cest_what | Recent Entries

I've spent the last three nights vidding Avengers, and wow, this is going so much faster than anything else I've tried to vid.

I'm still feeling my way with this medium: in two years of occasional-vidding I've finished two and left I think six unfinished in the graveyard of my hard drive, plus the playlist of never-to-be-made vids on my ipod. So I don't know if this one is so much quicker because it's the first time I've worked from a single source - especially as my characters have ensemble roles in the film, so there's even less canon to wrangle - or if I've just got saner about clipping. It's working so much better, anyway. I'm two thirds of the way through the song in three nights of working on it (plus two months of mentally mapping the vid out before I actually started, but, well). How You Survived the War took me freaking months, like possibly six of them I can't remember, and with technical dramas and losing the file and switching software, I didn't post (Don't You Mess Around With) My Little Sister until over a year after I started it.

It's a Clint & Natasha + Loki vid to Dessa's 'The Crow'. The challenges so far are trying to fit the clips into rap lyrics - because seriously slow down, woman, Clint didn't finish firing his bow yet - and trying to push all of my Natasha and Natasha/Clint and Loki feels into a single vid. They, uh, don't fit. Obviously. But I've been periodically trying to find a song I could vid Natasha & Clint to since the movie came out - I never got properly into Avengers fic, but the vids are my favourite thing in the world, and Co-Dependent Messed Up SHIELD Assassins vids were pretty much all I came out of the movie truly wanting - and I kind of don't think I'll find another one. So I've been messing up the storyline a bit by trying to force all of my thoughts about Natasha and monsters and vulnerability and redemption and heroism into a vid that is, in fact, about Loki suborning Clint. So, you know. Whoops.

Second Yuletide fic, this one was a last-minute treat.

Disney Animation | Mulan/Belle | 1300 words | PG | at AO3

Summary: "Wait, no, wait, don't shoot!" Belle cried, hopping and untangling a cord from her foot as she followed the robot into the workshop. "Chip, it's all right, she's the ship's security officer. She's a friend." (A Space AU.)

( Whole New Worlds )

Cross-posting my yuletide fics. This was my gift for

tvconnoisseur.

Lizzie Bennet Diaries | Lydia & Lizzie | 1400 words | G | at AO3

Summary: Lydia Bennet, bringing the adorbs and laying down the truth.

Notes: Canon threw a curveball at Lydia and Lizzie's relationship, with the fallout from Lydia's 21st, just after I finished this.

Thank you to rumpleghost and blottingtheink for looking at this for me.

( Reasons Why Lizzie Bennet Is Perpetually Single: A Helpful List Compiled by Her Awesomer, Sexier, Totes Adorbs and Amazing Younger Sister )

For me

Laliandra wrote It Can Be In Any Tense, But It Must Make Sense for me! It’s a Mary/Lydia Lizzie Bennet Diaries band AU, hells yes.

It’s more a slice-of-an-AU, as the author puts it, than a resolved story, but it’s awesome: I love Mary’s voice, and the way she thinks about Lydia. I would read all of the words in this ‘verse.

From me

In a staggering and in no way forseeable turn of events, that one 21-point list-fic about sisters was mine:

Reasons Why Lizzie Bennet Is Perpetually Single: A Helpful List Compiled by Her Awesomer, Sexier, Totes Adorbs and Amazing Younger Sister, also Lizzie Bennet Diaries because it is an LBD year.

I also wrote a treat, because I never have before and I liked the idea. I didn’t have much access to a laptop in the lead-up to Christmas, but I had a notebook, so I scribbled this in between wrapping presents and playing 500 with my mum, and uploaded it Xmas morning in the Southern Hemisphere:

Whole New Worlds, Disney Princesses, Mulan/Belle space AU feat. a small robot.

I'm going to cross-post these to DW at some point - because turning up late to so many fandoms has given me a huge appreciation for stories posted in more than one place - but I'll probably polish up the Disney one a bit before I go duplicating it anywhere. Maybe I will even give it a real summary! Who knows, possibilities are giddy.

*

Yuletide this year has been brilliant. Am I imagining that it's better than usual, or have I just been reading more than usual this year? (First time ever I have had good internet access on Boxing Day, was amaze.) Anyway, recs so far here for anyone interested.

Oh hey, today is Post Like You Are a Person Who Posts Things Day.

