Promotions Week & Nominations!

[dark_administrator]

Doers of darkness, there is one day left for our official Kaleidoscope Promotions Week!

We encourage you to continue to promote your rare chromatic fandoms of choice! The deadline for Kaleidoscope nominations is August 23, 9:00 pm Pacific Time (U.S.A.). You can check out our convenient countdown clock here. As always, feel free to post links here at dark_agenda.

So far we have over 70 fandom and 300 character nominations! We've discovered that after 30 fandom nominations, the AO3 tag set interface only allows us to view 30 randomized fandoms at a time, so we plan to go ahead and begin approving/rejecting nominations soon. However, once a nomination has been approved or rejected, the nominator will not be able to edit it further. We will begin the process of approving nominations on 17 August 2012, which will give those of you who have submitted nominations already a chance to go back and edit if you so desire. Our tutorial for How to Nominate for Kaleidoscope & Other Information about the Nominations Process has information on how to edit nominations.

Since nominations need to be approved before they are visible on the tag set, and it is taking us time to review for typographical, romanization and language consistency, you can see the list of what has been nominated already at our 2012 Nominations spreadsheet. Except for the "Nominated Name" and "Kaleidoscope Wrangled Name" columns, which are protected, any can contribute and edit the spreadsheet.

However, please let us know if you have any typographical, romanization or language corrections to either the approved tags appearing in our tag set, Kaleidoscope 2012 Nominations, or the "Kaleidoscope Wrangled Name" column in our spreadsheet, or suggestions on how to wrangle names under "Nominated Name" column for fandoms and characters.

We'd like to remind everyone that in order to be eligible for Kaleidoscope, fandoms should be produced by chromatic creators in addition to featuring chromatic characters.

If you're still deciding on what to nominate or if you would like to strategize with other dark_agenda members to maximize your five fandom slots, please use the comments below to let everyone know what you want to nominate.

Happy Fête Nationale (Congo) and स्वतन्त्रता दिवस (Independence Day of India)!

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Comments

[qem_chibati]

Fandom Stratege Go~

I have two nomination slots left, but would love to have these fandoms nominated~

Kuroko Basuke, Natsume Yuujinchou, Princess Jellyfish, Otomen, Transfer Student Storm Bringer, Koi Cha no Osahou & Princess Tutu, so help narrowing it down would be awesome! :D

[allchildren]

Princess Tutu is my favorite ever! I'd be happy to nominate it.

I haven't given it too much thought yet, so the only other nomination I'm pretty sure I'd like to make is Octavia Butler's Earthseed duology. (And Beasts of the Southern Wild, but it's DQed for white creator, I think.) Maybe Slice of Cherry by Dia Reeves? Hmmm.

Anyway, point is: I'm open to suggestions. :)

[qem_chibati]

Yay! Thank you! :D

[allchildren]

FYI, mod-word is that Tutu is not eligible because the characters code as European. So I won't be nominating it -- alas! It should make an appearance in Yuletide, though, I imagine.

[alias_sqbr]

I'll nominate Princess Jellyfish! I was on the fence about nominating it anyway.

[qem_chibati]

Sweet! :D

[alias_sqbr]

If anyone is looking for new works to nominate and likes yuri I recommend Morishima Akiko, she does the MOST ADORABLE lesbian romances, most of which are really short and ABOUT ADULT WOMEN OMG. You can find all of them on Lililicious, but I particularly recommend Off Time and 20 year old girl and 30 year old maiden (also Happy Picture Diary, but I already nominated that :))

[seekingferret]

I've presently nominated

-The Autograph Man - Zadie Smith (About hybrid Jewish-Chinese identity in present day London)

-Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie (Indian Magical-Realist post-independence history)

-Throne of the Crescent Moon - Saladin Ahmed (Medieval Arabia-inspired fantasy epic)

-Treemonisha - Scott Joplin (early twentieth century ragtime opera)

-Trapped in the Closet - R. Kelly (early twenty-first century hip hop opera)


If I had more nominating space I'd want to add Samuel Delany's Dhalgren, Terence Taylor's Vampire Testaments, and maybe something by RK Narayan.

[noldo]

R. K. Narayan! I might just throw in a nomination for one of his, 't hadn't occurred to me.

[seekingferret]

:D I've read probably four or five of his books (Talkative Man, The Vendor of Sweets, Swami and Friends, the Ramayana), but they're generally short and fun, so if you nominate one I haven't read, I'll try to read it quickly so I can offer it.

[noldo]

Alas, I ended up nominating something else for that last slot, but I shall see if I can con a friend into doing it!

[gramarye1971]

Mentioning my nominations for Capital Scandal, Library Wars, A Certain Scientific Railgun, Mononoke-hime, and Sword Art Online.

Magical Girl craziness!

