Holiday 'Thon Updates

[alixtii]

The prettylightsfic poll for primary-choice fandoms. This ficathon along with yuletide and 3_ships make up the three ficathons I've done ever year since 2007, so I'm glad the third 'thon of the trifecta is gearing up as well.

Speaking of Yuletide, I'm still trying to decide what I want my fourth request to be (if I even want a fourth request). The three fandoms I've nominated that I haven't already firmly decided I'll be requesting are Robert A. Heinlein's World-as-Myth multiverse (to request Laz/Lor), Michael Ende's NeverEnding Story bookverse (to request Childlike Empress/Xayide), and Firefly RPF (Joss/Summer, obviously). Although part of the reason I haven't firmly decided is I still want to wait and see which comic book fandoms were deemed elligible--I think some of you remember how disappointed I was when I couldn't get Jessica/MJ/Peter/Kitty in Ult!Marvel or MJ/Liz/Gwen/Felicia in Spider-Man <3s Mary Jane last year (even though those fandoms ended up staying elligible? I still don't get what happened).

Other nominated fandoms (only not by me) that I'd been thinking this past year of making requests in include

Frances Hodgson Burnett - A Little Princess
Frances Hodgson Burnett - Secret Garden
George Bernard Shaw - Pygmalion
Orson Scott Card - Enders Game series
Shakespeare - As You Like It
Into the Woods (musical)
Gertrude Chandler Warner - The Boxcar Children
Sunshine Cleaning
Alexander Key - Witch Mountain series
D.E.B.S.

I was considering offering a ficlet to whoever could guess what pairings I'd be requesting in each fandom, but the fact that the answers are easily found in a sticky post at the top of my journal kind of takes the sport out of the endeavor.

The list of fandoms I was thinking of but which didn't get nominated this year is sort of interesting, too. Some of them surprise me (I would have expected them to get nominated even though I didn't do it); some don't.

George Bernard Shaw - Man and Superman
George Orwell - Nineteen Eighty-Four
The Parent Trap (1999)
My Summer of Love
The Truman Show
The Secret Garden (musical)
Mark Twain - The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Shakespeare - The Taming of the Shrew
Gray Matters
Winter Passing
Kate Douglas Wiggin - Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
Beautiful Girls
Legally Blonde (movie)
Brides of Christ
Escape to Witch Mountain (1975)
Escape to Witch Mountain (1995)
Race to Witch Mountain (2009)
She's All That
Bruce Coville - The A.I. Gang
The Man in the Moon (1991)
Mars Attacks

ETA: And I just added The Black Adder to my possible requests, because I really want some Princess Leia of Hungary fic. Surprised?

However, also unsurprisingly, she's not on the list of characters for Blackadder, so that'll have to wait for next year.

Comments

[executrix]

Man and Superman? I kind of like Jack/"Enry. I suppose you ship Ann/Violet, though?

[alixtii]

Naturally, lol. Whitfieldcest all the way--although perhaps it would be an overstatement to say I 'ship them; my primary engagement with the text (my favorite play, although I've never yet seen it performed) isn't fannish, or at least not media-fannish. But if I were to request M&S for Yuletide, Ann/Violet would be my request--although I can certainly see the appeal of Jack/'Enry for people who like that sort of thing.

[hermionesviolin.livejournal.com]

Shakespeare - The Taming of the Shrew

Aww, Miss Conduct can't get "Kate and Petruchio go to a gay bar" for Yuletide.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Nope. And I can't get Kate/Bianca.

[lunabee34.livejournal.com]

So, curious. Are a lot of people writing Jossverse RPF? How do you decide what characterizations of Joss, etc., that you like? With something like CW RPF, there's such a body of stories out there that there's a wealth of fanon to work with.

[lunabee34.livejournal.com]

Also, looking at the list, I don't see Friends and I totally nommed that. Durn. And no more fandoms can be added now. Oh, well.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't say there's a lot of Jossverse RPF being written (and the Fanlore page agrees with me, no--and much of the body of work that has been produced is rather alien to my eccentric conception of what the fandom should be: focusing on Kames Marsters, David Boreanaz, Vincent Kartheiser, Christian Kane, Nicholas Brendon, Kelly Donovan, SMG, etc.

