Laboring after labor day
Sep. 7th, 2004 08:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwyn1. If anyone has written or is going to write a manifesto for the ship_manifesto community, would you mind contacting me? I just don't know if I really get what it is I'm supposed to do, and reading some of the various ones posted hasn't helped my confusion. I'm not sure I get the point of what this is supposed to achieve; OTOH, both ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
feochadn and movies_michelle pointed out to me this weekend that yes, indeed, I seem to be missing the point of the community. It strikes me as pointless to try to sell people on a pairing when almost no one expresses interest in them already no matter how much you talk about them, vid them, or write about them, but feochadn and michelle insist that people are always cruising for new things and will click through to find out what your fandom's about. This baffles me and is an utterly foreign concept. Help.
2. Alles gute zum Geburtstag to the lovely, warm, wonderfulmonanotlisa. My experience in Buffy fandom has been a better place because you are in it, and I hope you have a fabulous day.
3. My project to digitize and put on DVD my La Femme Nikita vids as well as some of my old X-Files vids is turning into a nightmare. All this hair-tearing for about three people (though they're good people!) is probably not worth it. Christ, the music alone is making me insane -- one XF vid song I'd edited from CD to casette tape so I could fade in the music at the beginning (something fairly difficult to do back then), and between casette tape speed differences and tape stretch on both ends, by the end of the song, the edits were a full lyric line behind. Slice, slice, slice. And of course it's painful to look at the degraded source, since many of these I don't have the original S-VHS masters for. Labor day is supposed to be about not laboring. Har. All this work and no one will appreciate my hair loss!
4. What constitutes a milestone? I keep thinking about the theme for the challenge show at next year's Vividcon and I can't seem to think of anything useful except my favorite, death. Birthdays? Anniversaries? Zzzzzz... First kiss? How could you make a vid out of that? Well, a good vid anyway. First job? Yuck. First sex? Well, okay, maybe, but... you'd sure have to have the right song and character. Marriage and babies? Ew, ew, ew. So you're basically at things like first love, last love, apocalypse, death... death! Death always makes a great subject for vids, doesn't it? Yum.
5. Watched some Magnificent 7 this weekend to pimpmlyn and talked about it with someone else. This person didn't agree with me that there is nearly nothing worth reading fic-wise (though she did concede it's pretty bad out there). But I have massive strikes against it: I don't care for het/gen in this fandom; it's the very rare one where I'm all about slash. One really good writer does primarily gen, and I'm bored. Then there's the fact that I don't care about the others that much; I love them as characters, all of them, but it's Chris and Vin I'm interested in, and most of the fandom seems to have gone for poor Ezra, who has no real natural pairing. Then there's the shared AUs -- no fandom has as many shared AUs as this, and 99.9 percent of the stories are set in ATF or something similar. So even if I could get Chris and Vin from a good writer, I can't, because I loathe the modern AUs. These are the not the characters I love, the instant you take them out of their western world, they are different characters. And then it gets worse because I know of a couple good writers who write old west, but they write pairings I don't like. Then there's the painful dialect. But I didn't explain that to the person. Damn, I miss my pretty cowboys in love. I wish there was more happening in this fandom and that more people loved my pretty Chris and Vin in the Old West, and that my friends hadn't bailed on it. And that there were DVDs. Waaahh. OTOH, I have pretty street racers in love. It's a trade-off.
feochadn and movies_michelle pointed out to me this weekend that yes, indeed, I seem to be missing the point of the community. It strikes me as pointless to try to sell people on a pairing when almost no one expresses interest in them already no matter how much you talk about them, vid them, or write about them, but feochadn and michelle insist that people are always cruising for new things and will click through to find out what your fandom's about. This baffles me and is an utterly foreign concept. Help.2. Alles gute zum Geburtstag to the lovely, warm, wonderful
monanotlisa. My experience in Buffy fandom has been a better place because you are in it, and I hope you have a fabulous day.3. My project to digitize and put on DVD my La Femme Nikita vids as well as some of my old X-Files vids is turning into a nightmare. All this hair-tearing for about three people (though they're good people!) is probably not worth it. Christ, the music alone is making me insane -- one XF vid song I'd edited from CD to casette tape so I could fade in the music at the beginning (something fairly difficult to do back then), and between casette tape speed differences and tape stretch on both ends, by the end of the song, the edits were a full lyric line behind. Slice, slice, slice. And of course it's painful to look at the degraded source, since many of these I don't have the original S-VHS masters for. Labor day is supposed to be about not laboring. Har. All this work and no one will appreciate my hair loss!
