qwanderer | Entries tagged with fandom

Me, less than a week ago: Safe to say that Discworld is my fandom at least until I get to the end of Raising Steam

Me now: So uh. Funny story. Watched Venom and now everything is symbrock

Current Mood: silly

I'm about a third of the way through Raising Steam and having Vetinari/Drumknott feels as well as autistic!Drumknott feels. I'm seriously considering rereading the Watch subseries again and even toying with the idea of revisiting the extremely abandoned Watch/Educated Rodents fic, Rats.

I'd probably need to rewrite most of what's there to at least vaguely comply with my present-day standards of writing. And actually come up with a plot this time. But structuring a plot to go with the characters and elements I want to use is something that's become much easier for me to do.

I'm not sure if this will stick once I do my upcoming reread of Queen's Thief before Return of the Thief comes out in March. When Thick as Thieves came out I got Very Involved in that fandom for a bit. You can bet if cosmet becomes canon in RotT, that's happening again. And probably even if it doesn't.

But at the moment, and at least as long as Raising Steam is my current book, it's safe to say that Discworld is my biggest fandom.

(This is not counting my current exploits in the Voltron MFE OT4 fandom, which, between one thing and another, are beginning to feel more like original work than the work of fandom.)

Current Mood: scattered

So I ended up setting aside my worries about spoiling Raising Steam for myself and my worries about not being familiar enough with the characters anymore to properly appreciate the fics and decided to go ahead and read the discworld fics I was interested in from my reading page, and I started with this one.

I immediately became attached to the Vetinari/Drumknott ship.

This is. Uh.

Okay. Let me paint you a picture of my first encounter with slashfic, way back in 2003 when I had just learned that fanfiction was a thing on the internet, and not just in my mom's star trek zine best-of compilations. (They were published books, and as such had to pass muster at Paramount, and as such could do no more than... imply things that I was too young and too autistic to catch.)

I was raised in a conservative Christian sect, and for the most part, I didn't see a reason to question the stuff they were telling me.

One of my friends was like "hey, you know they have fanfiction of stuff online?" and handed me some het final fantasy fix-it fic he was fond of. I did not get into it, having not played the games, but I was. Really into Discworld at the time.

The first slashfic I encountered was Vetinari/Rincewind, and I was majorly squicked.

Looking back, this was probably because I uhhhh... don't like Rincewind very much. I enjoyed the Wizards books, but some of Pratchett's characters - Rincewind and Moist von Lipwig in particular - seem to me to be more of a vehicle for interesting events than actually interesting characters in and of themselves.

However, at the time I was like "Oh. This is what slashfic is. It is gross."

Therefore, my first posted fic ever on this earth was an extremely embarrassing in retrospect, quite pointed meta-ish piece about how Vetinari just needed to meet the right girl.

I mostly read and wrote gen fic for the next few years, and wrote more than I read. Once ideas for my Amazing Maurice fic petered out, I drifted away from Discworld fic and didn't really look back. The only really shippy thing I posted during that time was a firefly fic featuring River Tam/Fess Higgins.

Then, in 2012 I was reading gen Avengers fic and I encountered a pre-slash ficlet for The Right Slash Pairing.

I mean, it probably helped that I had just gotten divorced and was questioning a lot of things I had thought I'd known about how life and romance worked. But also it was just a magical combination of two characters who I looked at and went "Yes. They should kiss."

So frostiron took everything I was questioning and gave it clear answers, like "this feeling, when you look at stony art, that is the notp feeling, not a reaction to the concept of slash itself." and "yes, you really do think same-gender relationships are totally okay."

I've done several big slash fandoms since then, gotten into polyamory as a concept, and also discovered that I myself am queer as fuck, agender aromantic, currently once again questioning the exact term for my weird fluid slice of asexuality.

Then this year, sixteen years after my entirely embarrassing freakout of a first posted work, sheith art led me to Voltron, Voltron led me to Ina Leifsdottir, who I headcanon as not really reading a lot of fiction but loving the Tiffany Aching series to bits, that led me to reread the Tiffany Aching series, and when tumblr did its distasteful policy change and I came here, I thought, "ooh, Discworld content, I would like to seek out some Discworld content again" and here we are.

A story in which my favorite character of all time in the Discworld, Sam Vimes, looks at Vetinari having a romantic relationship and is squicked. Where he is led to question his assumptions on the topic.

Where Vetinari is shown having a relationship with a man and it's straight up adorable to me. It makes me squee the way my favorite ships do, and I'm not even that up on my Vetinari/Drumknott dynamics anymore.

Anyway, it's a real weird juxtaposition that brings into focus just how much my attitudes have changed since I last considered Vetinari as a character in slashfic.

