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Notices Yuletide

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Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii back-and-forth

https://yuletide-admin.dreamwidth.org/124620.html?thread=2949836#cmt2949836

nominator: The game is in a completely different setting from any of the other games, can stand alone (literally I have only played one other Yakuza game) and I am absolutely fine with disqualifying Majima himself for Yuletide/this fandom

mods: Our understanding is that this is a direct continuation of the main character's plot from other, too-large-for-Yuletide games, so we're inclined to reject, but if you can show us how this isn't a direct continuation, we're willing to discuss further.

nominator: Honestly he has amnesia for 80%+ of the game so it's really just "and then he is doing pirate things with a new set of characters and deliberately ignoring the plot of the previous games" As mentioned, I'm fine with excluding Majima himself if he's the problem, but the setting of the game itself is new, the vast majority of the characters are new, and the game can be played without knowledge of anything else that happened in the previous games. But if you're inclined to reject, that's fine.

mods: ...after reviewing the series as a whole with someone familiar with it, that although this game presents a new setting and many new characters, this installment fits into the overall series continuity.

nominator: Just looking at last years tag set, canons such as Andor and the Agatha All Along, which would seem to be in the same situation, have been allowed. What is the distinguishing feature?

Ngl, I agree with the nominator about Andor - AAA was self-contained and doesn't really fit into the wider continuity of the MCU, so I can see the argument. If the protagonist of a series has amnesia for the duration of a game, surely that keeps the events separate enough? I don't know anything about the Yakuza games.

I know nothing about Yakuza either, but I think this particular game is based on a supporting character who gets booted to a totally new setting and apparently doesn't remember anything about the previous games.

Agatha All Along seems like a valid comparison, though I guess the amnesia does not last as long there.

The first season of Andor was really self-contained, the second wasn't.

AAA was really not distinct from "the wider continuity of the MCU" because you needed the background from Wandavision about who Agatha was in the first place, what Wanda did to her, what happened to Wanda's kids, what happened to Vision, etc. etc. That was Infinity War/Endgame, Wandavision, and Multiverse of Madness.

The second season of Andor depended way more on SW background worldbuilding and characters and especially toward the end if you hadn't seen the cartoons, there were a lot of WTF moments. It was good but not standalone like the first season was.

AAA was really not distinct from "the wider continuity of the MCU" because you needed the background from Wandavision about who Agatha was in the first place, what Wanda did to her, what happened to Wanda's kids, what happened to Vision, etc. etc. That was Infinity War/Endgame, Wandavision, and Multiverse of Madness.

idk, I watched it on its own, a friend filled me in later about what Agatha was doing in WV, neither of us has seen Infinity War/Endgame, idk what Multiverse of Madness even is. I'm sure they all add something to the experience, but I enjoyed myself just fine without them.

I've played all the Yakuza games, and I do agree that it can stand alone -- especially if they want to nominate only the new characters. To me, it's a lot more self-contained than those two canons they listed as examples that the mods approved, and it feels really unfair that they'd allow those and not this one. So yeah, I'm completely on the nominator's side here.

Maybe you should chime in to explain to the mods how it's distinct, then. Can you draw on anything from how it was marketed?

DC

It might be worth going through all the Related To Other Fandom eligibility questions one by one.

I just can't view something like Andor as standalone. There's absolutely nothing in there about Princess Leia, not by name, but you can bet your ass that if an Andor writer wrote a Senator Organa-centric fic that gave him a family made up entirely of OCs, or killed Leia off, or wrote her as an Imperial agent there's nothing about her in the show so it's free-for-all, it wouldn't be warmly received and the requester would probably not be happy.. There's a lot of presumption of having watched the larger canon with spinoffs like this, in a way I feel just isn't comparable with videogame franchises where cherrypicking which parts of canon you play is far more widespread.

