Fandom Stocking, Snowflake Challenge, and other ways of avoiding real life
I'm trying to hide from real life: L's big test is tonight, and I'm trying to walk the line between making sure she's focused and prepared and taking it seriously and... psyching her out past a point of usefulness. I'm not sure I'm doing a very good job of it. (I would be much less nervous if it were ME taking the test... XP)
Anyway, so, at least fandom_stocking reveal timing is fortuitous in this regard, because I can read the new fic and chat with new people and all that good stuff. My stocking was full of goodies -- way more than I'd expected, for a first year doing this and with mostly highly obscure fandoms -- critter icons, very promising book and puzzle game recs, lovely greetings, the news that The True Meaning of Smekday is getting a sequel OMG, and this wonderful Jaime/Loras ficlet: "Pleasure", PG by celeste9 -- I'm claiming having caused more Jaime/Loras fic to exist as my chief accomplishment for this, beyond any of the trifles I tried to stuff stockings with. But also it was just awesome to have a chance to share squee about my various tiny fandoms with both people I know, through flist or fic, and with brand new people. I'm very glad I decided to participate after all, and am already looking forward to doing this next year :D
I should also catch up on the Snowflake Challenge, where I've fallen a couple of days behind:
Day 6: In your own space, create a fanwork. A drabble, a ficlet, a podfic, or an icon, art or meta or a rec list. A picspam. Something.
I thought I'd already made everything I wanted a couple of days ago when I was messing around with Paint.NET, but then I remembered I had saved a nimue_18 Ted with the intention of making myself a Kosmo~oluhi icon and never did, so:
(art by nimue_18)
Also, this is as good a place as any, I guess, to park the couple of things I made for fandom_stocking. Mostly my contribution was book recs and fic recs and the like, but I did make a handful of icons (plus a couple of random extra icons not for anyone in particular):
||
||
||
||
||
||
||
||
||
||
||
||
||
||
||
Row 1: random hamsters
Row 2: Junta by Migunov from an article egelantier linked me to
Row 3: world's most obscure crossover (Killer Unicorns / Rivers of London) icons for ambyr
Row 4: Temeraire and Laurence icons for sineala
(Art credit: ileliberte for blue composition, annicorn on dA for sunset, rinian on dA for Laurence with baby Temeraire and book)
Row 5: Temeraire icons for asthenie_vd
(Art credit: skelettflickan on Tumblr for Granby + Iskierka, Kalia24 on dA for Iskierka (and backgrounds on the aviator icons), simply-irenic on dA for aviator portraits)
Row 6: Vorkosigan icons for kaffyr and philomytha (and a random Gregor, just because)
(Art credit: Bob Stevlic, illustrator for the Vorkosigan GURPS book. You can see larger versions of these pictures, and some others, linked below.)
The Vorkosigan art from the GURPS book I got as an Agnostica present from q99 the other year:
Vorkosigan family portrait
Aral
Ekaterin
Alys
Piotr (he's leading a horse, but I couldn't get them both in one picture :P)
Galeni
Gregor
Gregor and Laisa
Miles and Mark
Ivan
Bel Thorne
*
And there's this Arya sonnet-of-sorts for isiscolo, who mentioned a fondness for formal poetry (and Arya) in her sign-up :P
In playroom tussles with her brothers
("You stick them with the pointy end")
She learned one lesson like no other:
When winter comes, the Starks defend.
Captive or running, sword gripped tightly,
As Arry, Weasel, and No One,
Her list grows shorter, whispered nightly:
A Stark will see to justice done.
A continent away, in tatters,
Name lost in a street urchin's yell,
She knows, in all the ways that matter:
She is a Stark of Winterfell.
And when the storm howls at the door,
The she-wolf will come home once more.
(Using the Onegin stanza, something I haven't played with before. But, actually, Arya isn't a particularly sonnet-y person, so I first arrived at an alternative quattrain for the end:
And when (dead things in woods... in water...)
The blizzard howls at the door,
Then, Winterfell's long-wandering daughter,
The she-wolf, will come home once more.
I think I prefer this to the couplet...)
*
Holiday Greetings banners for my own records:
<
*
And, because I don't want to lose track of it, Rivers of London / Temeraire fusion musings for asthenie_vd
***
Day 7: In your own space, share your love for a trope, cliché, kink, motif, or theme. (More than one is okay, too.) Tell us about it, tell us why you love it, give us some examples and recs.
I've pondered this for a little bit, and I think there are maybe two categories of this: one for canons which prompt me to be fannish about them, and one for fic (mostly but not exclusively in those fandoms).