I've been enjoying the Yuletide History meme, but I didn't do it at first because - well, because posting, but also because I just don't have very much Yuletide history. I've only participated twice before this year, and I've submitted only my assignment for each one. But I would like Yuletide to be one of those things that I participate in every year, so m'gonna do it anyway.

Also I just uploaded my assignment, so I'm in a good mood. (I mean, it's not exactly a story for the ages, but still, it's done.)

2008

Apple Vines
Chrestomanci Chronicles
G, 2200 words
Cat & Chrestomanci, Cat & Gwendolen
Cat doesn't think he's had a family, a proper family, in - well, in a long time.

In all honesty, the best thing about this fic is the accidental title. I gave Chrestomanci a dressing gown with fanciful apples growing on vines because Chrestomanci wears fanciful dressing gowns, then I used it for the title because it sounded nice and I had no other ideas. It wasn't until - god, possibly years later - that I realised that it was a metaphor for adopted family and thriving in foreign places.

2011

A Fine and Public Place
Vorkosigan Saga
PG, 2400 words
Ivan/Byerly
High Vor gossip is both a volatile threat and a tool to be used.

I was horribly insecure about this one, and then it was really well received and now I'm all sorts of fond of it. I mean, it was probably always going to be well received because it was a slash pairing for one of the biggest fandoms of Yuletide. But I was terrified anyway. This canon is so goddamned intimidating. I almost got palpitations when I got my assignment and it hit home how lucky I'd been, because one of the characters I blithely offered to write was freaking Mark Vorkosigan. I got off so easily with Ivan and By.

I started doing that Fandom 2012 meme and accidentally wrote nearly a thousand words on Once Upon a Time. So I thought I would post the TV part of the meme separately, er.

Your favorite tv shows of the year?

I'm terrible about starting TV and then getting distracted by something else. So I'm partway through a season of about twelve different things at the moment. But my favourites of this year have been Warehouse 13, Revenge, Once Upon a Time and Psych.

Psych I actually tried to watch when it first aired, and I decided it was kind of dumb and not nearly as funny as it thought it was, and gave up. But every now and then Tumblr circulates a gif or some dialogue that's incredibly charming, so I got Season 3 and started watching it a few weeks back. And other than the weird fixation on casting only blonde women for all the regular and guest female roles, it is so charming. Shawn and Gus have such a darling friendship.

Warehouse 13 I started watching purely because I kept seeing femslash for it. I almost never get into live action screen fandoms, but lots of femslash = probably excellent relationships between female characters, and that's always going to pull me in. I did have some reservations for a while - it was fairly charming, but the aesthetic just kind of doesn't do it for me. I thought that a steampunk mystery procedural would hit my buttons square on, but the way that W13 does steampunk doesn't seem to work for me. I don't know, maybe it's the junkshop vibe?

As soon as the characters knew each other enough to really love each other, though, I was hooked. The kind of incredibly affectionate intertwining bonds that the warehouse crew all have with each other is basically all I want ever from team shows.

Revenge I watched basically for Nolan and Emily. I've only seen Season 1 and the very beginning of Season 2, and the chatter I've seen seems to suggest that the introduction of a third jerkily boring dark-haired white dude as yet another love interest is dragging it down pretty bad. I will watch it, though, because Emily and Nolan are still there. And also I haven't heard anything about what kinds of arcs Ashley and Charlotte get in this season, and I need to know.

Once Upon a Time is another one I started watching because I was seeing femslash around, and another one where the aesthetic jars for me a bit. Or, sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't? It's just sometimes the character style and makeup tilts too heavily into that kind of trashy/soapy Charmed look, especially Regina's evil queen persona. On the other hand I adore Regina's look in Storybrooke, and really like the character design of her younger persona, so it's kind of all over the place. I like the difference between Snow with her messy soft hair and Mary Margaret with her perfect Disney-esque short do, too.

I was a bit dubious going in, because modern interpretations of fairy tales tend to be so lazy, to take such dumb easy routes that miss the point of the story entirely, and apply modern sensibilities to "fix" the stories and make the female characters less lame, and miss the agency that the characters already had. If somebody had mentioned that OUaT's fairy tales are half reinterpretation and half unabashed Disney Princesses fanfiction, I would have been here so much sooner.

