Okay, as far as choosing fanfiction goes, here is the general guidelines I think we ought to follow.
1. The fanfic should be completed - The main reason for this is that, if we're going to be making community readings out of this, then when do we decide when the story is 'done', before we move onto the next one? If the story is incomplete, we might want to stick around for it. That, and incomplete stories are lame. On the other hand, it could lead to us anticipating the new chapter which can lead to some group speculation. That's always fun. Still, it might be better if overall we do not end our stories with cases of blueballs.
2. Lets try to keep it PG - Okay, this one is slightly controversial. Some people want to avoid shipping fics at all, but I fundamentally disagree with that. Romance is part of life and was a big part of the show. It has always been a strong foundation for many good stories. So if you have a shipping fic to recommend because you feel it's good, by all means. However, lets try to avoid something with explicit sex, and this goes double if it's something creepy. Good rule of thumb is this: If you wouldn't have seen it happen on the show specifically because it's age inappropriate, it's not appropriate for here. This doesn't just mean sexual stuff, but violence as well. I don't want to see a Avatar-Saw crossover where the primary story is how Aang has airbend his own eyeballs out or he'll have his testicles crushed by the evil earthbending Jigsaw or anything like that.
2a. On that note, ABSOLUTELY NO FIGHTING OVER PAIRINGS. You can debate whether the character relationship is believable within the fanfic or whatever, but, by god, we will not have shipping wars here. Rule of thumb is this: "I don't think the author of Watery Flames depicted the character development of Katara in falling in love with Zuko believably because *insert reasons relating to the narrative of Watery Flames here*" is okay. "ZUTARA SUCKS AND YOU SUCK FOR LIKING IT BECAUSE IT CAN NEVER EVER EVER HAPPEN KATAANG OTP FOREVA" is not. I don't care how much you believe an Azula, Smellerbee and Haru three way relationship would or would not work together, discuss it only within the context of a particular story, never as a general pairing.
3. Try to find continuation fanfiction - Continuation Fanfiction is, for the most part, stuff that keeps what happened in the show as is and continues on from there. A lot of fanfiction is "For want of a nail" where in the story is "What if this early thing happened instead of what actually happened" or alternate universe where "What if we had the same basic story, but Aang was born in the fire nation instead". Those are fun, but they involve basically the original plot being rewritten, atleast to some extent. Atleast for the first few fanfics we should abide by it, as we can make some progression of discovery in the world of Avatar. Sequels or Prequels, instead of....Requels. That said, I don't think this rule should last too long, because there are a lot of great fics that go over the same material from a fresh perspective and it's really good stuff. I just feel expansion of the source material should be our first priority, then we go back and to mess with it.
4. Lets alternate between TLA and LoK - This is more of just a courtesy to have equal representation for both shows in so far as possible. THe fact is that TLA has been around a LOT longer than LoK and has a much more content. So that both shows get a fair shot, lets alternate between the two so that we can get good stuff flowing.
And these are guidelines, not absolute rules. If the story is good enough, I feel we can make exceptions. I heard a lot of good things from stories from which the story premise/summary repulses me. There is a TLA Trilogy that might be best read back to back. And, as mentioned, there are a lot of good 'alternate universe' fics.
There's only one other thing: How do we decide what we read? I've given this a lot of thought, and I think it's best if we put our names in random order on a list and then we go down the list. Each person recommends one fanfic. They choose how to sell it. Then we put it to a vote. If more than half of the people who will be participating in the read vote for it, then it's veto'd and the person has to choose another and that's the one we read. It's not perfect, obviously, but this is the advantages of this are that everyone gets to give the community a fanfic to read. The system is abusable, but we're relying on an honor system that has the users here not be dicks to one another and recommend, to the best of their ability, fics that are truly good.
Sound good to everyone?