Trope/theme for canons: I've written about this before, and these are all still true, and there are examples there, but let me expand on the one that is the biggest draw to fandom for me (as in, the other things make me really enjoy canons, but don't necessarily elicit the same "must have MORE" feelings that drive me towards fandom for a particular work:
Family is probably the biggest one for me. I love Big Screwed Up Families, and just plain families that function, often in very difficult circumstances, and make do with each other, because that takes care of the most important thing. And I love Found Family tropes -- a conversation with ikel89 recently helped me add the rider that I also love the way Found Family and blood family ties interact, like when a found family grows up around the nucleus of a couple of people who are related to each other, or when two people who only have each other in the world come upon a Found Family that welcomes them.
Favorite examples:
- the Greek pantheon (of the Big Screwed Up Family variety)
- Chronicles of Amber (of the Big Screwed Up Family variety)
- Vorkosigan Saga, because it really is a family saga for me, first and foremost, even if it the family does include people like the Emperor of Barrayar and random mercenaries Miles has inadvertently or advertently entrained in his wake
- Firefly (which has the example of siblings being "adopted" by a Found Family with various degrees of reluctance)
- The Demon's Lexicon trilogy for the example of Found Family nucleating, mostly thanks to Alan's very aggressive Adopting People streak
- Rivers of London (where the Folly functions as a Found Family, and I love also that, in addition to his professional family, Peter also has a very present and vivid family with his parents and the numerous aluded cousins)
- Avatar: The Last Airbender (Found Family), and the various family arcs in Korra season 3 also work well for me.
- Avengers Assemble and the first Star Trek reboot movie, which made me fannish about franchises that I never cared about before in that way because they were creation of found family stories
Recent recs (that I could not talk about back then because I had not read them yet):
- I just finished Cloud Roads (book 1 of the Raksura cycle), and, allll the Found Family buttons, especially at the end, in the scenes involving Moon, Stone, Frost, Bitter, and Thorn.
- Ilona Andrews writing team is apparently very good at writing family (blood family, anyway, because the Pack doesn't necessarily work for me), because the Kate and Roland family dynamics, once they hit, are the best thing in 8 books, and all the family stuff in The Edge books is catnip to me -- Declan's family back home, and Rose and her brothers and grandmother, and the Mar clan -- it's all really great.
- I think the main reason The Goblin Emperor appealed to me so much and also makes me want fic is that it's got family tropes all over it, in all kinds of different ways (which is not surprising, I guess, because I really liked Monette's engagement with families in the Melusine books, but this is a much happier scenario, handled with the same deftness, and I like that a lot more. But there is Maia faced with the remnants of his unknown half-brothers' families, and his half-sisters, and the grandfather and aunt on his mother's side, as well as the found family of his household, and the background families -- it's omnipresent, and really well done.
As for tropes for fanworks, I tend to be drawn towards total crack, for some reason. Like, I like hurt/comfort a lot, but have to be in the mood for it, and it has to be the right sort of fandom. But there's something I'm always in the mood for and can enjoy with, I think, any kind of source: school AUs, whether we're talking mundane high school AUs or Hogwarts AUs (faculty getting in on the fun is good, too!)
I'm sure part of the appeal is that I love wizarding school as a trope in its own right (see linked post above for some favorites), and part of it is probably that my own high school experience was so awesome and fundamental (and frequently entertaining; I went to school with some characters!) that high school AUs always make me think back on it and that makes me happy, making me like the story more. But I think there's also both a comfort (structured day, seeing the same people over and over) and a freedom (take a whole bunch of different classes, figuring out who you are and what you want to do) about the (high) school setting, the combination of which both really appeals to me and lends itself well to the sort of AU exploration I like thinking about. And Hogwarts specifically, of course, has got that, plus MAGIC, plus the "planet of hats" aspect of the four houses, which I like because sorting is fun, and because it can create some interesting built in conflicts, if canonical teammates/family members are sorted into rival houses or, conversely, canonical enemies/rivals end up having to share a house.
Some of my favorite examples:
- Swordspoint high school AU: Riverside High
- Temeraire/Iskierka anthropomorphic high school AU
- Vorkosigan/Harry Potter crossover: Testing
- ASOIAF Quidditch teams art by the fabulous guad
- AtLA Hogwarts AU art
(do you know of more, with my fandoms? Rec me all of them! :D)
Day 8: In your own space, create a love meme for yourself. Let people tell you how amazing and awesome and loveable you really are.
I waffled about this prompt last year, because I feel weird about love memes, but liked the solution I came up with last year, so I'm reprising it:
If there's a book you picked up, or poem or fic you read, because I was talking about it, or a community you joined, or a fun meme or icon or silly timewasting game you found, or a random headcanon or phrase you've acquired because of me, directly or indirectly, or anything of this sort which makes you glad that you did, and you feel like telling me about it, please do!
