2025 Round Conclusion & Feedback

[morbane]

We revealed author names at the Once Upon 2025 Collection last week. Feel free to promote what you wrote in any space you like! We hope you enjoyed contributing to and also reading this year's stories. We did!

We wanted to bring up an issue for feedback while we're all still thinking about the exchange.

Once Upon a Fic is a "fairy-tale" focused exchange. We welcome a lot of texts - myths, lore, etc - that overlap with fairy tales in some way: they deal with archetypal figures, life lessons, fantastical creatures and/or the supernatural, they are often more closely associated with a culture and era than a specific author, and of course, as a goal of this event specifically, these texts are in the public domain.

Every year we get nominations that seek to expand that pool of text types in ways we hadn't thought of. Because more things enter the public domain every year, we've seen more and more longer texts, from closer in time, than the fairy tales the exchange started out with. These nominations are in good faith and we've enjoyed the stories that come from them, but we worry about scope creep and we aren't always sure where to draw the line. In order to keep the exchange focus narrower than "any kind of fantastical text in the public domain", we wanted to revisit what kinds of texts are in scope, with the hope that our rules are clearer before next round.

Some possible options:

• We give examples of the types of texts that we consider core to the exchange. All other texts are evaluated on a case-by-case basis. This is the status quo - but we haven't always decided consistently, from year to year. For example, sometimes we've included stories made freely available by their creators for more modern tales. But that makes it difficult for us to define a modern fairy tale vs any fantastical story.
• We give examples of the types of texts that we consider core to the exchange. We encourage you to make a case for anything that doesn't match the examples. The case could be based on factors such as similarity to types of canons we've previously approved; length; whether it was marketed as a fairy tale, etc.
• We set specific requirements for anything published after a specific date eg 1900 or 1925 (which may include a max length requirement).
• We set a strict date cut-off for certain types of nominations.
• Something else?

We welcome suggestions and would be interested to know what feels in scope to you, for a fairy tale exchange, and what doesn't. Approving a nomination into this exchange isn't a value judgment on that piece of media.

Thanks for your thoughts! Feedback on other parts of the exchange is welcome!

Comments

[lady_ragnell]

(Hope it's okay to have feedback from someone who didn't have a chance to participate this year!)

So, while I can say there have absolutely been times I looked at the tagset and wondered less at an approval and more at a nomination, I think that in the way it's all but impossible to scientifically define a bird without either leaving out or including species most people do not think of as birds, it's all but impossible to find a consistent set of standards that's going to include everybody's definition of a fairy tale, because a fairy tale is what a fairy tale does, you know?

I think, of all your options, the second makes the most sense to me. Having a public evidence post takes some of the burden off you in making decisions that might feel arbitrary to you, because you'll have context from the nominator (even if it adds burden in adding extra things), and it means that if you end up rejecting something, the nominator will know for sure you had to give it a fair consideration.