Chat: Comms and Challenges

[de_nugis]

[I had some kind of brain glitch and thought this was chat week, when it should have been last week. Better late than never, though!]

Moving back to fandom for March, tell us about your favorite comms and challenges in the fandom. Specialized comms for smaller ships or secondary characters (did you know there is a Kevin comm? spn_kevin), reccing comms

Comments

[tabaqui]

Well, i just gained five new comms on my flist. :)

I thought this comm was very cool: spnnightcrawler It groups up spn and j2 fics by catagory - vampire fic, werewolf fic, etc. It says it's still active, so people should definitely check it out and rec fic! There's also spn_au.

Favorite challenges..... spn_summergen - it's always good to flex those non-porn muscles. : ) And the spn_reversebang. And the kamikazeremix and the < lj user="apocabigbang"> . All of those have been amazing challenges to write for, and have produced amazing fic and art.

I...don't have a suggestion for a comm or challenge - I think at the moment I'm content. :)

[de_nugis]

It's nice to be content!

I'd never heard of the nightcrawler comm; I'll have to check it out.

I love the reversebang, too. I think one of the positive developments of the couple of years in this fandom is that there has been more integration of art and fic and more variations on established ways of relating them. The inclusion of art in kamikazeremix was also a cool development.

[tabaqui]

Yes! For a while art and fic were really divorced, almost like two separate fandoms.

[rince1wind]

I embarrassed to ask this, but could you explain how those coms ( or is it challenges? ) that have rounds work? I can't seem to figure it out. Also -- what is a tagging fic?

[de_nugis]

The two are related! You could have a look at salt_burn_porn, since that one is running right now. For each round, people sign up to participate. A mod tags the first person, and they have 24 hours to write a fic. When they post their fic, they choose someone from the list of participants and tag them with a prompt, and then it's that person's turn and they have 24 hours and so it goes on. So, tagging in the sense of playing tag, not in the sense of tagging for LJ etc entries.

[rince1wind]

Thanks! That was exactly where I was confused.

[monicawoe]

except that instead of writing individual fics participants would take turns contributing fic or art continuations to a single round robin fanwork.)
That sounds absolutely awesome!

Tabaqui listed two of my favorite challenge-comms already, but I also love spnspringfling and sammessiah. The latter is a comm for all things powers!Sam, but mostly active lately for the Antichrist-mas exchange which comes around every year for Sam's b-day. (my icon is a gift I received one year from said exchange made by Dauntdraws

[de_nugis]

I do like the idea of a round robin challenge, but it would be really difficult to set rules for (would we allow pairings? would we allow AU from canon? would we forbid people getting around sections of the fic as it came to them with "ha, it was all a djinn dream"?). Still, maybe I will think about it for the distant future when the big bang posting is dying down for the summer.

I love springfling. And sammessiah is one of those great niche challenges.

[zempasuchil]

I am only as active in lj-land to know of these comms and challenges you talk about yet no more, but I have to chime in - a round robin fanwork circle would be wonderful! I've run one before in rl, not fannish, but like a round of telephone-pictionary, alternating text and art. It is one of my favorite things to do and oh my gosh, would I ever get involved with it.

[de_nugis]

I think it could be fun, though very daunting to work out the rules and details for!

[zempasuchil]

Hmmm, I guess the hardest part of the rules would be what to do when someone doesn't meet the deadline, because the project would have to keep moving. So that would take some modly action. Otherwise, to have each person start with a prompt, and then pass it in an email circle every week, responding with whatever genre of thing they wish, either made like fic or art, or found like a song... Anyway, I think it's doable. I am gonna go look through the other responses to your post to see if other people expressed interest :)

[de_nugis]

The salt_burn_porn type challenges do OK with the passing on the prompt when someone just doesn't post -- I think that works better if you do it on a comm like that than in an e-mail circle. I like the idea of having it be like Doctor Who in the old half hour days, ending with mini cliffhangers, so that the place where the person before you broke off would function as a prompt. I'm more worried about how difficult it might be to get people to agree on things like shipping rules, how AU we wanted to be able to go, etc.

[citrusjava]

I rec j2-nonau cause while I enjoy the occasional Muppet pirate Jared or dragon Jensen, I'm always looking for more good non-au.

As for what I'd like to have - I really miss having a fandom place to just talk fandom. A place to go after every episode (but not only), to share in the experience, come up with story ideas, characters, meta, and to just generally squee with people. I miss the brainstorming and community aspects of fandom. I like reading and writing individual episode reactions, but I would love a place to interact with people about specific ideas, looks, scenes, twists and so forth. There is so much to talk about.

[de_nugis]

There are quite a lot of specialized places to have fandom discussions, but they do tend to organize officially or unofficially around specific interests. It's especially hard now when fandom is so fragmented among platforms as well as by the usual differences in focus -- I get the feeling that a lot of the free-wheeling squee nowadays is happening on Tumblr, but by all accounts it's much harder to have sustained conversations there than here.

[citrusjava]

Thanks :)

I'm still figuring all of this out. It's odd to have been in the fandom for months and still not know such things.
I agree, it's hard to keep track and find people to share this with, when fandom is so fragmented. I think I opened an account on pretty much every platform, trying to keep up, though I don't use most of them :)
At least people seem to be out there, it's not a rare thing.

Most of the communities and places I've found for SPN don't really include discussion, mostly products (fic, art, recs, gifs) or challenges. If any place comes to mind where there's more of a discussion, I'd really love that. I'd love to have a place to discuss meta, character analysis, writing... I don't know whether it matters, but I ship Dean/Sam and J2, both in yummy slashy ways and awesome asexual ways :)