YKINMK

Jan. 17th, 2012 03:18 pm
schmevil: (graffiti)
Your Kink Is Not My Kink, is, for those of you who haven't seen the acronym before, the guiding principle of kinkmeme coexistence. It's how feeder kink can be in the same meme as underage, noncon, bestiality, and tickling. YKINMK is invoked in cases of kink shaming. So you don't like foot fetish? Refrain from kink shaming and scroll on by -- YKINMK and that's ok.

Question: have people truly bought into it, or is YKINMK just the price of doing business? Or put differently, does YKINMK conceal mutual disgust and tension, thereby making it possible for people with dissimilar tastes to get along? Or does YKINMK represent now common actual fannish* attitudes to each others' kinks?


*At least as far as kinkmemes go.


BTW, I don't really want to get into the SPN Blindfold thing right now. I'll just end up throwing things. Please don't.
schmevil: (ruby)
[livejournal.com profile] trobadora (via [personal profile] etrangere):

A week ago I made a grumbly flocked post about the lack of interaction on LJ these days - comment levels, lack of meta, lack of sprawling discussions ... and it turned into a very busy post indeed. Seems I'm not alone missing the meta, and [livejournal.com profile] metafandom as a way to get the word out to the larger fannish community. In the comments, [livejournal.com profile] sholio and I did some brainstorming for what could be done about this situation, and here's what we came up with:

The Meta Month of March

Basically, we want to have a proper meta fest in March. It's very simple:

  • Beginnng mid-February, we'd ask people to sign up for posting meta – either general meta or fandom-specific meta - during the month of March.

  • In March, on your designated date you'd post your meta or a link to it in the fest community on LJ and/or on DW, and we’d all descend upon your post to enjoy and discuss. :)

  • Additional meta you didn't sign up with would of course be very welcome, including follow-ups to previous discussions.


  • There's a poll. Go click.
    schmevil: (jean)
    Time for a blog carnival for women and girls who write about comics!

    Women Write About Comics
    From the FAQ:

    What’s this all about?

    Women Write About Comics is a blog carnival; basically a giant blog crossover. In a blog carnival, a large group of disparate bloggers, get together to share their views on a specific topic. Our goal here is to forge new connections among women (and girls!) who love comics, and to make our voices heard.

    How does this work?

    The organizers, with input from participants, pick a specific topic and set posting dates. Participants post and link back to Women Write About Comics, which will maintain a masterlist of posts.

    Who can participate?

    Everyone. Established bloggers, pros, and fans of all stripes are welcome to participate. We ask, however, that you do so in good faith, honoring the topic and respecting other participants.

    What can I post? Where can I post it?

    Your post can be a blog entry, a video, a linkspam, a review, or pretty much anything you like, so long as it relates to our topic. We will link to entries hosted on all platforms, so long as they’re public. Please tag Tumblr and Twitter posts with “#womenoncomics.” The organizers will be tracking this tag, to make sure we don’t miss any entries.

    When does posting begin?

    *Dates to be determined. Once a topic is chosen, we will move forward with setting dates for the carnival, at which point this entry will be edited.

    Can I help out?

    Sure! We’d love to have your help advertising the carnival, or, when the time comes, collecting posts for our masterlist.

    You can contact the maintainer in chief at themegsbenedict[at]gmail[dot]com.

    Spread the word!
    schmevil: (graffiti)
    Recently I talked about missing Metafandom. I also talked about the slowing down of my flist/dwircle. The ~great slowdown is, I think, partly an actual LJ/DW slowdown (the natural life cycle of a social networking platform coming due), and partly due to my particular network of friends and acquaintances moving on. There are, of course, parts of LJ/DW that are as energetic as ever--I'm just not connected with them. And it's not only me.

    My personal plan is to join new communities, put myself out there, and chat with people who are hosting vibrant conversations, and interested in making new friends. I've embraced Twitter, Tumblr and anonmemes, but I'm still attached to this form of social networking, and I want my LJ/DW experience to lively. So I'm going to make that happen.

