obstinatecondolement | Entries tagged with event: snowflake challenge

Challenge #13
Make a rec list! 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.

I think I've mainly recced fics for this challenge, or similar ones, in the past, and I remember regretting not reccing any vids, so I am here now to remedy my past self's oversight there. In no particular order, here are ten vids that I give my strongest possible endorsement to. There are content warnings for several of them that are listed in the AO3 works themselves that I have linked here, but, all other things being equal, I would absolutely recommend that you watch all of them whether you are familiar with the canons in question or not.

Fun, Fun, Fun by cosmic_llin

Fandom: Lower Decks (Beckett Mariner character study vid)
Song: Fun, Fun, Fun by the Beach Boys

This is a Beckett Mariner vid about her relationship to responsibility that cosmic_llin gifted me for festivids last year. Full disclosure, many of the vids on this lists were gifts to me, and of those four were gifts I specifically got for Festivids 2022/2023, because it was an absolute banner year for me in terms of both the quantity and quality of vids that were so kindly gifted to me.

It's such a gorgeous, joyous vid that captures so much of what I love about Lower Decks in general and Mariner in particular. It's funny, irreverant, fond, and never afraid to be silly. Llin did a wonderful job with creating a strong narrative in this too about Beckett's relationship with her captain (who is also her mother) and fitting into the structure of Starfleet's hierarchy as an anarchic free spirit who will become a square peg to avoid fitting into round holes out of pique. I love her so, so much.

Get This Podcast Started by findmeinthealps

Fandom: Only Murders in the Building (Mabel Mora & Oliver Putnam & Charles Hayden-Savage ensemble vid)
Song: Get the Party Started by P!nk

This is another vid that was gifted to me last year for festivids and was, I think, the first one of the vids I received that I watch post-reveals. It's an ensemble vid and an absolute non-stop riot. Alps is an amazing vidder and, like everyone I've recced here, I could honestly have a rec list of just their work, but to keep things trim I'm limiting myself to this one as an introduction to their oeuvre.

I love humour in vids so much and I think that ironic pairings of clips and lyrics can be so effective, which this vid just absolutely nails. It's also visually such a treat and marries the visuals and the music in such a satisfying way, with so many satisfying little moments that land on exactly the write musical cue, and the editing is as smooth as butter. If you're not familiar with the fandom, I also think it's a great sales pitch for it and what makes it so fun, as it centres on the central trio from the show and their various amateur (and amateurish) murder investigations

Be Okay by cosmic_llin

Fandom: A League of Their Own (2022) (Shirley Cohen character study vid)
Song: Be OK by Ingrid Michaelson

And now for something completely different! This Shirley Cohen vid was another gift that the lovely cosmic_llin made for me for festivids last year and it was the second vid I watched. Even hot on the heels of the giddy fun of Get This Podcast Started, I welled up watching this within like a minute. I also cried again rewatching it when I was putting this list together and it hit me every bit as hard.

Llin is the only person who got two vids on the list, but I hope my naked partisanship can be excused here because I think that including both of the vids I've recommended here show her range really well. She's, of course, not unique in being able to nail more than one tone, but she pipped everyone else to the post by giving me two lovely vids last year and I wanted to include all my festivids 2022 gifts, haha.

Content warning: discussion of OCD, homophobia and medical abuse

Shirley can be a polarising character, or at least certainly was when the show came out, and in a show that centred and celebrated queerness so much, a character who struggled with homophobia—which, in my reading of her (and I think this is a pretty surface level take, honestly) is a manifestation of her OCD and her obsessions about contamination, and I cannot despite a mentally ill young woman from the 1940s with a "masculine" interest and talent who was terrified of being gay, because it would mean she would "have" to be lobotomised. Shirley also faces the things that terrify her so she can disprove her own fears out of love of her queer friends. I think that honest and compassionate represtations of the less "relatable" and sympathetic manifestations of mental illness, in particular with stuff like OCD, is so important and this vid was just so, so pitch perfect in how it handled its subject matter.

There is a lot of repetition in the song's lyrics and the vid uses this to its advantage by using repeated refrains, in particular, "I just wanna be okay, be okay, be okay" to edit montages of visually similar clips together, often showing Shirley repeating the same compulsive rituals and movements in different scenes. This is so effective and really helps to centre Shirley's point of view and anxieties really solidly at the heart of the vid. And, having established this motif, then transitions away from it in the last section, and instead shows several different instances of Shirley being happy and joyful with her teammates in very visually different scenes over the refrain.

Tubthumping by usuallyhats

Fandom: Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (ensemble vid)
Song: Tumbthumping by Chumbawamba

The summary on AO3 for this vid is:

"If the existing plan fails, I make a new plan."
"So you make plans that fail."
"No!"

and... accurate. So, so accurate. I love each and every vid I've ever seen set to Tubthumping, but, truly, I am quite convinced by this one that Chumbawamba had D&D: Honor Among Thieves (2023) in the front of their minds when they were writing this back in 1997.

This is an ensemble vid and it is non-stop laugh a minute fun, very much in keeping with the tone of the movie. I saw this in the room when it premiered in vidukon_cardiff last year, and it was a huge crowd pleaser. If you are a fan of plans ganging agley and people getting knocked down and getting up again, I cannot recommend this vid highly enough.

I won't spoil it for you, but the choice of clips for the "Oh, Danny boy, Danny boy, Danny boy" section makes me almost cry laughing no matter how many times I see it.

Pray Be Silent, and Join Me in a Dance by theletterelle

Fandom: Pride and Prejudice (1995) (Elizabeth Bennet/Fitzwilliam Darcy)
Song Shut Up and Dance by Walk the Moon, covered by Eric Wuest

Using this instrumental cover of Shut Up and Dance on strings was such an inspired choice for this vid and I am stunned to this day by how effective it is. There are several parts cutting to musicians at the various dances and balls featured in the vid and I find it very immersive. And fun!

'Shut Up and Dance' is also just such a fantastic song choice as-is for a P&P vid, given how much of the stop and start development of Lizzie and Darcy's relationship and their mutual fascination in each other, in all its cautiously spiky glory, involves dancing together and using this almost neoclassical arrangement of it just elevates the vid even further.

I Can Cook Too by Tafadhali

Fandom: Big Eden (Pike Dexter/Henry Hart)
Song: "I Can Cook Too" from On the Town, performed by Alysha Umphress

The last of the recs from my wonderful pile of the Festivids gifts I got last year! This is such a charming and fond little vid for a charming little movie I am so hopelessly fond of. It is just under a minute long, but feels exactly the length that it needs to be.

It centres Pike, the sweet, shy love interest of Big Eden, and his understated, modest courtship of Henry through cooking for him and does such a good job of showcasing Pike as the unqualified dreamboat that he is. Very sweet, very swoony: both the character and the vid.

I Want You to Want Me by hartknyx

Fandom: Much Ado About Nothing (1993) (Beatrice/Benedick, Claudio/Hero)
Song: I Want You to Want Me by Cheap Trick, covered by Letters to Cleo

Well, the last vid in the list was the last of my Festivid gifts from last year, but this vid is one that I got in Festivids 2020/2021, haha.

I will always hold the Kenneth Branagh adaptation of Much Ado very near and dear to my heart and I was unspeakably thrilled to be gifted this vid by hartknyx. It encapsulates everything I love about this adaptation so perfectly and it's so fun and makes such wonderful use of the physical comedy and delightful facial expressions and acting choices in the film. It's also really effective in how it shows Claudio's deep and profound regret over wronging Hero. I did watch this film very young, so maybe I was softer on Claudio then than I would be on a first viewing now, but I do think that Robert Sean Leonard is one of the more redeemed-in-my-eyes Claudio and I think this section of the vid shows why very well.

It was also such a fun choice to use a song from the 10 Things I Hate About You soundtrack for a vid to another film adaptation of a Shakespearean play! And, as I said at the time, even though there are a lot of repeated refrains in the lyrics, the vid never for one second feels anything but fresh and lively in how it rattles along. It also, as with the P&P vid, uses diegetic elements like showing a character playing a drum over the drum solo section that really, really work and marry the song to the visuals beautifully. Ten thousand out of ten stars, no notes.

Notice Me by lilly_the_kid

Fandom: Cobra Kai (Daniel LaRusso/Johnny Lawrence)
Song: Notice Me by Alexa Ray Joel

It does not matter how many times I see this vid, I fall in love with it again every time. It's so wonderfully adolescent and dumb in its portrayal of these fifty-something-year-old guys who re-light the flame of their teenage karate rivalry with each other almost four decades after the fact and become, once again, completely absorbed by thoughts of each other. Don't pretend you don't see me, baby!

This is just an all time favourite feel good vid for me and I love it to distraction.

Parachute by thingswithwings

Fandom: Leverage (Alec Hardison/Parker/Eliot Spencer)
Song: Parachute by Ingrid Michaelson

I almost cut this from my shortlist a few times, not because it is not phenomenal, but because I wondered whether there was anyone left in fandom who was not already well acquainted with its majesty. This is an absolute classic fanvid that everyone I know who I've mentioned it to, even if they're aren't into Leverage, even if they aren't into vids, has seen and was stunned by. But it will no doubt be new to some of you, so it would be a crime not to include it, and not the fun and morally-just kind of crime.

Parachute is such a wonderfully dynamic and active vid, both in terms of its use of movement through the visuals and its overall narrative arc and how each section flows into the next and progresses the central theme of the vid.

There is this wonderful bit near the start that transitions a section about Hardison and Parker's relationship into including Eliot and his relationships to both of them, where it cuts from Parker and Hardison jumping off a bridge onto a moving train, to Eliot landing in the middle of a brawl in a warehouse. The editing is utterly sublime and it's such a rewarding vid to watch closely every time I go back to it.

Batter Up! by videobaths

Fandom: Succession (Gerri Kellman character study, Gerri/Roman)
Song: Swing! by Ellie Dixon

Gerri alert! And, I mean, okay, do I think Gerri Kellman effectively utilised girl power by funneling money to cover up the worst abuses that occured under Logan Roy's leadership? No, and if she was real I would not be remotely sympathetic to the misogyny she faces as a cog in the machine of late stage capitalism and serving the interests of the richest people in the world. But also... she is a fictional character and she is baby girl and I love her very much and everyone who has ever patronised or overlooked her at WayStar or thrown her under the bus as a scapegoat should be publicly executed for crimes against Blorbo.

This wonderful vid was gifted to me by videobaths for the womansplace exchange in 2023 (which I feel very bad about defaulting from and which I hope comes back this year so I can have another crack at it).

