Announcing the Chromatic Yuletide 2010 Challenge

[dark_administrator]

Last year we started dark_agenda in order to try to promote the representation of chromatic sources and characters in the biggest pan-fandom challenge ficathon - yuletide. This year, we hope to renew and refine our challenge, and start it earlier with the nomination process itself.

Our challenge has four components:

• To nominate only or more sources with chromatic creators and/or characters.
  
• To request only or more sources with chromatic creators and/or characters.
  
• To offer to write only or more sources with chromatic creators and/or characters.
  
• To pick only or more prompts with sources with chromatic creators and/or characters when perusing 'dear author' letters or yuletide madness unfulfilled requests.

We suggest 'only' as an option because the odds of your receiving and writing something that meets the requirements of the challenge are significantly increased if you exclusively request and offer chromatic sources and characters.

Our suggested hierarchy for approaching the challenge:

• First, write for a language and culture other than your own.
  
• Second, support sources that are as authentic and unproblematic as they can be, especially in relation to those made about a culture from outside it.
  
• Third, celebrate actual source cultures before reinterpretations of it, because there just isn't enough of the first; i.e. realistic representations before retellings of myths, and actual religions before fantasy send-ups of them.
  
• Fourth, if you end up writing problematic source, engage in fixing it: finding the invisible people of colour and putting them back in, writing the back story for a character without tying it into the white people's narratives, showing not telling the blind spots and bigotry and flaws in the celebrated white heroes of the narrative.

Caveats:

• We use the term 'chromatic' as an umbrella definition for 'sourcelander', 'hyphenate', 'diasporian', 'person of colour', 'non-white', while we acknowledge that it has shortcomings. Similarly, we accept that there is a certain flattening in our 'White / Western /Other' terminology.
  
• We are not the final or authoritative arbitrators of what is offensive or acceptable. There is no such thing as universal agreement.
  
• We cannot and will not police authenticity or accuracy in sources, betas, or stories. We will accept and include clarifications and corrections about any opinions or facts we might state.

We prefer to focus on sources with chromatic creators because we find them underrepresented even in a challenge comprising of rare fandoms, and you can take a look at last year's list here to find inspiration on what to nominate.

When nominating, requesting and offering a source with a white creator, such as those listed here, please do make sure to specify the chromatic character(s) names.

This year, we are setting up a specific subcollection at the AO3 for the challenge, to which you can add your stories the same time as you upload them for yuletide. We would also be happy if you would use 'chromatic yuletide 2010 challenge' as a tag, in addition to whatever character-specific tags like 'Muslim character', 'PoC character', 'Latin@ character' etc that will help readers find your fic.

You can structure the challenge to meet what you feel comfortable committing to, and 'signing up' is only a way to give us some idea of who is interested in participating -- we do not penalise anyone for being unable to write what they had thought they might have been able to.

Please comment below if you would like to participate in our challenge, and mentioning which components of it you think you might be able to meet!

We would like to dedicate this challenge in remembrance of skywardprodigal, who founded multibeautiful and was responsible for adding so many chromatic visuals to our fannish landscapes.

Chromatic Yuletide 2010 Nominations!

[dark_administrator]

If you have nominated one or more fandoms that qualify for our challenge, please list them here! If you would like to brainstorm, urge other people to nominate something you might not have had a slot for, or discuss other aspects of nominations, this is the space to do it.

Do remember that the closer we get to 25th December 2010, the harder it will be for people to learn a new source canon - so this is the best time to try to woo a potential writer over into a TV series or epic 6 volume book canon.

How to Nominate
The nomination form

Nominations close Wednesday, 20th October at 8:59 pm US Eastern time.

Addendum:

With the help of dharmavati, eruthros, and thingswithwings, to whom we owe many thanks, we've been compiling nominated fandoms with chromatic creators and characters from your comments, the Yuletide Nominated Fandoms List, and the Yuletide Characters List in the Chromatic Yuletide 2010 Nominations List spreadsheet (html version).

We've been following titling and tagging conventions from yuletide and AO3 and will need help adding and verifying information, so if you have time and energy to spare, we would appreciate your assistance! The spreadsheet is set so anyone (no Google account needed) can edit, and Google Docs is designed so multiple editors can work on a document simultaneously and all their edits will update. We're currently working through the Yuletide Nominated Fandoms list, and you can check our status under Progress. We have also included a Color Key to explain the highlighted cells.

We're also maintaining a list of Chromatic Yuletide Fandom Promotion Posts here.