Fandom Snowflake Challenge, Day 14

[aadler]

 
Continuing the meme/challenge begun and tracked here.

Fandom Snowflake Challenge, Day 14
 
In your own space, post a rec for at least three fanworks that you did not create. Leave a comment in this [the assignment] post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so. See if you can rec fanworks that are less likely to be praised: tiny fandoms, rare pairings, fanworks other than stories, lesser-known kinks or tropes. Find fanworks that have few to no comments, or creators new to a particular fandom who maybe aren’t well known or appreciated. Appreciate them.

I’m sorry, this is just too obscure for me. I can see that it’s designed (the last part, that starts “See if you can rec fanworks”) to get us to stretch a bit, move outside comfort zones and/or familiar ruts. The ultimate effect, however, is like I’m being told, Listen, you know all the stuff that you’re interested in, that you actually like? Forget that and find us something different.

And I don’t want to. Give me a week for something like that, or at least a few days, and I could make it a research expedition, have some fun with it. This would be a scramble to find something that met the specs, and it’s just too much at once. I don’t follow tiny fandoms; I have nothing against rare pairings, but I’m not a fan of any (in fact, a story being about a pairing is enough to turn me off it); I don’t think in terms of tropes, and just the mention of ‘kinks’ has me turning away and looking elsewhere.

I’m going to do something else, then. Unwilling to follow the directions as given, I’ll use this space to point back to things that had a strong effect on me in the long-ago, and are — in my august opinion — still worth giving some attention. Two of the three stories are rather difficult to find on the Internet now; with the amount of time that has passed, it’s entirely possible that none of these authors are still active in fandom. If so, they did good work once, and it’s about to get one more look.

“Alternative Lifestyle”, by A.C. Chapin. The longest of today’s selections, it’s still less than 4,000 words. It manages to pack a lot into a small space, though, and it’s still enough to impress me even though I’ve read it multiple times over the years.

The stories get shorter as I proceed. “Broken”, by Vanessa Nichols, sets up a situation and then delivers. Devastatingly. I actually discovered Nichols via a longer and better-known story (“Five by Five”), but somehow this was the one that stayed with me.

Shortest of all, less than five hundred words, is “Dear Angel”, by Kare. One of a brief series of Kate-Angel fics (from a site that now no longer exists), there was just something about this that got to me. I can’t explain it any better than that, so if you can’t see it, sorry. But the effect is still there, and I still look at it again every few years.

I hope this (willful, arbitrary) substitution will make up for my unwillingness to follow the original prompt.

Comments

[velvetwhip.livejournal.com]

Thanks for these!


Gabrielle

[aadler]

Like I said, this is the old stuff, work I encountered in my first few years of reading Buffyfic. It just seemed like it shouldn’t be forgotten.

[snogged.livejournal.com]

Thank you for posting these!

[aadler]

I just hope it can bring other people some of the pleasure those stories brought me, because such work (even so much later) still deserves attention.

[slaymesoftly.livejournal.com]

I like it. It's a creative way of meeting the challenge. My first thought also was "how am I going to rec something that I don't want to read?" I can do so in a vague way, maybe, but most of the works I'd say were important to me have also been important to lots of other people (because they are awesome) and therefore they aren't lacking in attention or admiration. I'll have to think on this one a while. (but since I seem to be running a day behind everyday anyway...)

[aadler]

As I said, I’m not against the specs in principle; this is only the second time I’ve done the Snowflake Challenge, but both times the responses called for have required me to reach out to some extent, clearly to my benefit. This one was just too far. Before I realized how many possible questions they had to call on, I looked ahead to Create a fanwork of your own (which I remembered from my first foray) and did what became my Spike-and-“Seeing-Red” meta in advance, purely so I wouldn’t have to come up with something substantive on the spot. I could have used a similar approach to this one, but I had no way of knowing what was coming. Doing it the way I did was an answer to that, and seems to have been … well, not actively unpopular.

[angrboda]

Well, stories that aren't pairing-centric tend not to be as popular as stories that are, so in that way you actually have filled the prompt.

[aadler]

I’ve honestly never been able to understand that. I like stories, further depictions of a world I already enjoy. For me, focusing solely (or even mainly) on stories-about-pairings would be like focusing on stories-about-pizza: maybe not bad, but why limit yourself so cruelly?

I’m aware that mine is not a prevailing view, but that just doesn’t make sense to me.