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

[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.