The Coalies Are Back In Town

[coalcube]

Friday night they'll be dressed to kill
Down at Coaltide Bar'n'Grill
The receipts will flow and wank will spill
And if the coalies wanna fight, you better let 'em
That jukebox in the corner blastin' out my favorite song
The nights are getting longer, it won't be long
Won't be long 'til Yuletide comes
Now that the coalies are here again

Nominations: Mon 20 Sept to Thurs 30 Sept
Sign-ups: Fri 15 Oct to Sat 23 Oct
Assignments out by: Mon 25 Oct
Default deadline: Sat 11 Dec
Assignment deadline: Sat 18 Dec
Reveals: Sat 25 Dec

Yuletide Discord and Exchanges After Dark Discords for Namespace drama 18+ discussion. Google Group for PHs. F_F wiki for history. Universal App for all past Yuletides and any other exchanges (donate).

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Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Sorry for misunderstanding you about gen vs ships. But I don't quite see how this is a problem of worldbuilding specifically rather than bad writing.

[(Anonymous)]

The difference would be that Worldbuilding being something you can nominate/request (or pointedly not request) changes it from bad writing to outright breaking the rules.

Right now a 1k fic that is primarily about the goingson of the ship with Dave and Taylor relegated to the background is within the rules. If worldbuilding becomes something you match on, you have a stronger case to go to the mods and say "this person wrote worldbuilding when I didn't request it" similar to how right now you can say "I asked for Dave and Taylor and this fic only has a one-line mention of Taylor, therefore it doesn't meet the spirit of my two-character request."

From my understanding of the new rules proposed, if someone only requested "Worldbuilding (Spaceshow)" and I wrote them a completely insular fic about Dave and Taylor having a conversation about how they're best friends (or wrote shipfic where they made out for 1k and I tossed in a line about how making out is a fun pastime on the spacestation), that would go against the requested Worldbuilding focus and the recip would be entitled to an EPH. Which should mean the opposite is true: if someone then writes a worldbuilding-heavy fic that neglects the characters, someone who didn't ask for Worldbuilding should be entitled to a fic that focuses on their characters.

If the mods will not be handling the rules in that way then I don't think it's fair. It would be like having a & and / exchange where the mods police what counts as too shippy for a & fic but you can outright turn the / request into a NOTP bashing party and they shrug. If mods won't be enforcing either side then why bother having it at all, may as well leave it to optional details like it's always been.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think Original Character is a good match for what this is doing either. A lot of worldbuilding-y stories don't center on characters at all, either because they're in fandoms that also aren't character-centric, or because they use the characters to illuminate the world instead of vice versa. The last worldbuilding fic I was given was for a five-minute fandom based on art, where I wanted the fic to be set in the world the art illustrated, but there weren't really characters so much as figures that appeared in the art. That was a fandom where there were characters nominated but they were kind of awkward descriptions of bits of the art and everybody just matched on any/any. And I got exactly what I wanted! The last worldbuilding fic I wrote was for a worldbuilding-heavy epic SF novel that spanned nations and generations and didn't have an intense character focus. That was for a totally blank request, no characters, no optional details. I did canon pastiche themed around one of their generic likes, that had both canon and non-canon characters drifting in and out of the narrative but never its focus, and recip seems to have loved it. Neither of those stories would have sat comfortably with an OC request, because neither of them focused on OCs. (The one I wrote before that I brought in an AU of characters from one of their other requests as a way to explore the canon world, since they'd ok'd crossovers, but based on comments a lot of people thought it was an OC fic.)

I actually read your comment first as a proposal that people who just wanted fic about the fandom, with no character preferences or focus, be allowed to nominate the fandom *itself* as a matchable character, and on thinking about it I really like that as a workaround for AO3's inability to do null character matching well.