The pacing is so effective in this, both in how it builds the momentum of the vid from an excitement per second perspective and also in how it captures the fast pace of the world Gerri operates in and how sink or swim it is to survive in the waters she has been a shark in for decades. It is not constant go, go, go though and has great peaks and valleys in how it handles the pace and the length of each clip to reflect tone in the song.

The lyrics are also just... such a perfect fit for this vid "thought I left the oven on, 'cos your such a gaslight" and "if you're gonna play these games, I'll join in" are just so perfect for Gerri and the narrative thrust of this vid in particular.

The Gerri/Roman shippy sections are also just such an unparalled delight and it is always so fun seeing how actively she chose the awful series of decisions that led to their thing and how into it she is. "Now I'm lucid" oh, girl, are you? But I'm glad you had fun, you deserve it. Not... many of the other particulars that this particular relationship involved, but you deserved the fun part of a thrillingly terrible idea like getting involved with Roman Roy in the manner in which you did.

I pretty much rewatch this vid three times through every time I go back to it because it's so exciting, and it never, ever gets old.

Challenge #11
In your own space, create a fanwork.
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.

I've just posted the fic I wanted to use to fill this challenge with! I don't imagine it's going to have much broad appeal, since the AO3 tag has all of 11 works, three of which I wrote and two of which were gifts for me, but here it is all the same.

Fandom: Porridge (more specifically the spin-off Going Straight)
Title: I'll Always Feel Just the Same
Relationship/characters: Norman Stanley Fletcher/Lennie Godber
Word count: 7739 words
Warning(s): Homophobia (internalised and systemic), biphobia, systemic inequality, implied past dubiously consensual sex, insecurity about being a financial provider, some ironic in-character disparaging remarks about social welfare, references to prejudice against people who've been in prison/a lack of opportunities to make a living within the bounds of the law after being released from prison.
Summary: Godber catches Fletch trying to sneak out to dig up the field in Essex where he buried ill-gotten gains from his past. Sex and emotional catharsis ensues.

Read on AO3

Challenge #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.

Challenge #9
Rec Us Your Newest Thing. 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.

Content warning: Discussion of prison, abuse of prisoners, sexual assault, IRA hunger strikes, homophobia (including internalised homophobia), queerness being closeted/repressed, racism, and systemic injustic (especially classism).

This is, um, about a lighthearted sitcom, lol. Oh, which one?

Porridge

Click to expand

Intro

So my 'new' thing is not really new, either to me or in general, but I have been revisiting the 1970s British sitcom Porridge recently and, having had a lovely windfall of Yuletide gifts and written a couple of my own fics, am now absolutely in its thrall with no clear endpoint in sight. The show is generally remembered fondly by people in the UK and Ireland (and, I think, some other Anglophone countries) who are of an age to have seen it, but there is not much of a transformative fandom presence per se, which, of course, means that I have to do my level best to drag a few of you, who it may or may not be new to, down with me 😉

Porridge stars the late Ronnie Barker in the lead role of Norman Stanley Fletcher, a small-time career criminal who has been sent to serve a five year prison sentence in Slade Prison. This is far from his first time on the inside and, as an old hand, he takes the other lead, Lennie Godber, a young first-offender from Birmingham, played by the late Richard Beckinsale (father of Kate and Samantha Beckinsale), under his wing. Fletch and Godber are cellmates for most of the show, despite Fletch's attempts to finagle a single cell, and many of the scenes are set in their cell and mostly, or only, feature them.

Click for more background on the show

Other characters include:

Mr Barrowclough, an easily taken advantage of and ineffectual prison officer.
Mr McKay, a more punitive and harsh prison officer.
Mr Venables, Slade prison's governor, a tropical fish enthusiast who likes to think of himself as enlightened in his approach, a belief which may or may not be justified.
Lukewarm, an affable gay trusty^* who knits and lends his dubious cooking skills to the prison kitchen. Jokes are often made about his sexuality, but they are generally not meanspirited, especially when compared with other casually homophobic jokes and language in the show, but this is something to be aware of.
Jim "Jock" McLaren, played by a young Tony Osoba, a cagey prisoner who hasn't had many breaks other than the fractured bones he's inflicted on others, but who is generally on good terms with Fletch and Godber and who, under his defensiveness, is pretty easy going. Just to flag this as a 'buyer beware' thing, there are a number of jokes made about McLaren's ethnicity, nationality, and race (his is Black and Scottish, his biological parents being a West Indian woman and a white Scottish man, although he did not grow up with either of them and was "found wrapped up in a copy of the Glasgow Herald in a Greenock housing estate" and grew up in an orphange) which would not fly today and shouldn't have then, as well as outdated terminology that is not (usually) intended offensively, but which is by almost universal consensus considered racist today. Although some of the homophobic language in the show is, arguably, harsher, as they were used as slurs then as well as now, I think the racism in Porridge, both in its treatment of McLaren and in other incidental dialogue, is more overt and harsh than the homophobia.
"Bunny" Warren, a prisoner who often goes in on schemes with Fletch and who gets him to read his letters from his wife for cigarettes, since he himself is illiterate.
"Genial" Harry Grout, a prisoner who the rest of Slade, inmates and staff alike, lives in terror of and has fingers in many pies relating to blackmarket goods and gambling.
Ives, a horrible little man and frequent antagonist who, among other offenses, commits the cardinal sin of stealing from other prisoners.
Cyril Heslop, a prisoner who came in with Godber and Fletch who is slow and thoughtful, but not one of nature's great intellectuals, and often several steps behind in a conversation when he chimes in with a contribution.
Blanco Webb, a 63 year old prisoner serving a long sentence who is old before his time and who Fletch is very caring toward and reserves most of his sarcasm from.
Harris, another horrible little man along similar lines to Ives. As far as I know, the same actor played an almost identical character "Norris" in one of the other episodes, but I may be conflating two different actors.
Ingrid Fletcher, Fletch's daughter, who he conceived out of wedlock in Highgate Cemetary on the grave of Karl Marx (he was going through a political phase, and it was as handy a place as any). Ingrid is friendly and cheerful, but a little flakey.

Most of the plots involve harebrained schemes that go awry, like an underground high-stakes game of snakes and ladders, or a pineapple chunks heist. It is very silly and, while aspects of the humour are now dated, a lot of it stands up and I enjoy it a lot. Something I really like about it is that Fletch often repeats jokes in a nudge-nudge-did-you-get-it way, or looks around to see if people are laughing at them, which feels very true to his character, who is very prone to off-the-cuff wordplay and holding forth, and not a little show offish about it. He's very charming and funny and well-spoken, albeit in a way that includes frequent malapropisms, and he clearly bases a lot of his self-esteem on being seen as such. Also, being funny and irreverent is a large part of how he keeps the bastards from grinding him down.

Aside from the aspects of the show that have not aged well that I mentioned above, I really love the humour of the show and I find it very charming. As well as the wacky sitcom shenanigans, the dialogue has a lot of punning and wordplay, largely from Fletch, and the way Barker performs Fletch is extremely winning. A lot of the time he'll repeat jokes in a nudge-nudge-get-it way, or look around to see if people have reacted to a witticism, and I find that just such a lovely and real layer of characterisation. Fletch is rarely serious, often joking, loves playing with language and often holds forth, all of which he is pretty vain and show-offish about and it's clear that being thought of as funny and well-spoken or clever is a big part of his self-image. His irreverance is also a big part of what keeps him sane and stops the bastards from grinding him down, because, while the show is mostly a light hearted take on incarceration that does not really square with the realities of British prisons in the 1970s, at the height of IRA hunger-strikes and at a time rife with human rights violations of prisoners, it is not entirely rosy and uncynical or uncritical about the criminal justice system and prison. There are a lot of elements that focus on how class and marginalisation plays into who ends up in prison and the show is very much on the side of most of the prisoners in Slade over the system that put them in there even if they are as cheerfully unrepentent as Fletcher, although some crimes are framed less sympathetically than theft, notably white collar crime.

*A trusty is a prisoner with special responsibilities and privileges. Also, per the Wikipedia page on the prison trusty system, apparently trusty rather than trustee is the standard spelling, so the more you know, I guess.
[return to where you left off.]

The show has three series and two Christmas specials, two spin-offs—Going Straight, which follows Fletch immediately after he's released from Slade, and a reboot from 2016 where his grandson is the lead, which I have not seen and don't really intent to—a semi-canonical movie from 1979, and a once-off mockumentary set in-universe—Life Beyond the Box: Norman Stanley Fletcher—which came out in 2003.

My crackpot shippy slant on the dynamic between the leads, which is actually very reasonable, how dare you, I don't have to stand here and be insulted like this

Click to expand

Godber: I'm fed up with crime. I wanna go straight.
Fletch: How old are you, son?
Godber: Twenty-three.
Fletch: Twenty-three and you wanna go straight? What kind of talk is that, eh? You've got your whole life ahead of you!

So, yeah, I ship Fletch and Godber, because of course I do. Here is a graphic I made and posted on Tumblr in 2023 when I started rewatching the show:

A collage of featuring several images of the characters Norman Stanley Fletcher and Lennie Godber from the sitcom Porridge, which have been edited to look like Polaroids and superimposed over a background image of exterior of the fictional Slade Prison as seen in the show's opening credits. There are miscellanious hearts and arrows edited onto the image and it is captioned 'Back on my bullshit, 2023' with a smaller caption reading, '*at least I'm having fun, okay?'

This is not a recent development or a revelation I've only had upon rewatching the show, because I also shipped them a LOT when I saw the show first as a teenager. It was, however, extremely arresting (aha) to revisit it and be hit by the shippiness anew. Given my much-touted love of roguish con-men and crooks, and shipping them with wide-eyed younger men who adore them, this is extremely on-brand behaviour from me, to the point where a friend, after I told her that I was rewatching Porridge and having a great time sexualising Ronnie Barker through the proxy of Richard Beckinsale, said, "That makes total sense as a ship for you." A statement which remains the funniest way I have ever been called out in my entire life.

However! In my own defence, I don't think this is shipping goggles forcing a romantic dynamic that may not exist onto two characters who tick enough boxes for me that I'd like to imagine them kissing. I mean it's not not that, but it's not just that. There is, of course, Godber's general open admiration, sometimes almost to the point of awe, of Fletcher, and Fletch's protectiveness over Godber, and their little domestic squabbles and stuff like Godber darning Fletch's socks and nicking tins of pineapple chunks for him at great personal risk, but the first thing that piqued my interest came from their first scene together.

