melannen | There are a couple things in here not les-mis-related.

There are a couple things in here not les-mis-related.

asexual_fandom mini meta fest that's ongoing. So, you know, you should all go look at the post? And also write and comment on other things for the mini meta fest.

(Things I learned from doing that post: a) the a_f crowd seems to lean really heavily toward semi-obscure folk music. Somehow not too surprised?; b) the version of Windows Media Player that comes with Windows 8 is the most terrible thing ever for making fanfixes on; c) no really there needs to be a Les Mis vid to 99 Problems. Or a 99 Problems vid to Les Mis, I'm not picky.)

2. The difference in experiences between tag wrangling several dozen small/quiet fandoms and tag wrangling one very active and vocal fandom is so different that it doesn't feel like the same job at all. I suspect this difference is a major and largely invisible factor in some of the issues with wrangling culture and communication.

(Things I did not expect as a result of being in Les Mis fandom: that I would be inspired to brush up on my Spanish. Cheers and kudos to the small cadre of Spanish-Language Les Mis authors on AO3! I am enjoying translating all of your chatty freeforms and learning about the recent European student political movements you're writing about, even if my Spanish is still too terrible to actually enjoy your fic. ...no, nobody is posting Les Mis fic on AO3 in French, that would just be silly.)

3. Also I accidentally the Brick? I started writing a fanfic that was not intended to be crack, but then it started trying to be ALL ABOUT MARIUS, so in order to prevent that terrible fate I had to let it become a Javert & Courfeyrac mismatched buddycop casefile where they bond over how very Pontmercy Pontmercy is, and while there are a lot of things I can try to write without knowing canon, casefile is not one of them.

So anyway, Brick. I wanted to be good and read it straight through but so far I am just reading the Javert-relevant parts and the political digressions completely out of order. But, okay. So. I started this fic as a Javert/Valjean-ish story? But I was trying to follow the characterization I'd picked up from highly-rec'd bookverse stories, where Javert isn't nearly as obsessed with Valjean as he often is in musical canon. But now that I have read some scenes from the brick. I am going to have to go put some obsession-with-Valjean back in. Apparently the slashfic has misled me in the wrong direction about how slashy canon is, yet again...

(Thing I have learned from this adventure: Apparently, even though I have never even read this book before, I can open to approximately the right page to find any scene I want, if I know where it falls in the plot, just by feel. Book superpowers: Activate! Now I know why I was determined to wait for a paper copy. Can't navigate by feel in ebooks. Also, why was I worried about having to do extra history & politics research to write bookverse fic? ANY HISTORY HUGO WANTS HIS FANS TO KNOW HUGO WILL TELL THEM HIMSELF.)

4. Also reading the Brick has made me figure out where Valjean fits into the Discworld crossover, which has suddenly given me something like a plot. (Really the Brick in person is way, way more like a Discworld novel than I expected, right down to narrative voice and hilariously random non sequitur history digressions. Though I should have expected that, I just hadn't made the connections.)

Although putting Valjean (and probably Patron-Minette, because Thieves' Guild intrigue) in during Snapcase-era means I really can't get away with leaving out Javert. Figuring out Javert is hard (even when not writing cracky crossovers). (Hey,

carmarthen, would you feel terribly betrayed if I had Javert raised in the same Genua brothel where Vetinari was raised? I know it's just fanon but! Javert and Vetinari raised in the same brothel! And nobody ever seems to write I-am-from-the-gutter-too Vetinari even though it's more canon than any other backstory we've got for him. Probably because he doesn't shout at people about it.)

4. Also: WAISTCOATS. PEOPLE I NEED WAISTCOATS. 19th-CENTURY-STYLED WAISTCOATS.

I know some of the people reading this are waistcoat-people! Anybody have recommendations for how to acquire sturdy, fitted waistcoasts worthy of a Victorian dandy that are sized for a small-bosomed yet still lady-shaped person? Historical sewing patterns preferred, but I would enjoy anything, up to and including just pretty pictures...

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...no, nobody is posting Les Mis fic on AO3 in French, that would just be silly.

