Challenge #5

In your own space, create a list of at least three things you'd love to receive, a wishlist of sorts.

Oh lawd. This one's going to be a struggle too. Most of the stuff I want are physical—physical volumes of manga, figures, etc.—and that'd be too much of a hassle for any of y'all reading this.

1. Comments on any of my fic (AO3 has the most complete list right now but a handful are also mirrored on SqWA and sigaw). Please don't feel obligated to comment if you honestly didn't enjoy it or are unfamiliar with any of the fandoms I've written for. That would just make me feel so awkward /o\

2. More people (that aren't mods/admin) posting in communities. I know I can't bemoan this too much—I'm hardly as active in comms as I used to be when I was younger—but as someone modding a couple of comms, it does feel lonely sometimes 🥲 I do my best to post whenever I have something to share in the comms I'm part of, so I'll just keep doing my best and hope other people feel encouraged to do the same. I remember some newer DW users a while back sharing that they don't post in comms because they felt like that was a mod-only privilege. No disrespect to whoever told you that, but no. Comms are meant for all members to share their fandom squee! They're not meant to be a mod's personal soapbox. (Unless that's stated somewhere on the community profile, in which case that's a "personal" comm and a different conversation altogether.)

3. If you can afford it, premium paid time for anyone on DW. Support your friends and the site we're all on, win/win!

Day 1 * Day 2 * Day 3 * Day 4

Challenge #3

Write a love letter to fandom. It might be to fandom in general, to a particular fandom, favourite character, anything at all.

Today's prompt felt somewhat familiar, so I poked through my old entries and saw that I'd answered an iteration of it in 2018. The vibe of that 2018 entry is very "I didn't have the energy to write anything, but I still wanted to complete today's challenge so here's this half-baked response that's unintentionally prickly." I don't know whether to laugh or just ... sigh deeply.

That wasn't a great year for me, mentally.

I'm not really sure what I want to write for this prompt. Finding my 2018 post threw me into a melancholy mood and that's not really what I want to talk about right now. But at the same time, I couldn't really think of a topic/focus even before I started feeling down.

For now, I think I'll settle for a declaration of war of continuing devotion. (That's romantic a la love letters, right?)

At this point in time, I've spent more than half my life in fandom, being various levels of fannish through various mediums. I can't see myself ever stopping being in fandom, I can't see myself ever stopping being a fan of something. It's not an exaggeration that I can't imagine being a "normie." I want to one day be that old fandom lady that the Youths write about on whatever future version they have of a fandom platform, I want to be known as that one old lady who's keeping her ancient fandom alive by posting a fic every so often for it.

I entered fandom in the early 2000s because I wanted to and I'll exit it whenever I want to. And I don't want to exit fandom.

Day 1 * Day 2

The Empowered Stan

To me, the issue is not so much about the validity of music criticism—it’s that as both consumers and music fans, we have increasingly little space to criticize publicly without that critique being conflated with an attack on an artist’s identity or worldview.

The article is mostly about music criticism, but the discussion can be applied to any form of media.

In my personal experience, I was also significantly touchier about anyone criticizing my beloved media (even when it was obviously in good faith or just a discussion on personal preferences) when my mental health wasn't at its best.

Challenge #1: The Icebreaker Challenge

Introduce yourself. Tell us why you're doing the challenge, and what you hope to gain from it.

Hi, I'm Bear! I'm a 30-something Filipina (she/her), who's been active in fandom since the 2000s. I've been reading and writing fanfic since I started being fannish, and I have a couple of ancient fanarts squirreled away on my computer. My intro post has a bit more information on where else you can find me on the internet.

I've participated in the snowflake_challenge for the last few years though I skipped it in 2025. Considering the new wave of users that recently joined Dreamwidth, I thought the challenge would be a good way to reach out, meet new people, and hopefully make new friends!

Thanks for dropping by 👋🏽

Fics

• Malleable (Sk8 the Infinity • Cherry/Joe • Mature)
• Better late than never (Saiyuki • Hakkai & Sanzo & Gojyo & Goku • Teen And Up Audiences)

Stats

Yearly

Number of fics: 2
Total word count: 2,957
Number of fandoms: 2

Less than 2024's output, in terms of both fic count (3) and word count (6,998).