Godber: Know all the form, don't ya? You been here before?
Fletch: No, never been here. But it’s all the same; porridge is porridge innit?
Godber: First time for me. Don't know how I'll get through.
Fletch: Oh, cheer up, could be worse. State this country's in, you could be free, couldn't you? Stuck outside with no work and a crumbling economy. How horrible that would be. Nothing to do but go to bed early and increase the population.
Godber: Won't be doing that for a while.
Fletch: No, that's true, hmm. No, I shouldn't have said that, it's a tasteless joke, innit?
Godber, with an expression like butter wouldn't melt in his mouth: I'm gonna feel ever so deprived.

Like??? I cannot overstate how easy it is to read a lot of scenes in the first few episodes as Godber trying desperately to signal in every way that he can think of that he's up for it to this older, more experienced man who's done time before and has taken him under his wing. Tragically, Fletch doesn't pick up on these hints. I imagine that he hasn't quite got it right yet, per this quote from the pilot:

Godber: Hey, Fletcher, what does he mean by 'practising homosexual?'
Fletch: One who ain’t quite got it right yet.

Ah well, better blatant than latent, but better latent than never, eh? And, like, again, I feel like it is an extremely small stretch to read Fletch, a man who has spent most of his married life in prison and who got married very young to his also-very-young girlfriend after an unplanned pregnancy, as someone who is gay and just hasn't spent enough time outside prison to reflect much on not being that interested in women sexually/romantically.

Fletch, talking to the hens in the prison farm as he steals eggs: Now then, girls. This is what's known as one of the perks of the job. Now, with these eggs I'm smuggling in 'ere, I can get meself a quarter ounce of shag, or two tubes of toothpaste, or... three bars of Fruit 'N Nut! Or I could take them down to E-wing and see Smutty Garland, the king of the porn, exchange 'em for two of his dirty books, yeah, full of full-frontal naked nubiles...
Fletch: I think I'd rather have the Fruit 'N Nut meself.

He also says at various points that 'carnal thoughts' are a bad idea in prison and you should try your absolute best to suppress them—although he also plasters the cell with pictures of topless Page 3 girls, so he's not entirely consistent here, at least on a surface level reading where you do not assume that this choice of decor is performative. I am, however, equally open to readings of him as not gay but otherwise queer and attracted to men, but deeply repressed about it, perhaps in part because of having spent so much time in prison, where there is a lot of homophobic violence and sexual assault, which queer prisoners are disproportionately the victims of. Fletcher himself expresses a lot of casual homophobia, often in the form of jokes about sexual assault, which could just be read at face value as bad-taste homophobic jokes, but could also take on a more sinister undertone if you scratch the surface of it, particularly since Fletch's primary coping mechanism is humour.

Fletch is pretty fond of Lukewarm, who is gay and out, and textually treats Lukewarm's boyfriend on the outside, Trevor, and their relationship as basically equivalent to other prisoners' relationships with their wives, with the only caveat that Trevor also has to worry about Lukewarm having wandering eyes while they're apart, so I don't think he's a unilateral bigot. I do absolutely think he needs some practice to get the hang of one or two things though. As it were.

Where you can watch it

Click to expand

There are some different options to rent or buy various parts of the canon as well as a few streaming services that have it available in certain regions. What I've been able to find online are the following:

Porridge S1-3 (TV 1974):
- DVD
- Britbox
- BBC iPlayer
- Prime
- Apple TV
The Christmas specials:
- No Way Out:
  - DVD
  - Britbox
  - Apple TV
- The Desperate Hours:
  - DVD
  - Britbox
  - Apple TV
Going Straight (TV 1978):
- DVD
- Apple TV
- YouTube
Porridge (Movie 1979):
- YouTube
- DVD
Life Beyond the Box: Norman Stanley Fletcher (TV 2003):
- YouTube

I also think there were some episodes released on VHS at some point, if you have a VCR. I don't think any part of the canon has been released on BluRay, and as far as I know the 2003 mockumentary is only availabe online on YouTube. It doesn't seem to be on the iPlayer anymore and I don't think it ever got a physical release.

The digital options above may or may not be available in your region and there may be others that I am unaware of.

In terms of the DVDs, you can buy the individual series/seasons by themselves, or in one of a few different boxsets (one with S1-3, one with S1-3 plus the Christmas specials, a few miscellaneous Ronnie Barker DVD boxsets that have some of his other work), but something to bear in mind is the DVDs I've seen online seem to all be Region 2 or Region 4. If you are not in those regions, and you don't have a multiregion DVD player, VLC can usually play DVDs regardless of region if you plug a USB DVD player into a computer in my experience, but I think it depends on the drivers in your DVD player. It may be possible to change the region of your DVD player (although sometimes you can only do this a fixed number of times before it gets locked to one region) or install firmware from the internet that will allow it to play DVDs from any region, or you might also be able to use one of a variety of programs online, such as HandBrake, to rip a region-locked DVD (sometimes with some workarounds if it is not working in a straightforward way, but there are how-to guides that I can put you in the way of it you would like).

For what it's worth though, in my experience a USB DVD drive and VLC will play any DVD I throw at it, which I think is the case for most USB DVD drives and laptop DVD drives, and I've never tried to rip a DVD and then been prevented by region, regardless of the software I used (and I have tried a few), but your mileage may vary and there is a chance you might buy something that you can't play, or can't play without voiding your DVD players warranty or wandering into what you may consider to be legally grey areas (although I believe that ripping DVDs you bought legally for private use is legal in most juridications, which, again, is just my impression and may be wrong). They generally seem to be going fairly cheaply though, so it could be a relatively inexpensive gamble to pick up a single Region 2 DVD to test it out if you felt up for it.

There may be other more dubiously legal methods of seeing Porridge, or its various spin-offs and extended canon, but this is just an observation and not a recommendation, and I certainly would not advise anyone to send me a message asking me to make MP4s from DVDs that I've bought and ripped available to them.

As ever, please let me know if any of the links are broken and I'll fix them

Challenge #7
Make a list of fannish and/or creative resources. 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.

I was struggling with this, because I was thinking mostly of the 'creative' half of the challenge as opposed to more general fannish resources, but I think that refocusing more on the, for want of a better way to put it, 'user' experience of fandom this is a pretty useful list. There are some that are more focused on being a fanwork creator, but they are not craft/creative-focused resources so much as ways to streamline posting to AO3, etc. As a disclaimer, since a lot of this post relates to AO3, I am an OTW volunteer, but I am not speaking on behalf of the OTW in this post and the views and advice are purely my own, and may not reflect those of the OTW as an organisation (and may even be mistaken, if I have misunderstood or misremembered something). Also, I've linked some third-party scripts and extensions that customise the UX and/or UI of AO3, but please note that these are not officially affiliated with AO3 or the OTW and I am recommending them as an ordinary user of the site rather than endorsing them on behalf of the OTW.

Click to expand

That said though, here are some resources:

AO3 search and filtering

Maybe this one is super obvious, but AO3's native search and filtering options are very sophisticated and include options for sorting by kudos/comments/bookmarks/date posted, including/excluding certain tags from your search results, including/excluding crossovers/showing only crossovers, as well as filtering for complete/incomplete works only, works in a specific language, works in a specific word count range, works posted within a specific time period, etc.

If you are not already using filters to refine your search results, and have been frustrated by having to search a long time to find something you're interested manually, upping your filtering game can really help you find exactly what you are interested in much more quickly.

Hidden search operators cheatsheet for AO3

To make AO3's filtering even more sophisticated, you can use these search operators, which will help you get even more precisely filtered results.

Ao3 first tag search by Peter MacDonald

If you are a rarepair shipper who is used to having to look through pages upon pages of search results when you filter for your OTP, because they only appear as a background ship in most of the works they're tagged in, then this is a great browser extension to have installed. When it's enabled, it will add a ticky box on the AO3 search page to only return works where the ship you are searching for is tagged first. Most creators on AO3 tag the 'primary' ship in a work first, so this will mean that most results will probably give you works where your ship is the focus of the work.

You can install it here for Firefox or here for Chrome (I strongly advise switching to Firefox, by the way, but I will not bully you if you don't wanna).

AO3 floating comment box by ravenel

While I am a big believer in the validity of lurking and the fact that no one owes you a comment no matter how much they liked your work, I do want to get better at leaving comments more often and this script has really helped with that a lot. A big issue for me is that the comment box is at the very bottom of AO3 works and if I want to comment on specific parts there can be a lot of scrolling up and down to copy and paste, or refresh my memory, when I get to writing out my comment. I could keep notes in Notepad or something as I went, but realistically I don't think it's very likely I would remember to do that and even the negligible barrier to entry of opening up Notepad would make commenting seem less approachable and more difficult.

This script really streamlines the process of commenting for me. After you have downloaded and enabled the script with Tampermonkey, you should see a little 'O' in the top lefthand corner of AO3 works you have open. If you click on this, it will open a floating comment box (which you can minimise again without losing your notes) to start writing your comment as you go. If you highlight text in the work and click "Insert selection" it will copy and paste that text into the floating box. If you click "Add to comment box" everything you've written in the floating box will be transferred to the comment box at the end of the page, which you can then mess around with some more, if you like, or just click post. And then you're done! I like this script a lot and it's really opened up writing longer more detailed comments to me.

Here's a post by ravenel on Tumblr about the script. Here is the script itself on Pastebin. And if you are new to installing scripts with Tampermonkey, bourbon-ontherocks has a tutorial about how to install this script here.

Muting and blocking on AO3

I was talking to someone the other day who didn't know this, but you can now mute and/or block certain users on AO3 itself, rather than by creating a site skin yourself that hides their content, or using third-party extensions.

From the relevant AO3 News Posts themselves, muting someone will hide:

works they've created (or co-created) in search results and tag listings (you can still access the works themselves, if you have a direct link)
bookmarks they've created
other users' bookmarks of their works or series
comments they've left

AO3 News, "Introducing the ability to mute users" Published: 2023-02-06 00:49:38 UTC

and when you block someone:

"[...] they will no longer be able to comment on your works or reply to comments you've left on news posts or other creators' works. They will also be unable to edit existing comments or replies they've left you.
The block will persist even if the blocked user changes their name."

