greygerbil

Challenge #15: How Did the Fandom Snowflake Challenge Go?

Pretty good! I’ve been doing Snowflake for about 10 years now, and it’s always a good time, one of the fannish staples I look forward to every year. As always, I enjoyed answering the challenges and the “ritual” of the month of fandom chat/squee. But I did feel less of a sense of community this year (which makes sense, given what else has been going on in the world in January 2026…), which is a little sad, since that’s also an important part of Snowflake for me.

Actually, let me talk about that latter part here, because here’s where it seems to fit best into the flow of this post. ( Snowflake Challenge 2026 sense of community musings )

I answered all the challenges, like I usually do, and enjoyed the mix of old favorites and new prompts.

( Favorite challenges )

Old challenges I was looking forward to seeing again which were not repeated: I missed the Snowflake staples of “create a fanwork”, “try something new”, and “set some goals for yourself”. This is fine, though, because I can just do those anyway, as a challenge to myself – they do not require any creativity to SET as a challenge, and while I enjoy browsing people’s answers for them, the main reason I like them is the action I take in response, so I don’t really require a community for them. I’ve also missed the “rec something” / “rec yourself” type challenges – which I can still do on my own, since they don’t require creativity to set either – but a large part of those is definitely browsing other people’s answers. (I also miss the scavenger hunt, but that one’s not the same sort of staple as the others are, I think. And definitely not something I’m going to do on my own.)

So I’m just going to set myself those challenges anyway. The unasked challenges:

Make a fanwork:

I guess the moodboard and the primer are both fanworks, and I also made a fanwork for fandomtrees during this month, so that one is technically fulfilled, but also I use Snowflake as my push to make some icons for new fandoms and/or new images I’ve come across during the previous year. I still plan to do this, but I will wait a little bit because there’s an installment of Taskmaster cartoons coming that I want to potentially include in that icon batch.


Try something new:

I did this naturally, by watching the first 5 episodes of The Goes Wrong Show that rionaleonhart has been writing delightful fic for and posted a primer for. I will post about it in full once I’m done with both series, but it has been a very fun thing to watch and, as I’d hoped and as Riona mentioned, does have a similar vibe to Taskmaster – not that it’s a similar format or anything, but, like, the low-stakes absurdist disaster feeling is similar – which is obviously great!


Rec some fanworks:

I have also done this a little bit in the course of completing the other challenges, like reccing the Taskmaster cartoons when I was talking about r/Taskmaster for community promo and reccing a brand new Elis/John longfic in the E&J fandom primer post. But here are things that did not come up naturally that I was hoping to have a chance to rec: ( Vorkosigan Saga, Murderbot, original art )

And, you know what, I am going to do some self-recs, too: ( chemistry anthropomorfic, Machineries of Empire poem, Monday Begins on Saturday )


Set some goals for yourself:

( 2025 Fannish goals check-in )

( 2026 Fannish Goals )

Challenge #14: In your own space, create a promo and/or rec list for someone new to a fandom

I have had such great fun (and good luck!) with fandom primers in past Snowflakes, in the sense that I both really enjoyed writing them up, find them very useful to refer to down the road if I need to explain what obscure/hard-to-understand-from-osmosis thing I’m talking about, AND I think I have had at least one flister either directly take the plunge because of the primer each time or have it be a helping-along nudge towards that, which is really the best possible outcome. (Past primers: Dragaera, Terra Ignota, my 50-year-old Russian book love Monday Begins on Saturday, and Taskmaster, and I finally created a tag for them).

Last year the thought of doing one for Elis & John did occur to me, but I had only consumed one third of the “content” by then, and didn’t feel like I was ready to write any sort of primer. This year, I’m still not done catching up: I have listened to almost 9 years of radio out of 12 years, but that does mean I have about 25% to go. But, I do feel like 9 years of content is a lot of content, and I have now listened to at least some of all of the phases of their “digital decade”, and got to experience a live show, and E&J fandom on four different platforms, which hadn’t been the case last year, so I was thinking it was time. And then a 30k Elis & John fic popped up on AO3 the very day this Snowflake prompt went up, roughly doubling the total amount of E&J content on AO3, and if ever there was a sign from the universe, right? :P

So here you go. This is what I’ve been obsessed with for the last 20 months, to the extent of flying to England to attend a show.



What is it? Elis James and John Robins is a British radio show/podcast that has been on air almost-continuously in some form since February 2014. It started out on XFM/Radio X (“digital indie music radio”, as the boys rattle it off) as a live weekly radio show, moved to the BBC in 2019, as a live weekly radio show on 5Live, and in February 2024 changed to a “podcast-first” format, the exact mechanics of which are too complicated to explain (the show has adopted a sarcastic “it couldn’t be simpler!” tagline when attempting to explain it), but essentially it moved to two podcasts a week, with new episodes currently dropping Tuesdays and Fridays, and then the highlights of those go out on the radio once a week. The key thing is that across these last 12 years, with the exception of a couple of months when they were moving stations or formats, there’s been a steady output of 1-2 hours of new content a week, with occasional bonus special episodes, and all of that is available in podcast form. As of this writing, the BBC version of the show is up to 509 episodes, and there are 264 episodes on Radio X, plus a bunch of bonus ones that are unnumbered across both versions.

Elis and John have also written a book together, The Holy Vible, have done a bunch of livestreams over the years (not available officially anywhere, but there are curated sources), and have done live gigs and tours, most recently in the fall of 2025 (also not available anywhere, but there are clips, photos, etc.). You know, in case the 1000+ hours of radio/podcast content was not enough ‘canon’.

The premise: ( the key players and the chemistry )
( the format )

OK, I think that gives a sense of the format sufficiently.

How to listen: The current BBC shows are on Spotify (and BBC Sounds, and Podbean, and all the other places). There is also bonus BBC Sounds-only content that is only officially available within the UK (but there are sources; inquire within). The Radio X/XFM shows are also available on Spotify, separately.

You can see visuals and video versions of short clips on the Instagram “carra” at bbc5live (probably easiest to search by the #elisandjohn tag.

And longer clips are on YouTube in this playlist.

Where to start: This is a great question! Opinions vary.

( Two options that I think might work )

Links to things:

( fannish spaces and resources )
( fanworks, and more )