Pokémon Fanfiction Olympics

(Crossposting to both Fanfiction & Writing and Roleplay Theatre)​

What is it?
To put it in short, the Pokémon Fanfiction Olympics is a cross-forum/cross-community fandom event celebrating the creativity and dedication of our fellow fans. For one solid month, the best authors of Pokémon communities across the internet will compete in a friendly writing challenge designed to jumpstart writing projects and form bonds between fans.


In English:
The Pokémon Fanfiction Olympics is basically NaNoWriMo but between multiple fan communities. Each fan community will form teams of runners and support. The runners (three writers chosen by their community) will serve as the official word count for their community. The support, meanwhile, will be every other member who chooses to engage in the challenge.

Everyone will have exactly one month—the month of February—to write as much as they can. As soon as midnight (EST), March 1 rolls around, pens are down, and the runners' word counts are totalled and sent to the main committee for comparison. The community with the highest runner word count will be the winner for that year, although this is title is really for bragging rights only; ultimately, this is a friendly competition with more of an emphasis on productivity and cross-forum socializing than anything else.

Also, don't forget that the support will have just as important role throughout this. First off, support is exactly what it sounds like: support for the runners. They're the runners' cheerleaders, and by participating alongside your forum representatives and being active in your forum's branch of the event, they help maintain general morale all the way to the end. Moreover, if a runner realizes they absolutely cannot finish the month, they may step down, after which a member of the support team may step up to take their place. (Warning: Once a runner steps down from their position, they cannot step back up, so think carefully before doing so!)


How Teams Are Chosen/Rules
Team building (selecting runners and signing up support) varies on a community basis. It's recommended (and likely) that the strongest writers of each community participate as runners. Please consult your forum mods for details on the team building process, or read on for details on the selection process.

There are only a handful of general rules to team selection and participation:

1. Those who participate in the event must be working on a piece of writing of some kind. This can be short stories/one-shots, chapter fics, scripts (plays/screenplays/comic scripts), RP posts, non-academic nonfiction essays—whatever you'd like. We just require that all items counted for this event be 1) written works (and therefore not art or programming) and 2) not written for your coursework. Sorry, those of you working on a thesis of one sort or another.

2. Assume you'll be posting your work to one of your community's forums after the event is over. That is to say, whatever you write must be written within your community's rules for acceptable content. Please consult your community mods if you have any questions concerning your rules.

3. All runners and those who join the Discord must be able to join every community participating in the event. In other words, if you've been banned from one community, you are not eligible to become a runner, although you may join as support. This is to protect the other communities and to keep the event as drama-free as possible.

4. Additional rules may be added by your community mods, and how the event runs for your branch may be up to their discretion. Please don't hesitate to contact your mods if you have any questions!


Check-Ins/Discord
In order to keep up with everyone's word counts, your mods will be running weekly check-ins. These consist of … simply asking how you all are doing and what your word count is. Only runners' word counts will be recorded (to make sure your team isn't struggling), but check-ins are periods when runners, support, mods, and non-participants can come together to bond, cheer each other on, and share progress.

To help with communication and to bond with fellow participants across all communities, we've also founded a neutral zone on Discord. Each community has its own channel, but there are also pan-forum lounge area, a pan-forum word war channel, a pan-forum writing challenge channel, and even a voice channel/channel dedicated to music. Runners, mods, and support are all welcome to join for the duration of the event. We also ask that those joining observe the rules of the server, outlined in its own rules channel, but otherwise, this is meant to be a fun, relaxed area for members from all communities.

To join, simply click this link: https://discord.gg/v5Eqxc3


Participants
This year, the following forums will be participating:

Canalave Library
Pokécommunity
Serebii

We wish all of our participants the best of luck!

I'm interested in participating in this! How do I sign up?
Sign up by PMing moderator Bay with the subject line "Pokemon Fanfiction Olympics and state your interest in signing up!

How will the runners and supporters be chosen?
The three runners and supports will be chosen by the FF&W and Roleplay Theater moderators.

How long will the sign ups last?
At the moment I'm looking to see if there are any interest in this. Most likely though sign ups will be closed before January 31st.

What if I have any other questions?
Any questions you have you can post here!

Can I get a bit of clarifying on the bolded part? I think it was discussed at some point but I seem to have missed out some details.

Those who participate in the event must be working on a piece of writing of some kind. This can be short stories/one-shots, chapter fics, scripts (plays/screenplays/comic scripts), RP posts, non-academic nonfiction essays—whatever you'd like.

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"non-academic nonfiction" makes it like for example a commentary on RL religions showing up in the Pokémon games qualifies, but an in-universe essay on the marketing and marvels of Arceusism (or Mewism for those infidels among you ^_^) wouldn't qualify? Or for another example, an essay about how Japan regions map to G1-G4 regions qualifies, but an in-universe touristic brochure for one of the canon regions or for a fanon region doesn't qualify?

Venia Silente said:

Can I get a bit of clarifying on the bolded part? I think it was discussed at some point but I seem to have missed out some details.



