beckyh2112 | Why I Don't Care for OTW

No matter how much male they feel, transformative works belong to what I like to call the female part of fandom.

You know, this whole post is astonishingly sexist and full of useless, ill-informed generalizations.

Apparently discussing the relationships in a show is more 'transformative' than discussing the special effects. Or, like most of the males I know in Transformers, discussing the relative merits of Character A vs. Character B.

But apparently, to be 'transformative', you have to be discussing sex and relationships in the fandom.

This is just one idiot, who apparently ran away from comments disagreeing with her.

Yet, I've noticed this continuing idea, from OTW and their supporters, that to be a fan of the sort they care about, you have to be female or part of the 'female' side of fandom. This sort of creativity is just as "transformative" as slashfic. I know equal numbers of Transformers fanartists from either gender. I read a fair amount of Transformers fanfic by males.

So, how am I participating in a 'female' side of fandom? How can people even define fandom as being 'male' or 'female'? Dividing it up like that sets an implication that one side is better than the other, especially with OTW's emphasis on examination of the female side of fandom.

I believe that approaching an analysis of fandom from an academic-feminist perspective is going to be inherently flawed when you come to such fandoms as Transformers. Just as I believe that analyzing fandom as a whole based on exposures to individual fandoms is inherently flawed. Different fandoms have different cultures.

I don't like OTW. I find their seeking for legality to be something to be extremely nervous about. I find the gobzillions of meta posts about why people joined OTW to be intensely off-putting. I dislike them using

heidi8 as one of their Intellectual Property lawyers, as she's been a big defender and close friend of Cassandra Claire. I've never particularly liked the academic-feminist form of analysis that they seem to be using, at least not if it isn't in conjunction with another form of analysis.

I don't think what they are talking about providing is worth my time, especially when they seem structured in such a way as to shut out half the fandom that I love and participate in.

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I haven't heard about OTW before. Doesn't look like something I'll research too hard now. Ahh, the peacefulness of the ReBoot and He-Man fandoms.

I've noticed different trends along gender lines. You hardly ever see women drawing the huge muscleman/T&A pics in the MOTU fandom, for example. But those are trends, nothing more. This person is just getting weird about gender. Only men can be real hard-SF fans? Guess I've got a lot of books to sell on eBay.

That's one of the things that gets me about OTW. They want to be for all of fandom, but most of the people I know in smaller fandoms have never heard of them. I only hear about them because I read

metafandom and Journalfen's wank comms.

They are not good at advertising for something meant to be so inclusive.

If it wants to be inclusive, it can start by dropping the blurbs about how it is primarily female!

I check their What We Believe section and bloody 'ell, the second bit of Our Values is "We value our identity as a predominantly female community". This just under the bit saying "all fannish works" and "all fans", and before the fifth Value mentioning they value fans of all genders. Clash, surely.

Though they do believe _Real Person Fiction_ should be completely legal, so this is the least of their problems.

As far as I know, RPF is legal. Stalkerish, but legal. I mean, look at all the published novels about 20th century historical figures out there.

At any rate, if an RPF writer were to be taken to court, it would be a civil suit dealing with libel charges, not a (legal) matter of copyright infringement or trademark dilution.

My knowledge of OTW is limited to what's shown up on metafandom, but as far as I can tell, most of the people involved seemed to hail from slash fandom, which is largely female, and has been since its early days as a tiny subset of Star Trek fandom.

That said, this janssanja person sounds like someone I'd be scrambling to distance myself from, if I were them. There's a difference between stating that a majority of fanfiction writers are women, and announcing that only women can ever contribute to fandom and everyone else needs to shut up and leave.

At any rate, if an RPF writer were to be taken to court, it would be a civil suit dealing with libel charges

Actually, while libel may or may not be listed in the suit, the focus is most likely be on publicity rights. When the Winter brothers sued DC Comics et al for the "Autumn Brothers" characters in the Jonah Hex comics, the libel charges were dismissed earlier on, but the publicity rights/misappropriation charges went all the way to the Supreme Court. Same deal when hockey player sued Todd McFarlane over the Tony Twist character in the Spawn comics--the suit was all about publicity rights (and went to the Missouri Supreme Court). (DC won their case, btw; McFarlane lost his.)

You don't know me from adam, but that post is not from someone in or affiliated from the OTW and represents nothing the OTW is about. She's just a troll and an idiot who likes to rile people up. Look at her other posts and you can see that.

I'll take your word for it that the person I linked is a troll. She's either that or a high-quality sexist moron.

However, as extreme as the views she's spouting are, you can see similar sexist views (much more mild, definitely) in the OTW website itself.

Upon actual examination of her journal, my impression is that if she's a troll, she's an inconsistent one. Looks more like the usual bitter idiot who thinks that being polite is for pussies.

Out of curiosity, how did you find this entry?

It's on metafandom's delicious list.

It actually wasn't there when

dameparis responded to my entry. Wasn't there this afternoon, either.

But thank you for your own answer. *grins, collects information*

I'm sorry, I've been looking up OTW in google, ljseek, and clicking names of people commenting in OTW related posts and I can't remember quite how I got here. My apologies.

No particular worries. I'm just curious about the information flow, because I knew my entry hadn't even gotten into Metafandom's del.ici.ous by that point.

Ahh, the peacefulness of the ReBoot and He-Man fandoms.

*poke* *pokepokepoke* Where is this He-Man fandom you speak of? Is there fic?

The center of the He-Fandom is He-Man.org (http://www.he-man.org). My little corner of it (which has art and fic) is Castle Numbskull (http://www.c4vct.com/kym/numbskul).

Why I Don't Care for OTW

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here via metafandom

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