#which was like half the fanlore article

[linisiane]

What Kim Kitsuragi Tells Us About Fandom Ghost

I don't know if this has been said before, but I feel like another reason why Kim Kitsuragi is so wildly popular and beloved is how seamlessly he maps onto the trope of the Fanon Ghost.

Fanon Ghost is a concept that originated on Tumblr, by user wildehack, to describe the phenomenon of fandom elevating certain white male side characters from canon into main characters in fic, using a very specific set of characterization.

(Examples: wildehack focused on Star Wars' Hux's popularity in fic in comparison to characters like Finn/Poe, but others include Q from Craig!Bond verse, Arthur from Inception, Draco Malfoy, etc.)

From wildehack's defining essay:

"... prudish til you get him in bed, whereupon he is The Most Kinky, the charmingly repressed rage, the Love of Research and Order, the way lust/interest/affection is coded into irritation at The Neat and Tidy World being All Roughed Up by the hot mess of the other half of the ship?" "This crowdsourced tight-lipped furious perfectionist with his neat clothes and his scowling defensiveness and his biting sarcasm and his embarrassed desire to have a dude who is both sweaty and emotional take him apart."

Sound familiar?

Well, the terms may be a little different.

Where wildehack uses 'prudish,' 'biting sarcasm,' etc. to describe their fandom's fanon ghost, Disco fans might use 'professional,' 'dry wit,' etc. to describe Kim Kitsuragi.

But, the idea is the same, down to his embarrassing / sweaty / emotional partner. Kim Kitsuragi is Fanon Ghost if fanon ghost weren't a white male side character.

quick detour that'll become relevant later: i feel SO smug about the fact that Kim's characterization is canon to Disco Elysium. You had to make up your own perfect blorbo, but ours came like that! And he's not a white character being used to ignore POC main characters!

wildehack's essay started a conversation on why fandoms gravitate towards "This One Crowdsourced Dude," even when he doesn't exist in canon. And when there are other, often more established, minority main characters to work with.

There are a bunch of responses to this question—the FandomLore article I'm referencing this discussion from has a bunch of the full metas—ranging from exploring why he's often white and what exactly about him appeals to fandom. I think Kim's popularity can be really helpful in sorting my thoughts to these responses.

For instance, there are two general responses as to why the Fandom Ghost is usually a white side character:

Whiteness is considered a a blank slate default, making it easier to write about without fear of misrepresentation/mischaracterization

VS

White men are considered more desirable/more relatable by fandom.

It's probably a mix of the two, but I think a fascinating THIRD take is that these white side characters in canon aren't just blank slates, but also share minor traits that all point to One Trope that causes people to obsess.

certifiedspacetrash postulated that the fandom ghost is actually a reskinning of a much older beloved archetype—the byronic hero: a character notable for being hard to like and hard to know, but usually possessing a rich inner life and a softer side accessible only to a special few. (Sound familiar?)

He theorized that part of the reason we don't see many POC Fandom Ghosts is because mainstream medias don't cast byronic traits onto POC characters.

"I think if Hollywood cast more young, striking actors who happen to be PoC, women etc as villains / byronic heores we would see lots of fanfic of them. But Hollywood is still in some weirdass reaction to being accused of racial stereotyping (which they 100% still do), and almost refuse to cast poc or women as bad guys. If they are, they’re either cast very old; or they’re the mary sue badguys - 100% beautiful, geniuses, incredibly powerful, no flaws whatsoever - and that tends not to inspire a lot of writers."

I find this take fascinating with Disco Elysium in mind because of the way Kim Kitsuragi is the exception that proves the rule.

Kim Kitsuragi is a rare, well-written mixed Asian character with byronic traits. And would you look at that?—Kim Kitsuragi has captured the hearts and minds of basically every Disco Elysium enjoyer ever.

Kim Kitsuragi is notably NOT overshadowed by Jean Vicquemare, who is a white side character with byronic traits that, in an alternate universe, could've been possessed by the Fandom Ghost to overshadow Kim. Jean, in our universe, already has a pretty big fandom in proportion to his screentime.

But, by the grace of moments where Harry can get Kim to "give a smile only you can see," Kim Kitsuragi is the breakout star of Disco Elysium. I find that hopeful, in a time where Asian male characters (outside of Asia, ofc) are often overlooked or boxed in or emasculated.

[aurorasulphur]

First off, glad to see the DDDNE poll picking up speed in circles beyond my own.

Second, absolutely fascinated by the sheer variety of the nuanced explanations. (Idk what I expected, on this, the “my opinion is slightly different from everyone else’s” website.)

Third, I’m surprised and a little unsettled by the implied judgment in so many of the replies. Again, idk what I expected. Caveat that I’m both a linguist and a person from the USA, so sometimes my descriptivist training is at war with my stubborn “words mean SPECIFIC THINGS” mentality.

Fourth, all signs so far point to the fact that the broad misunderstanding that the primary purpose of the tag is “to indicate a lack of in-text moral condemnation” comes STRAIGHT from the first paragraph of the Fanlore article as it appeared from mid-2020 to literally this week. (When I bumped the info about the conflicting meanings up into the bit that shows above the infobox on mobile.) I feel Some Kind Of Way about that, as it underlines how seriously we should take our Fanlore edits, as well as how few people actually read the whole dang article.

Fourth and a half, I can only find TWO sources (tweets) from before the mid-2020 Fanlore edit that indicate the speaker believes the most important aspect of the DDDNE tag is that it deals with “problematic” or “morally questionable” topics without condemning them in-text.

Fifth, I completely understand why that Fanlore editor framed it that way (it is a rephrasing of Mostlyvalid’s original statement, after all) but seeing hundreds of tweets quote the statement verbatim without seeming to understand THE REST OF THE ARTICLE is alarming. And, imo, this phrase “morally reprehensible” has unintentionally contributed to the vitriol aimed at people who write fics tagged with DDDNE.

