Con.txt 2021 follow-up

[melannen]

Well, so much for my ongoing plans to post more often. >.< But I am home alone this week and I want the glowy box to talk back to me, so I have motivation.

I have actually been on Discord lately too, in my post-con.txt surge of optimism that I will be able to make the fun of online contxt continue, or recapture what I had in my best IRC days, but I still can't figure out how people live on discord. Except possibly just through PMs? Most of the people I know who do a lot of fandom on discord seem to mostly do PMs. I am terrible at PMs, they do not work?? But I guess I will keep looking at it at least.

And the con.txt follow-up I said I would do kept not happening because it kept turning into lists of things to make long posts about. So instead, here is a version of the con-txt followup post that is just a list of things I talked about at con-txt that I would follow up on if I followed up on things..

Notes from Panels I attended:

Enemies to Lovers : this ended up being the panel I had the most to say in, I think! I was slightly astonished at the number of attendees who said things along the lines of "I have only recently realized how much I love enemy ships," because I feel like I have always known that, but then I looked back over the pairings that had been mentioned in the panel, and I had the revelation that, for all that I feel like I just like pretty much all ships - if I'm invested in a ship as a ship, and don't just like the characters/fandom/tropes/author, it's got to have at least some element of enemy ship. I And I didn't know that about myself either.

Of course with a broad enough definition, pretty much everything has some element of enemy ship; until this panel it had never occurred to me that people put Elizabeth/Darcy from Pride & Prejudice under enemies to lovers, but, I guess! Sure! If you've been sadly deprived of ships where they've been battling each other across the galaxy for a hundred generations of mankind, Darcy/Elizabeth might do. But really if you start to dig the Western romance formula requires an element of conflict and obstacle that almost makes at least a little bit of enemies-to-lovers obligatory at some point.

Then I started making a list of enemy ships I have loved over the years and ended up with a spreadsheet with 100+ ships in it. I was going to do a recs list of 100 enemies-to-lovers fics in a hundred different fandom but that's, actually, a lot?? Now I'm tempted to do a hundred days of one rec a day, since I've been looking for something to keep me posting again, and 'revisiting old fandoms' seems to be my main fandom engagement these days anyway. But that might be a lot for you all to have to look at? (on the other hand if anyone wants to join me in 100 recs for 100 days, fic or not, themed or not, as a DW challenge, that might be fun anyway.)

Inverted tropes - if people are going to keep linking to the Star Trek canon coffeeshop thing I might have to write it into at least an actual not!fic and post on AO3. >:| I feel like I'd have to at least vaguely remind myself about movie-era canon first though and the whining in the linked comment thread still applies, augh.

Not In This Fandom - Co-modded with Lanna! Super good panel, really good modding from Lanna, who put up with me as co-mod really well! (See above and below for my thoughts on fandoms I'm not in, really, except--kind of--I am--.)

Star Wars - I went from that one right to the Star Wars panel and that is actually an excellent juxtaposition because what a good example of the complexity of being in or not in a fandom! Sitting in the panel made me think through my relationship with Star Wars fandom. I am in, in order of importance, Original Trilogy fandom (where I ship Han/Lando rival!slash and also Leia had some really amazing fucked-up energy with Tarkin okay), then I guess grudgingly Mandalorian fandom (the enemyship vibe there is "Wait, we're supposed to be the leaders of two groups of ancient intractable enemies? Why didn't anybody tell me that before now?" "Nobody told me that either! Do we have to be?" "I don't see why", which is an amazing enemyship dynamic, and also pretty great to come to if you, like me, have completely ignored all Mandalorian canon until now); select bits of Rebellion and early NR-era expanded universe books and comics, both pre- and post-Disney (all Aphra ships are enemy shipping, because Aphra); very select bits of the post-Disney movies (if only Kylo Ren was less.... Kylo Ren); anything else. My complete lack of interest in Clone Wars-era anything puts me at odds with some of the most long-term active parts of the fandom; I just -- not really interested in trying to engage with the ethical questions around the existence of the clone army in the ways I would have to in order to make that part of canon fun?

Also I now have an entirely R2-D2 themed bathroom which I may post photos of someday. Droids *are* fun and also I am happy to engage with *those* ethical questions if canon would ever like to try...

Time Travel Fixits - One thing I just kind of dropped into this panel that I super want to elaborate on more is the idea of Time-Travel Fixits in dialogue with classical tragedy and the whole concept of the tragic hero? But what I actually want is someone who has formally studied literature sometime this millennium to write it up instead and let me read it. But, okay, basically, Western literature has this whole deeply embedded concept of the "Tragic Hero", who is basically defined, going back to Aristotle, as an extraordinary person who is dropped into even more extraordinary circumstances and -- falls short, and then everything goes wrong. There's a lot of analysis about what exactly the "falling short" - hamartia - is, whether it has to be a character flaw, or if it could just be they were missing one piece of knowledge or skill or luck or deus ex machina or whatever that they needed in order to make things come out right. But whatever it is, to be a real tragedy, to give the "cathartic" sympathy where the audience experiences the fall with the hero and feels better for it afterward, the tragedy has to be inevitable - for this person, in this place at this time, there was no choice they could have made that would have made things okay. Maybe there was a choice someone else could have made, or a choice they should have made but couldn't have, but standing where they were, who they were, by the end there was no way out for them.

