Snowflake Challenge 2019 | Day 5 - 3 Platform Recs

Prompt: In your own space, promote three communities, challenges, blogs, pages, Twitters, Tumblrs or platforms and explain why you love them.

When the creative juices aren't flowing, there's one thing fans of non-English canons can do to stay involved with the community--translation. For those who're just starting to learn the language of their canon recs, here's three platform recs that budding translators can use as study material.

3 Platform Recs for Translator Superheroes

(01) Wikipedia in your canon's language

You may be surprised to find out that the non-English Wikipedia page for your canon can be five times longer than its English page. There's often more references to cast and crew interviews and extra material that English-speaking fans aren't able to access.

For instance, I've found the exact birthdates and family background of the main heroes of Showa era Kamen Rider series (filmed in the 70s) on their Japanese Wiki page. A closer look at the Plot and Characters sections may lead to more discoveries of tidbits that aren't explicitly referred to in the canon itself.

(02) Twitter fan accounts

For Japanese fandoms, Twitter is THE social platform for fannish activity. Aside from accounts of individual fans, you may find challenge accounts with unique hashtags for challengers to share their fanworks. Tokusatsu fandom has tokusatsu1draw2, a challenge to draw a fanart using a prompt from at least one of the three categories--Work (Shows), Word (Character, Organization etc.) and Free Prompt--within an hour.

If you're looking to encourage activity in your side of fandom, challenge accounts can be a useful starting point for generating inspiring prompts and creating a structured challenge.

(03) Official cast blog/social media account

Commentary from cast members is often a treasure trove for extending the pleasure of canon.

Right after an episode of Lupinranger VS Patranger has aired, I look forward to reading the official cast blog in which the cast members take turns to address the show's fans and talk about what it's like to work on the show. Also, there would often be pics of the actors for my otp being gay (Exhibit A,Exhibit B) like their characters in-universe :P

Snowflake Challenge 2019 | Day 6 - Fannish Wishlist

Prompt: In your own space, create a list of at least three fannish things you'd love to receive, something you've wanted but were afraid to ask for - a fannish wish-list of sorts.

Being used to small fandoms and creating all the content, my fannish wishlists tend to be more like to-do lists these days. One of my greatest fannish wishes is for tokusatsu fandom to have another active, thriving kink meme - a wish that no individual fan can fulfill alone.

Throughout the years, the fandom has had multiple Kamen Rider/Super Sentai/Ultraman/General tokusatsu kink memes that rarely stayed active for long unlike the long-running franchises of the source materials themselves. Below is my wishlist for the running of a new kink meme that could potentially last for a year or two.

Tokusatsu Kink Meme Wishlist

(01) Hosted on Dreamwidth with detailed tutorials on how kink memes work. Topics for the meta/tutorials can include: Tracking DW threads, writing short vs detailed prompts, writing short & satisfying fills etc. So newer fans can take advantage of the platform's features (that AO3 doesn't have) and be braver about writing prompts/creating fills.

(02) Top level threads with titles of each show. To allow tracking of the shows that you're interested in prompting and filling for.

(03) An associated AO3 Collection and Twitter account for notifications of new fills. For continuous promotion of the kink meme and fics created for it.

(04) Chat post for discussion of kinks and how to write/draw them. A free-for-all space to ask for help on the technical details and share recs of existing fics/art that focuses on niche kinks to learn from them.

(05) Affiliation with fanwork exchanges. I've been thinking that it's a waste that many cool and delicious requests in exchanges have been left unfilled, so why not reuse them as prompts for a kink meme? Plus as the requests for exchanges roll out, the kink meme may be a good avenue for practicing writing/drawing certain characters/ships. This way, the fanwork exchanges and kink meme can work in tandem to create a healthy fanwork ecosystem.