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snowflake_challenge challenges all at once today! sparkles
The goal: be concise, to the point, and offer thoughts that can generate discussions.
Snowflake Challenge #3: In your own space, talk about a fannish opinion you hold that has changed over time.
Being a "fan" doesn't have a specific aesthetic or a specific way of doing things. Like many other things, "fan identity" has been somewhat codified over time, and associated, for example, with stereotypical nerd aesthetic (especially about things that can be purchased: t-shirt with your fandom logos, trivia books, action-figures etc.), and with certain activities (from writing fan fiction to most recently "brain rotting" on social media).
I do and buy some of these things, but for a time I felt so disconnected from the image it gave (and the stigma, and most of all, the toxic side of things, as in flames and full-blown scandals in communities, horrible dynamics among fans, etc.) that I didn't want to be considered a "fan" and moved to "other interests". The spoilers (you're already caught up with it!) is that "other interests" also have "fans" and maybe their look is a bit different but overall we're talking about the same things, possibly discerning between different levels of "respectability" (e.g. moving within art circles vs. waiting for the next season of your favorite tv show).
The lack of awareness makes a lot of people wandering the "more respectable" circles completely clueless about the same pitfalls fan communities are very well knowledgeable about. (Hello, fans of Sally Rooney!)
I came back to fandom and on Dreamwidth because I want to be a fan of everything and in my own way, which is often all about learning how to create things on the things that I already love. Also, I enjoy being a fan in different scenes (hello postmodernist authors fandoms)!
Snowflake Challenge #5: Talk about what has improved in your life thanks to fandom.
Definitely my knowledge and mastery of language, as well as foreign languages, and of many other things (skills, crafts, and pure notion-based knowledge). Sometimes you just want to know more. Was I always a curious person? Probably. But I wasn't impressed with having to attend my English lessons until I needed to know the meaning of the lyrics of the singer-songwriter I loved; I probably owed my vast knowledge of mythology as a young person to Sailor Moon. And I still learn a lot because of fandom, and fan-related activities (RPGs), be it history to properly write the settings in my historical-drama fandoms, and a variety of fiber crafts both to make costumes for games and cosplay and/or use those crafts as in-game activities in historical live action games (embroidery was almost always a thing and I love doing that under the flickering light of a candle... for a limited-duration scene lol).
Snowflake Challenge #6: Share your favourite piece of original canon.
I don't know if I interpreted this challenge right, but I won't talk about a canon in general but a piece of it. Still, I will twist this a bit: it's not so much what I like about a certain canon, but a certain aspect that makes me enjoy a canon a lot more.
I am a live-action role-player (larper). Since I've started with this activity, I've found that the thing I enjoy the most is the rendering of atmosphere, or rather: my style of play is "immersionist". I care about quests very little, and limitedly about story and character arcs, as long as I'm made to inhabit the very specific fictional time and place we get to play in. It can be the local pub of a small village in the 1980s, or an underground bunker 100+ years after nuclear collapse: if I can sit down in a corner, or navigate corridors, and think "Oh, I am actually here!" then... I won the LARP.
The same happens with non-traditionally-experiential media like books and movies, and I'd like to give three examples, assuming that despite saying "this is not experiential", all art is experiential and a lot is determined by the reader/watcher as much as it is determined by the text itself.
I've recently seen the latest Nosferatu (2024). What I enjoyed the most of it was how dark every scene was. People nowadays complain about movies that they're all too dark and nothing is distinguishable, but this is of course a very different case: in this movie, barely-lit rooms and the low-visibility walks in the wilderness convey beautifully the dread of living and working in the 19th century in northern regions (and many other times in history of course). It filled me with dread and elation: I hate darkness, I do everything to have the best-lit rooms ever at any time, and I salute the chance I had to experience that dread safely.
The Apothecary Diaries has an arc about a locust swarm. I won't delve into spoilers for story or character, and I won't name the volume where it happens (but do ask if interested). You don't need to know the canon to understand, either: we're in a country that is somewhat a fiction version of Imperial China, in a time that could be around 16th century, and there is a village that arm itself to combat an imminent locust swarm, harvesting crops (even as they're not ready to be harvested) and storing them in warehouses, securing the warehouses, and preparing poison. Then the locust swarm arrives, and everything goes dark, and hair has to be covered, everything part of the body needs to be covered not to let the locusts in, and locusts have to be killed mechanically or chemically. Light novels are not usually a genre celebrated for great writing, but this is the greatest sequence I've read in this series that is not strictly connected with the plot and the characters - it's chilling. Do you know of other literature (or non fiction) that covers this particular natural disaster? I couldn't find much, and I'm growing more and more curious, considering especially... how much of it is a current (and future) issue for the world.
