Snowflake Challenge 2022 #4: More than Life, More than Jewels

[silveradept]

This time, in memory of the late Stephen Sondheim, rather than as tribute to him:

In your own space, make a list of things that you wish existed in fandom or elsewhere, and/or that you'd like someone to create or do for you. […]

A general guideline might be a list of three things, or one to ten things, but it can really be any number or length you want.

Your wish list items can be anything: a request for fanworks (art of your original character, podfic of your favourite story, a mood board of your AU idea, fic based on your art, someone to adopt that darn plotbunny), or for a some help with a project (cheerleader, beta reader, accountability buddy, someone to co-mod a challenge), or maybe you want recs for new canons or fic with just the right trope, or specific information about that one area you're having trouble researching.

(Note: If you would like artwork or podfic, please include a link to your story/podfic/fanmix. If you've requested podfic for someone else's work, ditto, and also make sure they've posted a permission statement. If you’ve requested icons or other artwork it’s helpful if you can link to screencaps or image galleries.)

[…]If you end up granting someone's wish, consider posting a link here, and maybe add it to our AO3 collection.

I wish…

• …for people to understand that in the non-Disney version of Into The Woods, the story only really goes off the rails when the Narrator gets sacrificed to the Giantess. Not coincidentally, it's also the point where the characters have irrevocably screwed themselves out of a true happy ending. (I'm rather salty that the Disney version chose to cut that character out of their adaptation, despite the Narrator being critical to the plot.) The people who are telling you the truth and the likely consequences of actions are to be cherished and protected, rather than scapegoated because we don't like the story they're telling us. In a similar vein…


• …that people who look like me understood better what Red meant when she said "Nice is different than good." (Mostly in the context of "Do not put your faith / In a cape and a hood, / They will not protect you / The way that they should.") Nice is still the default mode of a lot of interactions, and weaponization of Nice often happens to the detriment of Good (which can take plenty of forms other than tone policing), sometimes with documentation of how it happens. There is progress as much as there is backlash, but there's more we can do to listen for Good, even if it comes from someone who has decided they're done with Nice. (And especially if the capes and hoods have been called to quiet or attack the person who isn't playing Nice sufficiently.)


• I usually say this every year, but it still applies: Peace on Earth, Good Will Toward Fen. From my vantage point as a Great Old One, I'm seeing the return of the ship wars, but instead of the stakes being about who was more suited for someone else, or the endless jockeying to see which ship would become the endgame ship, I'm seeing a lot more of "this ship/trope/kink is problematic for me / distasteful to me, and therefore it is globally problematic / distasteful." The first part of the sentence is fine, and generally useful to have in the fannish space. Being fans, and especially transformative fans, means engaging with the material and making conscious decisions for yourself about the suitability of a thing for you. And it's a great public service announcement when you say what you liked and didn't like about a work, since it allows others to have more information about making their decisions to either consume or not consume a work. It's the jump from "not for me" to "not for anyone" that I tend to get shirty about, because that's historically a phrase used when someone wants to censor the existence of another group or an alternative to their way of thinking. (And currently in use by people who want to censor materials out of libraries and schools that disagree with their very specific partisan beliefs.) If the Discourse blanket-labels everything outside the values of the current majority as Problematic, then we've lost a lot of the power that media and fandom has to get us to step outside our own experiences and consider things from different points of view. (Especially looking at you, spec fic.) There's no blanket or universal pathway to follow on knowing when sometimes being a jerk and when they're being ignorant, unfortunately, and sometimes milkshake duck turns out to be a racist. (And sometimes Jean the Cat turns out to be all for worker unionization and solidarity.)
  
  Maybe it's something about the mystique of the old Web that calls to me, an amber or green tint to my lenses, but it seems like one of the things that was true and isn't any more (because now everyone is on the Web in some capacity, including Racist Uncle Davey and Homophobic Aunt Caroline and your TERFy friend Joanne) was a shared underlying agreement that "we're all weird here" and that there was space for everyone to be weird without it spilling over into someone else's place. Now, with algorithms designed for "engagement" that are deliberately crossing the streams, it seems like factionalism and feeling under siege are the norms. Which leads to strong stances and shibboleths and a lot of the exploration that used to be doable pseudonymously in relative public getting pushed into private spaces that are more likely to echo the shadow play than publicly instruct and explain.
  
  So, again: Peace on Earth, Good Will Towards Fen. (At least, the ones that haven't demonstrated already that they don't deserve your goodwill. Throw fascists, racists, TERFs, authoritarians, and their allies out of bars and libraries alike, but don't follow them to the parking lot to try and terminate their lives.)

Which are lofty goals. And sort of generally fannish and abstract. I know people also like having more concrete wishes to mull and consider, if they have the capacity to do so.

• Permissions statements were mentioned above. If you have one, and you didn't do housekeeping on it for challenge number one, why not check to make sure it's still what you want? Things may have changed since you last looked at it. If you don't have one, please consider making one. It doesn't have to be a statement granting permissions, it can be one revoking them or indicating that you don't want others to remix your work, record it, or otherwise transform it. That's okay, and while there might be a little sadness at not getting to adapt something or remix it, that sadness will be infinitely smaller than the person who did all that work, only to find out that it wasn't wanted or desired. It's okay to say no, honestly.


