Stuff about fandom yay!

[melannen]

Yuletide: Today I started reviewing my canon for my yuletide assignment, and OMG, people, I had not reviewed this canon since before I joined online fandom, and they are so together. Not even OTP MFEO together, they're soulbonded-domestic-partnershipped-that-was-an-incredibly-blatant-Kirk/Spock-reference-this-is-my-payback-for-requesting-Henree/Conway-if-this-is-what-they-gave-me-as-a-child-no-wonder-I-turned-out-this-way together.

I was also thinking "ooh, I forgot how much I loved the character designs, I should do some slashy fanart too" and then I realized that, omg, in [major canon art] Character A is totally staring at Character B's backside, in those skintight trousers no less, and can I really improve on that?

And then I remembered that creator[s] are known to be very lgbt friendly, and this is also the first story I can recall encountering that had non-gender-binary characters, and I'm about to go *completely* tinhat. It'll be brilliant!

This is the true torture of yuletide: not the waiting for your story to go up, or the anonymity and reveals, or assignments and requests: it's the fact that you find or rediscover an utterly *brilliant* small fandom that you are full of squee and joy about -- and then *aren't allowed to talk about it* for a month and a half. Being squeeblocked is deeply painful.

(Also my recipient - who is awesome, btw - also requested a fandom I've never heard of, but has minimal canon and is legally available online, and it's such a brilliant story that I don't know *why* I'd never heard of it, and I know a bunch of you would love it too, and WHY CAN'T I SHARE A LINK WITH YOU? It hurts us, it does, my precious.)

***

Archive of Our Own: I have an AO3, by the way: Melannen @ ao3! Invite courtesy of stellar_dust, and yay! (There is a rumor going around that all yuletide participants will get one, so I probably could have waited, but I didn't want to.)

It is still very obviously in beta, and I am making a list of things that are broken that they probably already know about, but it is still *leagues* beyond the last several multifandom archives I have tried to use.

I have uploaded all of my fic through the end of my monofannish period, which means approximately the year 2003, and that 90% of it is Harry Potter stuff. Going through old!fic, as many of us seem to be experiencing right now, is -- interesting.

I still like most of the stories I uploaded; there's two or three I'm ashamed of, and that one story from 2001 is only there for completeness, but in general, if I thought I could consitently do fic of that quality right now, I would be happy. (Which means, of course, that I have improved basically *not at all* in six years, which is depressing. Though part of it, I think, is that I haven't stuck with a fandom for a whole year since then, and haven't ever immersed nearly as fully as HP, so I haven't been nearly as confident with voice.)

It's also making me want to write more of my old Harry Potter characterizations! And boggle at the fact that pretty much everything I wrote back before OOTP still more-or-less works, minus a few minor references to characters that are alive and should be dead. And, my god, the pairings I wrote: I may still be the only person ever to have written Professor Quirrell/Mad-eye Moody... whoever got stuck doing the HP tag-wrangling has probably learned to groan whenever they see my name come up. (Don't worry! I'm pretty much done with your fandom! For now!)

It's also weird to look back and see that I have, if anything, gotten *more* shippy as I've spent more time in fandom: back in the day, I would have to describe my HP shipping preferences as "Ginny Weasley is about a 4 on the Kinsey Scale, but that whole thing with the dark damp tunnel, giant snakes, and swords has given her an unbreakable kink for dark-haired, dangerously intense wizards, and some other rather darker kinks; Harry Potter is about a 5.5 but Ginny has enough Tom Riddle left in her that he seized on her as his heterosexuality Hail Mary; Luna is completely detached from her own body, much less sexuality; Ron is too self-absorbed to have a preference other than "people who like Ron"; Draco is about a two but can't drop his fascination with Harry; Hermione is a one, but convinced she *should* be bi; and Snape is quite capable of sustaining a healthy grown-up relationship, except when he's around people he knew in high school, at which point he reverts to disturbed teenager with stalker tendencies.

There's 11 HP stories by me up, which is all the ones that were complete (more-or-less) and long enough for me to consider them an actual story. While I was at it I went through all my lj memories, though. Here's the incomplete stories from that period that are up in fragments that I really wish I'd finished (and kinda still want to):

Head of the Dragon: a war!fic, in which Draco Malfoy is Alexander the Great, Harry Potter is slowly losing bits of his soul, and war is exactly as horrible and grinding as everybody said it was.

Black Ice, the cyberpunk AU futurefic, in which everybody carries a Mark that binds them to a Family, and back-Alley infomancers use special tarot decks to hack into the Framework that links the portrait system together.

