bossymarmalade | jimmy stewart as a puppet is just wrong

jimmy stewart as a puppet is just wrong

So, on the subject of Yuletide:

Now that my initial reaction of DO NOT WANT has had time to mellow and

dhobikikutti made this measured, thoughtful post about it, I am considering options.

I've been doing Yuletide since it started and look forward to it a lot every year. Many people do (three thousand, as I was told). But there's also a lot of brainstorming that people have been doing in terms of an alternative that I am loathe to just forget or shove at the Yuletide mods in the hope that they'd have the time/inclination to address it. It probably wouldn't even be do-able within the current structure of Yuletide and might not be of as much interest to them as it is to me. And since a lot of people have expressed interest in an alternative to Yuletide (or at least a different sort of rare fandom fic thing), I am gonna try to round them up and lay them out here to see what y'all think:

a) have East Asian sources built in from the foundations, so there's no need for outreach and there's people on-board who know about anime/manga/manwha etc. fandoms

b) don't have it in a holiday season or associate it with any particular religious/cultural observance

c) allow bigger fandoms under certain circumstances:
- the fic involves race/gender/other-bending of the characters in a meaningful way
- the fic is not about the "big" pairings/characters in the fandom
(Point C seems most likely to cause wank, but I am still really attached to the ideas)

d) structure it less as a one-to-one exchange and more like an angel tree

EDIT Nov 15: It seems most people aren't keen on the angel tree idea, so let's nix that for now.

If various people would like to help mod, right now I am considering a rotating challenge along a five-year schedule:
Year 1 - race/gender/other-bending
Year 2 - "less popular" characters & pairings
Year 3 - multimedia projects that include a significant art component
Year 4 - focus on non-Western & non-East Asian sources
Year 5 - books-only rarelit (nothing that has been made into a miniseries/movie/etc.)

What do y'all think? What suggestions have I missed? Which of these sound the most feasible and desirable? What ideas have been kicking around in your head that you'd want to see in a rare fandom fic exchange/challenge/thingy? What sort of coding or webspace would such a thing require? What are some of the things that put you off most about these ideas or fic challenges? Anything you wanna talk about, please feel free to comment; I can't promise I'll be able to answer or engage intelligently because there's lots I know shit-all about, but probably *somebody* will take up the thread, heh.

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I like those points, especially b) b/c then you could move it if it needed to moved for a given round. a) is A+!

c) is fab for reasons I do not need to point out! I don't even do Yuletide and c) would be one of the first rules I would want if thinking about such a fest.

With d), would participants be assigned a gift to fill or would they choose one to fill themselves? I read the comment and then went to the website but still am not clear on how it works in light of a fest.

If the former, get some good matchers on your mod team! If you know you can't match well, don't, you'll just make things hard for participants (i.e. I am a crap matcher and one of my co-mods handles that).

If the latter, there are pluses and minuses. The plus is the idea that participants are more likely to complete a gift if they choose their own assignment, the minus is that they don't like any of the assignments or that they don't like any of the ones available to them (someone else got it first). I don't have a personal opinion on this method and don't know what the success/failure rates are. Hopefully other mods have experience with it and can tell you!

Most important is not to do it alone and to have a solid mod team.

*NOMS ALLLLL OF THESE* :D

I was also wondering, since we've been talking about the fact that DW/LJ/etc. are merely subsets of fandom, if we could structure a challenge so that the gift roundup might be hosted on DW/LJ/[webspace of choice], but the individual works could be hosted on whatever platform the creator chooses, sort of like the Asian Women Carnival did? Of course that leaves the issue of how to coordinate things like announcements for assignments/betas/etc. (email? roundup webspace?), but, I dunno, it would sidestep (some of?) the coding part of things, and it would hopefully promote some more cross-platform fannish exchange.

Edited 2010-11-12 17:33 (UTC)

I'm still not quite sure what an angel tree is and how it's different from the typical 'claim the prompt that someone left in the comments' type of fest.

But I do like the idea you've outlined, and I especially support c. One thing I've always found :| about

yuletide is that I can usually barely meet the fandom offer minimum because I'm not very confident in my skills at writing a lot of the rarer sources requested. Plus I'm usually quite interested in the *insert attribute*-bending of more popular characters or really love rare ships in popular fandoms, so...3:

Likewise, I agree with this comment in its entirety.

Edited (I can't spell today.) 2010-11-12 18:31 (UTC)

I'm still not quite sure what an angel tree is and how it's different from the typical 'claim the prompt that someone left in the comments' type of fest.

