hiii just wanted to say i scrolled through your entire scum villain tag (trying to find a particular drawing which turned out to be one of your earliest ones) and your art is all so so so good. i love it SO MUCH. i can't pick a favorite but i think if I HAD TO it would be your shang qinghua, because you have NAILED his sleazy used car salesman swag. <333
hello thank you so much that means a lot! i've always been really influenced by scum_vi and teardew's takes on sqh's OG official design which is sooo [would be handsome but something's off]
If you've done a Yuletide-style exchange on AO3 before, the process should be similar. If you haven't, have a look at the explanation and examples below, check out the FAQ and rules on AO3 and let me know if you have questions!
Also, please spread the word—the more, the merrier. Both fanfic writers and fanartists are welcome to participate!
The signup link is here!
Quick points:
NEW THIS YEAR: a signup guide and an optional details guide!
The tagset is big! Consider taking some time to go through it if you want.
Signups are open until Sunday, July 5 @ 8pm ET. See what time that is for you!
You'll need an AO3 account to sign up. You can request one here if you don't already have one. We have some extra codes if the wait list is too long so please ping me if that’s the case!
Please read the rules before signing up so you know what you're agreeing to do
You can see what other people have requested/offered within the exchange itself, as well as on the AO3 Automagic App — group by "character" instead of "fandom" for best results. Note that you may have to re-scrape in order to see the most up to date signups.
Check below the “read more” for more info on how signups work, the “optional details” field, and how to submit your Do Not Wants. And as always, please reach out here or in the QT discord if you have questions!
How signups work:
Each of us will use a form on AO3 to make requests and offers.
You must make at least two requests, each of which specifies a character or from the tag set and indicates that you’re requesting fanfiction, fanart, or both. You may make up to eight requests. Each request can also include optional details about your preferences, ideas for prompts, etc. More about that below. Your assigned writer or artist is responsible for creating a fanwork featuring the character or relationship in any one of your requests.
Offers are simple—you’ll just list the characters, relationships, or worldbuilding elements from the tag set about whom you’re willing to write or illustrate, specifying whether you’re offering fanart, fanfiction, or both
An important note on relationships--if characters are connected by &, this refers to a platonic relationship. If they are connected by an /, this refers to a romantic or sexual relationship. For example, if you want a story or artwork featuring Irene, request Attolia | Irene. If you want a story or artwork featuring Irene and Relius as friends, request Relationship: Attolia | Irene & Relius. If you want a story or artwork featuring Irene and Relius in a non-platonic, request Relationship: Attolia | Irene/Relius.
Optional details:
When you're making requests, it can be helpful to give your author/artist a little more detail than just the characters you're requesting. Remember that your author or artist is only required to create a work featuring your specified characters. If you ask for a specific story prompt or for art in a particular style, they may not be able to meet that request, and they aren't required to. Try not to be too proscriptive here—think of it as a way to explain why you like these characters and why you're interested in getting fanwork about them, and a way to kickstart your author/artist's creativity if they need it.
You can include either a link to a letter hosted on your journal or type directly in the optional details box in the signup form. If you're linking to your journal, please make sure it isn't friends-locked, or your creator won't be able to see it!
Do Not Want list:
If there's anything you specifically don't want to receive in your gift, you can include a Do Not Want (DNW) list in the optional details section. Examples might be things that squick or trigger you or 'ships you aren't interested in. This isn't about making value judgments, just about indicating your comfort level and making this a good experience for everyone.
Authors and artists must respect this list. When you're specifying Do Not Wants, please include them in the optional details text box in your signup, not in the letter, so I as the mod can be aware of them. If they are not in the optional details box, I cannot enforce them.
Examples of DNWs: sexual content, kidfic, violence, character death.
Treats
tl;dr: if you're open to receiving gifts, make sure your AO3 is set to receive gifts and consider indicating in your letter/optional details that you're open to receiving treats!
AO3 has setting that allows users to choose whether or not they can receive extra gifts. If a person has the setting "Allow anyone to gift me works" selected in their preferences, then AO3 users can give extra gifts to that person, including Hamiathes's Gift Exchange treats. If this setting is not checked, only a user who has an exchange assignment for that person, or who has claimed their prompts in a prompt meme, can give them gifts.