But there is fic in English with dialogue in French. *sobs*

Javert's obsession with Valjean kind of waxes and wanes in the Brick, I think--there are points where I definitely think he's obsessed, and other points where not so much--but mainly, in the Brick he has an actual career that is not 100% centered around Finding Valjean, which is easy to forget in the musical.

ALSO CASEFIC CASEFIC ILU.

Hey, carmarthen, would you feel terribly betrayed if I had Javert raised in the same Genua brothel where Vetinari was raised? I know it's just fanon but! Javert and Vetinari raised in the same brothel! And nobody ever seems to write I-am-from-the-gutter-too Vetinari even though it's more canon than any other backstory we've got for him. Probably because he doesn't shout at people about it.

Not at all, heh.

I ALSO NEED MORE WAISTCOATS IN MY LIFE. Since I have more or less quit the SCA with extreme prejudice, perhaps I should use some of that awesome Italian silk to make 19th century waistcoats....

>>....But there is fic in English with dialogue in French. *sobs*

I think I would almost prefer that to the fic where all the dialogue is song lyrics...

>> in the Brick he has an actual career that is not 100% centered around Finding Valjean,

Do you have any good scenes for evidence of this?? Because I started with the bit where Marius comes to him to report the kidnapping (which is where the fic I'm writing goes AU), thinking that would be a good place to find Javert just being a policeman, and he is all "THE GORBEAU HOUSE? I CHASED VALJEAN THERE ONCE! AN OLD MAN IN A CHURCH? HO HO HO MUST BE VALJEAN!" and I was like uh, okay, Javert...

(and don't get your hopes up, it is a very silly casefile that I will probably never finish writing. :P)

ALSO YES! You should totally repurpose your fabric for waistcoats! And if you do, report back! (I have had bad luck with trying to sew anything waistcoat-like, the fit is always terrible on me, but then I've never used a 19th-century based pattern.) I would say you should switch over to doing 1830s in general except, well, 1830s fashion. The only time period where disco!fanart can improve the fashion...

Well, he does spend years convinced Valjean is dead and not thinking about him, because what's the point? I think we tend to get the scenes where he is thinking about Valjean because those are the ones relevant to the plot, but he presumably doesn't spend years in Paris getting paid to obsess over a supposedly dead convict. And he's capable of laughing at himself: cf the "Valjean is dead and I am a ninny" scene. There are times he comes off as obsessed and times he doesn't--by the end he's all "UGH YOU AGAIN? WHY?"

I like the more sedate male 1830s fashion...frock coats, yesssss.

And yeah, fic with dialogue in French and/or song lyrics: thing #1 I didn't miss about being in a fandom for a musical based on a French novel. Sigh.

..or more briefly: Javert isn't relevant to the narrative except as a foil for Valjean, so Hugo had no reason to show him in Valjean-free contexts. But I do I think his whole bantering with Patron-Minette thing, and brief interactions with the Thenardier kids, do indicate that he is doing a job off-page that doesn't revolve around Valjean obsession. Is there some element of obsession at various points? Sure. But I think a one-note Javert whose entire mental life revolves around catching Valjean is a bit ludicrous, and less interesting than the alternatives.

Oh, I do think a multi-dimensional, non-obsessed Javert is far more interesting (and plausible) than an obsessed one! And it's certainly clear he does a v. good job as policeman doing things that have nothing at all to do with Valjean; it doesn't interfere with his work. (I mean, when he's actually making the arrests at the Gorbeau house, he's entirely focused on arresting the bad guys and pays no attention to the man in the corner.) But I'm still having trouble interpreting his comments about Marius's Old Man in any way other than a) he still sees Valjean around every corner and in every shadow, or b) he has known where Valjean is for years already and has been stalking him looking for evidence.... well, maybe when I've read more context it will stand out less.

Check out this analysis on Tumblr (I'd read Cinaed's original post also)--I assume that's the scene you're talking about?

http://sarah1281.tumblr.com/post/45725384522/we-can-rewrite-icarus-javert-you-are-confusing-me

Huh, okay, on re-read I can see that interpretation! And it does make it make a lot of sense without requiring excessive amounts of slashy. (Although it requires Javert to be doing a very bad job of interrogating Marius, because it means that a) Javert knows all about Thenardier and knows where he lives, and b) doesn't think to ask Marius if he knows anything about his neighbor, thus revealing that the Jondrette with the daughters is the neighbor. But I guess I guess many things can be explained just by "Pontmercy".)

