Challenge #12: Make an appreciation post to those who enhance your fandom life. Appreciate them in bullet points, prose, poetry, a moodboard, a song... whatever moves you!

This was a hard one! I would feel weird addressing specific individual people, and I feel like I’ve covered the general feeling of this in the “fandom love letter” post. There are a couple of specific groups I could talk about, but actually I’ve already talked about them on previous Snowflakes, westerosorting back in 2014 (everything I wrote there is still true, except that I’ve met 2 additional people in person <3) and westerosorting again and Best Chat (which grew out of westerosorting) in 2022 – and the Best Chat is still going strong, with additional exciting in-person meet-ups (I have now also met tabacoychanel in person, after 15+ years of online friendship, got to crash at cafemassolit’s place in a second country, and got to live together with 80% of Best Chat for a couple of days, bash’ style) and the most amazing birthday card.

But what do I actually write about this time without it being a rehash? I liked the approach some people took of addressing this challenge to fandom resources or collections or platforms – DW, AO3, Tumblr, Reddit, TV Tropes… but I think there’s only one such thing I truly feel strongly about (you’re reading it), and that not purely as a fannish resource.

So here’s my thing: I’m going to appreciate the people who enhanced my fandom life not in fannish spaces (which I’ve written about many times), but ( out in the Real Life wilds )

In many cases this was a momentary interaction, or a couple of shared hours of fannishness, or a shared nod of recognition in a relationship that has nothing to do with fandom, but all of them were memorable bright spots, and all the more so for coming in unexpected places. So in addition to the wonderful fannish spaces and fannish relationships that I've been lucky enough to cultivate, I also appreciate these moments of fannish serendipity. They enhance my fandom life, too :)


Challenge #13: TALK ABOUT A COMMUNITY SPACE YOU LIKE. It doesn’t need to be your favorite, or the one where you spend the most time (although it certainly can be). Maybe it’s even one that you’ve barely visited. But talk about that space and how it helps support fannish community.

By this point I think the only fannish DW communities I participate in are seasonal ones like fandomtrees, (lurking in) the Yuletide comms (yuletide/yuletide_admin), or snowflake_challenge itself (which additionally are all kind of clumped together October through January and dormant the rest of the year. I can’t seem to get the hang of Discord, even for fannish things I absolutely adore, like Terra Ignota.

So really my only current continuous fannish community is r/Taskmaster – and while Reddit is not my preferred way of doing fandom AT ALL, it is a really fun comm.

( What you’ll find there )

While I’m at it, let me link to a recent rec I came across through r/Taskmaster: this super fun fanart series with cartoonish headshots of contestants (so far up to s16, but the rest coming soon).