silver

I don't really have much to say for fannish year writing wrap up, except that in 2021 I finally wrote a fic that was not for an exchange. For the first time since 2009! I would link it but I actually put it under a sock and the anon comm >_> But I am really happy with it. It has a whole bunch of private bookmarks! It was really freeing to write without having to think about someone reading it, and I think my decade of not posting anything except a yearly yuletide fic (and in recent years, not even that) made me forget that it was possible to write something and post it and just enjoy what engagement I get. It's probably all the neurotic worrying about and thinking about reception that made writing dry up (okay, also real life and my disposition towards reading books, to be fair). I wrote two fics this year! I wrote 1 in 2020, 0 in 2019, 0 in 2018, 1 in 2017, 0 in 2016...

I did watch a lot of the D+ shows (thanks anticyclone for being my watch buddy and keeping me on track!) We watched Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Loki, What If?, and Hawkeye. I enjoyed them all! I think overall enjoyment, I loved F&WS the most. It was so enjoyable in characterization and that's really what I care about here - I have other preferences in different media, but once I care enough to follow along all these movies, I absolutely care about characterization most, and F&WS nailed that so well. FFA discussion threads were incredibly fun - I've never been active in the fannish space that way before (always with the book fandoms) and it was amazing. So many fun ideas being thrown about and squeeing over the small details. Thank you for the Winter Soldier Bucky. And of course, I developed a massive crush on Daniel Brühl through it, and watched a bunch more good things because of it. Loki was fun, What If? was fun. I should probably write up a little bit about Hawkeye and I think that it had the most satisfying conclusion - most of the D+ shows really fell down on the conclusions, IMO.

I also finished watching Agent Carter. I watched S1 back in 2016 and never got round to the second season, but again, having a watch buddy kept me on track. We started in Oct and went solidly for several months. I really, really loved it. PEGGY!!

I won't go into detail about reading since I should probably post about it in more depth, but fannishly, I think my mind got eaten by the Taltos books, and OMG thank you so much sholio and hamsterwoman for all the discussion. Honestly, what really got me online ages ago was books - I didn't start on LJ or this corner of fandom, I started on this weird forum about Diana Gabaldon books mostly populated by the kind of older ladies that talk about their DH/DS/DD and wine - and although I've sorta learned to watch and appreciate TV and movies, I really care about books. And screaming about various things that happen in them :D

I got the most awesome fic for yuletide!! For all the Kushiel's Legacy people on my flist, you have to read my gift! It's an AU divergence, if Dorelei didn't die, and had a child called Aniel, and Moirin was born to Morwen instead and was a witch, and omg these are the AUs I dream of reading. Kushiel shows up! There's magic! AHHH! I don't want to spoil it though, it's 8k and plotty and seriously, you should go read it!

Kushiel's Keys (8009 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Kushiel's Legacy - Jacqueline Carey
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Moirin mac Morwen, Aniel de la Courcel, Morwen
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence
Summary:

It is not wise to meddle with D'Angelines in the affairs of love - but the Great Bear Herself is not cowed by shining birds. A story of a world, and a witch, that might have been, if Morwen had succeeded in getting a half-D'angeline child to balance out Aniel, if Dorelai had lived and Imriel been much more fastidious with his croonie-stone, and his love with Sidonie had no time to develop a strong foundation before she was ensorceled, if he had been far away in Alba with his young son when the curse was cast. This is the story of a brother and a sister, of hybrids and heritage, of forgiveness and ghosts.

I'm rereading JS&MN at the moment (Norrell's running about with Drawlight in London; I'm not far in.) I wonder if there are enough JSMN fans on my flist to do a read along? Does anyone want to do a read along? There are about seventy chapters, so I could put up a post each week for chapters 1-5, or something. The details that are packed into footnotes means that any review or discussion I have of these books pretty much covers 1% of the novel.

(I'm totally fine with any of you guys spreading this/people dropping in to chat, and I'm happy to do it even if only one other person wants to. I really love this book.)

Poetry: On poetry thegorgon posted Why a Man Cannot Have Wings by Afian bin Sa'at. It was in response to the many Icarus poems that have been circulating in the community for the last few days: http://poetry.dreamwidth.org/348721.html

( Full text under cut )

If you follow the link I commented and said I liked the poem, but I read it (another three or four times) and now I completely disagree.

