Review 2022
Dec. 19th, 2022 06:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thisbinks What a year it's been, huh?
Somehow I can't believe it's already over but here we are
Work has been gruelling the past few weeks, so writing has been slow as has any form of planning anything — but it doesn't mean that I haven't been thinking™
BANGS
So, in hindsight... The way bangs have been modded this year was kind of disheartening because it often felt like Mods were just looking for the next bullet point on their fandom resumé to then proceed to zines... Which is kind of sad brcause I do believe it's very obvious to participants if a Mod actually cares about an event and the people involved or... Well, doesn't.
Given the fact that I organise stuff in my free-time as well with many people and prepping involved, I always think it's your choice to sign up for the task but once you're in and you don't want to drop, you better are /in/. We don't have to talk about occasional slumps and times when you're not as present/preppy/whatever as you'd like to be BUT you owe your participants who put their trust in you. If you're not ready to have responsibility, you're not ready to be a Mod.
At least, that's my personal opinion, I'm pretty sure there are a lot of successful mods out there with a more lax approach and that's fine!
However, back on track to that review...
I participated in 7 bangs
> 5 Bangs as a writer
> 1 Bang as a Beta
> 1 Bang as a Mod
Of those 5 bangs as a participant, one of my artists dropped, my writer vanished, one of my artists ghosted until just the day before posting,... In a lot of those servers, the Mods were either hard to catch or very inactive, not even checking check-ins, so that's my biggest takeaway from it all. It's a bitter summary after I had a blast during 2021 bang season.
EXCHANGES
Oh boy. I have written 22 fics for exchanges. Wild.
While I absolutely love the concept of gifting each other and writing sth based off someone else's prompts, I'm missing the sense of community I got from my early bangs where you were just vibing, sharing wips, etc.
However, I loved every second of my exchange mania after Vri introduced me to them fkdksjs
ZINES
I had two zines left from 2021 that shipped this year, so it was nice receiving them ans finally holding them in my hands~
THEN i joined 5 more zines, 5 1/2 if you're counting the Thousand Horizons' bonus round we bribed the mods into.
Due to my busy work schedule, i couldn't be as active on the servers as I wished to but some were doing a lot better than others community-wise.
I loved the vibe of the WLW zine, it's full of people passionate about these works, so much even that i sometimes feel like an imposter, lmao
The Gojo Cat (which is due to arrive any day now) was SO much fun bc it was such a fun idea in itself and everybody was just enjoying the absolute crack premises we came up with.
Then I was called as a pinch hitter to the Domme zine's kink add-on, all about femdoms, and challenged myself with my very first no-nonsense non-con and it was... Difficult. Haha, it catapulted me right out of my comfort zone and while it felt cleansing, it also felt very bleak. I guess I'll stay with very dubious consent for now.
MODDING
Started the year with a bang, well, an exchange actually. The secret easter bunny exchange remains my baby and I had a blast. Everybody was super energised and I hope I could channel this as a mod, making the experience as enjoyable as possible for everyone on my part. There are things I wish I could have done better but it is what it is and working with people is a challenge in itself after all.
Next event was the Lady Nagant Bang. That bang showed me how important it is to have a motivated team to work with and to clarify well ahead HOW you wanna run an event — I'm certainly not an easy person to work with but I hope most participants were happy with their outcome.
AND finally, Valkyries Week. Given this was a mature WLW week that focused specifically on "difficult" themes and not just roseydosey, our target group was small but I couldn't have been happier with the outcome and the enthusiasm everybody participating showed, it really warmed my heart. And I hope it showed that WLW works can get nitty-gritty as well.
LOOKING AHEAD—
2023 is certainly gonna be interesting. With Twitter slowly imploding in itself, a lot of zines might lose their follower bases and therefore potential customers. My best bet is that promotions in discord servers will be the no1 point, given tumblr's eccentricities.
But that's that. My plan is a reverse bang and I hope I can get it started soon. I'm off the week after Christmas, so i hope i can use that time to get things sorted — starting with a Mod team I trust and who knows my requirements of a mod team, haha.