Overall

Number of completed fics: 187
Number of fandoms: 22

( Rest of the review. )

Doing that meme that I saw floating around on my Reading page a while back because I currently lack the motivation to do anything else. (This took me way too long to write.)

How many letters of the alphabet have you used for [starting] a fic title? One fic per line, 'A' and 'The' do not count for 'a' and 't'. Post your score out of 26 at the end, along with your total fic count.

( Cut for length and some commentary! )

Personal rating 8/10

This was interesting! I enjoy the Alien franchise and its various entries as a whole—though I admit I've so far been limited to the live action movies/series and haven't explored the print entries—and this was no exception.

Alien: Earth is set between Alien: Covenant and Alien though I don't think you need any knowledge of the other franchise entries to understand what's going on here. It does raise interesting questions about the spread of xenomorphs throughout the universe post-Covenant.

( Spoilers for the franchise as a whole and for the series itself. )

Random stuff:

• I love Eyeleen, the alien eyeball octopus thing! She's amazing, she's iconic, and I predict she will take over the world if we get a S02.
• They really like superimposing shots in this series. It was used a bit too much for my liking; it went from "Oh, cool," to "Was this really necessary?" pretty quick.
• In the first episode, there's a scene where the text on the computer screen is apparently bright enough to be projecte legibly on Morrow's face. I can buy that, but it drove me up the wall that they didn't mirror the text.
• Kirsh slandering sleeved blankets, how dare he. (I love him but how dare he.)
• Alien: Earth decided to contribute to the franchise by adding to the worldbuilding and Alien Romulus contributed by adding content that followed closely in the footsteps of the original movie. I think both approaches are valid; what's more important is whether the cast and crew are able to pull off whatever they have planned.

I've finally finished this year's Saiyuki fic! Still has to go through a round or two of editing before I can post it, but I should have it up on the usual places before the end of the week.

The original plan was for the fic to be 100% lighthearted and/or funny. Some heavy backstory snuck in at the last minute, which shouldn't surprise me because it's happened multiple times before across different fandoms, and yet it did.

( Some thoughts about my writing style. )

All that to say, I almost took this year's Saiyuki fic in a completely different direction than I first wanted. But I decided to stick with the lighthearted vibe for this even if there is that one slightly heavier section. Personally, I think the slight deviation helps make everything else land better.

This was also discussed over at anime_manga, but I wanted a link here for mirroring reasons as well.

Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles for no good reason

There is only one conclusion that can be drawn from that: the Funimation-turned-Crunchyroll executives still do not have any respect for anime as a medium. In addition, they seem to be treating Crunchyroll and its ways of doing things as the ways of pirates – which isn’t entirely incorrect, as Crunchyroll’s use of Aegisub and ASS did originate from the ways of pirate fansubbers. But fansubbers deeply care about anime as medium (they wouldn’t be illegally subtitling it for free as a hobby otherwise), which in turn means that the ways fansubbers have developed to subtitle anime are in fact extremely efficient for the job – much better than basically any “industry standards” for subtitling, even.

Like the anime_manga OP says, I do remember a time when Crunchyroll was a piracy site. It's why I made an account over there in the first place 😂 (An account I promptly forgot about in favor of torrenting, only to log in again after so many years and be surprised to see that the site was now legit.)

If I were running Crunchyroll, I'd hire a bunch of fansubbers and have them use their preferred software to make high-quality subtitles then use that as my selling point versus other streaming platforms.

🌶️ I've started appreciating vegetable-based dishes as I get older, which the parents find endlessly amusing. Tangentially related to this, I randomly remembered the giant container of homemade laing Mom's friend sent over a while back. I usually avoid spicy food but this was so good. If you're interested in a spicy veg dish, here's a recipe. (Grain of salt: I can't vouch for how good the recipe itself is, as a non-cook.)

📚 I've started a re-read of Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer before jumping into the sequel books which I still haven't read but now finally own. Still very engaging! I wonder what details I'll pick up during this second read.

✒️ Settled on which Saiyuki WIP I want to try and finish before the end of the year. I started out planning it to be mostly from Goku's POV but realized halfway down the first page that it'd be funnier from the POV of the rest of the group. I'm just winging it, as usual, so I've got no idea how long this is going to be, if the lighthearted vibe is going to stay throughout, etc. 😆 We'll see where I end up when I get there.