thefourthvine

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Fan
Name: thefourthvine
Alias(es): TFV, littera_abactor (Littera Abactor)
Type: reccer, fan writer
Fandoms: LOTS
Communities: vidfinders
Other:
URL: thefourthvine on LiveJournal
thefourthvine on Dreamwidth
littera_abactor on LiveJournal
thefourthvine at AO3
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thefourthvine is a multi-fandom reccer on LiveJournal. She recs both vids and fanfic, though her focus is more on fic.

thefourthvine is known for not (or barely) watching canon for many of the fandoms she recs in; despite this her recs are widely appreciated.

Her recs tend to be rambling and exuberant, with quirky tag lines for each work she recs, such as "The One That Made Me Want a Crossover Between Hikaru no Go and SG1. Teal'c v. Touya Meijin! Fine, Fine. I Accept That I Am the Only Person on the Planet Who Wants That. But I Want It Enough for Everyone."[1]

Fan Comments About thefourthvine's Recs

Two comments from Fail-Fandomanon:

Thefourthvine's reccing style is idiosyncratic and very discursive and whimsical. She often though far from exclusively recs juggernaut pairings in the fandoms she recs. She's known for rarely watching any or much of canons she recs. Despite or because of these things, her recs are very popular, because she rarely recs anything that is poorly written/vidded/done from a technical standpoint or does not have some kind of engaging hook. So they're safe to read/watch in terms of avoiding badfic/eyesore vids. She also comes across as a nice albeit quirky person. And she's been in fandom for quite a while and is one of the reccing GNFs.[2]

She doesn't care about canon. She cares about tropes, and looks for and popularizes those tropes in whatever fandom she gets interested in, regardless of whether or not they're at all true to canon. She's one of the people who will, for example, decide that two characters are "just like John and Rodney!!!!!"

Basically, she likes any two (white) guy ships, which is fine as far as a personal preference goes, but she's influential enough that she can actually skew a fandom toward that. [3]

Polls

She occasionally holds polls (often on topics of fannish interest[4]), to which many people respond; sometimes asks questions of her flist which lead to wider discussion[5]; and has written charmingly idiosyncratic "Fandoms I Have Loved" primers for several fandoms.[6]

thefourthvine regularly requests fics for songs and music videos for Yuletide and has also written song fandom (and music video fandom) fics.[7]

Blanket Statement

thefourthvine has made a blanket statement about further transformation, translating, and podficcing of her fanfiction.[8]

Fandom Journey

From My Fannish Evolution, Part One in which thefourthvine cites five fanworks that began her journey as a fan.

The One That Gave Me Hope: Silence, by cinzia.

In the summer of 2003, I was, as had become my custom, browsing around archives of LotR fan fiction, and what I was finding was, well, basically really horrible. I would get a list of all the stories in a given site, and I would go through them methodically, and inevitably I would end up reading something involving Legolas braiding Boromir's hair and making daisy chains that involved actual flowers. (Or, god forbid, orcs. Or, typically, both.)

I was tough, then, a brave young fan, not crabbed and aged as I am today. But even so, it was, well, disheartening. I loved the concept too much to give up, and I loved my brain, my eyes, and the English language too much to keep reading. Those were hard times, is what I'm saying.

[snipped]

The One That Made Me Understand That Fandom Is a Conversation: The Elements of Slash: Inside the Wacky, Weird World of "Lord of the Rings" Slash Fiction, by Morgan Richter.

I started in fandom as an entirely passive consumer of fan fiction. I thought things about it - a lot of things, including that Legolas should never, ever be called "Leggy" - but I didn't articulate those things (excepted in hand-wavy dinner conversations), and I sure never considered that other people might be thinking about them, too.

Then, in September of 2003, I found this essay while randomly googling. (And, oh, until I saw some of the other links I'd bookmarked around that time, I'd almost forgotten how sad the random google phase of a fan's life is. Thank god for discoveries like this.) It was a revelation. There was another person out there! And she was interested in slash, and yet she could spell and punctuate and totally understood that in a reasonable universe, no one would ever have to read the phrase "his milky alabaster skin."

I was amazed. And pleased. And once I knew that this fans-discussing-fandom-and-fan-fiction stuff existed, I started looking for it. In short order, I found The Fanfic Symposium, and from there I branched out all over. I found the Mary Sue Litmus Tests and spent a happy evening reading about the ecology of the strange creature known as Mary Sue.

[snipped]

The picture of fandom in my head started to change. I no longer imagined random individuals writing and other random individuals reading, all in strange solitude. I realized that fandom was a community, a community of people thinking about stuff, paying attention to it, talking about it, writing about it. My picture of the average fan changed, too, from a 14-year-old girl posting, "OMG I just saw part of Felowship and Orli is so HAWTTTT I had to write this! It's my first time! Review lots or NO MORE updates!!!!" to someone - well, interesting. Someone I might want to know.

Someone I might want to be.

The Fellowship of the Rings made me read fan fiction. But meta made me a fan.