AO3 News, "Comment blocking is coming" Published: 2022-06-05 00:15:20 UTC

Site skin to hide stats/inbox from dashboard^*

I got a bit overwhelmed in 2023 by my relationship to Feedback™/the response a work I posted got, or didn't get, immediately after I posted it, so I turned off emails for comments in my settings on AO3, and created a site skin that hides my inbox on the dashboard and homepage, as well as hiding the comment/kudos/bookmark count on works, and hiding most of the information on the stats page (I kept word count, because that wasn't making me go weird and I like to see it). My intention at the time was to keep the skin on most of the time and toggle it off once a week to respond to any comments and then toggle it back on, to stop getting random spikes of excitement/disappointment based on seeing my inbox, which I did for a while, but now I mostly have it off because I think (for now) I've managed to achieve a healthier relationship with this stuff.

To figure out how to make a skin that did what I wanted it to do, I referred to:

this part of the AO3 FAQ
a comment by LuckyWaters on this post on the r/AO3 subreddit
the work "(How to Hide All Stats on AO3 (except a few)" by Anonymous on AO3
this Dreamwidth post by vriddy

Podfic work skin by Azdaema

Speaking of skins, you can use work skins on individual works you upload to alter their appearance. Sometimes people have work skins that format text messages to look as they would on a phone, etc., and a lot of podficcers use work skins on their podfics, particularly if they have cover art. You do not by any means have to make cover art or use a work skin to post podfic, and plenty of people don't, but if you do want to use a work skin to format your works when you post podfic to AO3, this skin by Azdaema lays things out nicely.

AO3 podfic posting helper by irrationalpie, lastonetheboat, and Jeremy Mowery

It is often common practice when posting podfic to AO3 to copy the metadata tags of the original work, as well as adding some of your own like "Podfic" or "Podfic length: 0-10 minutes" and so on, but doing this manually can be a bit tedious. This browser extension, which is available on Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, and some browser I don't know called Source, automatically copies over the metadata from the work your work was inspired by, and, optionally, adds some of your own. You can further customise this in advanced options.

Blanket permission highlighter by BrickGrass

If you are a podficcer, a fic translator, or anyone interested in creating works inspired by other fanworks on AO3, you are probably aware that it is common etiquette to ask permission from the original creator before you do this. Some people have a blanket statement about their transformative works policy—which might be a blanket yes, but could also be a blanket no/yes-for-X, no-for-Y, ask-me-about-Z—for people to refer to instead of having to ask for every individual transformative work they create. This is often, although not always, in their AO3 profile. You can check someone's profile manually, but there is a database of creators with blanket permission statements created/maintained by Rindle and if you install this add-on by BrickGrass, creators on listed on FPSlist will have their usernames highlighted in green on AO3. You can also, optionally, tick a box on the side panel with filters to hide works by creators who are not on the FPSlist, if you wanted to browse through a specific tag quickly to see at a glance what works were created with blanket permission. I found this very helpful when scouting out fic to podfic for ITPE, especially when combining it with using exclusion filters to filter out tags relating to a recipient's DNWs.

Blanket permission builder by flamingwell

Speaking of blanket permission, if you are a fanwork creator who would like to put together a blanket permission statement but are finding it hard to figure out the ins and outs of what you want to have on there, this tool will help you build and generate one based on your replies to a list of questions. fanworkspermissionstatement has an FAQ about the tool here and the tool itself can be found here

Since a lot of these ended up to relate to podfic, here's some bonus resouces for the pod-curious who want to dip their toes in the water but are worried about buying expensive equipment or software.

Software: Audacity is a free, open-source audio editing software and is the software most podifccers I know use.
Mic: your phone or your laptop's inbuilt mic.

That's it! If you have a headset mic, or a Zoom mic or something that you'd like to use instead: use that, but do not go out and spend money on anything before you've recorded a few podfics and decided if you like it. Also, for what it's worth, the audio quality of smartphone mics is very good and some of my favourite pods that I've done were things I recorded on my phone. Also, I've listened to multiple things recorded with inbuild laptop mics and I wouldn't have known if I hadn't been told, and I have a pretty good ear. This is an amateur hobby and I promise that you do not need to break the bank to just get started.

Bonus-bonus podfic resource:

Using a free teleprompter app like Imaginary Teleprompter frees you up from scrolling while you're reading through your script. It's helped me a lot!

*This just kept eating the rest of the post when I tried to put it higher, but if you would like to copy and paste my skin, the CSS can be found below. (Edit: I figured the problem out. I was missing an angled bracked when I was closing off the textarea element in the HTML for the form, but I can't be assed reformatting this post again to take the footnote out now that I've gone to the bother of putting it in, lol)

[return to where you left off.]

As with my last post for the snowflake_challenge, there are a lot of links in this, so let me know if any are broken and I'll fix them.

Challenge #6
In your own space, share a favourite piece of original canon (a show, a specific TV episode, a storyline, a book or series, a scene from a movie, etc) and explain why you love it so much. 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.

There are so many pieces of media that I have an enduring fondness for and that are large parts of the loose patchwork of quotations that make up my understanding of myself, so it was hard to pick just one. But, if I am narrowing it down to one then...

Click to expand

The Producers

Edit: The thought belatedly occurs that people might not be familiar with the movie, so I have written a quick summary below. Spoilers ahoy, and content warning for references to Nazis.

Brief plot synopsis

Max Bialystock, a once-great Broadway producer, now reduced to sleeping with his remaining investors, little old ladies, and telling them to make the cheque out to the name of the play (Cash), is visited by a mild-mannered accountant, Leo Bloom, to look over his books. Bloom discovers an irregularity, which Bialystock explains as him spending $500 on a Turkish bath and convinces Bloom to move numbers around to hide the fraud. Bloom, reluctantly, agrees, and concedes that the IRS is hardly going to be interested in auditing a show that flopped. He then is entertained by the hypothetical idea that you could, if you were an unscrupulous man, make more money with a flop than a hit by intentionally raising much more than you needed to stage the play, if you new it was a surefire flop.

Bialystock takes the idea and runs, enlisting Bloom, and they look for the worst play ever written, which they find in Springtime for Hitler.

Despite Bloom's initial hesitation to produce a show written by a former SS-soldier who 'wants to clear the Fuhrer's name,' even with the intention that it will be a catastrophic disaster, they go ahead and buy the rights to the play. They take further pains to ensure their failure by hiring the worst director and actors they can and all seems well, until the play is perceived as a brilliant satire and the show is a huge success, leading to their fraud being discovered.

I saw the 2005 remake of the 1967 original back in the mid-00s and I liked it a lot at the time, but once I got my hands on the original I absolutely never looked back. With all apologies to Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, accept no substitutes: it's Mostel and Wilder or bust for me.

I am incredibly fond of a lot of Mel Brooks' movies, but this one is especially dear to me. I often joke on Tumblr that I have to be sparing with rewatching it, because once I've flipped that switch I am very liable to just watch it every day for weeks and it'll become my entire personality for at minimum a month.

Gene Wilder as Leo Bloom holding a blue blanket to his cheek

I'm Leo Bloom, I'm an accountant, I'm from Whitehall & Marks, I was sent here to do your books, and I'm terribly sorry I caught you with the old lady.

The main reason that I love this movie so much is Gene Wilder's portrayal of Leo Bloom, which, from the moment I first saw it, seemed like it was ripped from the headlines of my real life. He does such a wonderful job of turning on a dime from being mild-mannered and professional, talking to Max about his accounts, to completely losing it and melting down when he gets overwhelmed and... it's a joke, I know it's a joke, but it's just something that I'd never seen before, and rarely have since, which felt so much like my experience of the world and even though it was supposed to be a joke, and not a flattering one, it has always felt deeply validating to me. Some of us are very good at playing the part of a polite, professional, normal person right up until we get too anxious or overstimulated and then absolutely all the wheels fall off the wagon and we can't do it anymore and it becomes obvious how strange and not the persona we adopt to cope in the world we are, and honestly it means a lot to see that, even in a comedic context, when the character is not just a joke.

And, in this movie, Leo's arc is about letting go of his inhibitions and experiencing joy for what may be the first time in his life.

Bialystock: Having a good time?
Bloom: I don't know. I feel so strange.
Bialystock: Maybe you're happy.
Bloom: That's it, I'm happy. *starts to laugh* Well what do you know about that? I'm happy!

The dream! Is he being manipulated into white collar crime by a scoundrel who, at first, only saw him as a means to make a fortune and exploited his loneliness and the ways he's been alienated by his oddness to do so, by being, perhaps, the first person who's ever been nice to him?

Bialystock, walking through the park arm-in-arm with Bloom: Call me Max. You know I don't let everyone call me Max. Just those people I like.
Bloom: And you can call me Leo.
Bialystock: I already did!
Bloom: Oh! *lifts his hand to touch his forehead in embarrassed delight*
Bialystock: Where would you like to eat?
Bloom: Well, Max. I don’t know, Max. What do you think, Max?

I mean, yeah, sure, but that doesn't mean it's not vicariously liberating to watch him stand on a fountain and shout, "I want everything I've ever seen in the movies! I'm Leo Bloom. I'm me! I can do whatever I want! I'm Leo Bloom!"

And it also doesn't mean that Bialy's fondness for him remains a lie, because very swiftly they are both incredibly fond of each other and not shy about being demonstrative about it.

ID: two screencaps where Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom embrace, posted to Tumblr by cherry-flavored-sigh on February 15, 2015.

There is a scene at the end of the movie where they get caught for embezzling and Leo speaks on Bialy's behalf, which goes like this:

I would like to say something your honor, not on my behalf, but in reference to my partner, Mr. Bialystock. Your honor, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, Max Bialystock is the most selfish man I ever met in my life. Not only is he liar, and a cheat and a scoundrel, and a crook, who has taken money from little old ladies, he has also talked people into doing things, especially me, that they would never in a thousand years had dreamed of doing.
But, your honor, as I understand it the law was created to protect people from being wronged. Your honor, whom has Max Bialystock wronged? I mean, whom has he really hurt? Not me. Not me.
I was... this man... No one ever called me 'Leo' before! I mean, I know it's not a big legal point, but even in kindergarten they used to call me 'Bloom!' I never sang a song before! I mean with someone else, I never sang a song with someone else before. This man, this man, this is a wonderful man. He made me what I am today... he did.
And what of the dear ladies? What would their lives have been without Max Bialystock? Max Bialystock, who made them feel young, and attractive, and wanted again. That's all I have to say.

I cry on at least a monthly basis when the words "I never sang a song before! I mean with someone else, I never sang a song with someone else before" and, again, maybe it's a joke but "Nobody ever called me 'Leo' before (...) even in kindgarten they used to call me 'Bloom!'" will never fail to produce at least a little mistiness, including now as I write this. It is also kind of the basis for my trans headcanon of Leo Bloom, but that is besides the point. Anyway...

