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

[springgreen]

I found so much of the comm resources incredibly helpful! Thank you guys so much for your hard work!

This is going to be so tl;dr...

I committed myself to only requesting chromatic sources, albeit two with possibly non-chromatic characters, and I also volunteered solely for chromatic sources or characters. I managed two full-length stories, one my assignment (chromatic source and characters) and one a treat (chromatic characters), and also got to make them full of lots of female characters, which made me super happy. I was also happy that even though I wrote a manga source (much more common for Yuletide chromatic fandoms), mine felt like it was about Actual Japanese People (tm) instead of robot dolls and required cultural and language research. And I managed to fit in an ethnic minority Japanese character!

... uh, this makes it all sound like stuff that is Good for You, like fiber in your diet, but I squeed the entire time I was writing it and had SO MUCH FUN.

I did feel like I cheated a little because I've written Japan and Japanese characters quite a few times, and because all my requests were either Chinese or Japanese. Next year I am going to try to offer and request more in chromatic non-e.asian-fandoms (and start reading up on sources earlier so I can actually write/read the fic).

Dark Agenda was incredibly helpful; that's how I found my cultural beta. I also got into a few fandoms I wouldn't have without the early pimping posts, and the chromatic prompts list was SO HELPFUL. Especially since the main one was huge. I wish I could have written more off the prompt list, but my main fic took me forever. I also enjoyed beta-ing for other people. Oh! Uh, I completely forgot to check my LJ inbox and therefore missed someone's request to get beta-ed... maybe optional contact information in the beta-list? In case dw/lj messaging is not the best way to get in touch with the beta.

I was also really happy to have a sub-collection of chromatic fandoms; given the overwhelming size of the archive, it helped me start out somewhere. I sadly didn't get to read very much this year, but hopefully will catch up later, so I can't comment that much on the fics in the collection, but I've started reading a few (mostly Chinese mythology) that make me really happy. I was also SO HAPPY to see bits of non-English languages in things! Ditto with the list of fic and rec posts you guys compiled. I cannot believe you guys did all that! So much work!

Ways to improve... hrm. I feel a lot of it depends on the participants? Maybe trying to get people pimping the lesser-requested/written chromatic fandoms way earlier than sign up period (African, Latin@, indigenous, S/SE/W-Asian?) or brainstorming posts to think of fandoms and collaborate on nominating them? Also I was really surprised by how many people doing Yuletide didn't know about the challenge (I am biased b/c of my dwircle)... so maybe more posts about it on the main Yuletide comm? (Or I might have completely just missed all the posts about it because I don't read the main comm all the time.) (I am also okay with keeping it smaller and less publicized to avoid wank.) I also spent forever trying to figure out if my recipient was okay with non-English languages or not, so I have to remember to put that into my request letter next year.

[wistfuljane]

Also I was really surprised by how many people doing Yuletide didn't know about the challenge (I am biased b/c of my dwircle)... so maybe more posts about it on the main Yuletide comm? (Or I might have completely just missed all the posts about it because I don't read the main comm all the time.)

We made about 5-6 posts to both yuletide and yuletide and dhobikikutti asked elynross to link to our community on yuletide_admin a few times. We tried to balance between not wanting to spam yuletide/yuletide and wanting to spread the words about the Chromatic Yuletide Challenge and its resources, but...

Hosting a Yuletide fandom promotion and nomination brainstorming fest maybe right at the start of October -- or ealier -- is an idea and I like the suggestion to indicate in "Dear Yuletide Writer" letter whether you're okay with non-English languages and/or codeswitching in stories (I totally went \o/ too) -- will have to remember to suggest that advice to the dark_agenda team for inclusion in various challenge advices and stuff next yuletide season.

In any case, I'm glad your yuletide experience this season was wonderful and fun!

[dhobikikutti]

In addition to everything Jane said, we're working on overhauling the beta list system to make it easier for everyone concerned. :)