Tag: fan fiction

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Geekier than thou?

Thanks to the Stooge for this one – The Onion’s A.V. Club points out twenty pop-cultural obsessions even geekier than Monty Python. While Star Trek is #1, there’s not much about Star Wars, although there are plenty of entries about things that SW fans do and like, including BSG, Joss Whedon, roleplaying games. (namecheck!) Dr. Who… Plus something I had a lot of high school friends obsessing over for reasons I to this day do not understand, Magic: The Gathering. And for the final blow… Fanfic. Sigh. At least they acknowledge it “isn’t always relegated to weird, unnecessarily erotic original stories with awkward dialogue, plot holes, and spelling errors…” Yeah…

But man, game-show tape trading? That’s just crazy.

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One-stop rec shop

Attention all fanfic readers: Hie yourselves over to Snacky’s Best Fic Ever poll to recommend your all-time favorites (any and all fandoms accepted) and read what others consider the best of the best. Guidelines are pretty simple:

Occasionally, I see discussions about how this is the best damn fic ever, and you’d give it to people who weren’t even in fandom to read!

Tell me about the greatest fic, the one you’d give to people who aren’t in fandom (although, I’d think they’d need to have at least a familiarity with the source material, but that’s up to you) and say, “OH MY GOD, YOU HAVE TO READ THIS, IT’S SO GOOD!” It doesn’t have to be anything recent – it can be the first or last fic you read, however many years or months or days ago. If you can’t narrow it down, pick two. And please, feel free to discuss the fic in the comments.

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Whatever happened to FanfiX?

For years, FanfiX.com was the fanfic archive for Star Wars fandom. The archive started in the late 90’s and was officially dubbed FanfiX.com with the domain purchase in 1997. And then, in 2003, it vanished, and people have been intermittently asking about it ever since. Wombat, one of the site archivists, gives her account.

While FanfiX could never completely archive all Star Wars fic online, particularly after the fandom explosion with TPM in 1999 and the growing popularity of self-upload archives like FanFiction.net during that same period, the loss was a striking blow to the SW fanfic community. Yes, you can still access it via the WayBack Machine, but the possibility was there for a central touchstone for the SW fanfic community.

Are all-encompassing archives like FanFiX or The Gossamer Project practical anymore? Are they even possible? Do we need them? Sometimes I wonder…

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Kerfuffle of the moment

We leave town for a week and everyone starts getting delusions of grandeur… The wankpocalypse (expected July 21, 2007) has come early, it seems. Livejournal has deleted several communities and journals that host incest and slash fanfic, supposedly prompted by complaints about said journals promoting pedophilia. Fandom being fandom, paranoia runs rampart, all the way to Fandom Wank and Boing Boing. I’m not particularly familiar with anything that got deleted, but community names like ‘childlove’ and ‘master_badtouch’ do give me pause.

Cause for concern? Yes. But I doubt this is going to cause a fandom-wide purge, although TPM slashers and Luke/Leia shippers best take a good look at their interest lists. And how about we just stay away from the underage incest porn, ‘mkay?

ETA: Mainstream attention from News.com, and a fan response that doesn’t involve excessive knee-jerking.

ETA2: Livejournal speaks.