This Week in Meta

Happy February! We're coming up on our second week in existence and are currently at 588 subscribers. Wow!

Thank you so much to everyone who's been submitting links and suggestions for the issues. Thank you also to the folks who've kindly let me link to them! I'm glad that everyone's been enjoying the newsletter and finding it useful. I'm having fun collecting and sharing links, and I look forward to sharing lots more.

GeekDad posted Toxic Fandom: When Criticism and Entitlement Go Too Far: "Like most people in fandom, I ship quite happily and I have yet to send a single death threat, because… well, sending threats of physical harm over a fictional relationship involving cartoon characters seems nonsensical to me (plus, it’s a crime in most jurisdictions)."

isozyme posted fannish currency and me, a Modest Name Fan : "setting aside the question of would removing kudos on AO3 lead to more comments (no, it would not), i'd like to talk about the value of my hit counter and my kudos number for me."

melannen posted Thoughts on canon het: "There’s a large cohort of people who think the only interesting story about romance is How They Got Together. In fanfic this works, because we can write How They Got Together 20 million times and it just gets deeper and richer with repetition, but when you’re trying to do this in a series with continuity, you either end up writing excruciatingly endless will-they-won’t-they, or repeated breakups and get-back-togethers that mostly just present a case for why they shouldn’t, or a bunch of romance-of-the-weeks that aren’t worth getting invested in, or the situation where they get together and the romance does, in fact, stop being interesting, because the writers think the interesting part is over."

Phil Plait for SyFy Wire posted Love what you love. Let others love what they love: "But it becomes a far more serious problem when these people want to declare that others shouldn't watch it because of that. That's called gatekeeping — they are standing in front of the only way in, stating None shall pass — and it's the antithesis of fandom."

olivermoss posted Post like it's the future: "tl:dr if this platform gets the momentum that I hope it will, the culture here will be something new, not a recreation of the days when I was using dial up to connect to Juno."

silveradept posted Expanded thoughts on the question of fandom, networks, and money: "Until things change structurally so that a person isn't forced to choose between what they love and what they need, people gotta do what they gotta do. If fandom requires a certain amount of privilege to participate, then only the privileged will be able to participate in fandom."

Flashback - 1984

Today's flashback offering was submitted by rosefox! It's different from previous flashbacks, as it's a whole book just about fanzines (history/background of zines: Fanlore).

Don West's book Fanzines in Theory and in Practice is available as a free download from the TransAtlantic Fan Fund. From the opening paragraph: "This is a book about fanzines. However, it has little to say about the mechanical details of fanzine production: the cutting of stencils, the layout of articles, the printing and so forth. The primary concern here is with the ideology of fanzines; not how but why they are produced and why certain approaches and strategies are more to be favoured than others."

thisweekmeta collects links of fandom meta and discussions from all over the web, and welcomes submissions from readers. If you know of an excellent fandom discussion post that we've missed, whether new or old, please feel free to leave a comment on this newest issue or email the editor.

The FAQ can be found here, and our editorial guidelines can be found here. Questions, concerns, and feedback are all welcomed.

Thank you all for your responses in the twm content poll! There's a lot of good discussion going on in the comments (as always), so please go check them out. If you'd rather PM me your thoughts instead, that's totally fine. You can also post anonymously if you're not comfortable attaching a username to your comment.

I'll leave the poll up through next weekend and then post the results.

For now, the next issue! We have a good mix of general meta, fandom-specific meta, and a con report-- which, although not strictly META, falls under the "fan experiences" part of the guidelines. I've always been interested in reading con reports, mostly because I don't get to go to nearly as many cons as I'd like, and when I DO go, I'm too nervous to really enjoy myself. Con reports offer a view into fen experiences off the internet, which is a nice change.

chaoticcliche posted Steven Universe and the Era of Hopepunk: "I feel like Steven Universe fits under the Hopepunk umbrella (Can we call it a genre? I feel like it would work better as a genre). Despite it's very punk themes of queerness, racial identity, gender identity, ability, otherness, and rebellion, it presents these things on a plate of sunlight and fluff. An important part of any balanced punk diet if you wanna survive out here, don't get me wrong, but nothing someone can sustain themselves on."

cassini posted Have a Healthy Wank: "honestly, my friends, my fellow soldiers on this front line of the bullshitstorm of existence, if your shipping is about 'goals', your personal hopes and dreams, some reflection of your emotional desires and ethics, if shipping is the way you learn about relationships, that's cool. it's sweet, fine, fuckin dandy. you do what makes you feel happy because everything sucks. but come on, don't make judgements on people who are doing their ships differently."

cuttimecomic posted on the difficulties of building fandoms for original works: "I see ppl bitter that their original characters don't get as much attention or exposure. That's because ppl can't connect to what they don't know. YOU have to create that base. Don't forget fandoms are born from someone else's persistence and dedication to their personal works."

portraitoftheoddity posted “This made me uncomfortable” =/= “this harmed me.”: "I’m gonna make the radical hot take here that discomfort can be good. Not all discomfort is harm."

rhodanum posted of fandoms and complete shitshows: "As someone who's been involved with fandoms for twenty years now, since the pre-LJ era, one of the most baffling and actively enraging developments in recent times has been the sharp rise of content-policing from within fandom itself, rather than something caused by the intervention of an outside entity (as was the case with the fundamentalist Christian group whose caterwauling kicked off Strikethrough)."

slipjig3 posted Arisia 2019 Wrap-Up: Still Too Tired to Come Up with a Witty Subtitle: "Another Arisia has come, and another Arisia has gone, huzzah, forsooth and yea verily. And since my foray into long-form blogging has returned, so have many of my old blogging traditions, including the annual Cleverly Formatted Arisia Wrap-Up post."

sylvaine posted Linking to fanworks, and meta specifically: "I always felt that meta, like any other fanwork, was free to link to (assuming unlocked post), but there's a lot of discussion in [community profile] thisweekmeta that suggests otherwise. And I can see why! Generally speaking, meta brings a lot more discussion and potential wank with it than fictional fanworks."

yvannairie posted Analysing negative feelings at their root must have some value: "So I know hating characters because they come "in the way" of your ship is bad, but I wish that was something we could at least talk about, you know?"

thisweekmeta collects links of fandom meta and discussions from all over the web, and welcomes submissions from readers. If you know of an excellent fandom discussion post that we've missed, whether new or old, please feel free to leave a comment on this newest issue or email the editor.

The FAQ can be found here, and our editorial guidelines can be found here. Questions, concerns, and feedback are all welcomed.