Guessing Post

[holmesticemods]

Thank you so much for another wonderful round of Holmestice! The mods want to say THANK YOU to all the creators who joined us for this, our twentieth round -- especially given how tumultuous these last months have been. Being in this community with you is a joy and an honour.

Reveals and the Master List go up on June 20th. Until then, please enjoy and comment on all the lovely fanworks. Creators, please do NOT respond to Dreamwidth comments or post your works elsewhere on the Internet until reveals go up in the community. You may of course reply to comments on AO3, which preserves your anonymity.

In the meanwhile, stay tuned: treats are coming up! For anyone thinking of making a treat, we will accept treats right through until reveals, so if there's a prompt that inspires you, please have at it! Just use the regular submission guidelines and send your headers to holmesticemods@gmail.com.

If you'd like to guess who created what in this round, here's a list of all the contributors for the main gifts. (You'll have to put in some extra work to guess the treat-makers!) Go ahead and take a guess! It's all in good fun.



alexcat
apprenticeofdoyle
bakerstmel / Callie4180
cam_elot (used to be thefrenchweirdone)
discordantwords
dryadinthegrove
evilinsanemonkey
fleetsparrow
fridaythegowerstreetcat / gowerstreet
gardnerhill
graycardinal
iwantthatcoat
Keenir/Rodlox/Anthony
language_escapes
mafief
milverton
monkiainen
natrix_natrix
oldshrewsburyian
pipmer1
rachelindeed
saki101
sanguinity
sanspatronymic
scfrankles
simplyclockwork
smallhobbit
starfishstar
strampunch
tepidspongebath
trobadora
twicecurvedspine / eyes-on-stilts
urbanhymnal
write_out



Go forth and leave love for your fellow Holmestice authors, artists, podficcers, and vidders! See you again on the 20th, when we reveal who made what!

Comments

Re: starfishstar's alarmingly large pile of guesses, pt. 7 (there wasn't even supposed to be a pt. 7

[sanguinity]

I wonder if that trend has any correlation with the growth of the rarer 'verses in the exchange?

Entirely off-the-cuff answer here, but I think so.

When you look at the way people write their sign-ups, they tend to nest 'ship within 'verse: for ACD I want these ships, for BBC I want these ships, for Elementary I want these other ships. Only a few ships strongly transcend that pattern -- obviously Holmes/Watson, but also Holmes/Moriarty and Gen (if you can call Gen a ship)... Watson/Mary sometimes looks like it's both an ACD and BBC ship, but there are enough people who see ACD-Mary and BBC-Mary as irreconcilable with each other that you definitely see people thinking of Watson/Morstan and John/Mary as distinct beasts, to be requested separately.

The thing is, if the ships nest inside the fandoms, and the number of participants for a particular fandom falls below a specific threshhold, its rare pairs will become unsustainable. Of the six rare pairings you just listed -- Mystrade, Sherlolly, Sherstrade, Holmescest, John/Mary, Sherlock/John/Lestrade -- at least three of those are BBC-specific pairings, and you can make a case that two more are mostly-BBC. When BBC started drawing a smaller share of Holmestice overall, it became much harder to sustain those rare ships.

You ask downthread about whether the mods can encourage the rarepairs the same way we encourage smaller fandoms and non-fic media types -- ugh, we try. We try not to describe the exchange as if it's an implicitly Holmes-and-Watson fest. I match on rare pairs whenever I can -- in many cases, I'm matching on rarepairs before I match on fandom. (The usual sequence is people who didn't offer/request fic, Holmes/Moriarty, gen-only, anyone else who looks like they may not have many matches in the pool, then one-off rare-pairs and rare-fandoms. After I've done what I can with those, as I get into bigger pools of ACD-centric or BBC-centric people, I match on rare pairs and rare media-types within those pools first, saving the Holmes/Watson matches for last.)

It's not a lot, but we try. If anyone has ideas beyond those, I'm happy to hear them.

Re: starfishstar's alarmingly large pile of guesses, pt. 7 (there wasn't even supposed to be a pt. 7

[starfishstar]

This is all very interesting and eloquently reasoned. BTW I definitely didn't mean to imply you aren't already doing all you can to encourage this kind of variety, too, as well as rare fandoms! I'm always impressed by all you do. I suppose I was more wondering, what are the other factors? What else might influence that, perhaps on the part of us participants? I'm not sure of any bright ideas right now, but I'm sure I'll be thinking about it!

Re: starfishstar's alarmingly large pile of guesses, pt. 7 (there wasn't even supposed to be a pt. 7

[trobadora]

This is a fascinating read, thank you! I always enjoy you talking about matching, and I very much appreciate all the thought and the work that goes into it. It's fantastic that you've managed to encourage so much diversity. ♥

I don't have any ideas for how to increase the gen and/or rarepairs either, but I'll definitely be thinking about it when the next round of Holmestice comes.