But I guess I guess many things can be explained just by "Pontmercy".

True words!

I dunno, I'll have to reread the scene again and think about it--I do think at that point that Patron-Minette and Thenardier are definitely major features in Javert's professional thoughts. Isn't he looking for Thenardier at the sewers?

Patron-Minette is definitely at the top of his thoughts! I dunno about Thenardier - I haven't read most of the other relevant bits yet (I'm currently skipped back to the rescue of Cosette and the first account of the Gorbeau house. And the Bishop, with the Tumblr read-along.) I believe he is looking for Thenardier in the sewers, but by that point Thenardier is also a prison escapee...

Well, Thenardier is closely involved with Patron-Minette, so they kind of go together.

True! But "Does Javert know Thenardier is involved with Patron-Minette yet"? is a more open question. (The casefile I'm playing with is about Javert following up on loose ends from the Thenardier arrests - hence Pontmercy, hence Courfeyrac - so I'm paying closer attention to what he does and doesn't know, when, than I might otherwise. So the question of who he thought the Old Man was is quite relevant here - things-gleaned-from-fanfic gave me the impression he didn't know, and didn't waste a lot of worry on it, in true melodrama-dramatic-irony tradition; canon is giving a much more complicated starting place. As seems to be the case with All Things Javert.)

canon is giving a much more complicated starting place. As seems to be the case with All Things Javert.

TRUFAX.

FROCK COATS ARE THE BEST. I own one (not a historical costuming one, but a modern-ish knit one that I picked up at a used clothing shop) and I have to be good and make myself not wear it EVERYWHERE. (Although specifically 1830s frock coats with the GIANT LAPELS and the weird sleeves and the open-front-down-to-the-bellybutton, I am still kind of dubious of.)

Edited 2013-03-18 16:50 (UTC)

Yay Bricking! :D

c) no really there needs to be a Les Mis vid to 99 Problems. Or a 99 Problems vid to Les Mis, I'm not picky.)

Or a filk!

(Line I cut from the fic I just posted: "But, seriously, Enjolras. I've got 99 problems, but consent ain't one.")

Also, why was I worried about having to do extra history & politics research to write bookverse fic? ANY HISTORY HUGO WANTS HIS FANS TO KNOW HUGO WILL TELL THEM HIMSELF.)

Which I love.

And why I read the ebook: so when it starts going completely over my head, I can ask Wikipedia. My knowledge of the French Revolution is hovering around I Saw The Wishbone territory. ;)

Or filk! Although really I prefer just casting Jay-Z as Bahorel. :D

...and if I go to wikipedia while reading I get distracted and forget what I am reading. ^_^ (The other day I went to look up if a certain song would've been sung by the Amis and ended up reading 200 pages of somebody's doctoral dissertation on Restoration politics before I remember why I'd looked it up...)

You could check www.poisonpenpress.com. She has a lot of costume books.

I have been through their book many times at War! (I've had bad experiences with trying to actually sew things from historic costume books, though...)

Folkwear 222 would probably work! But if I start ordering patterns from Folkwear, I'll never stop.

ANY HISTORY HUGO WANTS HIS FANS TO KNOW HUGO WILL TELL THEM HIMSELF

This is good to know. I need a new fandom like I need a hole in the head, but the last time I read the Brick I was twelve and I have no memory of it except it was long.

I don't know enough detailed 19th century French history to have a guideline on how accurate/biased Hugo's version of history is, mind you, but there is certainly enough of it in there, so I think just for fic-writing background, 'tis enough, 'twill serve.

Also, why was I worried about having to do extra history & politics research to write bookverse fic? ANY HISTORY HUGO WANTS HIS FANS TO KNOW HUGO WILL TELL THEM HIMSELF.

