Snowflake Challenge 2023 #2: The Manifesto

[silveradept]

Oh, hell. snowflake_challenge decided to come out swinging for Challenge #2. (#1 is, as always, tidy your space and make it ready for visitors, which usually involved examining the commenting culture post and the profile to make sure it's still reasonably accurate.)

Seems like we all spend a considerable chunk of our fandom time trying to convince loved ones, friends and total randos alike that our fave is in fact the best. This can take shape of anything from watch parties/read-alongs to capslock squee in DMs to relentless gifsets to PhD dissertations.

One of our favourite forms of this is the "fandom manifesto" or "fandom primer," wherein one writes up an outline of what their fave is, why it's great, and links to where one can find more (with more or less detail and formality, depending on the venue).

Challenge #2

In your own space, write a promo, manifesto or primer for your fave character, ship or fandom.

This is one of the ones I find difficult, as one of the profoundly multi-fannish. I'm used to manifestos full of images, animated or no, and detailed analysis of why this is the very best thing in the world, and…I don't usually get that involved in things to get to that point. And I tend to also try and see series for the things they do less well as for the things they do well, which makes the manifesto part, the unabashed declaration of love, a touch more difficult to pull off.

Plus, have I mentioned the rejection sensitivity that comes from having lived a life with the belief, inculcated from childhood, that others are waiting for you to slip up or be wrong about something so they can pounce viciously and tear you down for their own egoboosts? (Lucky me, then, that I didn't stumble into very toxic fandom places where that's considered normative behavior.) To get out on a limb and say "I like this" on a medium where there are people who are jerks is an act of bravery. (Witness one of my last works on AO3 for last year, where the second commenter to it complained about how much they disliked the characterization and the setup, rather than, say, using the back button and graciously withdrawing themselves.)

It gets tricky, too, when you want to use a concept that you like from a piece of work that is, as time goes by, ages gracelessly or the creator embraces a position that's toxic. (Or it turns out they've been less than stellar people and there's receipts and proof.) How much do you get to detatch a creator from their work. How much leeway do you get to "steal what works, fix what's broke, and discard the rest" when doing your fandom if you're doing a transformative fandom in an environment where there are people out there that think any interaction with a fandom is problematic?

I've spent a lot of words and quotes examining the shortcomings of the Dragonriders of Pern (the originals to everything are done, but porting them to AO3 is a multi-day affair that I usually only do when I have the energy for it), mostly to come to the conclusion that the setting for Pern is great and the execution for it is terrible. How do you write a manifesto that says "you're going to have to ignore most of the canon to make this canon work, but if you do, you're going to discover a great playground!" (You could say the same thing about the Potterverse. Or many of the science fiction and fantasy series I read in the library while I was a small.)

Another part of that profound multi-fannishness is that while there are canonical relationships in many series, so long as I have a good idea of how a non-canonical pairing might work, I can envision that, at least for the length of a fanwork, or writing one, so that tends to diminish both the characters and the ships for the purposes of manifestos, since a lot of them are often about how a particular canon or ship is extremely important to the series or carries it themselves, regardless of what the official opinion of the canon or other fans are.

A lot of transformative fandom is about queering the relentless heteronormativity of media, and in response to that, there's a lot more canonically queer material around. It's still not fully integrated into network television or, say, integrated fully into the parent Disney brand, but pay television, prestige television, streaming services, and independent media have been doing at least some work to help fans out and increase the amount of representation on screen. I won't say there's less need to aggressively queer media, but you don't have to go to fanworks archives or put on shipper's goggles to see those kinds of relationships any more, which removes another possible source of the fire for manifestos.

