Fandom Snowflake Challenge - Days 7-10

[momijizukamori]

In your own space, share a favorite piece of original canon (a TV episode, a song, a favorite interview, a book, a scene from a movie, etc) and explain why you love it so much.

One epside for you all! Peacemaker Kurogane ep 15 - Poetry, with apologies for those of you reading this outside of the US, because I'm pretty sure Funimation region-locks. While it's mid-series, most of the plot stands on it's own pretty well, and it never fails to make me laugh. For bonus entertainment - at least some of the poems quoted are in fact actual poetry written by the actual Hijikata Toshizou. He had many outstanding qualities, but poetry was not one of them, and nearly every Shinsengumi historical fiction series likes poking fun at this.

In your own space, set some goals for the coming year.
-Talk about fandom stuff more often!
-Wear a 'fancy' outfit out once a week or so (as opposed to 'this is the first shirt and pair of pants I grabbed in my dresser'
-Attempt more art
-Make progress studying Japanese. ANY progress.

Also, 'make goals with a low barrier to entry', because it's too easy to fail and just be like 'well no point in continuing now' which is rather missing the point.

In your own space, post a rec for fannish and/or creative resources and spaces. Tell us where you go to dig up canon facts for your fandom, or where you get all the juicy details about your favorite ship. Where do you like to hang out and squee like a squeeing thing?

Most of my bookmarked resources are for cosplay, heh. Many are extremely specific (Japanese armor c. 1400-1600!), but for a general starting place, Cosplay Tutorial collates and organizes a great deal of information for easy reference. I'm also extremely fond of Minitokyo, which collects lots of high-res scans of official art for anime and Japanese games. Quality references are a godsend when working on costumes.

General research references usually take me to Wikipedia, and occasionally Google Scholar - being in historical-fiction fandoms means a lot of research. little_details is not as active as it once was, but it has a wealth of knowledge stored in it, and is fairly well-tagged.

For more specific fandoms - sparrowdreams posts translations and summaries of Japanese history and related historical fiction. Primarily Bakumatsu, but also occasionally Sengoku (usually Date-related). A lot of the quality information about these periods has never been 'officially' translated into English (and most of the small number of English-language references are iffy at best), so stumbling across her work was AMAZING. And then, while I'm not really in this fandom any more, the Bleach wikia is everything a fandom wiki could hope to be, and is probably better-cited than Wikipedia.