Because of this setting, we encouraged people to state in their sign-up or profile page if they're open to treats (including treats in different mediums than those requested for your main gift). Mods can also check who's able to receive treats (especially because users could choose to change this setting during the event). If you're not sure if someone would like treats, you are very welcome to ask the mods.
Comments
Two notes about commenting, one about giving and one about receiving:
It's encouraged to comment on your gift(s) to show appreciation to your author and/or artist for creating it. Best practice during exchanges is to comment before author reveals (August 28). If you do not think you will be able to comment in the first few days after gifts are revealed, you may want to leave a placeholder comment to let your creator know that you will be back to read/comment later.
AO3 has recently changed its default commenting setting on new works to “logged in users only.” If you’d like to be able to receive comments from people who aren’t logged in (“guest” comments), you’ll need to change that setting when you’re posting your work
I Will by Mitski, a Scum Villain animatic [VD under cut]
[VD: The animatic is in black and white and focuses on Luo Binghe caring for Shen Qingqiu's corpse in volume 2. Intercut are scenes of them cohabiting happily in volume 1 and Luo Binghe with his mother, and there is a transition featuring Luo Binghe on his way to get congee for his mom, Luo Binghe about to lose his Guanyin pendant, and Luo Binghe holding Shen Qingqiu's body after his self-detonation. End VD]
What it really comes down to is this: I am angry. This is the first time in the, maybe, five-odd years I’ve been in fandom that I’ve admitted this. You can read between the lines in my past writing to discern this affect. A careful reader may have correctly assumed that just as surely I have reacted with distress to harm, I have also reacted with a desire to harm others.
I once wrote, discussing whitewashing in fandom and the public spectacle it produces:
but the fact of the matter is that despite all this–i do feel [pain], and i feel compelled to evoke it. maybe it’s some sort of petulant resistance to theory/via theory. i cannot prove to you anything i say about my own experience of pain; i talk around the shape of the pain and the places we have warped around it.
It is almost grotesquely vulnerable, in retrospect. That is the performance that made sense, in response to injury. I hurt. Let me tell you how. Please believe me. I offered no steps for redress. I think I already knew, at twenty-one, something I feel more acutely at twenty-five: public vulnerability often just gives people more ways to hurt you. I did not want to be disappointed again. I think I wrote it anyway, even anticipating it would change nothing, because I wanted to make visible that there was an emotional toll to whitewashing. I wanted at least to cry out in pain, to do my due diligence as a victim of sorts, even if I don’t think of myself in those terms.
There is no catharsis for me in that essay anymore. Noble suffering has little appeal to me anymore, emotionally as well as practically. Now that I rarely post publicly, I express myself more honestly as well as, frankly, rudely. On private accounts, I mock fanartists who lighten the hair and eyes of their favorite characters. I ridicule fanfiction writers whose fantasies trivialize the suffering of people of color (whatever type of fantasy you’re imagining right now, it’s worse). I vent my frustration. But paradoxically, the more I express myself, the more powerless I feel. Because when it comes down to it, I’m just a hater.
Nietzsche calls this ressentiment. In Genealogy of Morals, he names “a resentment experienced by creatures who, deprived as they are of the proper outlet of action, are forced to find their compensation in an imaginary revenge.” This concept has often been used in popular discourse today to put down what its detractors might call “grievance studies,” laughingly imagining modern social justice as nothing but a “slave morality” that emerges out of jealousy towards the white upper class.
But I think there’s something productive to salvage from this term. I turn next, actually, to Frantz Fanon. Brief note here: I am not comparing fandom racism to the institutions of slavery or colonization that Fanon critiques in their violence, dehumanization, or intensity. Rather, I am suggesting that since we already have a theorist of psychic structures that impose feelings of inferiority, powerlessness, and resentment in racialized subjects, we should look to him.
Anyway. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon argues that the Hegelian lord-bondsman dialectic (in which “Self-consciousness exists by itself and for itself,” always seeking recognition from the other) fails to be applicable in Fanon’s contemporary Black context. After all, while Hegel acknowledges that mutual recognition is impossible in an unequal relationship, in Hegel’s dialectic, it is the lord’s desire for recognition from the bondsman that elevates the bondsman. There is no such desire for recognition by white men vis a vis their Black slaves; moreover, when some semblance of recognition ultimately came in the form of abolition, it tended to be a unilateral white decision rather than the result of the dialectic being resolved.