    But in addition to that, I need something, and that is a list of link/meta collecting sites, newsletters, and people. Everything from When Fangirls Attack, to individual Delicious accounts tracking the conversations of particular fandoms. I need it like burning. I'm not looking for a masterlist, so much as various masterlists, from different parts of fandom. Or even just links to particularly good link collectors and newsletters,. MOAR META, MOAR TALK, MOAR MORE, is what I'm saying. One of the most satisfying parts of fandom meta, as opposed to reading reviews or author blogs, is its extremely social character. It's not just the post, it's the comments, the reaction posts, the followups, the quick development of arguments and counter arguments--and it's all for us, by us.

    So do me a favour? Link me to whatever you've got, regardless of fandom. Link me to your meta recs, your favourite meta writers, newsletters, blogs, Tumblrs-- WHATEVER. Link me to other people seeking meta, and them to me. Let's get a big exchange going, if we can, my fellow travellers in slow LJ/DW-land, because the main thing is, I want to talk to other fans and I want to create meta, with other fans, and I know that a bunch of you do as well.

    I mean, fuck it, let's just build a new network, right?


    ETA: Strategies. Share with me your strategies for finding meta (and meeting new people), when so much of the infrastructure (comms, people) we relied on has, well, dispersed or withered away.
    schmevil: (Default)
    Rambly ramble - I'll tag it meta because it's the best fitting tag I've got.


    Ernest Hemingway once said, "When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature."

    And this got me thinking about shared universes, long-running serials, and fanon. So much of what we call characterization is caricature: a series of traits, descriptions, a name (or two or three). Leather-pants!Draco isn't a fanon character (as we usually think about characters), he's a caricature. The Goddamn Batman isn't a character either, except when he's grounded in a work, the mind of a particular writer, reader (and maybe groups of writers/readers?).

    Hemingway's living person-character exists fully realized in the mind of the novelist, and in the novel's reader. On the stage, it's in the moment of performance - I think - the moment of actor-audience gestalt. How much of character is passed on to the next generation of stories and performances? How much of this shared characterization we like to talk about is actually shared? Is it a case of always creating a new character, each time based on the distilled caricature of what came before? Is Batman a character, existing in culture, or would he be better described as an archetype? a figure of myth? an icon?

    This, I guess, all depends on accepting Hemingway's definition of character, caricature and the thing that lives in novels, but yeah. Discuss, for I am confused.
    schmevil: (nietszche says relax!)
    Yeah, idek what happened. Feel free to poke me if I'm taking forever with something. In the meantime, the Die Hard Marathon is back!




    Every Die Hard movie is about hostages. DH2 puts John inside the crisis with Holly still out of reach. This time the terrorists seize Dulles Airport, complete with travelers, workers and planes circling overhead - they control all of it. As usual, everything's going according to plan, save one thing: John Fucking McClane. Our favourite fly in the ointment, the monkey in the wrench. You know how this goes, right?

    I think having John McClane show up even in the vicinity of a well-planned crime must be every criminal's nightmare in the DH universe. He's got some kind of probability-bending, criminal-foiling superpowers, amirite? It's nuts.

    This is easily the weakest of the four DH movies (imho of course). Read more... )

    SPN finale

    May. 13th, 2010 10:06 pm
    schmevil: (ruby one)
    No doubt some of you will disown me, but I'm generally satisfied and would have been happy with it as the series finale (with some adjustments obviously). It was... pretty much what I expected. With a couple of surprises good and bad, along the way. It would have been more satisfying if the season as a whole had been stronger, but yeah. Read more... )
    schmevil: (graffitti)
    Trigger warning for survivors of abuse and bullying!



    Currently flocked - unfiltered - because I don't know if this post is useful, or if it's 'finished'. Please to be letting me know what you think, oh great and powerful flist. The flist has pronounced this fit to post, so I'm unlocking it.

    I've been wanting to post this for a long time. It's been sitting half finished in my gdocs for months. Some recent RL conversations about bullying gave me the impetus to get it done and posted, but it's very much about bullying in general, and yes, online bullying.



    Read more... )
    schmevil: (ms. marvel (smash))
    While we're on the subject. Posting anon does not make one any of the above. It simply does not. Whether I'm posting about a baseball game, political philosophy or a real moment of sexual harassment I experienced. Posting anon does not, and should not, automatically disqualify me from having and sharing an opinion.

