Open the 'Gates!

Wow, nobody on my flist has anything to say about Friday's new Stargate episodes? I guess I'm the only one who hadn't seen them already in download, woe. ( Stargates!! )

After the 'Gates, we made the mistake of hanging around to check out Painkiller Jane and... whoa, I haven't seen something that excreble in awhile. Even... shitty, one might say. ( Read more... )

On a totally different, unrelated note, I've been thinking a lot about concrit, which I'll put off to the next post. There will be a poll!

Concrit Thinkies and Poll

So, as previously mentioned, I've been thinking about concrit lately.

This is partly due to all the discussion lately about Buffy Season 8 (interesting, isn't it, to hear all the variances in what people do or don't want from a story about Buffy?). It was enough to make me wonder how much fanfic authors do or don't have in common with the authors and creators they're borrowing from: some writers are world builders; others just want to tell a rollicking good story; some veer toward romance. Readers, ditto, in their likes and dislikes.

Are fanfic stories that are primarily by-the-numbers romances using familiar faces doing the same thing as stories that use, say, outer space as a scenic backdrop? If you write a fanfic story that expands on topics that your source material is largely uninterested in, what's the real relationship with the original story? And how does concrit fit into all this?

It strikes me that there's two major elements to fanfic: a large part of it is a social event, like a company picnic, and within that circle there are measures of popularity and "worth," and writers vary as to which one they value more. The second major element is the relationship to the original canon material: is it a continuing source of inspiration, or a jumping-off place for something orginal that may end up having little relation to the canon source's themes? If you tried to chart these elements - and I can't imagine it'd be easy, since every variable would have its own sliding scale - what would it tell us about how to give authors constructive criticism that they could really use?

( Writer's Poll - When You Write, What Do You Want? )

Birthdays! Plus Recs

Spamming today, I know.

A Very Happy Birthday to shapinglight and to (tomorrow) moscow_watcher!!!

Fabulous Buffy Season 6 icons by elizalavelle.

Another BtVS story I've read and loved recently (and yet been lame about giving feedback - really, sometimes, it's just hard to know what to say), eurydice72's "Beg the Liquid Red," which is up in full on Love's Last Glimpse. I remember reading the start of this some time ago, but hadn't realized it had been finished - and damn, it's a good one. (Ironically, this story has a "Sleeping Beauty" premise to it somewhat similar to what's in the S8 comic right now, but oh, the difference! Buffy is self-determined here like whoa, and the men are - relatively speaking - kind of hapless and squabbling. It's all about choices, folks.)