Snowflake Challenge #11

Hey everyone! It's nearly 11 PM on January 31st and I'm sick, but I threw words on the page until I had something to show for it for challenge #11 specifically:

In your own space, create a fanwork. Now, a fanwork is anything that you, a fan, creates. Fic, icons, and filling sparkly requests from your fellow snowflakes’ wishlists absolutely fit the bill. But really, your creation can be anything! Draw something, paint something, compose an ode to your current favorite movie. Whittle something to represent your fandom from a bit of driftwood or model it in clay and matchsticks or legos! Whip up a song about your favorite trope or concoct an interpretive dance number for your OTP. Bake some cupcakes and decorate them in homage to your favorite TV show or author. The possibilities are endless. Whatever means of self-expression tickles your fancy right now, embrace it! But most of all - have fun!

I thought of doing something simpler or easier but ... no, instead I word vomited the entire prologue to the Commander Elizabeth Bennet P&P/Mass Effect AU into a GoogleDoc. It's largely unedited but here it is!

Prologue

Elizabeth Bennet knew what people called her behind her back, whether they were Alliance or not.

The butcher of Torfan.

They didn’t understand. Nobody did, really, not even Captain Gardiner, who’d defended her to the tribunal, or Major Massey, who’d ordered her to take Torfan at any cost and been honorably discharged later.

Elizabeth was resigned to that. When she could do something about a problem, she acted; when she couldn’t, she let it go. And she couldn’t do anything about the past.

Least of all when she didn’t regret it.

---

Mira Gardiner was a failure.

A failure with a case full of medals, to be sure. She’d served the Alliance—served humanity—for decades, and the Alliance had rewarded her with a stream of commendations and promotions. Nobody talked about her lost chance to do more for their species. Not in her hearing, anyway. Even she hadn’t really thought about it in years. No point in wasting time recollecting the details when there was work to be done.

The more amorphous sense of failure, though: that lingered. Especially on the Normandy.

( Read more... )

Snowflake Challenge #12

Okay, let's see if we can power through the rest of the challenges in the next hour!

#12: Personal Win

Share whatever wins you’re comfortable with telling us all about. Found a new fandom that makes you light up? One of your creations has earned more kudos than you dreamed of? Wins from life, new job, new school, new adventure? You have a couple of wins you want to celebrate, we want to hear about them. Share a win or two so we can cheer for you.

I'm still very enthused about finishing the prologue to the Mass Effect/P&P AU I've been talking about for weeks. I actually powered through everything I wanted to do in the prologue while feeling like shit, didn't compulsively edit, didn't WIP-post it on AO3 for instant validation, didn't convince myself that it'd be fine to do it a bit later, nada. Go, me!

I've also made plans to move to a nearby city with a very close friend after I graduate, and I'm really excited about it.

Snowflake Challenge #13

Aww, the bird for this one is really cute!

Anyway. This challenge is:

Make a rec list of fanworks!

Hmm. This is actually really hard, because I haven't interacted that much wrt fanworks lately. But here's a motley collection of a few (well, five) things I've enjoyed checking out/re-visiting lately:

Attendance by hoeratius at AO3, for The Queen's Thief: "Irene's relationship to attendants shifts as she grows up from princess, to heir, to bride, widow, and queen."
pulse to pulse by incognitajones at AO3, for SW/Rogue One: "After nearly dying together on the sands of Scarif, Jyn Erso and Cassian Andor are somehow linked, with painful consequences: able to sense each other’s feelings and thoughts. The only explanation Jyn can think of is that the legendary Force bonds her mother used to tell stories of are real."
sweet like the morning light by hippolytas at AO3, for The Queen's Thief (rated E; Eugenides/Irene): this one's mostly about Eugenides being consumed with longing for his fantastic and beautiful wife while almost everyone else hates him.
The Hope of Love: Eärendil and Elwing as Symbols of Romance in Popular Culture by imakemywings on Tumblr: fake academia about specific depictions of Eärendil and Elwing in a sort of modern Middle-earth (not just Earth, but an AU with a lot more cultural continuity). 100% my jam and good Elwing content to boot in a fandom that can be super shitty about her.
Untitled by i-am-a-lonely-visitor on Tumblr about Elros's wife and her struggle to come to terms with aging painfully as the wife of a half-elf with centuries left to live.

Snowflake Challenge #14

Okay, #14 is: try something new! There were a lot of cool fannish suggestions that I do not have the time or energy for, unfortunately. But on a more granular level, I am trying something that I don't usually do with the ME/P&P AU (the mods did say #11 and #14 could be the same thing!). I usually stick quite strictly to 1-2 POVs to avoid the temptation to head hop, but I'm not doing that with this. We won't get everyone's perspective, but the prologue gave us a little bit of Elizabeth's POV (which of course will be the primary one) and quite a bit from Mira Gardiner, the Anderson-like mentor to Elizabeth in the AU. Mira is a significant character, but we won't actually get her POV that much—but it seemed right for the prologue. We're also definitely going to get significant POVs from both Illia/Darcy and Jori'Zanah/Georgiana and probably quite a few more. I'm going to see if I can juggle the POVs while still keeping Elizabeth central :D

Snowflake Challenge #15

Aaaaand as January 2024 closes out (it's actually a little past midnight but NEVER MIND), here's my last Snowflake entry!

#15: Fandom Snowflake Challenge's 2023 Fandom Wrapped!

Your top 5 fandoms for 2023 were: just guessing, but I'm sure Austen (mainly P&P), Tolkien, SW, complaining about grad school, and video games in general (esp GW2/BG3/ME).

Your top 5 fandom spaces (Discord, Twitter, etc.) in 2023 were: Tumblr, Dreamwidth, and ... no, that's pretty much it.

The top 5 things you did to contribute to fandom in 2023 were: I wrote a bunch of meta, esp earlier in the year. I updated my f/f Darcy/Elizabeth fic and per ardua ad astra, though the former still has a long way to go. I've tried to reblog things I like more and post on Dreamwidth more. I ditched Twitter (yes, I feel this counts as contributing to the general fandom good).

Your top 5 most appreciated fandom contributions were: various Austen meta posts, that damn tiers of headcanon post on Tumblr with thousands of notes, updating ad astra, and ... um, I'm sure there were other things that got spread around a bit, but that's what I recall right now!