Arctic Light

For the moment I'm skipping challenge #8 (promo a canon) and #9 (make a fanwork) because that's so much of the content around here anyway.



Day 10: In your own space, talk about one of your fandom firsts. This could be your first fandom, your first fandom friend, the first fanwork you created, the first fanwork you interacted with... The options are endless!

I thought about this a bit and decided to talk about Baby's First Fanvid. (Although this was back in my anime fandom days, so they were called AMVs, anime music videos.)

( So this was in 2002 )

We all have a favourite piece of original canon. Maybe that's a particular episode of a show, maybe a specific scene, maybe a whole storyline. Maybe it's one of those but from a movie. Maybe a comic, and you have a favourite piece of art. Maybe it's a chapter or a character in a book, or a song from a musical. Anything goes.

Day 6: Share your favourite piece of original canon.

One? ONE??? That's very optimistic of you, Snowflake Challenge.

There are obviously about a million things I could talk about here, and I could easily get stuck with decision paralysis trying to choose between 10,000 options. I'm not really a forever-faves person; I'm a person who tends to bounce around between different flings of the moment, falling in and out of love with canons at the drop of a hat. I could easily describe one of my favorite scenes from my current loves, but I decided to make it more interesting by trying to think of something I haven't talked about here before.

And what came to mind is the novel Dragonworld by Byron Preiss, Michael Reaves, and Joe Zucker - now available in ebook, apparently! I have no idea how well it's held up, because I haven't reread it since I was probably in my teens or even younger. This is an illustrated fat fantasy novel from my very early childhood that (along with LOTR, comics, and a few other things) was a huge influence on my early writing and art.

I can't imagine I would ever have even tried to read something like this at the age that I read it - the book is 500 pages long! - except that my mom had read it to me first (she read us a lot of adult fantasy when we were very young, including LOTR) and I was also absolutely charmed by the beautiful, magical pencil illustrations. Here's a review that includes one of the illustrations; another review has a dragon image that may have influenced how I draw dragons to this day (and the cover certainly did).

The plot involves two nations going to war over a child's accidental death, and the rediscovery of dragons long thought extinct. Heavy stuff for a young kid (I was probably about 7 the first time I read it on my own, and younger than that when it was read to me) but it was full of charming and evocative details that I still remember all these years later, including magical skyships, a dragon frozen in a glacier, and a form of democracy that involves voting by throwing magical stones into a charmed lake that change the color of the water, and the eventual color determines the outcome of the vote.

As a further twist, our copy had been read to death by small children (me, I am small child) and by the time I was old enough to remember the plot in detail, the last few pages had vanished so I'm not actually sure exactly how it ends. But maybe the best fairy tales are like that.

Day 3: In your own space, talk about a fannish opinion you hold that has changed over time.

Ha, well .... Shipping. Shipping has come for me. My early years in fandom, I was very profoundly set on Canon, Canon Only and also very set on gen; I read explicit fic once in a blue moon and generally only for canon couples, not really as a point of morality or anything, but just because I wasn't interested. I also very clearly remember my surprise the first time I encountered an OT3 fic, and furthermore one that simply had the characters having a casual threesome with no particular HEA to it. I was Confuse.

I used to read pairings mostly in self-defense because what I really wanted was gen, but it was harder to find. I'm honestly not entirely clear on when that started changing and I really started shipping things. I remember the first explicit fic I wrote (it was this one, for Stargate SG-1) but it wasn't really shippy so much as exploring different pairings in an AU. I guess that I kind of meandered through various shades of reading pairings I didn't ship just to get the Feels, and then actually kind of shipping it, and I'd say that it was in Agent Carter that I first started really shipping things, where I actually wanted to explore the pairing dynamics apart from their gen dynamic, and genuinely wanted them to be together at the end of the fic.

.... No, wait! A quick dive into my AO3 history reminded me that Highlander was the first fandom I did that in! I did actually ship the Methos/Duncan/Amanda triad, as an OT3 and in various sub-combinations, although the nature of the canon being what it was, I don't think I really thought of them as an HEA type pairing - but I did ship it. (Hence the Highlander icon on this post.)

My secondary answer here is just that I've gotten way more live and let live, ship and let ship about stuff. I used to be a lot judgier, but I think I've made way too many Problematic canon and shipping choices at this point to have any sort of a leg to stand on when it comes to judging other people's, and I no longer want to anyway. (TBH, it was watching judgmentalism take off on Tumblr in the mid-2010s that really made me change. I mean, I was never anything like that bad, but there's nothing like seeing some of your own opinions reflected through a warped lens to really make you reassess yourself. I think I used to reflect negative opinions around me in a performative kind of way - judge the right things so people know you're Not Into That - and as I've gotten more confident about my own opinions and secure in my own position in fandom, I haven't wanted to do that anymore.)

I guess I've gotten better at separating how I really feel from how I feel like I should feel, and also much better at realizing that it costs 0 cents and makes a much better fandom experience for everyone, including me, to simply learn to shut up some of the time.

I decided to do snowflake_challenge this year! It runs every January for the past few(?) years and I haven't done it before, which means all my answers will be fresh. I didn't sign up officially, so I'm just answering the questions for fun.



Day 1: Update your fandom information.

I do this semi-regularly anyway on the places where I regularly go (AO3, Tumblr, etc) so I think I'm probably good. But this is probably a good opportunity to mention where I am found in various places.

Here, obviously, and also

• Sholio on AO3
• laylainalaska on Tumblr (main blog, fandom reblogs and occasional meta or screencaps or whatnot)
• sholiofic (fic blog, links to posted fic, promptfic - generally reposted here - and occasional prompt calls)

I also technically have a youtube channel as sholiothefirst for my vids, but they're all unlisted (in an attempt to evade copyright blocking) and apparently at some point - I don't think it used to work like this - you can no longer view them at the channel link either; you need the direct link to the vid. Another rarely used youtube channel under my wallet name has a few videos of Alaska stuff.