Snowflake Challenge - Days 4 & 5
Jan. 5th, 2019 09:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
antuhsa
And the Snowflake Challenge continues! I'm combining two days into one post again. Day 4 doesn't actually require a post, but I'd like to write a short evaluation of my experiences with it anyway.
Day 4
Comment to someone you haven’t ever interacted with before or introduce yourself to someone you’ve interacted with and friend/ follow them.
This challenge was so much fun. Interacting with people with similar interests is probably my favourite thing about being in fandom. Unfortunately, I’m very shy, so I usually admire other fans from afar and hope that they one day start talking to me, instead of being bold and just sending them a message. This challenge, however, forced me to dust off my courage and go for it. I left comments left and right yesterday, in the journals of friends, acquaintances and strangers. It was surprisingly easy to do (though I will admit that having the challenge as an ‘excuse’ helped a lot) and I enjoyed it very much. I will make a point of doing it more often from now on.
Day 5
In your own space, promote three communities, challenges, blogs, pages, Twitters, Tumblrs or platforms and explain why you love them.
This challenge caught me by surprise, so it took me a while to come up with three recs. Not that aren't plenty of communities etc. that I love, but I wanted to promote ones that don't have a presence in the journals. Because if they do, I'm a member of them and they show up on my profile where everyone can see them. I feel that that is already a kind of promotion on its own, so I'm going to put different ones in the spotlight today.
The first one is my go-to writing blog: Helping Writers Become Authors. It's one of the first blogs I found when I became interested in writing and needed advice. It's still the first plce I visit when I want to know more about any writing related topic. The advice on this blog is so solid. The woman behind the blog is an author herself and has clearly spent a lot of time thinking about her craft. She has a very clear writing style that makes her posts easy to follow. I also love how she doesn't shy away from difficult topics like 'how to write character chemistry'. The only 'problem' (for lack of a better word) I have with it is that she is very structured in her writing and approaches everything logically, which is something that I, as a chaotic pantser, can't always relate to. I still love the blog, however, and it always succeeds in making writing seem less daunting and mysterious to me.
The second one is a community that I'm actually not a part of anymore, and that's the HP SlashFic Subreddit. I found it by accident about a year ago when I was searching for something slash related, and became hooked by the interesting meta discussions there. I didn't know any other places for those kind of conversations then, so I joined and ended up having a great time. I especially loved reading
perverse_idyll's wonderful meta and was always looking forwards to the monthly 'what have you read last month?' convo's. I enjoyed keeping track of what I read and taking notes to use in my response, which required me to approach my reading in a different way than what I was used to. But, most importantly, this subreddit is where I met the lovely williamsnickers ^^. Our crazy long comment conversations were often the highlight of my month and I'm so glad the Subreddit was easygoing enough that I could make a new friend! I myself have now deleted my reddit account and taken the conversations with the people that mattered the most elsewhere, because I felt that I had got everything out of the platform that I wanted, but I still have very fond memories of my time there.The third one is Potions and Snitches, a fanfic archive for Snape & Harry gen. I love the fact that this one is still reasonably active and hope it will continue to do so! It's a fun, oldschool place, with some Snape & Harry meta and the ocassional challenge. I haven't had the time to really delve into it yet, but I'm looking forwards to checking out the fics. Even though I call myself a Snarry shipper, I'm in essence only interested in seeing Snape and Harry interact; it doesn't matter to me if that is sexual or not. In fact, I often find sexual/ romantic Snarry to be somewhat disappointing, because those fics tend to soften Snape almost beyond recognition, which takes a lot of the enjoyment I otherwise find in the pairing away from me. I'm very curious to see how platonic Snarry fics portray the characters. The few I've already seen seemed promising!
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Date: 2019-01-05 10:54 pm (UTC)Yay!
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Date: 2019-01-06 04:34 am (UTC)Thanks for these links! You've intrigued me with that Reddit community ;) I've never used the site before... does it have tags, or a way to find previous meta etc? Or is it just a matter of scrolling through all the posts?
I haven't spent enough time on Potions and Snitches, I should really rectify that. I agree with you – my view of Snarry is also 'Snape & Harry interaction'. I wish gen stories got a bit more attention in fandom. It sometimes seems hard to get people to even click on a fic if it doesn't have a romantic pairing listed!
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Date: 2019-01-06 09:12 pm (UTC)You're welcome! The Reddit community was very lovely. A lot of people use pseuds though, myself included, because not everyone was comfortable being known as a slash reader/ writer in other parts of Reddit. Especially the general HP fanfic subreddit is quite unfriendly when it comes to slash. It's a shame, though it did help me hone my detective skills. I became pretty good at figuring out who other people were after a while :p. But to answer your question, no, Reddit doesn't have tags. There is a search bar which helps matter somewhat, but in the end it does come down to scrolling. You can scroll through the community in general or through one person's comments. It can be a bit of a pain, but in the case of PI, it was certainly worth it ;). However, if you aren't sure whether you'll like the platform, you don't actually need an account to be able to read everything, so you can try it out for a while without committing to anything.
So you know Potions and Snitches too? I hadn't expected that! I found it completely by accident a few weeks ago and had never seen anyone mention it before then.
I suppose you're right about gen not getting the attention it deserves. I love gen and often even prefer it to smut, but it is harder to search for it on ao3. A lot of people are following relationship tags, but there are no tags for gen, so it's easy to miss it. Funnily enough, the general HP fanfic Subreddit I mentioned might be anti-slash, but it's super pro gen, and to me it was worth following for some of the surprisingly lovely gen recs.
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Date: 2019-01-11 08:04 am (UTC)You're right that friends are the best part of fandom :) I think that's what I missed the most in my many years away. Twitter is fantastic for keeping up with people and following your favourite writers/actors etc, but I've never really felt like Twitter was an actual fandom space. (Except when Hannibal was on, but that was a fairly unique/special case.) We're lucky that there are so many lovely people in the Snape fandom, and many of them are still here on LJ & DW after so many years <3
I'll try to check out that Reddit community, I'm definitely interested in the meta! Although, I'm genuinely surprised to hear that it's not very accepting of Slash fans. I can understand why people might have a problem with a ship like Snarry, even if I disagree with them. But slash in general? To the point where slash fans feel they need to use different pseuds? That's really sad :(
To be honest, I haven't spent much time on Potions and Snitches, but I remembered the name from years ago. I think they even had a livejournal comm. But now that you've mentioned it, I might investigate it a bit more because it's always nice to find good Gen fics :)
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Date: 2019-01-07 08:27 am (UTC)As a writer-in-
denialtraining, I've followed the writing blog you recced. Hopefully I'll learn something there~no subject
Date: 2019-01-07 10:30 pm (UTC)