Sixth, the point, to me, is that the fic tagged with DDDNE may or may not explicitly address in-text the fact that its contents are (or could be considered) unpleasant, uncomfortable, disturbing, extreme, inappropriate, illegal, intense, “problematic”, immoral, or taboo. The tag serves as a piece of metadata to send up a flag (outside the context of the story itself) that the reader should carefully consider if they want to read a story where the contents (whatever they may be) might be presented as something other than what they would be in reality. It does not mean the fic DEFINITELY “glorifies violence” or “romanticizes necrophilia” or whatever phrase the kids are using these days. (Which is what the fanlore statement about “morally reprehensible” implies, imo.) All it means is that the fic might not have a flashing sign saying “hey this is bad”, so you-the-reader need to exercise your critical thinking skills and decide for yourself whether to read it at all, and whether the actions in the fic are something you should emulate in your daily life. Which, honestly, you should be using your critical thinking skills to assess this for every fic you read, regardless of the tags.

Finally, DDDNE is just the fic equivalent of the safety pop up on websites and applications saying “hey, did you really mean to do this? Are you fully aware of the consequences of sending this data packet to the server like this? Did you know you misspelled your own name? Are you sure you meant to type Wasingtn and not Washington? Do you understand what you are agreeing to? Did you read the tags so you know what to expect? You have unsaved changes, do you wish to exit without saving?”

By opening a fic tagged DDDNE, you are saying: “I, the reader, understand that this fic tagged X (a thing most people would not want to be jumpscared by) will contain X, and the treatment of X may or may not be subverted, glossed over, or otherwise toned down to a skippable cutscene. I agree that this is a thing I want to read.”

It’s hard to boil that down to a pithy statement that appears in the broad-strokes intro of a wiki article!!!!!!

[majorbaby]

lol i just wanted to know if u read heel or not but it is mostly meant for titilation not deep analysis so i see why u had that response to it. i would love to know more abt ur ddne potter ideas tho mash ao3 (not the fandom idc abt that) needs more of it tbh

ah, yeah, your question was pretty specific and my response not so much, i do tend to respond to asks that way.

and i'm about to do it right now:

cut for mentions of n/c

your question made me think about how 'ddne' is defined. fanlore article on the term has a few different definitions, but a quick search of the tag on ao3 reveals to me that i was applying a more theoretical definition than a practical one. so i don't know if this will still interest you or not, feel free to just move on if it doesn't.

the tags for this hypothetical fic of mine in order of significance would probably be: abuse of authority, sexual harassment, non-consensual touching, emotional/psychological abuse. i don't think this actually meets the threshold of ddne in practice.

what interests me is this idea of potter being repressed in the way people usually apply to BJ, because the show positions them as having wifeguy solidarity. in GFA there's even a scene where they commiserate over returning to their ho-hum marriages (my interpretation, not irrefutable fact)

in the beejhawk interpretation of this "everything changed when BJ met Hawkeye" - so that but with Potter, whose interest is piqued by Hawkeye's flirtatiousness, his emotional openness and his prioritizing of human connection over personal differences (I think this is more evident in the latter half of the show, which sees Hawkeye make in my opinion, several concessions in order to accommodate the people in his life - Margaret, Potter, BJ, Charles), and yeah, his 'unserious' or 'immature' nature that might make him appear to a predator as an easy target.

the gay awakening thing usually works out happily beejhawk but if you put Potter in BJ's shoes, I think it's much more evident how parasitic a relationship it can be - not because of the gay awakening itself, but because of how Hawkeye gives, and BJ/Potter/others take. tbf, there's no power imbalance with BJ and Hawkeye like there is for Potter and Hawkeye (this is even a problem with Potter and Hawkeye's "friendship" on the show) there's arguably some more Hawkeye could do to remove himself from a bad situation with a colleague than a bad situation with his boss, if we're imagining that this is a bad situation.

but i'd be interested in exploring more of how it's impossible for Hawkeye to escape, and how no one seems to notice, and the people who do notice either 1) recognize that it's wrong but are unwilling to help 2) recognize that it's wrong but can't do anything to help, or could face dire consequences if they try to help. i think this is a good metaphor for the draft in general - an infringement upon bodily autonomy by an entity with such power and influence that their actions are practically justified by the state.

[elfwreck]

The #1 problem with fanlore is not enough editors.

This means some areas are over-developed compared to others, and there are huge gaps in coverage, which makes it look like those other areas aren't wanted - see, if The Sentinel has such amazing coverage and Batfamily has basically nothing, that must mean they don't want Batfamily memes, tropes, history of fanworks, zines, meta articles, etc, right?

No. What it means is, the small handful of people involved at the beginning, were Sentinel fans, and grabbed a lot of meta and links and such from the areas of fandom they knew.

...And they structured the categories and articles to showcase those areas. And when those structures didn't work well for some entirely different fandoms, it winds up looking like those fandoms aren't wanted.

The fix for that is "300 new editors with a wide range of interests" - just ADD STUFF and let the gardeners & other staff sort out new categories and new page structures and new infoboxes and so on.

Simple, right? (Not easy. But simple.)

Unfortunately, that's not the only problem, just the biggest ones.

Other problems include:

Wiki structural decisions made early on by people who didn't understand how other wikis work, so regular wiki editors try to contribute and get stuck with rules violations or just run into walls because the structure they need isn't there.

Private fiefdoms, as mentioned--and "need new editors" runs into this--because when there's 1-3 people working in a fandom area and they're the only ones who touch it, they wind up thinking they basically own it. And if they get touchy about it, the wiki staff is stuck choosing between "tell them to stop and risk losing the only contributors on the topic" or "let them control their zone even if it doesn't quite fit into the rest of the rules."

Tinhats and people with An Agenda: the more editors we get, the more of these will show up - people who delete entire ship pages, people who remove a ship section from a fandom's page, people who add several paragraphs insisting that their ship of choice is absolutely canon, people who remove the "controversy" section from the history of a fannish community, people who insist "that was YEARS ago and nobody is interested in it now; just let it die" before blanking half the page.

(Edits like these are all reversible. But they're annoying, and new editors who run into one of them can get spooked by the weird drama.)

People who don't realize that Fanlore is to track fannish activity & history, not canon - or who technically know that but don't understand how it works.

...and, as mentioned, we've had issues with people wanting Fanlore to be more formal, more academic, only record "the important stuff," and who want to discourage "low value, low content" articles.

And it doesn't matter how many times I say NO WE WANT IT ALL; MAKE TEN THOUSANDS STUBS THAT ARE 50 WORDS EACH THAT IS FINE; WE CAN ALWAYS ADD STRUCTURE BUT WE DON'T KNOW THE CONTENT...

