Snowflake Challenge #8: Victory Fanfare
Jan. 15th, 2022 03:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptChallenge #8 asks us to remember the parts of the last year where victory was achieved.
The additional text from today's leader has some suggestions on where a win might be found.
Talking well about ourselves seems to be a common obstacle for creators, fannish or otherwise. In previous iterations, I might have talked about the general societal disdain for nerdery, geekery, and fannishness as being over-involved in fictional properties or forsaking living in the real world in favor of fictional ones. (In Beauty and the Beast (1991), think Gaston's (and the rest of the village's) attitude towards Belle's habits of reading books and understanding machines instead of trying to capture herself a husband that will provide for her.) As much as we'd be able to immediately point to the Sports fandom or the Outdoorsman fandom or the Bootstraps! fandom, or any other such activities and point out how highly gendered the line between "normal" and "you" is, the point never really sank in. "Appropriately" manly/masculine fandoms are respectable hobbies and not weird obsessions, but books and certain media properties are very feminine, and the transformative work is extremely feminized and queered, because "normal" people (men) don't look at two action dudes and wonder if they would make a cute couple. Being proud of what you did in fandom was waving the flag that you were weird and that you accepted whatever consequences came to you from anyone who wanted you to become normal again (usually by doing whatever it took to shove you firmly back into the fandom closet).
That landscape has changed, somewhat. Marketing and media companies have openly leaned into trying to create the kind of fans who would stay engaged with a property all throughout its run. It's no longer a badge of shame for a published author of a creator to talk about their fannish origins or the occasional forays they make into fandom (that is not their own, usually. It's really only after a thing is complete that creators sometimes join their fans and do things that they could not do in the actual canon itself.) And, several of the more litigious creators are no longer with us, with the hope that the people who have inherited their IP will be cool about fanworks and not specifically go looking for things to sue. So it's less of an issue to be a fan, and it's easier than ever to find a community for your fandom and your way of doing fandom.
Well, almost. As seems to be the case with most technological advances, the technology that makes it easier to find your kin also makes it easier for your opposition to do the same, and the technology that powers the monetary systems of the Internet had an extremely better interest in delivering your opposition to your front door and putting all of their terrible actions in front of you. And as much as people of my age and fandom experiences refer to it as the resurgence of the ship wars, there's enough about it that's different and reflects the passage of time and the advancement of the vocabulary and understanding of the underlying concepts. Rarely do I see this conflict playing or about who the potential options are and who is the best match for a given character, which seemed to be a primary catalyst for the shop wars of an earlier time. Now the focus seems to be on whether or not any given relationship or character fits within a fairly tightly bounded box of acceptable morality, (This is still profoundly weird to me, as fandom has always been the place that escaped the strictures of what could be shown on broadcast television, in movie theaters, or printed in books and magazines, always assuming to be more expansive in outlook than the limited perspective down in our canons.) Fictional creations are being tied more closely to their creations, which produces presumptions of abandoning a work because the creator turned out to be terrible, rather than being able to take the things that were good (and fix the things that aren't) in the creation without it reflecting as an endorsement of the creator. (So much of fandom has been about acknowledging and trying to fix the flaws of the things we enjoyed, as well as doing more of the things were like. Or so I've believed.)
This change in the temperature of the fandom seems brought on partially by the influx of new people into being part of the fandom, which brings new perspectives and viewpoints that were missing, but it also seems driven by the wider conflicts of reckoning and the backlash to it. As much as there is a narrative pushed that the "woke mob" awaits around every corner looking for the slightest slip-up to descend in a maenadic frenzy of cancellation, there's much more action and threats being leveled from the side that doesn't want to acknowledge that queer people exist, that teenagers need space to explore their own identities, that children understand gender (their own and others') long before they enter formal schooling, that even their own processed religions talk about how hoarding wealth and taking people unfairly is something the Deity does not approve of, and that most nations have a history of colonization, subjugation, and ill treatment of other people, among other things. The way of the world is changing, and the people most opposed to that change are the ones most audibly concerned that young people are being taught something different, something that might pass judgment on them as being ignorant as best and immoral in all other circumstances. They want all spaces, and especially those spaces for young people, sanitized so that there are no other ways presented (or presentable) but theirs in the desperate hope to keep fandom contained until they fully internalize those messages. (It won't work, but they'll try everything they can until there are no more avenues to try.)