This makes me sound like a silly optimist, but how is "but then people will use it to hurt you" a good justification against flying? Do you remember when it was 1999 and people were making predictions and, well, I do, I still have a book put together by students K-12 over what they thought would happen in 2020 and so many of them drew and wrote flying cars, new worlds, new technology. I mean, maybe we should stop making implants because then people will tear them out. Or we should stop making medicines because someone might steal them. Or we should stop making beautiful clothes because people will steal them. And put together sumptuary laws to prop up existing social divisions. Etc.

I don't believe that answering a question, making dreams reality, ever erodes dreams. (I see this argument in science/religion debates, to be honest.) We fly in planes, but people still dream of flying--not only wings but they fly in gliders, in hang-gliders, in parachutes, in all sorts of really scary things. We've been to the moon but people dream of going to space. When has discovering a new species, a new place, a new archaeological site, ever stopped others from dreaming of others? Dreams aren't a finite resource. Making a dream a reality doesn't mean you never dream again--you step onto that new block and reach for higher dreams.

There's an argument here to do with destructive technology and responsibility but flying? Come on.

I did like his comment about everything being a metaphor for the Fall of Man.

--

Fic: So I investigated the Georgina Kincaid fics on FFN and sadly there was nothing that I really wanted (I didn't read the last book because I knew what was going to happen with Seth and I'm really meh on him. The most interesting part about him was his sister and his nieces. They were really cute.) I need to remember to request this for yuletide.

In Kiesha'ra--ok, it's enormous! It's got 200 fic! I don't remember there being so many! But then I realized that I started in 2009 and if you go back, yeah, it's been four years, people have added more. The main types of fic people have written are:

• Mary-Sue/self-insert fic. I am inexplicably fond of these. I mean, I didn't click on any of them advertising stuff like Olivia's long-lost wyvern-falcon-wolf sister fics, but it makes me happy to know they're there. A flourishing fandom should have Mary Sue fic, and drabbles, and pointless gen meanders, and ultra-tropey yet satisfying fic. They're not what you want if you want "the continued adventures of", but that's what fans do.
  
• Retelling fics! Ahh, I remember these. I read one that narrated Hawksong from Zane's POV and I knew it was WIP (last updated: 2011) so I mean, I knew in advance, but I was still sad. Especially since, in the words of the author, she was just getting to the good part! I don't think this fandom really has the momentum to write the really big sort of fic--and I mean the fic that fills a lot of backstory, goes far into the future and past, leaves canon retellings behind and not size--but I enjoyed it way more than I should have.
  
• I also found a bizarro fic in there about oranges, which I think you should all totally click on. It has 5 reviews, and 4 out of 5 are all (to varying degrees of politeness) asking what on earth it's doing in the category. No, it's got nothing to do with Kiesha'ra. https://www.fanfiction.net/s/4977012/1/The-Little-Orange-That-Could

I SAW THOR: THE DARK WORLD TODAY. THIS DEFINITELY MERITS CAPSLOCK. I NEED TO RECOVER.

( Major spoilers immediately )
I have SO MANY thoughts but that should cover some of them. AHHHHHHHHHHH---

(PS to anyone watching: there are two scenes at the end. One after the credits for all the actors, and one after the loooong credits. Some people left before the first, but a bunch left before the second. Stay till the very end.)

I almost got sucked into reading Alastair Reynolds today when I was at the library. There was like ten of his books all in a row, I started rereading Pushing Ice (because I like causing myself pain, obviously), and I almost, almost, almost checked another book out.

Fortunately I couldn't, because I tried and the machine told me that "Your card will expire before the loan date, please talk to a librarian" and I didn't have sufficient ID to renew mine.

Pushing Ice made me absolutely despair because it is basically about exile. Involuntary, irreversible, complete cut off. Their ship is an ice-miner ordered to follow the suspicious activity of a gas giant's moon. Once out of the solar system, the "moon" begins to accelerate and attains a speed a significant fraction of the speed of light. They get caught up in the "slipstream" without realizing--they are deceived by their parent company--and Bella, the commander, makes the call that her duty is "not to get the crew home" but to keep them alive, the chances being too low to go back.

Yeah. And The Prefect was aggravatingly lacking any sort of character arc completion. I actually cared about Dreyfus; I didn't care about the super-sentient-intelligent-thing those two fighting robots were! Maybe it'd have been more interesting to people coming from the previous series, set in the future, though.

