Snowflake Catchup (days 10-14)
Day 10: In your own space, post a rec for fannish and/or creative resources and spaces. Tell us where you go to dig up canon facts for your fandom, or where you get all the juicy details about your favorite ship. Where do you like to hang out and squee like a squeeing thing?
For squee: LiveJournal, definitely, because it's possible to have an actual conversation. Also, the LJ/DW content text search (from the nav bar on Friends on LJ, DW) is actually not bad at finding posts or comments about small fandom. (I miiight know this because I've searched for "Dragaera" and various character names on both.) LJ used to have the option to sort results by date, which was good for quickly seeing if anything new was posted, as those entries would be on top, but that's disappeared now, at least with my settings. (You do end up catching a lot of RP applications like this, with the searches I do, on character and fandom names, but it also turns up some occasional fun stuff.)
I'm not a fan of Tumblr for much of anything, but it definitely is the best place for tracking down the grains of truly tiny fandoms, because of the tags, and some very-small-on-LJ fandoms are fairly thriving there.
TV Tropes is a wonderful time sink to browse by trope, but actually browsing the fandom pages is possibly even more addictive, like this and also Character pages, and other tabs on top there.
Text From Last Night as a fannish graphic and fic prompt generator can be hilarious (see: Texts from the Avengers, this Kirk/Bones fic), and is also pretty funny on its own.
Goodreads' format for book write-ups doesn't work for me, but I find their quotes search a really nice resource. (Google, of course, is pretty good for pulling up exact quotes, but Goodreads let you browse by author.)
TOR.com is a pretty fun place for SFF stuff. I found the Kvothe reread discussion really interesting, and Jo Walton's other articles are usually interesting, too. And they have free short stories up sometimes.
As for specific fandoms, it's interesting to see how even smallish fandoms can have nicely organized Wikis, though maybe not as frequently updated as I would like. These days I always search for "[fandom] wiki" when I'm getting into something new and want to refresh my memory about family relationships, appearance, etc.
Not a wiki, because it predates Wikipedia and that functionality, but my first single-fandom resource site is The Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5. I was reading it as it went up live in the 1990s, and found it to be an invaluable resource for my rewatch as well. The episode write-up format is especially great, with the different categories of info -- synopsis, things to watch out for, analysis, speculation, Word of God. I'm really, really curious how this would've worked in the age of wikis, but even as it is, it is an amazing resource, and a testament to the commitment and cleverness of the fans, and JMS's unique-at-the-time approach to fan interaction.
And I'm gonna finish with a Dragaera resource compilation which no-one cares about, I realize:
- Lyorn Records (the fandom wiki)
- The Dragaera Timeline (spanning some several hundred thousand years, with day-by-day detail for the Vlad books)
- Mark Mandel's Cracks and Shards site was really cool, but it's disappeared off the web. For a while I could dig it up via the Wayback Machine, but even those links are going somewhere else now :(
- Dragaera mailing list and archives (yes, an honest-to-goodness mailing list still...)
**
Day 11: In your own space, make a list of at least 3 things that you like about yourself. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it.
I'm not too into this prompt/challenge, to be honest, but since I'm a completist:
Real life:
1. I'm pretty smart. (That's not a qualifier, that's false modesty. I was looking for the Simon Tam "I am very smart." speech (where he explains River to the crew in the pilot, but since I couldn't find that one on YouTube, I just have to explain the joke.)
2. I am very conscientious and reliable, the consummate ISTJ in this regard.
3. I am optimistic, easy-going, and calm, and keep a sense of humour and perspective in most circumstances. (Except when it comes to lice or high school applications, apparently, 'cos I now have antibodies for those.)
4. I have pretty hair. B said so.
Fannishly (it seems only right to include this, since for me Snowflake is a fannish thing):
1. I'm a good "fandom baba" (to use lunasariel's term) -- or fandom yenta, if you prefer. I really enjoy hooking up people with new fandom/new canons for them to love, or new fannish friends, so I try to do this as often as possible, and I usually have good results, and sometimes outstanding ones, introducing people to those "where have you been all my life" series.
