Talk:Pining

More Examples please

Um, does this page really need TEN examples from SGA? I know we don't have a rule on it or anything, I just generally assume that 2 or 3 for a single fandom is enough, unless it's particularly known for a trope (not true here I don't think). And honestly, I think SGA and Merlin do tend to dominate the trope pages a bit as it is; can we maybe cut the list to the very piniest? MegR 19:33, 7 February 2012 (UTC)

Agreed. I think Harry Potter has some good pining fics. I didn't read that widely in the fandom, but you might check Victoria P.'s stuff - I think she's a big fan of the trope. --Anenko 19:55, 7 February 2012 (UTC)

Hey guys, I took out a few, but those ten were just some of the most-instantly obvious of the dozens of SGA fics I mentally have labeled as "major pining!John" (I should have added some "pining!Rodney" ones too, there are fewer I have labeled as that but they definitely exist) -- and I still managed to forget to add pir8fancier's where they're both pining. In other words, I was astonished that there wasn't a pining page yet, when I decided to stub one out I knew I'd end up with a lot of SGA fics (since I happen to be most familiar with SGA fanworks for pretty much any trope example and there are a lot of plot-is-mostly-pining fics in SGA). The Merlin stuff was easy to add (or the page would have been nothing but SGA examples) because there are so many individual pages for Merlin fanworks, and many of them use the word pining. So when I was going through pages to link to the new stub I added the handful of Merlin ones to this page where the review or the overview section seemed to most strongly indicate that the pining was an important part of the plot, not mainly a side-note. (Or where I knew the fanwork and could vouch for its cracktastic pininess, i.e., Alone.)

tl;dr, but what I would personally love to see is for people to add examples from more other fandoms -- either ones that are known for lots of pining fics, or ones that have a few pining standouts -- so it's not all SGA (and Merlin) fanworks before we start cutting examples that do illustrate the trope in different ways (pining for fuck-buddy, pining for married friend, pining after one-night stand, pining out of stubbornness, pining out of idiocy, etc.) even if mainly within one fandom. But if fanlore editors adding other examples prefer for the page to end up with max a handful of examples per fandom, then at that later point I'd try to help winnow down the SGA examples. Would that work for you guys? (I did just remember a Sherlock fic I've heard described as "a lot of pining" and added that.)

As for the larger concern of SGA and Merlin tending to dominate trope pages, I think that's a function of fanlore's history and editors. In fanlore's early years, there were a bunch of people who were in SGA fandom at the time working on the wiki, so lots of examples that way. Now there are I think at least two active editors very familiar with SGA fanworks (and in my case, not that many other fandoms and even for those, far less in-depth) so it may be very easy/fast for them to add SGA examples to a page on the theory of "better some examples even if heavily weighted towards one fandom than none." And because one of our editors has been so diligent about making pages for Merlin fanworks, those pages jump out and can also be easy to add to a trope page because searching for uses of the trope to link back to its page will bring them right up. If there were a few more active fanlore editors who were very familiar with one or a few fandoms either making fanworks pages for those fandoms or adding stuff from the fandoms they know to their favorite trope pages, I imagine it would start evening out fast (or we'd be thinking "One Piece, Glee, SGA, and Merlin sure tend to dominate trope pages, don't they?"). I would hope that a solution would be to invite and encourage more editors making more pages and additions for different fandoms -- like Kass's recent mini-push for Doctor Who -- rather than discouraging editors from focusing on fandoms they are most fond of/familiar with, or discouraging them from using/wikilinking to other editors' prior work. ? --Sk 23:22, 7 February 2012 (UTC)

I hope you didn't feel as if I were criticizing your work on the page. That certainly wasn't my intent. I know that people add examples from the fandoms they're most familiar with. I try to add het, femslash, and non-Western source fandoms whenever I can, but I have a hard time remembering specific examples for various tropes. I hit up my flist for help, and hopefully someone there will come through with examples from other fandoms.

I've made several appeals to my flist in the past. It's hard to get people to contribute, even if I offer to do the editing myself. I'm not sure how to get people interested in adding info about their own corners of fandom to Fanlore. --Anenko 23:30, 7 February 2012 (UTC)

Re "I'm not sure how to get people interested in adding info about their own corners of fandom to Fanlore." I tend to think that's part of a systemic problem. Fanlore does seem to be a bit of a stepchild (compared to AO3) for OTW in terms of (marketing, tech) resources/focus, there are people who have philosophical issues with OTW projects to begin with, and the editing curve is not actually easy (I remember diving into Wikipedia pages in its early stages feeling less intimidating than trying to pick up the conventions for adding stuff here when I first discovered fanlore) -- though it feels as if the wiki committee's been working on that, trying to make fl navigating and editing feel more accessible. Still, there's very little outreach or what feels like widespread, recurring, effective marketing from the OTW, or (through campaigns by the OTW or propelled from within fanlore) from current and former fanlore editors about the enjoyable little pleasure of making a shiny-new page and populating it with cool stuff for other people to find (facetofcathy is one of what -- in my not very wide reading -- feels like few exceptions, though she also points out issues with the site and project).

