Entries tagged with sunshine challenge: 2023

Current Mood: melancholy
Current Music: Yasunori Mitsuda - Fragment of a Dream

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sunshine challenge: 2023

Sunshine Challenge 2023 #7: Zinnias for good friends and absent friends.

Prompt 7: Zinnia
While Zinnia has many different meanings, it is usually associated with friendship, endurance, daily remembrance, goodness, and lasting affection. The Victorian meaning of Zinnia are thoughts of an absent friend or a friend you haven't seen in a while.

Bonus Prompt: Red Rose

With Red Roses in my head, probably because I've changed my alarm wakeup to the version that's in Guide My Way, I have what might be the most easily recogniable leitmotif of RWBY in my head, which provides additional duty as the shorthand personality for the four characters of team RWBY.

Red, like roses, fills my dreams and brings me to the place you rest
White is cold and always yearning, burdened by a royal test,
Black, the Beast, descends from shadows,
Yellow beauty burns gold.

Ruby Rose (Red) is chasing the memory of her mother, Summer, and wants to become great because her mother was great. (Maybe after her adventure in the Ever After, she's going to start actually believing that she doesn't have to chase Summer's memory so much, nor take on all the burdens of leadership and morale herself. Weiss Schnee (White) is dealing with being outside of a bubble for the first time and seeing not only how messed up her family dynamic has been, but that the family company she's associated with has repeatedly been at the center of very evil actions. (She needs a family to accept her and to correct her, and the one she has by biology won't ever be able to achieve this.) Blake Beladonna (Black) knows full well what living a life where you're seen as subhuman is like, and the lengths that someone will go to in trying to protect yourself and seize enough from the majoirty to be able to live your own life. At the same time, she has a stalker who hasn't learned how to respect anyone's no, much less how to have a functional and happy relationship with them. Yang Xiao Long (Yellow) was abandoned by her mother and raised by Summer and Taiyang, her father, and she constantly believes she has to prove herself to others, either as the capable big sis, or the strongest in the room. It means she's constantly angry and her temper can explode at the touch of a hair. What Yang needs is unconditional love and someone who can be relied on to be there for her, even when she's not there for herself.

(There wasn't a Black Rose in the rose alternates for this year, so we don't have all four represented here, but we have three of the four.)

( To Good Friends and To Absent Friends, mostly via the Chrono series )

But if some of you are still here and you've rediscovered me and you want to get back in touch, have fun. And if you're new, and what's going on here seems like something that you'd want to keep following (even though I do most of my talking about fannish things in other people's comments or in AO3 works), welcome, it's nice to meet you.

That's the last of the prompts for this

sunshine_challenge. There will be an outro post in a few days at the community, where the mods and the people who do the heroic job of reading trhough and commenting on all of the entries that come in will get to say what it's been like with us for the month, and then we'll wait once again for the winter-side (at least, for my hemisphere) version of it when

snowflake_challenge reappears in January.

Current Mood: dorky
Current Music: Toby Fox - Undertale - CORE

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sunshine challenge: 2023

Sunshine Challenge 2023 #6: A Hyacinth movie and Miss Hyacinth Priest

Six of seven prompts for

sunshine_challenge, and this one is potentially less sunny than the previous ones, but that makes it perfect for something I've wanted to talk about anyway.

Prompt 6: Hyacinth
Hyacinths symbolize jealousy, a desire for forgiveness, joy, and sincerity, depending on the flower color. Yellow hyacinths are linked to jealousy, purple flowers mean you're seeking forgiveness, and blue hyacinths are tied to sincere care.

Bonus Prompt: Yellow Rose

There's at least some mention of suicidal ideation from a movie character in this post, so if that's not a subject you want to deal with, you can pass this one by. Also, spoilers for Nimona, the movie and the book.

( Hello, Nimona. Are we the monsters, or are they? )

Current Mood: lazy
Current Music: Yasnori Mitsuda - A Presentiment

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sunshine challenge: 2023

Sunshine Challenge 2023 #5: Goldenrod and the Growth Mindset

Another

sunshine_challenge prompt, another flower, and more virtues to talk about,

Prompt 5: Goldenrod
Historically, Goldenrod has been used as a symbol of good fortune, growth, and encouragement. Because of its ability to survive in diverse, harsh environments, Goldenrod represents good luck and a pioneering spirit (pretty fitting given its origins in the meadows and pastures of North America).

