Some thoughts on kink_las...
Apr. 26th, 2011 07:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
letterblade[There's, like, 3429834 things I should post here, but this is what is on my mind as I click to the update window. So this is what you get. *headdesk*]
So I'm in this![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
kink_las thang, and right now it's making me contemplative. At this point (after the last elimination) it's down to six writers. I've generally been coming in second place so far. Never won a challenge, but I obviously haven't been eliminated. This round I was second from last, and this has made me contemplative and vaguely emo.
First, for context: this is how I go about voting for a round ofkink_las. I make a spreadsheet with all the fics, give a once-over read of the whole set, and rate each on a scale of one to five. One is laughably bad, five is so awesome it makes me poing, and fill in the scale inbetween. Most fics overall tend to net a three, which pretty much translates to, "yup, it's another piece of fanfiction pr0n that contains neither bad grammar and characterization nor anything exciting."
There haven't been any fives on my list in the last four challenges.
(There also haven't been any ones for a while, which is good, really, as it means that the bad writers are long gone--and their hilarious badfic with them. Which means the challenge is doing its job, but, y'know, no hilarious badfic. A sad side effect of a good thing. :P But that's neither here nor there.)
I really wish I'd been keeping track of authors in my spreadsheets, once they're revealed, because I feel like a lot of the best writers in the round have already disappeared, and I'd like to know how and why. Defaulted, most likely--lost interest, or had something come up in RL that they didn't have the skips to deal with. (The skip system is a little tight for those who don't win rounds. Understandably, I suppose, but I've come close to defaulting due to RL emergency once or twice.) Though I can think of one really good writer who got voted off relatively early on due to a fic/challenge disconnect.
So that's probably the single biggest thing that's making me slightly emo aboutkink_las. The second biggest thing? It's pretty much Whoverse kink_las at this poin. Last round was two-thirds Whofic. And I know the judging is supposed to be fandom-blind, but really, nobody's completely objective. It's not like I think there's some conscious conspiracy on behalf of the Whofen to vote for their own and take over the comm--that would be dumb, and involve butthurt of truly embarrassing scope--but all things being equal, there's an instinctive tendency to vote for fandoms you know.
And it's not even the parts of Whoverse that interest me right now. I haven't seen a single Eleven-era fic come down the pipeline (despite the vast potential for kinky porn in that TARDIS.) No, it's all Torchwood and Nine.
There's a lot of Jack/Ianto. Nothing against that pairing--in fact, I've voted for several fics with it--but at this point, there's so goddamn much of it out there that it kind of bores me. You've got to do really well to get me excited about that pairing at this point. (And I've voted for fics, purely on technical merit, that didn't get me interested and squeeing about the fic, but such a thing will never rate a five.)
There's a lot of Ninth Doctor/Jack, sometimes with a side of Rose, which is a pairing I'm quite fond of (and threesome I'm more fond of yet), but for whatever reason, this particular comm's hivemind is writing (and voting for, and winning challenges with) a lot of D/s with that pairing. With Nine on top. Which I just plain don't buy, and probably never will. A matter of personal character interpretation, and I've never voted against a fic purely for that. But. Meh. (This is my archetypical Nine/Jack fic, for context on what I'm saying here.)
There's a part of me that's really fucking tempted to write one of those pairings just to see if I get more votes than usual. But Jack/Ianto bores me, and the way I would write Nine/Jack would probably not sit well with that crowd.
And Whoverse in general is a fandom where I can be a horrific fic-snob. There are pro writers out there writing Whofic. And generally, I've found, my standards for fanfiction in any particular fandom are set to either "could I write as well as that on a bad day?" or "the best I've read," whichever is higher. Given the pro-quality stuff out there, yeah, I'm a total fucking snob about my Whofic, especially for Nine, Ten, and Torchwood. Moreso than for any other fandom.
But this is all purely personal preference. It's not exactly going to keep me from reading or voting. I just feel pretty damn out of place at this point.
Digression to some thoughts I've had about the very nature of the kink challenges: This comm has also, from time to time, highlighted a conceptual difference that I sometimes bang my head against: what constitutes a "kink" in fandom versus a "kink" in real life. I signed up for this expecting something like a Kink Bingo card (which, in turn, reads a lot like an RL BDSM negotiation chart--y'all have probably seen those around), and some rounds did work like that, but there are sometimes disconnects. Fairly early on, somebody got voted out for a lovely and tender domestic service scene (for a D/s challenge), and I have never more wanted to read somebody else's vote feedback and write a rant. Now I'm not high on the domestic service quotient, but there was somebody I played with a few times ages back (and fell out of touch with b/c I suck) who somehow brought it out in me, and that fic pinged those particular experiences very well. No sex, sure, but ringing true to RL BDSM practice. I don't know exactly why it got voted off, but I assume it was because people thought it didn't fulfill the challenge.