"non-academic nonfiction" makes it like for example a commentary on RL religions showing up in the Pokémon games qualifies, but an in-universe essay on the marketing and marvels of Arceusism (or Mewism for those infidels among you ^_^) wouldn't qualify? Or for another example, an essay about how Japan regions map to G1-G4 regions qualifies, but an in-universe touristic brochure for one of the canon regions or for a fanon region doesn't qualify?

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Basically whatever you're writing for school/college/university won't count. If you want to write a meta essay on those topics you mentioned, then it should be fine.

Okay, so update on what's going on with the Olympics. Short version is while there is interest in a multi-forum collab of sorts, doing a Nano friendly competition is a bit time consuming. The organizers of the event have been discussing on the next plan of action, and we decided to ask you guys on what you want instead. Here are a few ideas proposed that I'll copy/paste:

1. A book club, but for every community, basically. This won't necessarily replace our own book club, but it will be an opportunity to cross forum lines to give back to the fandom as a whole.
2. A game jam or other large-scale project, in which we basically work with PC's largest creative force (their rom hacking community) on something.
3. An affiliates list, in which we link to each other's servers. Minimal participation required, in other words.

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For 1, the book club is where you'll be assigned to read and comment on someone else's writing from another forum. So for instance I get assigned to read a story from Canalave Library while the other person from CL will read my story, etc.

One of the forums in the Olympics, Canalave Library, have been doing their own book club/review exchange and it's going well so far, so I hope this will peek some interest
Also I'm aware the majority of active PC writers are RPers and probably don't have a fanfic yet. In that case, the person that gets assigned to you will read and comment a sample of writing you sent to them. Probably will take it through forum PMs/Discord DMs

For 2 reason this was proposed because someone from CL mentioned lots of PC game dev members asking help for writing and such. While this is a huge advantage for PC, I know most people from CL aren't interested in that

3 is basically what it says on the tin

So yeah, @Loomie @WizardOfOdd @Venia Silente and any regulars here, what you guys think? If these ideas are no good, any other suggestions?

in theory (1) should be the most doable. Also the one most people would have interest in, though I presume some of that intersects with the Review Exchange thread and its current activity status.

How would the commentary be collected / checked across forums? In particular since each participant (reader and readed) do not necessarily have accounts on both sides of the forum divide. Linking to the piece to be read is the easy part. Commentary could be forwarded via the event organizers, posted in a pastebin, etc?

As for (2), I'd be for it as well if we had more prep time and a clearer idea beforehand, considering it is more unilateral in that the other communities don't have a romhacking or gamedev community to them, and that we'd have to arrange with ours and their mods as well. Lots of people in the gamedev section show up at the Writer's Lounge or the discord for interest check and for tidbits of assistance, and it'd be interesting to spread out the reach of the help they can ask for. In fact, hopefully we could somehow make that part into something more permanent

Venia Silente said:

How would the commentary be collected / checked across forums? In particular since each participant (reader and readed) do not necessarily have accounts on both sides of the forum divide. Linking to the piece to be read is the easy part. Commentary could be forwarded via the event organizers, posted in a pastebin, etc?

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If the other assigned person doesn't have an account, probably something will arrange. And to be honest I think Google Docs would be better for commentary than pastebin. Google Docs you can comment quotes more easily and such. I know how much you hate Google Docs lol

Hiya folks, it's been a while yeah? New update, the organizers and I have decided to go with the book review exchange idea. We've been going back and forth on the rules and we came up with these here.

What we need from you guys are opinions on the rules, and what months work best for you. If there's anything you're unsure of, let me know.

A general read of the rules so far reads fine. I mostly have two potential checks:

* In consideration to the fact that there's notorious length and density difference between oneshots, multichapters and RP posts, would it be possible for eg.: an RP participant to submit more than a single post worth of content for review if they deem it necessary? Let's say for example, a chain of up to three (correlative) posts. For this to work, of course, it means the submitter has to send all the links.

* Making sure in all items that the event is still runnable outside of Discord? (ie: the submissions for RPers can be posted outside #reviews, perhaps in the corresponding Olympics thread in the forum of origin if you don't have an account in the target forum? Would also help give the thread some activity)

Venia Silente said:

A general read of the rules so far reads fine. I mostly have two potential checks:

* In consideration to the fact that there's notorious length and density difference between oneshots, multichapters and RP posts, would it be possible for eg.: an RP participant to submit more than a single post worth of content for review if they deem it necessary? Let's say for example, a chain of up to three (correlative) posts. For this to work, of course, it means the submitter has to send all the links.

* Making sure in all items that the event is still runnable outside of Discord? (ie: the submissions for RPers can be posted outside #reviews, perhaps in the corresponding Olympics thread in the forum of origin if you don't have an account in the target forum? Would also help give the thread some activity)

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For your first question, I'll bring this up to the organizers. PC's RP posts tend to be a bit on the longer side than other RPs I've seen, so maybe at least two posts should work.

For your second question, the leaders for the corresponding community will be filling in posting if you don't have an account for that specific community. For RPs, probably will just have those from PC submit links of their writing samples here.

Makes sense, thanks for the replies.

Now, let's beat at least the IRL Olympics Committee... :p