Snowflake Challenge #15: Fandom Wrapped

[enchantedsleeper]

Now comes the part every year where I bawwwwww because the Snowflake Challenge is over for another year. 😭 But it wouldn't be as fun if it wasn't finite, and I've got the Sunshine Challenge to look forward to in the summer (as well as other events during the spring!)

Snowflake Challenge #15 is Fandom Wrapped! If you've come across Spotify Wrapped (and it's pretty everywhere) or one of its many variants, then you'll know this is a sort of "Top X" retrospective on the past year. (I was a bit sad that Tumblr didn't do their Wrapped this year, probably because of that whole "skeleton crew" thing...)

So here's my Fandom Wrapped for 2023, à la Snowflake Challenge:

Your top 5 fandoms for 2023 were:

1) Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
2) Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse
3) The Murderbot Diaries
4) FENCE! (comics)
5) Dixit

My stand-out new fandom of the year was D&D: HAT, and I waxed lyrical a bit about how much I enjoyed writing for it in a 2023 AO3 Writer Blanket Box on Pillowfort. (My other main retrospective post for 2023!) I fell into it shortly after seeing the film for a friend's birthday, and had such a good time creating fic for it - and I just wrote my first fic of 2024 for that fandom 😊

Across the Spiderverse also pulled me in deep over the summer, and I particularly enjoyed dusting off an idea that I'd originally had for Into the Spiderverse and writing it for that film. I wrote various fics for The Murderbot Diaries and took part in two events, and then in the autumn, I got back into FENCE after the release of the latest set of issues, and started creating a bunch of Tumblr posts centered around fun character parallels or significant moments. I also wrote FENCE fic for Yuletide, and took part in FENCE Secret Santa at the end of the year.

Dixit... how do I explain Dixit xD If you don't know of it, it's a board/card game, but I'm more familiar with the app, Dixit World, which was in beta up until recently. I've been playing it nonstop with a group of friends and I think our close readings of the various cards and increasingly inventive group games count as fannish xD

Your top 5 fandom spaces (Discord, Twitter, etc.) in 2023 were:

1) Mastodon/Fandom.ink
2) Tumblr
3) Dreamwidth
4) Discord

Dreamwidth makes the list for the first time in 2024! \o/ (To be fair, it's only the second year in a row I've done this list xD) Although DW is also trying hard to earn my displeasure since it ate my first draft of this post 🥲 I'll be happy for it to keep ranking high, since my ambition this year is to be more active than I was in 2023.

Fandom.ink is still my most-used social space, closely followed by Tumblr although less closely at the very end of this year, when I uninstalled the app because I was just doomscrolling on it too much in every idle moment. But it was a big site for my fandom activity for ATSV and FENCE!.

Discord is also a new entrant for this list, not because of any specific fandom (although I did join a nice little server for D&D: HAT) but more because I have a hangout there with various fannish friends and we use it to discuss fandoms of all kinds and also co-ordinate group watches. As much as I wish Discord hadn't taken over from other, less ephemeral options for fandom organising and community, it's nice to have :3

The top 5 things you did to contribute to fandom in 2023 were:

1) Writing fic
2) Taking part in events/challenges (counting this separately!)
3) Commenting (I did Comment Bingo twice!)
4) Creating original posts/meta on Tumblr
5) Reblogging/boosting fanworks (especially in Across the Spiderverse, I reblogged so much stuff that my fingers would start to tag the fandom out of muscle memory xD)

Your top 5 most appreciated fandom contributions were:

Hmmm... I know that "fandom contributions" here is designed to be inclusive, but it's pretty hard to know what measure of popularity to use for very different types of fanwork. Well, based on vibes, here are three fics and two Tumblr posts that went over well:

1) We can burn much brighter (if we don't look back) - fic, D&D: HAT, Xenk/Edgin
2) High Praise Indeed - fic, D&D: HAT, Xenk/Edgin
3) Grand Jeté - fic, ATSV, Gwen/Miles
4) Fence: Redemption parallels - special occasions - Tumblr post, FENCE
5) Harvard/Aiden and remembering each others' exes'(/flings') names - Tumblr post, FENCE

Thank you to the Snowflake Challenge mods for bringing this to us for another year - I'll miss it until it starts again! ♥

Comments

[kitarella_imagines]

Ooh, what is the Sunshine Challenge? And the spring ones?

[enchantedsleeper]

The Sunshine Challenge is a summer take on the Snowflake Challenge! The prompts are of a different type and more broad, sort of conceptual, but they work as either blog post prompts or fanwork prompts ^^ It's got a smaller participant base than Snowflake, but hopefully it can keep spreading to more people who'll decide to join :3

Some of the spring events I'm looking forward to are:
- Fic Rec February/Femslash February this month (last year there was a hashtag on Mastodon for Fic Rec February and lots of recs, though I haven't seen anything pop up yet this year)
- March Meta Matters, which is all about archiving meta essays!
- Three Weeks for Dreamwidth, which runs from late April to early May. It's less centralised than Snowflake in that not everything takes place on the main comm (some communities have their own prompts/challenges), but the main comm will usually collect what's happening, and the goal is just to generate activity that's specific to DW! Lots of people set out to post daily on a specific theme. ysabetwordsmith made a blogging questionnaire that you can use to make daily posts, and made a primer in 2022 on how to take part. There's also a points gifting event where people who have the means will gift points to those who don't!

I'm hoping you didn't already know about that, otherwise that's a lot of information you didn't need! XD

[kitarella_imagines]

No, I didn't know anything about those things at all. I am very new to Dreamwidth, it is a new world for me with all these challenges, like opening a door onto a hidden universe I never knew about. So thanks for the info!

I'm sorry you feel sad that Snowflake is over for another year, just think though: spring is on the way! Days are getting longer and better weather is coming 🌼🌷🌻🌸

[enchantedsleeper]

You're really welcome! <3 I love spring - the new year is a nice time with all its potential but I'm all for warmer and lighter days. Plus my birthday is in spring ^^

[kitarella_imagines]

Ooh nearly your birthday then!🎂

[wendelah1]

So many links. It's going to take time to check them all out.

This caught my eye: can you share a little about what a Tumblr Wrapped was like?

Thank you again for sharing your year with us.

[enchantedsleeper]

Thank you for coming to read and comment! <3 Tumblr Wrapped was a little roundup personalised to each user that would tell you things like your number of posts, your most-used tags, and your most popular posts. Here's mine if you'd like to see it in action! I would have liked to see how my 2023 activity compared to 2022.

There's probably ways to do that with scrapers, if I were inclined to figure out how... xD

[wendelah1]

That is very cool. It is a shame they didn't do it for 2023.