cahn | Frederick the Great, discussion post 16

If I'm still in fandom next year and health permits, I'll keep an eye out for it--I really like the structure.

I'm curious -- can you elaborate what you like about it? Since you would presumably still have to nominate several fandoms!

I am completely the opposite -- I've found out through trial and error that shipping exchanges are Not For Me (primarily on the request side, not the writing side), as for some reason I tend to get a little frustrated with having to specify how my requested characters are interacting. Really, author, write them as shipped or friends or frenemies or whatever, I just want them together! And I have a ton of (often very) rare fandoms, so Yuletide is basically perfect for me.

And other non-shippy exchanges, like

trickortreatex, can also work for me if I change around the characters I request (so my requests tend to look like "Write [character] with anyone else!"). Though this year I will probably give that one a miss too, it's too much with Yuletide.

I'm curious -- can you elaborate what you like about it? Since you would presumably still have to nominate several fandoms!

The number one thing I like is that the number of fandoms you can nominate is greater than the number of fandoms you have to offer! With Yuletide, you can only nominate 3, and you have to offer 4, so you're relying on someone else to nominate something you can write. Which, if you can write very very few things, and most of them have 0-1 fics on AO3 and never get nominated, is a gamble.

Btw, this may become a plot point during our nomination strategizing this year, since I might try to sign up.

With RMSE, you can nominate 10 and only have to offer 4, which means I can nominate all 4 fandoms I think I can write, plus some I would like to receive.

The other thing I like is being able to nominate pairings. With Yuletide's "and" matching, if I want, say, Fritz/Katte or Fritz/Suhm, I have to nominate either just Fritz, in which case the author can write gen fic where Fritz loses Kolin and humiliates AW if they want, or I have to nominate Fritz and Katte and Suhm, and risk nobody offering all three of them, so nobody matches on my request, or I have to pick one. I thought it was really awesome that Selena got to nominate 10 pairings she either could write or wanted to receive, and we got to pick and choose various pairings to write her (almost all of them!).

I also love that you can nominate 10 pairings per fandom! You can only nominate 4 characters per fandom in Yuletide. And since the number of characters we've come to know and love has greatly grown in the last year, there's going to be some serious picking and choosing this year.

Now, ideally you wouldn't have to ship the characters, but the ability to pick pairs of characters that you want and authors only have to have matched on one of those pairs is A+ for me.

Heh, we are total exchange opposites! I always do the thing where I nominate Fritz and Katte and Suhm (or in my case Fritz and Wilhelmine and MT), and specify in the signup and letter that not all of them have to be written together, and make sure my letter goes up before signups end so people can see what my deal is :) But I guess that works better for Wilhelmine and MT than it does for one pairing that is really common (Fritz/Katte) and one that isn't (Fritz/Suhm).

Ah, so you'd like

chocolateboxcomm! The big problem is that it's right after Yuletide, which means I am often burned out :) It lets you match on / or & relationships. I still seem not to enjoy that format of asking, but I enjoyed writing for it, the one time I did it.

I always do the thing where I nominate Fritz and Katte and Suhm (or in my case Fritz and Wilhelmine and MT), and specify in the signup and letter that not all of them have to be written together, and make sure my letter goes up before signups end so people can see what my deal is :)

And that worked because you and Selena knew each other, and she was willing to offer all the characters you requested, but if somebody sees that I've said A and B or A and C, they still have to offer A and B and C to match on me, and that means that if someone else requests A, B, and C, they could end up matched with that other person who expects them to write all three characters! So you're gambling if you offer more characters than you can write, and on your own requests, you're gambling that someone else will gamble when offering.

And I just really like the option to nominate and request way more characters per fandom. You don't get that kind of flexibility with Yuletide. How on earth would Selena have gotten Fritz/Heinrich, Heinrich/Seydlitz, Heinrich/Lehndorff, Lehndorff/Keith, Fritz/Keith, Heinrich/Mara, AND Fritz/Fredersdorf out of Yuletide?? :P

I mean, unless we convinced the mods that Frederician RPF and Henrician RPF were two separate fandoms. ^_^

Ohhhhh, yeah, so since you're not an exchange/Yuletide regular you may not know, but there's a whole Thing around letters and posting letters and gaming for people. There's even a website someone made (https://tagset2019.firebaseapp.com/#/) that collects letters. (Why Yuletide does not just open requests to plain view I do not know. Possibly no one does except the mods.)

And, of course, you're right; it's still gambling (and in your particular case might not work anyway because a lot of people who would be willing to write Fritz/Katte would probably decline to even consider signing up for Suhm). I don't mind the gambling aspect, in large part because I don't apparently think of fic exchanges in terms of relationships :) But your point about being able to request more characters/relationships is well taken! Yuletide is too big for that, I think. But I regularly request literary fandoms where I nominate and/or request zero characters, so...

I am aware of that app! I checked it regularly last year. And what I found was that I was not comfortable gambling as an author that I would get matched up to the offer I was eyeing, because there would be one letter for fandom + characters I felt I could write for, but another I couldn't, and the matching could go either way. I reeeally need to be able to nominate my own extremely small fandoms.

And yeah, I feel like I would have to pick Fritz/Katte, and while I love them, there are so many other things I would be happy with, but the alternative would be Fritz alone, and that's just too open-ended, especially in other fandoms where the author is more likely to go for major characters I'm not interested in.

I also want non-overlap between my requested and offered fandoms, and 3 nominations is just not enough for 4 offers + 3 requests, even with some overlap. RMSE FTW!

That is very fair! We just have very different exchange priorities, I always find that interesting.

Did you check out chocobox? It's quite close to Yuletide with a short writing period, and IDK how you feel about a 300-word minimum, but it does all the other things you want, I think :) (And allows for both & and / as well as non-slash relationships, which is a big plus for me but not sure about you?)

I did! (This one was at least on my radar as a thing that existed, unlike RMSE.) Also, & and / is great. :D

Frederick the Great, discussion post 16

Exchange structure

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Re: Exchange structure

Re: Exchange structure

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Re: Exchange structure