Zero Mostel as Max Bialystock

You know who I used to be? Max Bialystock! King of Broadway! Six shows running at once! Lunch at Delmonico's. $200 suits. You see this? This once held a pearl as big as your eye! Look at me now. LOOK AT ME NOW! I'm wearing a cardboard belt!

So, having spoken at great length about Leo Bloom, you might get the impression that I'm not that pushed about Max Bialystock. And, oh, how wrong you would be.

I have, for years, made jokes on Tumblr about The Type, alluding to my penchant for sleazy, dapper (but often slovenly and/or shabby) crooks with poorly concealed hearts of gold and soft spots for certain people. Your Bernard Blacks, your Grunkle Stans, your Quarks, your Norman Stanley Fletchers, and, very, very much in keeping with that, your Max Bialystocks.

He just is... this man. This is a wonderful man.

Also, while a movie with Mr. "Don't touch my blue blanket!" in it was always going to have me identifying more with Leo Bloom, Bialy himself is not exactly... um, unrelatable. I mean:

Bloom, look at me. Look at me, Bloom. Bloom, I'm drowning. Other men sail through life. Bialystock has struck a reef. Bloom, I'm going under. I'm being sunk by a society that demands success when all I can offer is failure.

I just... when will a dishonest man come and manipulate me into commiting white collar crime for him? When will an earnest and profoundly weird little man come and change my life by merely posing a little accounting theory and falling in love with me?

Because, in a move that could not be more on-brand for me, I do very much ship this. How could you not, honestly?

GIF of Leo Bloom leaning over and kissing Max Bialystock on the cheek as they smile and laugh next to each other.

GIF posted by giantmonster to Tumblr here on April 7, 2017

The movie is also, when it's not being the beautiful love story of an unscrupulous down-on-his-luck producer and a lonely autistic accountant, an irreverant anti-fascist satire (i.e. a satire that is anti-fascist, not a satire of anti-fascism) that was highly controversial when it was released, and has been, to varying degrees, ever since.

Content warning: discussion of Nazis and fascism, and allusions to, although not detailed discussion or descriptions of, the Holocaust

I do certainly think that over the years there have been fictional depictions of Nazis as inept villains used for comedy that insensitively diminished the horror of what the Nazis did, but for my money, that's not what's happening with The Producers. And, frankly, if anyone gets to make this particular movie, it's a Jewish WWII veteran. I also think that there is a distinct line between diminishing the Holocaust through comedy and in deflating the glamour of fascism by exposing it as ridiculous through comedy, and I think the latter can be a very effective means of making fascists seem less admirable. Which, unfortunately seems to be a trap even people who would never consider Nazism to be something that should be emulated can fall into: this idea that the Nazis really were extraordinary ubermenschen who were dazzlingly competent and even stylish, in a way, in their pagentry and their self-invented mythos of themselves.

No. They were buffoons. They were evil genocidal murderers and, as the meme goes, you do not, under any circumstances, 'have to give it to them.'

This is not just an idealogical objection that it's in bad taste to do this either, although it certainly is in extremely poor taste at best, I also feel that it's factually wrong. Hitler, and other people in leadership positions in Nazi Germany, made stupid strategic decisions all the time, and things like the idea that they made the public infrastructure much better are largely myths from what I understand,^* because for some reason there is this desire among some on the left to see fascist governments as more effective. They're not. They were buffoons and they were evil genocidal murderers. You don't have to be a genius tactitian to be evil.

Lindsay Ellis made a video essay about the use of satire in The Producers a few years ago, which I think is very good and certainly a lot better expressed and researched and more convincing than anything I just shot off the hip.

Mel Brooks, The Producers and the Ethics of Satire about N@zis

Watch on YouTube

*This impression is based on what I remember having read elsewhere from sources I believed to be trustworthy at the time, but I can't quite remember where and I am not a WWII expert or an academic, and I didn't rigorously fact-check myself on this when I was writing this post, or find sources to include that support my claim here, so, TL;DR citation needed (and if anyone does have a good source debunking this oft-repeated trope, I would greatly appreciate it). Just a quick note here though: I'm not interested in debating whether or not the Nazis were in any way admirable. I think I've made where I stand clear and I will be screening comments to avoid giving a platform to that sentiment, so I wouldn't bother if I were you.
[return to where you left off.]

Search in your current space, whether brick-and-mortar or digital. Post a picture (a link to a picture will be fine!) or description of something that is or represents:
1. Something your favorite character would like
2. Something that makes you laugh
3. A fandom place you would like to visit
4. A fandom creator (pro or not) you'd like to meet
5. Something you find comforting
6. Something from a favorite TV series or movie from your childhood
7. A piece of clothing you love
8. A book or song with a color in the title
9. Something only someone in your fandom would understand

Something your favorite character would like
This one was tricky! For one, I have so many characters who I love it would be hard to single out out as my absolute number one favourite, and for another I am quite different from a lot of my favourite characters in the things I like, or at least am a bit short on stuff they'd like at the moment. So, in the spirit of a well-intentioned relative doing their very best:
It's the thought that counts, Blorbo...
Who doesn't love nice, warm hand knitted socks? They're made from 100% alpaca fibre yarn! Well, almost 100%, there's a bit of polyamide in there to make them more hardwearing. But all the better, really, less darning! Really, Blorbo, you could be a little grateful.

Something that makes you laugh
This one was a lot easier, because I was in the middle of laughing at it when I first read today's challenge on the snowflake_challenge community.
You gotta make your own fun sometimes...
This is a once-off single episode podcast I recorded with my fellow trek-rarepair-swap co-mod cosmic_llin recently for voiceteam's Mystery Box 2023 event. The challege was Temptation and bluedreaming tempted people to record a mini-podcast or oral not!fic about their favourite overlooked fandom/rare ship/etc., which I all but jumped at and immediately asked the mods if it would be okay to record something with a non-Mystery Box participant if I did the rest of the work of creating the audio work, i.e. organising, editing and cover art, etc., and fortunately they gave me the all clear.
It was really lovely to record this with Llin and reminisce on the magical four years we spent modding trek-rarepair-swap together, the amazing community that built around it, the many wonderful fanworks that were created for it, and the Star Trek rarepairs of our own that inspired the creation of the swap.
If you're interested, you can listen to the pod on AO3 via an embedded stream, or you can use the download link on the work to get a copy of the MP3. Or not, this is not intended as a hard sell, haha. But in my subjective opinion it is a pleasant 51 minutes of listening to two Star Trek nerds being silly.

A fandom place you would like to visit
Now, to be clear, I am not saying that this would be a good idea, but:
All roads lead to...
or rather away from, the Big Wahoonie itself: Ankh-Morpork! More specifically, the offices of The Ankh-Morpork Times to visit William de Worde, who in many ways is The pedantic, morally scrupulous, yet often a bit of a dick, OCD/autistic character of all time. Also, going to visit a newspaper office at a place that's vaguely analogous to a Gutenberg-era print shop is too good a chance to pass up.

A fandom creator (pro or not) you'd like to meet
I am going to cheat here and pick two...
I went to World Con 2019 in no small part to see both of these creators. Sadly, Lindsay Ellis overslept, I think due to jet-lag, and missed the panel she was supposed to do on the day I had a ticket for, but I did get to go to two things where Naomi Novik spoke, which were both fabulous. In one, she read the first chapter of the then-upcoming A Deadly Education. She was a very engaging and funny speaker and had both sets of crowds in the palm of her hand.
I've loved Novik's Temereaire series for years, and reading Spinning Silver was what finally got me to get my drop spindle out again after having it for a full year before then but not being able to figure out how to use it from videos, and I at long last managed to crack how to get the first bit of fluff to catch onto my leader thread, which has brought a great deal of fun and quality of life to me in the years since. From reading Novik's work, I really like her sense of humour and her ideas, and I think she'd be fun to chat to in a low stakes sort of setting.
And, regarding my cheat-y second pick, it would be nice to see Lindsay Ellis speak in person at some point, even if I didn't get to "meet" her, since I didn't get the chance to see her panel in 2019.

Something you find comforting
This one was a doozy...
I've blurred most of the handwriting here to protect the innocent, or myself at any rate, but this is a kind of three, or perhaps even four-for-one thing that I find comforting. Firstly, I find planners and journals very helpful in terms of using pen and paper as a better memory than my fallible meaty brain and in helping me unplug a bit and do something tactile to stop my eyes from getting too square from looking at a screen. Secondly, I also like printing out digital photos on either of my two Polaroid printers, because I so often lose my photographs when I change phones, or I never back them up, and it's nice to just have them somewhere printed out and maybe stuck down. Even, and maybe especially, silly fandom-y ones. Thirdly and fourthly, in the photo-in-the-photo here, you can see my current knitting project, which is another non-digital hobby I am trying to give more time to, and the show that's paused on my laptop in the photo is Porridge, which I've been finding to be very comforting to revisit recently.
More specifically about journaling though, I have found that with my five-year Hobonichi journal, I've been trying to talk about the things, which so far this year have mostly been silly little fandom things, I'm doing that I want to remember five years from now, and that I want to remember how I felt about them at the time.
It has been kind of interesting having a five-year journal for the first time, because I've been finding myself very hestitant to be too optimistic about looking ahead, knowing that I will be looking back on what I'm writing, because historically with journaling it has been a bit dispiriting reading about things I wanted/intended/thought I would do that never happened or didn't work out.
But I suppose that's all part of life, really, and I do want to be able to capture how I really feel in part because I know it will change and I don't want to fall prey to thinking that I don't change my mind and that I've always thought X, Y or Z. The only constant is change, but I like to keep in touch with my past self and write my future self letters about how I'm getting on, you know? So I have, at the very least, been writing down that I'm worried about being optimistic and that it feels foolish, because I don't want to forget that's how I felt. I don't want to put on a brave face to my future self and hope the shame of having over-promised how well I'd do will keep me on the straight and narrow, but I also don't want to self-censor out of some kind of misguided PR-motivated impulse to not look foolish to myself.

Something from a favorite TV series or movie from your childhood
I actually had another plan for this one, until I saw this during the IRL portion of my scavenger hunt...
It wasn't actually the Boom! comics that got me into my brief, but intense, summer of writing Bulk/Skull fic and talking about Power Rangers on Tumblr in 2016, but it was this intense revisitation of my childhood favourite that led me to read the first few volumes of the MMPR and Go Go Power Rangers comics. I sort of fell off around Shattered Grid, and did intend on catching up again at one point, but there has been a lot of lamentation and rending of garments about writing choices that the comics have made from the people I follow on Tumblr who have kept up, so I may or may not at this point.
Regardless though, it's nice to be reminded of my summer of Power Rangers, because that felt like a very pure and unabashed expression of fannish joy and I want to do that more often for whatever niche corners of fandom I find myself in. It was also around that time that I was revisiting a lot of stuff from my childhood again and allowing myself to just be self-indulgent and juvenile about liking what I liked, up to and including campy '90s shows with questionable monster costumes, which is another thing I want to remember to do more often.

