Snowflake Challenge: Day Five

[kiki_eng]

In your own space, talk about a creator. Show us why you think they are amazing. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

I became aware of jerakeen first as a fic writer in American Idol RPF, a fandom she wrote some pretty great stories in. These days she's writing some pretty great stories in Teen Wolf, but while I love her fic a lot that's really not what I want to talk about with respect to her as a creator, because, see, jerakeen has done a lot to shape my fannish experience in the past few years, and that's something that she's done through her work as a mod.

jerakeen created and mod-ed kradamadness, which was a space that I loved. It was an incredibly enthusiastic place, and friendly and fun. I have some pretty strong lurker tendencies and it lured me in to prompting and commenting and fic writing and fanmixing. I had a ball, basically.

There was a lot of mod work that went into kradamadness. It's a comm that is beautifully organised. It has incredibly welcoming and enthusiastic guidelines that encouraged a lot of creativity, including the creation of fan cake as a challenge response. Round announcements were accompanied by graphic promo banners. WIP and complete works lists were kept up to date for each comment round with summary info, rating, word count where applicable, and so on. Things became progressively more organised and she picked up more mods. There were AO3 collections and a social bookmarking account and social posts.

...and she's gone on to set up fancake and bestthingever which are reccing comms that make up most of the recced content that I get via dreamwidth these days. The entries are beautifully tagged and there are polls and pinboards, and now cross-platform recs on tumblr and twitter.

...and I think all of that is huge, that these spaces that fans communicate in are incredibly important. The people who create, moderate, and maintain fannish spaces are highly influential and play a very important role in our community.

astolat has done a whole lot. She founded Vividcon. She founded yuletide. She posted a journal entry in 2007 titled An Archive Of One's Own, which the Organisation for Transformative Works spun out of.

And there are a lot of people involved with the OTW today in various roles - board, staff, volunteers; there has been a lot of work poured into that by various people. And it's great! Legal Advocacy! Archive of Our Own! Fanlore! Public Relations Work!

(I'm maybe starting to ramble excitedly a little bit. I'm tired and I should finish this.)

There are a lot of really amazing fanworks that aren't podfic or meta or fancrafts or vids or wallpapers or gif sets or fic or whatever (though there are plenty of those, too!) - fanworks that don't engage with texts in that way, but are instead the places that engagement happens - the archives that host our podfic or whatever. The people who create those spaces are doing something great. They connect us with each other, they make community happen. They make fandom happen.

I wrote mostly about jerakeen because I've been around, watching her do things for a while and I'm familiar with her work, (she's sort of my go-to mod example because of that) but I basically want to draw hearts around all the mods and archive hosts and couch-lenders and potluck organisers. Y'all are awesome? I love this bar?

You all are awesome. I love fandom. Thank you for helping to make it what it is. ♥

Comments

[glitteryv]

#AGREESTAMP

I love all of jerakeen's American Idol RPF fics (all of them are delicious. *g*) FWIW, I *still* discover fun and great fanworks over at kradamadness. Such a creative challenge! And, of course, fancake is great! I wish I could participate in bestthingever but I usually check fanworks out months (if not years!) after they've been postes. :-/

[kiki_eng]

Oh, gosh. I don't think I've read a Kradam fic since the last time I recced one, which was like six months ago, I think. I may have to fix that.

I like bestthingever but I don't post to it a lot because I usually don't remember to, unless I actually say those words when I'm reading something, and the amount that I liked a fic to be able to rec it there is higher and, usually I have a fanwork in my bookmarks for a couple months or years before I rec it so it's a bit different.