fictional_fans | Entries tagged with discussion

TVtropes is a guilty pleasure site for me and recently I stumbled across a very interesting page about a trope they call "Just Here for Godzilla." Quoting the page for a moment to sum up what it is:

[Artists] want to make each new installment bigger and better than the last, adding in new stories and conventions, and just make it a lot more fun than the last title in a series. In short, development.
[...]
Many fans of anything watch movies, or play games, for exactly one reason (generally Rule of Fun) and one reason only. To them, your work has only one purpose: they're Just Here For Godzilla.

It's not meant to be a judgement on anyone who does this cuz I do it too and will continue to do so. Not to mention you CAN learn to understand and enjoy a thing for its deeper side, even if it's not what you originally went in there for. Hell the deeper stuff may be what gives it staying power in your life or becomes the main reason you like it so much.

I am wondering what media is this for you and what is the Godzilla equivalent there (eg. good music or cool outfits)? And what's the deeper meaning in the work? Are you still consuming it just for Godzilla or have you developed an appreciation for its layers now as well? (Also if you have multiple examples feel free to list as many or as little as you want).

Again none of this is meant to be an invitation to judge others and how they consume media, I just thought it was an interesting experience since I'm definitely someone who's discovered a lot of cool (and sometimes multifaceted) media because I originally was Just There For Godzilla.

My main example would be from the Godzilla franchise, funnily enough. I came for King Ghidorah and the cool kaiju combat, but I'm staying for the interesting symbolism (and still King Ghidorah lol).

g_uava

How much fic for your ship is romantic in nature? One defintion of romance could be development towards greater emotional and/or physical intimacy.

It seems a no-brainer for most shipfics to be romantic, but for a couple of my OTPs, it's far more common to encounter stories in which one of them grieves over the death of the other half than fics featuring them kissing/hugging/trading love confessions/other stereotypically romantic gesture. I dashed off some thoughts in a journal entry on why that might be the case and wondered about how romantic the fanworks are for other ships/fandoms.

mekare

A very interesting essay on the increased visibility of fandom spaces nowadays and the people who come into these spaces without knowing the culture.

ETA: Due to my ignorance of certain terms, be warned now that this essay uses (by accident or design I truly cannot tell) an offensive term that I was unaware of. It also tries to make a point about gatekeeping in the sense of keeping fanworks protected from people who want to make money of it, but conflates this issue with several others. See the comments below for more details. Also, if anyone knows of any other meta talking about these issues separately, please do let me know!

Essay by caelum-in-the-avatarverse

So I finally decided to archive-lock my fics on AO3 last night. I’ve been considering it since the AI scrape last year, but the tipping point was this whole lore.fm debacle, coupled with some thoughts I’ve been thinking regarding Fandom These Days in general and Fandom As A Community in particular. So I wanna explain why I waited so long, why I locked my stuff up now, and why I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m a-okay with making it harder for people to see my stories.[…]

Personally, I‘ve been waffling back and forth on this issue which is being complicated by me posting my art on several platforms. So, for now it is not possible to lock down my stuff completely without also sacrificing visibility in the spaces that are most suited to the display of fanart.

What are your thoughts on this? Either for your own works, or as a fellow fan wanting to read/look at other people‘s fanworks?

g_uava

What's the upper limit of fanworks you've created as a self-sustaining fan? That means relying on yourself primarily to sustain your own interest to complete your creative projects since your fandom/ship/favourite is so obscure that feedback and other fanworks to inspire you are hard to come by.

Also, would you have wished to have created more for the same unpopular fandom/ship, even if there remains few others who are just as invested?

( My answer below the cut )

mekare

It‘s the last day of the year (where I live), so have another poll! Feel free to discuss or add new questions in the comments. I know

snowflake_challenge will make me review my fannish year at some point, but why not start early, right?

Poll #30414 Fannish Year Wrap up Poll

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 119

View Respondents

Looking back on this year in fandom I was able to create…

View Answers

some fanworks I‘m happy with
70 (58.8%)

a lot of fanworks I‘m happy with
29 (24.4%)

no fanworks at all and I don‘t mind that fact
6 (5.0%)

no fanworks, but I wish I had been able to
6 (5.0%)

no fanworks, but I was cheerleader for other people's creations
6 (5.0%)

no fanworks, but I was a beta for other people's creations
1 (0.8%)

I started a/some fanwork/s, but for various reasons did not finish
42 (35.3%)

some fanworks, but I‘m not quite happy with them
11 (9.2%)

Other (elaborate in the comments)
0 (0.0%)

Looking back on 2023…

View Answers

I got wonderful comments on my fanworks
77 (67.0%)

I wish I had gotten more comments on some fanworks
48 (41.7%)

I left a lot of comments on other people's fanworks
27 (23.5%)

I left some comments on other people's fanworks
75 (65.2%)

