mindstalk | Entries tagged with fanfic

when the fics have stats like this:

F/M (4782)
Gen (3796)
M/M (1506)
F/F (899)

That's A:tLA fics on AO3, excluding fics also categorized as Korra.

For comparison Star Trek is

M/M (35089)
F/M (17365)
Gen (15774)
F/F (4157)

Harry Potter is

M/M (118917)
F/M (78012)
Gen (48653)
F/F (15103)

Crossposts: https://mindstalk.livejournal.com/563564.html

I wondered how much of fanfic is gen (little relationship focus). A page on the fanlore wiki said people assume 20% but didn't give actual stats that I could see.

AO3 treats it as a high level category so is easy to find. Go to https://archiveofourown.org/media , pick a fandom, then click 'Categories' somewhere on the right-hand bar. There'll be M/M and Gen and others, and you can divide that number by the total.

For most of the big fandoms it's indeed 20-ish %, maybe slightly more. I haven't done precise divisions, just comparing the Gen number to "twice 10% of the total". 15-25% is probably a decent 90% confidence interval.

But for The Silmarillion? Gen is nearly 50 percent of the total. I am smirking in pride for my fandom.

Also I need some Tolkien usericons. Suggestions welcome.

Random icon choice popped up a Twelve Kingdoms one, and I checked that. Gen for it is also at 50%, though with 1% of the size of the Silmarillion.

FMA is at 33ish %, which makes me doubt my confidence interval.

Edit: A complication is that categories are non-exclusive, so a work can be e.g. both Gen and M/F. I'd guess if the author feels it's M/F but not overwhelmingly so, like a plot with some romance? If one wants pure Gen you'd have use the Exclude feature to exclude everything but Gen, which gives lower numbers, like 46% for the Silmarillion rather than 49%. Plus I guess not all works have a category. For Harry Potter works marked Gen and only that are 14% instead of 19%, Marvel is 16% instead of 22%

Edit 2: Not that I have anything against shipping as a class! I've read and written it. But I still can be happy in a favorite fandom having more than 20% Gen...

Out of my many fanfic ideas, today I wrote one down, 1900 words in 80 minutes, for a 2 chapter manga where I may have already written more words than exist in the source. Having cycled it through my imagination for the past few days, and being mostly dialogue, it flowed out pretty well -- and yet I find that even a tiny outline, say of the intended 'beats', might have helped, since I ended up combining two topics back to back when I'd meant for them to be separated by another episode. So that's interesting.

Crossposts: https://mindstalk.livejournal.com/562964.html

I mentioned reading a cool Korra fanfic: that's Icarus and the Sea, by Unpretty on AO3. This fic is Varrick/Zhu Li, long (a short novel) but quite good. Has both of their POVs. Sex scenes near the end, after they finally hook up, if that bothers you. [Oh, I've been reading the EPUB version, which apparently has more sex than what's on AO3.]

I'd discovered her via her Sorrowful and Immaculate Hearts, a whole bunch of DCU fics (mostly Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman.) That's a series set in chronological order but each work is standalone; someone had recommended Empty Graves, which I liked, and then I picked out lots of shorter works until I trusted her enough to read her longer works. I'm not a particular DC fan, but I enjoyed them a lot. If you know the basic 'facts' about the characters then I think that suffices, though there'll be the occasional minor character detail you don't fully appreciate. They're mostly 'human interest' stories, rather than drama with fights and such.

Some out of context quotes:

"Is Superman from Texas?"
"For that to be true," Batman said, "it would need to be possible for a man to be from Texas without telling anyone about it for years."

"Maybe you could give people tips to be successful?" Danny suggested.
"Based on personal experience you should try being born a white billionaire with a Type A personality and a need for external validation that can never be satisfied because your parents are dead."

"Look at this thing. Baguette toasts. What is a baguette toast? I want to shove myself in a locker for this."
(A new Robin has an identify crisis with Alfred's idea of Lunchables.)

Robin-1 to Robin-2:
"Your job is to take care of the genius whose solution to gun violence was to put himself in front of all the guns."

"What, ya just throw rubbers at randos tryin' to fuck in alleys?"
"Sometimes."
Harley laughed loud and hard at the thought of someone getting hit in the head with a condom like a batarang.

"If I see any scenery worth pissing on, I'll be sure to let you know."
"That won't be necessary."
A crudely made wooden sign came into view in the field beside the road. It had a lot of opinions about what constituted sin and what happened to sinners.
"I see some scenery," Bruce said.

