wanderings

In your own space, create a list of at least three fannish things you'd love to receive, something you've wanted but were afraid to ask for - a fannish wish-list of sorts. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it.

01. Go and vote for Marie-Philip Poulin for Captain for the 2017 Canadian Women's Hockey League All Star Game: HERE. Tell me about it, maybe?

Marie-Philip Poulin is sometimes called the Sydney Crosby of women's hockey, because she's a two time Olympic gold medal game-winning-goal-scorer for Canada, and she's good. I feel like game winning goals are kind of her thing, along with being just a fantastic person in general?

Like, she just seems like she has a good sense of humour and is kind of a French Canadian dork and also this fucking amazing role model of a human being:

Here is:
a gifset in which Poulin is doing that role model thing
a gifset of some of her on ice encouragement
a a photo of her tackling an ex teammate (I think) into a foam pit at the winter classic a year ago
a gifset of Pou on ice fails, basically

Marie-Philip Poulin is great, and I want to watch her make terrible jokes as she picks out her all star game team roster or try to steal all the goalies or be super casual and relaxed about the whole thing, because that seems like a her thing to do. And I want to watch her take the ceremonial puck drop at centre ice in the ACC and skate around there with a "C" on her chest.

You can vote every 24 hours until Thursday February 2, and anything helps and is amazing.

02. Meta on Reccing. Especially before 2003 and after 2013, and especially on non-journal platforms, though anything is good.

I have a project in my back pocket that involves compiling a lot of meta on reccing. Those "especially"s are where I have fewer links and where help would be really useful.

03. Tell me about a femslashy thing you love.

I love to hear what people are interested in and excited about, and femslash is love. ♥

In your own space, share a book/song/movie/tv show/fanwork/etc that changed your life. Something that impacted on your consciousness in a way that left its mark on your soul. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it.

Dealing with Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede

This book basically ate my brain when I read it as a kid and I became thoroughly obsessed with it. It consumed me, basically, in a good way - it sparked a lot of creativity and some of my early independent writing had its roots in that book's style, sensibilities, and humour.

Looking back on it, I think one of the greatest gifts it gave me was its characters, especially Morwen.

Cimorene showed me that I could have my own adventures, they didn't have to look like anyone else's, and I didn't have to fit in at home to be happy; I could find my own place. That was a really valuable thing to have, and to have pre-puberty, I think.

Morwen, though, was who I wanted to grow up to be. She was magic and clever and lived alone with a bunch of cats and she was happy. She kept her house neat and tidy, exactly how she liked it, was a skilled baker and ciderer, and was working on organising her library. She put up barriers to keep crap from entering her life (none of this nonsense, please).

I think Morwen let me grow up imagining a future for myself where being by myself and living by myself and doing the work I wanted to do was an option, and that option a given.

She introduced me to witches as independent women with deep lives, strong friendships, and morals. You could probably write a strong meta piece about Kazul, Morwen, and Cimorene - a dragon, a witch, and an improper princess - living outside the bounds of polite society and facing down the patriarchy (wizards): feminism and fairy tales in the enchanted forest and mountains of morning.

Morwen made me want to be a witch when I grew up, and she set me up pretty well for meeting the witches of the Discworld - and feminist texts for that matter. ...and you know what? I've got two feet on the ground, know I'm never going to fly on a broomstick, have been filing taxes for years, and I still want to be a witch.

snowflake_challenge is a posting challenge that runs annually for the first fifteen days in January. Some of the challenges are fannish in nature, some of them aren't, but they're all designed to be as do-able as possible for people and to encourage expression and creativity and caring and happiness, basically. It's a super-chill challenge, you do as much or as little as you like.

The mods are fantastic. In addition to posting a new challenge each day, they also post a ton of comments on the participants posts - the "I did it!" posts that they make on the comm and the post that they made on their journal or tumblr. The mods do an amazing job at setting a tone of encouragement and enthusiasm throughout the challenge and I've had some really great interactions as a result of the challenge and that tone.

I'm going to be so sorry to see it go, if it does, because that's the thing: it is a lot of work to run a challenge like that and they can do it because they have a team of multiple people trading off and making schedules behind the scenes, I imagine. This year has been a year of changes for a lot of people, though, and a lot of the old mods can't run the challenge this year, so they need new people.