Re "I hope you didn't feel as if I were criticizing your work on the page." -- I did a little bit, sorry for oversensitive moment. But I do understand where you are coming from -- pages I work on will tend to get more SGA examples than anything else, though I do try to add examples from other fandoms I've read in (they'll still be mostly slash and likely the juggernaut pairings, and western media fandoms, because that's how I seem to roll) when I remember them.

For fanlore editing I rely immensely on memory -- which due to a period of total immersion is better when it comes to SGA than any other fandom. It's also the only fandom I'd say I've ever been active in at all -- making lists and recs (though I'm back to lurking) while in others I may rec a tiny bit but mainly just read and lurk -- so hitting up flist: not likely.

(I do in most cases cherrypick the examples I include on a trope page as the ones I thought were better written re a trope or some of the most illustrative, because of my personal bias of hoping to help page viewers discover (IMO) fanworks I'd consider reccing as opposed to ones I really wouldn't, as that's how I've discovered more good-than-not fics to read thanks to other editors' work -- but that is very much a matter of personal opinion, and if another SGA-focused fanlore editor added examples I was not fond of even as idfic I certainly wouldn't take them off a page.)

In general -- rambling again, but -- maybe we could think about/discuss making a weekly or monthly post at the dreamwidth comm saying something like "New trope [and maybe not-just-one-fandom-specific glossary] pages have been made for x, y, and z! Yay! But they could use more examples. Current and former fanlore editors and comm watchers, do you have examples you think illustrate that trope particularly well in different fandoms that aren't already on the page? If so, either hop on over and add them, or put the info in answers to this post! (Or meta on the trope, if anyone has links for that fanlore editors will sing their praises.)" Or some other way of trying to engage people presumably already predisposed to be interested in adding to fanlore pages, and then maybe branching out from there to people less familiar with fanlore? --Sk 00:30, 8 February 2012 (UTC)

Oops, was trying to edit at the same time as you, Sk. That was actually just Anenko above, not me. But I'm certainly not trying to criticise you or discourage you either! I know people can only add fandoms they are familiar with, and I know why there is so much focus on certain fandoms, and it's certainly not the fault of people who are in those fandoms.

But to be honest, I really don't agree it's better to have a huge number of examples from one fandom just to have *something*. All that does for me is that I look at it, and I think: even if I add examples from ten other fandoms, it's still going to be 50% McShep. And I like McShep! But as you point out, you wouldn't take someone else's examples off a page, and people in general are very reluctant to remove content someone else has added. So, if a page is completely dominated by one fandom, it feels like it will stay that way.

I will try to think of some other examples (The Sentinel and Gundam Wing must both be packed full of them. And, god, The X-Files, surely?), but my memory is useless for that sort of thing and I'm not reading much fic atm. Plus my stupid internet keeps kicking me off literally every 30 seconds.

I agree that Fanlore doesn't get much of OTW's resources (though I don't know what we can do about that), but I am completely for your idea about posting to the comm seeking examples! I was going to suggest something similar. MegR 00:50, 8 February 2012 (UTC)

re "That was actually just Anenko above, not me." oops, yes, figured that out belatedly (and snuck in to edit). Sorry to hear about your internet connex kicking you off! (For me of late, fanlore has been logging me out at seemingly random intervals between 10 and 30 minutes, such a feature when I'm trying to edit a page or delete some spam! Ahem.)

I do try to restrain myself (a little) in adding SGA examples to pages -- just to frighten you, I can usually think of at least as many more SGA examples that would fit well (and I consider decently written or very illustrative) as I actually end up adding to any page. And some (rare) fl pages I even stop myself from adding any SGA examples to the page! :D

But yeah, I still think too the ideal would be getting more (new and not) fanlore editors focused on different fandoms to add stuff, just like some days it feels like kink finders is dominated by request answerers focused on only a few fandoms, and other days people seem to pull out stuff from far more varied fandoms -- but either way (and even if on fl the page remains more out of balance than any of us would like), at least the person looking for the trope/kink got more than one or two things to read at all? (Tangent: there may also sometimes be a bit of a discontinuity between each fanlore editor's practices and thoughts around editing pages -- and that varying between types of pages -- as portal/first-intro pages for a fandom newbie or regular-viewer-never-editor of fanlore vs. editing some pages to try and help out or fill a potential gap between pages another editor has been working on; so editing ideals viz other power users (editors) vs. editing compromises viz relative newbies to fandom or fanlore who only read pages.)

