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dolorosa_12So, the clown car of malicious incompetents laughably called this country's 'government' have decided they want to make us all sick for reasons of political expediency. I am so looking forward to catching crowded trains to work filled with hordes of unmasked teenagers. Thankfully, I only work one day a week in the office, and that's going to be the case until at least June, but two train rides a week is obviously still plenty of time to catch COVID.
My cousin (who lives in Korea) and I have been having an ongoing conversation since the pandemic started about the different ways wearing facemasks has been framed in East Asian and 'Western' countries, and the very different attitudes this framing engenders. In Korea, she says, wearing a mask is framed and thought of as something that gives people freedom — it's enabled them to escape the pandemic without having any lockdowns, and with few restrictions on people's activities — wearing a mask is seen as the thing that frees you from having to remain in your house. Meanwhile, in the UK, and in our country of origin (Australia), wearing a mask is seen as a terrible, restrictive imposition that must be endured, a limitation on individual freedom. That being said, most people in the UK comply with mask mandates in all settings — but as soon as they stop being mandated, in my experience compliance drops to about fifty per cent.
At least
Onward to
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snowflake_challenge: In your own space, rec a fanwork (fic, art, vid, playlist, anything!) you did not create. I'm going to share my Yuletide recs list from this year. It's got one of my own fics in it, but the remainder are by other people.
I'm not going to go through the list fic by fic and explain what I loved about each individual work (although if you click through to the comments on each fic on AO3, you'll see a comment from me pulling out the elements I particularly enjoyed. However, I will try to briefly summarise what I most enjoy seeing in fanfic, and what tends to be a common thread in all that I rec.
Firstly, I almost exclusively read fic in tiny fandoms — generally fandoms that only have a handful of works on AO3, generally book fandoms. Usually I'm not looking for works that try to mimic the writing style of the original (in fact I tend to find that distracting). Instead, what I enjoy is fic that makes prominent certain elements I enjoyed about the original: specific character dynamics, an underlying theme, a really strong sense of place. I find it even more impressive if the fic makes me take note of certain elements that the original canon only whispered in the margins, and brings those submerged elements to prominence. I generally prefer fic that has a lyrical, lush, or even portentous turn of phrase, unless it's a humorous canon/fic. And I really, really love fic that digs into the veins of fairytales, folktales, medieval literature, or mythology and finds a hidden seam of darkness, melancholoy, or just straight up weirdness to mine in fic.
What do you look for in fic, or in other fanworks?
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Date: 2022-01-19 04:38 pm (UTC)Something that illuminates canon for me... or just entertains the hell out of me. :D
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Date: 2022-01-20 03:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-19 04:59 pm (UTC)I want the chance to wallow in the fandom, and spend time with the characters I'm love. I like seeing how far they can be pushed, how far they will go for each other.
I suppose I also like the feeling that a fic is just a keyhole and there really is a fully functioning, self-contained world just beyond it.
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Date: 2022-01-20 03:58 pm (UTC)I love this description!
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Date: 2022-01-19 05:12 pm (UTC)I look for the nooks and crannies of the characters I love from canon that canon has neither the time or energy to explore. And sometimes I want something soft, funny, or sad, depending on the mood I'm in... and sometimes I want a fan work to surprise me with things I never thought about.
Thank you for sharing with us!
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Date: 2022-01-20 03:59 pm (UTC)I really love this, and I love that fanworks have the breadth to be able to be all these different things.
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Date: 2022-01-19 07:41 pm (UTC)On a lighter note, what a great list of recs! The Jewish folklore stuff looks especially interesting! Thank you!
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Date: 2022-01-20 04:02 pm (UTC)I'm glad you like the look of the recs list!
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Date: 2022-01-20 12:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-20 04:03 pm (UTC)Once Upon Fic
Date: 2022-01-20 12:04 am (UTC)-It's an exchange for fairy tales, myths, tall tales, ghost stories, urban legends, epics, some religious lore
-It's in nominations right now, and has a somewhat relaxed schedule, with assignments out in February and works due in May
-Matching (OR not AND) is done on characters
I realize that when you mentioned wanting matching on characters, you might prefer book characters you're already strongly invested in rather than ones that slant towards archetypes. And of course the timing or some other factor might not work for you.
