RatCreature's Journal

I skipped #12 because I'm not at all interested into fantasy (re-)casting anyone -- I don't visualize characters in my head to begin with, and can only remember celebrity or actor names if I'm very active in a fandom where they crop up constantly. I skipped #11 because interacting on cue without the prompt being more specific felt weird. So #13...

Challenge 13: In your own space, share a favorite memory about fandom: the first time you got into fandom, the last time a fanwork touched your heart, wild times with fellow fans (whether on-line or off-line), a lovely comment you’ve received or have left for someone.

I've written about my first fandom experiences (off- and online) for a past meme, and my first interaction attempt towards online fandom wasn't particularly successful, though it is still a somewhat fond memory. I think I might have come across as weird, because with the very first fanfic I found and read (for The Sentinel), I used the feedback email address to squee at the author about how awesome it was to have found fanfic and their story, and never heard anything back. It might just have been that besides fanfic it was also a really popular resource site, and the author a BNF. Unfortunately a hard disk calamity destroyed my carefully hoarded early emails, so I can't reread it now with hindsight. Not hearing anything back didn't deter me though, and there were links on how to join mailing lists, so I actually got to talk to other fans soon enough. (Somewhat painstakingly, because back then my English wasn't quite fully fluent.)

In general my favorite fandom memories happened when I was in big fandoms, where you then had high energy communities. So I fondly remember things like the opening months of Prospect-L for The Sentinel in 2000 (such an explosion of email in my inbox...), or SGA comms on LJ in the mid-00s, when I participated in the paintedspires fanart fest, and my painting got a lot of feedback rather than falling into a void.

Challenge #9: In your own space, list your Fandom Wrap categories.
I actually have not quantified my time by fandom. So these are somewhat dubious guesses at best.

What are your top five fandoms for 2021 based on the amount of time you interacted with them?
1. Romance Novels (does that count as fandom as much as genre, like SFF? I read a lot of those, and also read reviews and listened to many podcasts and such)
2. Rusty Quill Gaming (probably, if canon reception counts, because I started listening in early 2021 iirc and that's over three hundred podcast episodes I caught up on, so that's quite a lot, but I haven't delved much into the fandom yet)
3. MCU, particularly the Captain America and Falcon & Winter Soldier corner
4. The Magnus Archives
5. Check Please!

What are your top five fandom spaces in terms of time spent? (AO3, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, Dreamwidth, and others)
1. AO3
2. Dreamwidth
3. Tumblr
4. Twitter (only lurking)
5. Goodreads

What are the top five ways you interacted in these fandoms? (Reading fanfic, writing, commenting, watching videos, chatting with friends, making art, or anything else you can think of).
1. reading fanfic
2. looking at fanart
3. bookmarking fanworks (and less often commenting on them)
4. chatting on DW
5. modding a fannish community

What are the top five things you did to contribute to fandom in terms of time? Did you write? Comment? Send positive energy into the universe? Create art?
1. encouraged fannish activity by being a visible audience via kudos, bookmarks, comments, squeeful conversation etc.
2. maintained fanart_recs
3.
4.
5.

What things did you create that took the most time?

Have to skip this one, because I didn't create anything in 2021.

Have a Top 5 List you'd like to share?? By all means!

How about 5 podcasts I enjoyed last year?
1. Rusty Quill Gaming
2. Double Love
3. The Magnus Archives
4. Learning the Tropes
5. Maintenance Phase

Challenge #7: In your own space, tell us about 3 fandom resources, spaces, or communities you use or enjoy. (One or two is fine, especially if you're in a smaller fandom!)

This is difficult. Just in challenge #4 I was bemoaning the lack of newbie pages and resources like there used to be easy to find upon joining a new fandom.

That said, for anything not tiny at least there tends to be still a fandom wiki that is easy to find. And those are a great help to keep track of things if for example the canon has a lot of characters and worldbuilding. So I have visited both The Magnus Archives wiki and the Rusty Quill Gaming wiki quite a lot as I was catching up these two podcasts.

The fandom.com/wikia wikis also can be helpful if you want to read fanfic in an unfamiliar fandom and its wikipedia page is truncated of nerdy detail (like fictional character biographies or episode summaries etc.) for aspiring to be an encyclopedia and wanting sources etc.