Yeah. I don't remember much about the brick, which I read over a decade ago, but I do quite clearly remember the chapter after Valjean and Cosette end up in the convent, where Hugo says something to the effect of "it would be wrong to expect any writer concerned with religion to set something in a convent and not talk about it ..." and then writing a whole long essay about life in the cloister and various religious things that have absolutely no connection to the larger story except Hugo wants to make SURE that EVERYONE is on the same thematic page as him.

Yep! I just read five chapters about Louis-Phillipe and the general political climate of Paris for a payoff of a page-and-a-half of Enjolras and Company.

Also, why was I worried about having to do extra history & politics research to write bookverse fic? ANY HISTORY HUGO WANTS HIS FANS TO KNOW HUGO WILL TELL THEM HIMSELF.)

Unfortunately, my problem is that Hugo tells you a lot of history WHILE ASSUMING CERTAIN PIECES OF KNOWLEDGE on the part of the audience and so those of us who actually know basically zero of anything to do with French history are left going "aaaand WHAT are you alluding to there, sir?" Sigh.

ON ANOTHER NOTE YOU POSTED YOUR ACE PLAYLIST!!!! I am so excited to check it out. :D

Yeah, I have a v. basic level knowledge of European history of the era, but not enough to get much context or any nuances. Except what Hugo decides to spoonfeed me!

I suspect this difference is a major and largely invisible factor in some of the issues with wrangling culture and communication.

^ this

Though I don't know that "invisible" is exactly the word I would use? Or rather, it's probably invisible to some and painfully apparent to others. For some, it might even be tacitly assumed, idk?

Everything looks different to wranglers depending on what they wrangle, including guidelines, feature requests, priorities, etc. It's hard to have a big-picture view unless a wrangler's done a little of everything, and even if they have, the situation may have changed a lot since the last time they wrangled from a particular perspective.

Well, it's not invisible to those of us who have noticed it! And probably not invisible to most of the people who've wrangled busy fandoms. But since, at least as of the last time I saw stats, the majority of wranglers are only doing small/quiet fandoms, I sustpect a lot of us just have no idea?

Before I took on some very busy fandoms just in the last couple of months, I knew that my experience was different from the more active wranglers, and yeah, everybody's experience is slightly different, but I assumed it was mostly just in terms of how much time was put in. But it's more than the time increase - it's like you have to suddenly level up in all sorts of ways. You're dealing with tag types that are rarely relevant in quiet fandoms, you have to get a lot better at a bunch of skills, and thus get a lot more familiar with the tools and what they can and can't do, you can't just let tricky things slide the way you can in smaller fandoms, so you have to start communicating more to deal with that, and as a result of communicating more you level up in other ways...

I think if I was designing the ideal tag wrangler guidelines I would require that every wrangler co-wrangle one of the massive fandoms that needs help for at least a month or so, even if they can't commit to doing it long-term, just to learn all that stuff.

Yes, you're absolutely right, it changes the whole toolbox and approach. I remember when I first joined Transformers and my co-wrangler started explaining "the basics". My eyes almost glazed over, I was so stunned. It wasn't just the volume - though that was part of it - it was the that there were so many different kinds of tags and ways of tagging to be handled. And Transformers has turned out to be one of the most careful user groups on the archive when it comes to tagging. Marvel was yet another complete bootstrap for me.

I think when folks in smaller, English-only, or straightforward character name fandoms see some of the guidelines, they wonder why they're necessary. But for those of us handling a hundred or more tags a day, we want to spend as little brainpower on creating canonicals as possible. Having a specific guideline for what looks like a weird case might save someone (me) huge headaches down the line (because it's not weird - I've got over a hundred variations and need to make canonicals to cover at least some of them). Guidelines also help train users to expect certain formats, so they're more likely to enter new tags in that format, which saves us time later and makes searching easier for everyone, user and wrangler alike.

Everything for me is about efficiency right now, and as you say, I can't afford to leave a tag sitting around for more than a couple days, no matter how much I don't know what to do with it. So I ask. And communication leads to chatter, which leads to at least friendly acquaintances if not outright friends, which leads to wrangling feeling like a community activity. But that community's smaller than it looks, because not everyone needs or wants to participate.

I don't know that we can force everyone to co-wrangle a megafandom (nor are all megafandoms alike in this regard), but it certainly wouldn't hurt to apply some of the lessons learned in megafandoms to the training process for new wranglers.

