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

[beccastareyes]

I didn't request only chromatic canons, but several of my requests ended up fitting. (Come to think of it, all but the one I ended up getting...)

My assigned story may or may not have been eligible*, so I didn't submit it, but both my pinch hit and the treat I wrote were.

I felt a bit weird submitting the pinch hit to the Chromatic Yuletide because... well, I'm an anime fan, so it feels like Japanese characters from Japanese media (at least, anime/manga/video games) aren't under-represented in fandom, which seems to defeat the point of Dark Agenda.

OTOH, I did learn a bit about the Japanese university system and becoming a doctor in Japan that I didn't know, and part of the fic was addressing that.

The other story I wrote was for an anime fandom, but was about a Latina character who had moved to America as a child and who was rediscovering her native language/culture after meeting with another expat who had returned to their birth country to start a company to manufacture spacesuits. Which felt different than, say, writing about one of the Japanese leads in the series, or the fic I got last year in the same fandom about the African-American character and her family.

I don't know. I never really know what to do about anime and manga when it comes to these things, since both the primary audience is the same ethnicity as the characters and author, and they aren't under-represented in fandom as a whole (though maybe Yuletide, but that's a separate issue).

* It was for Super Mario RPG, which was originally developed in Japan by Nintendo and Square, but the only human-looking characters in the fic were Mario and Princess Toadstool.

[troisroyaumes]

well, I'm an anime fan, so it feels like Japanese characters from Japanese media (at least, anime/manga/video games) aren't under-represented in fandom, which seems to defeat the point of Dark Agenda.

As a fellow anime fan, I agree with you that anime/manga is not necessarily underrepresented in fandom. However, I think some of the rationale behind including anime/manga was that the fact that these fandoms are Japanese (and therefore, non-white and non-Western) in origin is often denied. E.g. you probably know Matt Thorn's post debunking the idea that anime/manga characters all look white, a common misperception that erases the identity of the characters. Last year, dhobikikutti compiled some posts (all from anime/manga fans, most of whom were also fen of color) that discussed this issue: The problems of White and Western consumption of Manga and Anime. In that sense, the fact that you can say the following:

OTOH, I did learn a bit about the Japanese university system and becoming a doctor in Japan that I didn't know, and part of the fic was addressing that.

suggests that you fulfilled the spirit of the challenge to its fullest, since the act of writing the fic allowed you to engage with a culture that is not your own.

Perhaps a step for next year is to revive discussion of anime/manga during the nominations and writing period to make it clear that in addition to our goal of underrepresentation, we also aim to improve thoughtful representation. On the one hand, the mere label of "chromatic" may remind some people to be more thoughtful towards anime/manga fandoms. But it may also be worth discussing these issues explicitly to help people be aware that anime/manga isn't exempt from questions of representation merely because it's a large subset of fic-writing fandom.

I also think it's important to note that people are at different stages when it comes to writing chromatic fandoms/characters. East Asian media, and Japanese media in particular, has high visibility in the U.S. and many other Western countries, and there tends to be more resources available for research when it comes to Japanese culture. So I can imagine that someone who hasn't written many chromatic sources or characters before may find it easier to tackle a fic for anime/manga. For those of us who are involved in anime/manga fandoms already, perhaps we should set the goal a little differently: either to write about characters that are ethnic minorities in Japan or to do more research into Japanese culture or to not write a Japanese fandom but another chromatic one. The mod team wanted to aim to be as inclusive as possible by allowing people to approach the challenge in whatever way that is most comfortable. At the same time, I think it will probably become more of a priority for us to also promote fandoms that are from underrepresented regions (esp. Latin America, First Nations, Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, West Asia, etc.).