(back to ao3-ing)

bang experience

(if you are unfamiliar w/the concept of a fandom bang altogether, then i must recommend you to the fanlore page on the subject)

bang #1: initiation to the bang experience

so i've participated in a lot of fandom bangs in my career. usually i partake as a writer, but i've been an artist for the bangs that will accept non-illustrative art as accompaniment. basically, what this means is that my wealth of participant experience gives me a fair few opinions on how these things Should work– at least in my opinion lol.

my first fandom bang took place over the course of summer 2016, and it was run entirely via tumblr. this was back when dms were still a fairly new concept on the site, and i'm pretty sure we technically still had fanmail on the site, but that is neither here nor there.

if memory serves, the way it worked was that the bang runners basically put out a blog post w/an explanation for what they were doing (the usual defining a fandom bang, the rules n regulations, etc.), and then linked to some google NOT google forms^[1] to sign up. on the forms themselves, you had to provide your main blog url, the blog you were posting/participating from, and an optional email as contact info, but those were the only communication line because this was a ~pre-discord-as-a-popular-fandom-space~ era lol.

anyway, they were one of those bangs that accepted non-illustrative creative works to be "art"– stuff like cosplay, voice acting (out of everything i miss from my mid-2010s fandom experience, i think i miss voice acting squads the most), fic playlists, you name it!!

and i remember they caught a bit of flak for accepting fic playlists because they were seen as "low-effort" compared to illustrations. admittedly, i felt similarly because i was young and i hadn't yet tried, like, curating a playlist so strictly you could burn it onto one cd (so like, 60-80 minutes max), but the mods were insistent that they should be allowed, and their compromise was that anyone paired with a fanmixer would also have another artist creating a different format as well, because this was also one of those bangs that allowed artists to pair off with multiple writers hehe

i remember the claims process was really chaotic because the summaries were all posted through tumblr submissions, and then tumblr itself, as a public forum, was the main line of communication, so a bunch of wank happened publicly even in the weeks leading into the claims process abt the types of content allowed to be written about (it was one of those fandoms were adult/minor pairings were common), and then in the end, the partnerships were announced via tumblr post where the participants were tagged together and ah… it was such a mess c':

at the very least, the claims process was done entirely anonymously, which is good! to do otherwise would unfairly privilege BNFs and cause envy and strife, and this bang had more than enough of that already lmao.

there was no posting schedule for final submissions, aside from, like, "post your fics and art within this week and tag us so we can reblog it", which led to some problems of people getting lost in the flood of new fics, and very little feedback was received as a result.

works were also allowed to be posted while incomplete, which i have some… thoughts on, nowadays. most of which boil down to, "most people who post incomplete works for a bang will never get back to continuing it after the posting period" lmao.

there were no standards of quality for art (bc bangs are meant to be open fandom events anyway), so looking back, i think there were quite a few young artists? participating? and i remember that partnerships were also matched based off age similarity. i forgot where i was going with this paragraph <3

anyway, i'm pretty sure it was those mods' first time running an event like that, and so they had a really rocky road as a result, especially when it came to the ever-changing rules and mods. probably explains why it never returned the following year LOL.

bang #2: smooth sharks are running this show (complimentary)

however, the next bang i participated in has been running annually for quite a few years now (longer than i've been in fandom), and as a result, its mods have this shit down to a science. i've also partaken in this bang twice, once as a writer and then again as an artist, several years later.

while the bang #1 was permissive about the types of accompanying art allowed, it wasn't especially radical in its definition. like yeah, illustrations, cosplay, fanmixes, and amvs; that was their whitelist.

bang #2 was (and continues to be!) absolutely radical about their definition of accompanying art, which has resulted in, alongside the previously mentioned stuff, artist submissions of stuff like puppets, jewelry– if memory serves, i remember that one year someone baked a cake based off the fic they were working with!!! i remember there was a year where someone composed an ost track for their partner's fic!!!!

and i love that about them; their attitude towards total creative freedom of not only the writers (who were allowed to write fics about any pairing or subject matter without restriction), but also artists is what eventually led me to participate in their annual bang again several years later as an artist.

