Nominations for Yuletide (2021) are open

September 21, 2021 4:27 PM

You can nominate any "small" fandom (less than 1000 works on ao3 and fanfiction.net combined) for the long-running winter holiday exchange event here!

I nominated Anathem - Neal Stephenson because I was sad it wasn’t there last year, The Expanse - James SA Corey although someone else beat me to it, and CHUANG / Produce Camp (Chinese TV), even though I couldn’t find Zhong Fei Fei or Tian Jianfan on the “character” list, so I just had to settle for nominating the Kpop idols and Lelush. Because F the swerve toward right-wing culture war “traditional values” in China, that’s why :P

posted by subdee (8 comments total)

I saw the announcement this morning and winced -- as with last year, the pandemic has completely wiped away that part of my brain that engages in fanfic. I'd participated for many years and usually eagerly consume the load of excellent fic that Yuletide creates. But for now, I (sadly) wave from the shore as the ship sails beyond my shore.

Please, everyone who can, do nominate and participate and read. The Yuletide deserves to swell on.
posted by Quasirandom at 4:37 PM on September 21, 2021 [2 favorites]

Yuletide is the best. I have loved it for years!!
posted by hepta at 5:21 PM on September 21, 2021 [1 favorite]

I'm not sure I'll have time to write either, but more because of other writing (and IRL) obligations than lack of inspiration. But I feel you on the pandemic Quasirandom, in 2020 I wrote over 100k of fanfiction because what else was there to do while we were locked inside, but after a year of being locked inside you just run out of novel experiences to write about. And now I'm back at work and there's a whole bunch of crazy stuff going on with that, too.
posted by subdee at 5:26 PM on September 21, 2021 [1 favorite]

A friend is trying to get me into this, and I'm intrigued, but I must admit I find the rules pretty incomprehensible. Nominations and requests and offers and tag sets, etc, you have to pick x fandoms and x characters and write y fandoms and y characters... I read the whole rules page on AO3 but there's something that's not clicking.
posted by showbiz_liz at 6:32 PM on September 21, 2021

showbiz_liz, I'd be happy to walk you through it. I co-created Yuletide with astolat waaaaay back in 2003. The current rules come from years of tweaking what started out as a "rare pairing in popular fandoms" challenge.

In order to match all participants to writers who are truly suited to them, they want everyone to be super-specific about what they will/won't write -- in the past someone would offer to write "anything" in Fandom X, and would get matched with someone who requested Fandom X with the most minor side-characters, and the writer was like "...who?" So they have to line it all up just right.

It's a perfect place to get that one story about that one character from that one episode who you love and nobody else does kind of thing. It's super-rewarding but very specific.
posted by tzikeh at 6:55 PM on September 21, 2021 [12 favorites]

There's a bunch of extra rules for people who are really into it, I signed up for the first time last year and didn't find it that difficult to navigate. Everything runs through in-built features on ao3 so it's easy to track what you're supposed to do next from your account.

It takes a bit of time to write your requests, but if you write them nicely you're more likely to get want you wanted from the blind exchange. XD for what I was willing to write, I just stuck with fandoms and characters I felt confident about and didn't do the long list of very specific exclusions that seems to be coming out of dreamwidth kinkmeme culture.
posted by subdee at 7:00 PM on September 21, 2021

I never have the time to write but I love reading these! Thanks to tzikeh and astolat for creating it in the first place -- it has given me so many hours of joy -- and all of you who contribute.
posted by contrapositive at 9:48 PM on September 21, 2021 [1 favorite]

I'm still contemplating my nominations, but one of them is definitely going to be the moon's haunted tweet.

Also while Yuletide seems intimidating, it really boils down to: request 3-6 fandoms in the tagset and up to four characters each in those fandoms (or any), offer at least four fandoms and up to four characters each (or any) in the tagset, and take it from there. There's some details about how the matching works that you might want to familiarize yourself with, just to avoid any nasty surprises, and you can get detailed in your Yuletide letter/requests, but Yuletide is what you make of it. You don't even have to participate in nominations, if there's not some small fandom of your heart that you don't think someone else will nominate.
posted by yasaman at 11:47 PM on September 21, 2021 [1 favorite]