My voice is small and whisper campaigns carry a lot farther.

But.

We do want it all. We want short pages. Make many edits. If you're shy about making "official" edits, leave comments in the Talk page with notes like "hey there was a big controversy about [topic] sometime in summer of 2021; it was all over Twitter and Insta; I don't have details but [actor name] showed up in a lot of memes."

...we can research & add details later. Or clean up the phrasing on that and add it to the main page. Gardeners are good at editing info about topics they barely know exist. But they need someone to leave the starting seeds.

and we kinda can't fix the structural and policy problems until we have more editors and more content, because otherwise we just wind up fixing toward the biases that are already there.

Plz help edit Fanlore. Wikis are supposed to be collaborative projects, and a lot of us involved really want it to be that way.

I really fear I might be unleashing a storm of wank here, but out of curiosity, why does everyone I know who knows of the Fanlore wiki tell me it's nothing worth trying to edit things or create pages there? Everyone seems to have a very burnt-out, I-don't-want-to-get-into-it vibe when it comes up, so I assume there's some underlying issues I'm unaware of. However, it's hard to figure out what that is when people don't give any details beyond "it sucks, don't interact with it".

--

It hasn't really gained the critical mass of editors necessary to make wiki work fun, IME. That can be an issue even if other things are fixed.

Some areas of fandom far from what OTW early adopters cared about are barely fleshed out at all, which can be intimidating if you aren't the kind of person who likes writing a whole article yourself. (I had to write the entire scanlation article at one point, for example.)

It has some areas where somebody wants to set up their little fiefdom and is a mega nitpicker about any edit, which is a common Wikipedia disease too but can be very shocking and offputting if you aren't used to fighting with dickheads on wikis.

And it has had many, many bad calls on the part of the people running it that have made it suck worse to work on. Some of those sound like they've improved over time. Some have gotten worse.

A few times, deeply misguided idiots (sorry, yes, I do mean you, friend who did this), have called for it to be more ~academic~ and have tried to police ~low quality~ contributions...

These are not people who have any real experience with functioning wiki cultures very clearly, and they should be ashamed of themselves for the chilling effect their bad takes had on Fanlore's struggling attempts to build an actual community of editors.

--

Of course, some people are just Big Mad that other fans have noticed them and choose to discuss them without running every phrase past them first and/or that some bully's bullying behavior is documented and not swept under the rug.

A lot of people are really shit at understanding what PPOV (plural point of view) means and want Fanlore to either be only Objective Truth instead of an account of fandom social things or want it to only tell their own side of some wank.

[romanceismycallingcard]

I got curious about the origin of the fandom term "slash," so I googled it. Like I knew why it was called slash, but I wanted to know more, you know? I also wanted to know why it's only used for homosexual relationships and never heterosexual. But anyway.

I found this article on fanlore wiki.

And I just love everything about this paragraph 😂

From the "you may be looking for the 2016 film"

To "slash can also be a verb" and I'm like well yeah. Duh. But "to slash is to create a slash fanwork." .. Makes sense.

And then "OR to interpret the chemistry between a pairing as HOMOEROTIC" so intense. But like. I gotchu. Bc that's accurate.

And then just tucked in there at the end: "the adjective form is slashy" 🤣🤣🤣 that's the most fandom thing I've ever heard.

And then there's

Which in itself is just interesting but I FREAKING LOVE that this originated because of Star Trek of all things!!

And the article continues, and it's pretty interesting actually! If you like history of pop culture and/or fandom things, you might want to check it out! I read maybe half the article myself.

[elvashayam]

first of all, please know that this is not a call-out post. i'm not vagueblogging anyone. furthermore, i'm not telling anyone how they "should" interact with fandom; i'm definitely not saying anyone's bad or bigoted. this is just an observation.

i've noticed a pattern in fandom where slashficcers will set out to write femslash or non-slash-focussed fics but almost immediately pivot back to slashfic. there's a whole bunch of authors i like (ficcers and irl published) who either start writing or say they're going to write, like, femslash or a-spec protagonists, and then a) write a small thing and nothing else, b) write something that's pretty obviously half-hearted (eg not up to their usual standard), or c) just......don't.

i think we need to talk about it.

much as we hate it, fandom's as prone to centring cis men and cis maleness as the rest of society. (check out the Fanlore articles on Migratory Slash Fandom¹ and Two White Guys² for a couple of examples.) in this case, i think it means that fannish folk (myself included!!!) unconsciously spend much more of our time developing the cis male characters than we do anyone else, which in turn means we struggle far more to create fanworks about non-cis, non-male characters.

it makes sense, like on a biological level - while our brains are highly malleable³, they prefer the path of least resistance when effort is required⁴ ⁵. so because we've been socially conditioned to prioritise cis men and their experiences, even the most progressive among us will unconsciously prefer cis male characters.

(the same thing explains why fandom falls to amatonormativity⁶ ⁷ and generally fails to write about aro characters without coupling them up.)

now, as i said, this is not a callout post. instead, i just want to encourage all fannish types to really evaluate our attention - are we unintentionally reinforcing social norms and contributing to marginalisation? i know i've had to do some serious rethinking. let's make fandom more diverse!

---------

i had wanted to say more (i haven't even touched on race or ableism), but i've run out of time. please, if you want to add to this, try to keep it value-judgment-free - we all have biases to address and shaming people for things they've never had to consider is the opposite of helpful.

references:

Migratory Slash Fandom (https://fanlore.org/wiki/Migratory_Slash_Fandom)

Two White Guys (https://fanlore.org/wiki/Two_White_Guys)

What is brain plasticity and why is it so important? (https://theconversation.com/what-is-brain-plasticity-and-why-is-it-so-important-55967)

Perceptual decisions are biased by the cost to act (https://elifesciences.org/articles/18422)

Perceptual decision confidence is sensitive to forgone physical effort expenditure (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104525)

Why American Culture Is So Obsessed With Romantic Love -- Science of Us (https://www.thecut.com/2017/03/amatonormativity-everybody-should-be-coupled-up.html)

Amatonormativity – Elizabeth Brake (https://elizabethbrake.com/amatonormativity/)

[gascon-en-exil]

How do you feel about your name being in fanlore? That said, I dislike Hubert x Edelgard but I can't say that it's unpopular. It's not as big as Edelgard x lords and some other lgbt ships like with Dorothea but it has one of the biggest followings of her fanbase. An unpopular ship would be, dunno, Edelgard x Hanneman, Linhardt or Caspar. That said, it's funny how the people that write those articles show their bias.

