Why I love Yuletide

Every year, there is wank about yuletide .  Sometimes it is entertaining, sometimes it is not.  One of the best things about Yuletide is that there can be wank (inevitable, with the number of people involved in it) and still most people have an awesome time.  But the thing is, there are some people in fandom who don't know much about Yuletide (there may even be some on my flist) and who have seen the wank on fandom_wank and elsewhere and base their opinions on the wank, and I wanted to give them another perspective.  This letter is not written for the people who dislike Yuletide, for whatever reason, and it's not written for those who love Yuletide.  Either way, I'm sure your opinions are based on your experiences and you don't need me yapping to convince you or validate you.  This is for the people out there going, "So what's all the fuss about?"

(Note: if you don't like Yuletide but would still like to participate a holiday small fandom fest, check out smallfandomfest.  I don't know much about it, but its format is very different from yuletide , so if you've got problems with yuletide 's format chances are good you'll like smallfandomfest better.  After all, the more fic from rare fandoms the better!)

I love yuletide (yuletide and yuletide ) because it's a way of getting fic written for me that I could never get anywhere else.  That John Wayne movie I watched with my grandparents as a kid?  That quirky New York cop show that only lasted ten episodes?  That favorite book I've never found fanfic for?  I can sign up with them and get a story from that fandom with the characters I love!  And that's awesome!  Also, you have no idea how fun it is to go through the list of fandoms to offer and go, wait a minute, I know that book, I haven't thought about it in years, but I bet I could get my hands on a copy and wow, I loved that book, I bet it would be fun to write a story about it.  Not only do I receive a story I would never have found otherwise, I write stories I never would have otherwise.  And you know what?  Two of my favorite fics I ever wrote are yuletide stories, My Three Good Companions (Rio Bravo) and The Storyteller (Big Fish).  (To the best of my knowledge, My Three Good Companions is the first Rio Bravo fanfic ever written; there were two others written for Yuletide, but mine was the first uploaded, and I think those are still the only three anywhere.)

The other thing I really love about yuletide is the squee.  Seriously, don't let the wank fool you.  There is more love and excitedness about Yuletide than you will find at any other point in the year.  People do this because they love it, and it's fun.  Simple as that.  Reading your fic for the first time is like opening Christmas presents on Christmas morning--you never quite know what you're going to get, and you can't wait to find out.  You know what this gift for you was a labor of love on someone's part.  Just as you poured your heart and soul into the fic that will make someone else's day.  Somehow, the wank never seems to boil over to the point where it spoils peoples' fun.

Another really cool thing about yuletide is that there are challenges-within-the-challenge.  If you think it's important to write more characters of color, or disabled characters, guess what.  There are groups devoted to raising awareness and getting more Yuletide stories written with chromatic or disabled characters.  (Go check them out, they've got some awesome fandom pimping: dark_agenda and access_fandom.)

So if Yuletide is so awesome, what's all the wank about?  Well, most of it (this year at least) comes from people who love it and want it to be the best they can be, and want to approach it differently.  Some stats and history may be of help here.  (I am not affiliated with Yuletide or OTW or AO3 except insofar as I use their archive and participate in the challenge; there's probably a lot I don't know.)

First, Yuletide is seven years old at this point.  (I think.  The original archive goes back to 2003; if there was Yuletide before that I don't know where it would be.)  And because people love it, and go out and pimp it to their friends, each year it is substantially larger than the year before, requiring a lot more time and effort from the mods and a lot more traffic on the servers.  The old archive is really kludgy by modern standards, and by 2008 (the last year it was there), it could barely handle the load.  I mean, it was so creaky, just uploading your fic could be tricky.  And if you found any problems after the fact, you had to get a mod to make the changes for you.  With over a thousand people as there were that year, I'm sure you can imagine what a madhouse it was.  Also, in the signup process, the mods had to go through the list of nominated fandoms and winnow out by hand which ones were too large, which was another massive task.  It was clear that Yuletide could not continue on the same way it had been going--the archive was simply too old and creaky, and had never been designed for the level of traffic it was getting, and the mods didn't have time to do everything that needed to be done.  A new archive (with automated software to handle much of the process) was needed.