I'd also love to do something small for Lunar New Year given it's the year of the rabbit and therefore my bunny wife's year. But I don't know yet and time's running out ðŸ˜
Anywho. I'll probably take a break from bangs, simply because I lost trust in them. Only exception is if it's a team I know and a theme I really really wanna do.
Okay,enough rambling from me for now. I just wanted to make up for my prolonged silence I guess, bahahaha
Somehow I can't believe it's already over but here we are
Work has been gruelling the past few weeks, so writing has been slow as has any form of planning anything — but it doesn't mean that I haven't been thinking™
BANGS
So, in hindsight... The way bangs have been modded this year was kind of disheartening because it often felt like Mods were just looking for the next bullet point on their fandom resumé to then proceed to zines... Which is kind of sad brcause I do believe it's very obvious to participants if a Mod actually cares about an event and the people involved or... Well, doesn't.
Given the fact that I organise stuff in my free-time as well with many people and prepping involved, I always think it's your choice to sign up for the task but once you're in and you don't want to drop, you better are /in/. We don't have to talk about occasional slumps and times when you're not as present/preppy/whatever as you'd like to be BUT you owe your participants who put their trust in you. If you're not ready to have responsibility, you're not ready to be a Mod.
At least, that's my personal opinion, I'm pretty sure there are a lot of successful mods out there with a more lax approach and that's fine!
However, back on track to that review...
I participated in 7 bangs
> 5 Bangs as a writer
> 1 Bang as a Beta
> 1 Bang as a Mod
Of those 5 bangs as a participant, one of my artists dropped, my writer vanished, one of my artists ghosted until just the day before posting,... In a lot of those servers, the Mods were either hard to catch or very inactive, not even checking check-ins, so that's my biggest takeaway from it all. It's a bitter summary after I had a blast during 2021 bang season.
EXCHANGES
Oh boy. I have written 22 fics for exchanges. Wild.
While I absolutely love the concept of gifting each other and writing sth based off someone else's prompts, I'm missing the sense of community I got from my early bangs where you were just vibing, sharing wips, etc.
However, I loved every second of my exchange mania after Vri introduced me to them fkdksjs
ZINES
I had two zines left from 2021 that shipped this year, so it was nice receiving them ans finally holding them in my hands~
THEN i joined 5 more zines, 5 1/2 if you're counting the Thousand Horizons' bonus round we bribed the mods into.
Due to my busy work schedule, i couldn't be as active on the servers as I wished to but some were doing a lot better than others community-wise.
I loved the vibe of the WLW zine, it's full of people passionate about these works, so much even that i sometimes feel like an imposter, lmao
The Gojo Cat (which is due to arrive any day now) was SO much fun bc it was such a fun idea in itself and everybody was just enjoying the absolute crack premises we came up with.
Then I was called as a pinch hitter to the Domme zine's kink add-on, all about femdoms, and challenged myself with my very first no-nonsense non-con and it was... Difficult. Haha, it catapulted me right out of my comfort zone and while it felt cleansing, it also felt very bleak. I guess I'll stay with very dubious consent for now.
MODDING
Started the year with a bang, well, an exchange actually. The secret easter bunny exchange remains my baby and I had a blast. Everybody was super energised and I hope I could channel this as a mod, making the experience as enjoyable as possible for everyone on my part. There are things I wish I could have done better but it is what it is and working with people is a challenge in itself after all.
Next event was the Lady Nagant Bang. That bang showed me how important it is to have a motivated team to work with and to clarify well ahead HOW you wanna run an event — I'm certainly not an easy person to work with but I hope most participants were happy with their outcome.
AND finally, Valkyries Week. Given this was a mature WLW week that focused specifically on "difficult" themes and not just roseydosey, our target group was small but I couldn't have been happier with the outcome and the enthusiasm everybody participating showed, it really warmed my heart. And I hope it showed that WLW works can get nitty-gritty as well.