"I do not brood."
"Based on the number of birds you've raised, you must."
Bruce groaned audibly.

"I'm imagining the worst fight," he admitted.
"Hawkman and a mirror."

Crossposts: https://mindstalk.livejournal.com/531181.html

questionoftheday asks: Is there a fictional world that feels like your home away from home? What is it and why does it appeal so much to you?

My answer:

Strictly speaking, no, that is not a thought I have.

More loosely speaking, Nanoha. It has the most fanfic I have actually written down, not just cycled in my head, and I think the most characters whose POVs I've thought about, and my own OCs. Although these days I've been reading more elsewhere, especially Valinor and Silmarillion fics, Nanoha is like a mental home space for composition.

Why? I like the characters: their good will, determination, prettiness, and yuri subtext. I like the optimistic magical Starfleet full of second chances and adoption, struggling to survive in a post-post-apocalyptic universe. I like the second communication channel of mental telepathy (Madoka has this too, and some brave Macross Frontier fics) and the games you can play with that. I like that I can justify some of the characters being immortal. I like how the various artificial beings raise various issues of ethics and identity, like some SF, only with a more engaging milieu and set of characters than most transhumanist SF.

And on the reading side of things, it's had quite a bit of good (re-readable) fic: funny gen fic, interesting worldbuilding gen fic, hot (to me) smut fic. Though not enough of the stuff I most want. The one (gen) which I know has amused multiple people who knew nothing of the franchise is Ready, Sette, Go.

Crossposts: https://mindstalk.livejournal.com/514887.html

I have no specific memory of when I first heard of the words fanfic, or fan fiction. There must have been a moment, after going to college, but no memory. (Filk I can do: S had tapes, and lent them to me, so that's restricted to a few years, and I can kind of remember borrowing and copying them.)

I can place a very likely upper bound. In the spring of 1998 I discovered "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (there's a story there for another time), coming in with Surprise and Innocence as they aired, and after Becoming, plowing through jtr's videotapes. Some time after that I was on the Buffy mailing list, and was introduced to the Buffy-Xena crossover fanfic "When Hellmouths Collide" (a mere 870K words, which I never finished). I'd also found a trove of Post-Becoming fic, which I am tickled pink to see is still online.

I'd also had my own ficcy ideas, perhaps some Post-Becoming but mostly about Amy the Underused Witch; meanwhile, my friend Liz went and started writing her own Season 3 scripts, I think to the exclusion of watching the actual show.

I had been in online fandoms before then: the Babylon-5 newsgroup, where I coined "battlecrab" for the Shadow vessels; Deryni newsgroup or mailing list (where I helped with the FAQ), Pliocene newsgroup or mailing list; my own fan pages for Vernor Vinge and Steven Brust; adopting a fan page for Robin McKinley; a SF newsgroup in general... but not a blip or hint of memory of fanfic from any of those. Vs. the eruption of fanfic, named or otherwise, from Buffy.

Funnily enough, I grew up reading a fair bit of what I now consider to be essentially, if not legally, fanfic: tie-in novels. Lots of Star Trek novels, back when Paramount gave them a very loose leash and lots of ideas or varieties could be explored (also back when they were more written by women). Some Brian Daley Star Wars tie-ins. The "Jack McKinney" (pseudonym for Brian Daley and another writer) Robotech novels. In fact, despite watching some DS9 later, and bits of other series, "Star Trek" for me is largely the old TOS novels that I read as a child and teen, with mental visuals coming from the covers and whatever my imagination could spin from those.

As for fanfic after Buffy, I don't have a clear memory. I suspect it went into remission for some years, like my interest in (or even memory of) filk. I had my own unwritten ideas, particularly about Hodgell's stories, but I'm not sure when I re-engaged with ficcy fandoms again. Bujold list? IU Anime? I dunno.

Now, of course, it's a fairly decent part of the fiction I read, ranging from tiny drabbles to massive epics, from smut to deep explorations and extrapolations.

Chrono-trivia: FF.net is from 1998, AO3 from 2008. I remember Latin-Sarah talking about AO3 while I was at IU, but didn't realize it was that late.

Crossposts: http://mindstalk.livejournal.com/486500.html

Crossposts: http://mindstalk.livejournal.com/462882.html

For various reasons I was browsing AO3 last night, and noticed that there was Always Coming Home fanfic. This was surprising. If you don't know ACH, it's mostly fictional anthropology by Le Guin, of some future, post-post-apocalyptic, Pacific Northwest society, living in harmony with nature and itself and all that. There's a bit of story interleaved through it, of the Condor People re-inventing armies and warfare and how everyone else deals with that, but mostly it's pure 'study', like the appendices to the Lord of the Rings without the LotR itself. Somewhat interesting, though I don't think I ever read it through. Anyway, there's a shortage of characters and conflict, so what do you write fic of?

