Fic-Privileging on Fanlore and Limitations to Fannish Diversity

[kylara]

Following a discussion in Talk:Tentaclefic, RatCreature suggested bringing the topic up in the community to raise awareness of the issue and hopefully get some more input on what to do about it. The topic began with the suggestion that the "Tentaclefic" article, which address tentacles in fandom and fanworks more broadly than just fic, be renamed to incorporate other mediums of fanwork. This expanded into a broader discussion on what to do about other such named articles and fic-privileging on Fanlore.

I'm mostly from anime/manga fandom. From the discussion it seems that fic is the core of many Western-sourced fandoms which would explain the fic-centricism on Fanlore. Fic is also important in anime/manga fandom, but quite a lot of activity is also focused on visual mediums such as fanart, webcomics, and manga-style doujinshi. Tropes aren't limited to written fiction, and fic-centered terms are not as prevalent.

I'm concerned that when topics (such as tentacles) have articles with fic-centered instead of inclusive names, that this works at the exclusion of other mediums of fanworks. I would like to see more anime/manga information brought into Fanlore, and so far the inclusion has been rather limited (which could be for a number of reasons besides). Still, I would like to see Fanlore remain welcoming to expansion.

So how about it? Ideas on how to be more mindful to non-fic fanworks? RatCreature's also looking for ideas on how to rename topics like "wingfic," "apocafic," and others which are not inherently fic-centric.

Comments

[facetofcathy]

I rather liked the phraseology you used in your comment on the tentaclefic page, Tentacles in Fanworks.

If we take ratcreature's point about the Story Tropes page, could we start there, change that page to Tropes in Fanworks, use the terminology above so we'd have a directory of things like Wings in Fanworks, Elves in Fanworks, etc.

(That page has a section on story lengths that just doesn't really need to be there in my opinion.)

The benefit of this approach as I see it is it gives a place to start on dealing with the issue of all fic-centric pages. It allows fic or art or vid centric tropes to stay connected to all the others. It allows tropes that are mostly based in one type of fanwork to still have discussion about other uses of the trope (I know of a couple Highschool AU vids even though that is usually a fic trope only.) It allows the individual trope pages that cover similar territory to have sections for each sub-element of the trope (there's a conversation on the Pastfic page about whether to make a separate Backstory page or merely make it a section on what we might chose to rename Pre-Canon in Fanworks). It creates trope pages that cannot be confused with discussion of that element in canon sources (The Elves issue.) and centres the page topic firmly on fandom ground.

The main downside to this is that we'd be using some clunky names in places, but the redirects would help with that somewhat.