I left no comments on other people's fanworks for various reasons
4 (3.5%)

I had a comment discussion under a fanwork with the creator of that work
19 (16.5%)

I had a comment discussion under a fanwork with other commenters
4 (3.5%)

I posted a lot of comments for non-fanwork entries (personal posts, discussion posts etc.)
33 (28.7%)

Other (elaborate in the comments)
2 (1.7%)

In 2023…

View Answers

I acquired a new fandom
36 (30.5%)

I acquired multiple new fandoms
33 (28.0%)

I posted about my new fandoms
42 (35.6%)

I participated in some new activites (e.g. an exchange you‘d never done before…)
41 (34.7%)

I participated in my old fandoms
80 (67.8%)

I posted about my old fandoms
61 (51.7%)

I created fanworks for my new fandoms
50 (42.4%)

I created fanworks for my old fandoms
89 (75.4%)

I fell in love with a new character
52 (44.1%)

I fell out of love with a character
7 (5.9%)

I left one of my fandoms behind for various reasons
14 (11.9%)

in general, I‘m a serial fandom person (one fandom at a time)
29 (24.6%)

in general, I‘m a multifandom person (several fandoms at the same time)
46 (39.0%)

in general, I hoard fandoms like a dragon and rarely let them go entirely
66 (55.9%)

jellyfishlover

Hello! I’m thinking about making a Vocaloid / Singing Synthesiser themed recommendations comm, but I've run into a problem with the name.

I’ve seen that Vocaloid is what’s typically used as an umbrella term for Voice Synthesisers with mascots, so I was thinking about naming it simply “VocaloidRecs,” but I also worry that using that in the name may seemingly exclude other programs. Singing Synthesiser is a bit opaque as to its meaning (and long, haha) and Vocal Synths seem to be a more technical term that applies to a lot of other things.

I was wondering if anyone has heard of or used a better term encompassing programs like Vocaloid / Utauloid / Synth V / etc.?

(Also, thank you

vriddy for reminding me I can ask these sort of things here! :D)

g_uava

How often do you review canon, either for creating fanworks or for other purposes, maybe just for the fun of it? How thorough is your review -- do you only watch the parts most relevant to your current project or go through everything all over again? Are there certain parts you review the most and do you keep a special note for them?

( My answer below the cut )

g_uava

How often do you catch up with friends from fandoms you or the both of you are no longer in, and what do you usually say when you reach out to them?

I've been thinking about what else to ask old fandom friends aside from updates on personal and fandom news, and what they're working on if they're fanwork creators. Also wondering if in anyone's experience, a brief online conversation is enough to sustain a connection in the case of having not as much to talk about with interests having diverged since the old days. A similar situation does sometimes happen in real life catch-up sessions but those feel more substantial when it happens over sharing a meal, as opposed to trading a few DMs.

mekare

Here at thebiballerina

Here are some notes I have on community-building. I am coming at this from the perspective of someone who has started online communities, moderated additional communities, and lead both new and established in-person community organizations. I hope someone finds this helpful!

[…] . I moderate multiple Discord servers, so I am not saying this because I have something against Discord. But I have seen a few Discord servers, especially very large ones, that I think would have been better off as forums, Dreamwidth communities, or using some other service or site. Or, perhaps, they would have been better off using Discord for only some community functions, and also having other "homes" online.

evilinsanemonkey

What It Is:

ficreadersadvisory Trope Scavenger Hunt Week 1: Fake Dating

How it Works: Look for fics that utilize the trope and give them a read, then return to the scavenger hunt post and comment with a link to the fic, a little bit about what it's about, and talk about what you thought of it - if you liked it, if you think the trope was well used within the fic, and anything else pertinent.

tei

Posted on my journal about this and then realized I could have just put it here for a wider audience-- I'm curious if there are ane corners of IRC still active in fandom and fandom-adjacent communities! Does anyone use it and have places they like to hang out?

fred_mouse

I'm looking for a community dedicated to meta* that I can post the occasional linkspam to, where I wouldn't be posting against the current rules. I did some poking around, which I documented in a post on my blog. fandom_meta looked promising, until I read the posting rules, and realised it is for posting links to one's personal meta posts. meta_warehouse might be suitable, but again, the focus is meta, not links.

Does anyone know of anything suitable? It doesn't have to be active -- I'm happy to just start posting into the void, and see what happens. At the very least, I'll have a record of the interesting things I found to go back and look at :)

* for those who haven't previously encountered the term, 'meta' here is used to refer to non-fiction fannish writing. There might be more specific definitions, but I like the broad brush inclusive option.

doranwen

I realized I had a question about how to organize recs and thought "where can I ask it?" Of course, the answer was "at fictional_fans". :)

If you're looking through a recs list for a fandom, one which is more than just a tiny handful of fics, how do you want to see the fics ordered? By the main ship(s)? By where it occurs in canon? Does it depend on what the canon is? (For instance, I could imagine fic recs for a TV show might be more useful organized by where each appears in the show, compared to those for a film.) Do you like to see both ways, depending on what you're looking for? (e.g. anything that features your favorite ship vs. fics set within the first season only because you've not seen the rest yet) (I presumed that within those two categorization methods, one would organize the fics by author and then title.)

