Fun with Yuletide fandoms!

[epershand]

I have now completed my annual "snarking about yuletide fandoms" ritual. I enjoy that a lot, I think it might be one of my favorite parts of the challenge. It is just so cathartic.

Except normally I do it privately on chat with oliviacirce. And this year instead I spammed my twitter feed with it. Sorry guys! I... hit the hourly usage limit two hours consecutively. And learned that that doesn't actually keep me from tweeting. It just keeps me from viewing new updates on the page!

Anyway, the annual Hilariously Large Fandoms That Slipped Through The Cracks Due to Clever Tag Usage:

• Captain America (2011) - 183 stories on the AO3


• The Avengers (2012) - in the last day, up to 215 stories on the AO3. (Let's ignore the fandoms Marvel (Movies) - more than 1000 stories; Marvel Avengers Movies Universe - more than 1000 stories. They're separate fandoms, although presumably with a lot of overlap)


• The Social Network RPF - 68 stories on the AO3. So... I take it they're an LJ fandom?


• X-Men: First Class (2011) RPF. 53 stories on the AO3. Ditto?


• Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys (Album) - 115 stories on the AO3. Presumably most people are tagging their Killjoys fic only with My Chemical Romance and not including the album listing?

Presumably most of these will get cleaned up in the next couple of days, but I am just so fascinated by what the net result of moving from the old qualitative process to the new quantitative process has been. The old method didn't scale, obviously, but the new method has some fascinating loopholes.

Also: BEST FANDOM NEW I DISCOVERED WHILE TRAWLING THROUGH THE LIST? Michael Fassbender With Pugs (tumblr). That link is to the tumblr. Which is AMAZING.


(OMG I JUST ACCIDENTALLY DISCOVERED THE BROWSE TAGS BUTTON ON THE BETA DREAMWIDTH UPDATE PAGE. BEST.)

Comments

[sofiaviolet]

There's a Browse Tags button????? *glee*

I think you were the person who tweeted that if it has a kink meme, it's not a Yuletide fandom? I feel like that's a good rule to have - but it would mean that Yuletide has to start checking outside AO3 again - all the kink memes I've ever seen have been on journal sites.

I think there are people who treat Danger Days as a separate fandom, but the tagging illustrates that most people have just used it as an excuse to write the characters from the band in a desert dystopia. "Has potential but is mainly just AU fodder" is not what I would consider Yuletide-eligible.

[epershand]

There is! It fills me with glee!

Yeah, I was. I mean, if there is an unsuccessful, mostly-inactive kinkmeme that shouldn't invalidate things, but if a fandom's producing fic at a kink-meme scale.... maybe it's not a fandom that belongs in yuletide, you know?

I should probably state up front that I did write a Danger Days NYR last year--but it was Korse-only, and it was a crossover with a fandom for which that story is still the only fic on the archive. It seems highly likely that if all the fic in that AU were tagged with the AU as a fandom, it would be disqualified.

But even uncommon AUs within popular-band fandoms seem kind of weird. The Panic "Mona Lisa" music video is in, and while I've only ever seen one fic in that particular AU universe.... it's still a request about Brendon Urie running around being Brendon Urie. Likewise, the Cobras "You Make Me Feel" music video is in, and that's not even an AU....

[sofiaviolet]

Having never seen either of the videos you mention in your last paragraph, I can't really comment intelligently on them. But I will say that the thing that gives Killjoys-verse the potential to be a fandom in its own right is the extent of its canon - a couple of videos, the twitter accounts, the listening party... There's enough material there to do things with even if you're not familiar with the band members.

But Killjoys-verse only has the potential to exist with that kind of independence from MCR fandom as a whole. Most people aren't treating the Killjoys as characters in their own right, they're treating the Killjoys-verse just like fans have treated the INOK or Ghost of You videos - laying the world over the actual band members as an AU framework the band happens to have provided/endorsed.