I'm at my best when I'm reacting to someone else's fannishness, especially when that fannishness is fixed in some form for me. For example, I received an interesting pin from my household a few days ago - a second from a shop that was closing, unfortunately. It was a clever design, though. In the She-Ra and the Princesses of Power fandom, it's Adora and Catra's hands stretching toward a Horde Force Captain's badge. In text, on a ribbon twining around their arms and the badge, "I love you. I always have." Which is a quote from the fifth season of the series, and precedes a world-saving kiss between the two of them. (When first released, this cued an explosion of "Catradora's canon!" As I was saying, aggressively queering media and being able to find your representation.) The clever part of the design and the caption, though, is that Catra has spent most of the series chasing what the Force Captain's badge represents, even while she's had the physical badge for herself for a significant amount of said series. Right from the start, Adora was going to be promoted to Force Captain and Catra was not, even though the two of them have been friends for so long, including friends with feelings for each other. The imbalance, the choice, the amount of favor that Adora has versus the amount of disfavor that Catra has produces a dynamic where Catra is trying so, so hard to have Adora recognize her as a peer, an equal, someone who can wield the same amount of power and accomplish great things herself. Catra loves Adora, that's clear, but when given the choice between Adora and power, Catra almost always chooses power, because she wants to prove others wrong. Which includes Adora, once Adora has her Heel-Face turn due to getting the sword and seeing the Horde from the outside.

(Adora is also striving for power, but her striving for power is so she can pull her idiot girlfriend out from the Horde and stop the tragedies from happening. What the tragedy is that she's trying to stop changes from season to season, but she's always trying to get her idiot girlfriend to give up working for the Horde, which causes friction between them because Catra sees it not as a question of morals, but a question of who's better, and Catra doesn't intend to give up until she's proven she's better than everyone.)

The line serves dual meanings in the design of this pin, so it's a clever pin that's made it on to my work lanyard, both to show fannish knowledge, and also a subtle signal of being a person who might understand about certain subjects, but also because anyone else who recognizes the fandom and the line will appreciate the design.

A similar design from the same artist has both Adora and Catra's hands reaching for the Heart of Etheria, with the ribbon captioned "You are worth more than you can give." Which is, instead about Adora's tendencies toward duty and self-sacrifice and Catra's zeal and single-mindedness toward her goal (which is often self-destruction, or if she can't manage that cleanly, dragging anyone and everyone she can take down with her so nobody wins.)

You can see a similar dynamic between Miaka and Yui in Fushigi Yugi, actually, now that I think about it - Miaka's the one who gets everything handed to her and who seeks power to avert tragedy, alongside a mostly supportive cast of others. Yui, on the other hand, not only gets manipulated by someone to their own ends, but is the one who is looking for power so that she can be Miaka's equal (even though Yui's portrayed as smarter and more mature right from the jump) and ends up needing to be rescued when Miaka finally obtains the power that she can use to save the world (and her idiot girlfriend. It's an aggressively het show for Miaka, or else the "many eligible suitors" part doesn't work, but especially after what the two of them go through, I would be completely unsurprised if the two of them develop a romantic relationship with each other, having seen each other at their most intimate. They could probably form a support group with Hitomi from Escaflowne in the same vein as the Wayward Children series from Seanan McGuire.)

There's nothing that's so core to myself that I have to have someone read it, watch it, or listen to it before I believe they'll understand me, There's no ship to declare war for, or against, no character who's ride-or-die. It's one of those aspects of fandom that I feel like I skipped, coming to it in the LiveJournal era instead of before, after most of the ship wars about Potter (which was one of the big ones) happened, and the endgame was already in sight. And because I'm a professionally trained stunt librarian, my default tends to be less about "what do I promote?" and more about "what are you interested in?"

So, what are you interested in?

Comments

[tellshannon815]

Thanks for still sharing even though this was a difficult one,it can be hard knowing what to choose as a multi fannish person. I do feel you on the reaction from fans sometimes as well, I find it frustrating when I get responses such as "I hate Character X and I am glad they're dead" (direct quote from "0 the Troll" from the Arrowverse fandom, don't ask) - okay, people are entitled to that opinion but maybe respect my right to like the character and don't read if you feel like that?

[silveradept]

As best I can tell, from the times it happens to me, some people are so convinced of the superiority of their own interpretation that anything that might be different from that has to be either mocked or criticized. So far, I've been lucky that those commenters face never brought a brigade with them, it's probably only a matter of time.

[snowynight]

I am glad that there are more explicit queer representation in media too. The pairing dynamic of Catradora remind me of Kendappa-ō/Soma in RG Veda. Kendappa-ō loves Soma, but when she has to choose between power and love, she chooses power.

[silveradept]

Usually, when that kind of dynamic comes up, the person choosing power is doing so to demonstrate their worth to someone. Not always the person they love, but sometimes. Is that what's going on in RG Veda?

[(Anonymous)]

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