Even apart from the Disney factor, though, I do think they do some really interesting things with the tales. (I've only seen the very beginning of S2, so this is basically about the S1 tales.) Snow White is obviously the main tale of S1, and even though they give Snow greater agency by making her kickass in some standard ways - swordplay! banditry! - it isn't executed in the usual way. Snow was never the spirited princess rejecting social expectations and defiantly riding her horse astride and yearning for freedom - that's Regina, and I am so in love with the fact that the evil queen gets the classic modern fairy tale heroine backstory. Instead Snow is gentle and kind and forgiving, just as her Disney version is, and her natural bravery tends towards self-sacrifice. Her toughness and kickass swordwielding woodswoman skills are a natural extension of the fact that when she's a teenager she is thrown into the woods, and survives and thrives.

And she's open to the criticism of being too perfect, this gentle forgiving leaderly girl who can wield a sword, but even that gets extra depth in Mary Margaret, still herself but weaker and making bad decisions. Snow is the best version of herself, the best-case scenario who became everything she could be, just like Charming is the best-case scenario for indecisive, cheating David.

I don't love the fact that Ruby and Regina are the two most sexualised characters. The sexy = evil thing that Regina's got going on, especially as the evil queen, is obviously a bit ugh. And the thing about Ruby is that when the original Red Riding Hood stories are framed as being about sex, then they're about rape. And Little Red is sexualised again and again in popular culture, and it's gross, and even though Red's actual story in OUaT isn't about sex, her character design still plays into that cultural history. BUT the fact that her actual story isn't about sex, and doesn't make her a victim while still pulling in the imagery of blood and primal fear and monsters, is pretty awesome and totally works for me.

I really like the way the Cinderella story is interpreted too, the change your life refrain. The way it's explicitly not about a desire to feel pretty for a night - which is a totally ok desire, but a bit of a short-sighted use of a magical gift given all the things that are awful about Cinderella's situation - and it's not about love, at least at first, because of course when Cinderella asks to go to the ball she's never even met the prince. Instead it's about wanting a way to escape her situation and change the hand she's been dealt, and even though OUaT makes Ella's agency a lot more explicit with her Deal, it works with the folk tale, too. Cinderella received her chance as a gift, but she asked for it and she pursued it, escaping her drudgery three nights running.

On the non-fairy tale side, I really like Emma and her approach to the world. I love how much I believe in her as a bounty hunter and a sheriff: that with all her issues and vulnerable spots, her bulldog bravery and instinct towards action is unquestionable. And the show never feels the need to question it, to undercut her in that way. And I really love how much the show validates her power and Regina's power and the importance of their rivalry on the village stage. The sheriff vs. the mayor. Only Mr Gold is as important a player in the events of the village, and his power is a sneaky and far more stereotypically feminine kind.

One of my favourite moments is when Henry is trapped in the mine and somebody has to heroically strap themself into a harness and go down to find him, and Regina immediately says "I'll do it" and Emma says "No I'll do it", and nobody there suggests that it should be anyone else. There's an unquestioning understanding that the two people with the right to it are these two women.

Hiiiii. I am so sorry.

So I was travelling during signups, which I mentioned in the bare bones signup along with a semi-promise to write a letter when I got home? And then I got home and I was tired and figured I would write a letter in a few days when I was feeling sparkier? And then I still hadn't written a letter and I thought wellll I love all these fandoms, I will be delighted with anything my recipient gives me, maybe I don't need to write a letter? And then it was definitely too late and I figured nobody was going to be checking for one anymore.

Then just now somebody on twitter was complaining that their recipient still hadn't written a letter, woe, and sudden guilt. So. On the off-chance that you have in fact been checking this journal periodically and with increasing frustration, 1) I apologise, and 2) here is a super quick letter. (ETA: Lies, this is really long, whoops. PROBABLY NOBODY IS READING IT, I don't know why I went on so.)

Most important note: Seriously, I love these fandoms, I will love anything you write me.

Things I am into in a general way: I love AUs, as out-there as you like. I also love canon fic! I'm just saying that AUs are a thing I'm cool with, if you had an idea but were unsure of it. I love femslash and het and gen and slash. I'm happy with explicit scenes, but don't need them. I love best stories that hinge on a relationship, whether it's romantic or otherwise, and where there are emotional stakes in that relationship: something that could be lost, something that's a point of conflict, something they want from each other. But stories that are about a character's relationship to self are also really cool, so, you know. If you want to write a character study, go for it.

