akamine_chan | Announcing the Fandom Snowflake Challenge

Holidays are difficult for me. Between the memories and the heartache of missing my family, getting gifts I don't feel I deserve, the stress of socializing in person more than normal and the end-of-year fannish activities...it's tough. It makes me lean a little harder on my fannish friends, my chosen family, which of course triggers that feeling of taking too much and not giving enough.

So this is my way of trying to give a little back to the people who help me through the difficult times and who are such a joy to me the rest of the time.

Bear with me for a second, here...

One of my favorite stories in due South is Adorned, by

resonant. I read this story before I actually started participating in fandom and it's left an indelible mark on me. Res is an amazing writer and the story is filled with so much beauty and just-perfect imagery. And this little bit has stuck with me for years:

"Let me look at you."

The first time Fraser did this, Ray made a bunch of excuses about looking the way he looks, and Fraser actually spoke a bit sharply to make him stop. The second time, he did all his apologizing mentally, but Fraser must have felt it in his muscles.

After that, Fraser seemed to consider it his duty to more or less introduce Ray to himself. The cup of his hipbone. The exact spot on his belly where hair gives way to no-hair. The slight difference between the color of his nipples and the color of his mouth, and the way they both get darker when kissed. Fraser told him about all these things, hotly and at length, until he made a gift of Ray's own body and wrapped it up and gave it to him.

This perfectly describes what I want to do. Give to all of you the gift of yourselves. Not your bodies, but your minds, your hearts, your souls.

I think fandom is a wonderful creation, a society of people who feel passionate about so much—art, music, sports, theater, cinema, television, writing, crafts, social justice, the world, etc. The people in fandom are creative and beautiful and feel strongly about the myriad things they love.

Where we fail, so often, is having faith in ourselves. We've let ourselves be convinced that it's not good to love as much as we do, that we shouldn't open ourselves up to possibilities, that we shouldn't put ourselves out where we can be seen. We're told we'll be misunderstood, laughed at, mocked, pushed back into our lockers, beat up with the contents of our hearts strewn across the cold tile of forgotten high school hallways.

So we try to hide ourselves, our talent, our brilliance. We talk down our creative works ("it's just fanfic"), we don't rec our own works, we're shy about friending others for fear of rejection. It's safer, easier to be quiet, to lurk, to keep our heads down.

I want to change that, if only for a little while. I want us to be proud, to be bold, to be loud. To be unafraid, just to prove to ourselves that we can. (

glitteryv here: Hear! Hear!)

The gift of ourselves. Because, in the words of one Mr. Gerard Way, every snowflake is different. That's what makes us special. That's what makes us beautiful.

This started out as something I wanted to do but I dragged

glitteryv into helping brainstorm the individual challenges and of course, she is fucking brilliant and totally enthusiastic and never ever tells me I'm being stupid or dumb or silly (

glitteryv here: *grins* I'm deffo excitable, y'all. It's a gift. Aside to

akamine_chan: Girl, you're faboo and you know it. ^_^). And then I made

andeincascade help, because that's the kind of person I am. She is another who is just too amazing for words. So when I talk about "me" and "I" in this post, I'm really talking about "us." And not just the three of us. All of us in fandom, every fandom.

Every day for the first 15 days of January, I'm going to post a fannish challenge. It could be something as simple as reccing fanworks to sharing a piece of canon that you love. Follow the instructions to complete the challenge. Sometimes you'll be asked to post to your own journal and drop a link in the challenge post. Sometimes you'll just need to say "I did it!" in the comments of the challenge post. You'll have about two days to complete each challenge. If there are links, they'll get collected and edited into the post. Everything will be listed in the Master post and all the associated challenge posts will be tagged with snowflake challenge for easy access.

This challenge isn't just for Bandom and C6D. This challenge is for everyone, all fandoms, all media, all platforms. It doesn't matter if you're in a fandom of two (been there) or if it's a fandom of a lot (there now) or something in between. It doesn't matter if your fandom has quieted down over the years or if it's currently awash with fannish activity. Canon, not-canon, old, young, real people or totally fictional. Doesn't matter. Come play with us.

And even though the challenge is being hosted on DW, please feel free to comment anonymously and signing your name if you don't have a DW account, or signing in with OpenID, which let's you use your LJ (and other platform) credentials to comment.

Part of this challenge is about fandom and the awesome the people in it. The other part of this challenge, just as important, is about getting us to interact with each other. Fandom is what weaves us together, friendship and love and laughter and life. It's the fabric of our lives. Come share it with us.

And share it with others.

Have a pimping banner that links to this post:

A couple of other things that I wanted to mention...

Stop hiding yourself. Stop making it difficult for people to find your works. I'm a big advocate of the AO3, but if it's not your thing, then please make a masterlist of some sort. Or create a journal for your fanworks. Something. Delicious or Pinboard your stuff. Put a link to your works on your profile. Make it easy for people to find your stuff. Keep it updated. Because your works are important, too. Even those early ones that you'd rather forget about. (

glitteryv here: YOU are important. Your voice, mind, creativity and opinions--even the silly ones--matter.)

Secondly, take the time to make it clear if your work is free to be transformed. And by transformed, I mean podficced or remixed or artified and more. Put a note in your profile, make a sticky post with blanket permission (or just point out what transformative works you do feel comfortable with). These are your works and if you're not comfortable with someone else playing in your sandbox, say so. There's no shame in it. Conversely, if you love it when people remix or podfic or make art based on your works, you need to let people know that, too. (

glitteryv here: Maybe you'll get a kicky surprise or two. :D!)

And lastly, for the purposes of this challenge, fanwork means all forms of creativity. From meta to fic writing to picspamming to hosting a comment-fic-meme to running a challenge, to vidding and podficcing and reccing and pretty much anything you can think of. Crafts, knitted items, repurposed rubber duckies, finger puppets. Pimping posts. Guides to timelines, tattoos, quotes, nit-picky canon guides, episode recaps, synopsis (synopsi?). If you think it's creative, if it took your time and energy and emotion to create, then it definitely fits under the heading "fanwork." *g*