Schedule and Rules

[fadmods]

2022 Schedule:
(all times 19:59 UTC)

Nominations Open: Wednesday 15 June
Nominations Close: Wednesday 22 June
Signups Open: Friday 24 June
Signups Close: Monday 4 July
Deadline: Friday 19 August
Works reveals: Friday 26 August Friday 2 September
Creator reveals: Friday 2 September Friday 9 September

AO3 Collection | Tagset

Femslash After Dark is a femslash ship exchange in which all works produced must be rated Mature or Explicit.

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Eligibility:

• All characters in each ship must canonically identify as women, or a reader/viewer must be able to reasonably infer that they do.
  
• There are no rarity requirements, for ships or for fandoms.

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Nominations:

• An AO3 account is required to nominate.
  
• Each participant may nominate up to 5 fandoms with up to 10 relationships in each.
  
• RPF: RPF is permitted, subject to eligibility as outlined above. Non-famous family members are not eligible. Under-18s are not eligible for modern RPF.
  
• Threesomes/moresomes: these are permitted. All ships must be F/F (or F/F/F, etc.) only.
  
• Crossovers: Crossover ships are permitted. These should be nominated under 'Crossover Fandom' with the fandom name for each character in brackets, e.g. Leia Organa (SW Original Trilogy)/Natasha Romanoff (MCU).
  
• Original characters in non-original canons: You may nominate Character/Original Character(s), e.g. Leia Organa/Original Character; Hermione Granger/Original Characters. Any original character(s) nominated will be assumed to be women.
  
• Original Works: Original ships are permitted. These must be nominated under ‘Original Work' in the format 'Character Type/Character Type' e.g. ‘Queen/Advisor’, ’Pilot/Soldier/General’, etc. All characters will be assumed to be women. If they are not nominated in this way, they will be rejected.

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Signups:

• An AO3 account is required to sign up.
  
• You can request 3-10 fandoms with 1-10 ships each.
  
• You can offer 3-10 fandoms with 1-10 ships each.
  
• If no offers match your requests, your requests will go out for claiming as an initial pinch hit. Please bear in mind that if this is unclaimed for a number of weeks, you may be asked to add extra requests; however, the mods will do all they can to prevent this.
  
• If no requests match your offers, the mods will contact you to see if there is anything else you can offer. If you do not reply within 24 hours, or there is nothing else you can offer, your signup will be deleted.
  
• Dear Creator letters may be linked to in your signup in order to give your gifter further details on your likes and dislikes. These are optional.
  
• Please include anything you absolutely don't want to receive (Do Not Wants) in the Optional Details field in your AO3 signup. In the event that a DNW is included in your gift, only reasonable DNWs noted in your signup will be enforced.
  
• If you sign up with more than one account, please bear in mind you will be expected to produce at least one fanwork per signup. Please sock responsibly!

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Assignments:

• Assignments are only guaranteed to match on one fandom and one ship.
  
• The minimum requirement is a complete fic of 1000 words or more or a finished piece of art, not on lined paper, with dimensions at least 500 x 500 px
  
• Your assignment must focus on a requested ship, and must include a romantic and/or sexual relationship of some kind. This is not a friendship exchange!
  
• All gifts must be rated Mature or Explicit. The rating could be for sexual content and/or dark themes and/or any other content warranting such a rating.
  
• Please do not discuss your assignment in public; creators should remain anonymous until after creator reveals. Do, however, feel free to discuss with a beta reader.
  
• If your assignment does not match a combination of tags which you offered, contact the mods as soon as possible. It will not be possible to change assignments for any other reason.

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Posting:

• To post your fic on AO3: navigate to your AO3 dashboard, click on 'Assignments', find your Femslash After Dark 2020 assignment and click 'Post to fulfil'.
  
• Works containing excessive spelling or grammar errors (enough to hinder comprehension) will not be accepted.
  
• Due to the collection's anonymous period, do not post your work elsewhere before creator reveals.
  
• You can edit your work after posting it, but your gift must be complete enough to stand as it is by the deadline.
  
• Saved drafts do not fulfil assignments. Please ensure that you post your gift!

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Defaulting:

• If you cannot finish your gift, please default.
  
• To default: navigate to your AO3 dashboard, click 'Assignments', locate your Femslash After Dark assignment and click 'Default'.
  
• If you default and your creator also defaults, you will not be assigned a pinch hitter.
  
• There is no penalty for defaulting before the deadline.
  
• If you have not posted a gift by the deadline, the mods will default you. You will need to post a full gift for any request in the exchange (excluding your own) before you will be permitted to participate in any further rounds.

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Pinch hits:

• Pinch hits will be posted to the Dreamwidth community.
  
• Please reply to the pinch hit post to claim, including your AO3 username; if you are successful, the mods will contact you and officially assign the pinch hit to you through AO3.
  
• You can claim a pinch hit even if you aren't signed up for the exchange, but you will need an AO3 account.

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Treats:

• You can write additional gifts for other participants and post them to the exchange collection as treats.
  
