![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Con.txt 2021 follow-up
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...
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...