yuletide_coal | The Dirty Energy Source

The Dirty Energy Source

Do you want to make a spreadsheet about spreadsheets?
Do you still need to figure out what two other fandoms you should request beside the only one you really want fic for?
Or are you trolling ALL the letter posts for placeholders, just so you can write those people some nice, dry coal?

We want to know all about it.

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Seriously, she needs to write her letter so I know if I have to change my offers.

I realize this story is objectively pretty awful, but it's still my favorite.

http://archiveofourown.org/collections/yuletide2013/works/1095773

What the fuck, mods. I missed nominations due to my own stupidity/lack of planning, just like she did. Clearly I should have thrown an enormous shitfit about and come bursting into chat flinging sob stories left and right instead of accepting my fate and going for things other people nominated.

+1

Or people could stop being whiny babies and decide if potentially getting a treat in one fandom is worth the risk of getting a main gift in that fandom. If yes, just request the damn thing. If no, don't request it.

Clearly I should have thrown an enormous shitfit about and come bursting into chat flinging sob stories left and right instead of accepting my fate and going for things other people nominated.

That's honestly how most people get what they want.

Okay, so I'm not in any comics fandoms but I have read some comics and I took a class on them in college so I'm good on most Marvel/DC through the early eighties. That's my background coming in on this. I do have basic grasp of how comics work(ed?), and I am genuinely asking:

What would you want them to do better? People always complain that comics fandoms get screwed (and I get it happened this year re:Black Widow) but they had the rule rewriting this year where people had opportunity to weigh in, and apparently nothing changed enough to make comics fans happy. And there's suggestions like, make a special mini-board of comics fans to handle it, but even if they had that, what are they supposed to HANDLE? What exactly are people still doing so wrong and is it actually fixable?

Because at this point, I'm almost ready to start buying into the whole 'comics fans are whiny assholes' thing because I've never seen anyone actually suggesting improvements.

*lesbane

Whoa. I hope someone does eventually see the potential and requests it, because I will treat the shit out of them.

Me too. It was something I'd requested a few years running, too, so I was kind of on autopilot and only realized I only really still wanted the one specific prompt when I started writing my letter.

season 3a killed teen wolf. you've been watching a zombie.

In a canon where there are canon supported (and fandom seems to like them to) pairings of A/B and C/D, someone has requested B/C and only wants tales of B/C's "epic love". I pray I'm not matched on that, because they're either getting a sweater that borders on coal or one of their other fandoms.

they had the rule rewriting this year where people had opportunity to weigh in, and apparently nothing changed enough to make comics fans happy.

That would be because they didn't actually listen to the comics fans. A lot of people argued against the idea of a lower limit for shared universes and against the character limit specifically because of things like what happened this year with Black Widow and Hawkeye happening in the past, but the mods went "hhertzof and moriann know comics so we're ignoring everything all of you say anyway."

What they should do different is exactly what was just suggested: treat comics like every other medium and do away with the character limit entirely. Sure, some people will backdoor their MCU Steve into their request or whatever the fuck, but people do that all the time in, for example, Sherlock Holmes related fandoms, so what does it even matter.

you really should watch orphan black.

People argued a lot on those posts but they didn't actually take very many suggestions, and especially none that would make rules less byzantine and stupid.

The ethos this year seems to be "we'll ban a hundred actually tiny fandoms, be as obstructionist as possible, and make it utterly painful for everyone to figure out what's going on in order to keep anyone from requesting Clint/Coulson, never mind that anyone who wants to request Clint/Coulson will do it behind our backs anyway."

just pick a random song lyric from the nightmare before Christmas soundtrack

Remember when they were going to make all fandoms have to be nominated twice in order to actively keep really rare fandoms out?

I still don't understand how this would have worked. I thought they couldn't see who nominated what fandom, so how would they know if something was nominated twice?

This is my dream change.

Oh man, that was such a fucking terrible idea.

To make sure I understand, you mean get rid of the 1000-character tag limit across the board, not just in comics fandom, yes? And okay, that does all make sense. I admit I was very puzzled by their shared universes rule.

Out of curiosity, is there any sort of documentation on how often people actually DO backdoor characters in? Especially in the sense, 'here's my letter, I'd actually like to request Steve/Tony, pls' way, not trying to nom ineligible characters/in the wrong fandom, etc. I've seen it on here when people get mocked for it, but that's not helpful for seeing how often it actually happens. It just sounds to me as if, rather than just overreacting to a small subsection of misbehavior, they might be preemptively punishing something that's hardly happened at all.

Someone requested the movie Interview with the Vampire and wrote a letter for the book series. Magical breasts fic might be in their future.

Would you mind sharing a few of the fandoms?

Yes, that is what I mean! Sorry for not being clearer.

And I don't know if any documentation like that exists, unfortunately. If there was a way to get a ballpark on how frequently that happens I'd be really interested to see it.

Anecdotally and so not helpfully, the only times I've been backdoored it's been for genuinely small fandoms.

ayrt I'm sorry, I don't remember. I only clicked on random letters to get a bit of an idea of how other people wrote their letters. I think it had some anime/manga fandoms, but I don't remember the names.

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The Dirty Energy Source

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