• To do this, navigate to the collection and click 'Post to Collection'. You will need to manually add the name of your intended recipient - please check this carefully!
  
• Treats do not have to fulfil the minimum word count.
  
• You are welcome to write treats even if you aren't signed up for the exchange.
  
• Treats will not become main gifts for this exchange.

Mods reserve the right to apply their best judgement to any situations that arise which are not specifically covered by the rules above.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask! You can either comment on this post (anon is on), or email femslashafterdark.mods@gmx.com.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Will we be able to specify "reason for high rating" anywhere? Not necessarily very specific, but just something like smut or violence or "pervasive mature themes not otherwise specified".

Thanks!

[fadmods]

Hi, thanks for getting in touch.

You can use your optional details to explain in more detail the sort of fic you're hoping to receive, and of course you can DNW specific types of content you don't want to receive.

We considered adding freeform matching on types of content, but decided to keep things simple for the first round; depending on the feedback we receive, we may add this option in future rounds.

Hope this helps!

[melsheartsthings]

Will Assignments be sent out quickly once sign-ups are closed or will they take a bit to generate?

[fadmods]

They'll take a little while because of the mods' requirement to sleep, but we're hoping it won't be too long!

[melsheartsthings]

That's not too bad. I completely understand a need to sleep, it's natural and human and I would never expect the mods of a challenge to neglect their need for it to do matching and send out assignments for an exchange like this.

Sleep well!

[(Anonymous)]

Will there be a beta post going up at some point?

[fadmods]

Your wish, etc.:

https://femslashafterdark.dreamwidth.org/3995.html

[(Anonymous)]

Starting to make my nominations list for this year's round and wondered: can we make nominations in the form "Natasha Romanoff/Any Female Character"?

[fadmods]

Sorry not to have seen this earlier! We don't allow tags in that sort of format, I'm afraid; please nominate relationships with specific other characters. (If you ship Natasha [or whoever else] with a sufficiently large number of people that you'd run out of nomination slots, I'm sure there are people who'd be willing to help you out.)

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks for the response! I'll pick my favorite few ships for my little black dress ladies. :)

[(Anonymous)]

Not trying to be extra, but how do you feel about characters who canonically identify as male sometimes and female sometimes?

[fadmods]

We're taking that sort of thing on a case by case basis. We're definitely not against it in all cases - La Pucelle from Magical Girl Raising Project is already in the tag set, for example.

But we'd have to know the particular example you were thinking of to make a specific decision. In any case where we did decide to allow it, we'd obviously expect that the work would focus on the character as a female.

[meatball42.livejournal.com]

Sorry about anon, looks like I forgot to log in my Open ID yesterday.

I'm thinking about Loki, specifically in the Avengers Academy video game. In the 616 comics, Lady Loki was a member of A-Force, a team of female Avengers, and Loki was later referred to as 'both' daughter and son of Odin. I'm only saying this for background, since I'm not planning to nom her for 616, but if someone did, I would think it would make sense, especially if they focused on the A-Force run or another series where she was Lady Loki.

In Avengers Academy, Loki explicitly identifies as both a man and a woman, and Lady Loki is a wearable skin that looks awesome and I'm so mad I couldn't get it lots of people just left her in after the A-Force event.

This is her skin storyline (it's not long), but she did have dialogue in this form periodically through the rest of the game.

[fadmods]

That sort of situation is definitely OK, as long as any work that ends up being created does focus on f!Loki over m!Loki. If "Lady Loki" is a canonical or semi-canonical name used in Avengers Academy, it might be a good idea to specify it in the tag to make everything 100% clear.

[(Anonymous)]

have you advertised on fandomcalendar yet?

[fadmods]

Not yet; probably this weekend.

[bardsley]

Hey,

I am sorry if this is covered somewhere else. I checked but couldn't find the information that I am looking for. I am interested in writing treats. I was wondering if there would be a letters post or a way of finding out more information about what people would like beyond what appears in the tagset. Thank you for running this exchange.

[fadmods]

Sign ups haven't started yet; the tag set is built up from the ships people have nominated because they're considering requesting or offering them, and we're now in the final stages of making sure it's ready.

Once sign ups do start (in about three days), all requests will be visible on AO3 here. Any letters people write will be linked from there; given the relatively small scale of the exchange and the fact that requests are visible throughout, we haven't seen the need for a separate letters post.

[bardsley]

Ah, I jumped the gun a bit. Thank you for your prompt response.

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you for running this again. =) Already looking forward to the possible pinch hits!

[aunt_zelda]

Hey, unfortunately I made a typo in one of my signups.
The name "Basira Hussain" should be spelled as such, in the nomination "Julia Montauk/Basira Husain/Alice "Daisy" Tonner" her name has been misspelled.

Since it's a new fandom, relatively small, and the tags are not all unified on AO3 for the Silt Verses: Carpenter, Charity, and Page are all female characters who use she/her pronouns. Carpenter is also sometimes called Sister Carpenter or Mallory Glass.

[fadmods]

Thanks; Basira is fixed and Silt Verses is in the tag set.