So, I suspect this time around, the reluctance to speak well of oneself is the worry that showcasing the Weird that is your very best self will being forth the hordes opposed to you to attack until they are satisfied you won't ever be Weird in public again.
Give it a try anyway? For the sake of one weirdo with a brain that tends to believe keeping status quo is nothing with celebrating?
Because the status quo is my big accomplishment for the last year. 100k of fiction is slightly above my average, actually, which seems to hover in the 70k-90k range annually. I did two auction thanks pieces last year instead of one, which was still two more pieces than I expected to do last year. And 2021 was the year that I finished the full read-through and snark/meta/analysis of all the published official Pern stories to that point. Which was a multi-year weekly project that I wasn't sure I was going to finish when I started. (And, having taken it apart and looked at the internals, and talked about the shortcomings of the place, I have a much firmer idea of the version that I'd like to write when fannish ideas come around.)
Last year was also a pretty She-Ra heavy year. I think it became my "big fandom in case of nothing else" escape valve. It was really enjoyable to write all those variations on the themes, but there was a lot of it.
I'm thinking about that last sentence, about being the right person in the right place at the right time, because, other than comments on fic, I never know if it's went well, and I'm not likely to be the singular, spoils all subsequent fic, this is perfect person for anytime. But last year was definitely a year for the weird when it came to which prompts turned up in the exchanges. "Don't offer anything you're not willing to write" is one of my rules for exchanges, and sometimes that means figuring out a plausible Hermione/Jareth, and sometimes it means writing explicit smut between Galahad, Zoot, and Dingo for the Python version of the quest for the Holy Grail. I'm proud of having managed to deliver on those ideas, and all the other weird ones that came through for me in that regard.
So. What went well for you in the last year?
In your own space, celebrate a personal win from the past year: it can be a list of fanworks you're especially proud of, a gift of your time to the community, a quality or skill you cultivated in yourself, something you generally feel went well.
The additional text from today's leader has some suggestions on where a win might be found.
[…]the general idea is to look back on the year (I know, even 2021) and think, "Hey, I'm actually glad for/happy about/proud of/pleased with how that one thing/list of things went." But more or less grammatically, as suits your needs.
Some starter ideas might be: "a list of three or more fanworks I'm especially proud of!" (the definition of fanworks including: meta, fic, icons, podfic, knitting projects, vids, graphics, AO3 skins, finger paintings, and anything else that strikes your fancy), or "I participated in the community in these ways!" (e.g.: left comments, helped mod, beta read, picked up pinch hits, et cetera), or "I worked on this skill, and am pleased with how it went!" (like: drawing hands that finally look like hands, improving pacing of soggy middle acts, making sharper vid cuts, organising meta more clearly).
It could also be a quality that you like about yourself that you felt got to really shine this year, like compassion and friendship, or fortitude, or problem solving, or just letting go (more difficult than you'd think!). What can you look back on with satisfaction and think, "I was the right person, in the right place, at the right time, and that went well"?
Talking well about ourselves seems to be a common obstacle for creators, fannish or otherwise. In previous iterations, I might have talked about the general societal disdain for nerdery, geekery, and fannishness as being over-involved in fictional properties or forsaking living in the real world in favor of fictional ones. (In Beauty and the Beast (1991), think Gaston's (and the rest of the village's) attitude towards Belle's habits of reading books and understanding machines instead of trying to capture herself a husband that will provide for her.) As much as we'd be able to immediately point to the Sports fandom or the Outdoorsman fandom or the Bootstraps! fandom, or any other such activities and point out how highly gendered the line between "normal" and "you" is, the point never really sank in. "Appropriately" manly/masculine fandoms are respectable hobbies and not weird obsessions, but books and certain media properties are very feminine, and the transformative work is extremely feminized and queered, because "normal" people (men) don't look at two action dudes and wonder if they would make a cute couple. Being proud of what you did in fandom was waving the flag that you were weird and that you accepted whatever consequences came to you from anyone who wanted you to become normal again (usually by doing whatever it took to shove you firmly back into the fandom closet).
That landscape has changed, somewhat. Marketing and media companies have openly leaned into trying to create the kind of fans who would stay engaged with a property all throughout its run. It's no longer a badge of shame for a published author of a creator to talk about their fannish origins or the occasional forays they make into fandom (that is not their own, usually. It's really only after a thing is complete that creators sometimes join their fans and do things that they could not do in the actual canon itself.) And, several of the more litigious creators are no longer with us, with the hope that the people who have inherited their IP will be cool about fanworks and not specifically go looking for things to sue. So it's less of an issue to be a fan, and it's easier than ever to find a community for your fandom and your way of doing fandom.
