"On Yuletide and Small Fandoms"

[browngirl]

yuletide signups are open! I won't be doing Yuletide this year, but I thought that in the current context I should be clear that this is entirely because I don't think I have the time and not because of any desire to distance myself from what I've found to be a joyful project or the nifty people who run it.

I was reminded by a discussion elsejournal that I hadn't signal-boosted this idea yet:
http://jadelennox.dreamwidth.org/393141.html Jadelennox proposes, for well-laid-out reasons, that participants might, "pledge to request and offer only fandoms below a certain size."

In the interest of 'fair and balanced' signalboosting: Bossymarmalade is holding a discussion for the creation of an alternative to Yuletide here: http://bossymarmalade.dreamwidth.org/509990.html .

And now, to stop posting and do something with my morning.

Comments

[ilthit.livejournal.com]

I read through bossymarmalade's suggestions, and go them if they can pull it off - it sounds like a lot of fine-tuning for each of those suggestions, especially in a multifandom challenge. I'm not dissing it, it sounds like good fun, but I can see complications for each of them - even the simplest one, which is book!canon, since, say, Red Dwarf (of course I was going to say Red Dwarf :D) has book canon that retells TV canon in a different way. Both have the playing-pool-with-planets scene, but the context is different and leads to an approximation of the events in "Marooned"... So if you write a "Marooned" fic and only change the background of the situation, does that count for book!canon? Gosh.

Would I be correct in assuming that the idea of having a separate challenge for a different conception of "small fandom" arises from people wanting to write alternative big-fandom fic like the stuff you might find on where_no_woman? It occurs to me that this could be achieved by just having a minor characters challenge. You'd need fine-tuning with that as well - what counts as a character, what counts as a minor character, how big a secondary role can major characters have - but it would let you write all the big fandom alt fic you like, with focus on the sort of characters who don't usually get the limelight. It would also automatically rule out the most popular pairings.

Though, I don't know if that would make people happy either, since people generally want to write about the main characters.

[ilthit.livejournal.com]

...I'm unpaid and I can't edit... I meant to say, "the stuff you might find on where_no_woman", but suffered code fail.