Do we need tea leaves for this?

[lunabee34]

I've been reading metafandom posts this evening and in one of them, musesfool makes a comment about hitting the fannish sweet spot, capturing the zeitgeist. You know what she's talking about. Those writers that manage to write the pairing/plot/kink/whathaveyou that suddenly becomes the rage in fandom X.

My question is, how do we predict the fannish zeitgeist? Are the writers who do so just extremely lucky and prescient, or is something else at work?

For example, is the zeitgeist ususally episode based? (OMG Rodney has to earn back John's trust! Bring on the lemon chicken and the moves to China!) Or is it BNF-based? (notlorraine wrote some Ruby/Bella that galvanized SPN to a flurry of femslash (oh, god please, this would be nice)) Or something else? Maybe interviews with the cast or writers? (Even in a non-RPF fandom)

If you are one of these kickass persons who manages to give us what we want BEFORE WE EVEN KNOW WE WANT IT *g* please to be explaining the whys and the wherefores.

Comments

[thelastgoodname.livejournal.com]

I don't think you can predict zeitgeist. I'm pretty sure that's not how it works, otherwise someone would be very rich and very famous right now. (Or maybe that explains all the very rich and very famous people out there.)

I think there are cues, like the ones you offer, but the larger phenomenon -- like the crack spree in SGA a few years ago -- isn't connected to anything quite so rational. It's lightning in a bottle.

[lunabee34.livejournal.com]

I think you are right. It's an unknowable thing, which means I can never capitalize on it! LOL I guess I just wonder how much people are consciously *attempting* to discover (instigate?) these trends, and how much of it is just "I happened to write/draw this thing that everybody loves and now everyone else is doing it too. Weird."

[thelastgoodname.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I do think there are people who attempt to instigate these sorts of things, but I also think it's more likely that it's some sort of collective impulse, which is often why it's so hard to figure out who started trends. Especially with fanfic, where it might take a person (me, for instance) a year to write a story, and then it may look like I'm following a trend, but really, I had the idea first! I'm just slow!

[lunabee34.livejournal.com]

Hahahahah.

Yep. Me too!

I *invented* amnesiafic many years ago but didn't post any until last year. LOL

Oooooh, Tehanu is here. Finally. *gets to reading*