And, like, a lot of fixits in general take a tragedy in canon (one other thing Aristotle points out - yes I did finally read the Poetics just to post this - is that a tragedy is just one incident in a life; it's the Joker's "one bad day"; if you string a bunch of tragedies together with other stuff into a longer story, it's not a tragedy anymore, it's an epic that has tragedies contained in it - which is another thing I think fandom is really good at in general, it takes one episode of a TV series and says this is the tragedy I want to write about, this is the one incident in the epic that I want to wring all the catharsis out of I can, like Euripides pulling just The Trojan Women out of the Iliad. Really I want someone to do a whole thing talking about the Poetics and modern fanfiction.)

ANYWAY. A lot of fixits take a canon tragedy, and they go, no, actually, this could have been averted, and let me show you how, and those can be great, but often by the very nature they undermine the character's place as a tragic hero, because they're making the argument that no, this was not inevitable, because X could have easily been different. What the time travel fixits do, very specifically, is they explicitly agree that for that character, in that place, in that time, it was inevitable; for who they were when it happened there was no way out; so we get to keep the catharsis of the canon events; and then they say BUT WAIT! What if they were that same character, in the same place, but from a different time? What if living through *(or dying of) the tragedy the first time around gave them whatever it was they were lacking? And what if we let them bring it back with them and try again??? What if?? And this lets you have both the satisfaction of making things come round right and the catharsis of the original tragedy both, lets you fix it without actively undermining canon's tragic power *(Look sometimes canon needs a good undermining. But sometimes you want to cry with canon AND let them eat all the lotus-and-pork-rib-soup they want at the same time). And also, especially when you start seeing fixits in a large fandom that send back characters who weren't the main focus in canon, it's a way of explicitly positioning that character *as* the tragic hero. It was they who fell short, they who were extraordinary and we could cry with, they who could have averted everything if they had just been a tiny-bit-more what was needed, it was their tragedy all along too.

(And timeloop AUs do all this but even more so, because not only do they argue that it was this character who was the tragic hero, their hamartia that broke things and only their wiser self that can fix them, by making them try and try again they emphasize that even if it's fixable it's not easy, that the original downfall was earned as hard as the fixit is going to have to be.)

This was all inspired by somebody's Tumblr post on hamartia in their fandom but of course I will never find that again, and anyway it was probably SPN.

Anyway my favorite timetravel fixit mechanism - "kid from canon era comes back as sexy adult with with awesome steampunk time machine, fixes all their parents' fuckups for them to make their future happen" doesn't really do as much of that as the standard trope but, on the other hand, grownup kid with steampunk time machine. (if we had to end up with an obnoxious 80s movie as a trope namer why was it Groundhog Day and not Back to the Future?)

Beyond Dress Up/ Identity Play - why are things like catharsis and hubris and deus ex machina and to a lesser extent even hamartia and peripeteia part of the standard literary lexicon even now, but I had to actually read Aristotle to find out about anagnorisis? He spends way more time on that than on any of the other stuff! Which fair enough because it's obviously the best part of any story and any story without it is sorely lacking. Thumbs up to Aristotle.

Writing historical fandoms - one thing I dropped into this that I've been thinking about since, about how I'd describe it better, is the idea that if you're trying to write a truly historical story (and not a pastiche of a historical fandom, or a fun modern story in period costume, both of which absolutely have their place) is you have to think about differences in the basic ways the characters conceptualize their own experiences, relationships, and psychology as much as you do about more concrete things, and how hard that can be. Like the first time this really hit me in a big way was when I tried to write a story using only English words with roots in Norman French or earlier, with no recent coinages, since I figured if the character couldn't talk about it in the words of her time then she probably would talk about it differently. And the main place I ran into problems wasn't things like technology or biology; most of that could be described well enough, even if it took more words - it was introspection that was the problem. There are so many things (including, say, "introspection") that are really basic to the way we think about ourselves that are only a century old, maybe two, as part of our everyday understanding of the world. The things the words describe still happened, but we described them very differently; and so much of psychology is about the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, that it really changed, like, the basic way I was writing that character?