I took a quick look at the Unrequited Love tag at AO3, and it looks like the fandoms with a lot represented there are: Harry Potter, all Sherlock Holmeses, Stargate Atlantis then other Gateverse (I think that's more because more SGA writers archived all or most of their fic on AO3 than because there really is less Sam yearning for Jack, Jack yearning for Daniel fic than SGA fic), Supernatural, Merlin, and Dragon Age. (Did not check for the Pining tag.) And yes, it seems like X-files and The Sentinel and more of Star Trek would be naturals for (more of) the trope.

re OTW resources, I'm not sure either, except occasionally squeak/speak up/talk about it? (OTW news has gotten better about adding a boilerplate line about fanlore in a bunch of its posts, but I have this fantasy about having fanlore feel less like a bit of an afterthought and more like one of OTW's three or four active initiatives that much more regularly gets big love and deserves time and active marketing energy...) As for the posts at the DW comm, let's see if there's places we should talk about it more on-site before we try it (maybe we can make an on-site Talk page somewhere -- , er, um, maybe on/near Wish List? -- asking for examples and collaborating on text for it?), and/or let's try it! --Sk 01:40, 8 February 2012 (UTC)

Hihi, chiming in here just to say - as a former OTW board member and former co-chair of the wiki committee, I hear what y'all are saying about wishing Fanlore got more support from the org at large. My board term is up, so I'm not able to speak to the current state of things, but I can say -- my sense has been that a lot of time and energy are going toward getting the AO3 through its roadmap and out of beta, which sometimes has the unfortunate side effect of making other projects feel/seem unsupported in comparison. I don't think it's any kind of anti-Fanlore bias or anything like that -- more a case of people trying to juggle a lot of projects at once, and because Fanlore is largely functional, it doesn't always get as much attention as other org projects.

On the positive end of things, I think the communications folks have been trying much harder to include Fanlore in news posts etc. And I think more posts to the DW comm would be awesome. We used to have regular challenges, but it seemed as though participation was declining, so those kind of fell off the radar. Anyway, I think the weekly/monthly post that you suggest, Sk, would be a great start. And I think there's something especially lovely about the idea of those posts being instigated in a grassroots way, e.g. by people who just enjoy the wiki and want to edit more, rather than seeming like yet another instance of top-down communication from the OTW. My two cents; hope they're helpful! Rbarenblat 01:56, 8 February 2012 (UTC)

I think it might be useful to tie in Fanlore editing challenges to events that already have a lot of fannish momentum. A challenge about female characters during Halfamoon or one of the other female centric challenges; small fandoms during Yuletide; non-Western source fandoms during a Dark Agenda event, etc. --Anenko 02:05, 8 February 2012 (UTC)

I think that is a really excellent idea, Anenko!

And Rachel, thanks for chiming in. I do get the sense that the OTW-in-general is trying to remember fanlore more (just, you know, not great at it yet, what with AO3 and discussions around that -- or the OTW itself as during election season -- seeming to regularly take up most of the available energy) and that as you say it's not that there is any kind of anti-Fanlore bias, but perhaps there is something to how, because fanlore is less regularly talked about/complained about/a source of issues OTW-wide or fandom-wide, it tends to get shoveled off to the side a bit with less attention. (My stepchild analogy.) In a scarily restrictive version of my ideal world, the OTW board and the communications committee would have a schedule where they'd look at posts and outreach campaigns and coding or design resources past and present and go "hmm, our regular rota says we should do a fanlore push every x months/times, for every x+y times we allocate resources to the AO3, and a TWC push just before every issue comes out, and remind people at least twice a year about how we're roadmapping Open Doors, and do this other thing for other OTW-project Z every so often" or something hideously structured like that. ;)

As for the idea of the from-the-editor-level-up posts pimping pages that could use more examples, I'd be happy to, over the weekend, collect the newer pages that might be nice to highlight that way for a DW post at the fanlore comm (in which we could also pimp the new Template:ExamplesWanted Aethel created), if that sounds good to folks watching this page? --08:10, 9 February 2012 (UTC)

Yes, awesome. And maybe we could highlight a couple of older pages that could use a wider variety, like the tentacles page.MegR 09:28, 9 February 2012 (UTC)

So MegR pointed out that we don't have a rule for optimum number of examples per fandom, etc. This issue probably hasn't come up before because everyone was censoring themselves, which is too bad. I agree with her that for tropes that are popular in many fandoms, the example section on that page should probably include no more than two or three fanworks per fandom. HOWEVER, if someone can think of ten examples from one pairing in one fandom off the top of their head, I think it's a sign we need a place to put them. Maybe a page focusing on the trope in that fandom (e.g. Pining/Stargate Atlantis Examples). If they're all from one pairing, we could also add a section about pining fic to the pairing page.