LOOKING AHEAD—
2023 is certainly gonna be interesting. With Twitter slowly imploding in itself, a lot of zines might lose their follower bases and therefore potential customers. My best bet is that promotions in discord servers will be the no1 point, given tumblr's eccentricities.
But that's that. My plan is a reverse bang and I hope I can get it started soon. I'm off the week after Christmas, so i hope i can use that time to get things sorted — starting with a Mod team I trust and who knows my requirements of a mod team, haha.
I'd also love to do something small for Lunar New Year given it's the year of the rabbit and therefore my bunny wife's year. But I don't know yet and time's running out ðŸ˜
Anywho. I'll probably take a break from bangs, simply because I lost trust in them. Only exception is if it's a team I know and a theme I really really wanna do.
Okay,enough rambling from me for now. I just wanted to make up for my prolonged silence I guess, bahahaha
no subject
Date: 20 Dec 2022 09:18 pm (UTC)And wow, you have been KILLING IT with exchanges :D :D
The Secret Easter Bunny Exchange was a blast, well run and we got so many lovely Miruko works out of it :) Thank you for running it!!
You make a good point on the effects that Twitter implosion might have on zines... I look at
no subject
Date: 21 Dec 2022 08:24 pm (UTC)I think the Easter Bunny Exchange was one of the most nicely-modded events I've participated in! Both in terms of being very nicely formatted/designed, and in that the mod team was pretty proactive about checking in on things (and I remember you literally checking around and getting some ppl back-up treats when their assigned person seemed MIA or something, like really paying attention and making sure no one got left in the dust). Fantastic work on that!
The phrase "losing trust" in bangs I feel like really encapsulates how I feel as well. Both on a fellow participant side (with people ghosting/dropping, and even generally super-delaying... like on the artist side, I've had some rough times where a writer says they're DEFINITELY going to write, and then it's a week before posting and there's like, two or three paragraphs, and I'm like "...What am I supposed to illustrate?") and on the mod side (there was one bang where the check-ins included a "concerns/questions" and I literally wrote like "Hey! My artist just let me know they had to drop, how do I get a pitch hitter?" and nobody contacted me... I went to #ask-a-mod after a week and it was fine, but I was like "Is nobody actually looking at the check-ins??". I've probably already complained about this but also a bang where the mod team literally just... didn't announce things that were on the schedule, didn't post pairings on the scheduled date, and gave no explanation for several days, didn't make a collection until prompted by participants... EVEN THO FOR ONCE ppl were somewhat active in the server, it didn't feel dead on the participant side, and yet the mods... And then I remember the Nagant Bang :). You were great in modding that ^_^. I'll stop before I go on more tangents). Overall there were just so many situations in Bangs where things just kind of felt like the worst kind of group project, even tho ppl sign up?? Voluntarily?? like why are they participating/modding if they don't...? actually want to do the thing?? On rare occasion I've had a bang partner that's vibed super well and made me feel like 'wow Bangs are worth it!' but when everything else feels like people are being dragged.... it gets disheartening.
Thank you for organizing Valkyries week! I know I helped out to some degree, but you were definitely the primary organizer who prepped basically everything XD. I was happy to be along for the ride, help with some tumblr stuff, and embrace the week when it came around!! Found a nice niche with some dedicated participants <3.
Good luck on the reverse bang (are u allowed to share the potential theme?), and potentially something Lunar! I'd try to hop in for another Miruko event (tho I'm also trying to take a step back from events for the most part, as you said I'd consider an event from a team I know), but no pressure.
no subject
Date: 29 Dec 2022 10:10 am (UTC)That is so many exchanges!! 22! Vriddy's promotion of them in the servers has got me into them, too, and I'm definitely having a lot of fun with them ^^
I'm worried about a Twitter implosion as well, since that seems to be where so much of the fandom is based. I hope it manages to limp along as usual, there doesn't seem to be an easy replacement for it just yet.
I only realized next year was going to the year of the bunny last week XD Was gonna compromise by making some personal art. If you are gonna do something last minute and need a hand with anything feel free to hit me up!