Well, almost. As seems to be the case with most technological advances, the technology that makes it easier to find your kin also makes it easier for your opposition to do the same, and the technology that powers the monetary systems of the Internet had an extremely better interest in delivering your opposition to your front door and putting all of their terrible actions in front of you. And as much as people of my age and fandom experiences refer to it as the resurgence of the ship wars, there's enough about it that's different and reflects the passage of time and the advancement of the vocabulary and understanding of the underlying concepts. Rarely do I see this conflict playing or about who the potential options are and who is the best match for a given character, which seemed to be a primary catalyst for the shop wars of an earlier time. Now the focus seems to be on whether or not any given relationship or character fits within a fairly tightly bounded box of acceptable morality, (This is still profoundly weird to me, as fandom has always been the place that escaped the strictures of what could be shown on broadcast television, in movie theaters, or printed in books and magazines, always assuming to be more expansive in outlook than the limited perspective down in our canons.) Fictional creations are being tied more closely to their creations, which produces presumptions of abandoning a work because the creator turned out to be terrible, rather than being able to take the things that were good (and fix the things that aren't) in the creation without it reflecting as an endorsement of the creator. (So much of fandom has been about acknowledging and trying to fix the flaws of the things we enjoyed, as well as doing more of the things were like. Or so I've believed.)
This change in the temperature of the fandom seems brought on partially by the influx of new people into being part of the fandom, which brings new perspectives and viewpoints that were missing, but it also seems driven by the wider conflicts of reckoning and the backlash to it. As much as there is a narrative pushed that the "woke mob" awaits around every corner looking for the slightest slip-up to descend in a maenadic frenzy of cancellation, there's much more action and threats being leveled from the side that doesn't want to acknowledge that queer people exist, that teenagers need space to explore their own identities, that children understand gender (their own and others') long before they enter formal schooling, that even their own processed religions talk about how hoarding wealth and taking people unfairly is something the Deity does not approve of, and that most nations have a history of colonization, subjugation, and ill treatment of other people, among other things. The way of the world is changing, and the people most opposed to that change are the ones most audibly concerned that young people are being taught something different, something that might pass judgment on them as being ignorant as best and immoral in all other circumstances. They want all spaces, and especially those spaces for young people, sanitized so that there are no other ways presented (or presentable) but theirs in the desperate hope to keep fandom contained until they fully internalize those messages. (It won't work, but they'll try everything they can until there are no more avenues to try.)
So, I suspect this time around, the reluctance to speak well of oneself is the worry that showcasing the Weird that is your very best self will being forth the hordes opposed to you to attack until they are satisfied you won't ever be Weird in public again.
Give it a try anyway? For the sake of one weirdo with a brain that tends to believe keeping status quo is nothing with celebrating?
Because the status quo is my big accomplishment for the last year. 100k of fiction is slightly above my average, actually, which seems to hover in the 70k-90k range annually. I did two auction thanks pieces last year instead of one, which was still two more pieces than I expected to do last year. And 2021 was the year that I finished the full read-through and snark/meta/analysis of all the published official Pern stories to that point. Which was a multi-year weekly project that I wasn't sure I was going to finish when I started. (And, having taken it apart and looked at the internals, and talked about the shortcomings of the place, I have a much firmer idea of the version that I'd like to write when fannish ideas come around.)
Last year was also a pretty She-Ra heavy year. I think it became my "big fandom in case of nothing else" escape valve. It was really enjoyable to write all those variations on the themes, but there was a lot of it.
I'm thinking about that last sentence, about being the right person in the right place at the right time, because, other than comments on fic, I never know if it's went well, and I'm not likely to be the singular, spoils all subsequent fic, this is perfect person for anytime. But last year was definitely a year for the weird when it came to which prompts turned up in the exchanges. "Don't offer anything you're not willing to write" is one of my rules for exchanges, and sometimes that means figuring out a plausible Hermione/Jareth, and sometimes it means writing explicit smut between Galahad, Zoot, and Dingo for the Python version of the quest for the Holy Grail. I'm proud of having managed to deliver on those ideas, and all the other weird ones that came through for me in that regard.
So. What went well for you in the last year?