I created a category and template for trope pages that need more examples: Template:ExamplesWanted. So if editors use it, we can just point everyone to the category page and watch the examples pile up. In theory.--æþel 23:35, 8 February 2012 (UTC)

Yay for new template, great idea! I'll start using it for sure! --Sk 08:10, 9 February 2012 (UTC)

Yay template! Though I'm not sure SGA really does have a huge number of pining stories, I think it just has a huge number of stories. We could probably fill the examples section of pretty much every trope with just SGA stories. But, I think I'd be more in favour of a section on the pairing page, if necessary. MegR 09:28, 9 February 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, I don't think pining in SGA is necessarily a Major Enough Subtrope to deserve its own page or subpage, it's just one of many, many, many tropes for which I can quickly come up with anywhere from a handful (circus AUs) to 10-50 (pining, presumed dead, food!porn, penguinfic, DADT, mathy!John, dating-without-knowing-they're-doing-it, genderfuck, fairies and elves, robots, etc. etc. etc.) mostly McShep example fics that IMO happen to illustrate that trope rather well/more memorably than other SGA/McShep fics with that trope I read or more memorably than fics from other fandoms with that trope I've read, a) because there are so many SGA fics in total, and b) because I happen to have read and remember a lot of 'em.

Adding all those as sections on the McShep pairing page would become way unwieldy I think; I'm still more inclined to try to restrain myself to adding what I think to be some of the most relevant SGA examples to a trope page when I cannot resist hitting the edit link (as well as any illustrative examples from other fandoms I've read or seen cited as being muchly-about-the-trope when I can), and hoping that a -- Merlin or Naruto or Sentinel or KDrama etc. -- different-fandom-focused editor will add ones from their fandoms to give the page even more (varied) meat for a visitor looking through fanlore for that trope. --Sk 11:09, 9 February 2012 (UTC)

I'm generally no fan of the subpage concept and would suggest instead a top level page like Pining in Stargate Atlantis Fanworks or whatever else works as a name for that fandom trope page. We do have fandom trope pages and maybe a trope has a special flavor in one fandom that it doesn't have in another fandom or it's based on a bit of fanon for one pairing, etc. --Doro 08:38, 9 February 2012 (UTC)

Intruding without being called. Look, I usually edit several pages on Fanlore, even those I'm not familiar with, because I have a green finger to search.I can find anything, sometimes these things find me :-) But the point here is that yes, I really agree that every page related to trope should have examples beyond a certain fandom. Of course there will be cases where a fandom is predominant or unique in that trope or genre, but that's a lot of different cases. I usually try to look for several connections between the page and possible works, adding more than one author, giving slight big preferences to those in the minority - poc, LGBT - and later to other nationalities and languages, to try to break a little the hegemony of American or European English. Ellakbhesse (talk) 15:31, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

Mutual pining page?

I noticed that the "mutual pining" hyperlink in this page redirects to... this page :p Should mutual pining stay on this page & get a sub-section, or be its own page? Greedy dancer (talk) 09:59, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

I'd vote for a mutual pining page because I think it's a trope in its own rights. --SecurityBreach (talk) 10:05, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

Sure! I think we could definitely fill out a full page for it. --enchantedsleeper (talk) 12:13, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

Cool! I think this means the redirect should be deleted, and a new page created in its place? I'm not 100% confident doing that, so please feel free! Greedy dancer (talk) 12:36, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

Created stub, redirect has been automatically taken care of :D I'm looking forward to see your edits ♥ --SecurityBreach (talk) 14:22, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

Yay, thank you! :DGreedy dancer (talk) 15:16, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

I liked this proposal and the creation of the page. Ellakbhesse (talk) 15:32, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

Greedy dancer thanks

Your addition of other Pining types made me very happy. I've seen some movies like this, I've also read fanfictions like that. Characters who think they're having sex for the sake of it and think there's no love there is interesting. Ellakbhesse (talk) 19:55, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

Yay, you're welcome! :D I was looking at my bookmarks to add examples to the other pages & realized there was a gap in the coverage of different pining configurations! :p -Greedy dancer (talk) 11:36, 25 August 2021 (UTC)