[(Anonymous)]

DC - it sounds like the problem here is not so much bad writing as that optional details are optional. You'll always be risking in an ODAO fest that you won't get a fic that focuses on exactly the aspects you want. And Yuletide has never had a rule that a story that matched on multiple characters has to focus on a relationship between them, just that they have to all play a major role in the story.

[(Anonymous)]

If people are going to take it like this, it sounds like a very good argument for why they shouldn't add worldbuilding matching.

[(Anonymous)]

You're treating it like either/or, when I doubt the mods will see it that way. Something can contain characters and worldbuilding, and can also contain neither. If the story has the characters performing actions, you're not going to get an EPH for your character-centred request.

You could try DNW-ing worldbuilding, but you'd probably just stress out much better writers, while the person who produced the work-shifts-on-a-space-ship/station piece you loathed would give you infodumping regardless.

[(Anonymous)]

and multiple adaptations, where Popular Characters can be barred because they make their otherwise microfandoms ineligible.

That's only RPF now. They ditched that rule for other fandoms in 2016 or 2017.

[(Anonymous)]

That’s pretty much my argument. If they aren’t going to treat it as either/or, what is the point? The people who love (or hate) worldbuilding can’t guarantee they’ll get it and the writers who are keen to give it will give it regardless. All it does is create another tag they need to wrangle without solving the problems for the people who want or DNW it.

[(Anonymous)]

If you have no character preferences or focus, surely "any" serves your purpose? Any character you write chooses to write about will result in fic for the fandom.

[(Anonymous)]

If characters A, B, and C are in the tagset, and I request "Any", there's a good chance I will match on someone who only wants to write C and is expecting a C-focused prompt. (Sometimes a very good chance, if there's an offerer who are only wants to write C and nobody ever requests C, they match the Any requester every time.) And there's an expectation that an Any requester will prompt for every nommed character, or only include requests which work equally well for them all, which gets super exhausting if there's 20 nommed characters, even if you do truly love them all. Sure it's not required, but if you get tired and don't prompt for W and you match the W stan, you're going to have an unhappy writer and a crappy gift.

Meanwhile if you offer Any, you have to be willing and able to write literally any possible combo of nommed characters, and that can be really hard to be confident of in some fandoms, especially if there are super obscure characters or chars from very different parts of canon. And again if you're the Any person you'll be the only match with the impossible combo request.

Either way if you're not a person who engages with the canon via specific characters, the lack of reciprocity for Any makes nominating and offering a lot more complicated and stressful, and a lot of the time you'll just give up and pick a couple characters just to get through it.

If there was an option so you could know you were matching two people who weren't expecting any particular characters in the requests, or who are both happy to treat characters as ODAO, it would open a lot of options.

Not to mention the fandoms that don't really have characters in the conventional sense at all, where the current nom guidelines are just a bunch of messy workarounds.

[(Anonymous)]

If you aren’t someone who engages with fandom for the characters, a character-matching exchange isn’t for you. Maybe 10 years ago adding this would be useful, but worldbuilding stans have a whole exchange ecosystem that would support a small fandom worldbuilding dedicated exchange.

Yuletide isn’t and shouldn’t be everything for all people. If you do allow it to cater to the niche worldbuilding sect because ~Yuletide is big and who knows if it would be offered elsewhere~ even though it goes against the character focus, then how do you continue to make an argument against not allowing ship matching as well?

Selfishly I am mad they are considering this but not dropping ffnet from the eligibility.

[(Anonymous)]

Generally, I'm in favor. I think it'll make finding participants who match your interests (and avoiding those that don't) easier. And it should save the people who didn't nominate a character from having their nomination torpedoed by a different nominator who does want specific characters.

But as someone who likes worldbuilding best when it's delivered by my fav characters interacting with their world, instead of just the world on its own, idk. Like, clearly the solution would be for me to include the Worldbuilding (Fandom) "character" in my request (if it's even nominated), but I'm not 100% sold. Of all the possible changes to Yuletide, I'm not sure if this is the one I'd choose to address the first time there's been an open discussion about rule changes in years. The current system isn't perfect, but idk if it really needs fixing either.