(and i mean, i guess at this point it's probably best for me to contextualize what art i do that would typically otherwise fall under a grey area for events w/stricter definitions of "art"– i do calligraphy. i might talk about this more later.)

anyway, in my first year of doing bang #2 had their sign-ups through an external forum, which they had at the time recently migrated to from their old forums (which i think were starting to either charge money or get egregious with ads– i did some digging on it a while back out of fandom history curiosity reasons, but the specifics aren't that important rn), and although they had a third-party online chatroom, they had migrated to discord relatively recently (which i did not join <3 (at that time)), and all mandatory communication was done via email.

and you know what, i really like that about these people. i like pretty much everything these particular bang runners do, but since they were advertising through multiple socmed accounts, making email the mandatory communication venue was a good decision, though if i had to guess, it was one born as a result of having started in a time gone by.

this bang also introduced me to the concept of beta sign-ups– with bang #1, i'm pretty sure authors were on their own if they wanted to have a beta reader, and i have no memory of them having a concept of pinch hitters, which bang #2 also introduced me to.

i was still very shy when i first partook in bang #2, so i did all my communication w/my partners via email (bc i was too shy to dm them over tumblr, i think ahaha). i don't remember if the mods had icebreaker questions for partnerships that year, but i do know that the second time i partook in bang #2, they gave us some optional icebreaker questions with our partnership emails :D

the mods of bang #2 also took a very, like, i guess old-school trusting stance on participant information. to my memory, never was i ever asked for my age, and i think part of the reason i was so shy about talking to my artist partners that year was because they were all quite a few years older than me, in completely different life stages, and that just intimidated me ahaha.

and i like that kind of "it is your responsibility to tell the truth and follow rules, guidelines, and The Fucking Law™" approach. fandom is a community, and healthy communities are made up of people of all ages and rely on its members being honest and acting in good faith to function. i think it set a very mature, "we are in fandom to have fun, and we are going to be kind to one another about the stuff we want to create" tone that i really wish was more widespread in fandom in general.

bang #2 also had a check-in system for its participants, to make sure that everyone was progressing smoothly. and while bang #1 might have had a check-in system (i really do not remember ahaha), it was probably just done on a "i'll take your word for it" basis.

on the other hand, bang #2 has, like, a whole Thing abt its check-ins. the due dates are written on their schedule, and reminders are sent out via-email about a week before they are due (although they may also be submitted sooner). in the email, participants are required to:

• restate their information (username, partner name(s), fic title)
• submit their complete progress so far
• (for authors, that means emailing a doc file or gdoc link that the mods can access; for artists, that means sending pictures of sketches or equivalent progress)
• estimate the current progress %
• this is bc there were three author check-ins (where you were expected to be 25, 50, and 75% complete with each progressive check-in) and two artist check-ins (as partnerships were also declared during the first author check-in)
• mention the remaining necessary steps towards completion, and
• estimate of how long those steps will take to make.

works were also required to be complete by the time of posting, and be a minimum of 10k words, which is something that i've noticed intimidates many people who take interest in fandom bangs. the mods were firm about these choices, however, and were gracious and accommodating to people who needed deadline extensions to make up for their strictness.

now, when it came to posting, the mods would create a schedule based off participant progress, so that the monsters who somehow finished 100k works in the four-ish month creation period could go first, buying time for the people who were maybe busy with life stuff at the start of the posting period.

there would be one fic posted a day, thereby staggering releases to allow the fandom the time to actually, like, y'know. read the fics being posted, which very neatly resolved one of the issues that bang #1 had with their "ehhh post whenever you want within this week, o several-dozen partnerships". multi-chapter fics also had to be posted all at once, with no staggering of chapters, to keep releases fair to those who were posting oneshots and would therefore only show up on the front page of the fandom tag once.

their resolution for the marked lack of feedback for bang fics is something that greatly intrigued me at the time and remains to this day one of my favorite things to have seen in fandom bangs to date: they made a little bang book club with the express purpose of ensuring that everyone participating received feedback on their works, no matter when it was posted or what subject matter or rarepair it portrayed!!! :D

the way it worked was that people (not just writers and artists, although they were obviously also welcome) would sign up to the book club by sending the mods an email, wherein they'd list their fandom names (tumblr url, ao3/ffn users, etc, if they were all different), and a list of will-not-read (squicks), and then the mods would assign them several random fics (w/o their stated squicks) to read and comment on.