OK, I'm done ripping on Reynolds. But still, the science fiction part is very attractive. I keep getting sucked back in, and I refuse to read books that don't have some kind of decent characterization.

I had something else I wanted to talk about but now I have forgotten.

--

Thor 2 trailer is out.



THAT SLAP. That landscape. Oh my god, I can't wait.

( I've never filled all the slots for everything before! )

This is my year to read ALL of Garth Nix's work, I agree. I hadn't realized just how many... In 2008 my fannish self would have absolutely killed for The Ragwitch fic, so bad I actually wrote something (it was terrible) so here goes another attempt!

All the Old Kingdom tags were already common, and so were Han and Raisa, but every-single-other tag I had to stab in the dark to make. Better to have them all with explanatory parentheses than to get them mixed up--I thought Lyssa was a common tag, but it was attached to Star Wars.

The exchange is running at fic_corner or fic_corner, if anyone wants to jump in!

SO I just got back from Iron Man 3, oh my god--

( everything under the cut for spoilers )

I was predisposed to like this movie and it definitely didn't disappoint me!

OTW approves meta hosting on AO3 announcement

My first reaction was YAY!

But then I realized that there is already a really big problem that AO3 has no resolution to, and this decision is sure to aggravate it: the fact that the filtering system is not good, and adding meta to the mix will make it worse.

In addition to all sorts of analysis springing up on various journals, here's FFA's roundup of links and discussion: http://fail-fandomanon.livejournal.com/50237.html?thread=232275517#t232275517

I confess I love these discussions about AO3. There's something in the discussion of how one should manage a project/resources that really fascinates me - some of it's venting, but there are lots of interesting comments that talk about the lack of existing infrastructure and how that's a problem. It's a great read if you're interested in that sort of thing, and they've helped crystalize a lot of my thoughts.

One of the core problems I actually have with the announcement, right off the bat, is that they said yes, meta is allowed! but they're not ready. They are so unready that they do not have a definition of meta. I know that they want to be more transparent and let us know, but telling us that 'something is approved!' while being unsure of what 'something' is is not actually helpful.

Leaving aside the issue of whether meta should be included*, there are major problems in implementation. The underlying problem of categorization on AO3 is becoming increasingly apparent: the listing of fandom names is unbelievably inconsistent, the anime/manga & comics vs visual media vs sequential art vs I-don't-even-know category name is still undecided, the inability to filter out anything using the tag system, the tag system's essential deception (telling users that they can label with whatever while doing a top-down decision on which tags to connect). All of this contributes to a site which is hard for the reader to navigate.

The thing that AO3 does really well is the writer's side of things: the posting interface is a dream, editing is easy, deleting saves you a copy, it's easy to mark up your fic as this and that. But as a reader, filtering is a nightmare. I'm lucky that I can literally read everything in the archive for my fandom, because it's small; scrolling past all the crossovers is doable. But that's an inelegant brute-force solution, and so is manually filtering out tags by search - faceofcathy had an interesting post on search vs browse: filtering using search means knowing exactly what terms are used and listing them all. Manually. And this is not to mention that filtering had to be taken offline, it was hogging so many resources before. Adding meta to this mess - meta, which is often tagged with every single fandom that the author can think of - will basically spam each fandom in turn, and make it even worse.

Given AO3's reluctance to make users do anything, it seems unlikely that the meta will be findable or filterable. AO3 does not require users use a consistent tag or even to mark their work as anything separate - you can embed videos and art, but there's no way to find them without using some kind of search if and only if (IFF!) the author has marked their work "vid" or "art". If they haven't marked their work as such, good luck wading through! Vids and art are clearly both fanworks. But fic is clearly a separate category from art which is separate from vids, and right now, we don't even have a way to clearly differentiate different mediums. It's all up to the user, and there isn't a clear way to even distinguish that - do you tag? Put it in the title? Put it in the description? Which of these will be indexed? If fic/art/vids are hard to distinguish on the archive now, how will meta/fic be filtered for? They're both text-based; at the moment, a crude way of telling is to filter by wordcount (since a vid or a piece of art won't be 50K), which isn't doable for meta.

There needs to be some way to make them findable, and making that infrastructure to support all this - and it's a fine thought, I don't deny - needs to come before the cheering.

*seperis's post here talks about meta and whether or not it even has a place on the archive, given its status.