( More specifically )

( Still fiddling with this )

I spent Friday night hyperventilating with feelings and fannish joy as I went through the update, which exhausted itself as the working week caught up with me and the walkaround continued and

blottingtheink eventually signed out and went to bed because it was, you know, morning where she was; then I spent Saturday reading tumblr reactions and fic about the new characters and redoing the walkaround to save all the dialogue (... ahaha. ha.) and basically burning out on anything to do with Homestuck. And now I'm actually in the mood to write thoughts. Yay \o/

( #good grief )

For the "our song" square in my cottoncandy bingo card. More Hogwarts 'verse.

Homestuck | Roxy & Dirk | 1500 words | PG | at AO3

Summary: The end of Seventh Year is coming too soon for Roxy.

( Celestina Warbeck Ultimate Mixtape )

For the "candy" square in my cottoncandy bingo card.

Homestuck | Feferi♥Sollux, Sollux♠Eridan | 2900 words | PG | at AO3

Summary: Sollux didn’t plan to start Fourth Year playing terrible travel games with Slytherin aristocracy, but the honour of Ravenclaw House is at stake. Apparently.

( Taste Test )

I have a

cottoncandy_bingo card! Under the cut:

( where the majyyks happen )

I have decided to use it to do the most self-indulgent thing I can think of, which is writing stand-alone ficlets in the Homestuck Hogwarts AU I've been playing around with. (Mostly I just mean I've been sending a bunch of emails to

blottingtheink about House Sorting, because that is the first great joy of a Hogwarts AU.)

I don't know how many I'll do, or whether they'll all strictly be fluff - I'm not really all that focused on getting bingos? But so far it's really fun. I actually wrote a Jane/Roxy ficlet for the first square, because cotton candy ship, but then I didn't like it, so I'll have to find something else to fill that. I have a Feferi/Sollux fill for the second square, though, which I'll cross-post here this evening. It's up on AO3 now.

(I've never felt any urge to write Feferi/Sollux before, I think it's going to be that kind of 'verse.)

I've started watching Warehouse 13. So far I am utterly charmed: I love the dynamic between Myka and Pete, how it's really playful and fond and full of mutual trust in the other's abilities even though they genuinely piss each other off. I also like the way the victims of the case-of-the-week keep on not dying or having anything truly horrible happen to them - I appreciate a crime-solving drama not based on the pain and death of one-off characters.

But it's also made me think a lot about the cliche of the logical by-the-book agent and the instinctual trust-your-gut agent, and the way when applied to a female/male partnership, Agent By-the-Book is always the woman and Agent Trust-Your-Gut is always the man. (My pool of examples is a bit thin, but it's true in X-Files and it's true in Bones and it's true more than once in Warehouse 13 and I don't know enough about any other female/male buddy cop show to judge.)

The thing is, I couldn't work out what I wanted from that cliche. It's not really that I want to see it reversed, because of course there is a long cultural tradition of women being incapable of logic and being ruled by their hearts and hormones and hereditary instincts, and this modern cliche is a subversion of that.

Only ... that's the thing. What annoys me about it is that the writers of all of these shows have clearly decided that they can't flip the dynamic the other way, because a female character trusting her instincts strays into the area of Women's Intuition, and that's a trope that nobody will respect. Which basically comes out as a subliminal message to the effect that a man's instincts are worth listening to, but a woman's instincts are laughable.

So I guess what I want, what I really really want, is to see female/male partnership dynamics that hinge around a different divide. Because that one is turning into the wrong kind of cliche.

So last year I spent I don't even know how many months obsessed with due South, and the one fanwork I managed to produce was this vid. It was the first vid I ever made, and it was nearly finished when Windows Movie Maker crashed on me and took the file with it. I had a draft version which I pulled into Sony Vegas, where it mocked me by having eight million glitches and needing most of its clips replaced. With the result that it has taken me like a year to fix it, in between working on other things.

There's never a bad time for Francesca Vecchio and Maggie MacKenzie to get their rockabilly on, though. I hope you like it!

due South | Francesca & Maggie | at AO3

Song: '(Don't You Mess Around With) My Little Sister' by Michelle Shocked
Summary: Well she's a rocker, she takes after me.

Password: sister

Download wmv from MediaFire (59 Mb)

( Lyrics )

I swear that this is the last post I'm going to make on this subject, but I think I've worked out what it is about Homestuck's failings as a social fandom that bothers me so badly.

