alixtii | Entries tagged with archive fever

I didn't write any treats this year. There were reasons for that, and they were exceptionally good reasons, but there's still a part of me which is very, very sad.

Looking over the Yuletide SJA fics, I really wish I had found a chance to write a Luke/Maria treat, as that's my SJA OTP (which is good, because ( of arguable spoileriness )). I mean, what I was doing instead was far more awesome (cryptic cat is cryptic), but still, the utter lack of my OTP in the Archive is depressing, and it'd be fairly easy--I mean, what else is Luke going to be doing in the wee hours of the morning if not Skype with Maria? She would tell him about her job working for the DOD or NSA or whoever it is she works for, and he'll not have to pretend that he has no idea that aliens actually exist, because otherwise he's going insane in Oxford not having anyone to confide in.

Other treats I wanted to write include a SJA tentacle-rape dubcon fic, any number of notebooked T:tSCC fics which could have been tweaked to fit various results and thus gotten extra eyeballs, an Arcadia fic (because I love writing Arcadia fic), a Nicole/Atreyu NeverEnding Story movieverse fic I have mostly finished but notebooked. . . .

Maybe once I get some of those transcribed, I'll be able to hold out and not post until next Yuletide. I'm not sure I have that willpower, though.

I'm always :/ at how many A03 authors don't link their livejournals/dreamwidths in their profile. I mean, usually their journal is fairly easy to find by googling (or even just adding ".livejournal.com" or ".dreamwidth.org" to the end of), but why not?

I would love to be able to find a text file of all the tags currently canonical on A03, since I'm such a maximalist when it comes to tagging (which has a lot to do with the fact that I have additional tags set not to show as a default). (There probably is a way for to me to do such as a tag wrangler, but I'm not sure what it is and it'd include enough formatting that getting the page to load would probably be next to impossible.)

Goodbye, 2010. You didn't suck, exactly (indeed, there was a whole lot of good), but here's hoping 2011 is a lot better and a whole lot more productive.

Crossposts: http://alixtii.livejournal.com/356815.html http://alixtii.insanejournal.com/291131.html

By "usage" I mean all the times I used a fe/male character tag on a fic at A03. If I use a character in three different fics, that counts as three uses; there's no weighting for the length of the fic or the size of the role the character plays in it. There were a total of 240 uses of male character tags and 408 of female character tags. (Go here to see how many times my more popular character tags each got used. Also the breakdown by genre.) N.B. Faith still isn't being counted in these numbers, for reasons discussed in the previous archive stats post.

If we look only at the number of (canonical, in the Archive tag wrangler sense of "canonical") characters of each gender (of the two genders I've written) I've written (i.e., Dawn counts only once instead of 51 times), then we get this chart:

( pie chart #2 )

I've written 130 different female characters (that get their own A03 tag) and 88 male. Which means the average (mean) female character I've written appears in 3.14 (just under pi, actually) fics, and the average male character appears in 2.75. So I write 48% more female characters than male characters, and I write them 14% more often.

And here's a graph showing which POVs I used. Bar graph instead of a pie chart because some fics use more than one, or none, of these tags, so I can't rightfully show it as percentages:

( bar graph )

And tenses:

( another graph )

$Jaques Derrida and the AO3 \o/ logo. Text: "Archive Fever."$

The breakdown of my fic output by genre, as categorized at the AoOO:

( cut for images )

Apparently Google doesn't think the >1% of my output which is m/m (1.0852%, actually) is significant enough to display in the second graph.

It strikes me that looking at the percentage in terms of fics is kinda silly. Looking at the number of words I've written in each genre would be much more useful. But also more labor intensive.

( more images )

1.My character tag at the Archive of Our Own. (I don't believe you need my permission to write RPF about me, but you certainly have my blessing. Just don't out me if you know my legal persona.)

2. SCC 1x02 strongly implies that Derek and Cameron come from the same future (the date that Cameron provides for Judgment Day is the combination for the safe). Thus, in the future that Derek comes from, John doesn't skip any years. (Presumably, in the future Jessie comes from, he does.) In short, Timelines B and C are the same.

That would mean any appearance of Cameron in Derek's flashbacks would be an appearance of our Cameron, and the differences between the future of, say, "Dungeons and Dragons" and T3 would be the same as between Cameron's future and T3--the main difference we know of being the date of Judgment Day. (I'm not quite sure I understand the mechanics of T3, though--at first glance it looks like a causality loop, but on further looks it become clear that history is being changed, although I'm not sure what it's being changed from--so it might be better to just ignore it altogether.) Off the top of my head, I can't think of anything problematic about this (other than one would expect his and Jessie's timelines to be more wildly divergent, but we already have weird parallelism existing between timelines: Judgment Day itself, of course, but also the fact that Cameron and Jessie both remember the conversation about Jessie's unborn child despite both coming from different timelines) or any detail to contradict the theory. Can anyone else?

Does anyone have any McKeller recs? The only Rodney/Jennifer story in the Archive isn't actually McKeller at all, if you know what I mean.

So, some other concerns raised about the AoOO's tagging system concerns the genre system. Namely, the two following interrelated concerns have been raised:

The distinction between "Multi" and "Other" is unclear and/or ambiguous.
There's not a sufficient distinction between, on the one hand, a story with multiple pairings and one with an instance of polyamory, and on the other, a story with an instance of polyamory and a one with pairings between non-traditionally gendered individuals.

