jjpor | A Modest Proposal...

No, I'm not about to suggest eating babies.

As those of you who have been keeping abreast of my woefully infrequent LJ posts during 2012 may have gathered, one thing above all things is currently weighing heavily upon my already wobbly mind. No, not the allegedly-imminent Mayan Apocalypse. I have it on good information that somebody found a temple inscription recently in Honduras or somewhere which basically translated as "Sorry, only joking!"

Rather, what impinges more and more upon my consciousness as this year draws all-too-quickly to its end is the fact that

Yes, the 50th Anniversay of the Greatest Television Programme of All Time (TM). Look, I made a not very good icon the other day when I was messing about with GIMP instead of writing like I'm supposed to be. Actually, it's a frame from a not very good .GIF animation I made while messing about with GIMP and then discovered, to my chagrin, was too big by a couple of dozen KB to upload to LJ as an icon, despite my using all sorts of trickery to try to slim it down:

But yes, enough of that small personal tragedy. As I was saying in one of the posts I made a while ago, possibly the one about Mark Gatiss penning a docu-drama about the origins of the programme, regardless of what the BBC do to celebrate the anniversary, whether or not it appeals to us individually as fans, or whether or not it's actually any good, it's up to us to make what we will of this coming year. I don't know about any of you, and you might consider that I'm being very silly and overexcited about this when it's, what, only October of the preceding year, but the coming 50th anniversary feels like some sort of personal landmark to me. I remember watching The Five Doctors with my granddad when I must have been all of five years old - that is my earliest, blurred by time and personal mythology, memory of Who - the Raston Warrior Robot slaughtering those hapless Cybermen and my aunty trying to explain to me what a Dalek was because I must have missed that opening bit with "One". It feels like it's always been a part of my life, growing up and in adulthood. It's special to me in the way that other genre fandoms I've fallen into over the years probably aren't, as I'm sure it is to many of you, however long ago and at whatever age you first discovered it.

What I'm saying is that there isn't ever going to be another 50th Anniversary of Doctor Who and I personally would feel that I had missed out in some way if I had not done something to mark that occasion and to celebrate it with my fellow fans. Now, I'm not a natural RL club-joiner or convention-goer by inclination, so for me that's probably going to mean doing so online, and probably in the form of fanfiction, as that has been my main interaction with fandom since I resumed participating regularly a few years ago. So here is my modest proposal (and be kind, because it's a plan I've been gestating for quite some time now):

I'm going to start a comm here on LJ (yeah, big deal, been there, done that, you're saying), specifically dedicated to Who At Fifty. And I know, traffic seems to be down here at the moment, and the ficathons and things I've seen around lately don't seem to be getting a lot of attention, but LJ has become my internet home from home of choice over the past couple of years and I quickly get set in my ways. I'm perfectly prepared for it to just be me and the usual suspects showing an interest in this; if others join in, I'll consider that a bonus.

So yeah, I think the comm itself will be a place for people to post general things - maybe 50th anniversary-related media and news, maybe meta stuff about what Who means to them, maybe just general japery, maybe details of RL events they're participating in or organising to celebrate the anniversary. But I'm going to be running some ficathons, I think. One a month. I can't promise to write something new every month, what with life the universe and everything at the moment, and I wouldn't expect anybody to sign up to that either, but it'll be something for people to dip into and out of, and hopefully some good fanfic will come out of it. This was the rough plan I'd formulated (it's very obvious, really):

January - One
February - Two
March - Three
April - Four
May - Five
June - Six
July - Seven
August - Eight
September - Nine
October - Ten
November - Flamboyant Multi-Doctor Stories after the manner of The Five Doctors (I'll think of a catchier title for that)
December - Eleven

And maybe various supplementary suggestions during some months for people who want to be a bit different - the idea would be to give as wide a range of impressions of what Who has been in its multi-faceted life over the years as possible. So maybe in some months, if people didn't want to write about that month's Doctor, they could write about characters from the novels or the audios or the comics, or a Torchwood or SJA - or K9 and Company! - fic. Or even something about the Peter Cushing Dalek films - there must be some good fanfic that could be wrung from those...

The basic unifying theme would be that they should all try to tie into the idea of the 50th anniversary in some way, but that could mean different things to different people. It might be a fic that meditates on the passage of time, on where the Doctor came from and where he's going, or it could just be taking a particular era in the show's history - One historicals, for instance, or Holmes/Hinchcliffe horror movie pastiche - and exemplifying it in fictional form. Or it could be just good old honest-to-gods shipping, if that's what floats your aquatic craft. ;D No party lines, no editorial preferences, just people coming together and celebrating this great thing that is Who by expressing their creativity.

And yes, that could include fanart, fanvids, icon-making, poetry, all of that too. Doesn't have to be fanfic per se.

So that is my modest proposal. I plan to set up the comm and start advertising it around the place come November, because signups will start in December for the One ficathon in January. We'll see how well that goes, with Christmas and people travelling about and stuff, but if I get one good fic out of it I'll be happy.

Anyway, what say you? Good idea? Terrible idea? I'm determined to at least give it a go and to stick with it, come what may. It'll feel like I've done my bit, or something.