2. I am totally committed to fannish crack. Whether you prompt me on a OTP meme with, what was it, q99, Pathfinder/Rocza, posit a ridiculous crossover, hit some crazy scenario on the Character Roulette Meme, challenge me to write Raven Cycle poems or draw fanart when I can't draw (ikel89), or whether a Character Stamping campaign requires me to, create a makeshift beard and naked Barbie knife for -- I am SO there for this. If there's a limit to the things I'll do for love crack, I haven't found it yet, and that's something I'm very happy with :D
3. I am conscientious when it comes to fandom, too (ISTJ, see above). I've stuck to every reading pact I've undertaken and stayed on schedule, I've answered every single meme prompt I've ever been given (with one exception, where I'm still waiting to finish consuming the fandom I was prompted for; I hven't forgotten about the Saga prompt, ladymercury_10). Which is quite possibly a ridiculous thing to be proud of, but I'm totally proud >:D
**
Day 12: What makes you fannish? And by that we mean, what is it about a tv show/movie/book/band/podcast/etc that takes you from, "Yeah, I like that," to "I need MOAR!!!" Is it a character? A plotline? The pretty? Subtext that’s just screaming to be acknowledged? In your own space, tell us what it is that gets you to cross that line into fandom.
You know, that's a great question, and one I haven't really asked myself before. There's obviously SOMETHING, because I can enjoy a canon without being fannish about it (recent example: Imperial Radch, the Craft Sequence, Hunger Games), and I can be fannish about things I'm not 100% sold on (recent example: Raven Cycle), so how does the whole process work?
I think that in order for me to be fannish about something it comes down to: at least one character I care about beyond a certain minimum threshold (+ maybe other stuff).
I'm pretty sure it's all about characters because (I've told this story before) when I was little, my grandfather and I would play this game we made up, called Pereputanits (~Mix-Up), where we would act out characters from different canons interacting with each other, and I always had characters I wanted to spend "extra" time with, after canon, in fix-it scenarios, in total crossover scenarios -- and that never went away. As I got older, I acquired a whole... "menagerie" is the best word I can think of -- a menagerie of characters from various sources (Hector and Hermes from Greek mythology, Junta from Ponedelnik, Azazello from Master i Margarita, Red from Roadside Picnic, Pedro Zurita from The Amphibian Man, Shredder from TMNT, Thrain from the Hobbit (though he's dead for the entire book), Gandalf and Boromir from LotR, Magneto from X-Men, etc. etc.) -- and all these people were, like, living in a house together and interacting (and eventually some Mary-Sues of mine came along, too), and when I would read a book or watch something that had a character that grabbed me, somebody from this gang would go and collect them, usually rescuing them from canonical death (my favorite characters tend to die a lot).
So, yeah, in the canons I'm fannish about, there's a character or two that grab me that way -- that I want to take and play with some more, put him in various situations and see what happens, put him with other characters I'm fannish about and see what they do -- there's a reason I love the character roulette memes so much. I think probably the more such characters there are in the canon, and/or the more prominent they are, the harder I fall for it? That might explain why Firefly mugged me so hard when I finally watched it, because Jayne and Simon and Zoe and Book are all such characters for me, so like 50% of the cast, and similar for the Vorkosigan Saga and Rivers of London, which also have a very high ratio like that (also known as "I love everybody in this bar").
But I do think one character can be enough, either entirely on their own (why hello there, Ronan Raven Cycle), or in combination with something else I like about the canon -- neat worldbuilding, awesome prose, snappy dialogue, eyecandy for visual fandoms. Worldbuilding by itself isn't enough (example: His Dark Materials, Craft Sequence -- canons with worldbuilding I like a lot, but that I'm not fannish about), although it may well work for fusion sources with characters that I like considerably more. Prose by itself definitely isn't enough (example: Lev Grossman's Magicians books). So, yeah.
Also, I'm not sure where this fits, but there are fandoms where I'm fannish but am mostly not interested in reading fic -- LotR is the most fundamental example, but this is also true of Discworld for instance. I think in these cases that's just because I find the canon difficult to improve on in the same medium, but by all means give me Lego Isengard and lembas recipes and all the epic fanart and shambles and lilac pins and HEX swag and anything else you can come up with.
Oh, OH! And the company definitely matters. I know I have an easier time turning fannish about something I may normally merely enjoy if there's a critical mass of like-minded people enjoying it, or if one good friend is obsessed with it.
Also, I feel like short, closed canons are more conducive for turning fannish, because there's so little canon to enjoy. I'm pretty sure Firefly benefited from this effect for me, and The Goblin Emperor.