More climate fiction in Not Dark Yet by Berit Ellingsen! (Oh, so there was a trend here...) In this novel from 2015, we follow a point of the life of young man that has messed up sentimental situations and uncertainty about the future in a world growing warmer and warmer, to the point that crops usually grown in tropical or mediterranean climates are now experimentally grown in the mountains. Aside from this, he enlists in a program for space exploration. During training, he travels from the mountain to the city, and what he finds there is both a life he rejected and a doubled sense of uncertainty; this translated into a void landscape that to me is quite what being on the Moon would feel like, a sense of solitude and alienation that is both physical and mental, which I found in not so very many novels. I remember this novel for this.
Snowflake Challenge #7: In your own space, create a list of at least three things you'd love to receive, something you've wanted but were afraid to ask for - a wishlist of sorts.
Not big on asking for things, but I'll try:
Comments on my fics always make my day. I wrote for Attack on Titan, The Apothecary Diaries, Oshi no Ko and Umineko no Naku Koro Ni. Among them all, I think the most fandom-blind reads (and non spoilery) are the Umineko fics (Return and Alkérmes).
Give a chance to watching The Apothecary Diaries, the second season just started airing and I'm trying to make discussion posts over at
anime_manga. Fictional history mysteries involving poisons and court intrigue with a side of romance; great character writing, great animation and voice actor work and music. (Season 1, 24 episodes, available on Crunchyroll in most places; in some others, maybe, on Netflix?) (No I will keep inserting this series in every Snowflake challenge post, I'm sorry, I'm in that phase ç__ç)Since I talked about this in the previous challenge: do you have climate fiction to recommend? Newer rather than older, definitely post-Bacigalupi and Vandermeer. Alternatively: your favorite non-fiction books about scenarios in climate change.
Thank you all!
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Date: 2025-01-15 03:02 am (UTC)The Apothecary Diaries is at the top of my to-watch list, so I'll see if I have access to it and get on that soon!
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Date: 2025-01-15 03:47 am (UTC)Thoughts
Date: 2025-01-15 06:42 am (UTC)I think most of the climate fiction I've read is older, because well, I'm less interested in reading fiction about things that are current threats. :/
However, I do have a postapocalyptic hopepunk series of my own, Daughters of the Apocalypse. There are multiple factors playing into the End, but a major one is climate change. It was doing the research for this project that clued me to how we need not one but two more hurricane categories and are a few miles per hour short of needing Category 8. O_O "Nature's Great Masterpiece" describes some of the effects from hurricanes.
On the nonfiction side, I just discovered fire scientist Stephen J. Pyne who makes a compelling case for the Pyrocene. I read the articles, but he's got a book out too. California is on fire in the middle of its rainy season, so I did some research on that and found this batch of articles.
You might count Landrace Gardening: Food Security through Biodiversity and Promiscuous Pollination. It explains how to develop edible crops that will withstand whatever challenges your particular climate throws at it, which we will definitely need in a rapidly changing climate. I've seen one nursery that developed tomatoes capable of withstanding a hard freeze.
Last year I did an analysis of the Chobani yogurt solarpunk ad, which is a pretty cool vision of a better future. I like solarpunk because it's a viable alternative to cooking off the atmosphere like people are doing now, and I am especially interested in low-tech solarpunk because it's cheap, easy, and effective. Solarpunk is the "green tech" or "Earth steward" out of the four-futures paradigm.
Among the climate issues I'm watching closely are the ocean conveyor current and permafrost loss.
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Date: 2025-01-15 07:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-19 12:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-23 07:03 am (UTC)There are definitely different levels of engagement. I read very little fic once I start to write in a fandom for example, but on the other hand a story really needs to get me in a certain way to make me look for fic at all! And it’s ok, there are many ways to participate.
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Date: 2025-02-15 07:33 pm (UTC)I haven't put muuuch thought into it, but there was a time when I felt weird to call myself a fan of smth and that got me hmmming a bit... I've concluded you're a fan of smth [1] if you say you are and [2] if it's memorable enough for you. You can be a big fan, like I am with Grand Chase, or a casual fan, like I am with Rihanna's music, I guess. All of this is 100% valid, and no fan is better than the other.
You def do NOT need to fit a certain criteria, esp regarding creating for a given fandom space, other than you feeling like you like it enough to call yourself a fan. Some people are known to complicate things... but I refuse that notion.