I used trauma as my off-the-cuff example in the panel, mostly because it's a term, and group of related concepts, that has become really central to the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves in a very different way than it wasn't even twenty-five years ago. And you can really see that in fic - I have recently rediscovered some old favorite Mulder/Krycek fic on AO3 (see above...) and fundamentally it's very very much about two deeply traumatized men dealing with severe trauma, like a lot of fanfic about Mulder was - there's even a scene where Mulder is explicitly using "post-traumatic therapy" techniques - and the trauma responses it shows are much the same ways we'd write today (with an allowance for the OTT that was part of the style) - and yet the ways they respond to their own trauma responses are so entirely different from how it would be written about now in so many little ways. Anyway trauma is maybe not the best example just because it is so much a fundamental thing in our current ways of thinking that it's tough to talk about without arguing about, so short version: a lot of people going for historical punctiliousness are careful about words like, idk, "snafu" or "meme" that read as clear anachronisms, but especially more than a few centurjes back, you often learn more by looking carefully at how you use words like "relationship" or "visualize" don't necessarily immediately strike the eye.

OED Text Visualizer that reads your words and gives you a history of every single one was linked in the panel and is my new best friend (though I suspect if I was trying to actively write historical fiction right now I would need to IP block it. :p_)

Werewolf torts - SOMEDAY I will actually make it to this entire panel and not have to wander in halfway through ):

Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered: a perfectly good panel (about magic systems in fanfic and fandoms) but set at a disadvantage by not being the panel I wanted it to be. (I wanted it to be a panel about magic systems and creative sex. Someday.)

Putting the Trans in Transformative - this was also really good and made me feel a lot more confident about maybe posting some trans fic non-anon someday, and also so much kudos for running a panel on a very difficult topic without a co-mod!

From Eroica With Love - This was a pre-recorded panel that was mostly just an enthusiastic fandom intro. It was really well done. And one of the things that I will always love about con-txt is that old fandoms live on there in joy forever. I have been re-reading a lot of Eroica fic since the con (shocking nobody, probably.) Here for posterity is my list of the five Eroica bunnies that have been on my to-write for at least fifteen years and never get written or go away:
* The one were Tyrian Persimmon made a deal with a demon painter to paint a portrait that held his soul, so that he could not die of harms to the body, but any injury he did to his soul through sin and dissipation would instead harm the painting, until his soul died and himself with it: for which the obvious loophole is that he must simply live a blameless and upright life, and keep the portrait on display to keep himself honest; which works fine for several centuries until a certain Earl starts showing up and turning his life upside down; and also the Earl doesn't seem to be getting any older either ---
* The one where there are two ways to be immune from blackmail: Klaus just doesn't do anything he could be blackmailed for. Dorian does it all, but doesn't bother to keep any of it secret. Except people have started trying to blackmail Klaus about his "secret affair" with Dorian - and no amount of denials will make them stop - so his only choice to save his career is to become open and flagrant about the affair with Dorian. Which they are not, in fact, having. (yet)
* The baseball AU that involves players from rival teams teaming up to take down a gambling ring--
* They are chasing down antiquities smugglers who are funding terrorist groups and both teams end up having to camp for a night together. In an ancient nuptial temple on an Aegean island somewhere that has the strange quality that it reverses your sexual orientation if you sleep there. (And of course the solution is to have sex with someone you find attractive). Suddenly Klaus has to deal with being pan and experiencing sexual attractions for the first time in his life, while Dorian is dealing with being straight (not well), and most of the Alphabets and thieves are now ace and panicking over whether they can get rid of the curse at all.
* June 2001. Same-sex marriage is legalized in the Netherlands. Klaus invites Dorian as his +1 to his (honorary) Uncle Pfirsich's wedding. Dorian learns some things he did not know.

Also! There was a vidshow! I basically only do vidshows at cons because I am really not the right kind of visual to seek them out, and also a lot of my fandom is done with the sound on mute these days. But the vidshow was soo good! Con.txt does a really good vidshow. I should watch more vids. The person who did the randomized vidshow late into the night as a "Room party" was really great too as a way to wind down, even if I didn't say anything in the room. :D

And con-txt also does really good games! I played Codenames which was super fun on Friday night, and then I signed up for the AO3 scavenger hunt, which was kind of the highlight of the con for me! As you know I am super awkward at "meet people and do unstructured social" stuff and it was really great to have assigned groupwork so I could go there and work on that and talk to my team when I was feeling overwhelmed by the general chat. :D I have thought for a long time that it would be a great idea to have some kind of "Con buddy" system so that people who want to try going to a con, but don't know anybody and feel weird, could get a pre-vetted Assigned Friend that they were allowed to cling with all weekend. I feel like this would work better in fandom context than other places because there's that pre-made assumption that we're all awkward as hell anyway.

But the AO3 scavenger hunt was also just really fun as a hunt! I'm tempted to try to run one on DW, I don't see why it wouldn't work here with a slightly shifted format...