**
Day 13: In your own space, post a rec for at least three fanworks that you did not create. One way to level up today's challenge is to try to rec any of the following: tiny fandoms, rare pairings, fanworks other than stories, lesser known kinks or tropes. Find fanworks that have few to no comments, or creators new to a particular fandom and maybe aren't well known or appreciated.
Let's see... what from my brand new AO3 bookmarks have I not posted yet?
The first two I found, either directly or indirectly, via fandom_stocking:
- Four Beers from Home (Dresden Files, teen, gen, 1k, Ramirez and Harry centric). This is the scene I keep wanting to read in the actual canon, where Ramirez has been missing suspiciously for the last three books...
- Ghosts (The Goblin Emperor, gen, Cala/Beshelar UST/pre-slash, 1.2k. There seems to be a tendency in TGE fic to depict Beshelar as a total stuffed shirt; the thing I like most about this fic is how nuanced and human and sympathetic he is (while still being a bit of a stuffed shirt :P) [Does this count as a rare pair? Cala/Beshelar has 4 works on AO3, compared to, say, 8 for Maia/Csethiro and 5 for Csevet/Maia, so maybe not...]
- Act of Union by brutti_ma_buoni (19th CE RPF: British politics, gen, 1.8k, Disraeli, Gladstone, magical AU). Apparently I'm really partial to a wizard!Disraeli AU (which is not the Bartimaeus books).
Fanworks which are not fics:
- Courtesy of ikel89's obsession + linking spree, these two adorable Captive Prince comics: Trust Issues and this one
- Also, tiny fandom: Mark Mandel (mentioned above) did some amazingly clever Dragaera filks, of which my favorite is the "Discoworld/Dragaera Musical Miscegenation of Doom" (aka the Hedgehog song taking on the 17 houses). Mandel's wonderful site has been down for a while, so his filks are not easy to find, but this one is still hanging out in the Dragaera mailing list archive here.
**
Day 14: In your own space, share your love for something fannish: a trope, cliché, kink, motif, theme, format, or fandom.
I've done fandom already recently Vorkosigan, Rivers of London, and Dragaera), but let's see if I can come up with one each for the rest.
Trope -- I seem to really like animal companion AUs/hypotheticals. My enjoyment of His Dark Materials (daemons) and Temeraire (dragons) and Psychic Wolves (what it says on the tin) fusions, and also just meme questions along the lines of, "if X had a dog, what breed would it be" and the like. Actually, you know, we can make it broader, because I like non-AU versions of this trope, too. I love the relationship between Vlad and Loiosh in the Taltos books, and the dragon-captain bond in Temeraire, and as I kid I used to ADORE "boy and his dog" sort of stories. So. (This answer brought to you by the letters C and O, and the exclamation, "ikel89, why didn't you tell me about the clockwork octopus?!" :P)
Cliche -- I'm sort of spectacularly easy for the Proud Warrior Race Guy cliches (Dragonlords, Fire Nation, Vor, etc. etc.)
Kink -- In a non-porn sense, COMPETENCE KINK. (This is one of the primary reasons Vetinari and Sherlock Holmes are some of my favorite characters ever.) It doesn't even have to be competence at something I personally care about -- just being really, really good at something important is a big draw in a character for me. In a straight-up porn sense, hmm... roughhousing, oneupmanship, and banter during sex.
Motif -- I was drawing a blank, and then browsing the Snowflake post reminded me I totally have one: Tam Lin retellings.
Theme -- FAMILY. Blood family, messed up family that still cares about each other, found family. ALL THE FAMILY! (This answer brought to you by the part where I've now read 2.5 Warchild books, and it is exceedingly clear that the only thing I truly care about in this universe is the Expandad Azarcon Family Theater. I appreciate the varied POVs, the thoughtful and impactful way different kinds of abuse and their lasting impact is handled, all of that is great and I respect that. But what I truly LOVED about these books were the moments between Cairo Azarcon and his assorted family/"family" members, Ryan and the admiral and Erret Dorr and, OK, even Jos. Because FAMILY, guys.
Format -- I don't even know why, given how I feel about anime and all things Japanese entertainment, but I'm super-partial to chibi versions of characters. Especially if they are, like, the opposite of cute and cuddly in canon. This generally extends to cutesified doodle versions of character fanart, like PotterPuffs and their ilk.