Just as important as impartial selection – maybe even moreso – is the appearance of impartial selection.

Would you want to submit to a contest or magazine with a history of the coordinator’s close friends winning a disproportionate amount of the time?

The answer is probably no.

In magazines, this is relatively easy to get around: do blind judging, and make it known that you do blind judging. You don’t have to trumpet the fact that you do it to everyone, but it can be reassuring to have ‘don’t include your name in the body of your submission’ as part of your submission guidelines. Issues focusing on particular writers are a separate issue completely. Another option is acquiring an unimpeachable reputation, or drawing from a wide enough field that there is no way you could know most of the people submitting. But I like process and things I can trust more than I like relying on my reputation, and Victoria in particular was not an incomparably vast pool to draw from when I was working on Island Writer.

In contests like Adam‘s Anything Goes Writing Contest, entries are submitted directly in a forum thread, so names are attached. We also spend a fair amount of time just conversing there, and the contest runs monthly through most of the year and fortnightly through the summer, so it’s inevitable that he ends up getting to know people. Strangely, studies I made up just now have shown that when you spend a lot of time talking to people with similar interests, you end up friends with some of them!

The difficulty is that then you still have to judge them side by side with people whom you have never met, and you need to do it fairly.

In the couple of years I’ve been hanging around in the contest, I’ve only seen it implied once that the contest might be less than impartial, and by someone relatively new who was doing a one-on-one challenge with a regular, and concerned the regular would have an advantage. This post is not in response to that person. This post is not in response to anything in particular except my own nagging need for transparency, because knowing for myself that I judge as fairly as I am able does not reassure the people considering entering my contests. In this case, Adam ended up not being the judge at all: he called in another contest judge and participant in his contest who billed themselves as hating everyone equally.

Yes, this is the bit where I shamelessly upload video of myself (it’s also on Adam’s site).

The transparency of including critique as well as results has been one of the reasons Adam’s contest has fared so well despite his quite scandalously becoming friends with some of the regulars. As I suggest in the video, the level of critique is pretty indicative of how the judge is going to come down about results.

This model might not work so well with larger-scale contests in which getting feedback to more than 50 or so people would be truly onerous, but on the kind of small-scale contest he and I are running, it’s the kind of transparency that encourages people to enter.

Transparency preserves the appearance of fair judgement, which lets us feel less bad when our friends win on the strength of their writing. It is not our fault that we make friends with people who write well.

I sometimes see requests for consent from romance writers like Christina Dodd, which always make me happy. For the many who don’t have them, the people who have not explicitly given their consent are still enjoying themselves, and it is still all happily ever after at the end.

But this relates back to cultural narratives and my obsession with normalizing things that are healthy, like consent. The things we consider normal shape our brains.

Another contributing factor to this short story was reading this story (Merlin fanfiction, too sexy for work), and finding the idea of arguing literature as foreplay completely and unutterably adorable.

But, of course, having brought up literary criticism, and having already been toying with the idea of doing this before I started it, the comments about Derrida are not just nonsense filler. It’s only in learning about kishotenketsu and reading more about literary criticism and semiotics that I’ve started to understand that Derrida’s presentation of stories revolving around binary opposition has coloured almost everything I’ve ever thought about storytelling. I’ve yet to read anything he’s written.

So the dialogue here are snippets from an argument I’d love to arm myself well enough to have in a few years.

So I linked it to another friend, one who plays video games and is not the same kind of social justice activist. I spend a lot of time with people who are, so the comments are alien to me. It felt a lot like the comments were coming from some strange ‘other’ that is aggressive and anonymous and hates women. I don’t have any kind of mental bridge between the kinds of people who make those comments and the kinds of people I actually have conversations with.

An interesting conversation ensued. I don’t play a lot of video games: I’ve played Trauma Center, and some Mario Party, and Wii Fit. I’ve played online MMOs like Rift and World of Warcraft. I’ve played flash games on the site Kongregate (mostly puzzle games and tower defenses). But he is coming from a world where he owns gaming consoles that are not the Wii, and actually plays games on them.

See, I have been reading a variety of articles about rape culture in video games. In Rift, despite being in a guild with people I quite liked, I knew a woman who never spoke in Ventrilo (a voice chat client), because she didn’t want people to know she was female. Another woman, though, used the fact that she had the kind of mezzo-soprano voice that can sound really cute to get first pick at loot. There were also the kind of casually sexist jokes that I don’t care about most of the time. I don’t care about those jokes because I’m pretty awesome, and people who don’t recognize that can’t keep up very long: they get burned up like so much ablative plating on my colonizing spaceship as it enters atmosphere on Planet Awesome.

But I’ve been doing that thing where I try to expand my horizons and better understand subtext in media, which means reading a lot of material about social justice and media. I’m more aware of what subtext connotes, and why it’s not something we should perpetuate. I have more of a vocabulary about the whole issue. I’m more aware of the taken-as-given connection between trailers like the one for Hitman and casually insulting conversation in Vent that suggests (jokingly, of course) that I should either go make someone a sandwich or post topless photos.

Still, the overuse of tropes about both sexes in video games and tits in place of storytelling are separate issues from the prevalence of rape culture in cooperative video games and multiplayer online games and internet culture. They are often conflated, to everyone’s detriment.

Rape culture is tautologically bad, and should be discouraged.