All of the fics turned out to be one series, linked above. A series crossover with... Slayers. The novel/anime Slayers. Lina Inverse and all. If you asked me to name anime/manga that at least fit the mood of ACH, I'd go with Mushi-shi. Kino no Tabi. YKK. Aria, even. Not Slayers. I'm sure Lina would be considered mentally ill, or "backwards-headed", by the locals.

That, in fact, provides much of the conflict: not so much fighting as talking. The gang turn to be chasing a prophecy/oracle that they needed to get something from the City of Mind, so they're adventuring in the ACH lands, which from their own POV is the far Outlands. (In return, they seem to be from within the Cyst.)

This particularly caught my attention, since the City of Mind... well, so, ACH is mostly about this anarcho-primitivist society, right? For hundreds of pages. But buried somewhere in the book is a few pages, or half a page, not much, about the City of Mind... an AI civilization/network busily exploring and cataloging the universe at a good fraction of the speed of light, and incidentally providing communication/library/satellite services to its an-prim progenitor-cousin humans back on Earth. Rather useful services, in fact: I think the army was dealt with partly by tracking its movements on satellite imagery and using that to run away more effectively. I'm a sucker for robots and AI in general, not to mention Culture-like AI civilizations, but also it was weird that this lovingly described primitivist society is dependent on high tech support they're culturally ill-equipped to even understand, let alone maintain on their own.

Well, Le Guin is famous for a couple of ambiguous utopias (The Dispossessed and "Those Who Walk Away From Omelas"), I guess this can be another one. Embrace the contradictions inherent in the system, or whatever.

As for the fics themselves, I found them pretty engaging. I have seen some Slayers, but I think you might be able to enjoy them even if you don't know much about Slayers or ACH. Seven pieces, not too long -- 2000-6000 words each.

Crossposts: http://mindstalk.livejournal.com/459839.html

Hanging out on /r/fanfiction recently, I've run across multiple people who hate 1st person narrators. This baffles me, like "I won't read books by women" or "I won't read books with a girl lead". There are so many great 1st POV books out there, including seminal works of the genre or its penumbra as well as 'literature': Frankenstein, Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, the parts of Moby Dick that aren't pure infodump, Amber, Night in the Lonesome October, Vlad Taltos, Book of the New Sun, Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee, Sunshine, Heart of Darkness, the Farseer trilogies, Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, Bertie Wooster, Hunger Games, Ancillary series, Black Company, 20,000 Leagues... and multiple high quality fanfics.

(Also my own Nanoha fics but I make no claims for the quality of those.)

Crossposts: http://mindstalk.livejournal.com/449611.html

Lightly microwaved cherry tomatoes explode in warm sweetness when you eat them with pasta.

El Goonish Shive is a good webcomic.

A Miracle of Science is still a good webcomic, and unlike EGS it's long over.

A Borrowed Voice is a surprisingly good crack-premise Tolkien fanfic.

A bunch of new Madoka AMVs, which I've added to my list. I'll link to just one. Warning: spoilers for series and Rebellion.

Years ago, I proved the sin(A+B) identity from first principles while lying in bed. I think it took 40 minutes. The impressive part is that I'm usually more of a symbolic/numerical thinker than a visual one, I still slide my fingers to manipulate supply and demand curves, so doing finicky geometry in my head, no paper, was pretty impressive. Last night I thought about it again (and again in bed), and solved it much faster; I think I found a simpler solution, though I can't be sure. Alas, the margins of this blog post... or rather, I've never invested effort in learning how to make pictures on line.

The Renaissance art hallway at the MFA was more interesting than I expected, especially in the half that's largely maiolica.

Crossposts: http://mindstalk.livejournal.com/448270.html

Speaking of Star Trek novels... I had a thought. Fanfic's reputation is of heavy dominance by women, as both writers and readers. F&SF published authors in general tend to be male, especially in SF. James Nicoll has a f/m tag bean-counting this for various publications.

But what about tie-in stuff? It's basically officially approved (not necessarily canonical) fanfic that's been contracted by a publisher. It's also lower status, which could mean "we let women do it because it's low status" or "it's low status because women do it". So, if I count lots of authors, will I find demographics more like fanfic, original fic, or something in between? I see no point to making a prediction, since I'm about to go count.