Having Kittens, In Which Minerva McGonagall spends too long in cat form, and discovers she's enceinte. If only she could figure out which of the possibilities is the father - and which species he was.

***

British telly:

I've been posting old Doctor/Master fic recs at the best_enemies community on LJ for the past week. (BTW, if anyone wants a model of how to keep a smallish fandom community active, I really recommend looking at what x_los has been doing there.) The theme for this round of recs was to look for obscure stuff, so I decided that for my recs, I would look for stories that pre-dated New Who. Most of them ended up pre-dating the Web. I spent a lot of time on the Wayback Machine (and am pretty convinced that it's the Doctor's fault it went down over the weekend.)

Hooray for archive.org! Though there's nothing that makes you feel as old as someone saying, "Wow, that fic was written before I was born!" Also, I remain convinced that *somewhere*, somewhere beyond my ken, there is a vast trove of pre-internet Doctor/Master slash - many of the Powers that Be considered it canon, even, so where is all the fic from before LotTL?? I even looked in some online 'zine indexes, and there wasn't nearly as much as there ought to have been (but it was all in multifandom zines, because there were no who-specific ones listed...)

Oh, and there was new Dr. Who yesterday or something? I have been so unimpressed with New Who of late that I haven't even gotten around to watching Planet of the Dead yet - really, my experience of the Tenth Doctor has been that if there's an awesome companion (see: Jack, Mickey, Jackie, Sarah Jane, Martha, Donna, the Master) I will gobble it up, and if there isn't I'll just be bored and skeptical. I think I'm well done with RTD; and the bits I've seen outside of cuts makes me, um, less than eager to rush out and torrent the new episode.

I'll watch the next one, of course, because it's supposed to have [spoiler] and [spoiler] in it. I just wish I could be more excited about Moffat taking over; if only he hadn't picked another too-young pretty boy as the doctor, *sigh*.

But! You know what else started new episodes yesterday? Top Gear!

That one I have torrented. Top Gear is still my fandom of shame-but-I-can't-stop-reading. I may have to stop feeling superior to the SPN and Glee people. :/ Though at least its fandom sees to respond to the very rare canon appearance of people who are not white and male by deciding they are awesome and writing smoking hot porn about them, instead of getting faily. Probably because it remains the poly-est fandom that has ever been poly: everybody 'ships OT3/4/5/6, more-or-less, even the people who mostly only write pairings.

...and it's helpful for talking to boys at parties?

Ooh, and John Hodgman is going to be on the new series of Quite Interesting next month!

Yes, I kind of skipped from watching old Top Gear to watching the entire run of QI on youtube. This makes perfect sense, once you know that my local NPR station used to run My Word and My Music reruns on Saturday afternoons, after Car Talk and Have I Got News For YouWait Wait Don't Tell Me, and I used to find an excuse to lock myself in my room all afternoon to listen to them. (luckily, I was never nearly as fond of Whaddaya Know, so I have managed to avoid looking for streams of Sorry I Haven't a Clue. ...oh wait, Stephen Fry is presenting it now, I'm a bit doomed, aren't I?)

America needs more panel shows, world! We can't get by on This Just In and old Whose Line reruns forever! Send help!

Anyway, John Hodgman on QI! I need to find a source for quick QI downloads before then. So I can force all my fake news people to watch it. And then suck them in to all the BBC RPS fandoms that link up to QI (and then back out to House, and American Idol, and LotRPs, and bandfic, and... though oddly my brain just kind of goes on pause whenever I try to work in John&Andy.)

(ooh, look, the local library has Jeeves & Wooster in DVD box sets. I bet I could get Mom to watch them. She has to have run out of House and Bones re-runs by now.)

Comments

[zvi]

Oh, I wish you had kept going with the pregnant!Minerva story, it seems potentially quite amusing.

[melannen]

I wish too! And really, all I'd have to change to bring it in line with post-book-7 canon is write out Dumbledore and have McGonagall Headmistress and handling her own affairs, which would only up the win factor for her. (As sad as it would be to lose 90%-gay-Dumbledore working through the slight possibility of fatherhood.)

I had some kind of fairly well worked out plot for the rest of it, too, though I don't remember if I ever decided who the father was. I wonder if I wrote down any notes anywhere that I could still find them. (It was going to end up Minerva/Millicent - I do remember that - just because I *could*. :D )

[zvi]

That sounds extremely fantastic. I can give you cheerleading and encouragement on this front!

