Fannish options & enthusiasms | February 2026

[brightknightie]

Here are some recent fannish things I've happened to see and would like to share!

Spotlight: I'm four episodes into the new Marvel Wonderman. It reminds me again how much I wish we could go back to "television" releasing one episode per week, many episodes per year. This streaming model doesn't allow viewers to build relationships with characters or each other. I can't consume or contribute to any discussions yet, because I've seen "only" four episodes (in less than a week). And by the time I catch up, everyone will have moved on. Granted, I feel strongly that Disney/Marvel should have approached its TV shows, from the start, as an anthology series, a la PBS's Masterpiece or The Wonderful World of Disney. That's a familiar model viewers would have understood and known how to engage with. Retrofitting it now as "Spotlight" may be too little, too late. I'm not asking that every story run for seven seasons, of course! But a big part of what makes TV different from movies, and precious to us, is the stories' presences in our lives as we live them through time.

Ficathons, fests & communities

• Create & engage
  • halfamoon, the 14-day challenge celebrating female characters, is in progress!
  • small_fandoms has a drabble-athon throughout February. ("Smallness" here is not by Yuletide metrics, but by reasonableness and on the honor system for present participation.)
  • pinchhitbingo is a rolling challenge to help out communities and support fellow fans by filling pinch hits (that is, exchange drops and unmatchables).
  • videogamefanworks is a community for sharing assorted fanworks and fanwork recs for any video game or visual novel.
  • allbingo's February theme is "Valentine's Day" (love and loss).
  • trope_of_the_month has not yet posted its February theme.
  • pinchhits is a community for posting needed fills for exchanges. For example, traumaticexperiences is currently seeking pinch hitters.
  • whenisitdue tracks many more events than I note here!
• Enjoy & share
  • fancake (themed fanfic recs); February theme: "inept in love" (fka "idiots in love")
  • gensplosion (gen fanfic recs)
  • het_reccers (m/f fanfic recs)
  • fanart_recs (fanart recs)
  • recthething (fanwork recs)

Sidelight: I've begun playing Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical, which is a choose-your-own-adventure visual novel murder mystery urban fantasy Greek gods retelling with full-on musical numbers that you direct and redirect as they are sung. So far, so good. Not good, it has no key to the chapter controls anywhere I can find. Three chapters in, I'm still struggling. I am not at all a savvy gamer, but this seems... not entirely my fault? A key to the controls, somewhere in the settings menus, is not an unreasonable ask, even for a multi-platform game, is it? (What is the tab sequence?)