The most popular temporary solution put forth is to further refine one's classification of the story with freeform tags. However, as I've set about to do so, I've realized I don't really have a sufficient working understanding of polyamory to do so. Largely this is a result of a monogamocentric (I'm assuming that's what the word would be, and Google attests hits) worldview, in which any relationship can be reduced to a set of pairings. (This, undoubtedly, is the source of the "Multi" tag.) Even a threesome can be reduced in this way: A/B/C becomes A/B, B/C, A/C--but admittedly, this reduction is a distortion, because the threesome is a fundamentally different thing than just the sum of its parts. That's the main complaint as I understand it: the "Multi" tag simply doesn't capture that extra richness.

So take a fic like What the Caged Bird Feels, which has two pairings: Dawn/Ethan and Dawn/Giles. Is this an example of polyamory, multiple pairings, or both? (In that story, Dawn is married to Giles. Does it make a difference that's she had sex with Ethan before, and may see it as likely that she'll do it again, or would the dynamic be the same if the relationship with Ethan was a one-time thing. Does Giles' perspective on the whole thing matter?)

Or how about Substitution Rule, which manages to be A/B, B/C, and A/C without being A/B/C (and to make it more complicated, C thinks A and B are the same person)?

Restricting a poly tag to just threesomes or moresomes doesn't seem to be in accordance with the way real polyamorous people on my flist use the term.

But I'm afraid that identifying all (or even most?) cases of a single character being involved in more than one pairing would be too broad a use, which could end up being appropriative.

So I'm throwing this out to those on my flist who know more about these issues than I do, in hope we can work out (and/or you can help me work out) a helpful, accurate, and non-appropriating tagging practice for me to utilize, because I've come to realize that my thoughts are much less clear and much more monogamocentric than I had previously realized. (ObDisclaimer: No one is required to help me do this.)

Current Mood: worried

1. I understand "Choose Not to Warn for Some Content" as meaning that, if no other warnings are selected, then there is a nonzero number of primary standardized warnings which don't apply to the story (most likely noncon)--because if all of them applied, and the author didn't warn for all of them, then the phrase "Choose Not to Warn [full stop]" comment would apply and, in accordance with Grice's Maxim of Quantity, the author would have used that tag.

Apparently, not everyone shares this understanding.

2. I'm very uncomfortable with the implication, given by the existence of the primary warning tag "noncon/rape," that dubcon isn't rape. "Rape," as the term is used more or less uniquely in contemporary usage, is a legal-ethical concept: it identifies a certain type of illicit sexual activity. "Noncon" and "dubcon" pull out certain aspects of these acts which are relevant to the needs of fanfic readers and writers, but not to a legal or ethical understanding, and involves knowledge unavailable to people who are not omniscient narrators (e.g., the precise mental state of the victim, and what what that state would have been in other circumstances). But any circumstance in which consent is in any way dubious--whether through the use of alien influence, or power imbalances, or social pressure, or drugs or alcohol, or through not being of legal age--is rape. Period.

"Noncon" and "dubcon" identify out types of rape, in much the same way the term "statutory rape" does. (ETA: Actually, they don't even do that, I think; they measure something which is on completely different axis than what "rape" measures. It just happens that there is an incredibly huge degree of correlation.)

Now, one doesn't have to read the "noncon/rape" tag as implying that "noncon" and "rape" or synonymous or equivalent. But if not, the meaning is ambiguous: does it cover for cases which are "noncon AND rape" (but not dubcon) or cases which are "noncon OR rape" (which would include dubcon). ("Noncon XOR rape" can be safely ruled out.) Praxis seems to support the first usage as being dominant, but I think this somehow covertly encourages the (problematic equivalence between the two terms discussed above. (And both usages are fundamentally redundant, because "noncon AND rape" = "noncon" and "noncon OR rape" = "rape.")

And, continuing to read the post linked above, I'm not the only who has thought of this (not that I had assumed I was).

So I posted my

dw_femslash fic to the AoOO, with fake cuts pointing to it from my DW/LJ/IJ/JF and from

dw_femslash itself. Largely this was because somehow it ended up with a lot of crap HTML (I think I'm going to go back to composing in Semagic until Dreamwidth introduces draft functionality, even though I'm not posting from Semagic anymore since DW has its nifty crossposter) and I had to fight to get it formatted correctly for AoOO and I didn't want to have to do all that again for Dreamwidth/LJ/IJ/JF.

Partly also because my shiny new AoOO account is shiny and new and I wanted to test it out. I don't expect to start posting solely to AoOO as a general rule anytime soon, though.

I spent most of today getting my fic up onto AoOO. I have to say that it's the most pleasant uploading experience I've had with an archive: the Rich Text Editor actually seems to understand what I want the text to do and does it. (I do wish it would auto-format line breaks the way DW and LJ do, though.) Most of my fic's there now, with three exceptions: 1) fic written for

yuletide, 2) Buffy/Angel fic, and 3) Firefly fic. 2 and 3--or really just 2 by itself, even--are pretty significant exceptions, though.

I have an invitation to the AoOO to give out if someone wants it (and they should!).

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30	31

The Tradëscan Codex

Yuletide/A03 Thoughts

Writing Female Characters

Fun with Numbers

Two Notes

Call for Recs

More AoOO Thoughts: This Time, With Polyamory

AoOO Thoughs

Archive of Our Own and Other Blatherings

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January 2012

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