coaltide | The Coalies Are Back In Town

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2021

The Coalies Are Back In Town

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

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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.

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.

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.~~

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.

So have the shipfic stans.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Look, I'm not someone who wants yuletide to have a ton of shipfic. I like that it doesn't match ships and gen is always okay. My ideal yuletide wouldn't even have character matching, it would be all any/any for everyone and if you can't think of three small fandoms where you're happy with anything you shouldn't sign up. I acknowledge I'm never going to get that, and YT is drifting further away from that every year.

But a lot of people do want ship matching, and a subset of those people have figured out how to do a yuletide that gets them ship matching. This clearly hasn't broken YT in a fundamental way, so formalizing it won't break YT either.

But any system that relies on certain people doing an end run around the stated rules is not a system where everything's fine! If I had said "Walter Wasp keeps getting the venture capital because he knows the unwritten ways in but Ayesha Inner-City can't even get a meeting," the correct solution would not be "maybe Ayesha Inner-City should start her own venture capital firm."

Yuletide shipfic is obviously way lower-stakes, and honestly I don't really care that much whether ship matching happens or not in YT. But the underlying system issue is structurally the same, when you set up a theoretically-open system that allows insiders to do things outsiders can't even see. And this kind of response annoys the crap out of me, because claiming that this kind of system access inequity isn't any kind of problem on this scale makes it harder to see it in bigger-stakes systems too.

The kind of response that says "this optional hobby event may not be for you, in which case you should do events that are more your style"? Or which response? And what rules is anyone taking an end-run around?

But honestly I can't take anyone seriously who thinks that ship matching versus character matching is a fucking access inequity issue.

Formalizing it does break Yuletide for people who are neutral on gen vs. shipfic though. Instead of nominating and requesting A and B and calling it a day, they'd need to pick either A/B or A&B (since AND matching means you can't pick two mutually exclusive options), and conceivably the mods would have to adjudicate what counts as shippy enough to qualify as A/B. And what if you want A, B and C, and A and B can be a couple or A, B and C can be a threesome or it can be gen depending on your writer's preferences? Something like that used to be very simple to request for Yuletide, but under AND ship matching it's impossible.

It's also going to complicate matching, because if you've got a fandom with twenty characters and you're not willing to offer any, you used to be able to offer 10 characters and match to any combination of them, but now you can only offer them in various permutations. What if someone just offers A&B but I requested A/B? Now I'm unmatchable, whereas under the current Yuletide system we would have matched, and they might be perfectly happy to write me the shipfic. For people who exclusively want to receive or write shipfic or exclusively want to receive or write gen ship matching is preferable because it eliminates the possibility of an id mismatch, but for everyone else it creates problems.

Adding worldbuilding, OTOH, only affects people who choose to request or offer worldbuilding. It won't interfere with people who want to do character matching at all, except possibly by taking some people who don't really want to write 'Any' out of the offer pool. It's like if you could implement ship matching only for the exclusive shipfic and gen requesters/writers without fucking character matching up for the rest of us - if that were possible I'd be in favor of Yuletide adopting ship matching too!

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.~~

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.

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.

I really do not think that's true. Giving prompts for every nommed character is ONE approach, but if you seriously do just want more fic for the fandom and don't care which characters feature, you could instead just talk about what in the canon you like, maybe focused on things other than the characters (settings, themes, tone, plot elements) and say "I'd love a fic that focuses on any of these things, featuring any character in the tagset you'd like to write."

Either way if you're not a person who engages with the canon via specific characters

Then you should do a worldbuilding exchange! Because YT is character based and other exchanges are ship based and you kind of need "specific characters" for those.

YT is a small fandoms exchange, it's great that they make allowances for people who want to limit who they write but there's a reason you can't just offer one, and there have always been a ton of any/any matches.

And you can want prompts that don't require a specific character without wanting worldbuilding!

DC And you can want prompts that don't require a specific character without wanting worldbuilding!

Earnestly, what would this look like? Fic about an ensemble?

ncyrt

Not exclusively. I'd imagine it could be anything like a prompt for post-canon fic with any of the nominated characters or characters D, E, and F are all off-screen during the climactic battle but come upon the carnage, write any of their POVs to the devastation. Basically any sort of broad scenario that could be fulfilled with any character.

-"I'd love anything about any character in this fandom, here are some scattershot ideas but go wild"
-"I would love this, this, or this AU, or something set during this time in canon"
-"I'm interested in how this plot thing that happened would have affected any of the characters, pick your fave"
-"I'd love anything using this trope/theme"
-"Porn and/or shenanigans please"
-"something based on this canon installment"

There's 800+ examples in last year's app, there's many ways of doing it!

pulled from my planned requests this year:

- canon left this plot thread dangling, please yank on it?
- there's a whole bunch of minor characters that are important to the MCs that are mentioned for a few hundred words each in the flashback sequence, I'd love anything about one of them and their relationship to their relevant MC
- I'd love something that looks at this five-minute fandom from a meta perspective
- OC or minor canon character's viewpoint on any of the MCs while X was happening to them
- this canon is very definitely always X genre by a strict formula, what if you took a canon-style story and went outside the formula or switched genre?
- If you connect this dot and this dot, there are interesting implications for why that other thing happened, so what if?
- This fandom is always so tragic, please make something happy happen/this fandom is never serious, but what if it was for once?

Like some of that could be interpreted as "worldbuilding" at a stretch, but at that point so would most character requests.

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The Coalies Are Back In Town

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