Current Mood: contemplative

I really. Like. Really like the discworld books. But it's been years and years since I read some of them, a lot of them I don't own copies of anymore, and some of them I've never read and I don't have an excessive amount of time right now.

There are a lot of fics on my reading page that I'd love to read, only I'm not up on the characters anymore. I haven't read a Wizards book in... um. Decades? To be quite honest, they are my least favorite subseries. I attempted to read Unseen Academicals when it came out and never got through it. But I love the Librarian and there's some Librarian stuff going on on my reading page and I'm like... hmm. Don't know that I'd appreciate that properly.

There's a lot of Vetinari, Drumknott, Vimes, and Sybil, in various combinations, and I love the Watch books but I haven't read any in AGES and I don't have time at the moment. I haven't read Raising Steam yet! I got it with Christmas money, though, and it's on my list. Right after I finish rereading I Shall Wear Midnight so I can finally read The Shepherd's Crown, which I also got with Christmas money.

I'm gonna be real, here, Discworld is too big for me to be in the whole fandom at once, I can only really deal with one subseries at a time, and right now it's the Tiffany Aching adventures. Then I'll read Raising Steam, and then I really need to reread the Queen's Thief books by Megan Whalen Turner so I can read the last one of THOSE.

Are there other people who are into the Tiffany Aching books right now? I'm about to be REALLY up on that subseries, once I finish it.

Current Mood: busy

TBH I've been narrating my life to my current Discord group instead of on a blog, and the server feels as if it's about to become more of a "check in occasionally and say hey" place? It was good to be involved heavily in Discord when the tumblr shit went down, but in the long run I really do think I'm more of a blog person.

I've still been posting cool things to tumblr when I write them, since I feel like I still have a little bit of an established audience there, although tbh most of the audience engagement comes from my mom and sister, who would totally start reading me here instead if I asked.

I'm feeling a little unmoored in fandom, since the craziness that has been getting into Voltron right before the release of season 6 in the year when seasons 6, 7, and 8 all got released and all caused their particular kinds of drama, and in particular Season 8 giving a serious blow to the emotional state and therefore cohesiveness of the fanbase. I only managed to dodge the emotional hit most of the way by becoming deeply involved in polyshipping four of the minor characters in the meantime. But that is a teeny tiny community, and a lot of them were heavy hit by events in the major ships as well.

Thankfully, I'm also deeply involved in writing one of my novels right now - Chloe Unearthed. Sunflowers Blooming Book 2, the sequel to Tabitha. I'm excited about it, but also I'm even less sure than I was how to attempt to build a following. Tumblr has been my primary community for so long, and now I feel as if I don't want to rely too much on it, especially for my works of romantica, like the Sunflowers Blooming series.

I haven't even really done any promotion for the book I've been putting the finishing touches on, The Movrekt Warmongers, which is Book 2 in the Half-Dragon series. I'm hoping to have it ready for an official release within the first week of February. Mostly I've been too busy, what with the new full-time day job, but it's also a complicated book for me, personally.

Think I'll save describing that mess for another post, though.

I also need to buy myself an actual domain and some hosting and build myself an actual website, now that I have the money and motivation to do something more official than a side tumblr. And I need to finally buy a smart phone, so I can mobile-test my stuff.

Anyway, yeah, I'm being pulled in a lot of different directions and I really need to settle down and build a new mental home base, and I'm feeling like it's gonna be here.

Current Mood: busy

I recently realized that I have some things that I often find myself wanting to say to people who are struggling with roleplay, especially group roleplay. Group roleplay is such an interesting phenomenon. In my experience, pairs roleplay is more or less the standard form - a person who has a serious roleplay habit may play with a lot of people but often even then, the stories they write together are isolated from each other.

I've done a decent amount of pairs roleplay, and I've found that it's fairly easy to fall into a rhythm with a compatible writer, even without a lot of experience. It's easier to stick around to see where things go and eventually finish out some kind of satisfying arc. It's fairly straightforward to keep track of what's happening in the storyline and there's a certain amount of expectation from the beginning about how things might go.

I'm currently involved in the third group roleplay I've been a part of, and all three of them were very much spontaneous events. In two cases, during a group chat associated with another activity, people began changing their display names and acting the parts of characters associated with the activity or group. In one case, a pairs roleplay was started in a public forum, based on a property with a large ensemble cast, and within the span of three or four days, all main and most secondary characters had sprouted up beside them.

It's a very different feel, and often it's powered by a sort of swell of enthusiasm that can prove difficult to maintain once the practicalities of large-group roleplay start to form speed bumps.