Comments

[ursula]

My experience is that Discord works best if you put it on your phone and then tune the alerts on your phone to an intensity you can handle.

But I might also be able to offer you a Radch server, if you are looking!

[melannen]

Unfortunately the intensity of alerts I can handle on my phone is 0 (that is also the amount of typing into a chat that I want to do on my phone...)

I'm not *not* interested in a Radch server! I will probably just lurk creepily like I do in all the other servers though.

[ursula]

I do often use my phone to post a cat picture, and then caption it from my laptop!

Here is the RadchDome invite.

[melannen]

Oh, radchdome! So much good fanfic has mentioned that in its notes. :D

Is your discord name deducible from your DW name?

[ursula]

It's a good group!

My usual Discord nickname is "Also a Bear," which is connected to my dw name if you like tiny etymology jokes.

[redbird]

The Discord server that works for me is very text-focused, though people (mostly not me) do use the conversation channels.

[melannen]

Hmm, what do you mean by text-focused? Or do you mean the text chat vs. the voice chat? I don't know any servers that casually use the voice chat, but maybe people do more in private channels.

[redbird]

That's more or less what I meant; I had the impression that there's a lot of Discord out there that's more audio-focused, but I could easily be wrong.

[melannen]

I think a lot of gaming discord uses the voice (and stream) options heavily, and they're still most of discord! But none of the fandom ones I've tried use it at all. con-txt tried to do a few things on a voice track, but people ended up asking if they could have parallel text channels for them too.

I do have a friend whose long-running email-then-forum-then-social-media RP moved to Discord, and they dump scene-long sections of text and huge backstory notes into the text chat on the RP channels in the server, which seems to work for them I guess.

[redbird]

The servers I'm spending significant time on is using the voice channels, mostly for readings and a bit of chat before or after the readings, I think largely because the person who set up the server wants to hear her friends' voices. I am almost always muted, because cattitude and I have our desks in the same room, and he'd rather not be on audio when he isn't there on purpose.

[sarken]

OED Text Visualizer that reads your words and gives you a history of every single one was linked in the panel and is my new best friend

Ohhhhh no.

I've been trying to be very conscious of "did that word exist" in the fic that I'm pretending is Hamilton fic (despite the fact it is definitely American Revolution RPF), and I am looking at that tool like, "Do I want to know how bad I have failed?"

[melannen]

I am the one who tried to code a tool for Les Mis fic that would not only check the age of the word, it would tell you how often it was used in the text of canon, so I am the wrong person to talk you out of it. :P

(tenlittlebullets did eventually code it, but the website was down last I checked.)

[sarken]

I definitely already started to do it anyway. :P It's not as bad as I feared! But finding out "regrettably" was about 100 years too late nearly made me throw my computer. "Regrettable" came about in 1600 and no one stuck an -ly on it for almost another 300 years? Really?!

[melannen]

I guess that makes sense? Regrettably isn't really used like a normal adverb modifying an action, it does kind of smell of modern-style weasel wording. But I wouldn't have guessed either!

[ellen_fremedon]

I love all of your thoughts about time-travel fixits.

[melannen]

Aristotle has many excellent things to say to fanfic writers, it turns out!

[beatrice_otter]

I use my laptop for work and for personal stuff, and I always have Discord on, and have all notifications except DMs muted. When I have a moment, I go through and see what happened in my servers since I last checked. If there's something interesting, I comment. If there's too much, I mark it all as read.

Your thoughts about time travel fixits interest me, and I too would be interested in the full essay by someone who knows what they're talking about.

For historical fiction, the thing that really gets me is the way people just don't get that prior to the 19th Century, "love" was not generally one of the major criteria for a marriage, and even in the 19th Century it was only sometimes the deciding criteria. There were a lot of people who had quite happy lives married to people they were not in love with, because that wasn't what they wanted or expected out of marriage.

[melannen]

I can't be on Discord during the workday, which probably contributes to me feeling like I am never there at the right time to catch the good conversations.

I agree with the love thing! Although it's also easy to overstate it. "Love" was still a factor in most marriages, and most people hoped to have romantic love in their marriage even if they didn't choose based on it! It just wasn't the only factor. Plus for the vast majority of humans, there were like at most maybe a couple dozen people in their circles who were eligible for them to marry, so it's not like they did the same kind of shopping around.

I think an bigger change there is less the question of hoping to marry in love, and more the idea that "not being in love" is a good enough reason to end a marriage. That would just sound ridiculous and frivolous to most people from the past, even ones who did marry for love.

One thing I wish more historical fiction remembered is how common it was, even in my grandparents' generation, to marry for sex. If you don't have reliable birth control, regular sex = kids, and kids are much more complicated without marriage, so a lot more people than we think about these days married just so they could fuck without worry (Not even counting the times and places where 'having a regular sex partner' was basically how you got married.)

