Sunday Silliness: a weekly chat post

[mindcrack_love]

Here is a place to discuss all of your thoughts and feelings, shippy and otherwise, about Mindcrack! Feel free to contribute whatever you'd like. :D

For my own contribution, I have lots of thoughts and feelings about "To Hear the Words" (and sadly very little actually written) over on my journal that I'll be posting in a bit, so go check that out if you're interested.

BELATED EDIT: I have tagged this post with everyone discussed in the comments. Phew! Let me know if I missed anyone?

Comments

[mindcrack_love]

As a moderator looking "to preserve works from elsewhere", I could contact Support about giving me invites for guiltyshirts and/or damnreddit if they don't have accounts already. Then we can archive "Perceptions", "Learning to Fly", "Quiet", "Such a Noob", "Eros, Philia, Agape", and "Thread is Ripping". I could also put up "A Journey Taken Together" since I wrote that myself anyway, but I'd like it in context as a sequel to guiltyshirts' "Perceptions".

...I might as well reveal my other fandom so I can put this conversation in better context: it's European football/soccer RPF, with a particular focus (in my case) on the German national team and FC Bayern Munich. (Thus the German accent complex I talked about elsewhere, though I don't *think* Doc is Bavarian? Need to check that.)

Now, "football fandom" is more like over a dozen tiny fandoms linked together. There are, for example, Spanish people playing at FC Bayern during the year, who can thus be shipped with their Bayern teammates during the season and then their Spanish countrymen during international tournaments like the World Cup. And those Spanish countrymen can be linked to their teammates from other teams, from Spain and elsewhere, during the year. Generally, things are *mostly* insular, though there are exceptions, and transfers between teams (though not nationalities) happens all the time. As a whole - including all the major footie nations in Europe - footie fandom is way, way too big to be Yuletide-worthy, and footballslash gets a half dozen posts a day. The thing is, each of those posts might be about completely different teams, completely different players who don't interact with each other - or not. Yes, some teams are bigger than others (the current trend biases towards two big Spanish clubs, whose fic counts currently dwarf any other clubs'), but they're all connected in weird ways and so most people just say "fuck it" and try to characterize footie as a whole.

I was part of an attempt to make "German football RPF" a fandom for last year's Yuletide, thus weeding out the Spanish giants and some other better-known parts of that fandom. That includes my Bayern players, but also players from other German clubs. It was indeed listed, but we ended up nominating so many players and all of us wanted different things - as a person who's only comfortable writing Bayern players and a few other national team members, I can't write fic for a diehard fan of Werder Bremen, I just don't know the characters well enough.

Now, replace "football" with "Minecraft LP", and the team names with "Mindcrack", "Mindcrack Fan Server", "Hermitcraft", "Yogscast", "the Shaft/Dead Workers Party", etc. (Race For Wool is probably the same interconnected mess international footie is, come to think of it...)

Long story short, it's going to be a mess, but it's mostly worthwhile for the promotional value. That and getting onto the AO3 itself, which is useful in its own small way.

[placeblocks]

This is pretty much why I feel like although I'd love to be inclusive of "Minecraft LP", I feel we should stick to nominating just Mindcrack. There are even Mindcrackers I'm not familiar enough with to write (though of course I could do research for Yuletide), but I'd far rather watch a ton of thejims videos to write a fic about him within the Mindcrack universe than to have to discover a new LPer all together. (The only Hermitscrafter I know is GenerikB, and I only know his Mindcrack stuff, for instance.)

So if at all possible I'd recommend just Mindcrack. If other people want Yogscast or whatever they can nominate those, and perhaps they can be merged if the need calls for it, but chances are we'll be the only group nominating LPers...

[crystalllized]

I have one spare invite for AO3 sitting on my account. I don't know much about Yuletide or any of the other stuff that happens on AO3, I just have three fics on my account there.

My last large fandom was Bandom/music RPF, and you can look at AO3 and see how they do that there - there's a Bandom fandom, and then one for each of a large variety of bands. You input the fandoms when you put up a work - it wouldn't be too difficult to put 'Minecraft LP' and 'Mindcrack' in as the fandoms. That's probably what I'll do if I ever finish a bloody fic XD Bandom tends to be really cohesive though - it's was a rare fic back in the days I frequented it that didn't include or mention members of at least 2-3 bands, not to mention people who were actually in many bands or played together. In that sense, it really reminds me of the LP community.

Edit: I'm starting to have to expand comments on this post and that's irritating. That's why I'd prefer using individual posts for topics of discussion rather than a prompt post, among other reasons.