Or, for another example, I got some negative feedback (not votes, just comments) for my own D/s fic for the second round, saying that it didn't seem kinky. I was dealing with a committed, collared, 24/7 D/s relationship, but because it wasn't largely porn (though did contain some), it wasn't "kinky" enough for the challenge, according to some. Hrrrmmmm.
Also, the last challenges? (There are two we get to pick from each time, btw.) BDSM and intimacy. The entire scope of BDSM lumped into a single challenge (also note that previous challenges have included D/s, spanking, and striking with implements, amongst other things) was a bit WTF. Especially set against something both very nebulous in definition and vanilla.
End digression of me griping about being an RL kinkster.
Anywho.
What I said, above, about the overall squee-level of fics diminishing? I've felt the same with my own writing. I haven't written a fic for this challenge that I was really pleased with since, er, the first two. (Kingdom Hearts, Replica/Riku; and PGSM, Mamoru/Zoisite with Usagi.) Some of that is that it's started to feel a little pointless, because this comm has its preferences and I'm not it. But mostly...word limit. That fucking 1,000 word limit is kicking my ass every time. Every time I think I have a neat, tight fic, as I construct it, that does what I want it to do, and then I word-count it and find I have to cut a quarter of it. And this gets worse every time, because I know I'm up against the limit, and I try to write tighter and more concisely to say what I need to say, which makes it harder to make the inevitable 200-300 words of cuts, and...
Overcutting, for me, tends to lead to clunky syntax, as I try to cram information into a small space, and people have started to vote against me for that. It leads to cutting corners in scene setup and characterization, which can leave readers confused and annoyed. (And I haven't gotten my negative vote feedback on the latest challenge yet, won't for a while, but I got three votes against me, and I have a sneaking suspicion they're on characterization. I tried to contextualize everything, but I had this big complicated scene, with backstory, that I was trying to stuff into 1,000 words, and there was stuff I just plain couldn't fit in. I could be wrong, but I think that's the source of the negatives on that one.) And it leads to all the life being sucked out of a fic. Or maybe it just feels like that to me, but...
Curse my inability to actually conceptualize and write a short fic these days! I suspect that's the greater half of why I'm doing so poorly in this challenge. (The lesser half is probably my fandom choices, because most of the fandoms that interest me right now are ones that none of those people have even heard of, let alone know, and all things being equal, people are more likely to vote for fic where they can fully appreciate the characterization. Fanfiction never really does stand independent of source material, IMHO. But that's a ramble for another day.) And I'm not going to say that I haven't had moments of butthurt about never winning, but that's between me and my water mug.
tl;dr: Comm has a Whoverse bias and is not always congruous with my own understandings of what kink is, which makes me cranky on a purely personal level that has little to do with the actual challenge mods and members. Also, I'm long-winded and I hate it. :P
So I'm in this
kink_las thang, and right now it's making me contemplative. At this point (after the last elimination) it's down to six writers. I've generally been coming in second place so far. Never won a challenge, but I obviously haven't been eliminated. This round I was second from last, and this has made me contemplative and vaguely emo.First, for context: this is how I go about voting for a round of
kink_las. I make a spreadsheet with all the fics, give a once-over read of the whole set, and rate each on a scale of one to five. One is laughably bad, five is so awesome it makes me poing, and fill in the scale inbetween. Most fics overall tend to net a three, which pretty much translates to, "yup, it's another piece of fanfiction pr0n that contains neither bad grammar and characterization nor anything exciting."There haven't been any fives on my list in the last four challenges.
(There also haven't been any ones for a while, which is good, really, as it means that the bad writers are long gone--and their hilarious badfic with them. Which means the challenge is doing its job, but, y'know, no hilarious badfic. A sad side effect of a good thing. :P But that's neither here nor there.)
I really wish I'd been keeping track of authors in my spreadsheets, once they're revealed, because I feel like a lot of the best writers in the round have already disappeared, and I'd like to know how and why. Defaulted, most likely--lost interest, or had something come up in RL that they didn't have the skips to deal with. (The skip system is a little tight for those who don't win rounds. Understandably, I suppose, but I've come close to defaulting due to RL emergency once or twice.) Though I can think of one really good writer who got voted off relatively early on due to a fic/challenge disconnect.
So that's probably the single biggest thing that's making me slightly emo about
kink_las. The second biggest thing? It's pretty much Whoverse kink_las at this poin. Last round was two-thirds Whofic. And I know the judging is supposed to be fandom-blind, but really, nobody's completely objective. It's not like I think there's some conscious conspiracy on behalf of the Whofen to vote for their own and take over the comm--that would be dumb, and involve butthurt of truly embarrassing scope--but all things being equal, there's an instinctive tendency to vote for fandoms you know.And it's not even the parts of Whoverse that interest me right now. I haven't seen a single Eleven-era fic come down the pipeline (despite the vast potential for kinky porn in that TARDIS.) No, it's all Torchwood and Nine.