As I understand it, an angel tree differs from a prompt-based meme in two ways:

1) Participants don't (have to) give prompts in order to receive their gifts; instead, they provide basic info regarding their favorite fandoms, genres, pairings, tropes, media (e.g. fic, art, vids, icons), etc.

2) Prompt-based memes often have an unspoken community standard that people will only receive one fill per prompt. This assumption is completely absent from angel tree exchanges, in which a participant might receive several gifts all based on the same request.

Ah, I see. Thank you for explaining!

Wandered in from a link by

glass_icarus, hope you don't mind.

RE: C, I would be all for the rarepairs! You have no idea how many times I've been all in favor of a rarepair in a fandom that got eaten up by the popular pairing.

Like someone else, I don't quite understand how the angel tree works. Everyone fills out surveys and people fill based off that or are assigned off that?

Reposted due to HTML fail.

Echoing people's confusion over (d), but I am enthusiastic about (a) and (b)! Also would be fine with seeing (c). ^^

I'd like to see an exchange (maybe a specific round?) focus specifically on the fandoms that don't get written for Yuletide (because one person who requests is the only person who offers /cough) or on the fandoms that don't get nominated (like how

wistfuljane's graph showed that there were very few sources nominated from Latin America & Africa). It might be interesting to have a non-Western & non-East Asian fandom exchange though participation may be harder to recruit for that.

Also, I said this elsewhere, but I know enough Python and Perl to write an automated matching algorithm if the number of participants makes it necessary and would be willing to volunteer.

I might possibly be interested (in doing this as well as Yuletide rather than instead of Yuletide) but I do have a few thoughts about C and D...

c) While I like the idea of race/gender/other bending in general, I'm rather concerned that allowing this in a rare fandom exchange would result in hundreds of alwaysagirl!Dean and alwaysagirl!Rodney fics (for example) when hundreds of such fics seem to exist already. There are some kinds of -bending that are just not rare.

d) I would probably not participate if there weren't one-to-one matching, because my fandoms are rare enough that I doubt anyone would fill my request without it.

Actually my fandoms are rare enough this year that they're a stretch even for Yuletide, with its thousands of writers, so doing something else might just not work for me, period.

Totally agreed with you on c) despite being a huge fan of girl!John Sheppard, girl!Harry Potter, etc.

I wonder if there can't be some way to only allow genderbending of characters who are rarely/never have been genderbended, whether it's the "always a girl/boy" variety, or writing the character as trans. To use Stargate examples, characters like Janet or Teal'c or Hammond or Zelenka. (I wouldn't even count Teyla or Ronon as "rare", since there are a handful of fics that genderbend them already.)

I'm not trans and claim no authority over the trans experience, but it seems problematic to me to equate trans identity (lived experience of actual people), always a X!fic (one fanfic trope dealing with cisgender issues) and genderbending/queering (a different fanfic trope potentially dealing with genderqueer issues, but sometimes being more speculative-fictiony than queer.)

No, you're right, I probably worded that badly. I wasn't trying to say that these are the same things--I only meant that I think it'd be good to allow people room to interpret characters as they saw fit, assuming the characters weren't already well represented in fandom (not "rare").

ETA: Fwiw, I personally think that a MtF Rodney, for example, would be considered "rare", whereas alwaysagirl!Rodney and "oops, Ancient device!" girl!Rodney are both already well represented in fandom.

Edited 2010-11-12 19:35 (UTC)

I'm excited about the possibilities here!

I really, really like the idea of b) & like others, do not understand d).

\o/

Would a two-level type thing work, whereby everyone is guaranteed *something* - perhaps through a claiming of prompts (take a prompt, leave one, maybe?) - but then the full list of the unclaimed is thrown open for additional giving?

I would like this kind of setup, with a guaranteed something for everyone who signs up but with as many extra somethings as people want to make. I'm afraid the angel tree structure would skew towards a lot of medium-sized fandoms, or large ones if the challenge includes c).

I'll probably still do Yuletide, because I have some deep and misplaced seed of loyalty that keeps me from abandoning things until they're Seriously FUBAR, and I keep convincing myself that Yuletide is not at that point yet.