    There is a widely understood fandom rule against outing our fellow fans. Many of us post under pseudonyms, and do our best to prevent their being connected with our real names. Even so, there are times when going fully anon is what's best for us. For our RL reputations, or security, for our emotional health and well-being. Some things are more comfortably said anon - and who are you to demand that we lift that veil?

    While it's true that hatememes and 4chan have given anons a bad reputation, and that all kinds of shenanigans have taken place under cover of anonymity, it does not follow that anonymity itself is a bad thing. To anchor this more firmly in current fandom goings-on, [livejournal.com profile] spnpermanon is an anonmeme of varied character. It is not a hate meme. It's a hate/love/meta/squee/srs bzns meme, where there is currently some A+ tracking of the con imbroglio going on. It is also the only place that people have felt safe enough to speak publicly about their experiences at WinCon.

    If you find yourself claiming that victim accounts are only credible when you can put a pseudonym to their words? Check yourself for asking a victim to display their wounds. There was, it seems, enough misconduct to get thenyxie banned from WinCon. What happens now (appeals etc.) is between her and the concom. You absolutely do not have the right to demand victims step forward, so that fandom can en masse assess the credibility of their stories.



    * Some sites and communities block anon comments, and for good reasons. On Scans Daily, for example, we've taken to blocking anon comments because a) it's easy to create an account, b) we got tired of manually unscreening all of them, c) we get trolled a whole hell of a lot. But this is a pragmatic measure, and not a statement about the value of anon comments.

    And of course there are good reasons to control and moderate speech. Hate speech, for example, is banned in many places. Fire in a crowded theater - also not good. But truly, ask yourself if your reason is akin to these, or if you're simply scared of what people might say.
    schmevil: (graffitti)
    I've gotten addicted to reading Fandom Secrets. Curse all of you who've linked me to it over the years. (Although hey, maybe I shouldn't be cursing, since I've actually made a few friends through the comm). Recently there was a secret bemoaning the maker's lack of BNFness. Basically, "Been in fandom for years. Still not a BNF. What's the pooooooint?"

    Ok, been in fandom for years. Still not a BNF. The point is having fun.

    It's been a few years since I came back to fandom. In those years I've done what I've always done: written some fic and meta, fangirled some stuff, ran a few communities for my fellow fans. Still not a BNF, alas - possibly I'm less known now than I was back in the day. But these have been the best years of my fandom life. I helped my community weather a TOSing and a Titter war. I've grown as a writer, producing some stories that I'm truly proud of. I ran my first ever fic exchange. I've reaffirmed my commitment to anti-oppression activism, this time online as well as offline. I've made some realizations about my own privilege and personal fail, and helped others to realizations of their own. I've made some awesome, irreplaceable friends.

    In short, I've had some fantastic experiences, some harrowing experiences, and all in all, a lot of rewarding experiences. Still not a BNF, but man am I having a great time.
    schmevil: (ruby one)
    Hindus are upset over the depiction of their gods in "Hammer of the Gods" episode in the "Supernatural" TV series reportedly aired on April 22 and say that such trivialization of their sacred deities was disturbing.

    Acclaimed Hindu statesman Rajan Zed, in a statement in Nevada (USA) today, said that Lord Ganesh and Goddess Kali were highly revered in Hinduism and such absurd depiction of them with no scriptural backing was hurtful to the devotees. Ganesh and Kali were meant to be worshiped in temples or home shrines and not to be thrown around loosely in re-imagined versions for dramatic effects in TV series.


    Read More.

    I don't buy arguments that the writers didn't know what they were doing. Of course they knew - that's why they came up with the idea of gods eating people in the first place. (Pagans + cannibalism = you know what the hell it equals!) They've extended it from ancient pagan gods, to those of contemporary world religions and of course they knew that people would be offended. They also knew that by throwing in some fights and a world turtle joke, a lot more people would laugh it off.

    On the other hand, I don't think that they were deliberately tying to hurt people. They were ~pushing boundaries with their edgy humor. Rationalization, right? They knew people would be offended, but you know, it's just a tv series, and what's a little cannibalism between friends? We're writing fake!gods who eat people, so why should we research them thoroughly? La la la. That, I think is the thought process: We aren't trying to depict actual gods and goddesses, so why should we bother with accuracy?

    I think... I think Stargate handled gods-as-people-exploiting-creatures better.