It’s nice to be recognized, although I do find it odd that I’m being referenced for Edelbert and not for a pairing I actually ship. All I’ve said in the past is that Hubert -> Edelgard is canon and that Ferdibert ideally should engage with that, and not reduce Hubert and Edelgard to platonic gay besties when the unrequited love angle makes Hubert’s romance with Ferdinand - someone who more or less wants to be Edelgard pre-timeskip - all the more interesting. (Edelgard being mislabeled as a lesbian by fandom is another issue all its own, but one I don’t have much stake in.)

It is true that Edelbert is a reasonably popular pairing, easily Edelgard’s most popular M/F option that isn’t Byleth (and maybe not even him?), but going by Tumblr/Twitter and AO3 it’s dwarfed by Ferdibert which itself is second to Sylvix in terms of M/M content. The absence of those two ships is quite telling...and the presence of Ashe/Yuri of all things is just bizarre. I just checked on AO3 and that pairing is sitting at 113 fics right now, about half of Edelbert’s total and a fifth of Dimidue’s, itself considered a less popular ship relative to some of Dimitri’s other options.

[ajollyyarn]

Mellon Chronicles binding project update & call for help

Oh how prettily they do pile up, don’t they? That is all 35 volumes, there, swaddled in their covering fabrics and labeled for reference.

If you’re asking 35 volumes of what? that’s The Mellon Chronicles, by Cassia and Siobhan (ao3 archive, fanlore article). There will actually be 36 volumes when I’m done, with a slim box at the end encasing a flash drive and microSD card, archiving the media files that were on the website. More on this later.

Every book that reaches over one signature - which is just over half of them, actually - has already been bound into a book block, with its endbands.

The next step for the books well be dyeing all of this fabric, which has become an ambitious project... that I’m going to keep under wraps in case it fails and I have to change my plan. I’ve now tested part of that process, and so it will hopefully happen within the next month or two. Ideally with documentation along the way, but I only have two hands. After that, the fabric will be turned into bookcloth, and each piece will be carefully embroidered to indicate the book it belongs to. At which point the book will finally be cased in; the larger books given boards and the slimmest given a saddle-stitch binding.

Obviously, this is a long-term project for me. I’ve now been working on it for over two years, and it’s been a wonderful journey. I’ve been in contact with one of the authors! I got to give them copies of one of the books! I’ve learned new skills, met other Mellon Chronicles fans, injured myself, and really strengthened those hand muscles and sleuthing techniques.

tl;dr, I was asking for help, right?

Yes! I need help! When you’re piecing together data from a website on the Wayback Machine, some things fall through the cracks. The Mellon Chronicles website is in amazing archival shape, thanks to its many loving fans. Much better than some of the sites I’ve been looking at. And being able to reach out to people who were actually there has been a god-send, to be honest. But there are still things I’m missing.

I lack a mere THREE of their trailers that did not get archived onto the Wayback Machine, one way or another. They’re the trailers for Black Breath, Stars of Harad, & Between Darkness and Dawn.

Priceless Treasure and Dark Visions also didn’t make it to the WM, but I currently believe the copies on youtube are the ones from the website. I would be grateful for any confirmation either way on this.

Audiobook-wise, with many, many thanks to the person behind MC Audio, I have 23 stories. This is probably all of them, but if you have some I would love to check your list against mine.

I’m also missing three of the music videos; Hit Me With Your Best Shot and Sweet, Sweet Victory by Trinity, and Incomplete by Rhonda. If you’ve got those. I realize this one especially is possibly is a very long shot.

Please send me an ask or message if you have any leads for me. These posts always feel like a long shot, but then I look at the stuff that I’ve kept over the years, and cross my fingers.

—

This is a one-time vanity printing done for my own library, with permission from the authors, and will not be repeated past the copies made for the authors, gratis.

—

Want to see me make more work like this? So do I!

tip jar & etsy

(I take commissions!)

[seenashwrite]

Again! Sorry for another question, and I hope this doesn't bother you... But I was wondering what a one-shot word count average is? I usually end up doing about 1000 - 1500 words as I get caught up in my writing hehe, but is that too long? Should I stick to around 500 or so? Hope this doesn't bother you too much!

Oh Spookster, you are not a bother in the least. I am glad you ask. Because I - and please, everyone sit down to hear this - did not know the complete deets on these by-word-count categorizations off the top of my head. I have a ballpark idea, of course, but still I tasked the interns with doing a lil’ digging.

Ah - while I’ve got ya - the interns [we’ll call them “Sham” and “Green”, the former who professed proficiency at research & the latter who appears to not know how to collate it at all] clarified some word vomit & added a point on Beta Readers which was left out in the answer to your first query. Moving on.

Let us take this moment to ask the fanfic writers of Tumblr their thoughts/what they were taught/what they’ve seen because TL;DR: there isn’t a formal, organized, academic-type fanfic-based collective with enough of a population of experts [and there would need to be criteria for what that means] for peer review and the like, ergo there cannot be any substantive consensus.  ��

WHEN authors label/categorize their work on word count around here, these are the ones *I* have personally seen + what the “sources” below have claimed -  

Drabble = 100 [some say “Exactly 100!” & to that Nash says “Suck it!”] 

One-Shot = N/A [it’s one-and-done, length is irrelevant]

Multi-Part = N/A [length of each chapter irrelevant; know your audience’s attention span, cater to that]

Series = N/A [reasoning same as above]

Poem/Poetry = N/A [reasoning same as above]

Big Bang = a minimum is given by organizers; may be 20K, may be 50K, point is it’s the… um…. biggest

Prose = ya got me, because “prose” is just “story”, it’s not some special sub-type [”the ordinary form of spoken or written language, without metrical structure, as distinguished from poetry or verse”. And, PS? A secondary take can also be “dull, ordinary, commonplace, plain”, even “tedious”. I’d hesitate to call something of mine “prose” unless it had a qualifier like “melodic prose” or “poetic prose” or something] 

This was a nutters hunt, right up there with crazed insects & sperm-donor poor-excuse-for-amazon daughters & the like. And you’re talking to a deep-diving, source ‘em if you got ‘em, just-the-facts-ma’am research hound. If it’s to be found, I can more often than not sniff it out. 