Bonus Prompt: Orange Rose

Admittedly, I know goldenrod more as a crayon than as a flower, because so many creation boxes of my childhood did not have colors such as red, yellow, and blue, which are specific shades to color with, apparently, but instead would get crimson, goldenrod, and cerulean, along with burnt sienna and several other flower names and shades that were lighter or darker than the colors I had assumed would be part of every box of crayons but definitely were not. Which, as a child, was different to have to work with these wrong shades that I was pretending were much more primary colors. The art parts were fine, anyway, since I was likely coloring in sheets or doing other things that didn't involve any kind of needing to draw my own lines and create something from those spaces. It would have been much more frustrating to me in that regard, mostly because art was one of those things that was very much about "you're talented or you're not" in my childhood, rather than something that's more "art is a process, and for some people, that process comes easier than others, but we can still scaffold someone into something that's uniquely themselves, rather than something that's being compared to a perfect example."

I am less inclined to go along with the "pioneering spirit" association of the goldenrod, but I think that's because a fair amount of my adult life has been finding out just how much those "pioneers" are products of a hagiography designed to erase the presence and history of the first nations of the Americas and treat them as little more then set dressing or adversaries against the march of "civilization" through those spaces, the same kind of "civilization" that brought rampant unregulated capitalism, exploitation, and slavery of black people as a way of life to the country. It may not have had much anything outside of the library world, but inside the library world, there's been an entire fight about whether or not it's appropriate for us to carry the Little House on the Prairie series, given how much of it is about reinforcing the hagiography of pioneering white men, their dutiful wives, and their pleasant children against the Indigenous peoples, Black peoples, and the oppression of government infringing on their freedom to do whatever they want with the land and their neighbors. The Children's Literature Legacy Award from the Association for Library Services to Children (ALSC, a division of the American Library Association) was, up until recently, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, but because of the rampant racism in Wilder's work, ALSC decided to change the name of the award. Because they're still ALA and library folk, the statement about the name change goes to great lengths to assure us that they're not suggesting that anyone change their relationship to Wilder's work because of this name change, because that would be having an unacceptably political opinion in public. Even though it's pretty clear that the name change was specifically so that an award that is supposed to be about lasting contributions to children's literature doesn't bear the name of someone whose works are incompatible with the values of today. (Ana Mardoll's Prairie Fires livetweets and reads are there so you don't necessarily have to read the things yourself, if you don't want to dive into that world and its mindset. And all the fabrication, gaslighting, and lies involved in trying to prop up the idea of the pioneer homestead and the pioneer spirit.)

Goldenrod can be a hardy plant that grows in all kinds of environments, and I'm cool with that, but there's a lot of romanticization of colonialism and The Past That Never Was that gets wrapped up in white people's recollections (and official hagiographies) of the "Wild" West, Manifest Destiny, the Discovery Doctrine, and their belief that they could survive and thrive in such rugged conditions and play out their libertarian fantasies (or their plantation fantasies) rather than admitting to the truth off what happened, and how much subsistence farming is hard work for very small yields and those who believe they don't need their community to sustain themselves and their neighbors are fools or people who have money enough that they can run a hobby farm and not actually care about whether it makes enough.

( And things take a personal turn )

Which is a long way to come back around to, even though I'm kind of "eh" about the plant, I like at least some of the meanings behind it, because they are the things that I still need in my life: good fortune, growth, and encouragement.

Current Mood: aggravated
Current Music: dan le sac vs. Scroobius Pip - Thou Shalt Always Kill

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sunshine challenge: 2023

Sunshine Challenge 2023 #4: Daisy, Princess of Sarasaland. Also, factionalism and bad-faith actors.

Prompt 4: Daisy
These sunny springtime blooms have several positive meanings. The meaning of a daisy flower can be purity, innocence, new beginnings, joy and cheerfulness. In the Victorian Era, daisies symbolized innocence, loyalty and an ability to keep things secret.

Bonus Prompt: White Rose

See also: Daisy, Princess of Sarasaland, introduced in Super Mario Land, the Game Boy spinoff series to the main Super Mario Brothers sequence on the Nintendo. Princess Daisy made Mario a series that no longer ran on the Smurfette Principle. (Depending on how you slot Super Mario USA (the reskinned Doki Doki Panic released as Super Mario Brothers 2 in the US) into the canon, Birdo has Daisy beat on that front by a year, but SMBUSA was a panic reaction to the difficulty of Super Mario Brothers 2 (released as The Lost Levels in the US), so Daisy is the first intentional new female character into the series. Anyway…) Because Daisy's series was a Game Boy spinoff, her presence is more known and felt in her appearances in the SMB sports games, Mario Party series, Mario Kart series, and Smash Brothers. She's not as well-known as Peach is, and she's usually canonically paired off with Luigi so that both Bros have a princess of their own, in what likely was a pair the spares situation. In the same way that Luigi started as a palette swap and slowly began developing his own ability set to play games with, Daisy seems to have started as a Peach clone and is still differentiating herself from the Princess of the Mushroom Kingdom, even as Peach herself has started to become more active in her own right. She and Luigi probably have a lot to chat about regarding their journeys to become characters in their own right, with unique mechanics and motivations. As characters without quite as much history and definition as Mario and Peach, though, I thoroughly expect the fanon about Daisy and Luigi to be intense and voluminous.

