Post-reveal discussion

[dark_administrator]

We're thinking about this challenge and community, and what its future might look like, and to do that we'd like to know how the experience so far has been.

So now that authors are revealed, how did your participation in the Dark Agenda Challenge go?
What thoughts do you have about it?
How did it change your yuletide experience?
What suggestions would you have for your future self doing this next year (or next ficathon)?
Any tips and tricks you'd like to share with the rest of us? (Here's one - a good source for suitable character names is local newspapers from the region.)

What problems or frustrations did you have, either while writing, or tagging, or reading? What trends (disturbing or pleasant), did you you notice?

Would you do it again next year?

Comments

[yhlee]

I was able to keep my pledge to write a Treat for Dark Agenda! Whew. (My actual assignment was decidedly non-Dark Agenda.) I loved writing the stories, although in all fairness two of them owe more to musicology than race/ethnicity.

I haven't gone through to read Dark Agenda stories because I normally start with familiar fandoms. I looked at the recs compilation, but was generally unfamiliar with the fandoms.

Suggestion to future self: The blocking point is, you guessed it, lack of familiarity. The big problem I have is not looking for chromatic sources to read. It's that I have almost completely lost my enthusiasm for reading fiction, and I don't watch TV very quickly, so that's out too. I suspect the best course would be to try for some of the mythologies (maybe I could nominate Korean folktales next year?), because that pings my brain as nonfiction rather than fiction. (My brain is well-trained by marketing categories.)

I'm sorry I don't have much to offer here. I am mostly burned out and tired, and I don't have a strong theoretical grounding in these issues, so I will bow out now.

[dhobikikutti]

I'm sorry I don't have much to offer here...I don't have a strong theoretical grounding in these issues, so I will bow out now.

OY. Don't you dare put yourself down like that. Talking about your personal experience shouldn't have to be validated by how much theory you can demonstrate knowledge of.

Burn out and tiredness otoh, fully acceptable!

::hugs you after the Indian 'i scold out of love' lecture::

[glass_icarus]

The Dark Agenda Challenge made Yuletide really satisfying for me this year! While I haven't read some of the stories due to lack of fandom familiarity, it's nice to have the Dark Agenda reclist to refer to when I'm looking for new sources to read/watch, because I know that there is also shiny fanfic to devour. *g* Also, apparently as a (bizarre/amazing) side effect, I seem to have won this year's Saving Face fandom. \o/

I wrote both of my Yuletide stories for chromatic fandoms, neither of which was a huge stretch for me. I fell down on tagging, though- I am a little ambivalent about tagging my assigned story as a Dark Agenda story, and I'm not sure why. Maybe because it didn't feel like much of a stretch to write; I didn't really explore the (not my own) culture the way I thought I would/should, which was what I wanted to do for the challenge. I'm much more comfortable with my madness story, because it was about my culture and I knew that it would scan a certain way.

In terms of reading... out of the stories I have read so far, at least, I felt like there was a very noticeable effort towards cultural awareness/accuracy. However, I was/am also specifically looking for fic in my chromatic source fandoms or that highlights chromatic characters in my non-chromatic source fandoms, so this may be a function of my selection tendencies. *hands* More thoughts later, perhaps!

[eruthros]

I was wondering if there could be a Dark Agenda NYR challenge or similar, actually -- I acquired two sources specifically to write treats, but got them so late that it never happened for this year. (This was partly because signups and therefore yuletide letters went out late, I think, because I started looking for one of them basically on signup day!)

I also echo yhlee's comment about source familiarity -- I wonder if there could be a series of posts before nominations, even, for people to enthuse about their favorite chromatic sources?

[vehemently]

Concur, on the source-familiarity. I got pimped on a source, I consumed the source, I wrote a Yuletide story for it -- in my case, I saw the movie after the Yuletide noms/signups were complete, so it was a treat and not very lengthy. But I could see myself signing up to write it next year.

Pimping is great! Even when I don't remember the slightest thing about what was pimped about that particular source, if I run across it on (say) Netflix Instant View, the name will ring a bell, and that bell will push it up the queue closer to the top.

[troisroyaumes]

Same theme here: my goal with the Dark Agenda challenge was to write for a source whose cultural background differed from my own but I ended up not having enough time to do the necessary research to write Treats. So my advice to myself for next year is to become familiar with more chromatic sources and to offer for more fandoms that aren't East Asian.

[sophinisba]

I did really like having that list of sources posted during the nominations because it gave me time to watch a few movies and get familiar enough at least to read in a few new fandoms. So I agree with others that it would be neat next year to talk up different sources even earlier, maybe have some kind of sign-up for people who want to promote their fandoms and have it spread out over a month or two, like choc_fic is doing right now with individual entertainers and characters.