Fanon continues that while white men will claim there is no difference between them, Black men will know keenly that there is. Those who have been subjected want a fight, Fanon writes. “Unable ever to be sure whether the white man considers him consciousness in-itself-for-itself, [the Black man] must forever absorb himself in uncovering resistance, opposition, challenge.” He urges that therefore one must not be simply reactional, trapped in that cycle of constant opposition, but actional for liberation to occur. He cites active revolutionary movements around the world in his conclusion, building solidarity with those who fight against oppression everywhere.
Now it feels very dramatic to recount all this to you. I suppose I am trying to legitimize and universalize my desire for a fight today, while acknowledging its limits. I have been trapped in a cycle of constant reaction for the past five years. I see something, I get angry, and I vent my frustration. I see something, I get angry, and I vent my frustration. This is fine, on some levels. This is kind of how social media keeps you engaged in general. And I don’t think the answer to my problems is to follow Fanon literally and take up armed struggle against people who draw Shen Qingqiu looking like green eyes white dragon. And, finally, fandom is inherently a space for reaction against a canon. The real question is whether I can do something transformative with my anger.
The problem, of course, with that question is that it pisses me off. A lot of things do, and I’m not particularly sorry about it. But that question upsets me because it’s the responsible thing to do. I’m tired of being responsible. I manage my feelings as best I can. I phrase my complaints in ways that will make people think I’m reasonable. I write long vulnerable essays that I design to protect the very people I’m criticizing from being hurt the way they hurt me.
And while I’m writing the most honest thing I can manage, I also feel that it’s the useless thing to do. While I’m writing a namedrop-y essay, let’s bring out Marx: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” And do my essays change anything? I don’t think they change anything more than my private venting does. I never intended them to change anything, actually. I wrote them because I wanted to feel less alone, and I wanted people like me to feel less alone too. But feelings can only get you so far. Especially when you can’t acknowledge all of them.
How does change actually happen, then, if not through Tumblr essays? Realistically, we all need to learn how to speak so others will listen. The burden of minimizing one’s feelings in order to be taken seriously ought to fall primarily on white fans, to call in their friends when they inevitably misstep and to be called in, in turn, when they also inevitably misstep. I need other people to be willing to risk relationships and reputations to do the right thing. Which is a big ask. But I’m asking it this time.
I didn’t even really want to write this essay. I actually wanted to write about how we perform race in digital spaces, with an eye to sinophilia, cultural appropriation, and extraction (I promise my take would have been new, for those of you who also thought you left those discussions behind in the 2010s). I didn’t want to write to white people, for once. I really wanted to spend time with a flawed text, pick apart its failures and slippages in meaning, and see what I had to say back. People of color rarely get to “talk back” in these spaces, and that enforced silence on racial performance is very frustrating to me for a lot of reasons, including selfishly because I find critique to be as central to my writing practice as my creativity.
But I’m writing this instead because things got in the way. I had the same hesitations that I did four years ago when I wrote the essay I referenced above. I was concerned, like many fan studies scholars before me have been, with the ethics of directing undue scrutiny to a single amateur fan. Because, as always, others’ safety supersedes my anger. Which, naturally, made me angrier. Which, therefore, led to the creation of a piece where I could express it, theorize it, and do nothing about it.
“IDK GUYS I JUST FEEL SO CASTRATED SOMETIMES.... “ I wrote this afternoon, in reference to my own anger. “and i know that's just what being asian american is like. but who's up feeling castrateddddddd,” I continued, a tongue in cheek reference to David Eng’s Racial Castration (which is more about Asian American emasculation generally). I was mostly talking about my feeling of powerlessness and my inability to feel like a whole person because of it. But there’s a much more relevant recent piece by Eng, one he did with Shinhee Han: “Racial Rage, Racial Guilt: The Uses of Anger in Asian America.” In it, they extend the historical framework of Asian racial triangulation between Black and white labor to the psychic dimension. Asian Americans, they argue, tend to internalize and carry the guilt and shame of others.