    And it's funny. The episode was undeniably offensive, but I can see why they went there. It makes sense in their internal mythology. They'd already established that 'pagan gods' were actually creatures who fed off of humanity's devotion, and sometimes even its flesh. They'd already more or less established that the Abrahamic god was THE god. So it's easier from a storytelling perspective to make all contemporary gods into pagan gods. They don't have to deal with the issue of rival pantheons, or rival apocalypses. Not really. But that's an easy choice that leads to some bad - and hard to resolve - results. The better choice may have been to showcase an assembly of cannibal-gods from extinct religions. Another option was to introduce the gods earlier in the season, and treat them with some kind of narrative respect. Developed them as individual supporting characters. Or even developed the idea of pagan gods more thoroughly.

    What do you think? How could they have maintained their "the gods are a sham! also, they eat people" thing, and not racefailed all over the place? Can that problematic trope be presented in a non-racist (albeit not unproblematic) way? Point me to some fiction where this was done really well.


    Yes, this post was inspired by the numerous threads on the anonmeme.


    Also, hey, speaking of the anonmeme - I fully anonfailed there the other day and asked for recs from the latest D/C exchange. None were forthcoming. Got any for me flist?
    schmevil: (bruce lee (jumpsuit))
    A good number of my fanfic pet peeves are due to writers trying to fit square pegs into round holes.

    There characters for whom domesticity is a better match than for others.

    There are stories that make the most of an explicit sex scene, and there are stories that are ground to a tedious halt by sex scenes.

    There are fandoms that are absolutely primed for a high school AU, and there are fandoms where it just wouldn't make a lick of sense, no matter how AU you take it.

    I know, I know - it's fic, and we can do whatever we like with the source material. That's the point, right? But honest to god, you don't need to tell EVERY STORY EVER with the same damn characters, in the same damn fandom. Sometimes you'll find a better match if you switch gears and write it in... idk, Moby Dick fandom.

    You can keep on jamming that square peg into that round hole, or you can hold onto it until you find a naturally square hole.



    On a side note, where's my freaking zombiepocalypse Gilmore Girls AU!? Damn it, world.
    schmevil: (ruby)
    Last week's episode was so utterly meh that I couldn't be bothered to do a reaction post. This week gave me a bit more to work with. Spoilers. Read more... )


    Last post of the day, I swear!
    schmevil: (daily planet)
    I've never been in a fandom where 'aliens made them do x' was a big thing. In HP you'd get the odd magical marriage malarky, but it was by no means full blown 'aliens made them do x'. Recently I've been reading ST XI and SGA stories, and this trope apparently went through the fandoms like wildfire, because man, it is everywhere.

    So what's it all about?

    Near as I can tell, the appeal is some outside force pushing the characters into doing something they otherwise would not do (but sometimes secretly want to), for angst, lolz, and sexytimes. It's not hard to understand why that would be fun for writers and readers alike. You, the writer, get to force the characters to do something OOC through the actions of another character, and the hand of god has legitimate story camouflage. Then you get to mine the situation for character development, fun, and emoporn. Additional thrills are garnered from the wacky customs of the aliens themselves. There's a kind of fantastical exoticism going on here, where alien customs are inexplicable and hilarious, and the aliens themselves are ignorant of Starfleet/Earth customs, and stubbornly cling to their own ways. And not only that, they force outsiders to conform as well!

    The more a story leans on 'those wacky natives,' the skeevier it is. I much prefer stories where Starfleet officers are performing a new and unfamiliar ritual, in order to honor allies that they respect. Or if you want to retain the element of coercion, stories where characters act OOC because they've been exposed to mind/body chemistry altering substances (and not by the aliens!). I don't know, the more 'aliens made them do x' stories I read, the more uncomfortable I am with them. There are just so very many of them that revel in things like describing the strange costumes, dwellings, foods, and rituals of aliens. They live in huts, how twee! And describing in even greater detail how put upon our heroes are, victimized by primitive, stubborn, unfeeling (or alternately too emotional) aliens. By and large, the aliens' actions are irrational, often opaque, and the aliens themselves are rarely fully realized characters. I'm not saying that all these stories are bad - far from it - but... some of them are just so goddamn creepy, and it's the ones that don't intend to be creepy, that are the worst of the bunch. Oops, I just happened to use a handful of colonial stereotypes of Darkest Africa to characterize my aliens. But the aliens are ~noble and well-meaning, so it's ok. Seriously?