My nose might have gotten bent on this one. 

First things first: in the field of academia to which I am accustomed, anything at the five-year mark is pushing it, anything beyond that should likely stick to referring to it in a study/article/etc. as a “here’s what we knew then” sort of thing, in order to set the scene for the current hypotheses/results/etc. That’s why I include the dates when able, just FYI.

⦁ Trickster.org - “symposium article” from 2006 - “When Size Matters: Story Terminology as Determined by Word Count” 

Opener: “Drabbles are a bit of a hot topic, and I’ve run across a few debates started by people who don’t like them. Now, this is nothing unusual in fandom, there seems to be at least one person who doesn’t like any given thing, and I usually just shrug my shoulders and move on. The problem with the drabble debates, however, lies in how people are defining drabbles.” 

[Nash Note: Seems to be a transcript of a speech, but it was a horrific, rambling eyesore, I’d never recommend anyone go through it, and the fact that this person was considered expert enough to give commentary on the topic of writing is bone-chilling disturbing. I am not exaggerating this, it is one of the most poorly-conveyed run-downs of what current standings/thoughts are in a given field that I’ve ever come upon. I hope there were some kickin’ visual aids.]

C&Ping the main points that were stated with some sort of conviction:

A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words 

“It’s debatable as to whether or not the title is included but the limit itself is not debatable” 

“the common definition I’ve seen allows for one to fifteen extra words for the title ”

[Nash note: in various spots, they then proceed to tell about how these things *are* debatable in the fanfic community - much as they noted right off in the intro. Which is the topic. Fanfiction. Not “pro-lit”. Which should’ve been there just for touch-and-move-on comparative purposes. Not the bulk of the talk. Which it was.]

A drabble and a half is exactly 150 words

A double drabble is 200 words, and anything over that really stops being a drabble, but in fandom, any story in increments of 50 words is often still referred to as some permutation of drabble, i.e. double drabble and a half, triple drabble, triple drabble and a half, quad-drabble, etc. 

Even in fandom, however, the key is that your word count is exactly on that 50 word increment mark, otherwise you are not writing a drabble of any kind

“In the pro-lit[erary] world…”:  [just knock me out now]

any story under 500 words is flash fiction. 

fic under 500 words that is not exactly 100 words, the term you want is flash fiction. Or even flashfic, or minute fic, or sudden fic, postcard fic, fast fic, quick fic, and a few others. 

none of those alternatives are drabble.

over 500 words, but under 1000, is generally known as a short short. 

Some magazines and anthologies actually use short short and flash fiction interchangeably, because of space constraints

1000 and over, up to 17500, is a short story

“So, just to review….”  [sigh]

100 words = drabble

500 words and under = flash fiction

500-1000 words = short short

1000-15000 words = short story

17500 = novella/novelette

40000 = novel

vignette = nothing to do with word count; typically under 1000 words; the significant thing is theme - meant to give illumination - one character or the relationship between two or more characters; typically don’t involve a lot of action; some have limited dialogue

[Nash co-signs “vignette” definition]

⦁ Save the Drabble - 2005/6

This one has 2 sources and one of them is the person above - the other is another LJ community. This is a circle-jerk. No new info given. We move on.

⦁ Fanlore

This is a hodge-podge that made my eye twitch a bit, but at least they have more info and background on the terms.

They re-hash the “drabble debate” of it having to be precisely 100 words.

They are the first that brought up another term I see around T-Town which is Big Bang 

“A Big Bang is a specific type of challenge usually involving long fics and accompanying artwork.This type of challenge is a reprise of the old zine tradition of collaboration between artists and writers for internet fandoms.” 

They note that back in ‘zine land it was a minimum of 50K, then in another place they say “the consensus” went to a minimum of 20K

[Nash Note: I gotta eschew my formatting, I’ve met my allotted time for this answer, as more peeps lie in wait for their Dear Nash to be addressed! I linked the blogbelow the other day because It. Is. Fantastic. This is what I was able to find for fanfic related terminology on lengths, threw in a couple other goodies, too - go over there and see if you have better luck pulling up with other search terms, entirely possible I wasn’t hitting the nail on the head with mine]

Writing Questions Answered - Tumblr

One result for “drabble”:

http://writing-questions-answered.tumblr.com/search/drabble

Doesn’t talk about length

One result for “one-shot”:

http://writing-questions-answered.tumblr.com/post/45179836171/fan-fiction-how-to-write-a-one-shot-fanfic

“A one-shot fanfic is a standalone story that is one chapter long and focuses on a single situation or event, usually from just one character’s point-of-view. There is no official length for a one-shot, but typically they are between 1,000 and 8,000 words long.” 

Length in general in the published world:

http://writing-questions-answered.tumblr.com/post/108997534333/advice-short-chapters-not-sure-about-word-count

Target length depends on what you’re writing:

Short Story - 1k - 7500 k

Novella - 20k - 50k

Novel-

Middle Grade 25k - 40k

Young Adult 45k - 80k

New Adult: 60k - 85k

Adult 65k - 120k

….and reinforces that nobody should or really does [in the pro world] care about chapter lengths - depends on what’s going on in the chapter. Nash side note on this? Know your audience. The younger they get, the less attention span - not that they can’t or won’t knock out a big book in the long-run, but you don’t want them to grow frustrated along the way, possibly checking out or worse, stopping altogether.  

Talks more about standards for professional lengths:

http://writing-questions-answered.tumblr.com/post/62254683880/advice-story-feels-rushed

Really good piece on “nevers” and “always” when it comes to “dos” and “don'ts”.

http://writing-questions-answered.tumblr.com/post/147225002823/a-quick-psa-about-writing-rules

I agree. And for me, there’s certainly lots of good advice out there, you’ll find some of it is objectively true, but on the other hand, it may be worth trying your hand at various things to see what (a) sticks with your target audience, and (b) speaks to your personal style. 

Plus - in my experience - there’s some “nevers” that I suspect got popular due to propagation by people who just don’t do whatever it is terribly well. [shrugs]

Chuckspeed, my friend. So sayeth the Nash, so say we all.

