Fandom Snowflake 2021 #8: The Cow as White as Milk, The Cape as Red As Blood...

(Every time this challenge comes around, Sondheim starts playing in my head. I'm resigned to this.)

Challenge #8 tells us to say "I wish…" and compile a list of things we wish. Between one and ten makes a good list, and most of the suggestions are things for fandom sorts of things.

(Once Upon A Time, in a far-off kingdom, lived a middling ficcer…)

Asking for things for yourself is often hard, especially when you've been socialized to give, and give, and give, and that the entirety of your identity requires you to subsume yourself and submit to someone else's desires and wishes, or you're behaving improperly. (There's a fixed version of the Giving Tree where the tree asserts healthy boundaries.) There's also a certain type of brainweasel that wants to attach all sorts of wrong ideas that appeal to them to whether or not anyone actually fulfills a wish, or suggests asking small things because those are the things that someone might deign to do, and all that you are worthy of having. There's a lot of negative talk, self or otherwise, around saying what you want without qualifications or preemptively trying to minimize yourself or your request.

(The woods are just trees. The trees are just wood.)

Maybe it's a sign of recovery or returning toward equilibrium that there are some things that actually come to mind as things I might wish for, fannishly, rather than spending a lot of time wondering whether it's even worth it to post something. Maybe it's that 02020, including the overtime period that we're in, has been harsh and terrible to everyone, and making a wish for something that will help take the edge off, even if only for a little bit, is much easier to do.

Things that I would wish for:

1. Transformative works (and feedback) would be lovely.
   
   I got a podfic of my Trick-or-Treat from 2019 this past year, and it was very nice to hear. Fanart of works or scenes in works would be neat, and podfic, or animatics or music videos or moodboards and such are also things that I think I would cherish and desire, mostly because I have trouble conceiving of the idea that people would like my stuff that well to do it.
   
   I realize, though, that creating art and podfic, or remixing or deriving works or creating a universe and other such things is something that takes time, effort, and dedication, and this past year has been a terrible sap on everyone's creativity, effort, and time. And I'm sure I'm not the only one who would like such things, and likely also not the only person who has put up a statement somewhere about what their transformative works policy is, so I suspect if you are in the mood for transformative works, you will have all sorts of choices to put your effort toward. So, barring that, I appreciate feedback on my efforts. You can find them all at silveradept, and frankly, because it's almost all exchange fic, there's a very long tail of possible fandoms you might find a useful work in.


2. I wish people could be more open about the things they were interested in.
   
   Which is a weird thing to say about fandom, right? We're the people waving the shipping banners from the rooftops, decorating the hotels when convention comes around so as to unmistakably say "We're here!" and otherwise making it clear in all of our spaces how much we are engaged with our canons and our fandoms.
   
   Except…not. For as much as the Geek Social Hierarchy is supposed to be a joke, or at least something to laugh at when you get the wider perspective of "the rest of the world just thinks you're a geek and will make fun of you accordingly," there's a lot of minefields to navigate in fandom, many of which, like their real-world counterparts, should be cleaned up so they stop harming people who step into them. I wish I had something more concrete to offer than "we know when someone is being shitty to someone else for bullshit reasons versus when they're making a sincere effort to raise awareness about something," but I feel like fen who have been around long enough, and have done the work to listen and educate themselves, can tell the difference between the two (much of the time, anyway, or at the very least not to dismiss someone saying a true thing out of hand), and it's a responsible thing to do, as fen, to not let people being shitty for bullshit reasons get a foothold or a following on the matter. The World Wide Web is much more tightly linked together than it was when I was smaller, and there's a lot of it built around the idea that you only ever should have one pseud (if they even allow pseuds) for everything you do, good and bad, so that your entire record can easily be scraped and scrutinized. Usually for advertising purposes. It's a little "fandom old yells at people" of me, but the speed at which someone can summon a brigade to harass someone until they leave is alarming, and it seems to be, more often than not, that the people with the biggest and fastest brigades are the people who are the shittiest people with the most bullshit reasons.
   
   So this wish isn't about "civility" or "neutrality" or "tone" or anything like that. It's a wish to metaphorically, or physically, punch the fascists in the face, ban their asses from any spaces you have control over, and generally lay about with your Aurora-class brickzooka in the service of making the space better so that more voices (and especially more marginalized voices) can be more open about the things they are interested in, whether it's about how cute that couple looks together on screen or that the general pattern of a particular author's works is "anything that doesn't look like me and believe exactly as I do is Evil and must be destroyed."


3. I wish to feel like less of an outsider.
   
   I kind of missed the part where Fandom got online, augmenting their zines and small press options with web sites, web rings, listservs, and eventually, the Archive of Our Own. While events like Strikethrough happened and I noticed them and commented on them (how could I not?), I don't think I really made it to Fandom until well after everything had settled in, and now I was interacting with a group that had known each other since I got online, but had been in different circles than the ones that I had been hanging out in. I missed out on a lot of fannish history. (Obversely, I missed out on a lot of fannish drama.) And, by at least some standards of Fandom, I'm already too old to be here and need to go so I stop polluting their space. It feels like, even with my successes, that I'm still speaking Fandom as a second language and hoping that my accent doesn't come through too much. Some of that is probably because I'm making deliberate choices about which sites I maintain a presence on, and many of the choices I'm making are against turning on the firehose or not engaging on platforms that don't have the kind of curation tools that I want to have, even if those tools could be provided with some browser add-ons.
   
   I suppose some of it is that, like everyone else, I miss the communities that I joined when I was smaller, but they have gone, and there hasn't really been anything that provides that feeling of community or communities any more. Things change, and so have I. But I feel like I lack the origin story, of coming online and finding My People and building all of that together into something, even if we eventually drifted apart and only some of us stay in contact. I look at the stories contained in things like The Internet Girlfriend Club, and while I can understand them, I don't have that visceral sense of relating to them, as if these are my own stories being echoed back to me through other people's experiences. And so, I feel, still, like I'm on the outside, looking in.


4. I wish, practically, for baking projects that can be done with smalls, ages 6-10, that don't require ingredients or tools outside of what would be affordable at the local Western grocery market, and that can be accomplished from startup to finished project in an hour or less.
   
   Even after the pandemic lifts and we start doing programming in person again, I will probably argue a bit for the idea of continuing at least some of the virtual programming that we've started, including some regular times in the kitchen where smalls can learn how to make stuff (with grownups, of course, helping out, either in the frame or just outside of it). Plus, it turns out these recipes, and doing them on camera for smalls, are really helping me build my own confidence about being able to follow cooking and baking directions and turn out things that taste good.


5. And finally, I wish, (more than life, more than anything, more than jewels, more than the moon) that if you are a person who has influence over some part of your world, that you use that influence to enrich all of us, to build a more sustainable world, and that, even if it is in only a small space of existence, that things become better for everyone because you were there.