Dreams and Swords

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crystaldrake and I are your new supreme overlords friendly mods.

People, when you are writing fanfiction, please provide a summary. Even if it's a bad summary, it gives me more information than the title alone does.

For bonus points: word count, rating, characters/pairings can be added. But definitely give me a summary.

See, on the one hand, I think the atlaland thing is kind of neat, but I already do ten thousand writing challenges on my own plus my own writing for the hell of it. I'm not sure this is something I could legitimately give attention to.

On the other hand, what the hell, why not.

ETA: Oh, wait, they have participation requirements. I definitely cannot handle them then.

[Poll #1433578]

Keeping in mind the following bits of information:
Sokkla Summer: June 21st-August 1st
Irko Week: July 13th-July 27th (not slash)(also, guestimate on how long it's running, since all it says is two weeks, and it started on the 13th)
Jeongdao Week: July 26th-August 1st
Tokka Week: August 2nd-August 8th
Zutara Week: August 10th-August 16th
Kataang Week: August 19th-August 25th
Joo Feng Week: August 24th-August 30th
Toko Week: September 5th-September 11th
Maikka Week: September 20th-October 3rd

Also, I'd just like to say "THANK YOU" to anyone who actually, oh, ADVERTISES THEIR SHIP WEEK on avatar_fans.

How many people would be interested if I put up the exact same offer on this eljay as I did on livelongnmarry, but the money gets donated to the Illinois Search Dogs¹ and specifically to help pay for the medical needs of a severely hurt search dog named Neeva?

1. Illinois Search Dogs is a registered non-profit, so for US people, you can write-off your donations come tax-time.

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.