obstinatecondolement | Entries tagged with fandom: fanworks

In your own space, set yourself some goals for the coming year. They can be fannish or not, public or private.

So... I have a very extensive Google Doc with my resolutions for the new year, broken down my category, which lists over 115 individual goals for 2023. Some of them are very personal and I wouldn't be comfortable sharing and including all of the ones I was comfortable sharing would be... um, a long post, lol. But here are my fandom resolutions for 2023:

Write one and post 1K word story a month ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ (✔) ✅ ✅ ✅ (EDIT: 01/09/23 I've managed this every month except May so far, so I'll give myself that as a mulligan and allow myself to count a fic from another month where I posted more than just one 1K words fic for May instead as a one-time thing)✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
Participate in Yuletide and write at least one treat in addition to assignment ✅ (✔) (✔) (Edit 03/01/24 I wrote two pinch hits, although I didn't write any treats, so I will call this one a qualified success.)
Participate in one non-Yuletide fic exchange ✅
Edit and post three fanvids (one festivids, one vidukon_cardiff, one other) ✅ ❌(Edit: 01/09/23 I didn't get it together for VidUKon this year, but I'll all myself to count this as a success if I post two more vids) ❌ (Edit: 03/01/24 I'm currently still working on my assignment for Festivids, but I didn't complete post any other vids in 2023.)
Typeset and bind a fic ✅
Record, edit and upload ten podfics (individual chapters count as one) ✅ (⅔) (I recorded some lines for the pod that the podficcer I worked together with for pod_together made for the event and I'll let myself count it for two thirds of one pod towards this goal, since I did have to edit the raw audio a little before I sent it off for her to edit into her Audacity project file)✅ ✅ ✅ (⅓) (⅓) (Edit 03/01/24 I recorded lines in two multivoices that I didn't edit when I went to europodfriends in October) ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
Beta at least one fic ✅
Leave more comments and kudos (kudos every fic that was enjoyable, comment on at least one out of three fics that were enjoyable). Always leave a short comment on a re-read, don’t forget to kudos if also commenting ❌ (Edit: 03/01/24 Definitely dropped the ball on this one)
Update Dreamwidth once a week ❌ (Edit: 01/09/23 Categorically have failed this, lol, but I'll try and get back on the horse and not be too all or nothing about it) (Edit: 03/01/24) Didn't really get back on the horse, I am sorry to say.
Look into bringing back trek-rarepair-swap could be an annual thing for now?) ✅ (Edit 01/09/23 I looked into it with my co-mod and decided it's probably a next year at the earliest thing)
Write more image descriptions and at least look through the notes of posts to find if others have written descriptions before reblogging undescribed posts ✅ (Edit: 01/09/23 I've actually been doing really well at this! Obviously it's an ongoing goal rather than a fait accompli that I'm going to give up on now that I've technically cleared the bar of doing more than I was, but it's nice to realise that I've committed to this very consistently)

Some of these are minimums rather than "do exactly this and no more" goals, obviously.

Looking back at these now, some of these seem extremely doable (and, in fact, I have betaed a fic so far this year and signed up to a handful of non-Yuletide exchanges, so well done me! I am also on track with at least four other goals and possibly more?) and others seem very hard. Ten podfics! I certainly was ambitious when I wrote this list in December in some respects. But, you know, sometimes it's good for me when my reach exceeds my grasp. Gives me room to improve the next year.

It feels fitting to be revisiting my resolutions a day after Lunar New Year. Happy year of the rabbit, everyone! It's my sign's year and I'm not going to waste it like I did 2011, lol. Also, I found out the other day, Vietnam celebrates the year of the cat rather than the year of the rabbit! I'm very charmed by this.

Edit: 03/01/24 So, I did better at this than I thought I would, honestly. Particularly with the podfic! Although to be fair, most of that was a third act twist where I recorded and edited five pods for ITPE in late December. It's good to see a baseline for what was easy and what I struggled with.

I used to get very preoccupied with the idea that I was personally responsible for increasing the representation of f/f and f/m fanworks through my output, largely because of moral scrupulosity OCD brain. I don't feel the same way anymore.

That said...

However, I do think, "I just coincidentally only ship m/m ships ¯\_(ツ)_/¯" can be a cop out and attempts to explain m/m's overrepresentation in the works posted to AO3 as, "male characters are typically the only ones given the depth and dimension which lends itself to shipping" is, in my opinion, disingenuous when you consider how ready, willing and able fandom is to invent characterisation out of whole cloth for minor male characters and shippable dynamics between male characters, who may never share screentime together or reference each other in dialogue, that just do not exist in the source material. I would like to clarify: I do not think this kind of transformation of the source material is sinister! I just think that since we can do that and we often do do that, we can, as a community, also do it for characters who are not male and ships that are not m/m more often.

I think it's worth thinking about how and why we ship what we ship and if we might have unconscious biases that make us overlook characters who are not men or ships other than m/m ships. Just so I'm not misunderstood, I'm certainly not saying that any individual has to ship things they are not enthused by or that they are obligated to Blorbify characters who do not speak to them. I'm also not saying that individual fans have to meet a quota of different ship categories or that they are personally responsible for increasing the representation of a diverse category of ships on AO3. Additionally, I'm not saying that the answer to the question, "Why do I mostly ship m/m?" is always, "Because I overlook and undervalue characters who are not men." Sometimes it's, "because I am primarily or exclusively attracted to men and ships featuring characters I am not myself attracted to do not interest me" or, "because I mostly read/write explicit fic and explicit fic about women makes me dysphoric" or, "because the kinds of characters I tend to be drawn to are seldom not male" or any number of other perfectly valid reasons. Again, this is a big picture issue, not a problem with individual fans' preferences. Note: the focus of this post is gender, but there are obviously many other forms of diversity that can be represented in fanworks. I took this as my primary focus mainly because the default ship categories make it easier to look at numbers for this particular kind of diverse representation.

[EDIT Jan 22 2023: I think that I could have expressed myself better in the above here. For one, I think that my use of the word "we" implies that I think everyone reading this post is primarily an m/m shipper or someone whose favourite characters are all men, which is obviously not the case. I meant "we" in the sense of "transformative fandom on AO3 collectively" which does disproprortionately favour m/m and male characters. I think I also neglected to say that people should create for and engage with ships and characters that they like! I said that no one is obligated to create for or engage with things they don't like, but that still leaves room for the interpretation that it would be a good thing for them to prioritise increasing representation at the expense of having fun anyway even if they chose not to do it. That's not at all what I want! I think that we could all be having even more fun, basically, and that people who primarily or exclusively like m/m ships and male characters are potentially missing out on fun that they could be having. Also, that people who like ships involving characters who are not men or fans of non-male characters are potentially missing out on friends, community and fanworks that they could have if transformative fandom as a whole was less weighted towards m/m ships and male characters.]

( So you said something about a self audit? What do you mean by that? )

A final note: I in no way would expect anyone to examine their fannish output in this level of detail I have here, or at all, and I don't think that I'm being morally virtuous by doing so myself. I'm just really fascinated by data and this kind of thing is interesting and fun for me. Also, to reiterate, shipping is not activism and your fannish output is not necessarily a reflection of your politics or values. While I would personally like to diversify my output in the future, and I think that as a community transformative fandom would be better served by a more diverse offering of fanworks, I don't think that anyone is bad or wrong for liking what they like.

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Like a dandelion up through the pavement, I persist

resistance is not futile

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