Evening, folks. It's been a while since I've posted. I've been keeping both busy and stressed. But then, given the circumstances, that's not a surprise.

As many of you may know, I've been running the Fanfiction Panel at Anime Central since around 2007? 2008? I took over from the late, great Jeanne Hedge, who had taken it over from Ryan Matthews. It was kind of cool being sort of a torchbearer for them.

The only years that I couldn't do the panel were the pandemic years. In 2022 and 2023, we had a pretty strong showing. In fact, in 2023, we were placed at 9 AM on Saturday and we still filled the room.

And then, in 2023, with new staff learning the ropes...my panel was rejected. There wasn't anything wrong with my application, they just went with other writing-related stuff like 18+ bad fanfiction panels, Writing Character Archetypes (a 2 hour slog of a panel where the presenter was basically reading off their Powerpoint) and...that was pretty much it.

OK, running the panel about 14 times is a good long run. But I figured, hey, as long as people are interested, we'll keep running it. And I tried to think of 2024 as a year off so that I could actually do the Con Thing (tm) without worrying about my panelists, etc.

I have applied for this year. I am currently listed as an alternate on a waitlist. It's the Schroedinger's Cat of "approved/rejected" for my panel. This is kind of more stressful than a clear yes or now answer.

So, on a whim, I asked the Live Events head this question on the Acen Discord:

Me: Quick question: How many writing-related panels have been approved?

Them: Looks like 0 but there weren't many applicants that submitted those types of panels.

Me: So, there aren't any things like the "bad fanfiction reading" types of panels, re-enactments of "My Immortal," or the 2 hour "Writing Character Archetypes" panels on the schedule?

Them: No there are not <.> There are two Gotta Go Cringe panels talking about Sonic Fanfics but that's about it

.....I am not terribly happy about this turn of events. I mean, yeah, if something constructive about fanfiction had been picked, then I think I would have been all right with it. But to have some guys go "hurr hurr this Sonic fic bad" in two instances when I just wanted one hour?

*sigh*

Rumor had it that there was a huge staff purge because of the way Anime Central had handled the mask mandate in 2022--and at the last minute. In past years, I wouldn't have had any trouble getting accepted.

I don't know. Has the time of the fanfiction panel passed? Should I start hosting "true facts from an ancient anime fan" panels?

--Doc

You gotta punch it up, get it more modern, make sure you put in your applications that you’ll have three screens showing Tiktok videos and subway surfers so the kids will be interested, that kinda thing.

But seriously, I think there’s been a shift to where just reading things is considered.....bad? Like it’s not worthwhile somehow if it isn’t getting read to you by an artificial voice, or accompanied by terrible AI art or both.

It’s bullshit. ....though I DO like having stuff read to me. My poor ancient eyes have trouble reading for too long these days. Much prefer an actual person though.

People haven't stopped posting to Archive of Our Own last time I checked.

Fanfic never slowed down. It's just as prolific as it ever was.

I don't have a good reason for why you would find a lack of interest in the discussion or critique of fanfic. Maybe people proofread within their own small communities on Discord these days or with AI. Maybe people have become more resistant to the idea of their work being lampooned. Maybe there are no truly 'horrid' badfics any more or at least the idea of widely lambasting them on social media has gone stale because sensitivity and the risk of being cancelled outweighs the fun of lampooning peoples' work.

Maybe it's the fact that, at least on The Social Media Site That Will Not Be Named But Used to Have a Little Blue Bird, things have mostly turned into a culture of vociferous hate and, again, cancelling rather than good-natured discussion, lampooning, or less good-natured mockery of fics you don't like.

>I don't have a good reason for why you would find a lack of interest
>in the discussion or critique of fanfic.

I'm gonna put my money on "someone with an outsized influence on panel selection really doesn't like fanfic".

-IA.

(really doesn't like the doc is also a possibility)

I tend to agree that this feels more like someone in charge doesn't consider fanfic legit than anything related to popularity.

Not sure what X has to do with anything, though.