On DW I follow fandomcalendar, a bulletin board for promoting fandom events like fests, challenges, memes etc. And drawesome, a drawing community to fanartists, still has regular drawing challenges every month.

And finally some self-promotion: IMO for anyone looking to find or post fanart recs, the comm fanart_recs, which I mod, is great.

Challenge #5: In your own space, talk about an idea you wish you had the time / talent / energy to do.

With my fanart ideas my problem is generally more self-motivation than that I think I couldn't do it justice. I mean, I'm not great at character likeness and if portrait or caricature was just easy for me, I might draw more often, but I probably would also get better with practice and I don't do that.

When I produce something, I generally don't let any quality concerns stop me from sharing it. I have posted elementary school drawings on my website, as well as comics I did in high school. So that the character likeness isn't great or my background dodgy, or whatever isn't going to stop me from posting. But generally I only actually draw something in the first place, when there is some outside audience energy pushing a bit. Way back in Sentinel fandom I didn't draw anything fannish for years, because the only style around seemed very realistic zine art work, so I didn't attempt that.

My one attempt at fanfic writing in fandom (also Sentinel) showed me however that I'm not suited to that all. It was mostly me elaborating details of my AU world building and failing to come up with any type of plot, and also failing at dialog. But I don't actually get ideas for fanfic plots either.

I fairly often have idle fanart ideas that I don't do anything about, so there is a long list of things that I would like to have drawn/painted, if the result just materialized (even done at my skill level), but the closest match to the premise of this question for me are probably ideas that would be best as a fanfic/fanart collaboration.

One example: I would love to have a Check Please/Sesame Street crossover, because I think Jack the hockey star being a guest star on Sesame Street talking about feeling anxious with an anxious muppet for example (maybe Big Bird? or Telly Monster?), or Bitty meeting Cookie Monster or such, would be cute as art, and I could draw it (having drawn Sesame/comic xovers before), but it would be so much better if it came with a sweet fic that actually provided specific scenes with Jack & Bitty and muppets, but I can't really think of anything, and Jack just standing next to a muppet isn't that great.

Challenge #3: In your own space, put some favorite characters into an AU, fuse some favorite canons together, talk about your favorite AU/fusion tropes, or tell us why AU/fusions aren’t your cup of tea.

Anyone who's known me fannishly for longer than five minutes will have noticed that I love AUs of (almost) all kinds. I haven't updated my AU recs page in years, but I still read a lot of AUs.

One of my few pieces of fandom meta writing was an essay on what I think about AUs, and that is many years old now, but I still basically think about AUs like that, i.e. I like when they somehow relate to canon by diverging from it.

The main exception to that for me are AUs that I like because they push some kink button (like A/B/O fic). Then I don't really care. But in those genres I also read if I have no clue about the canon in the first place.

My least favorite AU trope is probably "mundane" AUs, i.e. ones that strip a canon of its fantasy elements, though I have read some that I really like. But in general, if there is, say, a coffee shop AU with superheroes or such, I actually prefer them to still have powers, but it's an universe where they have to deal with their superpowers while also managing a coffee shop, or such scenarios. I like world building, so AUs with less of that than canon aren't my favorite. A prime example is that with LOTR I pretty much only like AUs that are still set in Middle Earth.

I'm also not that thrilled with genderswitch AUs. I mean, an AU-take on canon with a character being trans or genderqueer or such is fine, but the "always cis-female" type of genderswitch AUs or magical genderswitches rarely work for me. Crack AUs that do not take their premise seriously are also not my thing. OTOH some of those that do are among my favorites.

As for AU scenarios that I wish somebody would create, but I haven't found yet, there are so many. Here is an incomplete list:

• A MCU Captain America/Calvin & Hobbes fusion: Steve is Calvin obviously, Bucky (as Bucky Bear) is Hobbes
• XMFC AU: Erik and Charles meet in the Spanish Civil war in the International Brigades
• XMFC: In Roman Britain, Erik is a celtic druid (with his metal powers seen as magic), Charles is an upper class Roman

I was inspired by the Snowflake Challenge to update my website with the fanart from 2019 that I had neglected to post there.

I also slightly tweaked my DW profile, to reflect that I'm not maintaining my rec pages anymore, and have gotten too lazy to bookmark my fanfic reading on Pinboard, but just do it on AO3.