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beccastareyesSo Yuletide Treasures/![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
yuletide is an annual fandom thing, where 1000+ fanfiction authors* sit down and do a secret-Santa style exchange focused on rare fandoms. Basically, with the idea that there are boatloads of Harry Potter stories, and you could even find a decent number of, say, Discworld stories***, but finding a story for Beyond Good and Evil (example chosen to tempt ![[insanejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/ij-userinfo.gif)
yuuo) is harder.
Now, every year, it seems like two things happen:
1. The timeline gets compressed. Mostly because it takes a lot of work on the backend to get things to happen. Seriously, I remember when one could count on actual writing time to start before NaNo season, and this year we don't even have nominations open yet. Hell, at this point, Yuletide drives some of the backend stuff over on Archive of Our Own, because making features that can handle Yuletide (hell, the first year it became the second site I've been on where writers can crash things -- the first being NaNoWriMo's homepage).
2. The mods make changes, in an attempt to get things to run smoothly.
This year, the mods have done two things: dropped the number of nominations to 'fewer than the number of requests' and insisted that all requests and nominations include a character. The first is presumably to lower the number of orphaned fandoms -- things so small that only one person gave a damn. The second is because people couldn't follow instructions in previous years when 'any' was allowed as a character. The idea being that if you request any, you will be happy with anything in the fandom you get (though you can add optional details like 'Bob is my favorite character' or 'I really like the magic in these books' so your writer doesn't work blind), so could be matched to anyone who offered that fandom. What people would actually do would be things like 'I said 'any', but I meant Julie who wasn't on the character list/only stuff about the mages/something else that means I won't be happy with any story'. Since the matching algorithm would match 'Any' out of the entire pool of offers, rather than say 'Bob' matches to the pool of 'people who offered Any' + 'people who offered Bob', it meant that people would be disappointed.
Personally, I think it's their own damn fault for not realizing any = anyone, seriously. I'm surprised how well the community is taking it, but I also haven't gone into the comments to look for people throwing shit fits. There's a lot of people who are a bit annoyed over the drop of 'Any' from a request -- heck, I've used it in the past, and was planning on it this year -- but no flouncing yet.
--
* And others. I mean, you could probably fill a request/offer sheet with just Fairy Tales and Mythology, which is technically fanfiction but most people won't object to, say, retellings or 'with a twist'. Or, for that matter Historical** Real Person Fiction. Or 'fiction based on songs/music videos/commercials/gmail themes'. Yes, seriously.
** Or modern, but most people seem to treat writing about modern celebs or politicians different than Shakespeare or Queen Elizabeth I. Probably because the latter have been dead for ages, and half-mythologized.
*** Though part of that is that Discworld got a lot of attention in previous Yuletides, so it's kind of aged out.
yuletide is an annual fandom thing, where 1000+ fanfiction authors* sit down and do a secret-Santa style exchange focused on rare fandoms. Basically, with the idea that there are boatloads of Harry Potter stories, and you could even find a decent number of, say, Discworld stories***, but finding a story for Beyond Good and Evil (example chosen to tempt yuuo) is harder.Now, every year, it seems like two things happen:
1. The timeline gets compressed. Mostly because it takes a lot of work on the backend to get things to happen. Seriously, I remember when one could count on actual writing time to start before NaNo season, and this year we don't even have nominations open yet. Hell, at this point, Yuletide drives some of the backend stuff over on Archive of Our Own, because making features that can handle Yuletide (hell, the first year it became the second site I've been on where writers can crash things -- the first being NaNoWriMo's homepage).
2. The mods make changes, in an attempt to get things to run smoothly.
This year, the mods have done two things: dropped the number of nominations to 'fewer than the number of requests' and insisted that all requests and nominations include a character. The first is presumably to lower the number of orphaned fandoms -- things so small that only one person gave a damn. The second is because people couldn't follow instructions in previous years when 'any' was allowed as a character. The idea being that if you request any, you will be happy with anything in the fandom you get (though you can add optional details like 'Bob is my favorite character' or 'I really like the magic in these books' so your writer doesn't work blind), so could be matched to anyone who offered that fandom. What people would actually do would be things like 'I said 'any', but I meant Julie who wasn't on the character list/only stuff about the mages/something else that means I won't be happy with any story'. Since the matching algorithm would match 'Any' out of the entire pool of offers, rather than say 'Bob' matches to the pool of 'people who offered Any' + 'people who offered Bob', it meant that people would be disappointed.
Personally, I think it's their own damn fault for not realizing any = anyone, seriously. I'm surprised how well the community is taking it, but I also haven't gone into the comments to look for people throwing shit fits. There's a lot of people who are a bit annoyed over the drop of 'Any' from a request -- heck, I've used it in the past, and was planning on it this year -- but no flouncing yet.
--
* And others. I mean, you could probably fill a request/offer sheet with just Fairy Tales and Mythology, which is technically fanfiction but most people won't object to, say, retellings or 'with a twist'. Or, for that matter Historical** Real Person Fiction. Or 'fiction based on songs/music videos/commercials/gmail themes'. Yes, seriously.
** Or modern, but most people seem to treat writing about modern celebs or politicians different than Shakespeare or Queen Elizabeth I. Probably because the latter have been dead for ages, and half-mythologized.
*** Though part of that is that Discworld got a lot of attention in previous Yuletides, so it's kind of aged out.