And since I don't think Yuletide can enforce "treat it like a self-contained fictional universe, not MCR LARPing in the desert," I think the right thing to do is disqualify it on the basis of the band's fandom output, regardless of whether the volume of Danger Days AUs would independently disqualify it, as well.

Does any of that make any kind of sense?

[epershand]

Yeah, that totally makes sense!

As I mentioned, my NYR from last year, With Blood They Wash in the Money, is a Killjoys-verse story that barely has the band in it at all--a past relationship with Gerard is emotionally significant to Korse, but neither the band nor the Killjoys appear. (Korse is also the only character in it who isn't an OC--it's entirely a story about BLI internal politics from before the band-provided universe begins. Well. And also secret alien invasion.)

But IMO even the self-contained universe is large enough not to be a yuletide fandom, even discounting the quantity of MCR-LARPIng-in-the-desert fic. I've seen PATD Killjoys fic, Disney RPF Killjoys fic, etc. And given that both exist? I think it should absolutely be disqualified.

(Mona Lisa is a similar case to Ghost of You, INOK, etc--it's PaTD within a steampunk context, with the fun addition that Brendon plays multiple characters. I've actually got a WIP in that universe too, but if I ever finish that story, I'd probably tag it "Fandom: Panic At the Disco", freeform tag: "Alternate Universe: Mona Lisa".)

[likeadeuce]

I always have to wonder when I see this stuff get nominated, if the people (a) don't understand the point of Yuletide (b) are trying to get away with something or (c) actively have no clue how popular their fandoms are. I particularly get askance at the Marvel movieverse stuff because come on. I never even thought that the majority of Marvel/DC *comics* stuff should be eligible (though that never kept me from writing or requesting it once it got in). But no part of comics fandom has ever been as prominent as the Avengers-related stuff is, there isn't even a movie yet.

[epershand]

I'm kind of a yuletide hipster, in that my attitude tends to be "Um. Fic for that exists. Try again. Oh, ok, it was all written for yuletide? MAYBE I won't judge you." There are *things* within the Marvel universe I'd consider, but especially the superheroes should really considered as a universal whole from a fandom perspective, rather than having the option of every AU getting in.

(It's kind of odd, you don't generally see this thing happening with DC, for the most part. You don't wind up with, say, Red Son nominated, as far as I can tell...)

[likeadeuce]

It is odd! Although I know I wrote Gotham Central four or five years ago, that one has as good a claim as any (or at least had at the time) for being a group of distinct characters who don't show up other places. And I know they've taken the Batman and Superman movie franchises in the past, though I think the last couple years have been disallowed. Aside from an old-school generation of X-Men writers, though, Marvel fandom overall is probably a bit newer and so doesn't necessarily see itself as part of a bigger entity? Though in the case of the movieverse, so many people are insisting on writing Avengers fic as though there were already a movie that existed, I think that kills the argument that there are somehow distinct tiny fandoms.

[fifteendozentimes]

Honestly, I've found that people really don't often have a reasonable idea how big their fandoms are? It's so relative; someone who is only ever in the Next Big Thing fandoms has a way different idea of what "small" is than someone like me who tends to be in fandoms of 1-5 people who may or may not all be actively creating fanworks. I am frequently baffled by the things people will claim are "rare" or "small", but I guess if you're in a fandom that has a huge newsletter daily, the fandom that only fills a once-weekly newsletter does seem slow.

[franzeska]

But in Harry Potter, all of the one-line characters have their own kinkmemes! My fandom is smaaaaaaall!

Yes, I agree totally. Plus a lot of people check out older tv shows or anime or something else they don't normally watch for the first time and want their New Favorite in yuletide, not having had any contact with the part of fandom where it is probably popular and not having any way to evaluate its size. Someone, apparently seriously, asked in the yuletide com one year if anyone had considered due South. The howls of laughter were pretty epic.