(I will be very happy to hear it, because few things please me as much as connecting people with things they enjoy when I also enjoy them.)
Anyway, so, at least fandom_stocking reveal timing is fortuitous in this regard, because I can read the new fic and chat with new people and all that good stuff. My stocking was full of goodies -- way more than I'd expected, for a first year doing this and with mostly highly obscure fandoms -- critter icons, very promising book and puzzle game recs, lovely greetings, the news that The True Meaning of Smekday is getting a sequel OMG, and this wonderful Jaime/Loras ficlet: "Pleasure", PG by celeste9 -- I'm claiming having caused more Jaime/Loras fic to exist as my chief accomplishment for this, beyond any of the trifles I tried to stuff stockings with. But also it was just awesome to have a chance to share squee about my various tiny fandoms with both people I know, through flist or fic, and with brand new people. I'm very glad I decided to participate after all, and am already looking forward to doing this next year :D
I should also catch up on the Snowflake Challenge, where I've fallen a couple of days behind:
Day 6: In your own space, create a fanwork. A drabble, a ficlet, a podfic, or an icon, art or meta or a rec list. A picspam. Something.
I thought I'd already made everything I wanted a couple of days ago when I was messing around with Paint.NET, but then I remembered I had saved a nimue_18 Ted with the intention of making myself a Kosmo~oluhi icon and never did, so:
(art by nimue_18)
Also, this is as good a place as any, I guess, to park the couple of things I made for fandom_stocking. Mostly my contribution was book recs and fic recs and the like, but I did make a handful of icons (plus a couple of random extra icons not for anyone in particular):
||
||
||
||
||
||
||
||
||
||
||
||
||
||
||
Row 1: random hamsters
Row 2: Junta by Migunov from an article egelantier linked me to
Row 3: world's most obscure crossover (Killer Unicorns / Rivers of London) icons for ambyr
Row 4: Temeraire and Laurence icons for sineala
(Art credit: ileliberte for blue composition, annicorn on dA for sunset, rinian on dA for Laurence with baby Temeraire and book)
Row 5: Temeraire icons for asthenie_vd
(Art credit: skelettflickan on Tumblr for Granby + Iskierka, Kalia24 on dA for Iskierka (and backgrounds on the aviator icons), simply-irenic on dA for aviator portraits)
Row 6: Vorkosigan icons for kaffyr and philomytha (and a random Gregor, just because)
(Art credit: Bob Stevlic, illustrator for the Vorkosigan GURPS book. You can see larger versions of these pictures, and some others, linked below.)
The Vorkosigan art from the GURPS book I got as an Agnostica present from q99 the other year:
Vorkosigan family portrait
Aral
Ekaterin
Alys
Piotr (he's leading a horse, but I couldn't get them both in one picture :P)
Galeni
Gregor
Gregor and Laisa
Miles and Mark
Ivan
Bel Thorne
*
And there's this Arya sonnet-of-sorts for isiscolo, who mentioned a fondness for formal poetry (and Arya) in her sign-up :P
In playroom tussles with her brothers
("You stick them with the pointy end")
She learned one lesson like no other:
When winter comes, the Starks defend.
Captive or running, sword gripped tightly,
As Arry, Weasel, and No One,
Her list grows shorter, whispered nightly:
A Stark will see to justice done.
A continent away, in tatters,
Name lost in a street urchin's yell,
She knows, in all the ways that matter:
She is a Stark of Winterfell.
And when the storm howls at the door,
The she-wolf will come home once more.
(Using the Onegin stanza, something I haven't played with before. But, actually, Arya isn't a particularly sonnet-y person, so I first arrived at an alternative quattrain for the end:
And when (dead things in woods... in water...)
The blizzard howls at the door,
Then, Winterfell's long-wandering daughter,
The she-wolf, will come home once more.
I think I prefer this to the couplet...)
*
Holiday Greetings banners for my own records:
<
*
And, because I don't want to lose track of it, Rivers of London / Temeraire fusion musings for asthenie_vd
***
Day 7: In your own space, share your love for a trope, cliché, kink, motif, or theme. (More than one is okay, too.) Tell us about it, tell us why you love it, give us some examples and recs.
I've pondered this for a little bit, and I think there are maybe two categories of this: one for canons which prompt me to be fannish about them, and one for fic (mostly but not exclusively in those fandoms).
