yonmei

09:22 am: Seven Reasons Why Fanfic Is Like Gay Marriage
I like this:

1) A lot of people believe it is immoral and illegal--despite some forms of it being legal in some places, and having a history that goes back thousands of years.

2) A lot of the reactions are based not on rational or legal arguments, but personal squick--specifically, anti-sex squick, where the objector believes that any form of sexuality they don't like should be forbidden to everyone.

3) There's a long mainstream history of ignoring or denigrating both alternative-to-mainstream sexualities, and alternative-to-mainstream creativities: and strong connections between both.

4) Both inspire a common reaction of, "well, I suppose some people Do That Stuff, but do they need to be public about it? Why can't they just keep it to themselves and not inflict their weirdness/perversion on the rest of us?"

5) A serious, public interest in either can result in lost job opportunities and community ostracisation. It is common enough for people to argue in both instances "you're not actually being prosecuted - what more do you want?"

6) Some people reply to either with "well, you can want that, of course... but you should be able to control your impulse to act on those wants."

7) Most of the people getting outraged are not personally affected by either. In very basic terms, they are trying to control the behaviour of other people that has absolutely no effect on them. If you don't believe in gay marriage, don't marry someone of the same gender. And if you don't believe in fanfic, neither write it nor read it. A hefty helping of MYODB is now being served at the control-freak buffet. Please help yourself.

(Credit to elfwreck and aislingthebard, responding to a specific ranty-mcranty-pants post about the ingratitude of fanfic writers that they are not constantly being sued.)

Tags: i love fanfic, i write fanfic, join us on the outside, let's all be outcasts together, outcasts should stick together, write write write

06:36 pm: Things That Will Make Me Skip Over Your Story meme
Gacked from disc_sophist:

1. If I have already read a significant sampling of your stories, and know already that your writing bores me.

2. A lengthy author's note at the start of the story explaining/excusing/justifying the plot/the pairing/the lack of a beta/the challenge that inspired this story... Etc.

3. The story is formatted to make it very difficult or impossible to read. (The worst example of this was someone who colour-coded the dialogue in a Stargate story to avoid having to include the character names with the dialogue: instead you had to memorise a whole spectrum of colours.) Light text on dark background is one such formatting, but large quantities of images that are slow to load are another.

4. The first sentence or indeed the first paragraph includes any one of the following horrors: A POV switch; bad spelling; confusing grammar; horrendous mischaracterisation; attempted phonetic transcription of an actor/character's speech into AverageAmerican; any reference to elves or dragons, unless the story is LoTR; any reference to one or more of the actors from LoTR; the insertion of the author or a friend of the author's into the story; a yenta.

In particular, getting a whole number to itself: 5. Any of the nasty, mean, lonely, isolated, terrified, insane, murderous, ancient or just plain busy characters who I know and love going to pick out furniture, curtains, and/or wallpaper with their new itsy-bitsy cutesy-pie.

Tags: fannish snark, i love fanfic