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ginandchthonicI've only participated in a few exchange events, and a few more collaborative ones, partly because I feel a bit like I might be a difficult quantity in terms of pairings. (Or, as the inside of my head would put it, "I'm probably not doing fandom right.") Anyway, I've been messing with this since my first characteristically overlong ITPE letter, and thought I'd throw it up here in the dusty halls of my neglected journal for reference as needed.
Dear exchange partner/collaborator:
First — well, first, I'm very excited to be Doing a Thing with you. Hi!
Second — I suppose I should tell you that I consider myself far more a fan of transformative work itself than I do of any specific fandom, and in particular, of fan writing as a type of writing. Fan writing offers stories of enormous emotional depth and resonance, as well as wonderfully surprising instances of creative experiments in form. I get really excited whenever I discover wildly original work created within the bounds and conventions of fanwork.
But I’m also endlessly interested in how fan writing is shaped by common understandings, specific canons and fanons, community norms, and more, with the resulting variations on common tropes (from coffee shop AUs to A/B/O to character studies to how sexual acts are depicted to…).
So. When I list fandoms, below, what I’m listing are “fandoms in which I’ve read enough fanwork to have some familiarity with canon events, dynamics, and at least the main characters.” I may not have consumed any of that canon, and may have no intention of doing so. There are plenty of fandoms I dislike in canon (Sherlock, for example, or Game of Thrones) which have drawn many fantastic writers, and have large bodies of extremely good, even brilliant, fanwork. By the same token, there are canons I like very much (the Sleepy Hollow TV show's first season, for instance, and many, many, many literary and book canons) which have a relative lack of fanwork, and in which my interest in the canon doesn’t carry to fandom.
If you look at my AO3 account, you’ll see a lot of Good Omens — and Good Omens is an outlier that may never happen again. I loved the book for decades, and was equally delighted by the radio show, and the TV show — plus the fandom attracted a vast pool of amazing creators, who went all out with the essentially limitless possibilities this particular canon affords. (And even there, I spent so much time immersed in Good Omens in 2019/2020 that I’m a little surfeited now, and mostly taking a GO breather.)
What this means in terms of exchanges and collaborations is several things.
First, in the case of collaborations, I’m not the creative partner for someone who is extremely concerned about canon accuracy. I don’t, honestly, really care. Even where I am familiar with canon, I judge the choices made in fanwork, no matter how OC, on whether the OC-ness works in the context of the story the author has chosen to tell, not on where and how it deviates from the "official" line. If a new production team or director can choose to take a canon in entirely new directions or reboot it entirely, then so can fan creators as far as I’m concerned!
If a collaborator pitches me on a canon I don’t know yet, I will absolutely watch/read it (or a manageable amount of it anyway), dip into whatever meta or wikis might be around, and do my best — but I’m still probably going to lean in favour of creative! freedom! over canon.
Second, in the case of exchanges: when I say the best gift you could give me is something YOU love…
I really, really mean that. If I’ve read a lot in one particular fandom, it probably means mostly that I fell into a pool of writers I enjoyed, and I'm far more likely to be ready for something new than to want more of that, whatever it is. Introduce me to something new! I like a lot of things, and there are SO MANY things out there I don’t know I like yet!
In general, for most fandoms, you can safely assume either “I don’t go here” and I know little to nothing about canon, or if I do know the canon, I consider it its own thing, and am just as interested in how wildly an author can twist it. AUs, the more A the better, are my absolute jam. Fusions and crossovers? Sure thing. Well-developed OCs? My favourite! Because I tend to read from rec lists, I read a lot of the popular ships, but I myself have no real ship preferences, and am very, very open to your favourite rare or oddball pair, trio, or more!
The kinds of fic I like tend to fall into three broad categories:
Things I like (a small sampling):
I’m not going to pretend I have any REAL limits, because I don’t; there is no tag so horrifying I won’t at least dip into it some days, no dead dove I won’t take a nibble of, and I am a terminal ignorer of trigger warnings. Whether something works for me in a story or not depends very much on the execution, not the thing itself.
What this means: I don’t exclude most concepts, kinks, tropes, or ideas in theory, but in individual cases I may choose to disengage with a work for various reasons. In most cases this isn’t a judgement on either the creators or the consumers of the work. KINKTOMATO all the way over here.
My one, single, consistent squick (which admittedly is a lot easier to deal with in written work), is vomiting. I’m a bit emetophobic! Not a fan of vomiting, or images of people vomiting, or vomiting noises. No.
Also, and I hope this doesn't need to be said, no Nazis, white supremacy, or race kink.
