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Snowflake catch up: days 12, 8 and 10
Jan. 24th, 2024 03:43 pmChallenge #12
Tell Us about a Personal Win.
Share whatever wins you’re comfortable with telling us all about. Found a new fandom that makes you light up? One of your creations has earned more kudos than you dreamed of? Wins from life, new job, new school, new adventure? You have a couple of wins you want to celebrate, we want to hear about them. Share a win or two so we can cheer for you.
Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.
Yesterday, another Porridge fan who is trying to make fetch happen with getting a transformative Porridge fandom going, reached out to me on Tumblr and linked me to a fic they wrote! The fic is called "a certain type of man" and the author who reached out to me is Ebenelephant. The basic premise is that Lennie Godber, one of the show's two leads, comes out to Lukewarm, a canonically gay secondary character, as bisexual. It's really well written, beautifully in-character and evocative of the show in the dialogue. It's very nice to read something with gen with a queer reading of a canon character, as well as something that features a more minor character. While I'm still very deadset on writing whatever I want, whether anyone cares to read it or not, it's nice to not have to make all my own fun in a small fandom in the Yuletide off-season and it's great to meet someone to talk to about the show and the characters.
Since I've mentioned stuff I've been writing though...
Challenge #8
Talk about a current fannish project (fic, art, vid, crochet, funko pop village) (that you are creating or enjoying)
Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.
As well as various other WIPs I have bubbling away in the background, I am writing another Porridge fic at the moment that has been on the cusp of completion for a few days now, once I can muster up the willpower to knock the sex scene out of the way. I'm not shy about it, or anything, or in any way reluctant to imagine Ronnie Barker getting a good seeing to, but I often find smut kind of a grind to write and I get bored by it easily. I have been reassured by friends that this doesn't translate to the finished product, which still gets the job done, but, having been actively writing fic for about fifteen years at this point, it does just feel pretty staid and routine from behind the scenes, haha.
At any rate, I'm quite happy with how it's working out. It amused me that Ebenelephant had a bit in their fic where Godber mentions David Bowie in relation to bisexuality, because I did that too, haha. The parallel thinking there certainly not at all improbable, given we're in the 1970s here and Bowie is a very relevant cultural reference in discussions of bisexuality in that period, but it's nice that there are now enough of us in the mix that parallel thinking is occuring.
It was my hope to post a link to this still in-progress fic for my response to challenge #11, but it's not quite there yet, so in the mean time:
Challenge #10
Five Things! The five things are totally up to you. Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.
In no particular order, here's five of my favourite things about Porridge:
- Ronnie Barker's portrayal of Fletch is just so charming and funny and devastatingly relatable to me personally. He's funny, he's quippy, he's very keen to see if everyone's noticed his funny quips, he's a 'failure' by many conventionally understood metrics of fitting into mainstream society and is defiantly unashamed of it.
- While it is very punny and gag-heavy, the dialogue is very naturalistic in its delivery and the vernacular it's written in, which feels very lived-in and realistic in a way that more contemporary media with a similar quip-per-minute rate don't to me.
- While there are certainly aspects of the show that haven't aged great, in my subjective opinion it is a lot less uneasy viewing in terms of bigoted humour compared with a lot of its contemporaries and, even though it has unquestionably racist and homophobic aspects, its portrayal of McLaren, a Black character, and Lukewarm, a gay character, are overall sympathetic and I find them well-rounded and well integrated into the ensemble cast.
- For a show that has been criticised for sanitising the image of British prisons at a time when they were rife with abuse, it is refreshingly cynical about the criminal justice system and the inequalities that it enforces and perpetuates.
- Okay, fine, Richard Beckinsale is very pretty and I like to think about him trying his absolute best to shag Ronnie Barker, what do you want from me? I'm not made of stone.
That's all for now! Hopefully I can circle back on #11 soon with a link to my new hyperniche fic with whatever the opposite of broad appeal is, haha.
