Challenge #15: How Did the Fandom Snowflake Challenge Go?Pretty good! I’ve been doing Snowflake for about 10 years now, and it’s always a good time, one of the fannish staples I look forward to every year. As always, I enjoyed answering the challenges and the “ritual” of the month of fandom chat/squee. But I did feel less of a sense of community this year (which makes sense, given what else has been going on in the world in January 2026…), which is a little sad, since that’s also an important part of Snowflake for me.
Actually, let me talk about that latter part here, because here’s where it seems to fit best into the flow of this post.
( Snowflake Challenge 2026 sense of community musings )I answered all the challenges, like I usually do, and enjoyed the mix of old favorites and new prompts.
( Favorite challenges )Old challenges I was looking forward to seeing again which were not repeated: I missed the Snowflake staples of “create a fanwork”, “try something new”, and “set some goals for yourself”. This is fine, though, because I can just do those anyway, as a challenge to myself – they do not require any creativity to SET as a challenge, and while I enjoy browsing people’s answers for them, the main reason I like them is the action I take in response, so I don’t really require a community for them. I’ve also missed the “rec something” / “rec yourself” type challenges – which I can still do on my own, since they don’t require creativity to set either – but a large part of those is definitely browsing other people’s answers. (I also miss the scavenger hunt, but that one’s not the same sort of staple as the others are, I think. And definitely not something I’m going to do on my own.)
So I’m just going to set myself those challenges anyway. The unasked challenges:
Make a fanwork:I guess the moodboard and the primer are both fanworks, and I also made a fanwork for
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fandomtrees during this month, so that one is technically fulfilled, but also I use Snowflake as my push to make some icons for new fandoms and/or new images I’ve come across during the previous year. I still plan to do this, but I will wait a little bit because there’s an installment of Taskmaster cartoons coming that I want to potentially include in that icon batch.
Try something new: I did this naturally, by watching the first 5 episodes of
The Goes Wrong Show that
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rionaleonhart has been writing delightful fic for and posted
a primer for. I will post about it in full once I’m done with both series, but it has been a very fun thing to watch and, as I’d hoped and as Riona mentioned, does have a similar vibe to
Taskmaster – not that it’s a similar format or anything, but, like, the low-stakes absurdist disaster feeling is similar – which is obviously great!
Rec some fanworks: I have also done this a little bit in the course of completing the other challenges, like reccing the
Taskmaster cartoons when I was talking about r/Taskmaster for community promo and reccing a
brand new Elis/John longfic in the E&J fandom primer post. But here are things that did not come up naturally that I was hoping to have a chance to rec:
( Vorkosigan Saga, Murderbot, original art )And, you know what, I am going to do some self-recs, too:
( chemistry anthropomorfic, Machineries of Empire poem, Monday Begins on Saturday )Set some goals for yourself: ( 2025 Fannish goals check-in )( 2026 Fannish Goals )
