Fandom Snowflake Challenge: Day 1

In your own space, post a rec for at least three fanworks that you have created. It can be your favorite fanworks that you've created, or fanworks you feel no one ever saw, or fanworks you say would define you as a creator. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

1) The Spring Thaw, a Mushishi fanfic featuring Ginko and Tanyuu in a rather shippy but still ultimately gen sort of way. It is far and away my favorite thing I've ever written (not that I've written all that much). I tried to pour all the love I have for these two into this. Mushishi is such a small fandom, but it really is the fandom of my heart and I think (I hope) my small contribution can stand tall next to the other great fanworks people have created for it.

2) coprime_recs, just the entire thing. I have always been proud of the amount of work that I've put into my recs journal, especially considering it started out on DeadJournal without any metadata beyond the fandom name. I've always thought of myself as a reccer primarily and keep intending to get back into it regularly (although not managing quite yet). However, even if I never rec another thing, I still think there are a wide variety of gems in that journal that I tried to bring to people's attention as best I could.

3) The icon on this post. It's from a panel in Mushishi that I colorized. I will probably always be ridiculously proud of this icon because it took so much work for me to make. I find graphics editing programs very counter-intuitive to use and struggle pretty much every time I try using one. (There is a reason why any icon I make nowadays is simply me cropping, resizing, and adding a border to an image.) I like all my icons, but this one is my favorite. I think it's pretty and, well, it's Mushishi.


...It was surprisingly difficult to write that without adding a lot of hedging.

Fandom Snowflake Challenge: Day 2

In your own space, post a rec for at least three fanworks that you did not create. Drop a link to your post in the comments. See if you can rec fanworks that are less likely to be praised: tiny fandoms, rare pairings, fanworks other than stories, lesser known kinks or tropes. Find fanworks that have few to no comments, or creators new to a particular fandom and maybe aren't well known or appreciated. Appreciate them.

1) Eternal Friends by simounsibylla is an Aria fanfic featuring Alicia/Akira. Aria is an anime/manga in the slice of life genre where the characters appreciate the beauty and simplicity of everyday life, but this one is set on a future version of Mars that's been colonized, terraformed, and is now mostly covered by water and the characters are all Undines (gondoliers). It's a gentle and optimistic series, and "Eternal Friends" captures that feel perfectly. It's lovely to see Alicia and Akira, two of the secondary characters, given a chance to shine with the glimpses of their past together and also looking forward towards their future. I really don't know what else to say except that I think this could fit into the canon beautifully.

2) Put away childish things by sophiap is an Avatar: The Last Airbender fanfic looking at Monk Gyatso after Aang ran away. It's sad, but it's perfect in its own way. Gyatso doesn't get a lot of fanfic written about him, but the few things I've found have all been brilliant. "Put away childish things" even has some worldbuilding to make it feel like, yes, this is exactly how Gyatso dealt with his grief and how could it be any thing else.

3) Tape Madness by jmtorres is a Sector General fanfic starring Dr. Conway. who is having a problem with one of the tapes in his head. Sector General is a science fiction series by James White set on a huge, interspecies hospital/space station. All the alien species White came up with are imaginative and different, so the way canon works around having different species operate on each other is via tape technology. A tape is basically a psychic impression of a person's mind which is then overlaid onto another person's mind. The tape contains all the knowledge of the original person (hence letting vastly different species understand each other's anatomy), but it also contains all the instincts, drives, preferences, etc. of the original person. So there are pretty much always conflicts between a person's own needs and what the tape is telling them they need, like carnivore vs. herbivore or oxygen-breather vs. nitrogen-breather. I hope that explanation made sense because "Tape Madness" is a brilliant bit of fanfic dealing with one possible problem from a tape that has an even more brilliant ending. It is, if fact, the only fannish thing I have ever found for this canon, and I wish more people were familiar with Sector General because "Tape Madness" is just plain old fun.

Bonus) Did you ever wonder, if there were people like you? by Qem is a super short crossover between Azumanga Daioh and Hikaru no Go. It's a perfect little morsel of a fic, especially the last sentence, but I think that a passing familiarity with both canons is required to enjoy it.