The Fandom Snowflake Challenge

This year's Snowflake Challenge seems to have gone by so quickly. It's been a whirl, the comment pages a flurry of people saying, "I did it" - taking on challenges that were difficult for them, reveling in nostalgia, spreading joy and love, being creative, being giving, doing a challenge every day or a bunch at once or just one challenge.

It's a 15 day challenge, and that 15th day is over, but Snowflake Challenge is still here, and you can participate year round, browse through entries, leave comments, and fill wishes, too.

Whether you participated in every challenge, just one, or somewhere in between - well done, you. Doing these challenges takes time and effort. However you participated this year, thank you. You've made this challenge that flurry of joy and love and creativity and a hundred other things.

Thank you.

I want to thank all of the mods this year who made this challenge happen, too: fadedwings, mizface, rscreighton, sperrywink, spikedluv, summerstorm, tielan, tjs_whatnot, turlough, and wendelah1. This challenge wouldn't have happened without them - their enthusiasm, dedication, and generosity with their time. Please take a moment to thank them.

I also want to thank akamine_chan, who has made this challenge happen, this year and every year past, and andeincascade, argentumlupine, hazelwho, and glitteryv who, along with mizface, helped out in past years.

This year akamine_chan put out a call for volunteers to run the challenge. Aka shared google docs and funneled volunteer info, shared snowflake icons, provided and hosted this year's banners, answered questions, invited people into the comm and gave them access, gave advice when looked for and at one point pointed out something that everyone else had missed - all behind the scenes. akamine_chan also participated in this year's daily snowflake challenges.

I think that the reins handover that akamine_chan did for this year's challenge is the most generous I have ever witnessed and is probably likely to remain that way.

In 2012 the first Snowflake Challenge was held on aka's personal journal. The next year this community was created and aka wrote about that first year:

The band My Chemical Romance put in a guest appearance on the kids show Yo Gabba Gabba that December, singing about every snowflake being different, and that was what I wanted us to celebrate - how each one of us was unique and beautiful, broken and imperfect and intelligent and talented and lovable.

Some of us are broken, but we are still good. For some of us 2016 was the year that things got bad, and for some of us it was the year things got worse. Some of us woke up, and some of us were already woke. Good things also happened in 2016, and are happening every day. Fandom is firmly one of my good things. I am continually impressed by its passion, creativity, humour, intelligence, generosity, feeling, spontaneity, and ability to organise. I think that these are things that we need every day, and that we'll need going forward. So, with that in mind as a kind of hat tip or throwback to this challenge's roots, I want to close with a quote from MCR:

"Art is the weapon. Your imagination is the ammunition. Stay dirty, and stay dangerous. Create and Destroy as you see fit."

♥

Keep your stick on the ice.

kiki-eng

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( Note from tjs_whatnot )

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( Note from Spikedluv )

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( Note from sperrywink )

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( Note from mizface )

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( Note from fadedwings )

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This post is open to all comments and a friending meme will follow.

Introduction * Master Post * Day 1 * Day 2 * Day 3 * Day 4 * Day 5 * Day 6 * Day 7 * Day 8 * Day 9 * Day 10 * Day 11

Remember that there is no official deadline, so feel free to join in at any time, or go back and do challenges you've missed.

( Fandom Snowflake Challenge - Day 12 )

Check out the comments for all the awesome participants of the challenge!

And just as a reminder: this is a low pressure, fun challenge. If you aren't comfortable doing a particular challenge, then don't. We aren't keeping track of who does what.

Introduction * Master Post

Remember that there is no official deadline, so feel free to join in at any time, or go back and do challenges you've missed.

( Fandom Snowflake Challenge - Day 1 )

Check out the comments for all the awesome participants of the challenge!

And just as a reminder: this is a low pressure, fun challenge. If you aren't comfortable doing a particular challenge, then don't. We aren't keeping track of who does what.

We made it! Welcome to 2017! :)

If you’ve participated in the challenge in previous years, welcome back, and if this is your first year participating, just welcome. We’ve got a lot of new mods this year and we’re all excited to do this thing with you.

For a lot of us 2016 was awful - I don’t even want to talk about it right now, actually. For some of us December is really not a relaxing month, for whatever reason. So, in January, it’s nice to go to that good, fannish place.

The Snowflake Challenge is about reminding ourselves why we choose to be part of fannish communities, and embracing what being part of that community means to us, and celebrating who we are. It’s about celebrating our specialness and our talents and what it is that makes each one of us amazing.

The essentials of the challenge, wording from akamine_chan:

( How does it work? )

( What exactly is a fanwork? )

A master post for 2017, to help with navigation, will be sticky-posted to the top of the community in a bit, and we’ll be sending a mod intro your way before the second challenge is out. The first challenge will be out soon!