Comment on Fandom nonfiction: seeking feedback

  1. Aiffe Wed 20 Mar 2013 12:08AM UTC

    Tahno

    Yep, I'm agreed that it would probably be wise to choose a neutral term. And thanks for the detailed response.

    I did see the discussion over categories, and the whole thing is awk. It does seem a bit unnatural to have a division there, and it gets complicated when dealing with works not in English or Japanese. Like, a Chinese animation is "anime" but a French animation is a "cartoon"? That doesn't seem to make sense. On the other hand, I feel in favor of giving anime fans their own space.

    I saw in the tagging guidelines that names were supposed to follow the cultural conventions of the source material. That's how it is in the anime fandoms I've posted in, surname first, given name second. If the tag wranglers aren't using the correct form for the canonical tags in a fandom, that's an enforcement issue rather than a policy issue.

    I can see how Japanese-speaking fans might prefer non-romanized names, but I think that not romanizing anime characters' names would effectively make anime fandoms inaccessible to large numbers English-speaking anime fans, and would make the site unfriendlier to anime fandom, not friendlier. Unless they were both used in the canonical tag or something? IDK, it didn't scare anime fans off FFN.

    I remember the Yuletide thing too, but I thought it was actually an effort to build and support the anime community on AO3, rather than alienate it. Is it just that it was poorly handled and caused resentment from non-anime fans, who were then rude to the anime fans or something?

    When I talked to a friend whose main fandoms are all anime/manga, she wasn't interested in AO3 because she said AO3 was all Sherlock crossovers and stuff. She was also disappointed that some of her smaller fandoms didn't even have categories yet. It was less about policy and more about community. That can be frustrating to change, because someone has to start posting/reviewing works and get the ball rolling.

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    1. ghost_lingering Wed 20 Mar 2013 02:33AM UTC

      minus prepares to hit a meteor out of the park

      I got the naming convention thing wrong -- see SamJohnsson's reply above. I knew going from memory could be dangerous. But there is a bias towards romanizing names which, personally, I am pretty ambivalent about, mostly for the reasons you state, but that I have seen some discussion/criticism of.

      I think that your friend is right, too, that there just hasn't been a critical mass of users moving to AO3. There are probably a bunch of reasons for that, most of which have nothing to do with things that AO3 has or hasn't done, but I'd like to think that AO3 will win them over eventually.

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