[femslashrevolution]

Femslash History and Me

This post is part of Femslash Revolution’s I Am Femslash series, sharing voices of F/F creators from all walks of life. The views represented within are those of the author only.

I’d already been in femslash fandom for years before I thought about learning more about femslash history.

I started out in fandom with a het ship - Star Trek: Voyager’s Janeway and Chakotay - and I only really discovered femslash because of Minerva McGonagall. I was obsessed with her, and I was determined to find fic that featured her prominently. So much of what I discovered was femslash, and not only that, it was good femslash. The stories being told were full of rich, complex relationships between women, and incredibly encouraging to me, in my early twenties and not yet out as queer even to myself.

After that I found Doctor Who femslash - a magical playground of possibilities where half the fun was getting two women to actually meet - and then I looped back around to my roots and relaunched into Star Trek fandom, this time fully aware of the scope for connections between women in its detailed and sprawling universe.

So I’d been in femslash fandom, mostly in those three fandoms but dabbling all over the place in corners both large and small, for maybe a decade when a friend said: “So, I know that slash fandom began with Kirk/Spock, but how did femslash fandom get started?”

And I had to admit that I was stumped.

I confessed to my friend that I didn’t have a clue, that I knew almost nothing about the history of femslash beyond a handful of things about Xena fandom and my own hazy memories. I realised that I’ absorbed a lot of dudeslash knowledge by fannish osmosis, but that hadn’t happened in the same way with femslash. On the way home that afternoon I decided that I was going to find out everything I could.

Information was out there, but it was hard to find, scattered across the internet, not gathered in any one place. I opened about a million tabs, following dead links and googling names and titles. I started putting some of what I’d found into the Femslash article on Fanlore. I asked around, got fannish acquaintances to share their own memories. My wife effortlessly reeled off a list of about twenty popular femslash pairings from the late 1990s and early 2000s. A friend of a friend on Twitter shared a huge archive of old femslash vids. There was so much to learn and discover.

Since then I’ve been doing research on this topic whenever I get a chance, and here are a few things I’ve found out:

  The first extant femslash fic that we can date for definite, which has recognisable characters and which is undeniably classable as femslash, is a Star Trek fic called Kismet, published in 1977. It’s a Chapel/Uhura story that explores their feelings about carrying on a hidden relationship.

The first modern-day fandom to be dominated by a femslash pairing was Cagney and Lacey, a (wonderful!) show about two women cops that ran from 1981-1988. The show had a large, enthusiastic and creative following among women, particularly queer women, many of whom shipped Cagney and Lacey.

Plenty of fandoms had femslash contingents before the femslash explosion that was the Xena fandom - not just Star Trek but Blake’s 7, The X-Files, Forever Knight and Babylon 5.

The Xena fandom and its concept that Xena and Gabrielle would remain soulmates through multiple reincarnations played a huge role in popularising the setting-change AUs that are ubiquitous in fandom today.

Femslash vidding probably got started sometime in the late 1990s - the arrival of digital vidding coincided with the ascent of a few key femslash pairings to create an explosion of vidding creativity in femslash circles.

Femslash, as a community and as a body of fannish literature and art, is growing, thriving, and more popular and varied now than it’s ever been.

Maybe all of this was common knowledge and I just managed to miss out, but I don’t think so. I was part of a panel on the history of femslash at a convention last summer and the room was full, the mood excited. People asked a lot of questions. I know there are some folks who knew a lot of this already, but there are also people like me who are eager to learn.

I’m still trying to figure out ways to find more information about the early days of femslash - details are especially sparse when you get back to the 1970s and 1980s. Someday I’d like to have the time and the resources to really delve into investigating it, but for now I’m trying to increase my knowledge in smaller ways. I find what zines I can, I read the work of fannish historians, and I’ve just started a collaborative femslash timeline in Google Docs that anyone can contribute to. Whatever your place in the femslash community, you’re welcome to come and share your memories of fandoms and pairings both big and small!

About the Author:

These days I write mostly Star Trek femslash and femgen, which can be found on my AO3 here. My Femslash Timeline Google Doc is here.

[destielfanfic]

Hey there. I’ve noticed a lot of your recommendations are AU’s. I love those don’t get me wrong, but do you have anything non-AU? Preferably a non-established relationship. And also caught up with the show. (Season 11-12)

Another Ask: Do you know any fics that aren’t au’s, (idk how to explain I’m sorry) but like of normal dean and Castiel in the show.

Ok, we have no idea what is happening here and why there’s such confusion about what kind of fics our blog recs. We are pretty sure you are looking for canon verse fics, fics that are set in supernatural universe just like on the show, fics about hunters Dean and Sam, and angel Cas. Fics that constitute almost half of the reviews on this blog.

The first ask came late January when the top post on our blog was Castiel’s POV: Canon Verse fic rec list. The second came last week, when literally our last 4 reviews have been canon verse fics. Even if you don’t bother to read our reviews or look at the tags, the first line of each summary points to some canon event. 

Like, do people not check what is on the blog before sending asks? Or not read all the info around ask box or the many guides linked on sidebar? Or never open Tags Page to see what’s there? Or scroll through at least couple of pages on the blog to get the feeling of stuff we rec?

Or is there a deeper confusion about what is a non-AU destiel fic? Looking through Fanlore articles about this issue, it seems that terms “Canon” and  “AU” have a lot of interpretations that are used differently in different fandoms - Canon, Canon Complaint,  Canon AU, Canon Divergence AU, Alternate Universe. But we don’t think that’s the case with these asks?

If you checked out all articles and came out more confused, sorry about that! Below the cut is a break down about terms we use to categorize destiel fics on this blog. 

Each fic review on this blog is tagged with AU or SU, or sometimes both tags. Submitted recs are tagged with sr: au or sr: su. 

Alternate Universe (AU) tag is used for all fics where Dean and Cas are NOT like on the show - just ordinary humans (kids, high school, college, office, coffee shop, law enforcement, criminals, etc), superheroes, creatures, angels with corporeal wings, demons with tails, chickens, merpeople, omega verse, werewolves, witches & familiars, all crossover fics.

Supernatural Universe (SU) tag is used for canon like fics that are about hunters Dean and Sam, and angel/ fallen Castiel. When possible, we add season tags to our posts. Fics that use elements from Canon AU episodes (end verse, djinn, Dean Smith) will be tagged with SU tag if the fic is closer to canon than AU. For example, Dean Smith fic that takes in a universe manipulated by Zachariah will be tagged with SU tag, but Dean Smith fic with hippy Cas will have AU tag.  

