Sunshine Challenge prompt 3
Most of us here have at least one movie/book/tv series/comic book/and more that speaks to us on a special level. Here is your opportunity to wax poetic on those things!
We want to hear what new canons to investigate. Tell us why that thing is cool. Tell us why you enjoy it so much. Tell us where to start if we want to get into it too (and how to find it if it’s not something mainstream that’s easy to find everywhere). It can be difficult to find fandom friends with shared interests sometimes, but this is your chance to cultivate a shared interest!
Okay, I know that when this one last came up on the Snowflake Challenge, I wrote about the first book in this series. But since then, The Fandom by Anna Day has had its sequel, The Fandom Rising, and I am going to ramble about that.
So, for anyone who didn't see my first post on this, The Fandom was about a group of friends attending Comic Con for their favourite book, The Gallows Dance (think The Hunger Games and you're on the right lines. In the future, the "Panem" equivalent is a London filled with Genetically Enhanced Men (Gems), who are the equivalent of Hunger Games Capitol, while the Imperfects (Imps) are the society outcasts, and the story is that of their rebellion.)
The villain of The Gallows Dance, President Stoneback, wants an ending where the villains win, so he was trying to influence the original author to write such an ending to the sequel, eventually leading her to jump from her balcony. His next tactic, on seeing how the "loop" of the story going round and round again was being slightly changed by the creations of fanfiction, was to try and recruit the fanfic writer "AnimeAlice" to write a pro-Gem sequel, and ended up pulling in the entire group by mistake. They then had to complete the story in order to get home.
The next one in the series picks up the year after the end of The Fandom. Alice and Violet have written the sequel, but it's not the one President Stoneback wanted. Violet's brother Nate, shot by the president's nephew in the fandom world and stuck in a coma for a year in the regular world, is about to have his life support switched off, so Violet and Katie try to get themselves sent back to Gallows Dance canon to bring him home. Alice, stuck in the regular world, discovers that some rogue writer called Fanboy is writing the pro-Gem uprising that Stoneback originally wanted, so she then has to try and rescue things from here.
Without revealing too many spoilers, including the identity of Fanboy, I will say that a dispute running through the second book about whether to write another sequel is resolved when Alice and Violet decide to give the characters over to the fandom: they set up their own fansite where anyone can contribute, where writing about all characters is welcome, and anyone trying another Fanboy stunt will be removed.
And much as I think there is scope for more (I personally would have liked to see the characters of Ash and Nate get more of a voice, and I know how I would personally do that), I do like the idea of giving it to the fandom. I like the way that all characters are welcome, and if someone does want to give the villains a happy ending they can. Anyone who knows me at all well knows how much I love to write any possible character, especially those who don't get much fandom attention. I've said before that Ben Linus from Lost would have likely recruited me for a pro Others fic, and I would have happily worked for him because I did feel that the Others had so much untapped potential. Instead of main character PWP, I was fleshing out their backstories. And the message at the end of The Fandom Rising was that it's not only okay, but encouraged, to be That Writer, the one who spends time on minor characters, the one who sometimes lets the villains win.
We want to hear what new canons to investigate. Tell us why that thing is cool. Tell us why you enjoy it so much. Tell us where to start if we want to get into it too (and how to find it if it’s not something mainstream that’s easy to find everywhere). It can be difficult to find fandom friends with shared interests sometimes, but this is your chance to cultivate a shared interest!
Okay, I know that when this one last came up on the Snowflake Challenge, I wrote about the first book in this series. But since then, The Fandom by Anna Day has had its sequel, The Fandom Rising, and I am going to ramble about that.
So, for anyone who didn't see my first post on this, The Fandom was about a group of friends attending Comic Con for their favourite book, The Gallows Dance (think The Hunger Games and you're on the right lines. In the future, the "Panem" equivalent is a London filled with Genetically Enhanced Men (Gems), who are the equivalent of Hunger Games Capitol, while the Imperfects (Imps) are the society outcasts, and the story is that of their rebellion.)
The villain of The Gallows Dance, President Stoneback, wants an ending where the villains win, so he was trying to influence the original author to write such an ending to the sequel, eventually leading her to jump from her balcony. His next tactic, on seeing how the "loop" of the story going round and round again was being slightly changed by the creations of fanfiction, was to try and recruit the fanfic writer "AnimeAlice" to write a pro-Gem sequel, and ended up pulling in the entire group by mistake. They then had to complete the story in order to get home.
The next one in the series picks up the year after the end of The Fandom. Alice and Violet have written the sequel, but it's not the one President Stoneback wanted. Violet's brother Nate, shot by the president's nephew in the fandom world and stuck in a coma for a year in the regular world, is about to have his life support switched off, so Violet and Katie try to get themselves sent back to Gallows Dance canon to bring him home. Alice, stuck in the regular world, discovers that some rogue writer called Fanboy is writing the pro-Gem uprising that Stoneback originally wanted, so she then has to try and rescue things from here.
Without revealing too many spoilers, including the identity of Fanboy, I will say that a dispute running through the second book about whether to write another sequel is resolved when Alice and Violet decide to give the characters over to the fandom: they set up their own fansite where anyone can contribute, where writing about all characters is welcome, and anyone trying another Fanboy stunt will be removed.
And much as I think there is scope for more (I personally would have liked to see the characters of Ash and Nate get more of a voice, and I know how I would personally do that), I do like the idea of giving it to the fandom. I like the way that all characters are welcome, and if someone does want to give the villains a happy ending they can. Anyone who knows me at all well knows how much I love to write any possible character, especially those who don't get much fandom attention. I've said before that Ben Linus from Lost would have likely recruited me for a pro Others fic, and I would have happily worked for him because I did feel that the Others had so much untapped potential. Instead of main character PWP, I was fleshing out their backstories. And the message at the end of The Fandom Rising was that it's not only okay, but encouraged, to be That Writer, the one who spends time on minor characters, the one who sometimes lets the villains win.