Snowflake: Fandom Wrap
Challenge #9: In your own space, list your Fandom Wrap categories. These rankings are based on TIME spent on a particular item. If one of these categories doesn't apply to you, feel free to skip. You also don't have to list all 5 or just 5.
Oh man, this is both a great challenge and also terrible for me personally because it involves answering a quantitative question with limited data, which means that I will go and try to mine that limited data as much as I can, even though IT DOES NOT MATTER AT ALL XD
What are your top five fandoms for 2021 based on the amount of time you interacted with them?
This is going to be highly approximate, obviously, because it's hard to cross-compare things like watching videos and reading + chatting about it and DW comment exchanges. But let's see!
1. Sudoku XD yeah, I don't know how this happened either, except one of the Yuletide query posts introduced me to Cracking the Cryptic, and I started watching the videos, and then started talking to cyanshadow about the videos, and then started attempting the puzzles myself, and then started doing Killer Sudoku on a different site when Cyan's mother recced it. And I also read the Yuletide story which, delightfully, got written for the prompt for the fandom nomination that kicked everything off for me -- which has now been mentioned by Simon in a CtC video (!!!) -- and attempted to solve the puzzles therein. It's all been completely delightful. It looks like I spent at least 35 hours (!!!) watching Sudoku videos -- this is all between October and into half of January, but most of it was last year. I also spent at least 10 hours I would say solving Sudoku (probably more, but I don't know how to estimate it -- I haven't been saving my times, and there have definitely been puzzles I quit partway through after working on them for some time). And then on top of that time spent chatting with Cyan and her mom about Sudoku, plus the Yuletid fic and puzzles, which took me over an hour (I did not find the second puzzle approachable at all XD). So I think I feel safe in saying that was at least 46 hours of my time spent on Sudoku fandom this year. So, yeah XD I would not have thought of Sudoku as a fandom, but it was in Yuletide, and I've been doing it with fannish friends, and in a fannish way -- can't argue with that XD
2. Terra Ignota. This was mostly concentrated in the two weeks foolowing the release of Perhaps the Stars and the impromptu Pass-It-On sync read with
cafemassolit and
seriouslywhy, relayed through Best Chat by K. My Kindle app's timer says the reading took 22.5 hrs, which I can believe -- that was a chonky book! And then the chatting added quite a while, but I don't think it doubled the time, not even when I factor in writing up my 10k of a reaction post (which K correctly summarized as "I love Ada Palmer and I cannot lie"), or reading and commenting on other people's posts. I also did catch an Ada Palmer reading at a virtual con, which was the "I have misunderstood Poseidon" passage, so that was another 30 minutes. Anyway, a very respectable second, but I think still behind Sudoku on sheer time XD
3. MCU. This was much more passive than any of the other fandoms on this list, actually, but I did watch a lot of MCU content this year. I tallied it up for a prior fannish year in review meme and came up with 350 min for WandaVision, 260 min for Loki, and ~270 min for What If, plus 2.5 hours for Spider-Man = ~17 hours of canon content, plus I did watch a lot of Easter Egg videos -- these were probably 15-20 minutes per episode for some, and hour-long wrap-ups for others, but probably another 10 hours at least. I'm actually not sure if Terra Ignota or MCU took up more of my time this year, but it definitely feels like MCU belongs lower down on the list than Terra Ignota. Oh, and I also did read some Marvel universes fic this year, not all of it MCU, but since I'm reading it with just the knowledge of MCU canon, I'm lumping all that in here.
4. Dragaera, to my eternal delight! I don't have a way to estimate the amount of time I spent on this fandom, because it was all random non-time-bounded things like wallowing in my Yuletide treat from
misura and
fandomtrees gift from
sysann, and squeeing in
silverflight8's comments, and lurking in FFA threads, and filling out memes, and a tiny bit of rereading actual canon (I read bits of Taltos. But it was present throughout the year, and just knowing that there were people on my flist who also cared about this tiny fandom was such a warm glow <3
5. Chemistry??? (probably in terms of time it actually goes above Dragaera, because it took a while to write and edit, and there was a bunch of time spent looking up chemistry facts, including for angles I ended up dropping, and then some really fun chatting about the potential of Periodic Table fandom with
laniusplushie), but I kind of want to end on this note XD
So, two tiny fandoms I'm obsessed with, two "is this actually a fandom????" fandoms courtesy of Yuletide, and a megafandom to tide me over in between splashes of activity in the tiny ones -- that actually feels about right :)
I also chatted with people about the Vorkosigan Saga, as flisters picked up the books or continued on through the series; the Lady Astronaut books (catching up on canon and getting hyped for requesting it in Yuletide and for my gift); and found myself unexpectedly fannish about Encanto and talking a lot of meta about it, first with L, then with pretty much anyone who showed any inclination to talk about it.
What are your top five fandom spaces in terms of time spent? (AO3, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, Dreamwidth, and others)
1. Dreamwidth, between my flist (more fannish interaction on DW than on LJ, which has been true for a couple of years) and seasonal community activity like
snowflake_challenge itself,
fandomtrees, and Yuletide-related comms (I spend more time on DW between October and January than other times of year, I'm pretty sure, but even if you average it out).
