All the fandom things lately

[sholio]

There is a post over at CollarCorner on the next few months' themes and activities, including the possibility of a small, low-pressure, gen White Collar fanworks exchange.

Also, the Vacation prompt at starwarsflashmeme is extended for another week ('til Saturday) since SOMEONE (me) forgot to post a new prompt this weekend.

I seem to be mostly talking about fan stuff on Tumblr these days, which isn't something I MEANT to happen, but then interesting pieces of meta come along and I reblog them with notes and, well, yeah. My recent tumblr-reblog meta:

- A gifset and meta on how everyone's reactions to the "suicide mission" in 2x10 are little capsule versions of their personalities
- Daniel's moderating influence on Peggy, and Jack as a cynical balance to their shared idealism

I also stumbled across a tumblr-organized Agent Carter ficathon (not an exchange) with the theme Summer Nights. OF COURSE I signed up, because apparently I now have a Pavlovian reaction to anything with "Agent Carter" and some variation on exchange/ficathon/challenge in the name. >__> Luckily it's only 1000 words and it's not for someone else or anonymous (at least I don't think so), so I can write whatever I want. And just recently I had been wondering if anyone used the word "ficathon" anymore. It's actually very old-school, even though it's on Tumblr! There is a fairly distinctive current style to most fanworks events (run through AO3 exchange-style, anonymous period, fic & art both allowed, etc); either that, or everything is bingo cards. And although I enjoy both of those, it's nice to run across one that's set up differently.

I'd been thinking lately that Agent Carter fandom feels very scattered, compared to LJ-based fandoms; it's harder to find out about the events that are going on, or find all the places where people hang out. But actually, thinking about it and reflecting on past fandoms of mine, I don't think that's true. I think it FELT less scattered when fandom was mostly on LJ if you could manage to get hooked into the "where things were happening" places and get to know people who tended to post about events going on around the fandom. But not everyone was able to do that, and not all fandoms had that, and even so, they tended to localize into little pockets of activity centered around a particular ship or shared interest. Like, when I first got into SGA fandom on LJ, it was the gen everyone-who-met-on-ff.net crowd that I was hanging around with, and while I had a vague idea that things were happening elsewhere in the fandom, I really had no clue about either the het or slash parts of the fandom; aside from a few nexuses like sga_flashfic or the Big Bangs, which involved people from all corners of the fandom, there just wasn't THAT much overlap. Or A:tLA fandom, where the corner of the fandom that I got to know was a small and fairly well-connected one on DW, but I had the vague sense that there was a LOT going on elsewhere, it just wasn't here.

The existence of comms and newsletters did help centralize things, or at least made it easier not to miss events until after they happened. Newsletters don't seem to have made the jump to tumblr and I kinda hope someone will reinvent them someday, though I am certainly not going to be the sucker who has to comb through all the tags to find things. Or maybe they won't; maybe tumblr tags and the fact that most fanfic ends up on AO3 means that newsletters aren't necessary as they once were, just like people don't tend to have dedicated rec sites or directory sites anymore.

Comments

[muccamukk]

It would really be nice to have a tumblr version of fandom calendar, so people could just advertise fests, bingos, etc.

[sholio]

Awww man, that would be great. I really love fandom calendar, especially since I'm not going to FFA these days for various reasons, which was my only other way of finding out about most of the exchanges and other events going on around fandom.

[cathexys]

I think you're right that the tags and AO3 changes things. But I miss the newsletters too! (Especially, because I can go back to, let's say racefail '09, and still find all the relevant meta and links. Try finding the wank from 2 days ago on Tumblr!!!)

[winter_elf]

yea, it's all about who you follow, and true, it is/was easier on LJ to hop person/to/person/to/person to see what their interest are, you can still do that on tumblr. If you happen to follow a very chatty, connected person, you find out a lot of info just by what they post. If you follow a more low key person, not as much - but probably no drama either :)

[st_aurafina]

Newsletters don't seem to have made the jump to tumblr and I kinda hope someone will reinvent them someday

We tried with comicstore_news but it's so overwhelmingly huge, and combined with the move of fic from comms to the AO3, I really don't know where to start. There's a tumblr cross-post, but that's about it. I just can't figure out how the three platforms can be aggregated.

[sholio]

Yeah, after writing the above post I got to thinking about how you'd do it, and I'm not even sure how you would. Where would you draw the line? Would you link to every gifset, every headcanon, every 3-line reaction post? Even if you only restrict it to fic and general announcements, or something along those lines, to keep it from being too enormous, where do you draw the line on THAT? Do you include headcanons and imagines? What about the times a headcanon gets reblogged 8 times with new little bits of fic attached by different people? I'm not entirely sure if it's possible.

On the other hand, something like fandom calendar, where people submit notices of upcoming events, might work really well on Tumblr. I wonder if it might even be worth trying to start something like that. (Not that I'm volunteering. noooo.)

[st_aurafina]

See, I think most of all, it's the events I'm missing - there's all these exchanges that are taking place only on Tumblr, like there's a Bucky big bang, and there's that Agent Carter one you linked, and that's only the area I'm intersecting with, so only my little corner of Marvel fandom.

So, yeah, a comics based fandom calendar type tumblr would be awesome. I would run it, but I don't have tumblr nouse. Like, I don't do tumblr fandom very efficiently, I rarely interact, I'm sure I'm doin' it wrong? How would I get people to post on it? How would I find out about things?

It makes me sad because I think this is the edge of fandom where it's all changing rapidly and I can't keep up. (Maybe I'm aging out? /old fan is old)

ETA: Because if we can cross link a bit more between platforms, maybe a natural integration will start to happen? People will start posting to comms again, that sort of thing.

[chelseagirl]

You're right -- now I am nostalgic for LJ fandom, but at the time, I recall being nostalgic for email list fandoms, because I couldn't always find the conversations on LJ for the fandoms I was interested in, and a lot of my flist was (and is) friends I'd made through past fandoms and adored but did not necessarily share fandoms with anymore.

Tumblr is being really cranky with me at the moment (on my laptop it wants me to change my password, but then I'll have to do it on my phone and tablet as well . . . ), but in any case, thanks for the links!