That said, there are a few things that need to be extremely specifically and deftly handled for me personally to enjoy them:
An incomplete list of fandoms I enjoy (a star π indicates I’ve watched/read what I consider to be enough of the canon that I’m actually familiar with it — the whole movie, or in the case of TV shows or book series, more than a single episode or story):
Dear exchange partner/collaborator:
First — well, first, I'm very excited to be Doing a Thing with you. Hi!
Second — I suppose I should tell you that I consider myself far more a fan of transformative work itself than I do of any specific fandom, and in particular, of fan writing as a type of writing. Fan writing offers stories of enormous emotional depth and resonance, as well as wonderfully surprising instances of creative experiments in form. I get really excited whenever I discover wildly original work created within the bounds and conventions of fanwork.
But I’m also endlessly interested in how fan writing is shaped by common understandings, specific canons and fanons, community norms, and more, with the resulting variations on common tropes (from coffee shop AUs to A/B/O to character studies to how sexual acts are depicted to…).
So. When I list fandoms, below, what I’m listing are “fandoms in which I’ve read enough fanwork to have some familiarity with canon events, dynamics, and at least the main characters.” I may not have consumed any of that canon, and may have no intention of doing so. There are plenty of fandoms I dislike in canon (Sherlock, for example, or Game of Thrones) which have drawn many fantastic writers, and have large bodies of extremely good, even brilliant, fanwork. By the same token, there are canons I like very much (the Sleepy Hollow TV show's first season, for instance, and many, many, many literary and book canons) which have a relative lack of fanwork, and in which my interest in the canon doesn’t carry to fandom.
If you look at my AO3 account, you’ll see a lot of Good Omens — and Good Omens is an outlier that may never happen again. I loved the book for decades, and was equally delighted by the radio show, and the TV show — plus the fandom attracted a vast pool of amazing creators, who went all out with the essentially limitless possibilities this particular canon affords. (And even there, I spent so much time immersed in Good Omens in 2019/2020 that I’m a little surfeited now, and mostly taking a GO breather.)
What this means in terms of exchanges and collaborations is several things.
First, in the case of collaborations, I’m not the creative partner for someone who is extremely concerned about canon accuracy. I don’t, honestly, really care. Even where I am familiar with canon, I judge the choices made in fanwork, no matter how OC, on whether the OC-ness works in the context of the story the author has chosen to tell, not on where and how it deviates from the "official" line. If a new production team or director can choose to take a canon in entirely new directions or reboot it entirely, then so can fan creators as far as I’m concerned!
If a collaborator pitches me on a canon I don’t know yet, I will absolutely watch/read it (or a manageable amount of it anyway), dip into whatever meta or wikis might be around, and do my best — but I’m still probably going to lean in favour of creative! freedom! over canon.
Second, in the case of exchanges: when I say the best gift you could give me is something YOU love…
I really, really mean that. If I’ve read a lot in one particular fandom, it probably means mostly that I fell into a pool of writers I enjoyed, and I'm far more likely to be ready for something new than to want more of that, whatever it is. Introduce me to something new! I like a lot of things, and there are SO MANY things out there I don’t know I like yet!
In general, for most fandoms, you can safely assume either “I don’t go here” and I know little to nothing about canon, or if I do know the canon, I consider it its own thing, and am just as interested in how wildly an author can twist it. AUs, the more A the better, are my absolute jam. Fusions and crossovers? Sure thing. Well-developed OCs? My favourite! Because I tend to read from rec lists, I read a lot of the popular ships, but I myself have no real ship preferences, and am very, very open to your favourite rare or oddball pair, trio, or more!
The kinds of fic I like tend to fall into three broad categories:
- funny/crack/ridiculous/wacky hijinks
- extremely serious works — literary and/or psychological explorations full of eloquent prose, with plots and everything, or heavily researched, accurate and detailed AUs
- and, well, romance, smut, and romantic smut, especially when story-driven.
Things I like (a small sampling):
- found/chosen family
- bantering friend groups
- banter in general
- enemies to lovers
- pining! and Forbidden Love
- the smart snarky one with the dark past and the upstanding goodhearted one (the reason I’m always weak for Draco/anyone despite not particularly caring about Harry Potter canon at all)
- queerness as an accepted part of society
- BUT ALSO fics dipping into actual queer history with all its pain
- plotty mystery/casefics, especially for fandoms that aren’t about that in canon
- redemption arcs
- polyamory and OT3+s
- disaster bisexuals
- femslash, especially rich, story-driven femslash! there is far, far too little f/f!