    Anyway, I'm looking for some good meta that examines the trope. Links, anybody?

    Oh, and if you've got non-creepy fic recs, I'll take those too. ;)
    schmevil: (gwen and mj dance)
    We all have preferences for how writers treat feedback and comments. Many of us also have hidden expectations. In lieu of writing about this side of things, I thought I'd do a poll, and throw it out to you guys.

    Do you want a response? Do you expect one? Does it make a difference whether we're talking about fic, meta, lulz, or just general posts? What seems polite to you? What is the prevailing way that Things Are Done? Read more... )
    schmevil: (ron)
    [livejournal.com profile] amberlynne's written a post about feedback that's being linked around. I disagreed.

    Her central point is this: readers should comment and they should do so in a way that the writer will be comfortable with. She goes on to say that comments should focus on the story. They shouldn't, for example, be addressed to other readers unless a direct comment is also left. They shouldn't be off topic, and they should as much as possible, be in a form that the writer will appreciate. Save that concrit for when it's been explicitly made welcome.

    I think there's a point at which the proliferation of rules for commenting, soft or hard, implicit or explicit, starts to discourage comments.

    1. I'm just gonna lay it out, the more you tell me what form my comment should take, the less likely am I to comment at all. This is, I think, especially true of people new to fandom, who are already confused by new social rules. Fandom's rules for feedback (some honey with the vinegar, no concrit unless asked for, direct reviews > talking with other readers) are NOT intuitive. "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all," tends to fall by the wayside sometime in middle school/junior high. High school art and writing classes encourage students to share honest feedback. Lit classes train students to believe that discussing a work with each other, and not with the writer, is of real value. The internet itself encourages many-to-many conversations, even when the creators are present and talking up a storm. We've been told for years that it's not all about the artist, and that it's really about the work. So take it as written that there will always be people who just don't get what you're talking about. Take it also as written that your going to get some backs up, when you tell people how they should be commenting. Read more... )
    schmevil: (ms. marvel (smash))
    [Not an essay! Just some things I've been thinking about.]

    The USAF has prescribed amphetamines to combat pilots off and on for decades. They're called go pills, and they're supposed to improve concentration and response time. Couple this with the large numbers of military personal abusing drugs and alcohol both overseas and at home, and there's a plausible, pre-made background for Carol having a history of drug and alcohol abuse. She spent most of her adult life with people who think it's a good idea to give speed to combat pilots, and that drinking to excess is a sign of manliness.

    Why then, did Busiek not draw on this for Carol's alcoholism story? It seems like such a missed opportunity, especially since Tony later became her sponsor, because he too grew up in that culture. Carol's alcoholism just pops into existence, already fully formed, and hardly anchored to anything in her history - she's drinking because she needs to take the edge off, and she's not coping well with being back on earth. Well, why is she having so much trouble? Read more... )
    schmevil: (wonder woman (fire))
    [I hesitate to tag this 'meta' because it's more of a rambly rant than anything else... maybe I should create a 'rant' tag? Anyway. I know it's all been said before, but I guess I woke up annoyed. *g*]

    I get excited by projects like Models INC and Marvel Divas because I like girly confections like Janes In Love and Spider-Man Loves Mary-Jane, just as much as I love a good punch-up. Both of those projects suffered horribly from bad marketing, and a strange lack of spark. They weren't the best vanguards for Marvel's push into 'girl' territory - really, Westernized shoujo stories - but hopefully there are more and better projects coming down the pike, because 'girl comics' is still an area that Western comics publishers have neglected. I think there's room in the market for romance comics, female friendship comics, and adventure and superhero comics with female protagonists. I want all of this stuff, and lots of it.

    However, when it comes to superhero comics, what I want are some more Valkyries. I appreciate all sorts of female characters. I like smart girls, crafty girls, hopeless romantics, emotional wrecks, political dynamos, femme fatales, and ass kickers. I love them all - provided they're well written. But when it comes to superheros - to superheroines - I like my girls fierce. Righteous (or self-righteous), powerful and determined - I want me some heroes who are on fire.

