Chromatic Yuletide 2010 Challenge Summary & Discussion

[dark_administrator]

Authors have been revealed and yuletide has opened an AO3 collection for New Year's Resolution 2011, thus, marking the end of the main yuletide challenge.

Last year, dark_agenda was started as a collective effort to promote representation for chromatic sources and characters in yuletide. This year, with your continued help and support, we extended our effort and sought to provide more resources. Among them included the lists of Chromatic Yuletide 2010 Fandoms & Characters (html version), Chromatic Yuletide Fandom Promotion Posts, Source-Sharing Resources, Chromatic Yuletide Beta Offers, Chromatic Yuletide 2010 Prompts (html version), Critiques & Common Pitfalls and Chromatic Yuletide 2010 Stories & Resources. We amassed:

• ~1000 fandom meta tags for the Chromatic Yuletide 2010 Fandoms & Characters list
  
• ~700 requests for the Chromatic Yuletide 2010 Prompts list
  
• ~500 stories for the Chromatic Yuletide 2010 Stories & Resources list

And our challenge AO3 collection received ~260 submissions!

Thank you for all the participants, beta volunteers, readers, wranglers and passersby who contributed to and supported Chromatic Yuletide 2010 Challenge -- we can not truly thank you all enough!

Of course, our AO3 collection will remain open for New Year's Resolution 2011 submissions and we will continue to collect more fandom meta tags, requests and stories. (For New Year's Resolution 2011, we would love more help in adding requests from Yuletide Complete List of 2010 Prompts to our prompts spreadsheet -- you can use this form or add prompts directly into the spreadsheet, thank you!)

We realized that despite these awesome numbers and achievements there's still much we can to do to increase visibility of chromatic sources and characters. Stories from chromatic sources and/or featuring chromatic characters still only comprised less than 20% of yuletide output and the percentages for stories from African, First Nation, Latin American and South/Southeast/West Asian sources are even depressingly lower (some even non-existent).

With that in mind, how has your experience with Chromatic Yuletide been so far? We'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback! If you participated in Chromatic Yuletide 2010 Challenge:

• To which challenge components did you commit yourself and how did it go?
  
• Did you have specific goals in mind while writing your story? What were they?
  
• Do you have any tips and tricks for writing chromatic sources or characters you'd like to share?
  
• How were dark_agenda helpful for you in achieving your goals? And what do you think dark_agenda could do to be more helpful?
  
• How effective were the promo posts? Were there some formats that worked better than others?
  
• Was the information provided on the beta list sufficient? Are there other categories that we should include for next year?

As readers:

• What were your expectations for the Chromatic Yuletide 2010 Challenge? And did the challenge meet them?
  
• For yuletide stories in general this year, what were some portrayals of chromatic sources and characters that work for you? What didn't? How do you think those latter portrayals could be better?
  
• What do you wish to see next year with regards to chromatic source and character representation?

Comments

[jlh]

Two of my requests were focused on chromatic characters, and most of my offers were as well. My primary Yuletide fic was about a chromatic character (Motormouth Maybelle of Hairspray) as was one of my two Yuletide treats (Jade of Double Happiness). But, I was defaulted on not once but twice! My pinch hitter was flat-out amazing, but I can't say that it didn't cross my mind, especially when I saw my prompts on the pinch hit for a second time, that the prompts had something to do with it.

While I offered only chromatic characters or women, I ended up matching with someone who requested "any" for the fandom (Community) and ended up writing about all the characters, not just the chromatic ones. So I'm hesitant to link the story to the collection. I'm not sure if it "counts" if it's an ensemble fic that includes non-chromatic characters. (This is a challenge for me generally, in all of these challenges to write more female and chromatic characters. If you have a story with several leads, does that "count"?)

All that said, I don't think I would have skewed my requests or offers in the same way without this challenge, especially since the database helped me so much to find canons that I was familiar with but hadn't thought about in a while, such as Double Happiness. So that fic, absolutely, would not exist if not for this comm. I didn't have time to write Treats this year, but definitely putting together a database for the prompts once they become available is a great resource, not only for Yuletide Madness but also for people writing New Year's Resolutions or searching through the database to get ideas for next year's Yuletide.

Thanks to everyone for all their hard work!

[crossedwires]

Oooh, Double Happiness fic!

So I'm hesitant to link the story to the collection. I'm not sure if it "counts" if it's an ensemble fic that includes non-chromatic characters. (This is a challenge for me generally, in all of these challenges to write more female and chromatic characters. If you have a story with several leads, does that "count"?)

I have the same worries. One of my fics is about an ensemble, and only 2 of the characters are chromatic. I ended up using the 'chromatic character' tag, but not the chromatic yuletide one.

[jlh]

See below, the reply from troisroyaumes. For my story I used the chromatic character tag and did decide to add it to the chromatic yuletide collection. I wrote about a 7-character ensemble, featured 5 of them a little more prominently than the other two, and all three of the chromatic characters in the show were in the 5 characters featured, so I decided that was good enough!

[troisroyaumes]

I'm not sure if it "counts" if it's an ensemble fic that includes non-chromatic characters. (This is a challenge for me generally, in all of these challenges to write more female and chromatic characters. If you have a story with several leads, does that "count"?)

We've included ensemble fics with non-chromatic characters on the masterlist as long as the chromatic character appears fairly central to the story in some way. Admittedly, the lines for inclusion can get a bit fuzzy, and in those cases, it is really your personal call on whether you feel comfortable labeling your fic as "chromatic"--I think in some ways, the mere act of labeling meant that the writer has at least thought about the issue, which is in the spirit of the challenge.

[jlh]

I guess when I think of an ensemble fic there are always several characters that are central to the story—in this case, 5 of the 7 characters on the show, while the other two are slightly less prominent. But all three chromatic characters are of the first five, so I decided to add it to the collection.

Thanks for the reply! It really helped!

[dhobikikutti]

Yeah, those of us who were on the pinch hit list did notice a trend for the requests with chromatic-dominant sources to show up often, and linger 1/10th of a second longer. :/ But we shall overcome!