This Week in Meta

Hello, happy Sunday, here's some links, and oh btw: we've passed 600 subscribers (+42 since the last issue).

\o/

akamine_chan posted signal boost: on fandom and the "culture of selling": "There's the fact that for a long time, selling of fanworks was a big no-no because we were trying to stay under the radar and not attract the attention of copyright holders. And the fact that for years, fannish endeavors were considered frivolous and valueless."

elle_em posted a discussion about embarrassing fanfic: "So tell me, what's the most embarrassing piece of fanfiction you will COURAGEOUSLY ADMIT to writing?? Come on, BE BRAVE LIKE THE TROOPS."

Elizabeth Minkel for Medium posted “You’re Gonna Love This Franchise:” Fandom, corporate media, and San Diego Comic-Con: "I have only known this corporate behemoth, and for me, the event in its current form is what it is: a specific shape, only growing outwards rather than truly abandoning any one of its components, a sort of massive snowball picking up more and more pop culture as it hurtles down the mountain."

freedom-of-fanfic posted Any idea why the MST virtually disappeared from fandom?: "While some fics that were MST’ed were written for the express purpose of being MST’ed, or submitted for MSTing, many were not, and the practice was incredibly cruel. You can imagine how horrible it would be to find your fic had been plagiarized by another author for the express purpose of making fun of how bad the fic was."

sciatrix posted what's sovereignty worth to me, anyway?: "I think, though, that I'm still uneasy, and I'm fundamentally uneasy because to me what I am hearing echoed from the various Fediverse/p2p/Mastodon schools of How Fandom Should Do Next is that the future of fandom should be decentralized and spread around many small communities, each maintained and monitored by a few moderators. Like a set of fiefdoms, but administered without hereditary rule, with mobile users who can transfer allegiances from one fiefdom to another quickly--at least in theory."

tammaiya for disgracetoscholars posted In the Weeds: Same-Sex Subtext in Mainstream Media (Part One) : "This feature is specifically examining quasi-canon subtextual/implied same-sex relationships in popular East Asian media, particularly in relation to (1) the reasons why creators often leave it to the audience to read between the lines rather than outright confirm, and (2) the signs that imply that kind of authorial intent."

Flashback - January 2001

This piece of meta was written before the prevalence of things like coffee shop AUs, but it's still great because it's not really about SPECIFIC AUs. Instead, really digs down deep into WHAT makes an AU interesting/successful/etc., and why some AU fanfics work better than others.

ratcreature posted How to construct Alternate Universes that work as fanfic: "There are AUs which change very little, say the profession of the main characters, and don't work as fanfic anymore, whereas there are others, which change the species of the same characters (and with it a whole lot of other things among those the profession) and succeed as fanfic, and are perfectly recognizable as such to everybody who knows the source. Why does this happen? Are these rare exceptions, only due to totally exceptional writing? I don't think so."

[Linked with permission from Original Poster.]

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