[sirvalkyrie]

I am nominating Puella Magi Madoka Magica (already accepted), Cutie Honey The Live, Smile Pretty Cure, Suite Pretty Cure and Heartcatch Pretty Cure.

[littlebutfierce]

Is anyone going to nominate Darker than Black? :D

Am probably going to nominate: Natsume Yuujinchou, K-On!, Yozakura Quartet, Tumbling, &... probably Otome Youkai Zakuro.

[(Anonymous)]

Is anyone interested in reccing any eligible sf/f literature from 1960 or later? I have an open slot and would also love to read and offer some other genre works.

(I'm already familiar with Delany, Jemisin, Butler, Hopkinson, Yep, and Hearn.)

[seekingferret]

Well, two of my nominations (upthread) are for post-1960 SFF- Midnight's Children and Throne of the Crescent Moon.

Other novels I might have considered nominating had I extra slots include K.M. Ruiz's Mind Storm (cyberpunky post-apocalyptic mutant action-adventure), Delany's Dhalgren (urban post-apocalyptic post-modernist dreamscape), Terence Taylor's Bite Marks/Blood Pressure (NYC-centered vampire alternate histories), A. Lee Martinez's The Automatic Detective (retro-noir robot detective story), Minister Faust's Coyote Kings of the Space Age Bachelor Pad (Saharan mythology invades Edmonton), and Karin Lowachee's Warchild (space pirates vs. aliens, but thoughtfully so).

If any of those sound interesting, check them out and see if you'd want to nominate them.

[ambyr]

If you mean Lian Hearn, aka Gillian Rubinstein, she's white.

A few genre authors you might look into: David Anthony Durham (Acacia series), Nnedi Okorafor (Who Fears Death, etc.), Nalo Hopkinson (Brown Girl in the Ring, etc.), Alaya Dawn Johnson (Spirit Binders series), and Haruki Murakami (more lit than genre, but he's won the World Fantasy award so I'm counting him; Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World would be my rec).

Two of my nominations went to Octavia Butler's Patternist series and Michelle Sagara West's Sun Sword series.

[maat_seshat]

Quick question about why the Kaleidoscope Wrangled Name for Nadeshiko Japan got switched to Nadeshiko Nippon?

All of the news coverage I've seen (in Japanese--I haven't been able to find any English-language coverage; someone please tell me where it is!) has used "Nadeshiko Japan", with Japan phonetically in katakana. NHK Olympic commentators talking in general certainly use "Nippon", as in "Nippon got the ball", but the team nickname seems to be consistently "Nadeshiko [hiragana] Japan [katakana]". See: the NHK special on them (listing only) (and youku streaming).

[wistfuljane]

Thank you for the clarification & correction! I'll change the fandom name to Nadeshiko Japan. Our general policy is romanized English words, for lack of better terms, and in this case, I incorrectly switched Japan to Nippon.

(The only source in English that I know of that follows the Japan National Football teams is jfa_en.)

[maat_seshat]

Thank you for the quick reply! (And thanks for the Twitter feed. I got distracted browsing it. :D)

[(Anonymous)]

One correction for a character's name in the fandom Zombadings 1: Patayin sa shokot si Remington; the character's name should be Mimi, not MiMi. This is some kind of AO3 problem; the extraneous capitalization appeared when I submitted the nomination and wouldn't go away even when I tried to edit it.

Thanks for running all of this!

[wistfuljane]

Thanks for the correction! AO3 thinks that you're trying to nominate the character MiMi from Invader Zim as character name has been wrangled as such. I've added a fandom-specific character tag, Mimi (Zombadings), and added to the tags set as one way to get around this.

Thank you for participating & nominating!

[carmarthen]

I nominated

Ballad of Mulan, an ancient Chinese poem (text and a fairly typical translation here: http://www.yellowbridge.com/onlinelit/mulan.php). I don't think I've seen any fic based on the poem, rather than the Disney movie or the 2009 live action movie, but even if all Mulans are lumped together, I think it qualifies as a rare fandom anyway. All characters in the poem are Chinese.

The Spirit Binders - Alaya Dawn Johnson - a fantasy series by a Black American author, set in a secondary world that is heavily based on Polynesia. As far as I can tell, there are no white people in the books at all, and all the characters I nominated are described as chromatic. I have not found any fanworks based on these books.

Mongolian History RPF - This was just to add characters to an already approved fandom. All the historical figures I nominated are Mongolian or Turkic Muslims. There are a couple fanworks from last year's Kaleidoscope and Yuletide, but not much.

Heian jidai RPF - Japanese history, Japanese historical figures. There are a few stories from a couple Yuletides back.

Eighteen Songs of a Nomad Flute - another Chinese poem, all characters are Chinese or Xiongnu nomads, only one story in existence that I know of (mine from last year). Here is a translation available online.

Hope that helps fill some of the gaps in the decision spreadsheet!