then, participants would either submit a screenshot of or link to their their comments as proof of their completion of their assignment. if they finish all of their assigned book club fics, then they may receive more assignments, if they wish, and it becomes almost like a little competition for who can read and review the most bang submissions!! they very much made a game out of making sure that everyone writing received not only solid feedback on their works, and despite not participating myself, the description on paper always sounded like a very lovely sort of celebration of each completed work c':

participating authors also got to do an ama in the discord, set up, run, and facilitated by the mods themselves, which later had transcripts published to tumblr. and like!!! i think that's so cool; pretty much every fic author wants to be allowed to host a tedtalk abt their fics in my experience.

and honestly? overall, bang #2 continues to be my platonic ideal of how a fandom bang should be run.

bang #3: isolation and dropping out

i participated in bang #3 in an attempt to motivate myself to write fanfiction again, as i had been in the middle of a very long writing slump when its sign-ups opened. it had a theme i really enjoyed, and i had a pitch that i'd long wanted to write that would fit perfectly within it.

this bang grouped off participants for what i understand to be management reasons, with a hard boundary between people <18 and ≥18. basically, participants would report to one of the mods for their check-ins and questions, and would have their own section of the discord server (which, while optional like bang #2, was strongly recommended) for participants to just hang out and socialize together.

considering the [REDACTED LARGE FANDOM] alongside the shifts in general fandom culture at that time, i can see and perfectly understand the logic and reasoning behind the hard age-18 barrier, but for one thing, it had been my first time being asked for personal information in order to participate in an open fandom event.

i'm altogether not that secretive about my age in namespace. it's not on the front page of my anything, but it's not hidden away on a secret page^[2] or anything. so all things considered, i wasn't particularly concerned with giving out my age to participate in things.

the reason it made me a little anxious for this particular event was that the sign-ups opened up on.

my eighteenth birthday.

growing up, i'd heard my fair share of "stranger danger" things, esp. in regards to handling one's self online. entering fandom, "stranger danger" had, thinking abt it now, essentially morphed into "adults are dangerous", and i ended up being a little bit skittish abt interacting w/people older than eighteen.

except now i was an older-than-eighteen, and due to this bang's strict divide btwn people above and below the age of eighteen, i was being suddenly thrust into the role of adult (dangerous) (at least to my mind) like one would unceremoniously toss an eight-year-old into the deep end of an olympic swimming pool. sink or swim, kids!!

anyway, my partner was once again quite a few years older than me, and they were nice and all, but we didn't really click, and i couldn't really get motivated to write all that much as a result, so i ended up dropping the bang.

overall, i guess i just felt like there should have been more grey area in regards to the age thing, as i didn't feel like i yet belonged w/the fully fledged adult group. now that i'm older, i understand the value of having the opportunity to socialize with people outside one's immediate age group. i think that intergenerational friendships are imperative towards the health and longevity of a community, and so i think that when taken in good faith, it is Fine to let minors exist in proximity to adults. (blah blah blah, insert like eighty caveats abt "adult" or "minor" spaces and the sanitization of the internet and shit.)

since i didn't join the discord server, i obviously have no idea what that was like, but my memory gives me the impression that that was where most of the communication was happening. although i was contacted by my mod in regards to check-ins via tumblr dms, i never gave any solid confirmation to them (or my partner) that i would be dropping out for certain. like, i told them i was thinking about it and it was very probable, but after i said "maybe" to their solutions, we never contacted each other again.

anyway, my other major note about this bang is that it was strict about its definition of "artist": essentially, it was illustrators only. their requirements in the faq explicitly state that for an artist to fulfill their requirement, they must provide their partner with three "fully colored" "art pieces" (illustrations they mean illustrations) by the due date.

and like, they got asked about other art forms n stuff– cosplay comes to mind here– but the requests for leniency in the definition of art were turned down. and for as much as i do love to receive illustrations of my work as a gift, the diversity shown in bang #2's accompanying arts showed me something really cool, something really welcoming, especially as i began to send fic authors calligraphy i had done based off their works.

this bang also limited the specific pairings people were allowed to write about, which makes sense in certain contexts. for example, if you have a ship-specific bang, ofc i think it's fair that the main/focal pairing of the work be mandated as the ship the bang is centered around. but, in the case of this particular bang, it was open to all pairings except those between an adult and minor (and between characters "of the same family" (this was not elaborated on, though the involved fandom did not have any grey area/edge cases in this regard anyway)).

thinking about it now, it's interesting to note that they received no backlash for these caveats. like the source material and fandom environments btwn bang #1 and bang #3 were quite different, but bang #2 allowed for anything and everything despite its source material, like bang #3's, not really lending itself to Problematic™ ships anyway.