#instead of wanting to talk in a fannish way about the fandom theoretically based on comics

[elfwreck]

Hello, finding a lot of interesting posts on your blog and hope you are doing well! Anyway, i had some questions about fanlore and was wondering if i could ask you or get pointed to someone else. Mostly about like, what to post, like notoriety, if that changes based on if it's the "right" vs. the "wrong" type of fandom to be associated with fanlore. And also some stuff about adding or quoting stuff you're involved in but that's less of a big deal and more fiddly.

Adding stuff you're involved in is fine. Just be aware that other people might edit later, and if there are controversies, that might include editing in ways that don't put your participation in a good light. We encourage people to add stuff they know, and in fandom, that's often "stuff I'm directly involved in." The biggest issue here is privacy - we've got some complicated rules about maintaining privacy; we discourage connecting people's usernames with real names unless it's directly relevant (and sometimes not even then). And sometimes we separate usernames on one platform from usernames on another one. (If you have permission from the people involved, then multiple names are fine.)

Post EVERYTHING we want it ALL anYtHinG iS GoOd. Don't care how good the language is. We have a regular editor whose native language is not English and she translates with Google Translate and posts that way and someone goes through later and cleans up the phrasing AND WE LOVE THIS.

We don't have a "notability" standard like Wikipedia. We don't have a "citation needed" thing, although info without sources may wind up being rephrased into "some fans claim that..." instead of phrased like an absolute fact.

If you and two friends made an 8-page zine that you printed on the school printer and handed out to about 12 people... that's worth a Fanlore page. If you planned to make a zine, and had a name and a template and two volunteer artists and a theme and you got some comments, but it never happened... that is also worth a page.

There's some weirdness around "what kind of fandom do we cover?" Theoretically, anything is welcome; in practice, we're not covering mainstream sports fandoms (y'know, the guys who dress up in blue & yellow facepaint and wear giant foam fingers) and we're edging around classic sci-fi convention-ish literary fandom. (We have some of that. But we're not trying to recreate or override Fancyclopedia's work.) We're also not trying to overlap tvtropes, which gets more complicated to sort out, because we do cover a lot of the same topics, but we have a different focus for them.

For myself, I'd love to see

More video game fandom coverage, esp related to mods, controversies/dramas, and the screaming that happens every time a company releases a remake on a new platform for more than the original. Also speedrunning info.

More conventions, especially media-fandom/fanfic-ish conventions

Fannish trends on TikTok

Cosplay. Lots of cosplay. We are missing so much info on the history & trends of cosplay.

Pages for modern zines and pages for the processes involved in making them. (When I got into fandom, there were no "interest check/ mod applications/ contributor applications" etc. phases.)

Everything that's going on in Discord OMG we are missing SO DAMN MUCH FANDOM that is only happening in closed communities that you can't even search the names of and they're all gonna fuckin' VANISH when Discord does some weird fannish purge thing.

Updating older/early pages with new info for those fandoms, or new ways their common tropes connect to new fandoms.

Also, we always need submissions and voting on the Featured Article Nominations. Anyone can suggest. Anyone can vote.

...as you might be able to tell, I can talk about this AT LENGTH IN GREAT DETAIL.

[bitimdrake]

Why is it so damn hard these days to find fics without Tim’s parents being abusive and evil or Jason having “Lazarus Pit Madness”?? Dx I’m dying

I knowwww. I get annoyed by both, yet they’re so prevalent it’s impossible to really read fic without accepting them to some extent :( I wish my standards for accurate characterization in fic could be much higher, but instead I just have to keep high standards for writing quality, and the slimmest list of deal breakers for characterization/canonocity.

I haven't actually been into comics all that long, but I've looked back a bit at older fic a few times, and it's truly wild how different the vibe is. If you jump back like 10 years ago, almost everything is written with an awareness of canon, and a huge number of fics will outright say specifically when they occur or what specific events they're ignoring. You know when you read normal fic for, say, a TV show, and every author is like "this is au after episode 6" or "this occurs vaguely some time in season 2". Like...can you imagine if we still got to have that in dc fic. The fucking dream.

But as far as I can tell it's this combination of...the reboot mixed things up so much that even people who do read a lot of comics either have to declare their fics are set preboot, or operate on this unclear foundation of the contradictory backstories from the new 52 through now. And the less and less current preboot is, the less and less there is to keep popular interest in it alive.

You’d still think that people could be basing fic off current comics, even if the backstories/histories are under debate--but also a lot of people slid over from the fandoms of various adaptations (or just found the fandom by itself somehow??) and, for reasons that have never made sense to me personally, decided to create for this world that they’ve never actually interacted with. And one little piece of completely fabricated fanon--like “Jason was affected by ‘lazarus pit madness’ when he returned to gotham”--gets picked up by other people who use it in their work and claim it’s canon, which gets picked up by even more people, into a snowball effect. Until everyone who doesn’t know the source material thinks it’s true, and even people who do know comics can very very easily get swayed or muddled with popular fanon.

So now we have a million blogs run by people dedicated to a fandom for a fiction they’ve never even touched, and 90% of any given dc search on ao3 filled with fic that is based on other fic that was based on an incorrect quotes blog that was based on other fic that was based on an animated show that was loosely based on the comics.

And it becomes nearly impossible for comics readers to find fic that genuinely deals with the things from comics that they were excited to continue reading/see through an alternate perspective/read fix-its about/etc

(ps people who tag fics with some variation of “i’ve never read comics” have my genuine gratitude. I support you guys having fun, but I am so glad to get the warning so I can more easily customize my experience.)