This Week in Meta

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."

smallredboy at 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."

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.

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.