One of the founders and main mods astolat was also one of the driving forces behind the Organization for Transformative Works, which is "a nonprofit organization run by and for fans to provide access to and preserve the history of fanworks and fan cultures."  They were at that time in the process of going through all the dream features fans have for fic archives and trying to build the perfect archive, which they called An Archive of Our Own.  Aha, thought she, her fellow Yuletide mods, and the people trying to get AO3 off the ground: a test case!  AO3 wanted to have the ability to run challenges and fic collections on their site, and they wanted the ability to test under a huge user load.  (Also, they wanted to get the word out to as broad a spectrum of fandom as they could about their project.)  Yuletide wanted a newer and better archive that could handle the load, let people edit their own fic, and be more automated thus requiring less work on the part of the mods.  It seemed a perfect marriage.  And so, in 2009, AO3 was moved into open beta just in time for Yuletide.  Not all the features they wanted for Yuletide were in place, but the core was there and by and large things went fine.  There was some wank over the move to the new archive, though I never understood why even as it was happening.  (Look.  You have far, far more control over your story at AO3 than was ever possible at the old archive.  Also, I believe there were some personality conflicts and some other stuff, but I'm not sure what all was going on.)

So, this year, yuletide is again on AO3, and this time (with another year to work on the code) some things have been automated further, including figuring out which of the nominated fandoms are eligible.  The list is something like 4k fandoms long.  Going through all of those?  I wouldn't have time to do that, and I'm sure the mods didn't either.  Please to remember that they are volunteers.  So, they used the number of stories per fandom in AO3 as a guideline for the code to use, and then opened up the preliminary list for comment so that if people thought a fandom was too large (or had been eliminated unfairly) they could tell the mods and the mods could manually fine-tune the list.  Is it perfect?  No, for reasons brought up in the discussions on the main yuletide LJ and on peoples' personal journals.  fandom_wank also has a summary.  But it's a decent system, and remember, the mods and the AO3 coders and tag wranglers are trying to deal with four thousand fandoms, here.  Would it be possible to write a program that would search ff.net and LJ and a couple other places looking for fic for a more accurate representation?  Would it be possible for the mods or someone to google four thousand fandoms, looking for fanfic hits?  Yeah, but talk about time consuming and boring and difficult work, and (from long experience watching discussions about Yuletide) they would never be able to come up with a way to do it that would keep everyone happy.  Me, I'd go for simple and easy and reasonably workable, which the mods seem to have done.  It's not perfect.  Neither is life, but both can still be lots of fun.

And here's the thing, why I think people are making a mountain out of a molehill: most people are genuinely in Yuletide to write and receive rare fandom fics.  There may be a few people out there trying to game the system, but not many.  Also, the software that matches up offers and requests is designed so that it prioritizes rarer fandoms.  In other words, the fewer people who request/offer a fandom, the more likely those people who do request/offer that fandom are to be matched up on that fandom.  So the borderline fandoms, the ones that can be argued whether they're a small fandom or not?  Most of the time, they only get actually written if a) someone can't be matched up any other way or b) someone needs a pinch hit and they're scrambling to get a fic written for someone, and since more people will likely know the less-rare fandom, a writer is more likely to be found on short notice under pressure.  Neither of these are the norm.  So, really, the vast majority of stories written for Yuletide are going to be rare fandoms, just as they should be.  And the ones that aren't, I don't think that's enough to take away from the challenge as a whole.

For more squee: the Yuletide vid, One Night Fandoms, by eruthros and thingswithwings:

Thank you, Yuletide, you've always been great.

Dear Yulegoat,

The most important thing for me in a fic is that the characters are well-written and recognizably themselves.  Even when I don't like a character, I don't go in for character-bashing.  If nothing else, if the rest of this letter is too much or my kinks just don't fit yours, just concentrate on writing a good story with good spelling and grammar and everyone in character and I will almost certainly love what you come up with.