4. What constitutes a milestone? I keep thinking about the theme for the challenge show at next year's Vividcon and I can't seem to think of anything useful except my favorite, death. Birthdays? Anniversaries? Zzzzzz... First kiss? How could you make a vid out of that? Well, a good vid anyway. First job? Yuck. First sex? Well, okay, maybe, but... you'd sure have to have the right song and character. Marriage and babies? Ew, ew, ew. So you're basically at things like first love, last love, apocalypse, death... death! Death always makes a great subject for vids, doesn't it? Yum.
5. Watched some Magnificent 7 this weekend to pimp
mlyn and talked about it with someone else. This person didn't agree with me that there is nearly nothing worth reading fic-wise (though she did concede it's pretty bad out there). But I have massive strikes against it: I don't care for het/gen in this fandom; it's the very rare one where I'm all about slash. One really good writer does primarily gen, and I'm bored. Then there's the fact that I don't care about the others that much; I love them as characters, all of them, but it's Chris and Vin I'm interested in, and most of the fandom seems to have gone for poor Ezra, who has no real natural pairing. Then there's the shared AUs -- no fandom has as many shared AUs as this, and 99.9 percent of the stories are set in ATF or something similar. So even if I could get Chris and Vin from a good writer, I can't, because I loathe the modern AUs. These are the not the characters I love, the instant you take them out of their western world, they are different characters. And then it gets worse because I know of a couple good writers who write old west, but they write pairings I don't like. Then there's the painful dialect. But I didn't explain that to the person. Damn, I miss my pretty cowboys in love. I wish there was more happening in this fandom and that more people loved my pretty Chris and Vin in the Old West, and that my friends hadn't bailed on it. And that there were DVDs. Waaahh. OTOH, I have pretty street racers in love. It's a trade-off.
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no subject
Date: 2004-09-07 02:34 pm (UTC)It's not supposed to be a hard sell or anything. But the people who are reading this stuff are interested in hearing it, or they wouldn't have signed up and clicked the cut tag. And presumably the people who read the community is a different group than your FL, so you might pick up a few who haven't come across your stuff before.
If this is a pairing that you see subtext for in canon, I'd 1) explain where you see it, 2) tease out at least a representative smatter of the implications/possibilities, and 3) address the major stumbling blocks that people cite for not liking or seeing the pairing.
If, like me, you're writing about a pairing that doesn't have much canon subtext if any, then start with what you get out of putting them togther, whether it's hidden similarities and parallels, complementary differences, or productive and enlightening conflicts.
If you're willing to talk about your personal history with the pairing, how you got into it and why it speaks to you, that would probably also be appreciated.
no subject
Date: 2004-09-07 04:14 pm (UTC)I'm also used to people kind of blowing off or disparaging the show itself or the pairing (partly because it's the main one on the show and so a lot of people knee-jerk against it) that somehow it all seems counterproductive. I mean, it would be hard to overstate how little interest there is in it, and so it seems like you're just preaching to the converted. Which always seems like a big waste of time to me.
Which makes it hard to know how to structure something in that few words -- how do you explain an entire fandom, really, since so much of the fandom is based on one ship? How do you convince people to try something for which there is almost no source easily available in the current download-everything market? I don't know how, and so I don't know what to write. If people can't see what you're on about, they won't care. Or at least so it seems to me. (Not helped by the fact that I don't read any fic in the fandom.)
Things like this are a mystery to me, and things like crack van. It's always the same people talking about the same writers/vidders and the same fandoms and the exact same pairings all the time (oh, a Due South story? Let me guess, it will be about Ray K! oh, look, another rare Far/gate/ville rec! Let me guess the pairings!), so I've kind of tuned it all out and just had my little horsie blinders on. Now I have to do this and I have no idea what to do! ;-)
no subject
Date: 2004-09-07 05:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-07 07:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-08 07:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-08 12:24 pm (UTC)I just don't use things like this, and find fandoms on my own. So the concept of talking about something with the hope of encouraging participation is weirdly foreign to me. It seems like the only people who'd read it are already there, and it's just kind of like saying "yay us," which doesn't feel really compelling to me. But hopefully it's more like what you're saying and my friends are saying... though the worst part is that I have almost nothing to direct someone to if they are interested.