    I'm tired of heroines who have a tortured relationship to their sexuality, or the endless parade of heroines who are motivated by their having survived a sexual assault. I'm tired of damn near every female villain ~using their sexuality as a weapon~. I'm tired of the Madonna/whore complex, and I'm tired of female sexuality being a space of exploitation and fear. Read more... )
    schmevil: (darth vader (noooooo!))
    Coming Clean: 2009 & The End of Dumb Things, by [livejournal.com profile] 2_perseph

    I imagine that those of you who are interested in this sort of thing have already read the post. I found it a few days after the fact, via a post on my flist. I haven't been keeping up with things, what with being sick, but I made time for this, since it's Relevant To My Interests.
    Fandom was a subcultural mental space created initially by artists and writers, and then vidders, for the reason of creating works that were against the grain of mainstream culture, to satirize, criticize, and flaunt conventions and things held sacred. We’ll get to the why at the end, though of course we all know why.

    It was a place without windows or doors to the outside world, as the creations, like certain seeds needed a dark, warm space to grow. The nature of fandom, its ultimate goal was nothing more and nothing less than entertainment.

    My initial response to 2-perseph's post was quite simply, NO. But plenty of people had already pointed out the factual inaccuracies in her model of fandom history, so I passed on adding my two cents. (This comment, by [livejournal.com profile] ithiliana is particularly good for background). What I'd like to do here, is talk about how we model fandom, and how we can do it in a less blisteringly exclusive fashion. I'm going to lay this out really plainly: it offends me when my fellow fen model fandom in such a way as to invalidate my fannish experience, and that of my friends. Read more... )
    schmevil: (graffitti)
    I hate the fic labels het, slash, femslash and gen.

    Het and slash function as warnings: here there be m/f, f/f, or m/m relationship stuff; enter at your own risk. Or alternately, as beacons: slight femslash, come one, come all. Who cares what the story is actually about? They also have the effect of seeming to change the content of a story. "I don't read femslash." And so you miss out on a 300,000 word swashbuckling adventure, because Anna Maria and Elizabeth Swann happen to share a few kisses. "I don't read gen." And so you miss out on a satisfying story about lifelong friendship that has all the hallmarks of the het, slash and femslash stories you enjoy. The romantic labels het, slash and femslash, trump all other content tags save warnings. The story is het before it is horror; femslash before it is a character study.

    Gen, in contrast, is a categorical ghetto for misfit stories - stories that are none of the above. It's a category that's simultaneous too wide, and too narrow, to mean much of anything. There's an unending argument over how we can define gen, and that is because gen has no actual content: it's defined negatively. Gen ISN'T het, slash or femslash. Gen is everything else.

    Let me throw in some anecdotal evidence now: most fic is not out and out romance. Shipping is a major component of fic fandom, but it's not everything. A romantic subplot in an adventure story =/= a romance story. The appearance of a romantic relationship in a horror story, does not make it a romance, and it does not make it any less of a horror story. There are an awful lot of first time stories, and fluffy romances, but there are tons and tons of stories that deal with ships, without being romances. So why is it important to label a story het, slash, femslash or gen, in addition to pairing and character tags?

    There was a time where slash was a genre unto itself, I think. If you read the really old stuff, slash seemed to indicate not just the presence of a m/m relationship, but that what you are about to read, draws on a certain subset of story types and tropes. Slash and femslash are so much bigger now - they are whatever they want to be. A story about gingerbread dudes falling in love can be slash. A story about girls fighting back the apocalypse, and occasionally having sex, can be femslash. So is there still genre called slash, or a genre called femslash? (Seriously people, is there? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this).

    As a reader, I find it much more useful to know what kind of story I'm about to read, than to have two different notifications of the genitals contained therein. Femslash, Buffy/Faith, Summary. But What the hell is the story about? Is the Buffy/Faith relationship central to the story - is it about the relationship? If not, then throw me a bone, in the form of a genre indicator. A hint about what tropes you're drawing on. And for god's sake, I get it, Buffy/Faith does indeed imply hot lesbian action. I don't need the reminder.

    I know that some people love these labels to death, for whatever reason, but I think that the changing landscape of fic fandom makes them increasingly meaningless. But that, of course, is just my opinion.

    July 2012

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