TWiM, Issue 12: February 13, 2019

Feb. 13th, 2019 09:39 am
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[personal profile] alisx posted Consume, create, curate.: "Consumptive fandom, is primarily concerned with having “the most” of something. For example, “the most comics books”, “the most Lord of the Rings trivia”, “the most Supernatural convention attendances.”"

fluffysheap for Purple Row posted Fandom in the Time of Money: A rebuttal: "I guess I have a little issue with this notion of "exploiting" fandom. Exploiting implies a one-sided or unfair relationship which I don't think actually exists. The implication here is that owners are manipulating fans into siding with them, when in a fair relationship the fans would side more with the players. But I really don't think this is the case at all. Fans don't care about owners or players, they care about the sport itself."

[personal profile] smallredboy at [community profile] fan_flashworks posted House MD: Meta: On Autistic House & Stimming: "The concept of House as an autistic person is toyed with in the show, especially in season 3 episode 4 Lines in the Sand, but there it’s dismissed as ridiculous. I’d like to put that as the fact that men in their forties addicted to painkillers aren’t the poster child for our diagnosis, and so it’s easy to miss obvious signs on them— it’s the same case with woman-presenting people, because of sexism in psychiatry and the study of autism."

Ia Cabarle at RareJob Scribbles posted TV, Fandom, and Shipping: "I would be remiss to say that there is not a bit of schadenfreude on my part because of all this…straight-baiting, but the Elementary writers being adamant about Joan and Sherlock’s friendship opens up another avenue that is also rarely explored in media: platonic love between a man and a woman."

[personal profile] minim_calibre posted [Meta] The State of Fandom, as seen by me, reported by me, & experienced by me. Opinions are my own.: "Because there's nothing new under the sun, just different variations on the same old song."

Flashback - June 4, 2013

Adi Robertson for The Verge posted How Amazon's commercial fan fiction misses the point: "In May, Amazon announced Kindle Worlds, a fan fiction wing of its publishing program. In exchange for work written for three Warner Bros. shows, authors will receive between 20 and 35 percent of the revenue from each sale. Rather than existing in legal limbo, stories will be officially sanctioned by copyright holders. And it's one of the only ways for fan fiction authors to easily sell their work. But to some authors, Kindle Worlds is still a step backwards — an effort to monetize fan fiction while stripping out its best features."

More: Kindle Worlds entry on Fanlore.

[community profile] 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.

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006. January 29, 2019

Jan. 29th, 2019 08:16 am
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Am still playing a bit with the layout. Is everybody finding it readable enough? Easily perused? Etc.?

A selection of posts about fandom and money which have popped up lately:

The Daily Duranie posted It's a Lonely Burning Question: "The thing is, and I’m going to be brutally open about this – the “It” list of fans, you know the ones – they tend to be at most of the shows, they always seem to know where and when to be, and how to get places that normal, everyday fans don’t – aren’t really on our reader list."

Function podcast posted Fn 11: Social Media, 20 Years Ago: "Anil sits down with some of the pioneers of the social web — Bruce Ableson (founder of Open Diary), Lisa Phillips (former senior system administrator at LiveJournal), and Andrew Smales (founder of Diaryland) — for an oral history about social media 20 years ago." Includes a transcript.

[personal profile] kara_mckay posted about reblogging and DW culture: "When anyone can interact with any content anyone produces, issues of personal and public become murky. In the days of old, very few people would have thought it okay for someone to go out of their way to find another user's journal and then abuse them for their content. It's a little different when your journal isn't really a journal, and isn't really personal."

Peter Rubin for Wired posted Photo Gallery: Our Favorite Cosplay From NYC's Black Comic Book Festival: "And while the cosplay stretched across cultures—attendees came styled as Sailor Moon, Kayako Saeki from The Grudge, Coming to America's Prince Akeem, and all manner of superheros—Williams says that there was no mistaking how more inclusive storytelling has changed the feeling among fans."

thewickling (Pillowfort) posted Do BNFs still exist?: "Does the concept of BNFs still exist in fandom? What does it mean to be a BNF then? How has the concept shifted over the years?"