Methodology: so there's two variables of interest: number of unique authors of either sex, and books by either sex. I'll give both. For the record, it's easier to count books. If co-authorship was split between a man and a woman I counted it as half for each.

Star Trek novels

Source

Bantam original 1970-1981:
Authors: 3 f, 8 m. Doesn't include the New Voyages collections. f/t 0.375
Books: 4 f, m 9, f/t 0.31. (0.40 if we counted the mostly-female story collections:)
New Voyages: stories authors 8 f, 0 m, f/t 1.0
New Voyages 2: stories authors 8 f, 2 m, f/t 0.8

Wanderer + Archway 1982-1984:
Authors: 1 f, 3 m. f/t 0.25
Books: 0.5 f, 5.5 m. f/t 0.0833

Pocket Books 1979-present:
Authors: 34 f, 45 m. Not counting ST:TMP by Roddenberry. f/t 0.43

So majority male. But what I noticed going down the list is that there's been a huge surge of men in recent books. The most recent 26 books are all by men, and the last one by a woman is Unspoken Truth in 2010. That period contributes ten new male names; before it, the ratio is 34 f, 35 m. f/t 0.49

I picked the 20 year period from 1981 to 2001 as a likely breakpoint. There was apparently some editorial change: most of the books before 2001 are numbered, only the first one after it is.

Authors -2001: 33 f, 25 m, f/t 0.57
So there's been only one new female author since 2001, and 20 male ones.
Authors 2002-: 1 f, 20 m, f/t 0.04
Books -2001: 67.5 f, 42.5 m, f/t 0.61
Books 2002-: 11.5 f, 44.5 m, f/t 0.20

Yeaaahhh, that's a pretty big change.

E-books: Mere Anarchy (2006–07)
Authors: f 1, m 6. f/t 0.14
Books: 1 f, 5 m; f/t 0.17

The Next Generation 1987-present:
Authors -2001: 21 f, 31 m, f/t 0.40
Authors 2002-: 3 f, 11 m, f/t 0.21
Books -2001: 26 f, 59 m, f/t 0.31
Books: 2002-: 4 f, 35 m, f/t 0.10

Deep Space Nine (1993-present):

Authors -2001: 11 f, 22 m, f/t 0.333
Authors 2002-: 5 f, 8 m, f/t 0.38
Books -2001: 15.5 f, 23.5 m, f/t 0.40
Books: 2002-: 11.5 f, 19.5 m, f/t 0.37

Not much change here, and better than the other lines in the 2002- period.

Voyager 1995-present:

Authors -2001: 11 f, 12 m, f/t 0.49
Authors 2002-: 2 f, 2 m, f/t 0.50
Books -2001: 19.5 f, 12.5 m, f/t 0.61
Books 2002-: 14 f, 2 m, f/t 0.88
Worth noting that 12 of the later books are "post relaunch" and by two authors. But, not surprising that the series with a female captain gets -- or is allowed -- more female attention.

Enterprise:

Enterprise starts in 2001 so I'll just count it as one.

Authors: 3 f, 6 m, f/t 0.33
Books: 3.5 f, 14.5 m, f/t 0.19

There's also New Frontier, 21 books by Peter David, and the Titan (2005-) series following Riker, which is 14 books entirely by male authors, and Vanguard (2005-), 9 books by male authors, and Seekers (2014-), 4 books by male authors.

I refuse to do the work to find the set of all the unique authors, but it's easy to combine books for the whole franchise:
Books -2001: 133 f, 152 m, f/t 0.47
Books 2002-: 45.5 f, 169.5 m, f/t 0.21

Babylon-5 from here

Authors 4 f, 7 m, f/t 0.36
Books 6 f, 12 m, f/t 0.333

Doctor Who: Virgin New Adventures Source

The featuring the Doctor list:
Books: 5.5 f, 55.5 m, f/t 0.09

Welp. And it's just one woman, Kate Orman. "Featuring Bernice Summerfield" isn't much better, one other woman gets in as a co-author, out of 23 books.

Crossposts: https://mindstalk.livejournal.com/438283.html

Some articles on democracy (pluralist and feminist) among Syrian Kurds: NYTimes, FT, scribd copy of FT.

If we kept DST all year, or got rid of it.