------
Authors of our fates
Orchestrate our fall from grace
Poorest players on the stage
Our defiance drives us straight to the edge

>>I don't have a good reason for why you would find a lack of interest
>>in the discussion or critique of fanfic.
>
>I'm gonna put my money on "someone with an outsized influence on panel
>selection really doesn't like fanfic".
>
>-IA.
>
>(really doesn't like the doc is also a possibility)

Oof. Well, that second possibility really upped the paranoia. Perhaps a more reasonable spin on that may be "aw man, this guy's done this panel 14 times, so he MUST be just cruising in for a discounted badge."

I can honestly say that me and my panelists work hard to get things in shape. I fuss over details like the presentation and the handout. I can be like a mother hen when one of my panelists is late.

I wish that more people would understand that writing fanfiction is no less valid an expression of your fandom than collecting merchandise, creating a cosplay, or watching your favorite show alone or with friends. Perhaps it's the fact that fanfiction isn't as flashy as the New Hotness of a show/game, that it'll always be there--and thus, can be ignored for the flavor of the moment.

*sigh*

--Doc

LAST EDITED ON Mar-07-25 AT 01:07 AM (EST)
 
I don't know about the more recent lack of panels- it sounds like there weren't really any submissions.

For the initial rejection though, that might have legs. And now, it's become inertia, with a lot of now prospective panel creators not realizing its an option because it wasn't around the last flew years, and many of the rest submitting bad ideas.

There's also the possibility that with the greatly increased corporate interest in conventions since the plague years that IP and Copyright is now a larger concern.

LAST EDITED ON Mar-07-25 AT 03:05 PM (EST)
 
I wonder if fandom is simply just changing...

I attended Arisia for 27 years and was a panelist/moderator for about a third of that.

At first, I pursued whatever interested me (I was a fixture at Steampunk panels for a while—one of them is even online!)

But one of the reasons I stopped attending was that the panels that were being proposed had less and less content that I could contribute to—a lot of cosplay stuff, a slight tilt towards political themes. So, after a while, I tended only to do anime panels.

(One of the reasons I stopped attending, other than age, was that I was getting tired of doing the same panels every year.)

They keep inviting me back, but things have shifted even further. This past January, there was ONE Anime panel—an introductory one. And the only fanfic panel was "Crossovers we'd like to see."

Meanwhile, there were 7 panels tagged "Cosplay", 4 on Maker stuff, and 14 on fan communities.

It's just a different crowd these days.

I haven't been to a con in ~15 years thanks to kids and scheduling conflicts, but something I've noticed about fanfic over that time is that it has become both much more "mainstream" - that is, when I talk about fanfic I no longer have to tell people what I mean, they already know even if they haven't partaken of it themselves - as well as becoming more looked sideways at. Not that it's looked down upon entirely (though there's certainly some that do), but given the massive explosion of fanfic available on the net, the percentage of good fanfic has gone down so that while there's certainly plenty of good fanfic out there, many people mostly see all the stuff that's mediocre at best and really bad at worst. So I wonder if part of the issue is that with so much bad fanfic out there, the organizers aren't convinced that it's worth it to devote an hour or two of time to something that they see as unlikely to be a high quality panel. That said, I think an angle you might be able to use is to point out that this is a panel about said high quality fanfic, and how to find and/or write the good stuff (or however you feel it's best phrased) rather than just talking about all the bad fanfics you've found.

I know that the quality of fanfic writing is all over the place, but if there were more panels on writing it maybe it would help some of them improve. Then again, the biggest flaw I've seen in fanfic over the past 15+ years is that way too many people post without even doing a spell and grammar check in word/openoffice/google docs, let alone actually proofreading it properly. And while some people do have others read and critique it before (or even after) posting, it's rare to find an author with a sizable group of prereaders to help them out like you see here (or at least used to, I don't know how the studio is operating these days). But I don't know if that's a cause or effect of having fewer writing-related panels in the modern day where video rules...

Offsides

[...] in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles.
-- David Ben Gurion
EPU RCW #π
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