See, I'd set up my master recs post by fandom, and the posts for each fandom large enough to get its own post (or more than one), I organized by ship. The biggest one (which required four separate posts to get them all in) being a series of movies where at least half the fics are shippy for a single pairing, I figured that made the most sense. But my fic database *does* let me tag fics for their position in canon (and I do that for each fic), so it's quite possible for me to set up posts organized by "times" such as "pre-film 1", "post-film 1", "during film 2", "AU", "distant past", "future", "multi", "indeterminate", etc. Whether I *should* do so or not was the question I could not answer, because I don't know whether people would want to browse fics that way.

Note that for a post organized by time in canon, all fics would also be marked with which major ships were present, they just wouldn't be *grouped* together by ship. The reverse would not be true, however - at least, I haven't marked times for individual fics in any post yet. I *could*, though. (Possibly relevant - of the other four fandoms which got their own posts, two are TV shows, one's a film, and one's a film and book combo where the two mediums were similar enough that I combined them into one post.)

So I welcome your input. (If you never read recs posts at all, I'd also be curious to know why.)

fleurviolette

Anyone here have a nerdy ship that you like?

For me, it’s Egon/Janine from Ghostbusters.

mekare

A LOT of participants wished for more fannish engagement and feelings of community in the wishlist challenge.

ysabetwordsmith wrote a constructive post in response collecting a lot of links to active communities and practical tips for engaging here on Dreamwidth. I also referred some of the participants to this community.

Find the post here

mekare

So, during the current

snowflake_challenge someone brought up the need for a community to support creative projects of all kinds. There are many writing-support communities and some of them seem to be pretty active, but as a fanartist those are obviously not for me. I don‘t know where podficcers, vidders, crafters, or fanmixers go for support. Maybe some fandom-specific communities already fill that need?
In larger challenges like Big Bangs or Yuletide there usually are support systems in journals or Discord while the challenge lasts. What I need is a place for my other projects which don‘t have a set deadline.

I found

letsgetshitdone and like that it focuses on accountability, but daily posting about a project is not realistic for me. My life is busy.

What would your ideal community look like? What should it do? How would you prefer to be supported? Do you already have a community like this that I don‘t know about?

ETA:

justcreate and

get_knitted were recced in the comments

arcanetrivia

Twice in the past month I have decided to consume a canon I was not previously familiar with simply to better understand a fanfic I was interested in for some other reason. E.g., I know fandom A and that's how I found the fic, but it's a crossover with fandom B, so I decided to consume canon B so I could have a better idea what the heck was going on / who the characters were / whatever.

How many times has this happened to you?

sabotabby

Hey lovely folks! This is a genuine "asking for a friend" research question. Said friend posted about this tweet. Our responses were both "damn, good for them" but also neither of us understand the appeal of Reylo. Obviously there is and people are into it, and absolutely no judgment or squee-harshing at all—this is absolute curiosity.

I'm not in SW fandom at all, though I've seen most of the movies, and am only aware that there is some fandom drama around the issue. So if you ship it or a ship with similar dynamics and feel comfortable talking about it—what's the appeal? What about it does it for you?

mekare

Since one of my favourite fics has just been updated after 8 years (and the current part is now finished) - what‘s the longest that you have ever waited for an update?

Btw, I love the AO3 subscription option for individual works for this reason because it lets me know, even if it‘s been years, as in this case. Part 1 was posted to an archive (not AO3 back then) in 2001 by the way.

ETA:

schneefink reminded me that I forgot to tell you which fic I‘m talking about. It‘s the Identical Series (Smallville fandom) which of now has 11 parts and about 300.000 words.

arcanetrivia

Yanno what I kinda miss? GQMF flail posts. I didn't know until I read that Fanlore article just now that

ontd_startrek is where they really became popular after the 2009 Star Trek reboot movie, although that is the main place I had associated them with anyway, but I remember particularly that there were Potter fandom posts of the type taking off on the Half-Blood Prince film also released in 2009, 'cause, well, just look at this GQMF (for example):

But of course people could and did apply the treatment to just about anyone and it was fun. Not that people don't still use the term GQMF on Tumblr (which is the main place I get fan content these days other than RSS feeds from AO3 and DeviantArt) but I guess I miss seeing the meme in full-blown form and not just a tag on a pic, or something?

I don't know if I really have a point here, just musing. Maybe I'm being nostalgic for when LJ still had that kind of energy.