Trope/theme for canons: I've written about this before, and these are all still true, and there are examples there, but let me expand on the one that is the biggest draw to fandom for me (as in, the other things make me really enjoy canons, but don't necessarily elicit the same "must have MORE" feelings that drive me towards fandom for a particular work:
Family is probably the biggest one for me. I love Big Screwed Up Families, and just plain families that function, often in very difficult circumstances, and make do with each other, because that takes care of the most important thing. And I love Found Family tropes -- a conversation with ikel89 recently helped me add the rider that I also love the way Found Family and blood family ties interact, like when a found family grows up around the nucleus of a couple of people who are related to each other, or when two people who only have each other in the world come upon a Found Family that welcomes them.
Favorite examples:
- the Greek pantheon (of the Big Screwed Up Family variety)
- Chronicles of Amber (of the Big Screwed Up Family variety)
- Vorkosigan Saga, because it really is a family saga for me, first and foremost, even if it the family does include people like the Emperor of Barrayar and random mercenaries Miles has inadvertently or advertently entrained in his wake
- Firefly (which has the example of siblings being "adopted" by a Found Family with various degrees of reluctance)
- The Demon's Lexicon trilogy for the example of Found Family nucleating, mostly thanks to Alan's very aggressive Adopting People streak
- Rivers of London (where the Folly functions as a Found Family, and I love also that, in addition to his professional family, Peter also has a very present and vivid family with his parents and the numerous aluded cousins)
- Avatar: The Last Airbender (Found Family), and the various family arcs in Korra season 3 also work well for me.
- Avengers Assemble and the first Star Trek reboot movie, which made me fannish about franchises that I never cared about before in that way because they were creation of found family stories
Recent recs (that I could not talk about back then because I had not read them yet):
- I just finished Cloud Roads (book 1 of the Raksura cycle), and, allll the Found Family buttons, especially at the end, in the scenes involving Moon, Stone, Frost, Bitter, and Thorn.
- Ilona Andrews writing team is apparently very good at writing family (blood family, anyway, because the Pack doesn't necessarily work for me), because the Kate and Roland family dynamics, once they hit, are the best thing in 8 books, and all the family stuff in The Edge books is catnip to me -- Declan's family back home, and Rose and her brothers and grandmother, and the Mar clan -- it's all really great.
- I think the main reason The Goblin Emperor appealed to me so much and also makes me want fic is that it's got family tropes all over it, in all kinds of different ways (which is not surprising, I guess, because I really liked Monette's engagement with families in the Melusine books, but this is a much happier scenario, handled with the same deftness, and I like that a lot more. But there is Maia faced with the remnants of his unknown half-brothers' families, and his half-sisters, and the grandfather and aunt on his mother's side, as well as the found family of his household, and the background families -- it's omnipresent, and really well done.
As for tropes for fanworks, I tend to be drawn towards total crack, for some reason. Like, I like hurt/comfort a lot, but have to be in the mood for it, and it has to be the right sort of fandom. But there's something I'm always in the mood for and can enjoy with, I think, any kind of source: school AUs, whether we're talking mundane high school AUs or Hogwarts AUs (faculty getting in on the fun is good, too!)
I'm sure part of the appeal is that I love wizarding school as a trope in its own right (see linked post above for some favorites), and part of it is probably that my own high school experience was so awesome and fundamental (and frequently entertaining; I went to school with some characters!) that high school AUs always make me think back on it and that makes me happy, making me like the story more. But I think there's also both a comfort (structured day, seeing the same people over and over) and a freedom (take a whole bunch of different classes, figuring out who you are and what you want to do) about the (high) school setting, the combination of which both really appeals to me and lends itself well to the sort of AU exploration I like thinking about. And Hogwarts specifically, of course, has got that, plus MAGIC, plus the "planet of hats" aspect of the four houses, which I like because sorting is fun, and because it can create some interesting built in conflicts, if canonical teammates/family members are sorted into rival houses or, conversely, canonical enemies/rivals end up having to share a house.
Some of my favorite examples:
- Swordspoint high school AU: Riverside High
- Temeraire/Iskierka anthropomorphic high school AU
- Vorkosigan/Harry Potter crossover: Testing
- ASOIAF Quidditch teams art by the fabulous guad
- AtLA Hogwarts AU art
(do you know of more, with my fandoms? Rec me all of them! :D)
Day 8: In your own space, create a love meme for yourself. Let people tell you how amazing and awesome and loveable you really are.
I waffled about this prompt last year, because I feel weird about love memes, but liked the solution I came up with last year, so I'm reprising it:
If there's a book you picked up, or poem or fic you read, because I was talking about it, or a community you joined, or a fun meme or icon or silly timewasting game you found, or a random headcanon or phrase you've acquired because of me, directly or indirectly, or anything of this sort which makes you glad that you did, and you feel like telling me about it, please do!
(I will be very happy to hear it, because few things please me as much as connecting people with things they enjoy when I also enjoy them.)