The Garden of Discordia

Eta: About time... they've released the list and deleted these three. And yet, I can't help but boggle at the 1) attitude of some people on the Yuletide comm and 2) the fact that they couldn't come out and say it, straight out that the obvious offenders would go. (Not after the list was posted) Instead we get a lot of "this is not a matter of concern" mumbling.

For some reason that completely elludes me, this year, the Yuletide team has decided to only go after what is archived at Archive of Our Own when determining which fandoms are eligible for Yuletide.

Or, all right, they explain how it is to make things simpler for the mods, but this has consequences.

For one thing, Hetalia Axis Powers is - at the moment of writing this - a Yuletide fandom. While Discworld isn't.

HETALIA AXIS POWERS? One of the top three, if not the biggest anime fandom right now?

I can definitely understand that it takes way too much time to scrape through every corner of the internet. But. There is one big place which everyone knows about and where it is rather easy to get a general overview of whether a fandom is "rare" or not. Hate it or love it, a quick overview of fanfiction.net isn't that big a hassle. They could probably find volunteers who report 10 000+ fandoms

Hetalia has 19 747 fics at ff.net alone... while Discworld has 1470. And ff.net isn't even the main "home" for Hetalia, since it is an almost 80% LJ-based fandom (in english) with a huge Deviantart-following too. And, you know, all over the rest of the net too...

The kink meme alone has filled up 14 posts so far. 1 LJ post = 10 000 comments. Even counting multi-comment fics, requests and comments, that's a lot of kinky fics. Plus there's loads of stuff posted at the main comm every day.

Ranma 1/2 is also on the list (10 000) and freaking Sailor Moon which has a whopping 33 088 fics!!!

Dude, this was the fandom that ate the anime/manga part of the internet in the mid-nineties and a lot of those fics are still up. Granted, the death of Geocities decimated the old anime fan sites bigtime, but it is still nowhere near a rare fandom; neither is it completely dead. I only follow a few SM communities and very sporadically at that, but there's no doubt that one could find at least one fic a month to read.

Now, don't get me wrong, please

I know and enjoy these fandoms, I've been in them all! But there are SO MANY rare anime/manga fandoms out there! In some cases, not-one-single-fic-in-English rare - why not give them a fair chance instead? =(

While I can understand that the AO3 wants to spread and find new fandoms, I find it incredibly sad that the one time of the year when the really tiny fandoms have a chance to get some excellent fic written for them, the chance is shrunk and might even be completely wasted.

I usually look forward to Yuletide because I hope that "classic" fandoms such as Discworld and Pet Shop of Horrors get a much-needed dose of new fic.

I hop to find something new and unread (omigosh! 20:th Century Boy's is on the Yuletide list! Aw-so-me-e *crosses fingers and hopes*), perhaps even discover something I've read/seen and never imagined one could fic

And what do I get? The 60+ posts a day fandom is on the list. Nothing in the recend admin posts a la:
"Of course we'll remove obvious large fandoms, this is a computer generated list with inevitable bugs!"

If all they want with Yuletide is to promote the AO3 archive, then I honestly wish the challenge hadn't ever moved there.

If this is just a glitch due to the automated lists, then it would be appropriate if they posted about the issue and asked people to help rule out the most obvious big fandoms.

We'll have to wait and see, but this looks bad on all counts