If you want to make me the happiest recipient ever, here are some other things to keep in mind: I like strong women, and I love the acknowledgment that strength comes in many forms, of which the kinds put forward by modern western feminism are only a few.  I like cultural diversity, and to know that culture matters to people, but I don't like it when non-western culture is fetishized or exoticised.  I like quirky characters.  I like acknowledgment that different people can have different points of view without either of them being wrong.  I like stories that engage with problematic aspects of the source, and which deal with privilege in one way or another.  If you don't know what I mean by privilege, here are a few links: White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, and possibly the Spock/Uhura Racefail Prevention Post and associated links. I like plotty, gen stories, and plotty stories in general, but I don't like explicit sex of any kind, nor sex thrown in just because.  If there's going to be sex, there needs to be a reason for it within the story--it advances the plot, or characterization, or something (and, again, if you have to do it, please don't make it explicit).

Donovan's Reef
Amelia Deham, Leilani Dedham, gen preferred.  At the end of the movie, Amelia has accepted her siblings, but she's still a privileged Boston upper-class woman, with no real understanding of the gap between her experience and theirs. I'd love some exploration of the relationship between the two of them. And, you know, I love all of the other characters too, so any of them you want to include would be wonderful.

Please be very careful with this story.  I love the movie, I grew up watching it regularly, but it has problems.  For all its progressive handling of the situation with the Dedham children, it handled the Asian characters poorly.  Also, it was fairly misogynist in its treatment of Amelia.  I would absolutely adore fic that handled the issues the film raised (and didn't raise) with more delicacy than was possible in a John Wayne action comedy of the early 1960s.  Also, there really isn't much chemistry between Amelia and Gunns in the movie, so if you want to make their romance a major point you're going to have to work to convince me that they're in love, or find other reasons for them to be getting married.  The Duke is a lot of fun, but my absolute favorite character is Lelani.  She's young, but she's very intelligent, and very sensitive, and can stand up for herself when she has to.  (I love the scene where Amelia mocks her for giving thanks to the goddess of the canyon for the Christmas tree, and Lelani quietly puts her in her place.)

16th Century RPF
Martin Luther/Katharina von Bora, Philip Melanchthon.  I would love a story where Luther starts theological fights, Melanchthon tries to smooth things over, and Katie pwns them all. Exploration of theological issues a plus.
Luther, Katharina von Bora, and Phillip Melanchthon.  I'd love something where their strong personalities really shone forth.  (And they all had strong personalities in their different ways.)  I would also love something that dealt with the theology if you know enough about it to do a good job, and please, please do not give them modern 20th-21st century attitudes.

Chalion series
Ingrey kin Wolfcliffe/Ijada dy Castos.  Anything with these two characters, but particularly something post-book dealing with their spirit animals and the theology and politics around that.

What I love about this series is the way it brings theology to life without being preachy about it. The way theology is shown to have concrete impact on the way people act, and the way they respond to the world. It's not just gods and goddesses throwing lightning bolts around, but a truly deep spirituality that is fully integrated into the world and the characters. What I also love about the characters is that they are realistic and flawed and still manage great things despite (and sometimes because of) their flaws. What I love about Lois' works in general is the lyrical nature of her prose, the depth and breadth and weight of the way she uses words and themes and mood, though that's harder to pull off. If that's not your style of writing, I'd rather something plainly written than something overflowing with purple prose because you're not used to writing that way.

Batman Beyond
Mary McGinnis, Matt McGinnis, Terry McGinnis.  I would love a story about Mom and Matt finding out about Terry's nighttime job.  One possible idea: Terry's a backup guy for the Justice League and gets called out in a big emergency. Part of the emergency is that someone has hacked the JL computers looking for family/friends to use as hostages, so the Justice League rounds up everyone they can get and puts them in one place so it's easy to protect them. Mom and Matt have no idea why *they've* been included, think its all some mistake. Until the emergency is over, and Terry comes to pick them up ...

I love the whole series and all the characters.  I adore Terry and Max and Dana.  I love how old and grim Bruce has gotten.  I love Barbara Gordon, police commissioner.  I love piecing together the history, how we got there from Justice League/BtAS/Superman.  I wish we'd seen more of how Terry gets trained, because you know Batman has got to be giving him more than we see on the series.  I love characters from the rest of the DC universe too, but I can get stories about them anywhere.  If you bring in, say, Green Lantern or Superman or Wonder Woman I'll enjoy it, but I can get those stories anywhere.  I can't get BB fic anywhere, so please do focus on the BB characters.