- women being awesome
- stories centring middle-aged or older women/people
- bittersweet complicated endings
- plotty or character-driven porn, awkward sex, funny sex, sex in which the participants chat relentlessly with each other and make jokes, ethereal, monstrous, and supernatural sex shenanigans
- fem!character(s), whether trans or cis — also very happy to get into Rule 63s, especially in large dude-heavy fandoms (some of my all-time favourite works are Rule 63 Sherlock stories for example)
- genderfuckery
- loving established relationships (especially with banter!)
- actor and performance AUs
- fake relationships
- ghost stories
- people who are bad at feelings being forced to deal with Feelings
- people putting themselves back together after traumatic experiences
- in-story forum or Twitter discussions, epistolary fic, fictional meta, fictional scholarly extracts, fictional history
- I’ve read some good high school AUs but in general tend to prefer my stories to centre adult characters.
I’m not going to pretend I have any REAL limits, because I don’t; there is no tag so horrifying I won’t at least dip into it some days, no dead dove I won’t take a nibble of, and I am a terminal ignorer of trigger warnings. Whether something works for me in a story or not depends very much on the execution, not the thing itself.
What this means: I don’t exclude most concepts, kinks, tropes, or ideas in theory, but in individual cases I may choose to disengage with a work for various reasons. In most cases this isn’t a judgement on either the creators or the consumers of the work. KINKTOMATO all the way over here.
My one, single, consistent squick (which admittedly is a lot easier to deal with in written work), is vomiting. I’m a bit emetophobic! Not a fan of vomiting, or images of people vomiting, or vomiting noises. No.
Also, and I hope this doesn't need to be said, no Nazis, white supremacy, or race kink.
That said, there are a few things that need to be extremely specifically and deftly handled for me personally to enjoy them:
- vore, extreme blood, edge, or pain play, feederism, scat and watersports
- A/B/O or other tropes in which D/s and/or gendered dynamics are inherent in society/personality (unless it’s trans-themed, or the point is to subvert or rip apart those assumptions)
- D/s and top/bottom stuff in general
- kidfic
- stories, particularly romance, that hinge on someone/everyone being Too Stupid to Live, not talking to each other, Seeing A Thing and immediately leaping to the worst possible conclusion, lying to partners (even if it’s justified as For Good Reasons), being jealous, or cheating
- love triangles generally, but especially if they paint one option as The Obviously All Bad Choice Terrible Person. I mostly prefer a poly ending to my love triangles, and/or nuance.
- humiliation/praise kinks (if anyone is being spoken to as though they were a dog or a toddler during sex and liking it, that’s a NOPE from me)
- slavefic
- whump or torture for the sake of it (this one’s REALLY hard to define, as I’ve liked many stories in which a character suffers A LOT, but it GOES somewhere. I suppose what I mean is cases where it’s gratuitous or arbitrary)
- character/reader (I'm sure there must be character/reader I'd enjoy out there somewhere, but I haven't read any yet)
- actual rape and noncon (I’m fine with consensual rape play)
- zombies
- actual pedophilia (by which I do NOT mean age gaps, consensual relationships between teens, aged-up characters, or, spare me, height differences)
An incomplete list of fandoms I enjoy (a star π indicates I’ve watched/read what I consider to be enough of the canon that I’m actually familiar with it — the whole movie, or in the case of TV shows or book series, more than a single episode or story):
- Yuletide - yes, that's right, I did say I'm a fan of Yuletide. I absolutely love the rich variety, the incredibly niche canons that appear (t-shirts? ads? paintings? space exploration vehicles? tumblr posts? AW YISS!), and, in general, the whole, as they say, vibe. If you've been assigned to Make a Thing for me, you absolutely cannot go wrong by surfing Yuletide (or similar multifandom challenges)
- Jeeves and Wooster - books or showπ
- Welcome to Nightvale π
- Slings and Arrows π
- Vorkosigan Saga π
- Ghostbusters 2016 π
- Fairy tales, myths, legends
- Historical RPF - my own main areas of interest and basic knowledge are the ancient and classical periods in the areas surrounding the Mediterranean; European/British neolithic to medieval; and 18th, 19th and early 20th century European and British artists and writers, but I enjoy it all (perhaps MORE if it's set in a period or region I don't know much about, and I learn something). I'm not a historian or an academic, merely an enthusiastic reader in the field.