So, if you've loved this challenge, or are excited about the idea of it, I encourage you to help out however you can - spreading the word or volunteering.

This year has been fairly crap for a lot of people in many ways, and, I kind of think of snowflake_challenge, as, like, an extended More Joy Day. We could use some more joy this coming year, I think.

(The official how to help post is here. Yes, there are three links to the same post in this entry.)

Ways of Going Forward by redbrickrose
Tennessee wants to say "Where have you been?" or maybe just "Fuck you." She takes a deep breath and says, "Sleeping. It's..." she glances at the clock, "3 am. And my birthday was ten days ago."
Tennessee Thomas/Charlotte Froom | Rating: PG | 5,800 words
Bandom
This fic is raw edges and tentativeness and history. When Charlotte calls Tennessee in this fic it's awkward and terrible and the timing isn't perfect and both of them are still hurt, but it's a beginning. I love how broken they are in this - how much hurt there is, and how much pining. I love how they don't really let go of each other and how, having all of this history together, they start up again, and how that beginning has an echo in their past; it's really lovely. There's this thing where things aren't really resolved in this, their relationship isn't definitively settled, but they've taken some first steps together. It's hopeful.

The Journey of a Thousand Miles by igrockspock
Summary: After the end of the war, Luna makes two surprising discoveries: her father attempted to give Harry to Lord Voldemort, and Severus Snape is alive.
Luna Lovegood & Xenophilius Lovegood, Luna Lovegood & Severus Snape | Rating: PG-13 | 7,069 words
Harry Potter
It's a post-war fic about the aftermath of the war and Luna dealing with the revelation that her father is not the man she thought he was, that his principles are not what she thought they were. It's about Luna making her way back to her father after that realisation and her and Snape figuring out the business of living, after the war. It's about letting people in when you've been hurt, and Snape and Luna helping each other.

Time is but the Stream by chaosmanor
"I've been feeling like I've been swimming in two different time streams at once, ever since this started," Patrick said. "The 'now.' And the 'then.' Like being in two places at once. And I think I know why."
Andy Hurley/Patrick Stump | Rating: NC-17 | 27,846 words
Bandom
I love this story to pieces. There's this line that Patrick says in this - "I fell in love with a philosopher who would read Thoreau to me, and we'd talk about living beside a lake in the silence. I wound up choosing the band over them, which was really sad, but I think of them sometimes, and wish them all the best." and he's talking about Andy, and he says it on-air, just this matter of fact thing that is part of the narrative of his life for him; this fic destroys me in so many different ways. Patrick and Andy fell in love and then changed their relationship - broke up, so at the present that this story begins in they're friends and bandmates. (I love ex-lovers being friends and being able to move forward together.) Right at the beginning of this story there's this tiny comment that Andy makes, and him making it has nothing to do with his past with Patrick, but it takes Patrick back there and, yeah, hits him right in the face, and the story unfolds from there. There are two time-streams weaving back and forth in this and the end brings them into harmony, brings them into harmony. It's utterly lovely.

Buyer's Remorse by SilviaKundera
Summary: When Eduardo Saverin has a sudden vacancy for a best friend, no one on earth expects Sean Parker to fill it -- least of all Sean himself.
In which Sean Parker accidentally grows up, stumbles into a priorities readjustment, and helps Eduardo kick True Love's ass like a boss.
Eduardo Saverin/Mark Zuckerberg, Sean Parker & Eduardo Saverin | Rating: PG-13 | 18,674 words
The Social Network
The Social Network is the story of the birth of a website and the death of a relationship and the fandom is a lot of people trying to fix that relationship. There is a lot of fic about reconciliation in this fandom. As the character who sets the wheels in motion in the film, Sean Parker is not the typical focus of a reconciliation fic, but he is in this one. Sean Parker makes an overture of friendship toward Eduardo Saverin and things spin out differently from that. Sean, in his way, puts a lot of effort into his relationships in this and in trying to help his friends reconcile. Sean. So there's Eduardo's relationship with Sean, which is fascinating and hilarious, and then Eduardo and Mark's reconciliation, which is a long road, partially because they don't realise it's possible for a long time. The fic is ridiculous, funny, and interesting.

