Queen, Annie, Songbird, BlindPassenger, Deadly Chakram, and lovetvfan—thanks so much for sharing your thoughts and opinions to help keep the discussion going!!
I'd like to see the categories from previous years included - things like short, medium, epic, best supporting character, best villain, best revelation, etc. AU and Elseworlds are fewer and further between so it makes sense to keep them together. Best challenge response is great because it recognizes that someone ran with a simple idea and makes it more appealing for people to answer challenges. Best Introspective is also fun because it's nice to peek into a character's head. Holiday stories are awesome if we have enough! Maybe something like "Best Before," "Best During," and "Best After" for stories that take place before the pilot, during the show run, and after the finale (possibly different than Next Gen stories.) Also, they would need better names but my brain is toast from work training all week.
We’ll absolutely be having the size/length categories, and since those are straightforward and a given, I left those out of the potential list. So, we’ll totally have them! The only question is really whether we need both super short AND short or just short, but given how Ficlet Friday has taken off, it might well mean we have both!
I totally agree with best supporting character because some people do some REALLY great work with those supporting characters and original characters too! And best revelation seems like a mainstay of L&C fanfic! I did enjoy those years we had best villain; we’ll gauge interest on that and have a look at the stories to see if there are enough to make the category work this year.
And yes! The challenges were so fun last year to read how everyone took the Kerth prompts and made them their own! And adding to that Queen’s generator prompt and Advent Challenge, I think it’s almost certain we’ll have enough to support this category this year! And the same *might* be true for holiday fics as well—we’ll have to see how many more pop up in the last few weeks here.
I’d love to hear more about what best introspective means—because I LOVE me some introspection! (Sometimes too much.
) I feel like a lot of stories seem to have this by default, so I’m unclear about what would make something a best introspective story. Maybe one that has particularly good insights from one of our main character? A story that’s mostly introspective? Tell me more!
Ooh, I was looking through historical categories the other day before posting this, and I remember there was “Best Early Years” but… then that usually implied Clark’s childhood and adolescence, so yeah… “Best Before” would could be Clark’s travels, etc. I do like the ideas of the Before/During/After—hopefully others can chime in on those too!
I don't really understand what best enabler/supporter would look like and how it could be verified. I would think that would be more of an email/pm thing and personal to a particular writer. What would the guidelines be? What constitutes being a supporter? Is it just "Hey, you can totally write this?" or "I will sit and bounce ideas around with you so you can write this?"
Oh, good call! I included some categories that were just fun brainstorming ideas that weren’t thought all the way through—clearly.
Yeah, I agree this one is far too varied and subjective to be an award category.
Lifetime Achievement is interesting. What would the guidelines look like for this one? Oldest writer? Most fics written? (Would it matter if it was 100 short fics versus someone who wrote 50 epics?) Is it for someone who has always been around but never won a Kerth? (Kinda like when the Oscars recognize an actress for being nominated a boatload of times but never won anything?) Is it recognition for people who have won a boatload of Kerths?
I included this one for discussion because I saw it in the first year Kerths:
Lifetime Achievement Award
Rhen Brink
(Quote from the Kerth Award site formerly hosted by Pam Jernigan):
“For her invaluable efforts in distributing fanfic as the fandom was just getting started, the Kerth Awards Committee (Leanne, Pam, & Erin) are very pleased to recognize Renate Brink — and it should be noted that this idea also came up in #kerth_chat before we announced it :-) so that makes it nearly unanimous.”
So my thought was more of honoring someone for their contribution to the fandom as a whole over time. Part of what we’re looking at is to expand the Kerth Awards to celebrate all the many aspects of fandom and the FoLCs that do so much to keep the fandom alive all these years—like how you and Val worked so hard to keep the Kerths alive for YEARS! And Annette, who has worked hard to keep the boards and other sites alive and updated to the best of her ability. And LaurenW, who created and maintains (and pays for!) the main archive all these years. And Dawn and and crew, who have been indexing stories and running the nKerths. And Labrat who was very active in boards administration and still is EIC of the archive. I like the idea of honoring some of these individuals. So this one—like the Oscars—isn’t so much about competition, but for celebrating contributions to fandom. I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts on this and how it might be discussed and decided!
I’m going to address feedback separately so it doesn’t get lost in this really long post. (OMG, I’m so long-winded!
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Thanks so much for the time spent giving us such detailed and thoughtful discussion points!
Sara