A piece of clothing you love
In the context of #3, this one is kind of funny...
I coveted this Beach Boys-print Aloha shirt a lot before I bought it, because I was, at the time, trying very hard to be better about not buying things on the other side of the world impulsively and wanted to a) buy less new clothes in general and b) buy fewer clothes that weren't 100% natural fibres (this is 50/50 cotton and polyester IIRC). However, after about 5 weeks of sitting on my hands and Thinking Seriously about if I Really Needed it, I bought it. Just in time, really, because my size was very nearly sold out and it's a limited edition print that wasn't going to be brought back in stock. But I absolutely love it and I feel that it is very representative of me as a person, so I think that counts as mindful consumption, haha.
I have been trying to be more comfortable with the fact that I am not ever going to be able to pull off the willowy androgyne, or tall lumberjack, take on masculinity just because of my basic body type, which even with HRT can only change so much. I will always be short and round with small hands and feet, but that's okay because there are lots of short, round-faced men (and otherwise masculine-of-centre people) and they are great, so if I'm more of the Justin McElroy school of masculine gender presentation then I want to do that very hard and on purpose instead of living in bland unisex clothes that I try to hide in. I've fallen off a bit on this fashion-effort lately, so this is a good reminder to keep persisting in trying to get better at this.
And, regarding what I said about the relationship to #3, I wore this shirt when I was going to visit some friends in North Wales, one of whom happened to be wearing a Rincewind shirt when I got off the train. The friend wearing the Rincewind shirt took my luggage for me and my other friend remarked, shortly after I got done taking a photograph of the sign for Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch,^* "Um, so I've noticed something here..." and we all had a good laugh about me doing touristy things while I was doing an unintentional closet cosplay of Twoflower and my friend was channeling Rincewind at the same time. I, fortunately, did not leave my luggage in Wales, however.
*Which, incidentally, is a request only stop, so I had to tell the conductor that it was where I was disembarking ahead of time, a task for which I prepared by relentlessly drilling myself with Welsh language tutorials on YouTube and getting Welsh friends at vidukon_cardiff, where I was travelling from, to tutor me on the pronunciation before I left the hotel. All told, I spent almost a full day on this preparation (remember what I said about finding William de Worde relatable?), only, after all that, for the conductor to tell me he was getting off at Chester and I would have to tell the next fella.
Should you ever be in this situation though, I have been reliably informed that you don't have to say the whole name, and would seem like a bit of a try-hard if you attempted to, and all that you need to do is say "Llanfair-PG" or, if you really want to seem like you're in the know, "Llanfairpwllgwyngyll." I tried the latter the first time pretty successfully with conductor #1, but stumbled at the fence by not taking a long enough run up to it with conductor #2, and had to resort to shamefacedly saying that I'd meant Llanfair-PG.
The rather unfortuante thing is that even with an abbreviated version of the name in question, I'm really bad at the ll sound in Welsh (to say nothing of other sounds in Welsh that weren't there to trip me up on this occasion, like the trilled r), so I run into issues straight away. But, as an Irish person who gets very irate about tourists on the train who do not even attempt to learn how to say Irish language place-names and just blithely and confidently mangle them by assuming they should be pronounced like English, I wanted to do my best and make a genuine attempt. Which, unfortunately, was not amazing. Better luck next time, I guess, lol. At least I knew that written Welsh has it's own phonetic conventions that are not identical to written English, I suppose?
[return to where you left off.]

A book or song with a color in the title
This is very cheeky, but...
I also recorded this filk for voiceteam's Mystery Box event. It's based on Under a Blanket of Blue, as performed by Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald. I was taking part in a Filk Broken Telephone and the work before mine was 'Meet me in the blanket fort' (based on Meet Me in the Battlefield) by irrationalpie, so this seemed like a good lead on from that and I liked the opportunity for green as a reference to BrickGrass's browser extension that highlights the usernames of users on Rindle's directory of creators with blanket permission statements for transformative works of their fanworks in green, because an audio fanwork event seemed like the right venue for a work about blanket permission statements.
I do a fair bit of amateur singing and other kinds of music in a non-fannish context, but this is the first time I've made an attempt at a musical fanwork, so I hope it turned out okay. If I was doing it again I'd use my other mic, because this sounded a bit tinny, but I think it's listenable.
If you're curious, you can click on the image itself to follow the link to the AO3 work, or for convenience, here's another link here. But absolutely no pressure, and I am linking purely in case people wanted to hear it to save them from hunting it down or asking for a link. My 2024 fandom mission statement is doing whatever I want whether people are interested or not, so if you're not interested then that's genuinely fine.

Something only someone in your fandom would understand
Some more cheekiness...
Once again, the image is a link and here is another one, haha. But also, once again, I genuinely do not expect anyone to make use of either of these links and am just putting them there on the off-chance someone does want a link and, honestly, to scratch the itch caused by the HTML-fuelled goblin that lives in my brain.
I'm mostly including this at all to show that I am walking the walk re: doing whatever niche bullshit I want as I resolved to as part of my day #2 resolutions, because I've already written another fic for one of the micro fandoms I nominated, requested, and offered for Yuletide,^* in addition to the one I wrote for my assignment.
I am 10,000% delighted with how well I did out of Yuletide this year—so much in fact that I still wanted to write more because I was all fired up. So I did. Even though it will be completely impenetratible to, I'm gonna say, 100% of the people who are subscribed to my AO3 profile. And I may still write more! I have an idea for a vid too.
^*And, happily, which I was gifted two wonderful fics for as well, Long Drawn Sunday Night by twoam and A Bit of Bottle by nomadicwriter, as having the opportunity to write one of my own, What Good Are Cupid's Arrows to a Fletcher Without a Beau?, for my recip Emma_Oz.
[return to where you left off.]

I got very link happy in this, so if any are broken, give me a shout in the comments and I'll fix them.

P.S. I've screened comments on this because of a minor brain weasels concern about [REDACTED], but I've unscreened every comment I've gotten so far and if yours is screened for a while I'm probably just asleep or haven't checked DW for a bit.

Challenge #4
IceBreaker Challenge! Tell us about yourself. 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.

Oh, hmm, let me think about how to go about this in a way that's not just very fandom specific.

Here goes!

I love words and wordplay and writing sentence-level prose that I find sonically, or otherwise, satisfying (which I fixate on often at the expense of doing a better job with larger structural stuff, or in deprioritising writing things that sound plausible instead of that just make my brain fizz).
Another of my writing foibles is that I can't bear to write sad things that aren't in any way funny, or funny things that aren't a bit sad.
I am very over-confident and self-satisfied while also being profoundly insecure and embarrassed by every minute aspect of my person.
I often try to be a dilettante and an expert, with varying degrees of success.
I am instinctively very good at understanding cat body language, but had to learn human social skills from my culture of origin very deliberately and by rote and only really got the hang of them in my mid-twenties.
I'm really going to try to have one that is unambiguously positive now: I am well loved by many wonderful friends who I met through fandom.

Challenge #3
Create a wish list of fandom things (podfic, graphics, playlists, canon recs translations, research help, vids, sky's the limit!) that you'd like to receive. 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.

Oh gosh! I obviously do not feel entitled to expect any of these wishes to coming true, but in the spirit of blue-sky thinking, here's some things that would make my entire year:

A shippy Fletch/Godber Porridge fanwork of any variety.
A synopsis of, or fanwork about, a hypothetical episode of The Muppet Show (1976-1981) where the very special guest is a contemporary 2020s celebrity. Time travel optional, and feel free to use any medium (text, audio, audiovisual, visual, etc.) or format, e.g. meta, notfic, oral notfic, fanart, etc.
An unconventional soulmate AU, or a fake dating fanwork, about Roman Roy/Gerri Kellman.
A recommendation of a new-to-me fandom with a canon younger man/older woman ship.
A Survivor (as in the reality TV show) AU for any of my fandoms (anything I have a fandom tag on Dreamwidth for and anything I've created a fanwork for on AO3, besides Teen Wolf which I'm not really into anymore, is fair game).

Challenge #2
In your own space, set yourself some goals for the coming year. They can be fannish or not, public or private. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

I've just reviewed the fandom goals that I posted for 2023 for day 12 of last week's Snowflake Challenge, and I did better on them than I expected to! I had a full success with 5/11, a qualified success with 8/11 (I gave myself a few cheats on three of them to make up lost ground), and made some progress on all of my goals, even the ones I consider failures overall.

Looking at what was easy, what I was just about able to pull out of the bag, and what I thought was going to be easy but then didn't manage, I'm going to make the following adjustments for my goals this year:

Participate in three fandom exchanges.
Create one treat for an exchange.
Create three pinch hits.
Beta read three fics.
Bind three books (none of which have to be a new typeset, or my own typeset).
Typeset three fics (they do not have to be the same ones I bind).
Record, edit, and post at least one podfic a month (one Mulligan is allowed if I miss a month and then make it up by posting two in another month).
Finish my podfic of Wedding is Destiny; and Hanging Likewise by sqbr.
Complete and post two fanvids.
Health and other circumstances permitting, attend two in-person conventions.
Comment on at least one fanwork a week.
Update Dreamwidth at least once a month.
Write whatever self indulgent niche fic I want to without worrying about whether anyone else will care about it.

The last one is more qualitative, because I don't want to set a hard target of "Write one fic no one cares about a month" or something, but I do want to get more comfortable with just pursuing ideas that I am interested by and want to write without being worried about Alienating People Who Subscribed To My AO3 Profile For [X Fandom] or that no one will read it, or whatever.

In general, I've tried to (slightly) scale up the goals that I succeeded on last year, and scale down the ones that I didn't, or make them less specific so there's a wider scope for success. Most of my goals are less specific than they were last year, actually, but I think that this is good because it means I might try more things. I've also dropped a couple of goals that I think are sort of done, or that I'm doing okay on without tracking them/setting a goal for them.

Challenge #15

In your own space, opine on the future of fandom.