[bessemerprocess]

I'm having a blast uploading things to AO3. It's a great excuse to read all your old stuff, though unlike you, I started with the latest and went backwards, so I just left 2009. I haven't decided if I want to be truly completest or not yet. There are all those FNFF OT responses and some of them aren't more than a drabble/half written by sarken.

So far my major complaint is that Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert/Anderson Cooper/Keith Olbermann/Rachel Maddow is waaaay to long for a pairing tag (I compromised and called it PRT+, but still. Pairing tags need to be longer so I can indulge in my OT3/OT4/OT5 tendencies.)

On that note, Top Gear rocks, and I was so happy to finally get to watch the latest ep last night. (Well, except that part where I want to hold the Hamster down and cut his hair.) I am keeping myself from watching QI until the semester is over.

[melannen]

My output drops so precipitously after the first year that I wanted to get the early stuff in first (or else I'd probably decide not to bother). Plus, I like the idea that AO3 is supposed to be a real archive, in the historical preservation sense.

I'm struggling with what to do about drabbles and comment!fic, too, though. I'll probably wait until I have everything longer in, and then decide. And omg, pairing & character tags - I just kind of gave up on them. (I mean, for some of my HP stories the pairing list would be longer than the fic!) (I also can't figure out if I need to repeat the characters that are in pairing tags in character tags, too. It looks really icky in the headers if I do that and I have a lot of pairings.)

Hooray Top Gear! I am making myself actually write some fic before I watch it, but I may not be able to resist.

[zvi]

I would encourage you to repeat characters from pairing tags, because, if I understand the system correctly, when you filter on characters, that is not related to the tags for pairings

[cypher]

A couple of things about tagging, since I am working on it now and full of organization squee:

If you can't fit everybody's full names into the pairing (which starts to happen even with threesomes, when people's names are really long), then the standard suggestion is to use everybody's last name. ...We're all pirates here, though, so that's more a guideline than a rule: if something else makes more sense, do it! (For example, "Snape/Draco/Harry" is more useful than "Snape/Malfoy/Potter," so by all means use it instead!)

Also, repeating characters and pairings looks sort of cluttery until the fandom gets wrangled, yes -- but when a wrangler has had time to sort through and assign everything, the individual characters who make up a pairing will no longer be visible in the headers (e.g., the header just says "Snape/Draco/Harry" even though you also tagged it "Severus Snape," "Draco Malfoy," and "Harry Potter") but they'll still be attached to the fic, so someone filtering on one of those characters would see your story pop up.

...Signing up to wrangle big fandoms is intimidating, of course. But it should happen! I have faith in fandom!

[melannen]

So, if I have this right: once tags are properly wrangled, characters that occur in both character and pairing tags will only appear in the headers under the pairing, but if a character appears *only* in a pairing, they still don't get listed as a character tag?

It seems like that ought to be something the archive could do automatically! I wonder when they'll get a suggestions generator like DW's up! :D

(Are they still looking for tag wranglers for large fandoms? I looked over the tag wrangling volunteers page, and it looked like all the larg-ish fandom I could do weren't listed as needy. There were some small book fandoms I could claim, but I'm pretty sure they only have one story each, which was written for me, for yuletide, so it seemed a bit silly. Are they still looking for deputies for some of the really huge fandoms?)

[cypher]

Right! If you tagged your fic with "Bob/Jane," "Bob," "Jane," and "Fred" (pretend those are unique enough names to be made into official forms), then post-wrangle the header would say "Bob/Jane, Fred" (but you could still filter the fandom for "Bob" and find the story).

I think the reason it's happening manually is to allow people to type things in whatever way they want to; it takes a little discretion to decide what makes the most sense.

The lists are always in flux, and that one looks like it's at least a little out of date -- most obviously, in book fandoms, we're going to need somebody to ride herd on Harry Potter, but there are a lot of other things that could use doing (for example, I don't see Pundit RPF on the assigned list, and that has a substantial number of stories now).

The coordinator says yes, we would love to have more help! So yeah, if you'd like to get involved, drop a note in the volunteer form! :3

[cypher]

...also the amazing thing is that you can *also* tag a fic with "evil!Bob" and the wrangler can make that a synonym for "Bob" -- it still shows up on your headers the way you typed it in, so your readers get that "evil!" cue, but the system knows it's the same character so it shows up in the filtered results.

POSSIBLY I AM TOO DELIGHTED WITH THIS SYSTEM.

[melannen]

Hmm, I'm not entirely sure I like that idea. If I want to filter for evil!Bob, would I still be able to? (And if I wanted to filter for not-evil!bob, because I'm sick of people always writing the evil version, would I be able to?)