[beatrice_otter]

Oh, totally on the sex thing, I'm just asexual and don't tend to remember that bit's important to most people :D

[melannen]

Well, same, that's why I try to keep it in mind. :P

[ratcreature]

I'm a bit torn on how much having specific terms or delineate them differently really changes thinking. Like if you look up the translation for "introspection" into German in an online dictionary it will tell you it is "Selbstbeobachtung" (i.e. self-observation), which is a word that is just not in very common use or applied nearly as broadly as introspection. That becomes obvious if you look at the adjective, where to translate "feeling introspective" as "selbstbeobachtend" borders on nonsensical. When you look up a translation for "introspective" the dictionary may give you "introspektiv" i.e. a direct loan, which isn't widely used, or "beschaulich" which is kind of a quaint word, and technically means contemplative, but is mostly used to describe places not people in practice. Like you say it about streets or a pond or something.

There's also the noun "Innerlichkeit" which used to be a more popular word in the 19th century than now, which gets translated as "inwardness" in English, and tinges a bit more towards an aesthetic sentiment or moments when people retreat into their private lives, but also has an element of introspection.

So in German that specific term just isn't used, but a ton overlapping synonyms like "thoughtful" or such obviously are. But don't think it changes much fundamentally about how much introspection is or self-reflection is going on.

I mean, I'm as thrown as the next reader when psychoanalytic jargon pops up in fiction set before those theories got popular, but I am less sure how much more general vocabulary matters.

[melannen]

I mean, it's complicated - it brings you right around very quickly to the arguments around the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and the question of fiction as hypothetical translation (especially in historical and SF), and the fact that when it comes down to it no two people speak exactly the same language, and the deep magic of what words even do. In general I don't think it's super important to police your vocabulary hard in historical fiction, because unless you're actually writing in Middle English or Old Saxon or whatever, there's already that remove of translation, and anyway I like all the various grades of "modern story in period dress" stuff too.

But if you are trying really hard to be historically accurate to the characters' interiority, my thesis is that you may make better use of your time looking at things like "would they use the term visualize instead of saying 'make an image in your mind'?" than obsessing about what kinds of lace would have been in the collar, or even something like an Oedipus reference in passing (since after all people have known the Oedipus story and used it to understand themselves for a long time.)

But, like - if I'm speaking a language that doesn't have a word for purple (like English didn't until the late Middle Ages), it doesn't mean I can't see the color purple. But it does mean that if I look at something that reflects that range of light, I am not going to be thinking about its purple-ness - I am going to be thinking about its redness and blueness, or darkness and lightness, or how it's one of those colors that's an equal balance between two other colors and doesn't really have a name. The color is the same, to some extent the sensory experience of looking at the color is the same, but the way we talk about the color and fit it into the internal story we make about the world is different.

And also, if you don't have a word for purple, that's usually a sign that talking about purple isn't super important in your culture. It doesn't mean it's not super important to you! Or that you don't have lots of purple around! But English has a lot of fine-grained color because we have a lot of dyes and inks and paints and pixels that lets us do a lot with specific colors, and we use a lot of English in contexts like commerce and science where we need to be fine-grained and saying "grape-colored" won't slide. If you don't need to distinguish between four slightly different colors of yarn when talking to someone who hasn't seen your local grape variety, maybe blue-red and red-blue and grape-colored are all you need.

It's tougher when you go even more abstract with something like "introspection". But the idea isn't that people who don't have that word don't ever think about their own thoughts, it's that if you can say, idk, "I have a problem with too much introspection", you're telling yourself a different internal story than if you say "I've been turning inward too much lately" or "I've been too far inside my own head" or whatever else. If you have a word like "introspection" that treats looking inward like a thing, a well-defined noun with boundaries, then you, too, will be tempted to treat it like a well-defined object with boundaries. Whereas if you say something "looking inward at myself", that's an action you do, not an object that exists, and you'll be a little more likely to think in terms of stopping an action than getting rid of a thing. And if the only words you have are ones that draw slightly different boundaries around a slightly different concept, then you will think in terms of that concept instead.

Like - in the same way that putting colors from a spectrum under different names doesn't change what colors are in the spectrum, splitting up parts of human experience into different words doesn't change what those experiences are. But if your characters don't, say, have a word that's an exact equivalent to modern English "relationship" in the sense we use on AO3 (which only took on its modern usage really in the 1930s or so) maybe they're splitting the thing we put into that box between a bunch of other, different boxes. Or maybe they're only talking about it in terms of a much larger box that it fits in. Or maybe they don't put it in a box at all; maybe they have to explain it with nuance and poetry if they want to talk about it. And thinking that through is likely going to make a bigger difference to your characters' story than what kind of stew they ate.

But, I mean, talking about this fundamentally talking about how it's impossible to talk about things accurately because the mere act of talking about things changes our concepts of what we are talking about, so it's very hard to talk about. "A name that can be named is not a true name" and so on.