A Madoka fanfic I'm reading. It's like Starship Troopers or Old Man's War crossed with Madoka crossed with transhumanism and Culture ship Minds. Kyubey said we'd go to the stars, and we did. Many fans think magical girls are potentially immortal, and here they are. I've been enjoying it a lot. Could have used some more editing passes, but generally fun to read, often funny, I'm engaged with the show characters and the original one. Downside: it's longer than Lord of the Rings and still ongoing, last update Oct 6. I've read 34 chapters out of 44 and am thinking I should pace myself, maybe go read Ancillary Mercy while I still sort of remember what happened in Ancillary Sword.

Funny panel from the Fate/zero manga.

Japan is actually doing quite well per capita: low unemployment, very high employment to working-age-population ratio, inflation is back. Abenomics, and Keynesianism, works. GDP is shriking... because the population is, especially the working-age population.

James notes that Heinlein's first story is closer to Dickens' last novel than it is to us. This will be more interesting when his *last* book is closer to Dickens than to us, but still.

Polio is judged to be even closer to eradication.

Portugal's Left Bloc, a party run by women.

Secret gardens and numinous fantasy

SF written in 1666 by Margaret Cavendish

Crossposts: http://mindstalk.livejournal.com/437801.html

"The Coin", a Haruhi Suzumiya fanfic. It read like one of the novel translations, or better. From Haruhi's POV. I liked it a lot. Seems a lot shorter than the alleged word count.

There are 11 Elaine Belloc fanfics on AO3. I'm not sure any outright suck, but five in particular stood out to me.

http://archiveofourown.org/works/42834
http://archiveofourown.org/works/1088120?view_adult=true
http://archiveofourown.org/works/2811239
http://archiveofourown.org/works/37140
http://archiveofourown.org/works/76370

They're all pretty short, and I'm too lazy to give additional descriptions. They do tend to a common "Elaine chatting with Lucifer" theme.

Possibly linked before: Speak of the Devil, a Lucifer/Madoka-Rebellion crossover fanfic. I've seen the Madoka series, though not Rebellion. I thought it was pretty good as writing, and as a worked crossover fic, including addressing my metaphysical objections to "how could this even happen".

Not a completed fanfic, more a sketch of ideas: Bishop Jayne.

Crossposts: http://mindstalk.livejournal.com/421425.html

Guess I'm officially following the Methods of Rationality now. Curse you, Yudkowsky!

I totally understand someone not liking it; I'm not going to go around saying how awesome it is. But my interest has been caught.

Crossposts: http://mindstalk.livejournal.com/317359.html

I finally took a stab at Homestuck. I went "ehhh".
I finally took a stab at Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. I'm most of the way through. It's not perfect, it's got its moments of smugness, Mary Sueness, character clumsiness, or cultural arrogance. It also has a fair number of clever takes in it, and is full of CS and physics and SF reference I get because I've read the same stuff Eli Yudkowsky has. I'm actually surprised on the SF front, like when I saw the witch named Dorotea Senjak. And Dumbledore having read Lord of the Rings because Muggleborn students *would* compare him to Gandalf was brilliant.

I'll also give some credit for fanfic Harry not being perfect. He's super-rationaist and getting beyond implausible for an 11 year old -- Eli should really have fast-forward to age 15, say, except then he'd lose his take on Quirrel -- and super genius and all, but also pretty *stupid* in some realistic ways.

Anyway, so in the HP universe there's this horrible Azkaban, with Dementor guards, who drive people to depression and insanity. Really horrible and inhumane, and it seems to speak very ill of wizarding society.

Dementors are also called indestructible (outside of Mary Sue fanfic action.) And while the Wikia doesn't confirm this, in the fanfic they erode matter or magic containing them, so Harry's clever plan of encasing one in titanium and concrete and burying it deep beneath the earth would not in fact necessarily work for very long.

So I wonder if Azkaban is a devil's bargain. Not just about cruelty to prisoners, but about bribing indestructible monsters to stay away from society. Its formation might even be a bedrock of magical (or any) civilization, allowing people to live their lives in peace rather than getting attacked by Dementors in the middle of the night at random. But on the subject of Azkaban fanfic Harry's been pure moralist, without a touch of utilitarian dilemma.

Per the concrete, I thought about possible alternatives. Like imprisoning the Dementors and tasking wizards with maintaining the wards. Though if you've got 100+ Dementors and want say 3 shifts of guards it might take a fair chunk of wizarding society to keep them contained. But what price morality, eh?

Then I realized Azkaban could *be* a prison for the Dementors as well, one with prisoners thrown in to keep them happy and not trying to get out...