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)]

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.

[(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.

[(Anonymous)]

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.

[(Anonymous)]

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.

[(Anonymous)]

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!