Ghost Soup Infidel Blue
| Synonyms: | Ghost Soup |
| See also: | Yuletide, Fandom Wank |
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Ghost Soup Infidel Blue, commonly called Ghost Soup, is an imaginary fandom based in and around the annual Yuletide fic exchange.
It began with Franzeska's 2010 Yuletide fic Working Title, which purports to be written in the fandom Ghost Soup Infidel Blue (reboot) and was written as a treat for liviapenn.
This fandom is based on liviapenn's 2007 meta post about Yuletide Dear Author letters, and the fic takes its plot from the examples in liviapenn's post, such as:
'Bad: "I would like a Ghost Soup story where Luke makes out with Angela's clone and Angela gets mad and seduces Moira just to make Luke mad, and then Ryan and Luke duel to the death with their lightsabers and it ends up in an Angela/Angela's clone/Moira threesome. And Ryan feels really bad and flies off to Mars forever."
As part of the treat, Franzeska solicited people to come into the fic and create wank in the comments.[1] In addition to the fic setting out the "canon" for this fake fandom, this has also lead to part of the joke of the fandom to wank as hard about it as possible.
Participation in Ghost Soup Infidel Blue fandom has aspects of live-action roleplaying and elaborate in-jokes, in that participants in the wank may create new canon on the fly and take exception to everyone else's canon. Because of this, the fandom has many aspects of a game, as well as being meta commentary on fandom as a whole and wank in particular.
This is also an equally fake Ghost Soup Infidel Blue RPF fandom, which exists in the same meta state to general RPF fandoms as Ghost Soup Infidel Blue does to FPF fandoms.
Fake Canon
The canon for Ghost Soup Infidel series is, by necessity of the joke, very loose and open to interpretation and changing. Elements from other fic and from comments are taken into the joke and enjoy memetic mutation.
Some aspects of the fake canon are:
- There are at least five canons in the series: Ghost Soup Infidel Blue (original and reboot), Ghost Soup Infidel Red, Ghost Soup Infidel Purple (which is considered controversial; not many people like it) and Ghost Soup Infidel Gold (which is universally hated).
- New versions occasionally show up.
- Characters are taken from Livia's original post. Notably, Angela's clone has been named Annie. This name was coined by yasaman in the comments to Working Title.[2] This name, as with everything in Ghost Soup, is subject to debate.
Existence in Yuletide
2010:
- Franzeska writes Working Title and wrangles the fandom tag to be canonical on Archive of Our Own.
- Elfwreck posts Meeting Herself in the Yuletide Madness collection[3]
2011:
- Ghost Soup Infidel Blue is an eligible Yuletide fandom. In the initial sign-up, it receives 1 request and 4 offers[4]
- Two fics are posted for the main collection, both of them for false_alexis: Moira's Backstory as a Fighter in RED by Skogkatt, and In Space, Nobody Can Hear You Scream At Your Parents by Elfwreck. Skogkatt posts Luke: Forever Young in the Yuletide Madness collection for Elfwreck.
2012:
- Ghost Soup Infidel Blue receives 3 requests and 9 offers in the initial sign-up. Ghost Soup Infidel Blue RPF, a fandom new to this year, has 1 request and 8 offers.[5] Unlike Ghost Soup Infidel Blue, the RPF fandom has no nominated characters, allowing the writers to create whatever canon they please and to continue the joke.[6]
- voksen creates fan food based on Ghost Soup and posts it to fan_flashworks.[7] Fandom-specific wank occurs in the comments, but is deleted by the community moderator before the joke can be explained.
2013:
- Ghost Soup receives 6 requests and 8 offers; one request asked for Orange, and for fic featuring Stacy (a character who previously had not existed and was not on the nomination list), poking fun at the Yuletide drama about requesting fandom details or characters who were not offered.
- The main Yuletide collection received 6 works, including The Very Secret Diaries of Mary_Suep – Ghost Soup BNF (and grade-A cowbag), a collection of supposedly locked blog posts showing Mary_Suep's progress in writing her Yuletide fic for her recipient. Also included in the fic were links to a Ghost Soup anonmeme. Yuletide Madness received 2 more works.
Response in Fandom
Ghost Soup delights some fans on first exposure and disgusts others. It has been the subject of a number of threads on fail-fandomanon, both those continuing the joke and those criticizing it for being a boring, cliquish in-joke. FFA commonly takes the position that Ghost Soup sounds like classic space opera anime and that it's a sign of anti-anime sentiment that other parts of the fandom have failed to notice this.
Yuletide has been criticized for allowing Ghost Soup to be officially nominated. Its inclusion has particularly been challenged based on the rule that prohibits fanworks being nominated as canons.
External links
References
- ^ http://franzeska.dreamwidth.org/133292.html
- ^ http://archiveofourown.org/comments/140117
- ^ http://archiveofourown.org/works/143788
- ^ http://archiveofourown.org/collections/yuletide2011/signups/summary
- ^ http://archiveofourown.org/collections/yuletide2012/signups/summary
- ^ http://archiveofourown.org/tag_sets/167
- ^ http://fan-flashworks.dreamwidth.org/109544.html