silveradept: A dragon librarian, wearing a floral print shirt and pince-nez glasses, carrying a book in the left paw. Red and white. (Dragon Librarian)
Silver Adept ([personal profile] silveradept) wrote2024-01-06 10:39 am

Snowflake Challenge 2024 #3: A List of Wishes

Challenge #3 asks us to think of ourselves first, so that others might bring us joy.

Create a wish list of fandom things (podfic, graphics, playlists, canon recs, translations, research help, vids, sky's the limit!) that you'd like to receive.


So, heh, I'm not actually that deeply into any one particular fandom or pairing where I'm going to have a ready-made list of specific things that I desperately want to see more of. And while I think it's always nice to get podfic or fanart or other such works related to the stuff that I've done, it's not something that I believe can be done all that quickly, nor do I want to say "I'm sufficiently popular, or Big Name, or otherwise would have people who want to do this kind of thing for me, either because they think I'm wonderful or they want to curry favor with me about something." (I know people like doing it when the mood strikes them, but that's still a fair amount of time taken up by doing it.)

So, usually when this challenge comes around, I start asking for more abstract things, like smashing your local fascist in the face with a 40oz bottle full of rocks, or creating that work that's a giant Fuck You Very Much to the TERF Wizard Lady with the goblins that are Jewish stereotypes well known enough to have been used by Shakespeare, or letting the purity brigades that are creeping in your fandom know that transformative fandom has always been a queer space, a kinky space, a space for exploration, where people can lurk or contribute and be welcomed, so long as they don't try to impose their way as the only right way.

With the way that things have gone on some of my own works, though, with people feeling entirely free to leave comments about how much they detested the work and found it objectively wrong because it clashed with their headcanon, I guess that if you're going to create that work, be ready for people to shit on it because they think something else should be true. (Do it anyway, please?)

I know the prompt says the sky is the limit, with the implication that someone might do that thing you thought would be impossible or unlikely, but if you don't say it, they won't know you want it, but I also have the "I wouldn't want to impose on anyone, or risk the possibility that someone might laugh at me for my choices and asks," weasel. I'm not as fully unapologetic about my fandoms as others might be.

Still, may as well give it a try, right?

  • I always like transformative works of my works. There's the AO3 Output tag, which has the summaries and some comments on the works, and broken up into chunks rather than trying to wade through the entire two hundred plus set of works on AO3 all by themselves. So if there's an image you want to draw, or a work that asks to be made into audio, or there's a moodboard or icons or other such things that you'd like to make, that would be really cool.

  • I am serious about writing the thing that's your perspective, or that's the work specifically meant to be a callout to a creator that has loaded up their world with sexism, misogyny, transphobia and transmisia, racism, and other such social ills. Make their world better, and be sufficiently over-the-top that it's unmistakable that you're doing it because the original creator made poor choices and then doubled down repeatedly on it. Vivisect those poor choices in meta that makes it clear how terribly wrong things have gone and what it would take to bring things back to acceptable, much less good. The Web is full of strong opinions, why not give it a few that are organic and real, rather than generated by algorithms, clickbait, and confabulation machines?

  • Last, even though it's likely to show up later in the challenge as another activity, it's really easy for creators to get snowed under in negative comments, or to have been doing a lot of creating without anyone commenting on the work at all. I don't need someone to comment on my things (you're welcome to, if you want), but if there's someone else work you've admired, leave them a nice comment where you can, and let them know. Yes, even if it's next to a hundred other comments if the same kind, because creators appreciate having as many of those nice feedback as they can, especially the ones who are doing neat things and then have campaigns orchestrated against them. Or leave a supportive comment for a marginalized creator you have learned from or enjoyed their work, because they're more likely to have the people trying to hound them off the Web.


These are hopefully doable things, and there might be ample opportunities to make them go over the course of the challenge.

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