Daisy was also a regular Mario Kart and Mario Party choice for some of the people I played with when they came over to game and talk during the evil ex phase of my life. The one where my evil ex deliberately mistook my grumbles about the fairness of the RNG as me having sour grapes about not winning all the time. I don't hold the character any ill will from the experience, though.

And it's also interesting how few human-looking characters there are in the Mario Brothers series: two plumbers, two princesses, Rosalina, who probably qualifies as at least a Princess, if not higher on the authority scale, and Paulina, who came back in Odyssey as the mayor of New Donk City after having been connected to the Mario Brothers greater universe because Jumpman was in Donkey Kong before he became Mario. (And, okay, New Donk City is full of humans and humanlike characters, but they're an outlier, a single world across basically all of the games and their various worlds.)

( The rest, based on the flower language virtues. Talks about the anti-fandom, anti-freedom factions a fair amount. )

We do not need to put these virtues at odds with each other. Joy and cheerfulness at the act of creation (and possibly even creating things where someone's innocence or purity are given freely, corrupted, taken, or manipulated) can co-exist alongside reasonable efforts to make sure that people know what they're getting into, such that if they want to maintain their innocence about what a particular trope or stay "pure" by not reading something they don't like, they have the opportunity to avoid it. It's a lot easier to promote and uphold Don't Like, Don't Read, The Back Button Is Your Friend, and Your Kink Is Okay, It's Just Not My Kink when there's been an effort put in to tags and warnings. I'd rather someone use a search engine to figure out what "Dead Dove, Do Not Eat" means before they read through a fic with that tag and find out the hard way. Yes, I know, metadata is a pain in the ass to have to write. I work with metadata on a daily basis. I know. But I would much rather have a world where the norms are such that when someone says "I don't want to describe those tags, they'll spoil the story," they use a tag that indicates they've consciously thought about this and have made the decision to go "Choose Not To Warn" or they indicate "Some Content Notes Untagged." By doing that, it becomes harder for the next moral panicker to look at a lack of tags and say "This person clearly intends to endorse everything in their fic! They're Problematic! Cancel them!" And if they adopted similar kinds of warnings or indications that the lack of warnings is a deliberate choice with traditionally published materials, I would be ecstatic. I want a world where people can find what they love and filter out what they don't, rather than one where a reader always has to be on guard against something that wasn't mentioned. And I want authors to be able to be their entire selves so that their readers can decide whether or not the author is someone they want to support according to their own moral and ethical systems, without being pressured into taking the side of "they're perfect and can do no wrong" or "they're Problematic and nobody is allowed to like them."

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Vangelis - Chariots of Fire

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sunshine challenge: 2023

Sunshine Challenge 2023 #3: Bluebells and Discarded Shells, And Pretty People All In A Row

Prompt 3: Bluebell
In the language of flowers, the bluebell is a symbol of humility, constancy, gratitude and everlasting love. It is said that if you turn a bluebell flower inside-out without tearing it, you will win the one you love, and if you wear a wreath of bluebells, you will only be able to speak the truth.

Bonus prompt: Lavender Rose

Perhaps it is my jaded outlook on the world, but looking at those virtues alone makes me think "that's a recipe for abuse by itself." I mean, it's also supposed to be something like the societal romantic ideal, where you have one true love that you make up with when you fight, who you always are with in the end, who you appreciate for all the things they do (eventually), and who you ride off into the sunset with for your happily ever after. It's a very specific mindset, still mostly performed by cisgender heterosexual monogamous people, and reflected in a lot of published fiction with cisgender heterosexual monogamous characters.

That virtues that seem ripe for putting someone in an abusive situation if their humility, constancy, gratitude, and love aren't reciprocated are seen as great for love, regardless of whether they are reciprocated, probably says a lot about cultural conceptions of love and how they are still fairly firmly rooted in systems that are more concerned with property rights, social standing, and gendered role expectations in a society saturated with patriarchy and obsessed with power.