2. YouTube, weirdly. It is not a place where I engage with anyone besides liking videos and such, but between Sudoku and MCU above, I spent a lot of my fandom canon and meta consumption on YouTube, which I would've been very surprised to hear a couple of years ago. I also continued to follow or dip into some YouTube channels commenting on either fandom in general (e.g. Screen Junkies; Lindsay Ellis, whose departure from YouTube I'm really sad about) or specific canons/genres I care about (Dominic Noble's Lost in Adaptation, Daniel Green's SFF news, and from there starting to dip a bit into "BookTube" in general -- Merphy Napier, and then the Hugos introduced me to Kalanadi, whose channel I actually like. Oh, right! and some of the virtual cons I attended were via YouTube as well, so that should be added to the list. And I watched like 3 hours of WSFS Business Meeting footage from Worldcon, for some reason (under the influence of my booster, so I wasn't much good for anything, and I found it weirdly soothing).
3. Zoom, I guess? Or Zoom + other video conference things. It's either that or WhatsApp... It's hard to deconvolute the personal from the fannish with these (harder than with DW/LJ, since I can't just looked at locked vs unlocked posts or specific comments), but definitely a lot of my fannish discussion with the fannish friends with whom I have WhatsApp chats and standing or periodic Zoom dates going has been via these two forms. E.g. the entirety of the Pass It On sync read for Terra Ignota happened via WhatsApp, and a lot of the Sudoku talk. And some of the virtual conventions used Zoom or similar functionality.
4. AO3 -- I don't use it very much year round, but I definitely spent a bunch of time reading/commenting on fic during Yuletide, and checking out various recs from folks / collections once they were revealed, that kind of thing. Oh, and this year there was another splash for me during
minutia_r's Multifandom Poetry Fest, which is uniquely relevant to my interests :)
5. LiveJournal. While most of the fannish interaction for me has moved to DW, I do still have some fannish folks who either post exclusively on LJ or with whom I interact primarily on LJ. (Not sure about the ranking of this vs AO3...)
I also dipped some more into Discord this year, around Balticon, mostly to follow Ada Palmer around once her panels were over, but also got to chat with
leiacat for a bit, and then I also peeked into Yuletide's Discord's recs channel. I did check a couple of author Twitters and followed some Tumblr links as they were sent to me, and occasionally was desperate enough for fandom news for tiny fandoms to attempt to follow Reddit links, even though they always dump me somewhere unexpected. And I know I used File770 around Hugo season, but I don't think enough to elevate it to top 5 status.
What are the top five ways you interacted in these fandoms? (Reading fanfic, writing, commenting, watching videos, chatting with friends, making art, or anything else you can think of).
1. Chatting with friends -- in DW comments, on WhatsApp chats, on Zoom Best Chat dates, and, marvelously, a couple of times in person, when
lunasariel came to visit after lockdown in California was lifted and we could grab dinner and ice cream like old times. And I could chat about the MCU stuff with O, and about Encanto with L, which was fun -- it had been a while since i actually shared an active fandom with my kids. (I consider my book write-ups and things to be part of this category because I kind of view them as a starting point for that kind of discussion, just allowing for it to be asynchronous, you know? I also considered fannish memes to be part of this.)
2. Watching videos, I guess? I did spend a lot of time on YouTube... Actually, I'm going to bundle together watching videos and listening to podcasts, because I feel like those are both similar on the way they are "consuming fannish commentary in a format which is asymmetrical because I cannot interact with the creators in the same medium". I don't know why it feels different to me than commenting on fannish posts, but it does, and so it forces a much more passive way of interacting with fannish content, and I was doing a lot of that this year.
3. After some internal debate, I'm going to say "Yuletide-ing" as a blanket category. Because I did a bunch of things, of which writing a Yuletide fic was only a small portion of the time. I followed the nomination post queries, which I just find really fun for some reason -- it's like you get the most bizzare glimpses of these already rare things, and I just endlessly delight in both the sort of keyhole view it affords of some tiny fandoms and at the way that, no matter how obscure the fandom*, other fans come out of the woodwork to comment on whether or not Character X and Character Y are the same person, or Character Z belongs in Sub-canon F, or whether [Character Q's mother] has a canonical name (*and when it proves to be TOO obscure, you get amazing things like this :D). I browsed the promo post, and the tagset when it opened, and refreshed the app to pounce on any fresh letters in my bookmarked fandoms (to ferret out likeminded individuals or learn more about what some of these intriguing-sounding canons were), and I hung out in the Yuletide-adjacent comms from October to the end of the year. I did write a fic, and beta a fic, and read and comment on and rec a bunch of stories, but I do think the general hanging-out-in-Yuletide part of it took up a larger amount of time than anything concrete I could point to -- which is actually how I like it :)
4. Writing a tiny amount of fic and fannish poems. (Actually this is true for only one of my "top 5 fandoms by time" -- the other stuff I wrote this year was for different fandoms.)
