My Philcon program schedule

[seekingferret]

Philcon is this weekend, and after not being quite up for attending last year (I was conserving my risky behavior time for Discon), I am planning to return this year. I have the sense that it will still not be quite as big as pre-pandemic (and Philcon was already a shrinking con before the pandemic), but I'm still very excited to go and see people. I have a bunch of program stuff to keep me busy, as well. Three panels, a D&D game I'm DMing, and a crossword meetup.


D&D Carting Wars

You are independent carters trying to make ends meet transporting cargo around the Kingdom, competing against other carters. It can sometimes be a dangerous job and is always unpredictable. But the challenge is part of the fun. You never know what your next cargo will be or whether it will try to eat you! Pregens will be provided or bring your own 2nd level character. D&D 5th Edition.


Ethical Norms in Fanworks Fandom

Fanworks are created by relatively small, self-selecting communities that have developed their own ethical standards about how and when elements from other peoples' work, fan- and otherwise, can be incorporated into your own. These rules often overlap, but are not congruent with, copyright law. How are these community norms created, and how are they enforced?

When Non-SF Procedural TV Shows Go SF

On Elementary, P=NP has been proven. On NUMB3RS, AI has become sentient. In virtually every police procedural, computers can perform miraculous image enhancements and organize and recall data with magical efficiency. Is there a meaningful line between shows like Person of Interest that are deliberately science fictional and shows like NCIS that aren't, or are all police procedurals inherently science fictional? Why is it so difficult to tell an effective investigative story without crossing the line into science fiction? Do we learn something different when we read mundane procedurals as if they were science fictional?

Banned Books

Banned books figure in SF, from Ray Bradbury’s FAHRENHEIT 451 to Sarah Gailey’s UPRIGHT WOMEN WANTED, and some SFF work has been banned. What can such books say to us as book banning is on the rise in real life?

Sunday Morning Crossword Solving Meetup

Meetup to solve Sunday's puzzles and talk about crosswords.

Comments

[makamu]

Oh! All of these look really interesting. But due to my current fascination with crime procedurals, I'd love to hear what that panel is about.

Have fun at Philcon!

[seekingferret]

There's a greater than slight chance that panel will consist of me ranting about the P=NP episodes of NUMB3RS (with NPH!) and Elementary for way too long; it's the reason I pitched the panel. Hopefully the other panelists will balance me out.

[makamu]

Oh! :D Well, I'd love to hear your rant, even if I am not a maths geek myself (heh, mot even close).

I mean, I have a working theory for the "why" of these episodes and the general slide between genres in this case, but I'd love to hear your thoughts before I get on the old soapbox :)

[psiten]

Just waving to all my friends since I'm expecting to spend more time on Dreamwidth now, with Twitter imploding!

ETA: note that when I wrote this, I mistakenly thought you were attending these panels, not RUNNING them (headdesk) and please update accordingly to a world where I had the right context.

PhilCon sounds like it will be interesting, and I look forward to any follow-up you may have about the panels you attend. I kind of wonder if the fanworks panel intends to cover behavior of disputing parties (violence, threats, cyberbullying, doxxing) and content censorship vs. disrespectful portrayals of minority or foreign cultures and ableism in addition to copyright guardianship? Those are issues I've seen crop up at least as often in contemporary fandom battles, if not more often, than complaints about plagiarism.

For what it's worth, as a creator: I had to deal with someone who copied part of a fanfic I'd written before, word for word, without permission, and they removed the section immediately after I asked politely. Similarly, I've authorized people to make "remix" works (essentially fanfics inspired by fanfics) at will, with my only request being that I'd like to see them. There are even entire fanfic exchanges built around creating remix works. It's fun to see that someone was inspired by what you wrote! The only real issue for me and most people I know is plagiarism, when the text in their document is a word for word copy (sometimes with a search and replace done on names to create a "new story for a new fandom"), or someone scraping your account for content to upload to a different site (usually fishing for hits/comments, or a corporation trying to monetize - that happened to me once as well, and I only found out after the commenters directed each other to my original post).

Where to draw the line on issues of *what* people are allowed to write, who is allowed to write it, and the degree to which people trying to enforce content limits on other people are asking for censorship, on the other hand, has been a hugely contentious issue in every new fandom I've seen rise to prominence in the last decade, with the additional concerns regarding patterns of dangerous, anti-social, and at times illegal behavior from people involved in disputes. I'm a little surprised to see those issues weren't included in the brief, so it makes me curious which fandom the panelists are in that they've managed to escape those problems.

I'm talking about a level where people are doxxing other people and sending packages they publicly claim are bombs through international mail, with photographic evidence that the recipient had to call off Scotland Yard and the FBI when it turned out to only be a hoax, not an actual bomb, over Cookie Run. And we won't get into how somebody in I forget what fandom baking another fan cookies with needles in them morphed online into a story about Voltron fans baking the voice actors poisoned cupcakes filled with glass shards because the show wouldn't confirm their preferred fanfic headcanon, which an alarming number of people in the actual fangroup accused believe could have happened and take pride in as a demonstration of their group's commitment to their central headcanon. As a fanfic author, someone copying something I wrote is just a thing that happens, and I deal with it. I honestly can't think of a fandom sphere I've engaged in that handles plagiarism *differently*, or thinks it's right. Maybe I haven't traveled far enough outside my enclosure?

