Fandom Snowflake 2021 #13: It is a well-known truth that a properly-resourced fandom...

Challenge 13 asks us to provide at least three resources for fans, whether generally or for a specific fandom, with the option of less if the fandom itself is pretty small.

Supplementary resources help fandom go, especially for those times when you want to look up a detail, rewatch a specific clip or reread a specific quotable passage, or to dive hard into the meta so as to construct a plausible reason why your story will work and the characters are behaving appropriately. A lot of these resources have the curative side of fandom to thank, as they are the people with all of the materials so they can add all those thrilling details. And for big, long-running shows, those databases are a thing all by themselves to have to wrangle.

I'm going to aim for more general than specific resources, mostly because that profound multifannishness is something that keeps me from getting too far into the wickets in any one direction.

1. I'm going to start by recommending TVTropes as a general fandom resource. I understand there are some objections to the idea of trope language, seeing it as reductive and flattening the craft of language and the specific choices made in the service of categorization and occasionally trying to fit multifaceted prism pegs intro a singular space. I also know there are whole-hearted enthusiasts who talk pretty significantly in terms of tropes as a way of shorthand explanation about what they like or dislike about a work, a character, or some other aspect of fandom.
   
   I personally see TVtropes as filling the roles of the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index and the Motif-Index of Folk Literature for fandom and canons. Like any kind of classification system, there are always going to be things that don't fit nicely, that could be filed in multiple places, depending on how you look at it, and disagreements assembly which parts are important, or which parts even apply. There's also the discussion about whether it's a good idea to attach morality, ethics, or value judgment to tropes themselves or whether to confine those judgments to the use of troops and the skill involved. I tend to follow Tropes Are Not Good, Tropes Are Not Bad, Tropes Are Tools and say that any judgment on the execution of a trope (or variations thereof) should be confined to the instance or the author of said instance, if it's a pattern for them.


2. I wouldn't be an information professional if I didn't mention that the Archive Of Our Own's search features are very robust, with a great many operators that aren't obviously exposed, although I understand why people use browser extensions like AO3 Savior for their experience so as to make their search preferences stick rather than having to reinput them every time. That said, learning how to make AO3 Search dance like a marionette is going to take some time and doing, and so I recommend to you melannen's 2019 post on getting more out of AO3's search as a great place to start, and not just because there's a nice breakdown of the URL components so that you can build/tweak a search to your liking and then bookmark the results so you get what you want (within the limits of what AO3 accepts as operators and values). I'll note that if you are enthused about the way that AO3 exposes so many ways of searching and refining, that a lot of search engines also have operators that you can use on them to perform similar tricks. The good ones will have documentation on how to use the operators and what syntax they are expecting.


3. There are some communities around, even as we worry about the lack of community activity. fandomcalendar, for example, is a place to put your exchange events, or any other events where you'd like 0articipation. And there are more than a few ongoing challenges like getyourwordsout or the land communities or other things that you may want or not want, based on what they're offering. I guess the last resource I have to offer is something more like advice about using Dreamwidth. Finding community on Dreamwidth involves a lot of looking, following rabbit holes when they appear, and interacting in many different spaces before there's enough content on your reading page to have a healthy scroll. It's curation by hand (or the Web equivalent thereof), rather than by algorithm, tag following, or push notification. It can feel charmingly quaint or frustratingly old-fashioned, a relic of the time before suggestions were being made by machines about humans. The show, effortful, intentional building of your own network is a feature, not a bug, because Dreamwidth is built on the idea that you are in control. Not the algorithm, not the tag spam, not the advertisers. You get to decide who you follow and how much access those who follow you get. It takes longer and it often means you will be generating content, too, and having conversations, but ultimately, I think the satisfaction of having tuned your reading list to such personal precision will make all the effort that goes into it seem worthwhile.
   
   Stick with the process, and the results will be excellent, if not as swift as we might like.