I suppose it's left up to the tag wranglers to decide what does and doesn't count as the same character, but it seems like if the author took the trouble to distinguish between the two, I'd rather be able to use that information in search.

Of course, that opens up to people who will inevitably complain that Alan/Bob is different from Bob/Alan. :D

(I'm fairly active on LibraryThing, which also had a folksonomic system to let people mark tags as synonymous-- and the system's been disabled for over a year because nobody could agree on which tags were actually usefully synonymous; there were ongoing flamewars over whether "humour" vs. "humor" should be combined, and "sf" vs. "sci-fi", and "Alexandre Dumas" vs. "Alexandre Dumas pere", and you can't combine "romance" with "romance novel" because people might be using the pre-20th-century meaning of romance.

I do think it's a good idea to have it for character & pairing - and even things like pluralizing, in the freeform tags - but I really hope someone is emphasizing to the wranglers that we need to do the absolute *minimum* of combining, or it's all going to end in tears.)

[zvi]

Is it too long if you do all last names or First name + Initial?

[bessemerprocess]

Yup. I figure AO3 will figure out the best way to deal with OT4+ fics pairing tags eventually, and until then PRT and PRT+ will work just fine. (Though for Criminal Minds, I think I'll just tag most used name, because I think Hotch/Rossi/Prentiss will fit. Pornbattle has made me a completest where to comes to using the characters entire name.)

[stellar_dust]

OMG JOHN&ANDY.

I really liked the companion in PotD - I mean it did have a few issues, but overall it was a very fun episode and I will make you watch it over Thanksgiving!

Waters of Mars, on the other hand, is UBER DEPRESSING, but probably inevitable, however overall I think I would rather the depressingness had remained limited to fic and/or Torchwood. D: SIGH.

On the OTHER hand, have been watching some Three whilst entering Iceland data into FileMaker over the past week or so, so there's that. :D

[melannen]

QI is full of slashy British comedians! And yet I am completely incapable of fitting John&Andy in! And I don't know why!

Oh, Doctor Who, you are so depressing. And marry all your Companions, apparently :/ I have been watching some of the S4 and Sarah Jane episodes I'd missed so I could write Top Gear fic about them and Donna & Martha & Sarah Jane & co. continue to be win, however.

[stellar_dust]

Jo is pretty awesome too, even though the version of Eight she falls in love with is sort of a dick (but a very Doctor-ish dick). You need to finish your Handy fic, speaking of fic you need to finish!


.. and yeah, WoM is probably the darkest DW episode ever in its entire going-on-half-century, and imo steps over the line a bit for something that still tries to call itself a "kids show." Bah.


.. so did you guys ever talk about "humanistic geography" and the SPATIAL TURN in your geo classes?

[zana16]

Now I want to know what fandom you're yuletiding!

Also, smallish British fandoms? If you'd like to borrow my Professionals dvds, you absolutely can. 30 years of slash, is all I can say.

[melannen]

I want to tell you! But I can't. Not until next year. Is torment! My RL friends are going to get really sick of me talking to them about it, god. It's *almost* enough to tempt me to set up IM again.

I would totally borrow your Pros DVDs, if I thought there was any chance I would get around to watching them anytime soon, because pros is love!

But I seem to be unable to watch DVDs and videos; I only ever seem to watch stuff streaming (so I can watch on the spur of the moment, in youtube-sized chunks), on air (because I'll miss it if I don't watch right now) or torrented (because I have to delete it and make hard drive space). If I have it in some kind of physical form I just go "eh, I'll watch it later, I'll read one more fic instead", with the results that my to-watch videos pile is getting nearly as ludicrous as my to-read books pile.

[zana16]

I know what you mean -- I don't seem to watch anything until my harddrive starts getting dangerously low on gigs.

If you want downloads, I could point you in that direction. My evil plan is to hook lots of multi-fannish people on Pros, so that I don't feel like I'm the only one in the fandom!

(Actually, a few of them are into SPN, which I haven't seen, so I guess they're multi-fannish now...)

[lady_ganesh]

Jeeves & Wooster is complete and total WIN.

[melannen]

I have seen nothing of it, but Fry and Laurie are both so adorable *separately* that I quiver at merely imagining the adorableness that must result from them *together*.

Add Wodehouse on top of that, and ... ummmm.

[lady_ganesh]

It's goddamned brilliant. Rent A Bit of Fry & Laurie too. They are my BFF OTP.