The problem is not that there's no one to talk to. I've been late to more than one fandom, and been pretty content wandering about abandoned fic archives reading everything I could and boring my friends list with my three-years-late flail.

The problem is that there's discussion going on, interesting and lively and highly visible discussion, but it's inaccessible. There's nothing wrong with a BNF-heavy fandom, BNF blogs can be really excellent sites of discussion and engagement and ideas. But not on Tumblr. Tumblr assumes that the goal is not mutual communication, but celebrity - many people hearing your voice and seeing your art, without you hearing anything from them that isn't related to you. So the only ways to speak to somebody are:

1) the Ask box, which you are expected to use to ask the cool and interesting opinions of the person you're talking to, not to express your own opinions

2) private messaging, which is explicitly called "fan mail", just to drive home that even though mutual communication is possible, it's not the point

3) commenting on posts, which is set up so that the only way for the poster to respond to a comment is to make a whole new post for it, again driving home that the point is not a conversation but feedback on your awesomeness

4) reblogging with commentary, which is understood to be a method of creating dialogue only secondarily, and at the original poster's discretion - there's no feeling that it's the polite thing to do to engage with the commentary on reblogs of your text posts. A lot of the time you probably don't even see it.

So because so much of Homestuck fandom has actually been born on Tumblr, rather than migrating there from LJ, fannish engagement is fundamentally constructed to be top-down, or centre-out. It's not that you can't engage with fandom ideas, it's that only the people immediately around you will hear. You can't affect the conversation. It's controlled - not deliberately, but controlled all the same - by people in the centre. Even writing fic doesn't feel like a contribution that affects fandom, with no conversation around it.

I feel, basically, as though I've been relegated to being a consumer of my own fandom. Like sitting on a couch with a small group of friends, chatting as we watch pop culture commentary on TV about something we love. I can talk about what they're saying with the person next to me, but that's about it.

(I know it's not quite as clear-cut as that, and that there's more than one hub of conversation, and that probably more gregarious people than me, or people more comfortable with the dynamic of Asks maybe, can manage to work this system to connect with the fandom in a meaningful way. But it's definitely a simile that works for me.)

The things I love to pieces about Homestuck fandom, the things that make it the best fandom I have ever been in, are that I adore the canon like nothing; that unlike the only other fandoms where I've loved the canon this much (due South and Hikaru no Go), it's also exactly the kind to inspire me to write the kind of stories I'm best at; that both canon and fic are full of girls; that it's also the most multi-shippy place I've ever been; and that people create the most AMAZING fanworks, I am constantly in awe of the fic and art and videos and everything else that fans of this webcomic create.

The thing that makes Homestuck the worst fandom I have ever been in is that, despite having written 6 Homestuck stories, having spent eight months reading and being excited about it, having talked about it everywhere I have a platform, having written meta, speculation, reaction to updates, having participated in a major fest, having recced fic, having engaged in every single way I know how ...

... I don't actually feel as though I'm in it.

_____________

Anyway, the conclusion I'm coming to is that, I guess, I can't actually do this anymore. I'm not going to stop loving the webcomic, and I'm not going to stop reading Homestuck fic at least fairly regularly, but I have to either pull back quite a bit from Fandom altogether for a while, or I have to branch out so that Homestuck isn't my only fandom.

So hey. Uh.

Avengers is cool, right?

Voting results for Round 1 of the HSO are up! So, I get to link this one, finally. The word limit was a bit of a bind, and avoiding using the words eyes, see and look turned out to be a bigger technical challenge than I'd anticipated, but on balance I'm really happy with this one. This ship is such a good ship. It placed 17/109, which I'm comfortable with.

With thanks to

blottingtheink, who not only beta'd this but also talked through every idea about blackrom dynamics I've ever had.

Homestuck | Terezi♠Vriska | 3000 words | PG

Summary: They have a conflicted and difficult friendship again now, but Terezi wouldn't be preparing to be in the same room as Vriska, for the first time in nearly two sweeps, if they hadn't been paired up for a trainee examination. (A non-Sgrub AU.)