[ratcreature]

This reminds me of how bewildered I was about "teal" constantly cropping up in fanfic when I first started reading online, and I still forget that it is blue-green sometimes. I think for half the 90s I assumed it was a brownish shade for some reason, possibly because I keep forgetting what "taupe" is as well.

[melannen]

The other side of this is that English *objectively* has too many color words! I think everybody has at least one English color word they had completely wrong. (I spent a long time thinking 'cyan' was yellow.)

Have you talked about siniy and goluboy in Russian? There've been some really interesting studies about Russian and English speakers and how they process the colors described by those terms.

[ratcreature]

The problem with the English extra color terms is that so many refer to such obscure stuff. It's like plant names when you are not a plant person. Nobody is confused by "orange" or "lemon" or even "chestnut" as color name. It's the "mauve", "periwinkle" and "chartreuse" that get you. With the latter I thought for the longest time it was some sort of red color, not yellow-green. No idea why, it just sounded red, I guess.

Or take "teal" -- even if you know that it's a duck, that duck only has a tiny bit of actual teal on it, even the drakes, it's mostly brownish. That's just intentionally creating pitfalls. (Though back when I thought teal was a brown, I didn't actually realize that it's also a duck.)

In my Russian course we were just told that синий is blue and голубой is a light blue or sky blue, and then you get familiar with the common use cases through examples. It's a bit odd at first to have two blues, but not nearly as much a hassle as a dozen or more extra words on the pink-rose-lilac-purple spectrum, named for some obscure flower petal or other.

[melannen]

I also had chartreuse wrong for a long time! And I'm enough of a plant person that I know periwinkle and cornflower but I know a lot of people who had them wrong for a long time too.

I mean honestly I'd say English really only has the color categories red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, brown, white, gray, and black - everything else can be described using those and you don't really need more. But we also have all these other auxiliary words for when you want to be fancy and/or very specific, related to the fact that honestly nearly any concrete noun can be turned into a color word if you want to hard enough.

(The red/pink split I get the impression is pretty similar to the Russian blues, although the Russian one is maybe more strict? It would be weird to say "light red" in English for some reason, because we exclude pinks from the category "red", even though, idk, "light brown" instead of tan isn't weird.)

[ratcreature]

You can't say light red? In German "hellrot" is very common (and different from pink) but that may be because it also means "bright red" as the words light and bright are both "hell". So maybe in English you just have "bright red" whereas "bright brown" isn't a thing (I don't think), because it's not a brilliant color.

Some of the fancy extra color terms have at least additional purposes, like with horse colors that often also mean coat pattern and manes, so you get "bay" instead of a brown horse, but iirc it also implies a black mane and ankles or something (not a horse person).

English is somewhat annoying in that it really likes to have a ton of extra words instead of just combining the ones it already has, like the pig/pork, sheep/mutton and cow/beef thing instead of just using the animal for both like with chicken or add "meat" after or something. I get that it's because the French got dumped on top and status and what not in that instance, but English seems to enjoy having gratuitous extra terms in general. It's bad with all the body parts too where English uses all this Latin and Greek like a medical textbook e.g. esophagus, instead of just saying foodpipe like windpipe.

[thawrecka]

I'm in 16 different Discord servers (though some are quiet and some I regularly mark all read), and I think for me it works because the servers I check most often have the right mix of people talking about things I'm interested often enough to keep me interested, in similar ways to the ways I'm interested in. I do check it about three times a day, granted.

[melannen]

I have a dozen or so, but some are very very quite. I check once or twice a day when I'm trying, or every week or so when I'm not, but there rarely seems to be anything going on that I want to join in on that doesn't seem like it's so long ago it's awkward. IDK. The fact that I really can't get on Discord until evening these days probably doesn't help; it seems to work best for people who can just have it running all the time, but backgrounded.

[oracne]

That sounds like it was a blast!

[melannen]

I did not expect online cons to have been as fun as they have, but they are! I get a lot of the fun of going to a RL con, but with less logistics and anxieties to deal with, and the post-intense-socializing comedown is less. (There are also many things to miss about face-to-face though of course.)

[hannah]

I'm on a handful of Discord servers - some inactive ones from past cons, some quiet ones, a couple loud ones, and a couple I check regularly. It's good for focused fandom discussion, but in my experience, not so much for meeting new friends or casual conversation about daily life.

[melannen]

I think the only one I'm on that counts as even a little bit busy is the yuletide one, but for all that it has a lot of posts, even it doesn't tend to have, like, sustained or focused conversations most of the time? People post something and get maybe one or two responses and then a few minutes later somebody else posts something entirely different. It feels weird and disconnected, which is not why I'm interested in joining a chat. On the con weekends there's actual conversation happening.