The three fics I wrote this Yuletide were about characters of color but they were for movies I was already familiar with and I guess I was a little hesitant about whether to tag things. I know you've said people should use their own judgment but maybe next year there could be slightly clearer guidelines. I got a bit tripped up on Latin American sources, for instance, because they seemed to be in the spirit of the challenge but the focus here has been more on Asian and African sources and the wording was often about Western/non-Western.

I still love that this happened/is happening and I think it made a big difference in this year's Yuletide, even for people who didn't participate directly. I think there's been more awareness and effort for people to write outside their culture and comfort zones.

[tree]

it was terrifying and wonderful. terrifying because i didn't know the source material and it was my first time writing a chromatic character in a chromatic source. (clueless white girl here.) but wonderful because i got the opportunity to make myself a little less clueless and also write in a needy fandom. i also had the pleasure of working with an awesome beta.

in future i would like to make myself more familiar with chromatic fandoms so that i'm more prepared. and particularly those that are australian--there was an australian chromatic fandom requested that i didn't even know about until sign-ups were happening. educate thyself! etc.

it was exciting that someone else wrote in the same tiny fandom--it actually made me more enthusiastic about the source material.

um, i don't think i have anything useful to offer.

[devilc]

How did your participation in the Dark Agenda Challenge go?
I had a blast. Then again, my participation was a "two birds, one stone" sort of deal.

What thoughts do you have about it?

It's a fun and worthwhile challenge.

How did it change your yuletide experience?

I had to remember to tag my fic as Dark Agenda, but that's about it.

What suggestions would you have for your future self doing this next year (or next ficathon)?

Nothing, beyond remembering that if I write a story that's eligible, to tag it properly.


Any tips and tricks you'd like to share with the rest of us?

Eligible fandoms/prompts might be right in front of you.

What problems or frustrations did you have, either while writing, or tagging, or reading? What trends (disturbing or pleasant), did you you notice?

The frustration of writing for my primary recipient is that her prompt asked me to essentially re-do a story I'd already written. So, I struggled with that.

I also discovered that I'm the only person in the fandom who thought to write from the CoC's POV. I got a comment that that was really refreshing. (Thing of it is, I identify more with the CoC in that fandom more than the white character.)

---

ETA: After thinking on this most of the night, I don't know if I'll ever write in a non-contemporary non-western fandom. For a variety of reasons I just don't feel comfortable doing so.

And for contemporary non-western fandoms, I'd have to know the canon excruciatingly well to feel comfortable doing so.

[berry]

i loved the idea of the challenge but, as others have said above, i really meant to challenge myself to write in a non-western fandom, and i totally failed to do so. in my case, that was due partly to lack of time and general disorganisation, but lack of familiarity with a lot of the canon in the prompt list definitely didn't help me.

i've bookmarked the list of chromatic fandoms so that i can catch up with sources over the course of the year for participation in yuletide next year. i also love the idea of posts for people to promote their favourite fandoms/characters, as some folk have mentioned above.

[jadelennox]

I didn't participate in the dark_agenda challenge, but I was aware of it when I wrote my Treat and my Madness story (both about chromatic characters by white creators). After Yuletide, I posted my perceptions of the stories in this year's Yuletide: "Why talking about these things is awesome", which dhobikikutti asked me to mention here. It's my perception that Yuletide has a lot more chromatic characters than in previous years (although I don't see a lot in the way of chromatic sources).

One thing I noticed as a reader is a whole lot of stories featuring characters of color which weren't tagged as such. Which makes me think that a lot of people have been influenced by these discussions in subtle ways. I think that discussions about being aware of the awesome of the characters of color influenced people enough to make them, well, aware of the awesome, so they wrote the stories. Because people who were thinking about these as ideological issues explicitly, I think, would have used the tags.

[zvi]

I didn't do anything with non-Western sources because I already had seven or eight Western sources I wanted to request, and I do not offer Yuletide sources I'm not already familiar with at the time of sign up (and even with that, I defaulted this year [too sick to know if I could do a proper source review by the time of no fault default] and half of the years I've signed up, I've wound up writing for a fandom other than what I was matched on.)

On the other hand, the Dark Agenda challenge meant that I felt like I could make clear in my dear yulegoat letter that I wanted to read stories about black people this year, in a way I can't imagine having made explicit in previous years.

What I think would be really useful would be Dark Agenda canon promotion starting in, like, August, so I could have time to try several things and find one or more canons that I like.