[chosenmortal]

a lot of people check out older tv shows or anime or something else they don't normally watch for the first time and want their New Favorite in yuletide

i think this is definitely a cause of a lot of it-- it's happened to all of us at one point i'm sure. and especially if you only find fic through your LJ/DW rather than searching on an archive, it can be hard to figure out the total scope of a fandom.

but still..... lol, due south.

[franzeska]

I've seen multiple people not understand that it's a rare fandoms exchange and still more not understand why it is. Also, every year, people whine that they can only write in 3-4 fandoms total, so if their not-really-rare fandom doesn't make it in, they can't participate at all. (I usually respond with a lot of eye-rolling. But I'm sure it's true for them, and there can be a lot of social pressure to do yuletide.)

[likeadeuce]

I do have some sympathy for not immediately understanding the small-fandom focus of Yuletide -- I did it five years in a row before this one, and read it regularly before that, but I know not everybody has been around it forever, etc. Though I do think "Unwilling to write something that isn't the same thing you write the other 11 months of the year" is a reasonable opt-out. Not everybody is in enough 'big' fandoms to do Remix.

[toft]

NO WAY. Those got through? EVIL.

However, I am 100% delighted by Michael Fassbender With Pugs.

[epershand]

I don't think it's *evil* per se? Maybe misguided. And as eruthros said on twitter, it winds up raising really interesting question about the nature of folksonomies, especially when there is overlap and categorizing ambiguity between fandoms.

[vass]

The Social Network RPF - 68 stories on the AO3. So... I take it they're an LJ fandom?

Oh dear. The amount of time I've spent scrolling past TSN RPF that I'm not interested in to get to the TSN movieverse stuff that I am. I particularly like it when midway through a prompt or a fill, the commenter forgets whether they're discussing the actor or the character. I have no interest in the actors! I'm just there for geeks, codependence, betrayal and redemption.

[epershand]

I guess some people within TSN RPF fandom contested this and pointed to the update frequency of their fandom newsletter, but they were overruled by the mods....

(I'm not in either fandom, so while I can tell which is which if one says "Justin/Jesse" and another says "Mark/Eduardo", if they have any more obscure characters I often don't know which is which.

[turlough]

I thought it deeply weird LAST YEAR that Danger Days was part of Yuletide. This year it's just silly! I don't know anyone who treats it as a separate fandom.

[epershand]

Yeah, I guess the question is whether it exists as a fandom in its own right, or as an AU in another fandom. The lack of agreement on this topic, ironically, means that it looks smaller than it it actually is as a fandom in its own right....

[eccentric_hat]

Does Yuletide still cater to "dead" fandoms as well as nonexistent and tiny living ones? It seems like the numerical approach would sort of prevent that from working.

[epershand]

Yeah, it does. I think they're looking at the total count of stories posted in the last N years? But I'm not sure what N is. Deep Space Nine squeaked in this year under that rule.

[franzeska]

Ha ha ha. That's yuletide, all right. The thing is, the old methods didn't work all that terribly well either since X stories on FFN would disqualify something, but people had to report it first. Nothing was automatically checked. This method at least involves a degree of checking every single thing plus the same level of human oversight there was previously.

[likeadeuce]

Oh, yes, and then the impetus was on people in the fandom to say, "Actually there are 50 kabillion Newsies fics at FFN" and have people in their own fandom hate them.

Good times!

[chosenmortal]

i sporfled out loud when i saw the avengers was on there. like really? i can't even look at *tumblr* without hitting four or five avengers fics, let alone LJ or the AO3. i pretty much feel like if it's a marvel comic and it has a movie made of it, it's out. and hell yes: if it has a kink meme with more than three posts' worth of prompts, it's out.

PS MICHAEL FASSBENDER WITH PUGS IS THE BEST. *________*;;;

[esteefee]

I am seriously tempted to join Yuletide just to start my own pairing tag. Hank/Francisco from Atlas Shrugged. The slashiest of the slash. Am I all alone in the universe? I want to know.