Read at: AO3 | DW

So I ended up dropping out of my HSO team just after Round 2 submissions, and transferring to Team English (the voting-only team). I wrote and submitted fic which, actually, I really like - and will link to when the Round 1 voting results are up, I guess, although I think the anonymous period is over now that voting is closed? And I participated a bunch in one of the bonus rounds and read all the Round 1 fics and commented and voted on them and posted a rec set, and have been reading the Round 2 fics and commenting. So I don't really feel like I failed out - that's a lot more participation than any other fanworks fest that I've taken part in has asked for.

Everyone on the team was talented and nice, but we never really came together and clicked, and we had a lot of admin and communication problems and leadership uncertainty, and it just got too hard to maintain the energy to contribute to keeping the team functioning as well as to work on what I'd promised to do for the collaborative round. I was getting ridiculously stressed and the whole fest was starting to feel not fun, so! It would have been cool to keep my team and get to be properly excited about our points rankings and such (although I'll still be cheering for them), and I feel bad about dropping out on the collab round plans, but I feel a whole lot lighter.

Anyway once out of the team I got much more excited about reading the Round 2 entries, and oh my god it's all ghostbusters and cannibalistic mermaids and zombie apocalypses and wow, I love this round's theme \o/ And I'm all kindsa excited about the voting results - even apart from my own fic in this first round. I'm terribly invested in people voting for the right things, "right" in this case obviously meaning "my favourites" but that probably goes without saying.

Would anyone be interested in an HSO recs post over here?

This was supposed to be a much longer story about all the ways John has met Rose for the first time, through timeline shenanigans and unfortunate bouts of unconsciousness and grimdarkness, exploring the things I love most about the dynamics of their friendship. Also: grimdark throes! Totally were going to be a thing. That story tied itself into knots and fell in an unworkable heap, but I really liked this pesterlog and I thought it could stand alone as a ficlet.

Homestuck | Rose & John | 800 words | G | at AO3

Summary:
TT: That's what I mean.
TT: I am not a good friend.
GT: i bet that's not true.
TT: That would be a singularly ill-conceived bet.

( Past John: Pester Rose for the first time )

I've been thinking a lot about hetfic lately. When I started out in fandom it was 2006, femslash barely existed on my radar, and het was that less-cool, way-more-mainstream thing that some other people did in other parts of fandom and mostly I didn't get why you would bother.

Then fandom rediscovered feminism (again? I guess?) and I personally discovered that having called yourself a feminist from the time you could read did not actually mean that all of your thoughts and opinions were feminist by default and you got to not question yourself and your assumptions. And that maybe this thing where we as a community didn't really want to read fic with girls as main characters was less awesome and progressively subversive than previously thought.

Which meant that het, along with femslash, became itself cool and subversive. And, especially in fandoms with no or very few important canon relationships between female characters, where femslash was as a result going to be a particular hardsell, focusing on important female–male relationships as a reader and a writer became an act of feminist fannishness.

Which is a pretty common fandom arc to have followed, I think? But it isn't everybody's. So I would find these new fandoms that had a lot of het, and I would read that as feminism, and cheer. Only sometimes it isn't. Homestuck in particular is excellent for hetfic: of my 165 HS saves at pinboard, 61 are het, with only 30-something each for slash and femslash. And it was only after a few months in the fandom that I began to realise that some of those het writers and readers are actually, you know, crazy revelation, coming from a place of unacknowledged homophobia. The "I just happen not to like slash it's personal taste" folks and the "I have no interest in two guys together because I'm a straight dude" folks. (Because ... personal sexuality is totally a bar to appreciating romances that don't cater to it, that's why no queer people through history have ever been into hetero romantic literature, and also why Homestuck is exclusively populated by people who are turned on by underage grey-skinned aliens with horns. In their personal lives.)

Which led to me feeling weird about het again. Because I don't want to be part of a movement to make fanfiction less subversive of mainstream constructions of sexuality and gender and the dynamics of romance. I don't want to de-claw it in a way that makes it palatable to anti-queer prejudices. That would be the opposite of cool.*

Except, OK, last night I was reading this Jade/Dave ficlet, and I had one of those revelations-that-shouldn't-have-been-a-revelation-because-it's-completely-obvious. You go to fanfiction for what you can't already get everywhere else, and that applies to het just as much as it does to every other kind of fic, doesn't it? The Jade/Dave ficlet above has the kind of deeply personal gender dynamics and shivery exploration of male physical and emotional passivity and vulnerability, without being explicitly about power - just about these two characters and the ways they respond to each other - that I couldn't find in one in a hundred YA romances. It's really fucking hot, and really appealing, and it's human and individual and it's what I read hetfic for. Even though I didn't realise it.