[author_by_night]

Sounds fun!

I've been on Ao3 more lately, and have noticed all the AUs. I gotta be honest, they're not always my thing - I prefer ones that are a bit more grounded in canon what-ifs, as opposed to completely different contexts. This is obviously just me, not here to yuck anybody's yum.

Actually though, being in other fandom spaces has taken me away from LJ/DW, a bit. I've pretty much resigned myself to the fact that LJ and DW are harder to use for fandom purposes, unless you're into MCU or anime. (Not that those are bad things to love! They're just not my things.) Although I did get a lot of feedback about a year ago when I rewatched Firefly. I'm in a few Facebook groups and like I said, Ao3. I was on a few subreddits, but well, Reddit.

What if they were that same character, in the same place, but from a different time? What if living through *(or dying of) the tragedy the first time around gave them whatever it was they were lacking? And what if we let them bring it back with them and try again??? What if?? And this lets you have both the satisfaction of making things come round right and the catharsis of the original tragedy both, lets you fix it without actively undermining canon's tragic power *(Look sometimes canon needs a good undermining. But sometimes you want to cry with canon AND let them eat all the lotus-and-pork-rib-soup they want at the same time). And also, especially when you start seeing fixits in a large fandom that send back characters who weren't the main focus in canon, it's a way of explicitly positioning that character *as* the tragic hero. It was they who fell short, they who were extraordinary and we could cry with, they who could have averted everything if they had just been a tiny-bit-more what was needed, it was their tragedy all along too.

I love this "thought bubble" so to speak.

And... I may have to run with that concept now. Oh my god. As though I needed more fic ideas. :P I don't think I've ever seen a time travel that used a minor character, but that's really interesting. I did read a pretty good It's A Wonderful Plot fic that used a minor character, though, and I guess those are basically the same idea.

[melannen]

DW is tough to use if you want to talk about a particular fandom in general, unless you happen to luck into a community. There just aren't enough people active here to make it worthwhile for most fandoms. It can be pretty good if you're willing to talk about general stuff in a fandom-y way though! But not everybody engages in fandom in the way DW seems to have settled into.

There are a couple large fandoms that are really into time travel fixit AUs right now - Star Wars and Untamed leap to mind - and in a fandom that large at this point any given character has probably been sent back in time at least once. :D It's more a symptom of being a popular trope in a large fandom though - that's where you see people really engaging with background characters, after all the major characters have already been done fifteen times.

It's A Wonderful Life AUs are similar but backwards in weird way, I guess? Interesting thought! It's almost saying this person *isn't* a tragic hero, even if they think they are, because they *do* measure up, they *do* make things better! (The only It's a Wonderful Life AU I have written used the canon characters but not the plot device.)

Christmas Carol fic where characters are visited by three ghosts shares some DNA too I guess, though those are more "this is the tragic you will create if you *don't* learn better in time!" That one lets you see and enjoy the tragic ending from the outside but averts it before the character experiences it personally...

[author_by_night]

. It can be pretty good if you're willing to talk about general stuff in a fandom-y way though!

Sadly, I've even had trouble with that. Though to be fair, I also tend to focus less on fanfic and more on canon stuff, even if it's general, whereas I think a lot of people are more into discussing fanfic. That being said, I am into fic again, so that is easier for me. (I took a long break because none of the fandoms I was in really had any fanfic, or fanfic I was interested in, then I finally hit the jackpot with one.)

It's more a symptom of being a popular trope in a large fandom though - that's where you see people really engaging with background characters, after all the major characters have already been done fifteen times.

Good point. The fandom I'm in is a bit mixed in that regard. People love engaging with the minor characters but the main focus is usually on the OTP, which happens to be a canon pairing.* There's a lot of love for the minor characters, though.

*Which is the other stroke of luck for me, since I tend to ship canon. I know, I know, throw popcorn all you want. :P Although to be fair, there are canon ships I don't like or have that much interest in, whereas this particular ship is definitely one I love and am invested in.

That one lets you see and enjoy the tragic ending from the outside but averts it before the character experiences it personally...

Exactly. Although IAWL can as well. You're right that the IAWL plot can help a tragic hero their value, which arguably the original does as well. (Although I'm not sure I'd call George Bailey a tragic hero per se, since it isn't his fatal flaws which cause his problems. His uncle, however...)

[kalloway]

I'm in a couple dozen discord servers, but they're all varying degrees of muted aside from one for a mobile game I play that posts new banners on Mondays. Everything else, I just peek in when I have time. Quite a few aren't active enough for real-time chat, it's just leaving messages and checking back for responses.

Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered: a perfectly good panel (about magic systems in fanfic and fandoms) but set at a disadvantage by not being the panel I wanted it to be. (I wanted it to be a panel about magic systems and creative sex. Someday.)