Lazy sexualized storytelling is bad in a completely different way. Some romance novels share the same attributes. Many romance novels that I happily read share the same attributes. If I can read about sexy immortal shape-changing warriors with guns, I am pretty much okay with a straight male friend admiring Bayonetta‘s attributes.

Wish-fulfillment media being conflated whole-hog with rape culture is not a positive thing for anyone. If the entirety of a genre you imbibe is supposed to be disempowering to women and misogynist and hateful, how are you supposed to be able to tell when something actually heinous pops up?

You’ll note that most of the linked articles are a bit out of date. This is because the issue is something that I’ve been mentally prodding with a stick for a while. I had a really hard time figuring out what I thought about it. Video games are not the media I consume the most of, so it was difficult to get a broad sense of context.

On one hand, I am all for napalming the bejeezus out of anything that supports rape culture.

But at the same time, specifics matter, and context matters.

The fanworks themselves can be utterly amazing, and I gushed at length about a couple in particular. She suggested that she might look some up herself, and, while I have full faith in her ability to find archives of fanfiction on the internet, I have full faith in her ability to find archives of fanfiction on the internet.

Fanfiction is like any other sort of self-published work. Some of the stories are absolute gems written by people who know their craft and get other people to read them over for errors. Some of them are adolescent wish-fulfillment posted before the pixels are dry. As everywhere else, the latter outnumber the former rather spectacularly.

So here is my short, incomplete list of recommendations. These are not necessarily those stories that I love best, but those that I feel both stand alone as literature and are stronger and more interesting because of their context as fanfiction.

First, Strider’s Edge, by tumblr user Paratactician

It is the combination of Homestuck by Andrew Hussie, The Secret History by Donna Tartt, and Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. It is set in Oxford, and we are informed that most places mentioned in the story map to real places, though names have been changed.

Strider’s Edge kicks off with an A. E. Housman poem, the whole of which foreshadows the entire story, and only part of which is included in the text itself. The story itself is difficult to summarize without giving away all the important bits, but the one at the top of the story is “It was a Tuesday late in September when I went up to Oxford University.” The story follows the adventures of John Egbert as he grows up, meets new friends, falls in love, and is peripheral witness to several murders. The solving of the murders is not central to the plot.

One of the central themes is that all things are repeated: this is addressed explicitly in one of the interesting conversations about literary constructs that occurs in John’s Tutorials sessions, as well as being a central facet of the way the story is presented and integral to the fact that this is fanfiction.

Second, One of Our Submarines, by Luka Grindstaff

It should be no surprise to anyone that one of Luka’s stories ended up on this list: I adore Luka’s comic Kagerou so much that I am writing fanfiction of it myself.

One of Our Submarines is summarized as “Sollux Captor, recently drafted into the Service of Her Imperious Condescension, discovers a secret community of Helmsmen hidden inside the Imperial communications network. Meanwhile on Alternia, Karkat Vantas is up to his goddamn nook in revolution.”


Yes, it makes more sense initially if you have already read Homestuck, which it is a fanfiction of. It is also not complete yet.


One of Our Submarines explores what it would be like to be a sentient and formerly autonomous computer system, the horrors inherent in that transition, and storytelling entirely via chatlog.


Third, General Vantas Gets Hitched, by Jesse Hajicek

I probably link Luka and Jesse entirely more than I should, but I deeply admire both of them as writers.

Just go read the articles so I can blither about implications without explaining the basic concepts, okay?

I find it really fascinating how kishotenketsu contrasts with the convention of three acts. The role of plot without conflict in Western culture can be found somewhat in how we treat vignettes and one-act plays, but our approach to it is much different. When I think of vignettes, I think of Slums of Beverly Hills, where there’s some conflict within the family and internal conflict over growing up, but no over-arching conflict. I still remember it years after seeing it, because it had a tone all its own and I think it was also the first time I’d seen breasts in a movie, but it didn’t leave me inspired or emotionally satisfied the way The Hunger Games did.

Part of this is probably my predilection for adventure stories and grand fantasy and science fiction adventures where the world is changed forever. I like conflict. I like it when characters triumph. I like it when there’s something to fight.

I am not overly fond of vignettes. But kishotenketsu is something distinct from that, despite a vignette being the closest Western approximation I can think of, and it seems to me contains different opportunities. Kishotenketsu is less about personal agency than adaptability, and so requires a different mindset, which is always interesting to explore.

The principle behind it is to write those things you are familiar with.

This can be interpreted a number of different ways.

It can be interpreted as writing only those things you have direct experience of, as in travel and memoir pieces, or only writing about places you’ve actually been. This is probably the narrowest definition, and limits us most.

It can be interpreted as only writing about those experiences you can directly relate to, as in fiction set in the present day, about circumstances with which you are at least tangentially familiar. This is the mid-range definition, and one of the more commonly used ones. It is the basis upon which I’m going to take the pain radiating up from my jaw like being repeatedly sucker-punched by my own teeth and go write alien body-horror dentistry (I went to the dentist today. It is good for me, and my general health, and makes me feel like a Responsible Adult. I don’t care: it hurts now that the anesthetic has worn off, and I’m unhappy about it).

It can also be taken as an exhortation to go forth and do the fucking research. This is probably the best way to interpret it, as we should all do more research.

I had more plans for this post, talking about research resources and reading memoirs and not just statistics when researching groups, but all of you know how to use Google, and my face hurts.