Anyway that was way too many words to say not very much, except that mainstream romance is hopelessly limited and limiting and fandom is awesome and hetfic is important, and also I read a story I really liked last night. YAY \o/

______________
*Which is not to say that people shouldn’t read and write exactly what they want to read and write, or that wanting, say, Elizabeth/Darcy stories with mainstream nineteenth century gender politics and notions of satisfying romance is a less valid fannish desire than wanting Thor/Loki alien incest slash, etc. etc. you know this line and it's really not the point here.

There was yet another round of "Oh god AO3 is going to the dogs or the teenie badficcers whatever" complaints in my corner of tumblr just recently. (Which is always sort of equal parts sad and hilarious, partly because it's the tumblrfication of tagging at AO3 that most gets to me anyway.) And basically what came out of it was a bunch of conversations about the kudos/hits ratio being the best marker of quality.

If you could sort by the kudos/hits ratio that would obviously be the best (although I guess it would create a skew against multi-chapter WIPs in the same way sorting by hits skews in favour of them), but it's still pretty invaluable, imprecise as it is.

Anyway, it made me really curious about how different my most popular fics list would be on this criteria rather than the hitcount one. So I spreadsheeted. 85% of my fic at AO3 was uploaded before the kudos system was introduced, so it's not hugely meaningful, but still, here are my top 10 most popular fics by kudos/hitcount ratio, with chatter:

( A few of them are definitely surprising )

I'm increasingly glad for the kudos system. As a reader for the quality gauge and as a writer for the little parcel of reassurance every day that I'm not throwing words into a void. Fandom is so lonely and lacking in social engagement for me now, compared to what it was. I have a few excellent fannish friends, but I don't feel like I'm part of a community. Tumblr is so terrible as a fannish platform, the only way to talk to people you don't know is to reblog or comment in a way that requires them to make a whole new post to acknowledge you, or to use the Ask Box, which is all Please expand on your important opinions and not at all This is interesting and here are my thoughts - which is a dynamic that makes me way too uncomfortable to ever use Ask Boxes. And even with fic, even with well-received stories, you deal in handfuls of AO3 comments from strangers compared to piles of LJ comments from your extended friends list.

And I think the HSO is especially driving home the loss of a sense of actual community that I have going from Bandom to Homestuck? The HSO is the most vibrant, ridiculously active fanworks fest I have ever been involved in. And it's still. so. lonely. There's still so little conversation and feedback, it's just this whirlwind of creation. Which is awesome. But I miss knowing a whole crowd of other creators and having them know who I am, and having long comment thread discussions, and feeling like part of something.

But hey, every day I get a kudos email and I don't know till I open it if it's one person letting me know they appreciated that one fic I never liked very much, or if it's a super-popular day and there are a whole bunch. It's nice.

(This post brought to you by PMS and the fact that it's winter. You're welcome.)

Profile

c'est what

January 2022

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
						1
2	3	4	5	6	7	8
9	10	11	12	13	14	15
16	17	18	19	20	21	22
23	24	25	26	27	28	29
30	31

Syndicate

Page Summary

The slideshow don't put all the pictures together
Fic: Whole New Worlds (Mulan/Belle)
Fic: Reasons Why Lizzie Bennet Is Perpetually Single (Lydia & Lizzie)
Yuletide
Yuletide History Meme
2012 in TV
Dear Yuletide Author
Homestuck Fanart Reclist
Bubblr Walkaround (Is this officially being called Openbound? How does that figure?)
Fic: Celestina Warbeck Ultimate Mixtape (Roxy & Dirk)
Fic: Taste Test (Feferi♥Sollux & Sollux♠Eridan)
Cotton Candy Bingo card: majyyks
It also annoys me that TV Tropes defines Buddy Cop as only male/male partnerships
Vid: (Don't You Mess Around With) My Little Sister (due South)
On top-down fannish engagement
Fic: A 1-in-8 Chance (Terezi♠Vriska)
HSO things
Fic: Past John: Pester Rose for the first time (Rose & John)
Boys and girls are all het up
Kudos-to-Hitcounts Ratio

Style Credit

Style: Gray for Boxes and Borders by branchandroot

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Apr. 24th, 2026 08:29 pm