Snowflake Challenge 2026 #8 & #9

[mrsluigivargas]

Challenge #8: Talk about your creative process.
For fic writing, I start with an idea that I find compelling and/or funny. Then I make an outline about it! In the early stages of that, in order to assist with the outline making or otherwise help narrow and refine the idea into something viable, I often record voice memos on my phone of myself talking and rambling and developing the idea. Then I transcribe that into my document, and it makes for a good jumping off point for the rest of the outline. I develop the outline to be as detailed as I can, and then after that it's just writing!

For other posts it's a lot of the same strokes, tbh. Less outlining, though; I just list the points I wanna make and then arrange them in a way that makes sense.

And for comments (and posts, generally) I've been really trying not to think too hard about them. It's a soft New Year's Resolution of mine.

Challenge #9: Talk about your favorite tropes in media or transformative works. (Feel free to substitute in theme/motif/cliche if "trope" doesn't resonate with you.)
Here's something that's been top of mind recently: I really like stories where a group of people who don't really know each other come together around something. Taking care of someone, fighting a bigger threat, to survive, whatever. It's fun to see the relationships develop in real time. Even if some of them don't like each other, there's still a shared understanding of their circumstances to bond over. Calling it found family feels restrictive — and not just because of the modern propensity to map nuclear family roles onto it — even though that's probably nominally what I'm describing, haha.

Although —

• The bigger threat shouldn't supercede the character/relationship building too much or too quickly (why I dropped out of media like Voltron and She-ra and TAZ Amnesty)
• While literally everyone doesn't have to be hunkydory, it would be nice if there were more positive relationships than otherwise. Too much interpersonal drama is a total drag. (why I dropped out of Vampires SMP)
• It would be nice if there wasn't romance in there. Just a preference, though 🙂

Media I have in mind regarding this: Impossible Minecraft SMP, Haunted Winter SMP, Spore Apocalypse SMP, Cowboy SMP (finale), Linked Universe, 2012 era Avengers fic, S1 of VLD, Dragon Quest XI, a lot of the slice of life & sports anime I used to watch (Barakamon, Gakuen Babysitters, How to Keep a Mummy; Cheer Danshi, Big Windup, Yowamushi Pedal)

An offshoot of this: when it's just one (traumatized) person added to an established friend group, and unintentionally or otherwise with the power of patience and kindness and friendship, they coax that person into a better more supported place (or inspire them to coax themselves into it). I think Mercyfic comes close to what I want, but I'm pretty sure that has roots in whump that have grown too deep for it to be a match. I don't need it to go that crazy, lmao. They can just have slightly more than normal issues or something. A little dignity is nice.

Media I have in mind regarding this: Murderbot (Books 1 and 2, mainly), DPxDC fic where Danny ends up in Gotham in need of help

Idk, I just think stories about community and friendship are neat.

Comments

[greetingsfrommaars]

ooh i find your process with the voice memos really interesting! i feel like if i do something equivalent it's probably in written text, but there's a different kind of flow to developing things out loud... also great trope. when i think about it, it totally makes sense that sports anime fit here because there's a clear unifying goal (we must win at nationals!) but not a huge life-threatening danger to accelerate things. it does feel adjacent to found family but not equivalent, i think.

[silveradept]

You're not wrong for dropping She-Re and the Princesses of Power for the escalation, and there's still plenty of that, so no reason to go back to it if you don't want, but they do settle down a little bit and go back toward working on relationship and friendship building rather than constant escalation of the hostilities and the tension. (But then there's the romance, so you've probably made a good decision for passing on it early.)

Stories about friendship and community are neat, and I like having plenty of them.