icarusancalion

The Call Of The Traveler... I think I missed that one. I was off licking my wounds during most of that challenge.

Some stories don't get acclaim but they make an impact. I'm thinking of stories like the Jack/Ba'al story that everyone read and it still lingered, "oh yeah, you remember that-?"

I am using a base-line review statistic of 150+ to support the fact that one or another story had an impact on someone other than me. I have to view the stats with a jaundiced eye, however, because some people automatically get a lot of reviews -- like astolat -- simply because they have a lot of fans. But if a relative unknown has 150 reviews in sga_flashfic, I'm going to pay close attention to it.

Still, I am going to be forced to make some personal judgement calls about which stories I pick to illustrate this or that... oh... flavor. This is going to be biased and has to be my personal take (with as much input as I can get). There's just no way around that.

I can use the stats and make a fairly good guess that the story with 150 reviews is more influential than the one with only 5 reviews. But stats are just a symptom. Something is going on there, yet they don't tell what's going on. Recs also help point out that something about that story had an impact. A story that's recced in numerous locations -- something is going on. Then discussion of a story can help ferret out what that impact was.

I'm not decided how to approach this.

- As a lit project with some commentary?
- As a simple rec-list?
- As a fandom ethnography?
- Or perhaps a combination, a rec-list with a description as to why I picked this or that story to illustrate what.

The goal, however, is context. I'm coming out of the HP fandom where stories from 2002 and 2003 have lost their frame of reference due to the passage of time and the publishing of two books in the series. This vanishing context is even more true of a fandom where canon is changed every episode. I can provide only one perspective, but I hope I can make some connections.

As for rebuttal fics for Last Port...

I know there was a lot of discussion about John after Last Port of Call. There were several fairly important people in fandom who didn't like the story. cesperanza said, "a good story, but not exactly the feel-good hit of the summer" and was disturbed by John's behavior. amireal was very honest and flatly said she didn't like it, and she had specific reasons why not.

Then I think it was... was it eleveninches(?) who put up an informal poll about your preferred characterization of John in response to all the discussion, while... it was maybe frogspace(?)... talked about how we used different characters as points of entry, that people who viewed through Rodney felt shut out of Last Port Of Call.

So, based on the overall discussion of John, seperis (who didn't tell me if she read Last Port Of Call or not, though she had heard about it) wrote a post about her frustrations in John characterization, and then posted two stories as part of the discussion, one arising out of the other one (the second was more a story summary of John sleeping with someone for a ZPM).

Not a direct rebuttal, but a fandom trend, this one blowing in the opposite direction so-to-speak.

Icarus