There's a lot of Jack/Ianto. Nothing against that pairing--in fact, I've voted for several fics with it--but at this point, there's so goddamn much of it out there that it kind of bores me. You've got to do really well to get me excited about that pairing at this point. (And I've voted for fics, purely on technical merit, that didn't get me interested and squeeing about the fic, but such a thing will never rate a five.)
There's a lot of Ninth Doctor/Jack, sometimes with a side of Rose, which is a pairing I'm quite fond of (and threesome I'm more fond of yet), but for whatever reason, this particular comm's hivemind is writing (and voting for, and winning challenges with) a lot of D/s with that pairing. With Nine on top. Which I just plain don't buy, and probably never will. A matter of personal character interpretation, and I've never voted against a fic purely for that. But. Meh. (This is my archetypical Nine/Jack fic, for context on what I'm saying here.)
There's a part of me that's really fucking tempted to write one of those pairings just to see if I get more votes than usual. But Jack/Ianto bores me, and the way I would write Nine/Jack would probably not sit well with that crowd.
And Whoverse in general is a fandom where I can be a horrific fic-snob. There are pro writers out there writing Whofic. And generally, I've found, my standards for fanfiction in any particular fandom are set to either "could I write as well as that on a bad day?" or "the best I've read," whichever is higher. Given the pro-quality stuff out there, yeah, I'm a total fucking snob about my Whofic, especially for Nine, Ten, and Torchwood. Moreso than for any other fandom.
But this is all purely personal preference. It's not exactly going to keep me from reading or voting. I just feel pretty damn out of place at this point.
Digression to some thoughts I've had about the very nature of the kink challenges: This comm has also, from time to time, highlighted a conceptual difference that I sometimes bang my head against: what constitutes a "kink" in fandom versus a "kink" in real life. I signed up for this expecting something like a Kink Bingo card (which, in turn, reads a lot like an RL BDSM negotiation chart--y'all have probably seen those around), and some rounds did work like that, but there are sometimes disconnects. Fairly early on, somebody got voted out for a lovely and tender domestic service scene (for a D/s challenge), and I have never more wanted to read somebody else's vote feedback and write a rant. Now I'm not high on the domestic service quotient, but there was somebody I played with a few times ages back (and fell out of touch with b/c I suck) who somehow brought it out in me, and that fic pinged those particular experiences very well. No sex, sure, but ringing true to RL BDSM practice. I don't know exactly why it got voted off, but I assume it was because people thought it didn't fulfill the challenge.
Or, for another example, I got some negative feedback (not votes, just comments) for my own D/s fic for the second round, saying that it didn't seem kinky. I was dealing with a committed, collared, 24/7 D/s relationship, but because it wasn't largely porn (though did contain some), it wasn't "kinky" enough for the challenge, according to some. Hrrrmmmm.
Also, the last challenges? (There are two we get to pick from each time, btw.) BDSM and intimacy. The entire scope of BDSM lumped into a single challenge (also note that previous challenges have included D/s, spanking, and striking with implements, amongst other things) was a bit WTF. Especially set against something both very nebulous in definition and vanilla.
End digression of me griping about being an RL kinkster.
Anywho.
What I said, above, about the overall squee-level of fics diminishing? I've felt the same with my own writing. I haven't written a fic for this challenge that I was really pleased with since, er, the first two. (Kingdom Hearts, Replica/Riku; and PGSM, Mamoru/Zoisite with Usagi.) Some of that is that it's started to feel a little pointless, because this comm has its preferences and I'm not it. But mostly...word limit. That fucking 1,000 word limit is kicking my ass every time. Every time I think I have a neat, tight fic, as I construct it, that does what I want it to do, and then I word-count it and find I have to cut a quarter of it. And this gets worse every time, because I know I'm up against the limit, and I try to write tighter and more concisely to say what I need to say, which makes it harder to make the inevitable 200-300 words of cuts, and...
Overcutting, for me, tends to lead to clunky syntax, as I try to cram information into a small space, and people have started to vote against me for that. It leads to cutting corners in scene setup and characterization, which can leave readers confused and annoyed. (And I haven't gotten my negative vote feedback on the latest challenge yet, won't for a while, but I got three votes against me, and I have a sneaking suspicion they're on characterization. I tried to contextualize everything, but I had this big complicated scene, with backstory, that I was trying to stuff into 1,000 words, and there was stuff I just plain couldn't fit in. I could be wrong, but I think that's the source of the negatives on that one.) And it leads to all the life being sucked out of a fic. Or maybe it just feels like that to me, but...
