First off, I thought I had to publish this meme of sorts I found browsing through LJcom. Most people must have done it already (this very same meme I mean), and I even remember posting it to my blog a couple of years ago, but I was pretty amused by the results I got this year.

In 2009, viride resolves to…

Spend less time on yaoi.
Volunteer to spend time with roleplaying games.
Backup my fanfiction regularly.
Start a manga fund.
Cut down to ten fandoms a day.
Admit my true feelings to scuttlebuttincx.

Get your own New Year’s Resolutions:

1. Don’t ask for impossible. A very big part of my life revolves about yaoi, so just… no. No resolution for that happening anytime soon.

2. Yeah, why not? Last time I had a roleplaying session (the traditional paper + dice one), it was a complete disaster, maybe because it wasn’t my brother directing it (he’s one awesome Dungeon/Game Master). Since we’re both into Avatar: The Last Airbender now, we’re looking forward to a D20 Avatar game (based on the Oriental Adventures campaign setting, for people who remember it back from Third Edition). I want to play as an Earthbender, or better yet, as a badass normal pretty much in the line of Sokka.

3. Truth is, I never back-up my fanfiction. The day my PC crashes and FFnet goes down, that’d be the end of most of it. Also, I’ve lost several unfinished pieces because I thrown away the manuscripts without noticing. But if I’m not that worried about my fanfiction, that’s because I don’t feel the world will cry at the loss of my creative works. Bleh.

4. I’d actually rather begin a doujinshi fund.

5. First thing in the list I can do. In fact, I already do: I’m not into that many fandoms, for starters. But if it’s about fandoms, then… (Scroll down a bit for the rest.)

5. Second and last thing I can also comply with. isn’t a user, but actually two fanfic writers I read from time to time. I’ve read their One Piece and Katekyo Hitman Reborn fics, but I’ve never left any review nor comment – yet. Guess I can always drop by their writing journal to tell them how much I’ve liked some of their works, and especially their pretty IC Kyouya Hibari…

Ok, about fandoms: I finally finished Persona 4 on the 31st, after getting all possible endings. In fact, the game has but one ending; how much you see of it depends on your decisions and progress towards the end of the story. For instance, in the worst ending you face the death of a very loved character, and you never get the chance to uncover the true mastermind behind all. I’m currently playing the game for the third time (if you count the Japanese version) and trying to get all minor quests I previously missed; also, since the game’s mechanics revolve around establishing and developing relationships with people (very much like a dating/romantic simulation game), you must finish the game at least once to “meet” the whole cast of characters and learn about their stories. Well, more on P4 later in my blog (I’d have to explain to you in detail why this is the installment I’ve liked the most in the series). Now, some talk/rant about fandoms. Feel free to ignore the ranty talk behind this LJ-CUT, but please check what’s written below said CUT. That’s important, I swear.

Because, you know, when something becomes popular, a fandom is more likely to be born… and some or lots of wtf ensues. Actually, the P4 fandom is proving to be a nice and somewhat quiet place for the time being; it was the Persona 3 fandom I couldn’t stand. I left the LJ comm because of the deeply philosophical, discussion-bound and highly entertaining -both for the soul and the mind- entries in which members asked whether you’d do a certain character, or molest another one. In any other community such entries would be deemed as spam, OT or plainly too stupid, but after the entry about molesting the main character hit I-don’t-remember-how-many-but-it-was-a-number-in-the-thousands comments, all of them just as brainy as the question that spawned the thread, I just left. Besides, and this is one of my fandom woes, I just seem to a) dislike the most popular characters and/or pairings and b) like some characters and/or pairings that aren’t that popular, so finding fanworks to my liking will more or less involve digging through tons of fanarts and fanfiction about chars I can’t stand before coming across a 100-word drabble featuring my OTP, or something like that. Oh, and I can’t forget the brainy discussions. Of course I can’t. I’d rather unsee them, but it seems I can’t do that, either.

There are two things I really and completely liked about P3: the game system (the day-to-day and Social Link systems, improved in P4) and Shinjirou Aragaki, the typical (in the Persona games at least) mysterious character who joins the party very late in the story. So, yeah, he was voiced by Kazuya Nakai in the original Japanese (Masamune Date of Sengoku BASARA fame for me, Doumeki from XXXholic, Mugen in Samurai Champloo, One Piece‘s Zoro and a bunch of other roles in BL dramas), which completely fit his almost delinquent-to-be badass personality. The things I TRULY despised about that game are too many to rant about, but just some examples: THE MAIN CHARACTER (Minato Arisato can go jump off a cliff and kill himself for all I care), most of the female characters save for one exception (and she was a somewhat short-lived NPC), lots and lots of other supporting characters, oh, and the fandom. ESPECIALLY THE FANDOM. You don’t want me to elaborate on this, trust me, but I’ll say anyway that I can’t stand the most popular yaoi pairing in the game, Minato Arisato / Ryouji Mochizuki. Yeah, you can say I was mostly unprejudiced about the characters: I hated most of them equally.