Many years ago, I attended a panel on magic systems at Yaoicon, of all places, and I think it was more technical than most people were expecting. (Basically, how important internal consistency is and how to do the world-building.) Alas I don't recall much more about it than the above, but it was very good and could have been many times as long. (As someone struggling with a magic system for an original novel at the time, it really helped me sort some stuff out!)

[melannen]

I think one of my issues is that for large-group conversation I am used to either actual real-time chat (like IRC) or actual asynchronous threads (like DW or tumblr or Reddit). I can't quite figure out how that works on Discord. Is it weird or OK to respond to something posted a day or more ago? Is it still weird to respond to that if a different conversation happened in the meantime? Do people actually use the threading options? Does it vary by server?

I am really good with the coming up with technical magic systems part! If only I found it as easy to then write stories using them.

[kalloway]

I think that depends on the server, tbh. I've seen a few where it's pretty normal to @/quote a person from the previous conversation then add in, and some where once conversation has moved on, it's effectively over unless it comes up again. Definitely recommended to lurk to see what the etiquette/flow is in each individual space. (Also some where it's normal for specific two-person conversations to move to PM. Might depend on your own comfort level, but it's usually okay to PM someone with "I missed the conversation about XYZ but I liked your comments. Would you be interested in chatting about that more?")

I'm much more a writer who charges ahead and then realizes I should be applying some internal consistency on what powers/skills exist and how they work. (Or in the case of video-game fic, converting mechanics over to a workable in-verse set of rules/use.)

[princessofgeeks]

Sounds amazing!

[thedarlingone]

I mean, thisbluespirit formerly lost_spook just created the 100ships comm, where you do fannish things about 100 different relationships (romantic, platonic, familial, friendship, whatever) to 100 color prompts, I'm sure 100 enemies-to-lovers recs would fit the premise... ^_^

(My partner and I have been writing more or less one Star Wars X-Wing piece per day for that challenge. Also if you want the invite for the Rogue Squadron discord server we're both on, I can get you that.)

[melannen]

Oh I saw you posting that and I was going to mention it as inspiration and it slipped my mind! I don't think I could do a hundred days of much other than recs, and IDK about the color prompts, but maybe I will try!)

I mostly only know and love Rogue Squadron from the Stackpole books so I don't know if I'd really fit in with your end of fandom though.

[thedarlingone]

I mean, it is true that I'm personally very Allston oriented, but this Discord server definitely focuses on both. We were doing a Rogue book club starting with the Stackpole books, although it seems to have fallen a bit by the wayside recently for lack of leadership.

[lannamichaels]

(on the other hand if anyone wants to join me in 100 recs for 100 days, fic or not, themed or not, as a DW challenge, that might be fun anyway.)

I know myself to know that I couldn't do this, but I would enjoy reading it and sometimes reccing along :D

Inverted tropes - if people are going to keep linking to the Star Trek canon coffeeshop thing I might have to write it into at least an actual not!fic and post on AO3. >:| I feel like I'd have to at least vaguely remind myself about movie-era canon first though and the whining in the linked comment thread still applies, augh.

You should definitely post it! I don't think you'd need to do much clean up? You could put each as section or a chapter and leave it unfinished. It is notfic, after all :D

Not In This Fandom - Co-modded with Lanna! Super good panel, really good modding from Lanna, who put up with me as co-mod really well! (See above and below for my thoughts on fandoms I'm not in, really, except--kind of--I am--.)

It was great to mod with you! :D

Time Travel Fixits - One thing I just kind of dropped into this panel that I super want to elaborate on more is the idea of Time-Travel Fixits in dialogue with classical tragedy and the whole concept of the tragic hero? But what I actually want is someone who has formally studied literature sometime this millennium to write it up instead and let me read it.

This sounds amazing and I also want to read it.

Putting the Trans in Transformative - this was also really good and made me feel a lot more confident about maybe posting some trans fic non-anon someday, and also so much kudos for running a panel on a very difficult topic without a co-mod!

You should absolutely post things! All the things!

But the AO3 scavenger hunt was also just really fun as a hunt! I'm tempted to try to run one on DW, I don't see why it wouldn't work here with a slightly shifted format...

I didn't do the scavenger hunt but it looked fantastic and I'd love to try a DW version.

[melannen]

I guess I will try the 100 recs, nobody is stopping me! We'll see how far I get.

A DW version would be fun to mock up - you could just post the questions list on a comm - though it would be harder to have teams without going off-DW for the separate conversations. Hmmm.

[lannamichaels]

It could be done in comment threads on locked posts, maybe?

[melannen]

Maybe! Or even just give each team their own post on a community and ask for word of honor not to snoop.

[superborb]

Discord has worked best for me as essentially a small to medium size group chat, with themed channels for some organization. But the struggle becomes finding a cozy group, idk how you do that except with existing friends or at random...