I don't think Leia would be eligible to nominate and request in Andor because IIRC she never appears there, so I don't see the "killed Leia off, or wrote her as an Imperial agent" scenario happening at all.

I think maybe you have a point about people being weird about Bail if you wrote him with radical changes to his canonical family but I can see it working if you just say it's an Andor-only based AU.

Re: Evidence Post

(Anonymous) - 2025-09-24 11:01 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Evidence Post

(Anonymous) - 2025-09-24 11:03 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Evidence Post

(Anonymous) - 2025-09-24 11:42 (UTC) - Expand

It is so fascinating to me when people argue with mods (especially in public forums). I am so terrified of being kicked out of an exchange that I would never.

Lol the arguing is only getting more intense!

What about the 20% where he doesn't have amnesia?

I'm also team nominator here

The distinguishing feature is, of course, that Andor and Agatha All Along are both oh so perennially acceptable Western Live Action, while the Yakuza games are video games from Japan.

Video games, comics, or tbqh anything else that isn't live action (preferably Western) or certain subsets of written literature (also preferably Western) will always get the short end of every Yuletide stick because Yuletide springs from the same fannish pool as the OTW and even DW itself.

DC

Personally I don't think either of those should be accepted either, because I can't imagine most Andor or AGA requesters would be happy with a genuinely Star Wars or Wandavision-blind fill that (say) went completely canon-divergent on the worldbuilding and background (such as who the Empire is or what whatshername was doing before she got amnesia... sorry, I haven't seen AGA and don't know what its exact relation to MCU canon is but my point is, there are many ways to fill those gaps.)

Especially when something like Andor is not even feature-complete. The final episode is a bunch of cryptic nonsense if you haven't watched Rogue One.

I don't know the pirate game but it sounds like most requesters of it would however be happy just receiving amnesia pirate AU stuff that's got nothing to do with Yakuza.

CYRT

Yeah, if anything I think the pirate Yakuza game sounds more Yuletide-eligible than Andor or AAA.

And maybe this is me being unfair but TBH I feel a lot less charitable about on-the-edge nominations that lean heavily on juggernaut fandoms like SW or MCU compared to a Japanese videogame franchise. The former just feels far more "against the spirit of Yuletide" than the latter.

Stalking their bluesky it looks like they want something about "the lady pirates"

I can see the OTW, but why does it matter about DW? The OTW founders were on LJ and I don't think they really went to DW, OTW was started from astolat's LJ.

Denise was and is up to her eyeballs in similar western live-action canons, like SGA, and the cohort that followed her to DW initially was more of the same. It's all the same kind of fans that have always pushed back on and excluded "feral" aka not from western fandoms fans and what they like.

OK but for real, how did we get to "this is all the same kind of fans excluding ferals!" from the Yuletide mods rejecting *checks notes* one (1) spinoff video game?

Re: Evidence Post

(Anonymous) - 2025-09-24 13:09 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Evidence Post

(Anonymous) - 2025-09-24 19:16 (UTC) - Expand

Given Denise has also written a ton of Final Fantasy I'm pretty sure she's aware of jrpgs.

Re: Evidence Post

(Anonymous) - 2025-09-24 14:02 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Evidence Post

(Anonymous) - 2025-09-25 08:56 (UTC) - Expand

You're so right, thank you for saying this. This is one of the reasons why I left most of the fandom "communities" I once tried to be part of.

The mods have changed their minds, in part because of the Andor/AAA counter-arguments by the nominator.

https://yuletide-admin.dreamwidth.org/124620.html?thread=3066572#cmt3066572

All right. We've continued to discuss this. We are not sure that it stands as far apart from a large fandom - in terms of how it is constructed and marketed, its focus on characters, and its separation in time within the narrative - as we would prefer for a Yuletide fandom, but we think you have a fair point that some other fandoms have been welcomed with less scrutiny. We don't guarantee approving it - or some fandoms in similar positions - next year, but will approve it this year.

Good for the nominator, I think they're right.

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