Fandom Snowflake 01 - What are you doing here?

[silveradept]

In your own space, talk about why you are doing the Fandom Snowflake Challenge? What drew you to it as a participant? What do you hope to accomplish by doing these challenges?

I'm not exactly forthcoming with fannish glee about shows, movies, media, games, and the like, at least in my own space. I'll link to others doing it, and I will post in comment sections with my own thoughts about things. My most visible fan project right now is giving The Dragonriders of Pern a lot of grief for what it wrote and the society it created. I am the Suck Fairy, in that case, and in other places, I moderate and speculate, and occasionally write short fixfic, I guess. (Twilight annoyed me for a lot of reasons. At least I could provide some insight on why the baseball was handled poorly.)

I do not fic, really. Or vid, art, podcast, mix, spin, or really do anything that constitutes the bulk of fannish expression. I don't have an AO3 account. I am an essayist hanging out in meta land, and for that, it doesn't always feel like I'm part of fandom.

I also haven't done a whole lot of writing code, although I use and adapt programs and scripts all the time for my own nefarious purposes. Even on Dreamwidth, I'm better suited to the task of working with documentation than in coding. (Unsurprisingly, my signature achievement for my career this far is the creation of a new hire documentation manual, after I got fed up with the lack of one and decided it would be better to smooth the path of those that come after. Why yes, I am a Hufflepuff, which sidelines me from most of the action of Harry Potter, too, because it's a story about Gryffindors.) So I don't necessarily feel like I'm part of the projects because I'm a user or a documentation person, not a coder. (I totally enjoyed Open Source Bridge because they explicitly make room for people who don't code to show off things.)

You can sense a pattern here - of course, the Snowflake explicitly days everybody is welcome, but reading a few a Yuletide gifts has helped remind me of the breath of fandom, and so maybe this will work out. If not, there are more than a few people who are participating that I'll get to see the responses of, so that should be fun of itself - fandom is vast and contains multitudes, so seeing someone else's interpretation should be quite the fun time.

And maybe I'll find that fannish voice ready to express in some other form.

Comments

[azurelunatic]

Documentation is great! Hufflepuffs are awesome, and if there were no Hufflepuffs, Ravenclaws would die an ignominious death from any number of household accidents involving lack of cleanliness, avalanches of stuff, or attempting to use something dangerous that has no manual. Or simple infighting with no moderation...

[silveradept]

These are all true things, especially the last. It gets a bit tough, though, when you see credit tending to accrue to Slytherins and Gryffindors for work that you know had Hufflepuff involvement.

[azurelunatic]

I have a rant, which I have been honing and polishing because it is increasingly relevant to me on a personal level, about the type of infrastructural support work which certain corporate policies are treating as interchangeable labor, when actually it is not. Maybe some places it is. Those places sound very boring (although perhaps that's a feature).

[silveradept]

It is likely a feature of those places to be interchangeable. And those places are often soul-suckingly boring for persons doing that kind of work.

I look forward to hearing that rant, because I suspect that it will have immediate relevance in many places.

[akamine_chan]

I just want to point out how Snowflake defines the word fanwork:

For the purposes of this challenge, fanwork means all forms of creativity. From meta to fic writing to picspamming to hosting a comment-fic-meme to running a challenge, to vidding and podficcing and reccing and pretty much anything you can think of. Crafts, knitted items, repurposed rubber duckies, finger puppets. Promo posts. Guides to timelines, tattoos, quotes, nit-picky canon guides, episode recaps, synopsis (synopsi?). Creating gifsets. Concert write-ups. Filking. If you think it's creative, if it took your time and energy and emotion to create, then it definitely fits under the heading "fanwork."

Critical analyses of pop culture definitely falls under my definition of fanwork. :D

Also, interested in your giving-of-grief to the Pern books. Loved them as a teenager in the 80's, can't stomach them now as a cognizant feminist. I feel that way about a lot of things that bb!me loved, and trying to figure out a way to reconcile those feelings. :(

[silveradept]

The statement is the reason I decided that participation was a thing I could do, since it talked about meta and less popular forms of fanwork.

If you'd like to join the romp on Pern, the whole tag is available at The Slacktiverse Pern Deconstruction Tag - I just started with Moreta, after all of the first trilogy, Harper Hall, and a couple short stories. You'll fit right in with the other commenters, many of whom are also working with "I liked this better when I was younger."

[akamine_chan]

Oh, just skimmed through the essay and wow, bookmarked the site so fast. Won't have time to read or participate until after the Snowflake Challenge, but wow. Yes.

[azurelunatic]

I will always love and honor Pern for the joy it gave me as a teenager and the things it introduced me to.

This does not mean that I am going to necessarily pass them down to my little fish.

It does mean, perhaps, that if I get book-bunnied by something that fills the same niche, I should answer the call.

[momijizukamori]

Technical writers of any sort are the unsung heroes of this century, seriously. They're taken for granted until you come across some OSS project with like no docs and end up staring blankly at the one sentence of install "instructions".

[silveradept]

A situation I have not yet had the pleasure of dealing with, but there have been some things that have had clearly insufficient documentation and that had to be supplemented with search engine work to get the thing to actually do what it is supposed to.

Docs are good things - they make projects look like they want to be used.