The One That Gave Me Half of My Forty-or-So Fandoms: Out of Whack, by Bone, aka thisisbone, and Aristide, aka cimmerians*.

I spent the fall of 2003 exploring fandom and reading obsessively. (Or, okay, I've done that since the fall of 2003, but I'm specifically talking about then.) I learned that maybe random archives weren't my friend. More importantly, I learned that another not-my-friend thing was kind of integral to fandom. Namely, television.

[snipped]

The One That Gave Me This LJ: Confidence Men, by Dorinda.

In January 2004 I heard about yuletide, and I was pathetically excited. I had developed a great love of small fandoms, and this was clearly the small-fandom-lover's holy grail.

I went to the archive and did my usual hopeful clicking. (Note: Yuletide is pretty much the only archive on the planet where this strategy regularly works for me. Yet more proof that it is a Christmas Miracle.)

My first click took me to Confidence Men. I was stunned. It was beyond good, beyond great; it was perfect. And I felt, welling up inside, something very familiar to me and every religious weirdo on this earth: the urge to proselytize.

See, when I read something wonderful, I want to tell everyone about it, get everyone to read it. I just can't bear to think of those sad, lonely, damned souls, unaware of the joy and peace they can find in the holy embrace of really good reading material. But at that point in my life, I had no outlet for my proselytizing urge.

[snipped]

The One That Gave Me a Look at How the Other Half Lives: Untitled [9], by, well, me.

Obviously, I wouldn't recommend my own story - and if I did, for the record, it would not be this one - but this isn't a recs set. It's a history of my fannish evolution. And this was a big change for me; it gave me a sort of fannish superbranchial organ, and suddenly I could breathe on land for short periods. (The story also ushered in the Era of Having a Secret LJ, about which I will only say that it proved that I am much too lazy to have secrets. I came out as a fan fiction writer because I just could not take all the work, the intense and demanding labor, of logging out and logging back in every time I wanted to reply to a comment.)

Until the summer of 2004, I didn't think I was a fan fiction writer. Sure, I'd written my share of humiliating-to-recall pre-fandom fan fiction; like, in second grade, when we were assigned to write a paragraph about a book we'd read, I wrote about 35 pages of Laura Ingalls Wilder's diary.

[snipped]

But before Sports Night, I had no desire or ability to write fan fiction.

And then I actually watched some canon, and I realized I could hear the characters in my head. (Still can. Danny and Casey: always in my heart and always in my mind.) Yeah, yeah - bad kind of special, all right, I know. But I wrote it down and posted the sucker.

Here's the thing. This didn't just make me realize I could do something I was sure I couldn't. It also changed the way I interacted with fandom and canons. Writing fan fiction, taking an active, interactive approach to the canon, made me - well. I can't really quantify the change, except to say that I no longer saw canons as static, or unchangeable, or even privileged. (I've always seen books that way, sure, but TV - well, I'd just kind of figured it knew best.)

In other words, after I wrote this, I started interacting with canons the same way I always had with fan fiction: evaluating, analyzing, criticizing, changing. (I've written more fan fiction for fan fiction than for all my canons put together, and I started writing that long before I started this story. I've continued stories, I've remixed them, I've written sequels and missing scenes and fixes. I don't share this stuff, obviously - well, except for when I'm playing with z_rayne's work, since she loves to see what other people do with her toys even when what they do is pretty dorky and eternally unfinished.) [10]

Notable Works

References

  1. ^ thefourthvine, 181: A General Flavor rec post, August 5th, 2008. (Accessed 12 October, 2008)
  2. ^ review of fourthvine's rec page] in a fail-fandomanon post dated March 4, 2012.
  3. ^ Thread in Fail. Fandom. Anon. (Accessed May 4, 2012)
  4. ^ Woobies Wanted post, mirror on LJ, asking respondents to say who is the woobiest in their fandoms, 27 Feb 2010. Accessed 1 March 2010, at which point: 9 pages of comments.
  5. ^ Show Me, Show You post (LJ mirror) asking for picture examples (many in comments) of people deemed "classically gorgeous," 6 Aug 2011. (Accessed 31 Jan 2012)
  6. ^ Posts tagged "Fandoms I Have Loved" at her LiveJournal. (Accessed 31 Jan 2012)
  7. ^ See thefourthvine's posts tagged "Yuletide" for examples. (Accessed 31 Jan 2012)
  8. ^ "Transformative works: If you want to remix, record, or translate any of my stories, go right ahead - no need to ask permission. Just please link back to the original story when you post your work, and let me know so I can go revel in whatever awesome thing you've done. Same goes for art, secondary fanworks, or whatever other creative things you might feel inspired to do. Just don't use my work for anything commercial, please! Or, as Creative Commons would put it: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License." at AO3 profile. (Accessed 31 Jan 2012)
  9. ^ Minion of the Universe
  10. ^ My Fannish Evolution, Part One, October 8, 2006
  11. ^ See also Yuletide Revealingness! post, 31 Dec 2010. (Accessed 31 Jan 2012)
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