I love good guys

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

Spotlight: OSP's JttW
December brought Overly Sarcastic Productions's annual new "Journey to the West Kai" installment! To explain my joy: ( Read more... )

Ficathons, fests & communities

• Create & engage
  • fanart_recs no longer requires sign-ups to post recommendations! (It does still require using its template and following its rules.)
  • hlh_shortcuts has released all its '24 stories and is now in its annual author-guessing game phase.
  • snowflake_challenge '25 has begun! They post a modest challenge every second day to help build fannish community. Challenge #1 is to update your fannish info and post to say you did so.
  • whenisitdue is a running list of deadlines for assorted writing communities, challenges, and fests.
  • inkingitout is a challenge community for writing >75K words in 2025, though they also welcome lower wordcount goals.
  • sweetandshort is a weekly challenge community for fics up to 500 words, tiny poems, userpic icons, and small banners.
  • goals_on_dw is running Fannish 50 in 2025, a challenge to make 50 fandom-related posts by the end of the year, among other assorted challenges.
  • lyricaltitles is an event community that uses song lyrics as fic titles.
  • candyheartsex is an exchange with emphases on relationships, both gen and otherwise.
  • trope_of_the_month's January theme is an amnesty (that is, fill any previous theme).
  • allbingo's January theme is "Public Domain Day."
  • pinchhits is a forum for pinch-hits in fannish exchanges. For example, heroexchange is currently seeking pinch hitters.
• Enjoy & share
  • fancake (themed fanfic recs); January theme: "(not really) unrequited love"
  • het_reccers (m/f fanfic recs)
  • gensplosion (gen fanfic recs)
  • recthething (fanwork recs)
  • fanart_recs (fanart recs)

Sidelight: MCU's What If? season three
All episodes in order of how much I personally, subjectively enjoyed them on first viewing:

1. 0304: "What If... Howard the Duck Got Hitched?"
2. 0303: "What If... the Red Guardian Stopped the Winter Soldier?"
3. 0307-08: "What If... the Watcher Disappeared?" + "What If... What If?"
4. 0302: "What If... Agatha Went to Hollywood?"
5. 0306: "What If... 1872?"
6. 0305: "What If... the Emergence Destroyed the Earth?"
7. 0301: "What If... the Hulk Fought the Mech Avengers?"

(I appreciate the insight -- credit YouTuber TheNandoCut -- that this series, all three seasons, has actually been trying to simultaneously embody both What If? and The Exiles comics; that really explains its series structure for me.)

Challenge #7: Share a fannish creative resource.

Journey to the West Research is an archive for Jim McClanahan's research into the historical, religious, and folklore origins of the classic Chinese sixteenth-century novel Journey to the West.

( If you're into JttW, read on... )

"Write a promo, manifesto or primer."

Imagine, if you will, an epic crossover between Homer's Odyssey and Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, with all the ancient Greek and medieval Christian religious beliefs and holy figures running around, equally, and interacting with each other and the protagonists. Then marinate this crossover in Cervantes's Don Quixote for satire and irony. Finally, generously dust it with shredded Spenser's Faerie Queene for allegory and top off with a slather of gooey melted Dante's Divine Comedy for worldbuilding. And it's funny. So funny.

That wild mash-up would be a western literary approximation of the eastern literary classic The Journey to the West, which is set in 7th-century China, and was published as the hundred-chapter novel we know today circa 1592. It's attributed to Wu Cheng'en (questioning the real authorship is a thing a la Shakespeare, only more so, because the original publication was anonymous). It wasn't translated into English at all until the early 20th-century, and wasn't translated into English in full until the 1980s, but of course it's been available and loved in many other languages for centuries. Like the European works I mention above, the hundred-chapter-novel of JttW draws on previous literature, folklore, and real history and religion to craft a literary achievement that has stood the test of time and been itself endlessly adapted. The way many of us might casually refer to Arthur's sword or Odysseus's journey, folks who grew up with JttW might casually refer to Wukong's rod or Xuanzang's quest.

We need a back-cover blurb here, right? Wikipedia says: "Enduringly popular, the novel is at once a comic adventure story, a humorous satire of Chinese bureaucracy, a source of spiritual insight, and an extended allegory." ( Read more... )