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Unofficial WisCon 43 Panel-Generation Post
Hello! It's been a while since I've hosted one of these.
Comment with any thoughts you have, however semi-formed. One thread per panel, please.
People can comment & try to come up with the best panels possible! Anyone can suggest panel ideas: People who run the convention, authors, attendees, or people who have never attended WisCon and never will. Please feel free to join in!
If the comments go in a direction you dislike, or you don't want to participate in a discussion, you can submit your own panel idea here on WisCon's website.
Things to know:
Here are a few thoughts to maybe get you going:
Programming recently posted a great blog post with an explanation of how to propose a panel. They also recommend now as a good time for updating your profile and inputting your availability, and provide instructions on how to do so.
Disclaimer: I am not on WisCon's Programming team and have no influence over their decision-making process. This is just a friendly place to generate some ideas and get them submitted!
Comment with any thoughts you have, however semi-formed. One thread per panel, please.
People can comment & try to come up with the best panels possible! Anyone can suggest panel ideas: People who run the convention, authors, attendees, or people who have never attended WisCon and never will. Please feel free to join in!
If the comments go in a direction you dislike, or you don't want to participate in a discussion, you can submit your own panel idea here on WisCon's website.
Things to know:
- Not every panel idea that gets suggested ends up on the schedule. Programming typically has to cut about 50% of the panels due to space/time constraints.
- People will be able to vote on WisCon's website for panels they'd like to attend, & also indicate their interest in being a panelist or a moderator. These votes matter.
- The programming team edits panel titles/descriptions after they've been submitted. Sometimes they combine multiple panels on the same theme into a single panel.
- This year, the submission deadline is January 21st.
Here are a few thoughts to maybe get you going:
- Our Guests of Honor are Charlie Jane Anders & G. Willow Wilson. Which of their works do you want to talk about, and what kinds of themes?
- Are there any sci-fi or fantasy TV shows, movies, or anime that you've enjoyed this year?
- What about books? Ongoing comics, or manga?
- Which online conversations have you found the most interesting in the past year that you wish to revisit, or expand upon?
- Can we talk about how to document and preserve our fannish history when we keep having to pull up stakes and move house every few years?
Programming recently posted a great blog post with an explanation of how to propose a panel. They also recommend now as a good time for updating your profile and inputting your availability, and provide instructions on how to do so.
Disclaimer: I am not on WisCon's Programming team and have no influence over their decision-making process. This is just a friendly place to generate some ideas and get them submitted!
Collective livestream to Nico on someone's mobile device
Preventing the apocalypse
Re: Preventing the apocalypse
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altho maybe we can DM about general things you're looking at?!?! Do you mean fandom/RPF relationships with the show, or more like white bros (& L as "gay Jew") as the central set of people whose voices are loudest, however much they try to amplify other marginalized voices.
OR like Slytherin POV that whomever/however people are getting others to volunteer and politically activated, cool.
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"Fan of the Pod
So.
You got addicted to a political podcast by four white men while you were emotionally compromised by the 2016 election. Now you’re trapped and you don’t particularly want to leave. Get together with other fans to celebrate/commiserate and answer once and for all: is Pundit an angel?"
Hopepunk
* What works are in the canon
* Is this a meaningful term
Re: Hopepunk
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Someone wrote an article on Vox.
Then the Discourse got hold of it and threw a fit.
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Trans stories that don't make you throw your reader/book/clay tablet across the room
Re: Trans stories that don't make you throw your reader/book/clay tablet across the room
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Yes!
Re: Trans stories that don't make you throw your reader/book/clay tablet across the room
Reclaiming the people God made from smokeless fire
One of our guests of honor have written three works that bring the Djinn back to their folk/faith roots (Cairo, Alif the Unseen, and The Bird King). SC Chakraborty's Daevabad Trilogy centers the Djinn in the story. Yasmine Seale's has a retelling of the Aladdin story.
What other works are getting the story right?
The live action Aladdin comes out a couple of week before WisCon so we can snark on that too.
Re: Reclaiming the people God made from smokeless fire
Re: Reclaiming the people God made from smokeless fire
Re: Reclaiming the people God made from smokeless fire
LibraryThing has lots of books tagged "djinn" (various spellings), including Rushdie and Borges -- and Matt Ruff and Christopher Moore. Do you want to focus on retellings of the Arabian Nights, because that could probably be a whole panel (or two) in itself.