This is an interesting one, because I feel like my ability to guess at future fandom migrations has never really been amazing. I bet against AO3, I bet against Tumblr, I bet so hard against Twitter that I never conceded and started being fannish there. I bet on Pillowfort, at least insofar as paying them the necessary $5 to create an account, and then never posted a single thing on it. But, as much as my guesses are any good, I think that the next phase of fandom will be/may already be primarily based on Discord, which I guess is kind of a return to form for me in the sense that when I arrived on the scene a lot of what went down happened in Livejournal communities.

I think that there are plusses and minuses to Discord as a platform for fandom. On the one hand, you have to know someone to know where to go, so it can be inaccessible in that way. But that can also be a positive, because it is possible to be have more private moderated spaces than is possible on Tumblr (or, as far as I know, Twitter). The big drawback for me is the difficulty of archiving things for fandom posterity. There are reams of thoughtful and insightful meta that will never be posted outside a Discord server and will probably die with that server. There is art that is never posted anywhere else. Some people are linking people to Google Docs to share their fic rather than archive it on AO3 (or elsewhere). And that's, like, obviously well within the rights of the people doing this, if that's what they want, but I think that many people who particpate in fandom through Discord would like for certain conversations and fanworks to be able to survive past one single, ephemeral fandom space.

My perspective on this is pretty limited, because there are so many pockets of fandom I have never gotten into and I have no idea what the people who hang out there are likely to want out of a future fandom home. But this is what my current thoughts are. Tumblr seems to have a near death experience every 3-5 years, so it's easy to simultaneously think of it as being incredibly precarious and also invulnerable to harm, so it is hard to say if and how long that will last as a fandom hub. Dreamwidth, as far as I can tell, has a dedicated base, but not a broad one and I don't necessarily see that changing in the near future, despite it being (from my mid-2000s to early 2010s Livejournal-reared perspective) a much better platform for fandom than Tumblr, Discord or Twitter. But I guess something being well built for fandom has never been a good predictor of where we flock to. Give us enough time and we'll probably start a fandom presence on LinkedIn.

Snowflake Challenge promotional banner with image of a hollow ice ball sitting on ice crystals on a dark blue background. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

Challenge #14

In your own space, do the Fandom Wrap Challenge. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

( Read more... )

In your own space, create a quiz or a poll (or tell us your thoughts about answering quizzes/polls)

I had an interesting conversation with a friend of mine today where we butted up against a difference in understanding we had about what to "ship" something actually meant in practice. Specifically, I was said the following about a ship:

"Yeah, like, I do not ship this! I think it's a fascinating kind of... deconstruction of teen crushes on authority figures? Or people who they think are safe outlets for burgeoning sexual feelings who turn out to be not that? But I think it's repulsive. And my reading of [movie] is that [character 1] had a crush on [character 2] and the betrayal of him turning out to be literally manipulating him as part of an elaborate revenge plot shut down [character 1]'s tentative exploration of bisexuality for years. Also, I have never thought it was reciprocated, lol. Like, I don't get people who ship it in a fluffy consensual way, and I find the way that I think it is actually plausible to be repellent, but I do get it? Idk"

which they found interesting, because their feelings on the ship and reading of the canon was pretty much the same as mine, but they felt that they did ship it. So we clearly meant different things when we said "I ship this" or "I don't ship this" and we teased out what we meant specifically by this shorthand.

I am not aware if there is any agreed upon Definitive™ meaning, but I thought it would be a fun subject for a poll! So, here goes:

Poll #28319 Shipping

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 20

View Respondents

So like... what does "I ship this" mean to you?

View Answers

I want this to be canon
2 (10.0%)

I think this is an aspirational relationship dynamic
1 (5.0%)

I find this interesting, but I don't necessarily want it to be canon or think it would be a good idea in real life
15 (75.0%)

I find the characters very attractive
5 (25.0%)

I find the dynamic between the characters very attractive
16 (80.0%)

I actively want to engage with this ship (via fanworks, meta, just thinking about them) in a more than incidental way
17 (85.0%)

I think this is a plausible interpretation of their canon relationship
10 (50.0%)

I think this is a plausible extrapolation of their canon relationship's potential evolution
12 (60.0%)

I don't like the relationship in canon but the fanon/what it could be is great
2 (10.0%)

Other I will explain in comments
2 (10.0%)

The responses are check boxes, so tick as many as apply!

Snowflake Challenge promotional banner with image of crystal snowflakes on green leaves on a dark blue background. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

Challenge #13

In your own space, rec three fanworks that you did not create.

Okay! So, in no particular order:

turn a little faster; the world will follow after by katiemariie—hands down my favourite DS9 fic of all time. It has it all! Not one, but two cultural revolutions! Deconstructions of fanon post-canon tropes! Alexander Rozhenko as a midwife! Honestly, I am extremely picking about Garak/Bashir fic, as I find that often it is written in a way that is not to my tastes compared with how it's portrayed on the show, and katiemariee is one of the few authors whose take on the ship I gel with. But Garak/Bashir is by no means the only ship nor is it the main ship! The story is roughly half and half two parallel narratives that feature Lenara Kahn reunited with (now Ezri) Dax on DS9 and the two of them fighting against the Trill reassociation taboo, which is amazing and is probably the reason I am more likely to read Lenara/Ezri than Lenara/Jadzia, and Julian reuniting with Garak on Cardassia as an aid worker-cum-spy (as Kira remarks in the fourth chapter: "Frontier medicine by day, spy by night. Sounds like your dream job."). There is nothing about this fic I would change and I re-read it at least twice a year.
Profit & Growth by trinityofone—A John Kreese/Terry Silver fic in the Karate Kid/Cobra Kai fandom. This is the (intentionally) problematic kinky mpreg fic of my dreams! I usually am not a cis mpreg fan, but truly nobody is doing it like trinityofone! A guy babytrapping his boyfriend who won't commit by using mad science to knock himself up?? Sign me up! This fic was, to my knowledge, the first fic that used the Dynatox R&D tag which tragically is not yet a filterable tag on AO3, which is used on stories where Terry Silver's company Dynatox's R&D department is the jumping off point for various mad science premises. So far it has just been Kreese/Silver stories, but who knows! Maybe one day the Silverussos will join us in the lab!
Wedding is Destiny; and Hanging Likewise by sqbr—this is a post-canon Pride and Prejudice fic about Anne de Bourgh and Mary Bennet falling in love. It's... you guys, it's the best P&P fic I have ever read, and I am including the pro-novel Longbourne by Jo Baker in this. Mary is such an insufferable prig and I love her and Anne is such an unbearable snob and I adore her! The premise of the fic is that Mary chooses to go to Rosings Park to be Anne's live-in companion, largely out of a sense of anxiety about her role within her own family of birth after the marriage of three of her sisters. When I first read this fic I went on a liveblogging spree on my Tumblr, which you can read here in chronological order, but I'm also going to c&p one such post here, which includes a passage from the fic itself:
“You have impure thoughts about me?” asked Mary. “You would like to–do–sinful things? With me?” Her eyes were very bright and Anne could still taste the memory of her kiss. Anne had to look away, sure the answer to Mary’s question was written all over her face.

“I am sorry,” said Anne. “Knowing your disinterest I would never consider…”

“I would be willing,” said Mary. “I had not considered the possibility before, but it solves everything. As your friend, I would be willing to help you resist temptation by lying with you. I have spent some time considering the method, and it does not sound disagreeable.”

“No,” said Anne, horrified. This was like some strange, shameful dream. “No that is…Mary, that is perverse. How is that any better than me simply taking a lover in the first place?”

“Because…” Mary frowned in concentration, seriously considering the question. “Because nobody should touch you that way but me,” she said, in a wondering tone, as if it was some great truth that had just been revealed to her. “They will not love you as I do. It would be impure and sordid. With me it would be a pure, transcendental expression of friendship and love.” She sighed happily and lay back on the pillow, closing her eyes. “We would be like Diana and her acolytes, bathing naked together after a hunt,” said Mary. “How agreeable it would be…”

“Oh my God,” said Anne.

Outstanding heterosexual Mary Bennet smashed on punch after a ball proposing to Anne de Bourgh that they be the closest of chums and kiss and hug and make love with each other the better to help Anne avoid having inappropriate and sinful relationships with women who are not Mary. What’s better than gals being pals?
This fic is also extremely disgaybled and I would recommend it especially to people who are queer or disabled or both. Obviously Anne and Mary are in lesbians with each other, but additionally Anne's canonical chronic illness is wonderfully represented and Mary Bennet's canonical preoccupation with morality and propriety is given wonderful dimension and life that pings extremely autistic and/or OCD to me (an, admittedly, autistic and OCD person, lol).

It is everything I could ever want from a rarepair fic, a Pride and Prejudice fic, a femslash fic, a post-canon fic, a fic that touches on disability and canon typical cultural attitudes towards women, queer people and people in different social classes. It, as I have so often said, has it all.

In the words of Shane Madej and Ryan Bergara: that's the list! I would have loved to have recced some of my favourite vids or podfics, but when I went to my bookmarks to see which ones I revisited most often, these were the three. And I feel they are very deserving of that honour!

Snowflake Challenge promotional banner with image of three snowmen and two robins with snowflakes. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

In your own space, set yourself some goals for the coming year. They can be fannish or not, public or private.