• Even though I have permissions statements in places, I'm open to remixes, fanarts, podficcing, and other transformations of my works on AO3. Or, for that matter, if they're easily findable, any of the written or unwritten prompt ideas that I've had for the many exchanges I've signed up for. They haven't happened all that often, because creative output still takes time and energy, and in this day and age, time and energy are being actively nommed by just about everything related to mere existence. But if someone wanted to do it, it would be cool.


• I know that I'm comfortable being out in the weird places of the Internet (after all, I'm here on this LiveJournal clone and have been for years), and I'm probably not going to leave my presences on various corporate-owned social media sites, but I'm curious about finding a good spot to call home on the Fediverse, likely on a microblogging space rather than a long-form one for my professional self (as Dreamwidth more than suits my long-form needs) and possibly for my less professional self. I'm basically stuck trying to evaluate all the options of everything available, both of services and of instances. If there's someone who can help cut through the choices or ask some useful questions or make recommendations of their own instances and the services they use, that would be helpful. (Entirely separate from that, I think I know why most IT departments would laugh at a suggestion I'm thinking of regarding getting people away from the walled gardens and toward the Fediverse, but having the perspective of other people rubber ducking with me and providing me other problems that I will have to think of clever solutions to would be excellent. Mostly, I'll be trying to package it up as a proposal to be laughed at or a conference talk to be given, but perspective is helpful.)


• I also wish for you to have a year where great things happen without requiring you to burn through your energy reserves for it. The kinds of things where you can let go, without guilt, things that aren't going to happen for you, or where you find enough time to complete the things that are important to you without having that time wrenched away by emergency, disaster, or imperious people around you. I wish for you to have the permission slip that allows you to get out of anything that is harmful to you and to engage in the things that are joyful, restful, and rejuvenating to you.

And happily ever after. (I wish.)

Comments

[sodium_amytal]

a shared underlying agreement that "we're all weird here" and that there was space for everyone to be weird without it spilling over into someone else's place. Now, with algorithms designed for "engagement" that are deliberately crossing the streams, it seems like factionalism and feeling under siege are the norms.
So true. I feel like the corporatization of online spaces helped sanitize everything, because website owners don't want weird porn being the face of their site, and advertisers don't want to be associated with anything that isn't clean and sanitized.

But the internet just *growing* helped too. Before, the internet was a playground for weird people, because only weird people were interested in using computers and talking to strangers through a screen and a keyboard. But now everyone is online, and the normies probably outnumber the weirdos. Since the normies are the driving financial force behind the internet, sites will cater to them and kick people like us out. Or at least create so many restrictions for us that staying on those spaces would be pointless.

I wish for you to have the permission slip that allows you to get out of anything that is harmful to you and to engage in the things that are joyful, restful, and rejuvenating to you.

Thank you :D

[silveradept]

Yeah. Corporatization and the volume of people coming online definitely made the web into much less of a weird space and much more like the spaces the weird were fleeing. Even then, it would have still been possible to coexist, even if the weird spaces weren't getting any of the dollars because the advertisers wanted a fantasy that online was clean and sanitized for everyone. But then the money from the advertisers wasn't enough, and now they needed to drive engagement to serve more ads, and that was the spot where I think war got declared, because they figured out that the more you show someone another person being Wrong On The Internet, the more energy and time they'll spend trying to fight them or to get them banned.

[muccamukk]

Thanks for mentioning that "You don't have permission" is still a permission statement. I always forget to do that.

I also wish for you to have a year where great things happen without requiring you to burn through your energy reserves for it.
💖🧡💛💚💙💜

[silveradept]

I would like for people to be okay with many of the transformative works of works, just to have a bigger pool to play in, but if someone doesn't want it, I want them to be able to say no and have it respected, too.

[tjs_whatnot]

I also wish for you to have a year where great things happen without requiring you to burn through your energy reserves for it. The kinds of things where you can let go, without guilt, things that aren't going to happen for you, or where you find enough time to complete the things that are important to you without having that time wrenched away by emergency, disaster, or imperious people around you. I wish for you to have the permission slip that allows you to get out of anything that is harmful to you and to engage in the things that are joyful, restful, and rejuvenating to you.

I COULDN'T LOVE YOU MORE IF I TRIED! Thank you for this! ♥ ♥

[silveradept]

It seems like something that people were wishing for themselves, in more or less explicit manners.

[corvidology]

It's the jump from "not for me" to "not for anyone" that I tend to get shirty about, because that's historically a phrase used when someone wants to censor the existence of another group or an alternative to their way of thinking. THIS, just this everywhere.

I can't imagine how much energy it must take to run other people's lives.

[silveradept]

For them, I think the energy expenditure they're confused about is why we spend so much time and energy resisting their inherently superior way of living our lives.

[anonne]

a shared underlying agreement that "we're all weird here" – yes this. I miss this. Maybe I’m naive but I feel like DW at least is a place where that understanding still seems to be present, to at least some extent, and I’m grateful for that.

[silveradept]

It's certainly more like to be true on Dreamwidth than many other places, if for no other reason than not taking advertising dollars and managing to stay in business for as long as we have.

[azurelunatic]

(It helps that the owners are weird.)