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so: if you think someone will be good on a panel, you need to also tell them that and ask them to fill out the survey and state that they want to be on the panel, as well as suggesting them.
when you handstaff a panel, you basically say that in your proposal so that when the survey goes up it only asks if people are interested in attending -- there's no option for saying you're interested in being on the panel in the survey. then you contact panels@wiscon.net to let them know who will be on the panel, and that everyone on your list has agreed to be on it.
delegating hand-staffing to a subject matter expert can happen, but that sometimes kind of boils down to volunteering other people for work as well -- it means that the Panels team has to find an expert and then ask them spend time reaching out to a minimum of five people to ask them if they would be willing to be on the panel.
my point is that it's a surprisingly small pool of people who volunteer to be panelists on the survey, and that lack of panelists is more often the reason things don't run than schedule & space concerns, at least lately. the remedy to that, i think, is encouraging people who have never been on panels to try it, and continuing to make it explicit that you don't need qualifications to be a panelist -- you just need to have some thoughts and be willing to share them. (that said, while anyone can be a panelist, anyone can't be on any panel -- there's definitely an 'own voices' element in respect to many topics, and white people in general should be thoughtful about stepping out of panels that lack POC, cis people should be thoughtful about making sure the panels they are on aren't all cis, and the same in regards to class, disability, and other backgrounds -- and that's especially crucial in the "general discussion" panels, imo.
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Current frontrunners are:
"The Alpha and the Omega" - a panel about ABO tropes in both fanfic and profic, and how very different they are in the two mediums.
ABO & Sex Pollen & Soul Bonds, Oh My! - Fanfic Tropes that complicate consent.
The Only Way Out Is Through - Dystopian Narratives of Resistance
"Other People Gaming Is My Fandom" - I feel like gaming is a segment of fandom that doesn't get enough Wiscon love, and the whole phenomenon of fandoms built around watching other people play games, both video game playthroughs and things like Critical Role, just fascinates me.
Fanfic Without Source Texts - The Rise of Original Fic
Also, there definitely needs to be a 50 years after Stonewall panel of some sort, but I don't have a clear idea of what.
And I'd love to see a panel of some sort about audiobooks and podcasts and podfic and the general popularity of spoken audio narratives, but as someone whose brain doesn't work that way, I'm not the one to suggest it or be on it.
And I have a note here that just says, "Engagement and Escape," which I think was meant to turn into some thoughts on the balance between using fiction to engage with the world and using fiction to escape the world, but I'm not sure, I hadn't actually slept very much when I was making this list.
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"Other People Gaming Is My Fandom
From Twitch streams to Youtube speedruns to popular web series and podcasts like Critical Role and Adventure Zone, watching and listening to people playing video games and role playing games is an increasingly popular part of fandom. Let's talk about what makes watching other people's games fun, and how it changes our own relationship with games and gaming."
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Hooray, exciting! Hmmmm maybe I'll even volunteer to be on the panel (IDK if I'm "enough" in CR fandom to "count"...). I used to also watch LPs as a way to progress my language learning, hahaha. Anyway, crossing my fingers that this gets through so I can attend the panel in any case!
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My fave comment on it was, "I thought I knew sex pollen fic. I KNEW NOTHING."
It works A LOT on like, the whole thing of consent/non-con/ALL OF IT, plus obviously angst. I presume it is a deconstruction of the genre BUT having no 'control' to which I can compare it, I can only speculate.
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"ABO & Sex Pollen & Soul Bonds, Oh My! - Popular Fanfic Tropes and Consent
From newer tropes like Alpha/Beta/Omega stories, to old standbys like soulmates, sex pollen and "aliens made them do it," fanfic fandom really loves tropes that have a complicated and dubious relationship with consent. What is it that brings readers and writers back to these same themes of choice and predestination and consent over and over again? Let’s talk about these popular tropes and our sometimes-complicated feelings about them, and share some recs of our favorite works."
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And speedruns both as affirmational and transformative fandom!
Ooh yeah, including serial audio fiction podcasts like "Alice Isn't Dead" and "Wolf 359". And the anthology podcasts that have been around for a while, like Starship Sofa and EscapePod.
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"Other People Gaming Is My Fandom
From Twitch streams to Youtube speedruns to popular web series and podcasts like Critical Role and Adventure Zone, watching and listening to people playing video games and role playing games is an increasingly popular part of fandom. Let's talk about what makes watching other people's games fun, and how it changes our own relationship with games and gaming."
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other comics-wise, The last issue of The Wicked + The Divine is planned for June, so that's a panel I'll be suggesting for next year rather than this year for sure. But I just read the first two issues of DIE, Gillen's love letter/meta-commentary/dystopian deconstruction of 1980s-90s rpgs, and they blew my mind and I want to talk about it with everyone.
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