So... I have a very extensive Google Doc with my resolutions for the new year, broken down my category, which lists over 115 individual goals for 2023. Some of them are very personal and I wouldn't be comfortable sharing and including all of the ones I was comfortable sharing would be... um, a long post, lol. But here are my fandom resolutions for 2023:

Write one and post 1K word story a month ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ (✔) ✅ ✅ ✅ (EDIT: 01/09/23 I've managed this every month except May so far, so I'll give myself that as a mulligan and allow myself to count a fic from another month where I posted more than just one 1K words fic for May instead as a one-time thing)✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
Participate in Yuletide and write at least one treat in addition to assignment ✅ (✔) (✔) (Edit 03/01/24 I wrote two pinch hits, although I didn't write any treats, so I will call this one a qualified success.)
Participate in one non-Yuletide fic exchange ✅
Edit and post three fanvids (one festivids, one vidukon_cardiff, one other) ✅ ❌(Edit: 01/09/23 I didn't get it together for VidUKon this year, but I'll all myself to count this as a success if I post two more vids) ❌ (Edit: 03/01/24 I'm currently still working on my assignment for Festivids, but I didn't complete post any other vids in 2023.)
Typeset and bind a fic ✅
Record, edit and upload ten podfics (individual chapters count as one) ✅ (⅔) (I recorded some lines for the pod that the podficcer I worked together with for pod_together made for the event and I'll let myself count it for two thirds of one pod towards this goal, since I did have to edit the raw audio a little before I sent it off for her to edit into her Audacity project file)✅ ✅ ✅ (⅓) (⅓) (Edit 03/01/24 I recorded lines in two multivoices that I didn't edit when I went to europodfriends in October) ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
Beta at least one fic ✅
Leave more comments and kudos (kudos every fic that was enjoyable, comment on at least one out of three fics that were enjoyable). Always leave a short comment on a re-read, don’t forget to kudos if also commenting ❌ (Edit: 03/01/24 Definitely dropped the ball on this one)
Update Dreamwidth once a week ❌ (Edit: 01/09/23 Categorically have failed this, lol, but I'll try and get back on the horse and not be too all or nothing about it) (Edit: 03/01/24) Didn't really get back on the horse, I am sorry to say.
Look into bringing back trek-rarepair-swap could be an annual thing for now?) ✅ (Edit 01/09/23 I looked into it with my co-mod and decided it's probably a next year at the earliest thing)
Write more image descriptions and at least look through the notes of posts to find if others have written descriptions before reblogging undescribed posts ✅ (Edit: 01/09/23 I've actually been doing really well at this! Obviously it's an ongoing goal rather than a fait accompli that I'm going to give up on now that I've technically cleared the bar of doing more than I was, but it's nice to realise that I've committed to this very consistently)

Some of these are minimums rather than "do exactly this and no more" goals, obviously.

Looking back at these now, some of these seem extremely doable (and, in fact, I have betaed a fic so far this year and signed up to a handful of non-Yuletide exchanges, so well done me! I am also on track with at least four other goals and possibly more?) and others seem very hard. Ten podfics! I certainly was ambitious when I wrote this list in December in some respects. But, you know, sometimes it's good for me when my reach exceeds my grasp. Gives me room to improve the next year.

It feels fitting to be revisiting my resolutions a day after Lunar New Year. Happy year of the rabbit, everyone! It's my sign's year and I'm not going to waste it like I did 2011, lol. Also, I found out the other day, Vietnam celebrates the year of the cat rather than the year of the rabbit! I'm very charmed by this.

Edit: 03/01/24 So, I did better at this than I thought I would, honestly. Particularly with the podfic! Although to be fair, most of that was a third act twist where I recorded and edited five pods for ITPE in late December. It's good to see a baseline for what was easy and what I struggled with.

Challenge #10

In your own space, create a fanwork.

So this came at a fortuitous time, because I just had the idea for this fic yesterday. It was going to be for an exchange, but then it edged a bit too close to one of the DNWs, in spirit if nothing else, i.e. if someone DNWed daddy kink, I felt it would be a dick move to write them mommy kink. I guess I could have emailed the mods to double check, because there are certainly people who are squicked by the former but not the latter, and vice versa, but I had another idea so I thought I'd just go with that. I still really liked this idea though, so I planned to write it eventually. Which turned out to be sooner than I thought!

Title: A Quite Complex Complex
Rating: Explicit
Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Category: F/M
Fandom: Succession (TV 2018)
Relationship: Gerri Kellman/Roman "Romulus" Roy
Characters: Gerri Kellman, Roman "Romulus" Roy
Additional Tags: POV Roman "Romulus" Roy, Roman "Romulus" Roy Has a Mommy Kink, Bad Decisions, Kink Negotiation, (not presented in a best practices light lol), Phone Sex, Gerri Kellman Does Not Have an Orgasm, set in a nebulous pre-texting incident canon divergent au, where they communicated boundaries to each other SLIGHTLY better.
Language: English
Published: 2023-01-19
Words: 1476
Chapters: 1/1

Summary: Roman sends Gerri a Mother's Day card As A Joke™ because this is how mature adults drop hints that they want to try certain kinks.

Read at AO3

Snowflake Challenge promotional banner with image of small box wrapped with snowflake paper on a white-pink snowflake paper background. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

In your own space, tell us about 3 creative/fannish resources, spaces, or communities you use or enjoy. (One or two is fine, especially if you're in a smaller fandom or like many people at the moment, fannishly adrift right now) Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

—

snowflake_challenge

I would like to rec DW-specific resources, but I'm not really on here frequently enough to have many unique insights in that sphere, sadly! However, here are a few resources that have been helpful for me in Trek fandom:

TrekCore is, in its own words "The Web's largest and most frequently updated Star Trek multimedia resource" and it is an invaluable resource for screencaps, episode guides, sound effects and news about new merch, etc. I once planned out a whole DS9 vid using screencaps that I sourced from TrekCore as storyboards. It is resources like these that make me realise how lucky we Trekkies are when I feel the absense of them in other fandoms!
Memory Alpha is the fan wiki for all things (canon) Trek! Again, a truly wonderful and comprehensive resource that makes other fan wikis pale in comparison (I certainly feel very wistful about Memory Alpha whenever I'm contending with the Karate Kid wiki, which literally just makes things up and editorialises constantly). Its sister site, Memory Beta, covers beta canon (i.e. novelisations etc.).

I'm listing these resources specifically because from time to time I have seen proponents of transformative fandom dismiss "curatorial" fandom that "simply" catalogues canon and is therefore "not creative" and, honestly, this makes me very uncomfortable. I understand that some people in more mainstream parts of fandom are often very rude about transformative fandom and that defensiveness in the face of this is probably natural, but I dislike the idea that we need to prop ourselves up by putting down another way of being fannish. And, as I've said, these resources that curate canon information have been invaluable to me for creating fanworks! I really don't think this is or should be a "us and them" issue and, besides, lots of people like both ways of particpating in fandom, so the binary is a false one in the first place.

Snowflake Challenge promotional banner with image of ice covered tree branches and falling snowflakes on a blue background. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

If you got the opportunity to add one thing to the canon of any of your fandoms, what would that be? Maybe there’s a character who didn’t get much of a backstory/storyline and you’d like to do something with them, maybe a show was axed too soon and you had thoughts on what could happen in a subsequent season, maybe there’s a new episode you’d like to have added.

Challenge #4

In your own space, add something to your fandom’s canon.

—

snowflake_challenge

This is said with all possible love in my heart for the character of Amanda LaRusso: Kumiko should have been Daniel's wife in Cobra Kai.

First of all, they were so cute together in TKK2! No criticism of Ali intended, but Daniel/Kumiko was peak teen Daniel romance! It was an enormous bummer when we found out they broke up offscreen before the start of TKK3 (although I 1000% agree with Kumiko's decision to go to school for dance in Tokyo instead of following Daniel to America) and I think it would have been really sweet to have them canonically reunited and married going into Cobra Kai.

Second of all, I think it would have been a pretty painless way to increase the diversity of the show in general and the representation of East Asian characters specifically (which I think is important given that the franchise is so strongly associated with a martial art that developed in the Ryukyu Kingdom) if Daniel's wife and children were Japanese and Japanese-Italian American respectively. Jen Ruggirello is probably too old to have played this version of Sam, but maybe they have family in the business! Or, indeed, maybe there are lots of mixed actors who could have been given this opportunity to get a break.

Third of all... can we please have some women over 50 with regular roles on this show besides Rose Bianco?? Idk if Amanda is supposed to be the same age, approximately, as Courtney Henggeler, who plays her, or closer in age to Daniel and just incredibly well preserved, but it's just kind of frustrating that both Daniel and Johnny's love interests are played by women so much younger than them. Not in a "problematic age difference" way, but in a "women in Hollywood are considered to have an expiration date and that blows" way. Like... Johnny is closer in age to Rosa than Carmen (granted, only just about, he's basically between them in age, but still!), but the show would have never in a thousand years have pursued that as a love story. Shannon, Robby's mother, is also played by a woman significantly younger than Johnny (or his actor William Zabka). Because Tamlyn Tomita played an age appropriate love interest opposite Ralph Macchio in 1986, there would be no getting around the fact that she was 51 when the first season of Cobra Kai was being shot. And I think that would have been great!

I began writing this primer/manifesto Some Time Ago and then abandoned it because I got overwhelmed, so thank you to the

snowflake_challenge for the nudge to get it out of mothballs and finish it! It is not perfect: my biases are definitely present as much as I have tried not to put them to the forefront. There are parts of the fandom that I don't have much connection to and can't offer much insight on (see: the Instagram side of fandom). I also do not cover the musical or the upcoming remake. But, I think that it's certainly better than nothing! I may revisit and revise this post in the future.

So what is The Karate Kid? And what about its spin off Cobra Kai? How can you learn more about it? I’m so glad you asked.

First and foremost: the wiki is garbage. The factual and the completely fabricated lie cheek by jowl with no means of distinguishing between them. I can’t replace what the wiki should be as a resource, but I can certainly get you started.

The Karate Kid is a martial arts drama written by Robert Mark Kanen and directed by John G Avildsen that opened on June 22 1984 to critical and popular acclaim. It is the story of Daniel LaRusso, a spunky New Jersey transplant to California, who is bullied by the popular kid and karate black belt Johnny Lawrence. To defend himself, Daniel learns traditional Okinawan karate from Mr Miyagi, his building’s handyman. There are two further instalments starring Ralph Macchio and Pat Morita as Daniel and Mr Miyagi and a fourth movie starring Hilary Swank as Julie Pierce, the titular next karate kid that Mr Miyagi mentors.

Cobra Kai, which debuted on the now defunct YouTube Red in 2018, is the story of Johnny Lawrence 34 years after the events of The Karate Kid. It takes more of a shades of grey approach to characterisation and all the characters can be sympathetic or unsympathetic by turns. The show faced an uncertain future after season two, before being acquired by Netflix and renewed in June 2020, releasing season three on January 1 2021. At present, there are five seasons of the show and, while a sixth season has not yet been confirmed, it is likely that the show will be renewed. [EDIT Jan 20 2023: Cobra Kai has been renewed for a sixth and final season]

You can watch Cobra Kai season 1-5 on Netflix and seasons 1-3 are available on DVD and BluRay (season 4 is only available on DVD). The Karate Kid I-III is also available on DVD and BluRay and can be streamed on Netflix Ireland (the fourth movie and the 2010 remake with Jaden Smith and Jackie Chan are also on Irish Netflix as of January 2023).

What’s that? You want to know more?

Here are some summaries! Spoilers ahead.

( plot summaries, fandom events and communities, mini-ship manifestos and a rec list under the cut )

Current Mood: accomplished

Hello, beautiful Dreamwidth people! I know that every so often I come back and solemnly pledge to use DW more often, but I will, at the very least, be around this January doing the

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