I am also becoming more intrigued by the idea of another rare[stuff] fic exchange, especially this idea:

the fic involves race/gender/other-bending of the characters in a meaningful way

I like the idea of the products not just being for a rare fic/pairing, but having another defining quality to the challenge that really sets it apart from being a counter-Yuletide protest. It's also just a neat idea for a challenge :)

Oh yeah, the other suggestion that I've heard mooted (and found interesting) was a books-only rarelit exchange: nothing that has been made into a miniseries or movie or anything else. Which could work.

The "angel tree" strikes me as unnecessarily complicated/hard to work out. I did a fic exchange based on that once, and the result was very little fic.

What are the benefits of that system as opposed to the one-on-one exchange?

I really adore c) because God, that would finally allow for my femslash pairings to be written. (It's one of the few drawbacks of generally liking "big" shows; I generally don't complain too much, for obvious reasons.)

I would like the ability to ask for crossovers.

There's oodles of SGA fic, and there's oodles of SPN fic, but how many SPN-SGA stories are there?

This sounds interesting. I'd have to wait and see how many of the fandoms I knew--or if I knew any of them--before I committed.

Hello! I got here via metafandom but I assume outside opinions are useful.

Anyway: I already do

yuletart, but if it didn't clash would be really interested in a rare fandoms exchange that let me draw art/comics. If there's no art I can't participate, and since yuletart, while awesome, is mostly for big fandoms this always makes me a little sad.

If you really are just talking about fic my opinions are somewhat irrelevant (though I'd certainly read the fic happily!) but here they are anyway :)

a) YES

b) Yes. And then if you include art it won't clash with

yuletart :D

c) Personally I'm a bit iffy about gender bending in this context, it seems to mostly act as a way for people to write the same old characters and feel like they're being inclusive. I think race and trans-ness have more potential and are certainly less common, but...I don't know.

Rare pairings and characters I can see, though to me rare characters feels like it fulfills a similar function to rare fandoms, but rare pairings or crossovers using entirely popular characters doesn't. For me there's a significant difference between "characters noone writes about" (whether their overall fandom is popular or not) and "stories noone writes (whether the characters involved are popular or not)", and I personally would prefer them to be separate.

d) As a creator I MUCH prefer exchanges to comment memes etc: with comment memes etc I get self conscious that noone will like what I have to make, or that someone else will fill it better while I'm working on it, so I never make anything (I keep trying! But then my self consciousness always wins). I don't know how common such neuroses are though.

As a consumer I have unusual tastes (eg femslash) that could easily end up with my request being ignored in favour of more conventional requests. Afaict part of the way Yuletide often works is people sign up for stuff they've never written for before and then do some research/rewatching when they're assigned it. With an angel tree the temptation would be to stick to stuff that you've written for before or that you're more familiar with, which will benefit the "only kind of rare" fandoms and make people less likely to write for the REALLY rare ones.

Hi, I saw this linked somewhere, and would love to participate! Speaking as someone who doesn't ID as an anime/East Asian fan, but really wishes she had an actual hope in hell of finally getting Captain Tylor or Sally the Witch or Kingyo Used Books fic for yuletide.

I want to point out a problem with C; other people have mentioned the issues you might get with the first half of that, but you'd get related problems with the rare characters/rarepairs half: I can tell you that my experience the first yuletide was that I requested a rarepair and got an ensemble gen fic that had extremely background rarepair (I mean, I still liked my fic and enjoyed the fest, but I suspect that sort of thing is part of why yuletide dropped the rarepairs part.) You'd need to be able to enforce how much of the rare character/pair counted as "about" and I suspect that would be really difficult to do in a multifandom context.

ETA: Also, I would like to note that one thing I'd love is a rare fandoms fest that was for the English-speaking community but was limited to not-originally-English-language sources *only*.

Edited 2010-11-12 21:26 (UTC)

Also, I would like to note that one thing I'd love is a rare fandoms fest that was for the English-speaking community but was limited to not-originally-English-language sources *only*.

Ooh, I would love this too.

a rare fandoms fest that was for the English-speaking community but was limited to not-originally-English-language sources *only*.
I love this so much!

I don't even think it would be necessary or helpful to specify "for the Anglophone community". Not just because I'd love more work like

dhobikikutti's Promise of the पुरवाई, but also because "English only" is an unfortunate resonance.

N.b,

melannen, I'm riffing on your suggestion, not criticizing you, as I hope is obvious, but in case it's not - I'm not.

Oh, no, I wasn't thinking English-language-only as a requirement. But there *are* already not-in-English fests out there for non-Anglophone fandoms, and I'm afraid that if the sign-ups and instructions didn't at least have an option for monolingual Anglophones, I would still cheer it on, but I wouldn't be able to sign up, alas. :/ So the fest I personally would want would at least have one foot in the English-speaking part of fandom.