If you could cherry-pick skills you learned in Les Mis that you think every wrangler should have, what would they be?

Oh, goodness, the number one lessons would be a) hang out in chat as much as you can, and b) use the tag comments and read the discussion page, and c) communicating is necessary, not intimidating and something only the cool kids do. Also minor technical things like "when making a new relationship canonical, add characters at the same time you make the canonical, it saves steps" etc. (I'm sure there are many more of them that I've yet to learn, since I've mostly been figuring it out on my own.)

Also I've gotten much more confident about messing around in No Fandom out of self-defense, because if Les Mis starts using No Fandom tags that are poorly wrangled it spills over into what I do. I would add "keeping track of large piles of unfilterables" but I don't think I've figured that one out yet...

Beyond that it's mostly just been a matter of becoming much, much more familiar with the guidelines, by necessity. And figuring out what needs to be dealt with NOW and what can sit if necessary, which is a completely different set of things in a very active fandom than in a quiet one. And starting to think of my-fandom-on-AO3 as almost a living thing which responds noticeably to the stimuli I give it! That too.

Our experiences are eerily similar! I wonder if it comes from joining an active fandom as it explodes?

Saving steps, yes. That's on my list too.

I use a Scrivener page to keep track of 2-use unfilterable freeforms I've already looked up. Every couple weeks I skim the list and pop some of them into search to see if they're ready yet. (Characters and relationships are completely different.) Actually, just using search was something I never thought to do before I was staring down a wall of 5K tags.

Fandoms do respond! Once I realized that, I went back and started trying to wrangle more carefully, undoing some of my original decisions and making new ones. And that turned out to be one of the best decisions I ever made.

Also - we have a doc about adopting new fandoms, but I think it's more attuned to adopting a smaller fandom alone than joining a megafandom. It might be good to have a "Here's what to do if you want to join a megafandom" doc as well. It would say completely different things.

No Fandom freeforms are beyond the ability of any group of wranglers to manage alone, so I'm really glad you're joining in. One of the things I'd like to help train new wranglers into is not just throwing things into No Fandom but at least typing relevant terms into the syn box to see if something reasonable pops up. It happens way more often than I think many wranglers assume, and it saves collective wrangling time if we syn as we shift, rather than waiting for someone to come along and clean up later (because probably no one will).

Yes! Using Search! I've done that so much more, and for many things I'd never even considered using it for before.

...I've had very different experiences with "joining" megafandoms. I'm technically co-wrangler for my current largest fandom, but the other assigned wrangler has done nothing in the fandom, afaict, since telling me she'd be happy for me to join up. Which I'm fine with because I'm enjoying being a control freak there for now, but is not ideal?

Then there's a couple of large metafandoms, where I joined awhile back as the result of a general call for help but, despite asking, got very little guidance on what help exactly would be needed or wanted, and the older wranglers seem to be mostly on top of things, so I only join in once in awhile when it looks like extra help or wider discussion are needed. (If I ever catch up with my other wrangling I'm planning to push for more clarification there, but that may not happen for some time...)

And then there's Homestuck, which I very recently joined, and xparrot has been very communicative and helpful and I'm quickly getting more confident about doing stuff, so yay.

And now that I'm following more communication channels, I'm seeing some of the communication that's going on in other megafandoms and learning about other styles! So yeah, signing up as a co-wrangler is really a crapshoot - I would like a good "here's what you should do when new wranglers join your megafandom" doc, too.

And I would love for all wranglers to get a guide to No Fandom freeforms that you are likely to be able to syn to a lot, and to syn when possible rather than just kicking over. It slows it down a lot but really helps the archive, I think. (Also the "other additional tags to be added later" freeforms in Relationships and Characters.)

And it took me awhile to get confident that 90% of the time nobody minds if you just go in and do stuff in No Fandom, and if they do mind they start a constructive discussion, they don't tell you to stop causing problems. I think there would be a lot more wranglers working No Fandom if there was active encouragement to do so, but I think having the staff set up as the No Fandom wranglers, added to the cultural issues around Authority in the org, kind of suppresses that.