For me, the center of the fandom will always be wisdomeagle's Jossverse RPF fics, most of which are Joss/Alexis. (It amuses me that, after the Fanlore page, Ari's fic index is Google's second hit for "Jossverse RPF.") (likeadeuce has also written a Joss/Alexis piece in the same vein, but I see it's under flock.) So one can argue that Ari and I have worked out our own fanon, which basically boils down to Joss and everyone he's ever worked with being highly, highly neurotic. (Although I'm still convinced that's canon.) And Joss being in love with most of his actors, but especially Alexis, Amy, Nathan, and Summer. (Call me a tinhat, but this is at least a sort of pseudo-canon; they deliberately play it up often.)

For characterization of Joss, the first place to go is of course canon--which is to say episdoe commentaries (and Whedonesque posts and interviews and other sources, but mostly episdoe commentaries), with Ari's characterization of Joss being a strong influence on me. But to tell the truth, I don't really think of it that way; while I might have difficulty with other characters, writing Joss (which I have done many, many times--there's only one, arguably two, of my RPF stories that doesn't include him as a character) has always come easy to me. I just sort of effortlessly slip into his mindset, and write.

Not to mention sometimes you have to tweak the characterization to make the plot and/or theme work anyway, so.

As to how someone who wasn't me or Ari would write the characters if assigned them for yuletide or prettylightsfic, I'd suspect tha they do the same thing I do when I get a prettylightsfic assignment outside my comfort zone (and every year, I drive the mods crazy because I'm a pain to match, so it usually is outside my comfort zone): watch YouTube clips of interviews until one feels one has a sense of the character. This is what I did when I wrote Heroes RPF two years ago, and had to get into the head of Hayden Panettiere: I listened to the cast commentary of Ice Princess, then watched interviews of Hayden and Kristin Bell on YouTube until I felt I had enough sense of the woman to write her in fic.

I've never seen someone outside my flist actually attempt writing Joss himself; only once did prettylightsfic allow writers to be requested alongside actors, although the year previous to that one I did request Joss/Summer and Joss/Tina Majorino on the grounds that Joss had acted in both Angel and Veronica Mars, and neither of those times did my assigned author choose to write to the Joss-centric prompt(s) (for the quite understandable reason that writing Joss/actor can end up squicky--which is of course part of the appeal). In general I'd have to say that when I read the fics at prettylightsfic sometime I feel like I'm reading a brilliant deconstruction of the actors that catches them perfectly, and sometimes it seems like they're unrecognizable people with their names having sex. C'est la vie.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Hmm. You think they decided it was inelligible, or that it got lost in cyberspace, or what?

[lunabee34.livejournal.com]

Well it was eligible last year and I don't think there's been any upsurge in the fandom. LOL

It probably got somehow swallowed up. No big. I mean, there's 3500 other things to choose from.

[lunabee34.livejournal.com]

Well it was eligible last year and I don't think there's been any upsurge in the fandom. LOL

It probably got somehow swallowed up. No big. I mean, there's 3500 other things to choose from.

[lunabee34.livejournal.com]

So I just went and read all of your Joss fic and also Ari's. Very, very interesting. If I take all those fics as part of a set, I would say that the way that you guys have characterized him is as having very close, nearly proprietary, relationships with the actors he works with frequently; that that he is respected as Creator by those actors who in turn love him for that; that's the erotic linch pin (his genius and also a strange kind of fragility); also he OTPs Wesley/Alexis forever! It's this fascinating deification of him as a writer with this undercurrent of uncomfortable power dynamics. I love it. Love it.

If I were going to write Joss!anybody for a ficathon, I would probably do just what you suggest--hit the Youtube and read any and all fic I could find about him as a character.

More in a sec--dinner interrupts.

[lunabee34.livejournal.com]

I was going to say earlier that the only RPF I've written is for SPN (for which there is a rich rich fanon already) and for Mythbusters which is teensy as a fandom and my characterizations were based entirely on ep watching.

I hope you get your story!!!