New Feature: Subfandoms
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fandomtrumpshateIf you’ve done FTH before, you may have noticed that our three-fandom limit system made it difficult to offer fanworks in a fandom that has multiple subfandoms: either you had to be willing to write for anything in that fandom, or you had to dedicate one of your three slots to each subfandom you were willing to create for.
For example, if you’re in the MCU fandom and will write for Captain America or Thor, plus you’re in Star Wars and will write for the Original Trilogy or Sequel Trilogy (but not Prequel Trilogy), that would have been four fandoms under our old system, and you’d have needed to cut one out. It wasn’t a great system, to be honest!
Moving our posts to Dreamwidth helped with organization, thanks to DW’s nested tagging system, but that didn’t fix the problem of how to count fandoms.
But we’ve figured out how to fix it!
Rejoice!
On the new signup form (signups open Monday, Jan 13!), a handful of fandoms have asterisks by their names in the selection menu. If you choose one of these fandoms, you’ll then be taken to a page to choose your subfandoms. If you’re fine writing anything within, say, MCU, go ahead and choose “Any” and you’re done.
But if you only want to write for Thor or Captain America, choose those - and it all counts as one fandom.
So you can choose MCU: Any, Star Wars: Any, and Harry Potter: Fantastic Beasts as your three fandoms.
Or you can choose MCU: Captain America, Thor, Black Panther; Star Wars: The Mandalorian, Rogue One; and Harry Potter: Fantastic Beasts as your three fandoms.
We limit to three fandoms because our first year, we let people list as many as they wanted. We ran into trouble with people listing their fringe fandoms, getting a bidder who wants one of those, and then either losing motivation or not actually knowing the fandom well enough to write in it. So we want you to focus on the three fandoms you’re most interested in or familiar with, to make sure you can follow through.
But we realize that when one universe has many different subfandoms, it works a little differently. Some people will only be into one or two. Some will be able to work with anything in that universe. And some people will be familiar with a larger subset - and because all those subfandoms are related, their knowledge and interest in one subfandom will spill over into others. So even if you maybe don’t know quite as much about Black Panther as you do Thor or Captain America, you’ll probably be able to complete that Black Panther fic.
As always, just be honest with yourself about what you can and can’t do, and what you do and don’t want to do. If you’re on the fence about a subfandom and aren’t sure you’d really want to write a fic about it, don’t choose it - because the way the universe works, you’ll get the one bidder who’s dying for a fic in that subfandom.
Note: If you create in many small fandoms, you are allowed to give a link in your notes to a full list of fandoms you’ve created in before (i.e. “See my AO3 for a full list of fandoms I’ve written in”) and let bidders know that if they’re interested in those they can contact you about it. However, that is an unofficial mechanism. If you and the bidder cannot agree on a fanwork in one of those fandoms, you both need to be okay with sticking to your official 3 fandoms. This subfandom policy affects those official 3 fandoms, not this unofficial small fandom caveat.
For example, if you’re in the MCU fandom and will write for Captain America or Thor, plus you’re in Star Wars and will write for the Original Trilogy or Sequel Trilogy (but not Prequel Trilogy), that would have been four fandoms under our old system, and you’d have needed to cut one out. It wasn’t a great system, to be honest!
Moving our posts to Dreamwidth helped with organization, thanks to DW’s nested tagging system, but that didn’t fix the problem of how to count fandoms.
But we’ve figured out how to fix it!
Rejoice!
On the new signup form (signups open Monday, Jan 13!), a handful of fandoms have asterisks by their names in the selection menu. If you choose one of these fandoms, you’ll then be taken to a page to choose your subfandoms. If you’re fine writing anything within, say, MCU, go ahead and choose “Any” and you’re done.
But if you only want to write for Thor or Captain America, choose those - and it all counts as one fandom.
So you can choose MCU: Any, Star Wars: Any, and Harry Potter: Fantastic Beasts as your three fandoms.
Or you can choose MCU: Captain America, Thor, Black Panther; Star Wars: The Mandalorian, Rogue One; and Harry Potter: Fantastic Beasts as your three fandoms.
We limit to three fandoms because our first year, we let people list as many as they wanted. We ran into trouble with people listing their fringe fandoms, getting a bidder who wants one of those, and then either losing motivation or not actually knowing the fandom well enough to write in it. So we want you to focus on the three fandoms you’re most interested in or familiar with, to make sure you can follow through.
But we realize that when one universe has many different subfandoms, it works a little differently. Some people will only be into one or two. Some will be able to work with anything in that universe. And some people will be familiar with a larger subset - and because all those subfandoms are related, their knowledge and interest in one subfandom will spill over into others. So even if you maybe don’t know quite as much about Black Panther as you do Thor or Captain America, you’ll probably be able to complete that Black Panther fic.
As always, just be honest with yourself about what you can and can’t do, and what you do and don’t want to do. If you’re on the fence about a subfandom and aren’t sure you’d really want to write a fic about it, don’t choose it - because the way the universe works, you’ll get the one bidder who’s dying for a fic in that subfandom.
Note: If you create in many small fandoms, you are allowed to give a link in your notes to a full list of fandoms you’ve created in before (i.e. “See my AO3 for a full list of fandoms I’ve written in”) and let bidders know that if they’re interested in those they can contact you about it. However, that is an unofficial mechanism. If you and the bidder cannot agree on a fanwork in one of those fandoms, you both need to be okay with sticking to your official 3 fandoms. This subfandom policy affects those official 3 fandoms, not this unofficial small fandom caveat.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-13 03:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-13 04:13 pm (UTC)In some cases, a specific version is in our list (for example, we added Little Women (2019) because it seems likely to be a new fandom with multiple signups, while we don't expect to get any for the original book), while in other cases, we've just used the main property title and people will need to specify in their notes which version(s) they will create for. As we do every year, we'll go through next year and see which ones were popular and which ones seemed to need further breaking down and redo the list accordingly. We don't always catch everything, but you can always use the notes to clarify what you will and won't create for.