In P4 it’s pretty much the opposite. The one character I dislike is, well, a pretty minor NPC who gets the spotlight at the very end of the story. He’s pretty popular in the fandom, but I think I can live with that. I’ve also noticed there’s a couple featuring him (and another male character I really like) that’s becoming quite popular as well, but that won’t kill me either. My woe is, the most popular pairings are precisely the ones I don’t like at all. In both the Japanese and the English fandoms, it seems. And, I just noticed, P3 and P4 are two fandoms in which I largely prefer het pairings to yaoi ones, maybe because the games revolve about friendship and partnership, and thus I prefer seeing most of the characters in friendly/fraternal relationships rather than plain R or NC-17 situations.

I should keep on talking (well, writing) about P4 in other occasion. And maybe about Persona 2: Innocent Sin as well, for some fans released an English patch for this PSX game back in October (you can check the group’s blog here for more info). I’ve already downloaded it, but since I know nothing about ISO files and how to burn games, I’m leaving that to my brother (and he’s having some problems with his very old DVD Burner for the time being). It might be actually easier to try to run the game in an Emulator, at least for us: I have the original Japanese game (well, it officially exists only in Japanese…), for my siblings got it for me in a second-hand store, back when they lived in Japan. I haven’t tried it yet, though.

Now, the important and relevant part of this entry I wanted you to read. I wrote that, as soon as an anime/manga/videogame/practically anything becomes popular, a fandom is born. And also, those fans who shows very little or no respect at all towards other people’s fanworks are bound to appear, reproduce themselves at an alarming rate, and populate certain places in the net. Such as LJcom: you’d get to see the number of LJ users who are ravaging Japanese fansites and reusing fanarts. Without caring about what the original authors request of them, so to speak. As you might know, most if not all Japanese fanartists ask for other people to request their permission before reusing their works. Most people don’t apparently give a damn about it and just snatch fanarts to make icons and other graphics. Some other people is more considerate and actually give credit back – but miss the whole point in here, that Japanese fanartists ask them to request permission. Since the vast majority of these fanartists put up an announcement IN ENGLISH in their websites (“don’t reuse fanarts without permission”), all those excuses in the lines of “I don’t speak Japanese so I didn’t know” or “I didn’t see that request” just tell me people a) don’t know how to read, those they’re pretty fluent when it comes to write and come up with excuses or b) don’t care at all. Ah, but you should see how they shriek and go through the roof when anyone else takes their icons, or if they’re iconmakers, how they’ll chase you to the end of the world and beyond if you use those little 100×100 pixels graphics without giving them credit. Got to wonder why they think we should follow their rules when they can’t respect other people’s work in the first place. That’s why I’m so annoyed at some iconmakers in LJcom.

…At some LJ users who use fanarts for their icons, well, not that much. At least said people prove to be real asses, of course. Such as one user who once told me that, according to US laws, if you take an image and alter it in more than 60% of its original “form”, it can be considered yours. I’m to wonder what law is that, in what direction she was stretching or interpreting it or whether she had read it the right way, because I don’t see people drawing a mustache and a beard in La Monalisa and claiming Da Vinci’s famous picture as theirs. (Ok, I think I understand this user’s reasoning behind said law, but still, it sounds like a lame excuse for me.)

Nowadays, it almost seems like, out of 10 LJ users, about 7 sport pretty fanarts in their icons. Of course, they do know about LJcom etiquette and give credit back to the iconmakers, the majority of which provide a link back to the site where they got them in turn, pretty obviously missing the point that Japanese fanartists (as well as some other artists in this part of the world) want them to ask for permission, not a shiny link. And there are some other people who seem to think 4chan or Google Image Search is a valid way to give credit for the fanarts they reuse… I sometimes feel like leaving these people some comments (actually, I’d like to bitch at them, but then there’s netiquette and all that, you know…). I think I should, instead of simply ranting about it in my blog. But then again, there’s even one person in my f-list who usually features fanarts (and don’t see her giving credit for that) in her layouts; as she’s a very kind and well-mannered person, I’ve got no idea how I should lecture her about minding other people’s wishes if it comes to the fandom. As per the people I don’t know (the rest of the LJcom users, that’s it), bitching attelling them to respect other fans’ work look like a daunting task, sort of… In the Persona 4 community, for instance, it’d mean to leave a comment to about 90% of the members, and then again, it can be argued they’re not at fault, but the iconmakers who reused those fanarts in the first place.