5. Making a very small number of icons (also just 1-2 of them were for one of my top 5 fandoms, the rest were for something else.)
What are the top five things you did to contribute to fandom in terms of time? Did you write? Comment? Send positive energy into the universe? Create art?
I don't think I had any really heavy contributions this year, and I don't know how the ones below stack up to each other in relative time spent, but here goes:
1. Hugo homework (which I think of as sort of the equivalent of doing your civic duty by voting :) -- it's a single voice, but contributes to the overall outcome in a tiny way) goes at the top. I read 11 novels, 6 novellas, 6 novelettes, 6 short stories, watched 1 movie and a couple of videos, listened to half a dozen podcast episodes (though most of these were short), browsed the packets for pro and fan artist and editors (specifically for Hugo homework; not counting content I'd consumed previously on my own), and voted on 73 finalists in 15 Hugo ballot categories. This would definitely not have happened if the Hugo voting deadline had not been in November rather than July like most years, but this was actually pretty good, and way more than I'd been expecting, especially as I started this year not really planning to do Hugo homework this year. Oh, and then I poked around the Hugo statistics and nattered a bunch about that, too.
2. I wrote up my thoughts on my reading and television and movies I watched (and had conversations on other people's Wednesday Reading/etc. and other fannish write-up posts). I do this more for myself than "to contribute to fandom", but it does seem like people find the write-ups useful, to learn about things, or to stay away from things, or to have conversations about the things.
3. Fandom baba-ing and godparenting? What I mean by that is, continuing to emanate enthusiasm about the fandoms of my heart (Dragaera, Vorkosigan Saga, Terra Ignota) at the universe/my flist, and then when flisters picked up said fandoms (not through my contributions alone, of course!) squeeing along with them as they got to my favorite characters/bits, helping answer questions or suggest reading order, commenting on their reaction posts, and so on. This is pretty much my favorite thing to do in fandom, and this year I had several folks who picked up the Vorkosigan Saga (and a few more who continued it) and a couple more who picked up Dragaera, and one brave soul has started their Terra Ignota journey, all of which makes me very happy. And I totally fandom baba-ed
cyanshadow into Cracking the Cryptic, ha, which she then passed on to her mother and several friends/coworkers XD
4. I filled out a bunch of fannish memes, starting with the Snowflake Challenge prompt to do so, a smorgasbord of memes when I was home alone for a couple of weeks in November, and 10 days of the Frankenstein meme (that I need to get back to). I mean, I'm not sure my answers per se are much of a contribution to fandom, but I love fannish memes as a thing, and inasmuch as posting a fannish meme, and maybe having other people pick it up, is a contribution to keeping that meme culture alive on DW, I think it counts.
5. Probably writing the fic took longer, but to avoid repetition I'm going to defer that to the next question and talk about the tiny bit of betaing I did this year, for
sysann's Good Omens ficlet for
fandomtrees and for
cafemassolit's Yuletide fic (for which neither Cyan nor I knew the canon, but it was a fun tag-team experience with
seriouslywhy, who did).
Oh, right, and I also hosted a sync read of Winter's Orbit, but it's not like that was much work/time on my part.
What things did you create that took the most time?
1. For sure my chemistry nonsense
2. A couple of batches of icons (Blake's 7 and Frances Hardinge quotes, one specific Dragaera quote, and a couple of Dresden Files and Silmarillion fanart icons)
3. Ghazals are deceptively hard to write!
4. Hm, I guess maybe this challenge created for Snowflake last year: "create a 30 day fandom meme", which I had completely forgotten about, but
chacusha took it up and improved it by adding art to it :D
5. this very short poem for The Unspoken Name, because I think I only created five things last year (unless I start counting the icons individually)
(There were a couple of other poems for last year's and this year's rounds of
fandomtrees, but it looks like none of them were posted in 2021, so I'm not counting them here. I'm also not counting my various reading/watching write-ups or memes because I don't think of them as "creations" -- the finished product is not the point, getting my thoughts down where I can revist them and/or starting a conversation is.)
This was a great lens through which to look at the fannish year -- I think I may need to add some of these questions, or methodologies, to the fannish year in review memes I do every year.
The last question is:
Have a Top 5 List you'd like to share?? By all means!
This actually seems like the perfect time to bring back the fannish "top 5" meme, so:
Ask me my top 5 fannish anything and I'll answer.
For reference, fandoms of note: ASOIAF, AtLA(/Korra), Babylon 5, Blake's 7, Buffy (through s6), Chronicles of Amber, Community, Curseworkers, Demon's Lexicon, Discworld, Dragaera/Vlad Taltos, Dresden Files, Farscape (2.5 seasons), Firefly, The Good Place, Harry Potter, Killjoys (first two seasons), Kingkiller Chronicles, Kushiel's Legacy, Lord of the Rings, Machineries of Empire, MCU, Rivers of London, Saga, Sherlock BBC (through s3), Temeraire, Vorkosigan Saga, Warchild, White Collar (through s4), and anything else you know I'm into.
This entry was originally posted at https://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1165291.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).