything. AO3 lets you design your own categories, and choose how to use theirs. Every time I post fic somewhere other than AO3, I have to spend precious cycles trying to figure out how to label it.
I mean, the
intoabar story, while it had a (very background) non-canon slash pairing, was mostly gen? Yet all the Top Gear communities where I might post it are technically slash communities - they explicitly accept gen and crack and canon het and basically everything except OFC het, but they're set up as slash comm, which by default expect you to be able to label romantic pairings, and that the pairings will be the important thing in the story. And that sort of thing just doesn't happen in my fic.And then I went to post the
remixduello story to doctor_and_master, which is a pairing community but pretty laid-back about what constitutes "pairing". (And I'm incapable of writing about the Master without laying the slash on thick, so that for once wasn't the problem.) No, the only rule that mod feels very strongly about in "non-con"- she doesn't like it. She says if you're writing fic with rape in it, then label it rape. Which, fine, if I ever post fic there where somebody is subjected to sexual contact after explictly saying "no", I will label it rape anyway, because it is. But of course the first fic I have that I could maybe post there is a fic about possession and body-theft*, with no explicit sexual content but a constant sub-theme of bodily autonomy and using attraction under false pretenses and whatever. Damn it, most of the people I know who write about consent are most interested in the edge cases - that's why we have the non-con and dub-con labels, because I don't want to water down the actual word 'rape' and yet you want to be able to say that this story is about those issues, that sometimes consent isn't wholehearted and clearheaded, that sometimes consent isn't about sex, that sometimes consent in that sense is so far beyond where we've gone that you can't even bring it up. But I understand why some people don't like non-con as a term, so I had to sit there staring going "do I just not label? do I bother the mod who is already sensitive about this stuff? do I just not post the story? do I add a rambling paragraph going into detail?" (Well, you know me, you can probably guess which one I went with. But the angst!)
Not that the Archive is perfect on this - I noticed filling in my yuletide sign-up that they know let you specify an (optional) m/m, m/f, f/f, gen, multi, other on your requests. And that for two of the three fandoms where I might have wanted to specify something like that, it was *useless*, because there was no way to say "I'd like a story that involves pairing combinations and numbers other than m/f/s" or "I'd like a story exploring genderedness and sexual orientation inside relationships in this fandom.". Even "other" wouldn't have worked, because that implicitly excludes het and basic slash, and for both those worlds, m/f is deeply, deeply queer. (yes, out of seven fandoms for which I specified details, two of them were set in worlds without a male/female gender binary. I have themes, okay?)
Although. There is a lot of griping about AO3 coming out lately, and especially with it being so broken due to yuletide, I agree with it. It's ugly, the tagging system is baroque at best, the filters don't behave logically, search is non-intuitive, author pages are unhelpful and cluttered-- but what it's really, really great at is people who don't write normal fic in normal fandoms in normal categories. That is, me.
I counted down and out of fifty stories I now have up, 27 of them include at least one yuletide-qualifying fandom. And AO3 gives me a place where those stories feel at home, and even get found - yes, it's a bit comical to watch the AO3 people turning in circles trying to claim that the archive doesn't give yuletide special treatment, but I don't mind that. Because it means there's an archive where a significant fraction of the stories are in one- or two-story fandoms. Where those stories get found. Where small fandom stories actually have a significantly better hit-to-feedback ratio than large fandoms. So you can complain all you like about AO3 not being a great place for SPN or Naruto fans, but I am going to keep making it my main home for Pinkwater fanfic.
And, hey! 27 out of 50 stories! You know what? You don't have to play in yuletide to write in small fandoms! No, really you don't! You don't have to wait for yuletide to 'come round, either! I mean, a lot of us look forward to yuletide because we know it's the only time most of fandom *does* - the fest was originally started to remedy that lack, after all - but when people talk about saving their small fandom love all year for yuletide, or talk like there is nothing beyond the one fest, it makes me sad.
One thing that frequently annoys me when I'm posting small fandom fic in spaces that aren't explicitly set up for tiny fandoms (like, say,
intoabar, apparently) is that I will inevitably get the comment that says, "Oh, wow! I didn't know people wrote fic for that!"As if somewhere there is a man with a long white beard who keeps an official list of "Things People Write Fic About" and you have to check the list before you can write. I mean, I get being surprised and happy that you have found fic for a fandom you loved when not expecting it! I am happy for you too! (And this is not aimed at anyone in particular who might have left me a comment like that recently, btw, ♥ you all). Somehow, "Wow, I didn't know there was any fic for this!" or "Wow, I can't believe you wrote fic for this!" both make me much happier than the man-with-a-long-beard version. I usually respond to it as if they had given one of the first two - thanks, shared squee, and a short precis of other fic in the fandom - but I wish there wasn't this idea that there are Things People Write Fic About and Things People Don't Write Fic about. You can be the first! No really! There is no enforcement team!
Anyway, the other interesting thing I noticed in doing the crossposting: I treat DW communities much differently from LJ ones. In that I'm much more comfortable posting to them. Maybe because, for some reason, I feel a greater sense of ownership of them here? I dunno, but I'm not the only one -
intobar had an lj and a dw mirror, and looking down the masterlist, on the lj side, 29 out of 40 people chose to post to a personal journal rather than an external archive or directly to the community. On the DW side, only 9 out of 38 did. Which is an interesting commentary on the perception that DW is all about personal journals....which immediately brings up the question of whether I want to repeat last year's statistical analysis of yuletide letter hosts. Hmm. Have a while to decide, anyway.