SU tag is our main tag for all fics with canon material.  We DO NOT distinguish with separate tags between Canon AU, Canon-divergent and Canon-complaint (see this post where we talk more about it).

Coda is a tag we use for fics that are a direct follow up to some significant canon event or written after the episode. These would be the closest to canon fics. But even post episode coda fic could be called canon divergent if they have Dean and Cas smooching (but you still have to watch next episode/season where they’re not smooching at all). Supernatural is an open canon fandom which means that every canon fic can be jossed, and coda/ post finale fics will be jossed most definitely (hello, Toni Bewell!!)

Supernatural AU (Super AU) tag is used in conjuncture with AU tag or SU tag to show that the world building in the story is infused more with supernatural than AU or SU tags would suggest. See also Supernatural AU Reference post.

Some fics are tagged with both, SU tag and AU tag which means that some canon elements are really strong but also AU stuff happens.

Supernatural fanfic writershave an amazing imagination and are endlessly blending together all possible story elements. Every story is unique and, sometimes, very hard to describe with only couple of tags. That’s why, on this blog, we try to keep things simple and use tags as broader terms. 

This got rather long and complicated. In short, every time when we get an ask about non-AU fics, we are going to assume that you just wanted good old canon verse fic - hunters, angels, demons, bunker, apocalypse, the works.  If you want something different, please be more specific! Otherwise our answer will always be - but did you took a look at our reviews [click on Filter out ask responses button to get reviews only] and Tags Page? Did you, really?

/Like guys, we try, we really do. Destielfanfic is one of the rare still active rec blogs that regularly rec canon verse fics. Why are we getting asks that make it look that the only useful feature on our blog is ask box?/

[olderthannetfic]

(same Fanlore anon, sorry)…also, Fanlore says a user page is like a profile page???? Like, okay, fine, but also, what. I cannot comphrehend what they are doing. I'm also taken aback by PPOV. I'm definitely more on Wiki's side. Fanlore's example for PPOV: "For example, when it comes to the article on Slash, we do not believe it is possible (or valuable) to make a statement such as "fans write slash in order to objectify male bodies" (1/2)

--

Dunno where the second half of this went.

If you're talking about the actual userpages that all wikis have, yes, those are one's own page, like a profile/info page on LJ or DW. This is part of the wiki format. Here's what my own looks like on Wikipedia, for example.

The user fills it out themselves. On many wikis, people use them to list what projects they're working on on the wiki, what languages they speak, what their areas of expertise are, etc. The talk page of that userpage becomes a place to leave direct but public messages coordinating wiki activities. Mine on Wikipedia has people thanking me for work, complaining about edits they thought were bad, discussing restructuring pages in ways that require getting community consensus, etc.

Fanlore user pages tend to have fannish bios on the page and nothing on the talk page because Fanlore isn't as active, but these talk pages are a valuable tool for collaboration on a wiki.

Plenty of fans also have a regular Fanlore article that is not their userpage if they're a well-known fan or if someone just decided to make one. I think most fans would be better off not reading their own, let alone editing it. Your impact on history is for other people to decide.

For a Fanlore example, here's the regular article about Cesperanza. Here is her user page.

--

By "Wiki's side", do you mean Wikipedia? If so, I'll just tell you now that people calling Wikipedia "Wiki" is even more of a pet peeve of mine than people calling fanfiction.net "Fanfiction" and for the same reasons.

(Yes, before anyone asks, people do actually refer to FFN as "Fanfiction", as in: "I can't remember whether I read it on AO3 or Fanfiction".)

--

PPOV is a confusing policy if you aren't used to it. I think some people who also aren't familiar with Wikipedia and the like think it means you can't correct misinformation.

My view is that it is absolutely fine to delete "This Japanese word means ___" if it's incorrect and replace it with something accurate.

The PPOV part is that when someone has posted "Many fans hate a/b/o because ___", instead of deleting that, you add counterpoints from fans who like a/b/o or fans who see the specific anti-a/b/o argument as spurious. I also think it's fine to tone down a "most fans think" to a "some fans think" along with adding counterarguments.

It's less "There are no right or wrong answers! Everyone is always equally correct!" and more "Here's a list of things people think or remember, plenty of which will contradict each other".

The basic problem Fanlore faces is that Wikipedia-style notability requirements are typically used to remove content about niche subcultures and about the sorts of people and things who don't make the news or don't make the right news in the right languages in the right countries.

PPOV is attempting to solicit more oral history type information but without just letting the first person who gets to the article decide what reality is for the rest of us forever.

[olderthannetfic]

Tumblr etiquette, comments, reblogs

darkness-befriended replied to your post “AO3 comments, feedback wank”

My god, if I known my comment to @olderthannetfic​ would germinate such amazing conversation I would not have buried it in the comment section ah! I am very illiterate in Tumblr etiquette but have a world to say about this so I'm reblogging with that very soon. Thank you all for sharing so many generative thoughts!!

@darkness-befriended​ LOL. Welcome to TL;DR LAND aka my tumblr. Honestly, I think “tumblr etiquette” is very much in favor of burying things in comments.

A lot of tumblr etiquette is all about being self-effacing and ephemeral. It’s somewhere between tall poppy syndrome and thinking that our content is inconsequential.

And I do get the impulse to hide in tag commentary and comments. The problem is that tumblr is a cesspit of bad coding and dumb site design. Reblogs each have an actual URL. You can tell which reblog someone else’s reblog is responding to because it’s right there in their post. With xkit, it’s easy to force a real timestamp onto these posts, no matter what kind of dumb blog theme the person has. You can also link to multiple URLs that are different parts of the conversation, whether that’s in a tumblr post where you’re responding to two threads at once or in a Fanlore article where you want to cite some fan’s words.

Comments aren’t attached to the specific part of the reblog chain they’re on. You can kind of tell by seeing where they fall, but that’s only visible in the mobile app or in some online views. It’s not easy to immediately see. Sometimes, you think someone was going “LOL no” to the OP when they were really responding to a “OP is wrong!” reblog or vice versa. No bueno.