---

Because I was writing about white U.S. sources, and because there was, in 2 of 3 CoC stories, no content that I felt was particularly racialized, I felt much more comfortable tagging fic Character of Color than tagging it Dark Agenda, because I felt as if someone using Dark Agenda to surf would be disappointed when they found my sexytimes story or my funny first time story, stories where, if they weren't familiar with the canon, they might not even know which characters were white and which were black.

OTOH, the story written for me was also based on a U.S. source, and while nothing in it was explicitly racial, it felt, well, Black-er to me than any of the stories I wrote, and so I asked my writer to tag it Dark Agenda, and they did.

So, I guess that something I would like to be clearer on is what people expect to find, when they read a story tagged Dark Agenda, like, are they expecting to find something which grounds itself in non-Westernness or non-Whiteness, or are we just looking to expand the space where these stories can exist in the context of media fandom?

[noracharles]

For me it's both. Ideally I'd like a story which grounds itself in non-Westernness or non-Whiteness, but I also want to expand the space for these stories. When the author is in doubt, I would prefer that they do tag their fic.

[isis]

I didn't tag my story Dark Agenda (but did tag it Character of Color). It's a story set in a source fandom about black African people written by a white African man (No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency), and even though I was writing a culture not my own, I was doing so from the perspective of the original author, rather than of the actual characters (that is, I attempted to pastiche the original, rather than write a genuinely Botswana-based story), and it just didn't feel to me as though it really answered the challenge. I mean, I wasn't writing in a source in which all the characters are CoC because I wanted to reach out of my tiny white Jewish female box - I wrote in a source that I love, and it just happens that all the characters are CoC.

As far as "tips and tricks" go, I found suitable names for my original characters by looking up the Botswana football teams.

[inner_v0ice]

Although I wrote for a non-Western source (Trese, a Filipino comic book series), I didn't tag my fic "Dark Agenda" or "chromatic characters" for various reasons. I did finally decide to go back post-reveal and tag it "chromatic source."

Dark Agenda - I didn't actually feel that I was participating in this challenge. I had no "dark agenda" while writing; to paraphrase from isis above, I wrote in a source that I love, and it just happens to be chromatic. Additionally, I wasn't reaching outside the box, in fact, I was reaching inside the box for the very first time by writing a piece set in my own time and place. It was an absolutely exhilarating experience to 'reach inside the box' like that--I included a joke that would only make sense to a Filipino who went to school in the late 1990s, and my recipient loved it.
On one level, this is my personal Yuletide experience. On another level, it illustrates something I've found a bit odd about the Dark Agenda challenge from the beginning--it seems focused on encouraging people to write outside their own culture (on one of the original posts: My personal hierarchy is -- First, write for a language and culture other than your own) and less on encouraging chromatic fic authors to write in their own cultures instead of or in addition to writing for Western media. This really struck me from the beginning, possibly because the discourse where I am (Filipino university) is all about Filipinos throwing off the 'colonial mentality' and encouraging nationalism and appreciation of our own culture. (I am perfectly happy for people to write well-researched stories in cultures not their own; the "only X people can write stories about X people" line of thinking is ridiculously restrictive. It's just that the prioritization of people writing outside their own culture is bit opposite of what I normally expect, that's all.)

Chromatic character - technically true for all the characters, but I feel none of the main characters would self-identify as chromatic. (I imagine them giving me weird looks for even bringing up the issue, then getting back to the practical business of kicking butt.) Additionally, I don't normally self-identify as chromatic (long story) and I didn't want to make assumptions about whether my recipient would identify as chromatic, so in a fic that was basically between me, her, and the characters, a "chromatic character" tag didn't really seem to have a place.

Chromatic source - I finally decided that this was the tag that fit best, since the source is very Filipino. Although it's written in English, it's so utterly full of Filipino touches (settings, magic, characters, everything), and it was pure glee to inject that Filipinoness into my own fic. A DVD commentary version is in the works with all the things that went into this, because practically every paragraph was deliberately crafted with Filipino culture in mind.

However!
After going on and on about how my Yuletide fic didn't quite fit Dark Agenda, I will say that I'm very much planning to write some NYR stories in non-Western, non-Filipino sources. I think the Dark Agenda challenge this year raised awareness, and I do think that I'm more likely to write NYRs that fit Dark Agenda now than I would be if this challenge had never existed. So, I am glad for Dark Agenda's existence this year, and I hope it will continue next year.

[ljc]

I sort of accidently participated (I realised after-the-fact that my June and Hardison stories were eligible) but I really am looking foward to participating properly with forethought and everything next year!

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