Curse my inability to actually conceptualize and write a short fic these days! I suspect that's the greater half of why I'm doing so poorly in this challenge. (The lesser half is probably my fandom choices, because most of the fandoms that interest me right now are ones that none of those people have even heard of, let alone know, and all things being equal, people are more likely to vote for fic where they can fully appreciate the characterization. Fanfiction never really does stand independent of source material, IMHO. But that's a ramble for another day.) And I'm not going to say that I haven't had moments of butthurt about never winning, but that's between me and my water mug.
tl;dr: Comm has a Whoverse bias and is not always congruous with my own understandings of what kink is, which makes me cranky on a purely personal level that has little to do with the actual challenge mods and members. Also, I'm long-winded and I hate it. :P
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: Apr. 27th, 2011 10:39 am (UTC)The multi-fandom part is awkward. It *is* hard to vote on the same terms for fandoms you don't know. Saying that, that tends to mean that both my positive and negative votes tend to err towards fandoms I know. If it's a choice for 'least well-written' between a fandom I know and a fandom I don't, then I'll often go for the fandom I know because at least then I feel confident in saying the grammar was bad, when in the fandom I don't know it might be deliberate because the character actually talks like that. That's an extreme example but you know what I mean!
The slant towards Whoverse is interesting. I have to admit, I've defaulted to writing Jack/someone on every round now since the first, because it's Jack I'm most comfortable with – but, weirdly, I didn't think of actually writing from his POV until this round and this was by far my best fic imo. And I'll admit, I did deliberately go for Jack/Ianto last time (which didn't pay off because it was a crap fic) and for Jack/Nine this time, just to see if I would get more votes, and unsurprisingly it did get me a nice two positive votes and no negatives for once.
Saying that, your writing is good enough that you nearly always hook me with your stories even though I have no knowledge of your characters, and I have voted for you on occasion. This Sherlock fic, though, was the first one I didn't realise was you. Weirdly, presumably because you had to cut a lot out, what I didn't get from it was a sense of John really knowing what he was doing – which is why I didn't think it was you, because for obvious reasons you usually write very authoritatively on BDSM stuff. And as you say, there was far too much going on there for the word count. For which you have my sympathy, as I'm frequently having to cut several hundred words out of my first draft too!
(Btw, re. your complaint for no Eleven-era fic – I did write that Eleven/Jack one, admittedly set during the Year of Hell, but it *was* Eleven! I'd quite like to try my hand at Eleven's companions too now the new series has made me feel more like I actually know them!)
I totally agree with you on the disconnect over what 'kink' actually means too. I really liked that domestic service fic too and nearly voted for it, but it's obvious that for some voters kink means sex. And I get that, because as you say that's what it tends to be seen as in fic, and that's all most people know. Whereas a lot of my kink education has been through reading the fic and RP of people involved in kink in RL, so while it's not something I've ever actually practised, I hope I have more of a RL understanding of it. And the 'real' definition of kink, as I understand it, is something that fulfils a need in you, whether sexual or otherwise.
And the prompts are really confusing that way, because a lot of them aren't things I would really consider a kink (like intimacy and fantasies) and it's hard to write a fic about them being a kink. I've tried always to *write* each prompt as a kink that does something for the characters, but with voting I'm a lot more lenient. I've voted for quite a few fics that didn't actually write the prompt as a kink but just wrote a fic about the prompt, simply because I felt they were the best-written fics.
It really is a very complicated affair!
no subject
Date: Apr. 28th, 2011 01:24 am (UTC)I've had a whole lot of trouble with the prompts for this challenge. They often seem either too narrow or too broad to me, and I totally don't get this "a kink is not a kink" which means I'm probably partly at fault for those stories are complaining about that are written to the prompt, without regards to whether or not they are written with the prompt as a kink. Because some of these prompts, I can't envision as a kink. I just can't wrap my brain around it.
With that said, I noticed that I get a whole lot more votes if I pick a pairing/trio that appeals to a certain subset of people I know are voting, and if I pick something that's in a specific subset of genres. And it pisses me off, so I keep trying to break that mold, and then I end up with people telling me that I haven't actually written the story to the prompt, even though I've included the prompt. It's horribly confusing, and I'm find myself in knots around the question of whether I should just be writing the best damn story I can write, or taking some of this other crap into account.
I should probably quit worrying about it. I suspect I'm going to have to default in about four weeks. We'll have a challenge where we'll no longer be allowed to use skips, and I'll be on vacation all but about two days of the writing period. Somehow, that doesn't stop me from angsting.
And for what it's worth, you've gotten my vote in most of these challenges. I didn't guess the Sherlock one was yours this time, because it just seemed a little too disconnected for you (having to cut out hundreds of words will do that--I got the same feedback from someone who voted against me in this round). The concept was fascinating, though, and the title fit perfectly.