I always love the range of prompts and fills. We've had all the following IN SPACE!: Pecos Bill, Little Red Riding Hood, Snow-white and Rose Red; we've had Bluebeard done as a short time-travel story and as a beautifully detailed epistolary fic; we've drawn on Egyptian, Inuit, Japanese, and Eastern European Jewish lore and folk tales.
Some of my own favourite (gen/gen-friendly) things I've written include Cinderella as a changeling child; a caper involving magical otters; and a gender-swapped Kemp Owyne/Dove Isabeau fic in which the hero(ine), instead of kissing the princess to break the curse of taking the shape of a dragon, drafts the dragon-princess into her army.
Since it's a tiny exchange, we also tweak matches to take into account things like "I don't want to write porn" or "Secretly, I am most excited to receive X".
/end advertisement
(if nothing else, I hope there'll be a work or two you enjoy when it goes live.)
Also, thanks for the rec for Selden's Mabinogion fic! I adore Selden's work but had been hesitant to try that work because of poor familiarity with the Mabinogion. I have no doubt it's richer if you do know, but it was still rewarding to read without canon familiarity.
Re: Once Upon Fic
Date: 2022-01-20 04:07 pm (UTC)I'm glad you liked the rec list — that Mabinogion fic is great, and as you say it can be enjoyed without knowledge of the canon.
Re: Once Upon Fic
Date: 2022-01-20 08:06 pm (UTC)Re: Once Upon Fic
Date: 2022-01-20 09:52 pm (UTC)- I guess internal consistency most of all, and psychological consistency. Crack that maintains the same tone throughout? Excellent. Characters who value the opposite of what the narrative says they value? Meh. And I want a work to have an idea about the characters or the canon, that it communicates to me. That sounds very cerebral but 'I think this would be hot' counts.
It's fascinating to me to hear you don't place high value on works that mimic a source's written style. I really do, and I aim for it when possible. But I also enjoy works that deliberately avoid that. I can find an otherwise competent and creative work offputting if someone is aiming for pastiche and (in my very subjective judgment) falling distinctly short.
Re: Once Upon Fic
Date: 2022-01-21 06:26 pm (UTC)Yes, this is basically my issue — this is such a big risk in works trying to mimic the writing style (you get this with fic for TV/film canons where the scriptwriters have very distinct dialogue styles as well). I can appreciate well written book fandom fanfic as long as I feel it matches my understanding of the characters, setting, and important themes of the original, but as soon as it attempts to mimic the writing style and falls short, it's lost me, and I'd rather the writer hadn't bothered. If they get it right, of course, it's an added bonus.
Thanks for sharing the link to the
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Date: 2022-01-20 09:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-20 04:11 pm (UTC)I prefer to write in third person past tense, but I have written in first person for Sunshine fic since the original book is in the first person, and I wrote a Pagan Chronicles fic in the kind of stream-of-consciousness, short choppy sentences, first person present tense of the original due to the specific Yuletide request I ended up with, but in general I don't get too bogged down in replicating the writing style of the original.
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Date: 2022-01-21 07:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-20 09:31 pm (UTC)I thought I would recognise some fandoms on your rec list, but I know none of those things except the Heath Ledger movie! -I haven't even read that Chaucer.
The myth ones look really interesting though!
What do you look for in fic, or in other fanworks? Generally I enter a fandom seeking fix-its. I enjoy basically any sort of fanwork that corrects what I find wrong in canon. Bonus point: well constructed sentences!
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Date: 2022-01-21 06:30 pm (UTC)I like a good fix-it fic, but only if I feel the canon had something wrong with it! If I disagree with the author that something needed fixing, I'm not going to enjoy their fic. What I generally tend to want is more of what I enjoyed in canon, so I tend to read a lot of futurefic — I want to know what happens to the characters after the last page has turned or the credits have rolled!
I'm glad some of the recs I shared seemed interesting! They're from Yuletide, so it's no wonder that you haven't heard of most of the fandoms.