Comment Meta

[amaresu]

Femslash Mini Meta fest was an utter fail this year. And I'm still not in a place where I could do it, so I purpose Comment Meta. And let's have it cover all things female and fannish. However you define those.

How it works

1. Post a meta topic in a top level comment. Use the subject line for the meta subject and expand as you want in the body of the comment. Or don't.

2. Repeat Step 1 for as many meta ideas as you have.

3. Comment on other meta topics.


It's kinda like a kink meme, only with meta. Feel free to browse the mini meta tag for ideas.

This is meant to be about as low pressure as it comes. Feel free to write on your own journal/Tumblr/blog and link back here. Respond with as little or as much as you want. This post will remain open indefinitely, so please track it if that makes things easier for you.

Comments

Re: Femslash Fandom Migration

[havocthecat]

I think hype and where your friends gafiate to makes a huge difference, definitely. I know OUaT had a bunch of people who were into it for the Emma/Regina content, which I think could have been brilliant if they'd only done it right. But they were never going to do a good girl/bad girl pairing, only the dichotomy between them. I partly just wonder where all the old school femslash fans ended up, you know? I think it would be neat to have a road map of historic (or as historic as you're going to get for us) femslash fandom.

Re: Femslash Fandom Migration

[kmo]

i've certainly been reading femlsash since the heyday of Xena and Star Trek: VOY and ER (remember Kerry/Kim and Kerry/Sandy?) but i wasn't really active in the fandoms as a writer, so i can't really say where they've gone. i'd be willing to bet that a lot of the BSG femslashers are now into other sci-fi shows with queer content like Warehouse 13 and Lost Girl. i'm guessing the Harry Potter fans have moved on to other book fandoms with interesting female characters like ASOIAF and Hunger Games, maybe even AtLA and Legend of Korra. perhaps the ER folks are into Grey's Anatomy and Rizzoli & Isles. these are just guesses- i'm kind of a bad person to ask as i'm mostly a small fandom femslasher.

Re: Femslash Fandom Migration

[havocthecat]

I mostly just remember Kerry, honestly! But yes, I've been reading femslash for about as long as you have, and most of my time was just as a reader. I know there are some panfandom femslashers who will dabble in anything as long as there's femslash - which I'm kind of there, you know? But there are some serious OTPers who are serially monofannish too. I think that you're probably right in tracing the paths of femslash in the fandoms you mentioned.

Re: Femslash Fandom Migration

[cantarina]

I feel like checking the events related to the official IDF celebrations are a really good way to hook back into that part of fandom. (It would be super fascinating if someone did the ethnographic legwork and compiled it for Fanlore, although it won't be me, alas.)

Re: Femslash Fandom Migration

[kmo]

ditto! it would be really cool if someone did that for IDF. maybe some kind of survey? we could suggest it to the organizers.

Re: Femslash Fandom Migration

[cantarina]

More like a fill-in-the-blank option? Trace us your fandoms chronologically! (Ignore any where you didn't ship any f/f pairings?)

Re: Femslash Fandom Migration

[kmo]

that makes much more sense. give us your femslash genealogy. :)

Re: Femslash Fandom Migration

[cantarina]

I don't know that I can?

I mean, I can tell you that I remember reading B'Elanna/Janeway fic as a lurking lurker, feeling like I was doing something illicit, before I ever owned my own queerness, which places that reading sometime pre-2005, and that the first major fandom I was in (recognizing that I've always got fingers in all of the pies) where I'd say f/f was really a major or defining component of how I participated was Supernatural, from about mid 2009 to early 2011. You could kind of say I went from SPN to Avengers verses by way of a lot of short-lived fannish love affairs, but f/f doesn't dominate my Avengers fanwork consumption. Although it does dominate my fanwork production, I think?

A lot of it ties into thingswithwing's comments downthread, about how she doesn't identify as femslash fan specifically. I think I do a little, because I'm a big ol' queer and I love women characters more than anything else except maybe podfic metafandom, but f/f isn't a reason I go to any fandom in particular. It's just usually the first thing I look for when I get there, even if I want all of the rest of it too.

Re: Femslash Fandom Migration

[kmo]

haha, i didn't actually mean to demand your personal genealogy, just as a general guideline for what to ask people at IDF. :) but thank you for sharing all the same.

yeah, i definitely identify more as a femslash reader and writer than het-shipper or slasher, but i definitely enjoy all of those things depending on the fandom and the pairing. it would be hard for me to identify fandoms where i shipped femslash exclusively. like a lot of other people on the comm, i look for canons that feature interesting female characters- even if it's only one interesting female character. so yeah, identifying fandoms where femslash was an important or integral part of your fannish consumption/production but not the *only* part would be a better question for most people

i remember being into J/7 back in the day, but I also liked to read J/P, J/Q or J/anyone who wasn't Chakotay. but then i was into Harry Potter where i read lots of different types of things, including femslash. i like Doctor Who, but again, i'm pretty omnivorous in what i ship.