This is an interest check for a potential fanwork challenge! After some discussion within the Discord, a few of us are interested in running a Harlequin challenge.
What is a Harlequin challenge?
The name of the game is Harlequin AUs, in which your faves are transplanted into a ridiculous romance novel, the type that only comes in paperback from lines like Harlequin and Mills & Boon. Extravagant drama, a forest-worth of pining, agonized proclamations of love, making out in the rain– all your favorite and dreaded romance tropes, shovel them in!
Shorthand: the kind of stories that Karkat Vantas would love to read.
Rose moving to a small town to escape her Tragic Past and meeting a lovely horned fashion designer, and falling in love! Karkat writing the Next Great Novel and finding inspiration in his muse, a mysterious nighttime DJ he listens to, and falling in love! Jake needing to get married to appease his old gran and stay in her will, and his best bro Dirk volunteering to tie the knot with him, and them falling in love! John weathering his first job as a paralegal for terrifying hotshot lawyer Terezi, and falling in love!
Sensing the trend?
Is this for writers or for artists?
Potentially both. This is what the interest check is meant to ascertain: the structure of the challenge. There are a few options– a straight up fanfic challenge, a more loose “make whatever you want” fic/art/other fest, or a Big Bang.
A Big Bang structure sort of requires us to have about the same number of writers to pair with artists and fanmixers and graphic folks. We’ll only go with this direction if the numbers are right.
What timeframe are you looking at?
Tentatively, a two-month period with a check in halfway through to make sure things are going smoothly.
I’m interested in participating, but don’t know much about Harlequin-style work. Can I get a prompt?
Again, tentatively there is a plan to handle this.
For people who know how this works and know what they wanna make, you’ll have a basic guideline of what to create, just some thematic stuff to keep you skewed close to the challenge. Everything else is up to you.
For people who want a little more guidance, we can offer a list of commonplace tropes and narratives for this genre, or even a sampling of book-style summaries that you can use as your basic plot.
Any restrictions? Pairings? NSFW?
In the event of a challenge that isn’t pairing people up, we probably will let you create whatever you like. For a Big Bang-style challenge or similar, we’ll ask for your age and what pairing you think you’ll be doing so we can pair you up with similarly-minded folks.
All of this is subject to change. Right now, we simply want to know if anyone is interested in doing this, and if so, what they would like the make.
To that end, if you are interested, please:
1. Reblog this post. 2. Tag it with what you are interested in doing. Let us know if you want to write fic or art something up or make a fanmix/soundtrack for a fic, or anything else. (Or, you can just signal boost it, that is very helpful too!) 3. If you want updates, please follow @hsharlequin, where we will be sharing info as it becomes available, including organizational news.
ugh 