[seekingferret]

Hey, good to see you again! Hope you're doing well.

I definitely expect we will cover some of those topics but I'm honestly not super-interested in them. Trolling and harassment are important wider topics in internet community development, both right now and historically, and certainly they impact fandom and they impact the way we enforce communal norms, but as far as your question about how I've managed to escape those problems, I haven't been totally insulated from them, but spending time on dreamwidth and discord instead of tumblr and twitter has been really good for my fandom community experience, let me say! I do not miss the kind of drama I used to see on LJ, let alone what people are seeing now elsewhere in fandom.


Also, obviously doxxing and bomb threats are terrible, but I tend to react skeptically when I see people pushing arguments along these lines in order to advance an argument about what content should be tolerated in fandom. Where is it leading, is the person advancing it trying to say that they should be celebrated for posting racist fanfiction because someone might hypothetically doxx them? Are they arguing that keeping fanfiction free of anything some authority thinks is rape-apologist is the only way to keep bomb threats from happening? There needs to be a balance, sure, but my initial answer tends to be that the way to balance these things is to focus on one's own small community of fans in your own fandom and making sure that community is functional and safe and fun, rather than trying to drink from the firehose and impose top down solutions that crowd out people in the margins. The answers are not the same at both levels. I write fanfiction full of anti-semitism sometimes, I get very nervous when people talk about these topics with a birds-eye view because my stories could be on the line for some inappropriate consequences, but somehow the smallish Purim Gifts exchange community that I write those stories for is able to figure out the nuance.

You're clearly not alone in reacting to the topic this way, though! I ran a version of this panel at Fanworks Con a few months ago, after trying to run it at Discon last winter and having it transformed by someone else into a panel much more along the lines you envision. Clearly antis and cancel culture and trolling is the conversation that a lot of fandom wants to have right now about fandom, and clearly it's an important conversation, but as long as I can keep happy in my little corner of fandom I'd like to have the other conversations too.


As to plagiarism, obviously fannish norms about plagiarism are not too different from non-fannish norms about plagiarism (though I think there are differences at the margins), but when you start looking at derivative works it gets more interesting. Can you use another fan writer's original character without permission? What about some worldbuilding idea? Who owns ABO? In fanvidding, clip-stealing from another vid is verboten in my fannish community, even though it's hard to distinguish intellectually from clipping from the original source. Fannish intuitions about these questions are very different from copyright law's intuitions about them, and in sometimes very interesting ways.

[psiten]

Oh my goodness, the court case over someone claiming that the "omegaverse" trope was her personal invention left so many people I know just embarrassed on her behalf that she would have tried it... by then it was just so common, with so many variations, but the fandom knowledge still exists and has been clearly documented that the first story using "wolf-inspired" concepts to imbue humans with secondary genders in a form identifiable as the omegaverse umbrella grouping was in an anonymous Supernatural kinkmeme, so whether you assign ownership to the person who requested it or the person who wrote it, the fan is still anonymous. The point of the publishing avenue is *not* to claim the creation, and to make it general property of the fandom. No one can own the copyright on omegaverse because the people whose actual idea it was chose anonymity over ownership and control, and since then it has become a thoroughly generic concept with as many variants as there are people who write it. I haven't, mostly becausen I'm not interested in pregnancy, but it's one of those things where you can't leave your figurative door in most fandoms without tripping over a few, and I have friends who write it.

The omegaverse court case was a very special time to be in fandom, that's for sure.

It sounds like a lot of the things you're more interested in are social, about community etiquette and how to navigate boundaries between different people politely. What level of respect or "ask first" permission people expect from others, which is a very interesting issue to think about. It might also be interesting to compare fan environments to, say, academic or corporate ones and see how they foster different expectations.

I think the question of censorship, content boundaries, and online safety is one with wider implications. Goodness knows, people in fandom who have seen 12 year olds trying to doxx each other, engage in suicide baiting, or report people to authorities over very morally neutral things that they claim deserve actual death or imprisonment have attempted to say that real world authority figures need to have a greater awareness of what their children are doing, and help them gain some context about the seriousness of trying to harm real people over fiction. Most of the time, people will just say, "Log off," or, "It's just the internet, it's not real," which is a little frustrating when the stories about it becoming real crop up. Well... I will not deluge you with the news stories about kids getting cyberbullied or drawn into chats with groomers (real ones) who present themselves as the "safe adult" in fandom, and the parents don't find out until the child is suspended for threatening to kill their classmates over fandom opinions. Like you said, those are the fandom flavor of wider issues, and they're not what you want to discuss. It's your panel, so of course it should be on what interests you!

For the record, I'm generally against censorship and for people having the ability to intellectually interrogate media, while also against people being asshats and deliberately choosing to remain ignorant of context. All of which I think is a complicated situation everywhere, and probably needs to be addressed on a case by case basis rather than settled with firm rules about what people may write (or demand).