The Dark Ocean Bottom. by Pennyplainknits
Summary: Stressed and ansty after the end of the tour, Brendon escapes to London, and finds more than he bargains for.
Ryan leans his elbow on the table, puts his chin in his hand. "So, why are you here?"
"I," Brendon pauses... "I just couldn't be there. I needed to be somewhere else."
"Yeah," Ryan finally takes a sip of his tea. "Yeah, I know how that feels."
Brendon Urie/Ryan Ross | Rating: NC-17 | 24,054 words
Bandom
It's post-split fic, with that delicate between them, and they end up alone in a strange place and find each other. It's really great. There's this thing where, rebuilding their relationship after Ryan has left the band, they build something new. There's a chunk of typos in this, but the tone of the piece is great, and there's this wonderful OT3 element in it, and a really satisfying coming home bit, with pieces slotting together.

(This post is for snowflake_challenge. Details about the fourteenth day are here.)

What makes you fannish? And by that we mean, what is it about a tv show/movie/book/band/podcast/etc that takes you from, "Yeah, I like that," to "I need MOAR!!!" Is it a character? A plotline? The pretty? Subtext that’s just screaming to be acknowledged?

In your own space, tell us what it is that gets you to cross that line into fandom. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

I don't really tend to do fandom that way? Fandom is usually not about the canon for me, like, my first steps into online fandom were not motivated because of a source material I really loved; I went looking for fandom because I heard about fanfic and it sounded like an interesting literary thing? Like, for me it was another source of stories, I am pretty sure, and that's still kind of how I do fandom. I'll read in fandoms I don't know if they're writing tropes that are interesting to me or I stumble on a summary that's really intriguing.

Sometimes the fandom will pull me into the canon, and sometimes not. Like, Generation Kill made me watch the source material, which is really great, but the mini-series didn't make me want fic, it just gave me a crush on Alexander Skarsgård and opinions about Nate's face - like, my appreciation of the fandom was enhanced by my having watched the mini-series, but watching the mini-series wouldn't have sent me looking for the fandom, and how I appreciate and interact with the canon and the fandom are different things.

I tend to take on more of a consumer role in fandom, so my motivations for being in a particular fandom tend to be more in line with why you might listen to a CD or watch a particular drama, than having fallen in love with a CD and needing more, or needing to change something somehow.

When I create prompts for things like exchanges that tends to be more motivated by my love of stories in general than a particular canon. I'll go for things that seem interesting to me, or like there's a lot of potential there - like, one of my prompts for a yuletide fandom was zombies, not because I particularly like zombies, but because I felt that fandom/trope match-up had a lot of potential.

When I'm picking yuletide fandoms I've gone with: canons that have really great worlds I'd be interested in seeing more of [Alice (2009)], canons with unrealised ships that I've gotten really invested in [Pasta (TV)], canons with characters I have fallen in love with [Sungkyunkwan Scandal], canons where I'm invested in the creation of fanworks for fanworks' sake [Michael Buble Being Stalked By A Velociraptor (Tumblr)], canons I fell in love with and just want more of [Shakespeare Retold - Much Ado About Nothing]. ...and sometimes canons fall more into one category.

When I'm writing something it's usually for an exchange, and I'll sign up to write canons and characters I'm familiar with and would be comfortable writing in a lot of different ways and reviewing source material a lot, and then I get my recipient's request and just try to make them happy and write where our tastes overlap as much as possible. When I write something outside of an exchange it's a fandom that I'm comfortable writing in and a theme or trope or story that interests me, basically. Usually I'm motivated to write for the sake of writing, but sometimes it's because I've fallen really hard for a particular dynamic [Remus/Sirius] and want to explore that, or, an idea snags me and I start giggling and then there's a line and then there's a story [Someone needs a hero. Someone is holding out for a hero 'til the end of the night.] - it varies.

My fannish engagement isn't really me falling in love with a series of canons, but falling for a series of fandoms and the stories they like to tell, that's what lures me in.