- I play only the smallest, silliest phone games myself, but am open to any video game fandom. Off the top of my head, some of the games I've read and enjoyed multiple fanworks for are: Detroit: Being Human, Among Us, Dragon Age, Dream Daddy, and Hades
- Untitled Goose Game — this brilliant piece of crack and its multiple inspired crossovers is listed separately from "video games" for obvious reasons
- WiedΕΊmin | Witcher
- MDZS/Untamed
- Bangtan Boys/BTS
- Transformers
- Jujutsu Kaisen π
- Mad Max Fury Road π
- Venom - movie
- X-Men - movies, original and First Class
- Jane Austen π - my Jane Austen likes are preeeeettty broad. Any of her books (yes, including juvenilia), any of the films directly from the books. Adaptations I’m personally familiar with include Lizzie Bennett Diaries, Bridget Jones’ Diary. I don’t care for zombies.
- Discworld π
- Check Please! π
- Harry Potter π (generally prefer fics exploring their adult lives to school-age ones; I like Marauders and Cursed Child stories as well. I’ve read the original series books and seen the movies, and didn’t particularly care for them even before their creator made her views unfortunately clear, but I think transformative fandom has done brilliant work within this canon).
- Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell — book and movie π
- the Earthsea books, and really absolutely anything by Ursula K. Le Guin, who'd be my favourite writer if I had to name just one. I've read all her books and most of the stories, essays, and poems, most of them multiple times. π
- Gentleman Jack
- Dirk Gently - book π or TV show but let’s be real, how much Dirk Gently book fic is out there? (I’m aware they’re completely different things. I love the books, and have reread them many times. I actually hated the TV show quite a lot, but I enjoy the fic inspired by it. Go figure.)
- Eagle of the Ninth (book or movie, but honestly, how much of the fic in this fandom is truly book only?)
- Inception (I’ve fallen asleep trying to watch the actual film four times, but WOW is this a brilliant fandom, home of some of my favourite stories!)
- Firefly π
- Game of Thrones π , especially AUs – there are some really fine AUs in this fandom (read the books and didn’t mind them, though by that point my Fat Fantasy days were mostly behind me; watched the first season of the TV show)
- Good Omens π - unlike many Good Omens fans, I have no strong preference for any one of Book Omens vs Radio Omens vs TV Omens. They’re all “Good” Omens to my mind.
- The Magnus Archives π
- What We Do in the Shadows π
- Star Wars, especially Rogue One π , The Force Awakens π and The Last Jedi π (I’ve seen all the films, I enjoyed the three mentioned, nothing could possibly induce me to rewatch the first (in terms of chronological release dates) six. I haven’t seen The Mandalorian, or read/watched any of the extended canon material.
- MCU in which Infinity War and Endgame never happened or are firmly and uncompromisingly Fixed - both fun, funny team fics AND very angsty Winter Soldier or Loki or Natasha sort of stuff. (My MCU knowledge is almost entirely fan-sourced, I’ve seen only a few of the films)
- Sherlock Holmes variants - ACD originals π , Elementary π , Sherlock π , The Tea Master and the Detective π (I was pretty deep into Original Holmes fandom for some time, and absolutely adore almost all variations on this canon, the only exception for some reason being the Mary Russell books, which I dislike a lot.)
- Shakespeare π - there’s probably something Shakespeare-related I don’t like. But if it has a recognisable connection to the plays, I’m probably into it.
- The Goblin Emperor and Witness for the Deadπ
- Murderbot π
- The Books of the Raksura π
- Dorothy L. Sayers (Lord Peter Wimsey) π
- Margery Allingham π (Albert Campion) for the all of… a dozen fics there are in this fandom
- Star Trek — TOS π
, TNG π
, original TOS π
cast films, VOY π
(not usually so into AOS/reboot, as Leonard Nimoy is the only authentic and genuine Spock, although – change my mind?) Though I haven't watched any of the newer shows, it's safe to say I'm into the general Star Trek aesthetic.
- Stargate Atlantis
- Dr. Who π both old and new, and Torchwood π (although I am not usually very into anything involving Rose because Billy Piper’s acting drives me spare and I can’t separate her from the character)
- Black Books π
- Tolkien π anything - yes, literally anything. The books. The movies. The Silmarillion and other works of the legendarium. Leaf by Niggle or Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics? Sure. His letters or laundry list? I haven’t looked, but if there’s fanwork of that, sure. (I’m not a JRRT fan scholar and I haven’t written in Elvish letters since high school, but I know canon here too)
- Les Misérables
- Hadestown
- Pretty much ANY small obscure literary fandom – particularly, is it a queer-coded book of the late 19th/early to mid 20th century that likely isn’t even available except as a creased secondhand paper copy? Probably a hearty YES. I also read a LOT of speculative fiction and fantasy, and it would be impractical to list them all, but SFF book fandoms are fair game too, and there’s a decent chance I’ll be familiar with it or at least aware of it.
- Original works
- Fandom meta! it will probably surprise no one that I’m a fan of fandom meta
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