This Week in Meta

Happy Sunday! I'm trying really hard to stick to the tentative posting schedule, which at the moment is Sundays, Wednesdays, and the occasional Friday.

Thank you to everyone who suggested links over the last few issues! I'm particularly thankful for links of off-Dreamwidth meta. I haven't been finding as much new stuff on Tumblr/Pillowfort/etc., suprisingly; if you happen to run into anything good, please send it along for possible inclusion in a future issue. ♥

cimorene posted Rivers of London: shipping in canon and fanon (the role of fan favorites): "This fandom seems like a perfect example to me of that situation where people like the woman in a f/m relationship - I'd bet that probably everybody who ships the protagonist with Nightingale instead (or in addition but not in OT3, as in... will read both/either) likes her - but are more interested in the other ship because of (1) interest in the other character (and a desire to put that character in a pairing) and (2) screentime and story weight devoted to the relationship."

Claire Rousseau (Youtube) posted Hugo Awards Nominations 101 - Who, What & How Can You Nominate?: "Time for a deep dive into the hugo Awards nomination process!!"

jadislefeu posted On setting up Calibre for fanfic: "was asked on Discord for a tutorial about using Calibre for fanfic in general! Please feel welcome to share or link this wherever, because it was more work than I realized it would be when I started and I want it to be useful to people."

lovetincture posted The Ethics of Monetizing Fanworks: "Leaving aside legality, because I think that’s already been discussed by people who are much, much smarter than I am, my primary concern about the monetization of fanworks is ethics."

naye posted Guardian meta-meta: Censorship and Homosexuality in China: "However, given the political situation in the People's Republic of China, every interview touching on sensitive subjects (and homosexuality is absolutely a sensitive subject) must out of necessity come with an aspect of performance, as there are things you absolutely cannot say. My thoughts on that kind of spiralled out of control, and so here's a long meta (meta-meta?) about Guardian, censorship and homosexuality in the PRC."

nostalgia posted It's A Topic ("You wore your soldier-hat!"): "I come at this mostly from Dr Whom fandom, which has been monetising fandom in one way or another since at least the 90s. (It use to be fairly easy to find old bits of fic by NA/EDA/BF writers online, and some of it's probably still there.) I once got into a fight on Outpost Gallifrey because I called the tie-in books "published fanfic" and one of the authors assumed I meant "they're shit, because all fanfic is shit.""

Rowan Ellis (Youtube) posted The Evolution Of Queerbaiting: From Queercoding to Queercatching: "From The Hays Code to the new phenomenon of "queercatching" - here is the history of queerbaiting. Including all your favourite like every Disney villain ever, Destiel, Valkyrie, Johnlock, Sterek, Le Fou, Sulu, the Yellow Power Ranger, and more!"

Flashback - April 1, 2015

A nostalgic look at LiveJournal:

Lindsay Gates-Markel for The Toast posted In Celebration of Old-School LiveJournal: "I can’t shake the memory that writing was easy in the LiveJournal days; I remember sitting at that computer desk in my childhood home, writing about my innermost joys, and pausing at the keyboard, my fingers poised over the keys. I shut my eyes and waited, knowing the next words would come soon—and they always did. Whether they came only because I believed they would, or vice versa, I still don’t know. But in the same way I knew the words would come, I knew that life would always be good to me, that its riches would always be clear to me; or at least that I could be “poet enough” to seek them out."

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.

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.

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:

• Original post by cesperanza (linked previously)): Money and Networks.
• Response by fairestcat (linked previously): On Fandom and the "culture of selling".
• More discussion: arduinna; goss; niqaeli; oursin.
• More historical context of fandom and money: Fanlore: Fandom and Profit.
• Know of more links? (Maybe your own?) Drop 'em in the comments.

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.

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.

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.]

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.

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?

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."

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."

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.

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."

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."

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."

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:

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."