( On virtues and fannish implementations of the same )

Fandom is pushing the envelope on what kind of stories can get told, both officially and unofficially. And, at least to me, it's big enough that it can accommodate everyone's niche. There's people who can write sprawling epics for works that have finished their canons years ago, or drabbles that manage to compress a great amount of meaning into careful word choices to deliver an impact in a hundred words. There's also space for people who are putting out their first piece, full of heart and hope that they can find a community (and also, likely some rough edges or unexamined assumptions.) There's space for the people who are working out issues by putting their blorbos through the same situations and writing out the endings they want for themselves, or who tell about things that are too painful to discuss directly by using characters for the necessary distance. There's people who put together stories that are meant to make others happy. There's creators who draw so many beautiful things, and vidders who splice things together and set a soundtrack to show the things they love, and the podficcers who give voice to stories. There's the meta folks, the manifestos, the analysts and the organizers. All of this output to try and expand the space for discussion and experience and eventually even manage to get those kinds of stories told both in the canon and in the fandom. The fans become creators, and eventually the creators of things that will generate their own fans, expanding the possible stories being told even further outward. And even though we get the occasional person who seems into it for their own ego, for the most part, it seems like fandom has humility, constancy, gratitude and love to their creators and their own fans. Even when the expression of those virtues comes out in a full-throated demand for creators and gatekeepers to do better than what they are doing now.

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: John Coltrane - Blue Train

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sunshine challenge: 2023

Sunshine Challenge 2023 #2: A Gladiolus Reminds Us That We Build Ourselves, One Flower At A Time

Prompt #2 dropped for the

sunshine_challenge and its floral theme.

Prompt 2: Gladiolus
Generally, gladioli represent strength of character, faithfulness, moral integrity, and remembrance. Gladioli are actually the traditional 40th-anniversary flower and the birth flower for the month of August! Each individual colour of gladiolus is also symbolic.

Bonus Prompt: Coral Rose

( Fandom characters and ambivalent morality. References to the struggles of trans people and the history of fascists attempting genocide )

There isn't necessarily a pat ending to this, or a stirring and rousing speech that gets us to go back out with renewed vigor and continue the battle that's going on. I don't have the answers to this. I may never have the answers to this, even as I try to work on things with my professionals and everyone else around here. What I do have, at least in this specific instance, in addition to the whirlwind tour of various fandoms here, is The Latest Kate, involving a lot of cute animals, occasionally in Lisa Frank-type colors, with encouraging messages attached to them about how it's okay, sometimes, to have just made it through the day and not done anything more. Or that you are perfect exactly the way you are, and that you have done well for existing and surviving up to this point in your life. They're very cute. They're very positive. And, at several points in my life, and possibly in yours, they're very necessary for knocking back the cloud of brainweasels. (Oh, I have thoughts about the Netflix Nimona compared to the graphic novel Nimona, but they're not thematic to this post.)

The BLACKSMITH: Choose for yourself: One who can leave your burdens behind…or choose one who will be enough to bear them.
SUMMER ROSE (voice): I love you, just the way you are.
RUBY ROSE (standing in front of her choice): This one. What happens…if I choose me?
THE BLACKSMITH: Then maybe, that girl is enough.

Current Mood: optimistic
Current Music: George Benson - Give Me The Night

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sunshine challenge: 2023

Sunshine Challenge 2023 #1: An Iris To Help Us See More Clearly

It's

sunshine_challenge time, since it's July, and that means that we have some spaced-out, themed prompts to go through, and I can freely admit that I will try to go through some of the responses, many of them, even, but I will probably not go through all of them, because they just keep coming, and people are interested in that kind of thing.

This year's prompt set seems to be flower-themed. I mostly know nothing about the supposed language of flowers, but I suspect there are several languages of flowers around, much like the uses of gemstones and the various interpretations of oracle cards and tarot decks and the like. So you'll get to watch me contort things into fandom stories or ruminations about my own life and where it stands. Or hare off on weird tangents because that's where my brain decided it wanted to go at the time and I'm indulging it in doing so.

Prompt 1: Iris
They can represent faith, hope, courage, wisdom and admiration. Specific flower colors attach further meanings to the pretty blooms. Purple iris brings a message of wisdom and compliments, while a bouquet of blue iris blossoms speak of hope and faith.

Bonus prompt: Pink Rose

( A virtuous start )

So, faith and hope that things will get better, both in fandom and outside of it, even in these times where things seem to be moving in the wrong direction a lot, and admiration for those who use their courage and wisdom to keep creating things, to share things, and to push and try to move fandom and society toward better outcomes.