[(Anonymous)]

It's a rare fandoms exchange that matches on characters, but the worldbuilding stans have been there from the beginning, too. I don't think it's a particularly niche part of Yuletide.

[(Anonymous)]

So have the shipfic stans.

[(Anonymous)]

That's true. I don't see how the shipfic fans could be better accommodated, however, except by making much bigger changes to Yuletide. I don't think the worldbuilding tag would make shippers worse off.

[(Anonymous)]

Poor shipfic stans. No shipper has ever gotten a shipfic from Yuletide before, never. :-(

[(Anonymous)]

Meh, if the ship fans can match to the ship fans and the gen fans can match to the gen fans everyone's better off. But redesigning Yuletide around that makes everyone worse off. So we cope.

[(Anonymous)]

I mean I'm not actually a worldbuilding fan in particular, I'm a 'tiny fandom' fan (who incidentally has been doing yuletide since it was a pairing exchange, so I super appreciate being told it's not an exchange for me.) And "go create a splinter fest of one that only had seventy fandoms most of which were very large fandoms" is definitely a great solution for someone who just wants any fic in their tiny fandom that has 0 non-yt fic on the archive. Someone should look at last year's app and see how common this really is.


I don't do the worldbuildin exchange because I'm not actually suoer into the really intense worldbuilding end of fic - I don't want to request conlangs or xenobiology! It's just that for my tiny fandoms I'm more likely to want to request, idk, "fic that expands on this thread canon left dangling" or "an AU like this" or "something set in this part of canon" rather than fic that is only about my fave character. That's why I don't like them calling it worldbuilding! I don't think that's that odd in YT either, given how often I have matched no-characters or ODAO-characters requests in the past few years.

If you want an exchange for fandoms that are big on ff.net maybe a small-fandoms exchange isn't for you.

[(Anonymous)]

Honestly I don't think it would be the end of the world to add ship requesting to yt. Given the amount of gaming that happens for certaon fandoms it's basocally happening anyway. The reason it didn't work before is that they allowed rare ships in large fandoms, and didn't match on ships, so basically everybody got their requested rareship as background at best in a large fandom. The matching is way more doable now, it's just it would be a ton more work for the mods, because ship requesters are the wankiest.

[(Anonymous)]

I just pulled up a random prompt on last year's app and the the first one I got was literally "I requested C because D is the other nommed character and I didn't want an only D-focused fic but I love the world and all the characters so you don't have to write me C fic!"

Yeah. Super common. But I don't think a "worldbuilding" slot is a good fix for that.

[(Anonymous)]

If people can and already do game requests and write/receive shipfic, then there’s no need to change to ship matching. Yuletide’s fine just the way it is.

[(Anonymous)]

Yes? That’s why unless you’re going to let all subsections of participants have a way to filter themselves, there’s no reason to single out worldbuilding. Fans still manage to request and write it currently.

[(Anonymous)]

If power-users are routinely doing a complicated dance that requires a ton of outside knowledge to get something that beginners can't get and is technically against the rules, then something is broken. "Emmeline Exchange-Addict can get her shipfic every year but Geraldine Greenhorn doesn't even know it's an option" is an equity problem. Usually the fix is to remove barriers for Geraldine because Emmeline will weasel through one way or another anyway.

RPF guidelines changes

[(Anonymous)]

oooh I see, they aren't just looking at redoing worldbuilding requests, they're going to trickle these out one at a time until the end of the season, just for Coalies!

[(Anonymous)]

Treating is a thing. Maybe a writer who loved Geraldine Greenhorn’s shipfic ideas wrote her a treat and she, like Emmeline Exchange-Addict, got the shipfic of her dreams.

Or maybe Geraldine Greenhorn learned that other exchanges that matched on ships are a thing, signed up and got her shipfics that way.