29/40
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The multi/other options are way better than not having them at all, but right now there's so much confusion about what they actually mean that they aren't very useful.
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As if somewhere there is a man with a long white beard who keeps an official list of "Things People Write Fic About" and you have to check the list before you can write.
I've been thinking, recently, about what makes a Ficcable Fandom vs a doesn't-generate-fic fandom. 'Cos some of those nonficcish fandoms are HUGE as media fandoms. (Indiana Jones is a Yuletide fandom? Is it really all about the slashable center pairing?) (No, wait; Burn Notice is small. White Collar is big. Same rough dynamic: MMF white trio, couple-and-extra-guy; together, they
fight crimestop the bad guys. I don't get it.)Even "other" wouldn't have worked, because that implicitly excludes het and basic slash, and for both those worlds, m/f is deeply, deeply queer.
I'd say "other" means "anything other than the expected meanings of these tags." Includes M/F where the M is normally a shapeless energy being whose taken on a male body, or fics where Snape & Harry polyjuice themselves into Hermione & Ginny to have sex. (And I was under the impression you could select multiples? You could click "M/F" and "other.")
the tagging system is baroque at best
And the wranglers are very, very aware of that. There's a couple of technical issues getting in the way of better tag usability, and the rest is the need for good documentation--some nice posts that say "you can tag any way you want to, but should you want to tag for maximum visibility, this is how the archive sorts them..."
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The staff has been working on that post! We're getting it reviewed by AD&T to make sure it doesn't say anything contrary to broader policies, but we really hope to have an overview of the guidelines in postable shape soon.
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My long-standing theory on this is that while there are a lot of things that help - conventionally attractive white men being slashy, for example, yes - that what finally makes the difference is that shows that get big fandom followings are shows that in some way feel incomplete, or shows that feel like they're not comfortable in their own genre, or don't quite know where they're going, or don't live up to their potential. The fic writers need loose strings that they can pull on, and lots of them; a show that knows exactly what it wants to do, and does that well, and only that, may attract lots of watchers, but there's not that same rush to add fanfic to it. (Which isn't to say all slashnip canon are bad - but it's probably part of the reason why objective quality generally isn't the first thing we go for.)
I'd say "other" means "anything other than the expected meanings of these tags."
Yeah, for general-purpose, I can usually figure out something to click on. But for something like yuletide, where we might be matched based on that, and we might be interpreting it very differently (or where the meaning of something like "other" would be incredibly broad in context) I couldn't really make it work.
There's a couple of technical issues getting in the way of better tag usability
TBH, that tag system is always going to be baroque and opaque, no matter how much work the tag wranglers and techies put in - with canonical tags and non-canonical tags and meta tags and synonymous tags and hierarchical tags, it's going to be baroque either way.
Actually, now that I am signed up as a wrangler, and I see the archive the way wranglers do, especially that extra page I get when I click on a tag that shows me the tag's place in the system and all its related tags, I'm finding the tag system a heckuva lot easier to navigate. I am now wondering a) how much usability would be improved if all users got that landing page (or at least a similar diagram at the top of the page when filtering by tag) and b) how much having that is giving the wranglers a distorted view of how the tag system looks to ordinary users.
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I've tried using the tags to navigate; it's utterly pointless. The "tags" page is a code-generated art project, not a user resource. (I want to nudge towards splitting the page into two parts: top 20 tags at the top, and everything else underneath, so angst, humor, crossover & romance don't overwhelm *everything else*.) The tags are nice warning-ish things on fic; they're useless for sorting.
What we need is the easy ability to exclude entire fandoms. (I gather the coders are working on it. Or will be, after YT is over; everything takes a back seat to YT-related code updates for a while.) I also want fandom-specific tags to be sortable/searchable; there's currently no coherent way to look for "legilimency" as a tag.
And it might be good to give standard users access to the wrangulator pages, just without the ability to edit.
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It's little things like that which just make it almost impossible to figure out the tags system.
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The more specific things that are bothering me are not so much user-facing issues, as things that I can guess about the way it probably works inside from my miminal knowledge of how to code searches, and I suspect what I should do about that is get my AO3 coder abilities up to stat and fix it myself. :P
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*puts on cheerleader hat and cheers for coder things*
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Uh. Sorry, capslock over. Love!
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(I am afraid as a result of that, they are going to get a lot fewer people offering huge numbers of fandoms this year, I hope that doesn't result in more difficulty in matching.)
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The yuletide signups really aren't that bad, it's just getting autocomplete to work, and hopefully that's getting better and better as they work behind the scenes and the rush slows down.
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But hopefully there will be at least a few in this year's NYR, since the fandoms got nominated!
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And we can hope so!
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:-)
There are now transcripts, linked below the embeds: http://community.livejournal.com/yuletide_admin/106124.html
:-)
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And I've been saying through the whole AO3-for-eligibility debate that I really would love a fic fest devoted to making fandoms Yuletide ineligible, because I'd be thrilled if my fandoms were that big.