In the first two groups that I have been part of, play petered out before we could resolve many of the arcs that we had started. Every problem the group encountered made it more difficult to continue, and every person to drop out for their own health or because they were dissatisfied with the state of play left more for the remaining players to figure out on their own.

Both times, I was one of the last players left with enthusiasm to write. I've been trying to figure out how much of this is simply my personality, and how much is the things that I know about improv and storytelling.

(I hate doing stage improv, but I have watched a lot of it. It impresses the hell out of me every time. Even chat or real-time roleplay allows me enough extra time to get me comfortable with formulating ideas on the fly.)

Here is a really great article on stage improv. A lot of it applies to roleplay, even things you wouldn't think to apply. Establishing the physicality of your surroundings, describing and interacting with them, can do a lot for the playability of an RP.

The part about large groups onstage is applicable in some ways to the kind of situation I'm describing, but in others, it isn't. Because of the spontaneous nature of these events, and because they can sometimes be very open to new people, there's not really a practical way to avoid leaving people alone "on stage."

Entrances and exits can be much more abstract in a roleplay, especially one framed through chat or social media. Because of this, it's often really up to the person "stepping onstage" to make themselves a place in the story. This can get awkward if they find themselves continually approaching people who are uninterested or uncomfortable with the things they're initiating.

Every approach needs to find a balance of interesting, benign, and manageable, as well as the additional requirement of fitting the established setting. It's a difficult tone to strike.

Becoming part of a roleplay can be looked at from the perspective of making friends, or from the perspective of storytelling. Friends are often made through common interests, and through helping each other. Stories, in their simplest form, are a question and an answer.

My formula for a good, compelling starter to attract attention within a group RP is this: Ask an interesting question with a simple/manageable answer.

Here are some ways of coming up with such a thing: What is strange about your character? What are the specific things that they want that are hard for them to acquire by themselves, but easy and fun for others to provide? Company does not count. We are all playing to find company. The fun and interesting company has unique and specific questions, or unique and specific answers. The most approachable established characters are often those with unique skills or knowledge bases that can be worked into a new player's story fairly easily, or unique problems that new players may be able to step up and help solve.

There are a lot of characters in the properties I've played in who are extraterrestrial, supernatural, or otherwise outside the ordinary, and I often feel the urge to push people to leverage that strangeness more effectively. Invent things that your character needs/wants/misses/is less capable of because of their strangeness, that others may have the resources to help provide.

This does take some effort. Friendships can be hard work. Storytelling can be hard work. Natural chemistry between players is nice to have, but sometimes it takes a little nudge to get the chemistry started - or to keep it going.

Maintaining the roleplay to a satisfying ending is one of the things I'd most like to help people with. It's also one of the things that the rules of stage improv don't really help with. This is where we most need storytelling theory as well.

This is because the rules of improv are focused on building energy and tension, and not on releasing or resolving it. Stage improv tends to release its tension in a satisfying way naturally, via humor. One doesn't really need to find a way to answer all the questions brought up in a stage improv, as long as one finds a satisfying punchline.

(So much of stage improv is the timing of the unpredictable. This makes it easier in some ways. This is also why I hate it.)

When some players get fatigued, and others are still running high on enthusiasm, it can be difficult to try and negotiate your way to an endpoint. What I recommend most is for those players who still have energy to burn look out for fatigue in their closest other players, and start to pull more of the storytelling weight.

This involves a lot of the same basic components as my recommendations for joining a roleplay. But because the stories are most likely now much more involved, you'll have more to work with. The biggest challenge at this point is often setting reasonable limits.

Make a list of priorities for tensions that you want to see resolved, and a plan for each one that takes a short, easy route to that resolution. Do make plans, but don't get too involved. Present the plans to the relevant counterparts one at a time, and pay attention to any objections they may have, if one plot point or another seems like it might be rough for them. Adapt.

This is where we try to stop ourselves from asking too many new questions. This is where the "yes, and" rule often stumbles over its own weight. A lot of open questions can be very overwhelming and draining for a player. If you notice fatigue, try and resolve some of the open questions before posing any new ones. Work together to find a resolution for each one that works for both of you.

These are strategies I'm working to put into play right now, and we will see how well they work!

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qwanderer

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Page Summary

oops I fandomed
Yes, my fandom attention is drifting in the Discworld direction.
I've come full circle.
discworld fandom?
I'm gonna give this blog a little more attention.
Some thoughts on how to roleplay in larger groups

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qwanderer aka Irene Wendy Wode

mucking about in fandom since at least 2012

Entries tagged with fandom

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oops I fandomed

Yes, my fandom attention is drifting in the Discworld direction.

I've come full circle.

discworld fandom?

I'm gonna give this blog a little more attention.

Some thoughts on how to roleplay in larger groups