(TBH though, a no-English-allowed multifandom multilanguage fest aimed at raising visibility for all the non-monolingual-English-speakers in this part of fandom would also be awesome too.)

I would probably be interested! :D

I'm really not fond of D) because I love one-on-one exchanges, I love getting a prompt and knowing it has been sent to me in particular to write/draw for someone, but other than that, I would LOVE to participate in this!

I'm a yuletider, and will remain one this year, kerfluffles or no, but another exchange along these lines at a none holiday/end-of-the-year time sounds good to me!

a) Yes. I'm not into those fandoms, but excluding them, I know, excludes a lot of wonderful fen who get shut out too much of Anglo-dominated fandom spaces.

b) Yes. I agree that this also allows for greater flexibility in timing.

c) Yes, if the problems, e.g. SGA or SPN always-a-girl fic, can be ironed out. Also, I love that this is intersectional, more so than, say,

lgbtfest,

dark_agenda,

daysofawesome,

eid_ka_chand &c. could ever be alone. (Although, ftr, the Eid Ka Chand/Days of Awesome crossover this year was wonderful!)

d) I'm a bit iffy about this one -- I'd prefer that everybody gets something.

I couldn't do an challenge under those terms, sadly, but I totally support the concept. More challenges => more fan fiction => joy!

And point c is, yes, the one most likely to cause wank, but the points most likely to cause wank are the also the points most likely to make the fest work. (People only wank - in the fannish sense, I mean; this rule of course does not apply to masturbation - when they care about something. So, like, Yuletide - every year there's a bucketload of wank, discussion, complaints, and suggestions, because people care about it. And one of the points that gets extensive play is the smallness or bigness of fandoms, the determination thereof, the reasons fandoms are included or excluded, because what draws people to Yuletide is the rare fandoms aspect. People care about it, so there's wank.)

I will say, though, that to me c seems too scattered, and thus potentially hard to organize and draw people in for. Canon reclaiming and reshaping is a whole other bailiwick from rare fandoms and pairings, and it seems to me that you've got two challenges there, not one. (And I wholly support doing two challenges. Again, for me, this leads to nothing but joy.)

And, also, I beg of you - organize it sometime that ISN'T THE END OF THE YEAR. There are so many challenges and fests and exchanges that a lot of wonderful works get lost in the glut.

I love your points a) and b) and could probably be convinced of c) and d), and I'd like to add "e) allow participation from artists and vidders as well as writers."

I've always wanted to participate in Yuletide but felt left out because I'm not a writer; I love Yuletart, but it's missing the small-fandom focus and a lot of my fandoms are tiny. I don't like how there are separate exchanges for people working in different media. (And even when art is "allowed" in a lot of exchanges, they're still primarily structured around fic.)

All of the topic areas on your 5 year plan sound like productive and useful challenges, both for the people still participating in Yuletide and those that are becoming less attached to it.

Re. year 3 on your 5 year plan, I would luuuuuuuurve for someone to do a challenge that promoted the creation of multimedia-type fic. By multimedia (not sure that's quite the best term for it) I mean fic that experiments with form and/or with different images and manufactured ephemera built into the stories.

Ultimately, my ability to participate in challenges is severely limited by when their deadlines are, but I would love to try.

I really love the idea of a five year rotation and I love the categories you've picked. One thing ... I'd like to echo the idea that Year 3 be for multi-media projects, especially now that vidders have

festivids for our rare fandom exchange needs. Festivids is awesome, and a lot of vidders have really latched on to it (myself included!), and I know I would be less likely to sign up for a rare vid/art exchange because of it. But I don't think there's really an exchange out there for multimedia projects and I'd definitely be interested in signing up for one.

I have nothing to say other then I find this whole concept incredibly shiny just on its own merits, reaction to Yuletide* aside, sign me on up. Especially digging the idea of doing a challenge based on a multimedia story, fic or otherwise and the concept of being at some other point in the year.

I will note that a thing that normally comes up is in chat is a crossover exchange, but I THINK I could browbeat certain parts of #yuletide into that, because it would have to be an inherently different structure then any other challenge.

* spoilers: I love Yuletide's cycle, and have made good friends through it so I am still incredibly attached to it, despite all the stuff this year.

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jimmy stewart as a puppet is just wrong

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