I’m still working out how I feel about the piece as a general theory, for the record, because I have serious concerns with how they position Asian interests in relation to Black interests (if the two can be so wholly separated). But part of the composite case history they relay was deeply affecting to me. Clara, the composite patient, at one point confides in Han: “I am sick of beating myself up for every single thing I do. I live in terror of making mistakes. Even when I do something well, I doubt myself and don’t trust myself.” When the two explore the feeling, it is rooted in a childhood accusation of plagiarism, in which her teacher believed she was not capable of creating high quality writing because English is her second language, while her parents deferred to the teacher. Although eventually exonerated, the hurt stayed. “When I suggested that all this time she had been holding her parents’ guilt for failing to protect her innocence as well as the teacher’s shame projected onto her, Clara burst into tears,” Han explains. Clara struggled to feel angry, as she deserved to, because she internalized the consciences and projections of others. She is a receptacle for others’ emotions; this is true on multiple levels since she is also a constructed case history. She was born to hold others’ feelings.
I don’t just struggle with the affect of anger, one’s reaction to a threat. I also struggle with shame, or one’s reaction to failure. It is rooted in my feeling that I have failed to change anything. I once hoped that if I simply catalogued enough, learned enough, wrote enough, that the knowledge would find a way to coalesce into some meaning so undeniable in its truth that— Look, it’s an infantile fantasy. All that really resulted is that I have an incredible mental Rolodex of racist Twitter artists that I can never put to use. Knowledge wasn’t power itself, just knowledge of power.
The marketplace of ideas is a bullshit concept. But I wasn't even trying to win in it. I was approaching it obliquely, in some form of trickle-down narrative change. If I simply write good fic, characterization I like will win. If I simply write good essays, politics I like will win. It's only when I say my innermost desires plainly that it’s obvious to me how naive they are. Like, hooray, you’re disenchanted with incrementalism. Should we throw a party? Should we invite Lenin?
I’ve been circling the problem of catharsis in this essay. How will I help you process my feelings of rage and shame? (More importantly, how will I process them for myself?) What is to be done about any of this? In some ways, I gave the answer away halfway through: I need you to say something too, because there are a lot of people who don’t listen to me who will listen to you. This is true no matter who you are, reading this. So I suppose the reason this essay continued past that solution, is that I want to make visible the stakes.
The vast majority of my posts are now on private accounts. I miss talking publicly, making new friends, seeing new art and fics and fannish joy. But the fact of the matter is that I cannot express myself freely as it currently stands. I am forced to manage others’ racial failures for them. I am not alone in this. Like, I’m not the only person who notices or experiences racism in fandom!!! The toll that your silences have taken is spread across countless people of color, who have slowly begun to withdraw from public life. Because, frankly, it’s embarrassing to love something so much that does not love you back. It is embarrassing to be hurt by something that never loved you at all. My heart is resilient enough to bear this. But we all have limits.
Okay, that’s enough of “one day I’ll be gone and you’ll be SORRY!!!!!” 13 Reasons Why type bullshit. That’s my FOR REAL final expression of ressentiment, my desire to make other people feel the guilt and shame I do. It’s beautiful how writing can bring people together. Or something.
I leave you now with something concrete you can do to temporarily allay that feeling, and materially help some of the most vulnerable people around us: some good friends over at @kfsf-initiatives are raising money to help a young man named Ahmed keep his community sheltered amidst adverse weather. Here is the link for the campaign. It’s very close to its goal: https://www.paypal.com/donate?campaign_id=943USDAM3Q2D8 It is efforts like this that keep me believing in the people that participate in fandom. I would like to help make our online spaces more equitable, and addressing people’s offline needs first is a prerequisite to that. Thank you. That’s all from me.
I AM HOLDING A FANART RAFFLE and i will match the first $100 donate for a chance to make me draw whatever you want* see form for details: https://forms.gle/zk8t3bP8YKCJtzLp9
*a colored illustration from any fandom I've drawn for at any point in time, NSFW is ok, basically anything in the realm of things I have posted are good to go
Today is July 29, 2025. I will leave this open until Friday, August 8 and pick the winner (or winners if there are a lot of entries) on Saturday, August 9 CLOSED!