(My personal objection is largely that I always manage to try to type a comment in the app and then click away somehow, deleting the whole thing by accident. Gaaaah! With a reblog, this happens to me less. Also, the reblog button is easier for me to find on the web interface.)

According to a lot of oldschool LJ people, Tumblr “killed meta” or at least meta discussion. One used to be able to have these elaborate comment threads on a LJ meta post. Often the comment essays had more content than the original post. That’s “impossible” on tumblr--or so say those people.

Personally, I found that intense meta discussion was perfectly easy on tumblr once I gave up caring if I spammed other people’s dashes with 500 versions of the same long-ass post.

I rarely use a readmore on tumblr because tumblr’s broken site design means that content is often hidden and unreachable. If the OP deletes, the rest of it is in reblogs, but not the readmore part. If the OP gets zapped by tumblr and marked nsfw, their blog only opens in that sidebar view thing, and you can’t click the readmore. I guess it’s still viewable in the phone app in that latter case...? But still: SUPER BROKEN.

So I’m spammy now. And I have great discussions now. And I have like 40x more followers now, even though tumblr overall is less active. Sweet, sweet validation!

DW does still have a better format for this kind of thing, but Tumblr isn’t any worse than an old email mailing list, and fandom made those work for years.

So what I learned was: Fuck tumblr etiquette!

I try to be nice to people; I’m not against that kind of etiquette. But a lot of received wisdom about how “tumblr fandom” operates is unhelpful. If this is the crappy interface we’ve chosen to hang out on, we should use its features in whatever way helps us have the fandom discussions we want to have. It’s not like there was ever only one standard for how to use tumblr anyway.

Half the “rules” are from 2011 and are being repeated by people who weren’t even here then!

[elvashayam]

this is truly hilarious

I posted 11,840 times in 2021

28 posts created (0%)

11812 posts reblogged (100%)

For every post I created, I reblogged 421.9 posts.

I added 41 tags in 2021

#undescribed - 9 posts

#adhd - 5 posts

#lmao - 4 posts

#youtube - 4 posts

#this is beautiful - 4 posts

#the witcher - 3 posts

#ableism - 3 posts

#long post - 3 posts

#actually autistic - 3 posts

#supernatural metafandom - 3 posts

Longest Tag: 136 characters

#while some patient is having the most traumatic experience ever and like i’m like hey we don’t care if you’re fucking please be a doctor

My Top Posts in 2021

#5

time to temporarily remove supernatural from my blacklists

2 notes • Posted 2021-06-27 11:54:23 GMT

#4

dearest cis allies: you know i love you. just. please. don't blindly reblog discourse from trans accounts. if they're aggressive in the notes to well-meaning questions or other trans people who disagree then just ignore them, i beg you. sometimes trans people are trolls and they deserve as much of a platform as cis trolls.

choosing not to reblog a trans person's posts won't take your allyship card away!!! just block them and move on!!

5 notes • Posted 2021-09-01 05:04:11 GMT

#3

first of all, please know that this is not a call-out post. i'm not vagueblogging anyone. furthermore, i'm not telling anyone how they "should" interact with fandom; i'm definitely not saying anyone's bad or bigoted. this is just an observation.

i've noticed a pattern in fandom where slashficcers will set out to write femslash or non-slash-focussed fics but almost immediately pivot back to slashfic. there's a whole bunch of authors i like (ficcers and irl published) who either start writing or say they're going to write, like, femslash or a-spec protagonists, and then a) write a small thing and nothing else, b) write something that's pretty obviously half-hearted (eg not up to their usual standard), or c) just......don't.

i think we need to talk about it.

much as we hate it, fandom's as prone to centring cis men and cis maleness as the rest of society. (check out the Fanlore articles on Migratory Slash Fandom¹ and Two White Guys² for a couple of examples.) in this case, i think it means that fannish folk (myself included!!!) unconsciously spend much more of our time developing the cis male characters than we do anyone else, which in turn means we struggle far more to create fanworks about non-cis, non-male characters.

it makes sense, like on a biological level - while our brains are highly malleable³, they prefer the path of least resistance when effort is required⁴ ⁵. so because we've been socially conditioned to prioritise cis men and their experiences, even the most progressive among us will unconsciously prefer cis male characters.

(the same thing explains why fandom falls to amatonormativity⁶ ⁷ and generally fails to write about aro characters without coupling them up.)

now, as i said, this is not a callout post. instead, i just want to encourage all fannish types to really evaluate our attention - are we unintentionally reinforcing social norms and contributing to marginalisation? i know i've had to do some serious rethinking. let's make fandom more diverse!

---------

i had wanted to say more (i haven't even touched on race or ableism), but i've run out of time. please, if you want to add to this, try to keep it value-judgment-free - we all have biases to address and shaming people for things they've never had to consider is the opposite of helpful.

references:

Migratory Slash Fandom (https://fanlore.org/wiki/Migratory_Slash_Fandom)

Two White Guys (https://fanlore.org/wiki/Two_White_Guys)

What is brain plasticity and why is it so important? (https://theconversation.com/what-is-brain-plasticity-and-why-is-it-so-important-55967)

Perceptual decisions are biased by the cost to act (https://elifesciences.org/articles/18422)

Perceptual decision confidence is sensitive to forgone physical effort expenditure (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104525)

Why American Culture Is So Obsessed With Romantic Love -- Science of Us (https://www.thecut.com/2017/03/amatonormativity-everybody-should-be-coupled-up.html)

Amatonormativity – Elizabeth Brake (https://elizabethbrake.com/amatonormativity/)

7 notes • Posted 2021-06-07 05:48:08 GMT

#2

before you write that snarky post aimed at young folk, please please pause and think:

when i was a teenager, how did i feel when adults were sarcastic at me?

brutal honesty is only effective in close irl relationships, with mutual trust and respect. sarcasm is appropriate for discussions among peers, not aimed at people who are genuinely ignorant. what's the point of being correct if it alienates the very people who need to hear it most?

kindness is PARAMOUNT. be honest, but be gentle in your honesty: if you wouldn't speak that way to someone you admire, then don't do so to strangers.

15 notes • Posted 2021-11-16 07:35:09 GMT

#1

dearest followers, please know that i get sweet sweet serotonin every time you reblog stuff (especially if you add commentary/notes)

46 notes • Posted 2021-04-19 13:28:04 GMT

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