Edited 2013-03-19 12:56 (UTC)

I actually have a half-finished No Fandom freeforms guide, but I stopped making it when I realized that No Fandom is really a monster that can't be kept up with. I think we actually need a tool? Something like the Unwrangled fandoms list but that pulls out canonical metatags and shows them on a separate page, nested and CTRL-F-able? (And still, I want a pony.)

There will definitely be a No Fandom special topic training page, if I have to write the whole thing myself.

...Which brings me to a question: how do you feel about consulting on/writing a special training topic about "What to do when you join a megafandom"/"What to do when you get a new co-wrangler"? We don't need them right away, but we could really use some basic docs like that, and the Special Topics tutorials don't have to fit into a certain length of time, because they're used on an as-needed basis.

I... suspect any attempt at a comprehensive No Fandom canonicals list would be too huge to do anything much with unless we had REALLY GOOD tools, and if we get tools that good I want them to be everywhere in the Wrangulator. :P

I would be willing to consult? But I'm not sure how qualified I am? I haven't really done much yet in any fandoms with a team that work together closely - my contributions would be mostly "these are the things I would like to have been told when I joined".

(Sorry for the delay! Too many balls in the air at once.)

I agree, any such tool would need to be shared. I do have ideas! But it'll have to wait until coders have more staffing.

I'd actually love a list of things you wish you'd known, if only because I'm finally in the position of being the less-junior wrangler to a new wrangler, and I'm pretty sure I'm missing things I should be telling them. Being a co-wrangling mentor is hard! (Also, we can crib any such list into a tutorial, given a little time and effort.)

If you feel like sending me a PM or email, that would probably be easiest? But don't if you're too busy or concerned about it - it's mostly just something for us to keep in mind as a future project.

I will think about it! And try to come up with a list!

I'm theoretically already in as a coder, I just need to ... learn how to code ...

Anyway I put together a list? It was a good idea anyway because I also may end up being Senior Wrangler on a fandom before too long, at this rate. I was just going to put it in comments here unless you think it shouldn't be public? (I'm not criticizing anyone in it...)

ETA: Never mind, I'll just e-mail! It got longer. ^_^

Edited 2013-03-25 16:37 (UTC)

I was going to refrain from leaving drive-by comments on week-old posts, but this rang a lot of bells from modding the Les Mis kinkmeme. I started that thing on a lark in 2009 when Les Mis was still a tiny fandom, and was seriously impressed that it accrued about a thousand comments in three years... now it's averaging 300 comments a day, and the difference is qualitative, not just quantitative. The organizational overhead--fills post, chatter post, multiple rounds--is so much greater and so much more necessary, there's stuff like prompt freezes that I didn't even know about because it's only necessary on megafandom prompt memes (and it still makes my tiny-fandom hindbrain go NO NO WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO DO THAT), the need to have coherent rules and policies grows and grows with the size of the meme. The need to document shit grows as the thing snowballs and attracts LJ newbies and people who've never kinkmemed before. And the pull in different directions from people who desperately want incompatible things rears its head, especially re warnings policy and "move to Dreamwidth? stay on LJ? stay on LJ with custom comment pages? no I hate the custom pages they don't work in my browser" etc.

Plus stuff that's specific to modding, like the need to decide between constant, active, frequently ruthless modding and letting wank take over the meme. But again, qualitative differences, because there's a near-zero probability that one inflammatory comment will make a low-volume comm go off like a bomb in the time it takes me to write up a mod note. Small-fandom mods can be pretty hands-off and still intervene in time to keep things from getting ugly; megafandoms are tinderboxes, and there is an explicit choice between maintaining a reasonably civil and pleasant space and allowing people the freedom to walk around with open cans of gasoline. (Or maybe that's just Les Mis fandom? LM fandom doesn't seem to grok cheerfully abrasive disagreement at all; it's divided between over-earnest "you're oppressing me by having an opinion" and people blatantly trolling the over-earnest types.)

So yes, in conclusion, herding megafandom cats = brain-breakingly different, and not just in terms of volume.

Would it also be okay to post this at

metanews?

Sure!

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There are a couple things in here not les-mis-related.

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