Wild-Card Discussion

[theladyscribe]

I've had several questions regarding the possibility of the Wild-Card, so I thought it would be a good idea to start some real discussion of it.

I see it working like this:

To be a wild-card remixee, you must still meet the three-or-five rule in the qualifying fandoms, but the stories that count do not have to all be in the same fandom. For example, let's say you've written two 500-word stories with women in Supernatural and one 500-word story in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Woo-hoo, you can sign up to be remixed by a wild-card participant! If you do meet the requirements for regular qualification, you can still sign up to be a wild-card remixee, but you are not required to do so. Furthermore, you can still be matched on the fandoms you qualify with even if you sign up for the wild-card.

To be a wild-card remixer, you are agreeing to potentially be assigned an author with whom you do not share any fandoms. For example, you only read/write Battlestar Galactica, but you signed up for the wild-card and were assigned someone who has only written Star Wars! You have two options: you can either research the fandom and try to access some of the canon and then write your remix, or you can remix blind and use only the author's works as the source for your story, whichever works best for you.

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Thoughts? Questions? Concerns?

Comments

[alexseanchai]

So I could sign up to be a wild-card remixee but not a wild-card remixer? 'Cause I only want to write in Fairy Tales and October Daye, but it would be fun to open up aaaall my fandoms—I've got like forty per my AO3 profile—to remixing. I only not-wild-card qualify in three and of those three I don't actually want to write in Supernatural (which is naturally the overwhelming majority of my fics), so I don't want to be a wild-card remixer, but it would be fun to be a wild-card remixee.

[theladyscribe]

Just because you don't qualify in a fandom does not mean that fandom cannot be remixed. The purpose of the qualifying fandoms is to make sure that everyone participating has at least one fandom in common with other people in the remix so they can be matched. However, it's possible that you'll be matched to someone who shares not only your qualifying fandoms but one of your non-qualifying fandoms. They might decide to stick with what you're matched on, or they might go for the other one you have in common.

If you are a wild-card remixer, you may not have ANY fandoms in common with the person you're given to write. So you may have written Fairy Tales, October Daye, and Supernatural, but the person you're given has only written Buffy, The Silmarillion, and Stargate. Also, unless the person you get has *only* written Supernatural, you don't have to write it. And by definition, that won't happen in the wild-card remix, because the rules for that will be that you have to have a total of five-or-seven stories across at least two of the qualifying fandoms. So even if they've written SPN, they'd have at least one other fandom you could choose from.

Since you already qualify in Fairy Tales and October Daye, you don't *have* to sign up as a wild-card remixee, but if you want to, you totally can. The part I'm trying to decide is whether to allow people who DO *have* to sign up as a wild-card remixee to not sign up as a wild-card remixer as well.