Flashback - July 24, 2004

This meta/fandom history post was written in the early days of LiveJournal. It covers a bunch of topics: the changes in fandom discussion, public vs. private, discussion and ownership, BNFs ("Quick: When did the BNF = bad!wrong!evol concept first evolve? Answer: At the same time as the ability to see how many Friends a person has."), moving from mailing lists to other fandom spaces and the changes inherent in that, and more. It's a very good look at early 2000s fandom, fandom on LiveJournal, and the changes that happened in fandom around that time.

[livejournal.com profile] sophia_helix posted three years, three months, and 1,188 entries later: "So here we are. What makes Livejournal so drastically different?

Well, for starters, there's that self-selection thing. No longer are we blocking that hated listmate, or scanning for messages from the people we really like -- we now have the capacity put all those people in one place."

[Linked with permission from Original Poster.]

[community profile] 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.

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005. January 27, 2019

Jan. 27th, 2019 09:17 am
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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.

[personal profile] 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."

[personal profile] 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."

[twitter.com profile] 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."

[tumblr.com profile] 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."

[personal profile] 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)."

[personal profile] 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."

[personal profile] 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."

[personal profile] 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?"

[community profile] 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.

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003. January 25, 2019

Jan. 25th, 2019 08:55 am
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[personal profile] thisweekmod

I seem to be averaging about 6-7 links per issue, plus the old school featured link. Hm. I WAS going to separate things out by topic, but if only one or two are on the same thing, it seems a little superfluous. Perhaps if I do a super-sized issue (10+) that would come in handy?

[community profile] 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.

New Stuff

alis (Mastodon) posted shipping as activism: "The growth of "shipping-as-activism" is a side-product of the mainstream popularization of liberal communist* rhetoric, discuss."

[personal profile] anneapocalypse posted A Ball of String: dreamwidth, tumblr, twitter, youtube, and a bag of chips.: "I have a lot of thoughts on this that I haven’t had time to hammer out into a post, but reading these posts, and most importantly the discussions in the comments, has been fascinating to me and I am learning a lot of things about dreamwidth culture, which, yes, already exists, and has existed this whole time, which I think is important for those of us just recently coming here to realize."

[tumblr.com profile] goldentruth813 posted a discussion about the meaning of BNF (Big Name Fan): "The term BNF really fell out of favor in the drarry squad around the decline of livejournal. I think this was a combination of the social norms of tumblr being different than livejourbal as a platform and a few other reasons which I have theories on but am not sure I really wanna share in depth right now."

More BNF info: Fanlore's Big Name Fan page.

[tumblr.com profile] icouldwritebooks posted Fandom exists because people bother to build it: "Then, one day, dumb fangirlish teenage me was making one of those “Purity Litmus Tests” (you know, the ones where the goal was to get a low score to show how “corrupted” you’d been by the thing?) for my geocities site, when I realized that all this fun I’d been having wouldn’t even exist if other fans weren’t out there creating stuff. I realized that when I created stuff, I was a part of that, and it was really cool."

[personal profile] muccamukk posted New Meta Newsletter, Signal Boosting, Linking, Dogpiling, and History: "On the other hand, there is a conflicting need: the need of people who are affected by something to express their opinion and their hurt, or to try to protect their space. I also think that is important part of fandom. And then there's just difference of opinion and people having actual discussions about them like goddamn adults. Which happens! And is also important."

[personal profile] sciatrix posted about whisperspace: the sorrow of my favorite absence: "But I haven't mentioned the thing I use the favorites for that makes me love them best of all: the ability to do the equivalent of smiling, nodding, and projecting thank you for saying that in a rough conversation, especially one where I'm concerned the other person thinks I'm angrier than I actually am."

[twitter.com profile] teawoodski posted about fandom community: "Been thinking a lot lately about differing approaches to fandom engagement; now that my favorite show's back from hiatus and we've all got fresh content to roll around in, it's hard not to notice I have an entirely different use pattern from most of my closest fandom friends"

Flashback - March 22, 2006

Older meta can be a valuable way to see how fandom has changed (or stayed the same) over time. Today's flashback meta:

[livejournal.com profile] hesychasm posted in lieu of life: "I've been here long enough to know that my fannishness is cyclical, but that it will always be part of my life. I haven't delved as deep as some, but fandom has definitely gotten its hooks into me."

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