Bad Bang

Bad Bang is a recurrent challenge associated with Fail-Fandomanon in which participants write deliberate badfic accompanied by bad fanart.
Stories/art are posted to AO3, where the perpetrators are anonymous for one week, after which names are revealed. Though some people post under their own names, others prefer to use sock puppet accounts, and still others permanently anonymize or orphan their Bad Bang fanworks.
The "official pinch hitter" for Bad Bang is a five-year-old child. However, in Bad Bang IV, (which took over a month as it was run as a gift exchange), there was an actual pinch-hitter list to cover the possibility that someone might genuinely need to default.
==Bad Bang I==
On 26 August 2014, an anonymous contributor began a post on Fail-Fandomanon, "Thanks for Nothing", in which fellow nonnies could make complaints. The following day, a nonnie posted the response:
While early comments related to the actual situation, the following—
—elicited an immediate positive reaction. By the same afternoon, the first Bad Bang had been officially announced on Fail-Fandomanon. Participants were given 48 hours to write badfic of any length in any fandom and post it to the collection.
The announcement of Bad Bang received numerous comments, many of which were mock badfic prompts. Comments include the following:
The deadline for uploading stories was 29 August 2014 with full summary and tags. Artists then claimed fics, and assignments went out 31 August 2014. Art was uploaded by 2 September 2014. Writers were specifically requested not to orphan their stories until after the art link had been added to the post so that art and story could be properly associated with one another.
Posts were initially anonymous, with the reveal taking place a week later. In total, there were 119 works (art and story being posted separately, with links between them).
==Big Bang II==
Bad Bang II: Bang Backwards was run as a reverse big bang.
On 15 September 2014, the newly dubbed Bang!Mod announced on FFA that, as s/he had a free week, Big Bang II would begin immediately. Bad art was to be uploaded to AO3 within 48 hours, i.e., a deadline of 17 September 2014.
The announcement again elicited numerous comments, many of them prompts, including:
Fic claims took place on Bang!Mod's Dreamwidth account, with assignments going out on 18 September 2014. The deadline for stories to be uploaded was 20 September 2014.
In total, there were 202 fanworks (art and story being posted separately, with links between them).
==Big Bang III==
Bad Bang III: Banging By Telephone was a chain story. Somebody wrote a badfic, somebody else illustrated it, a third person wrote a story about the artwork, etc.
The announcement that Bad Bang III was forthcoming was made by the Bang!Mod on FFA on 28 December 2014, to begin on 1 January 2015. In order to play, potential participants were told to claim a time slot on the post "Bad Bang III: January Claims" on the mod's DW account. Each person would have a 48-hour time slot in which to produce their installment in the collective fanwork. All told, there were ten slots, all of which were claimed within hours.
Comments to the thread include:
The first installment was fic, and thereafter fic and art alternated. The various parts can be read in order here.
==Big Bang IV==
Bad Bang IV: The World's Worst Exchange was structured as a gift exchange in which deliberately wanky requests received deliberate badfic. It was therefore run on AO3 using its matching software in a parody of serious gift exchanges such as Yuletide. For the first time, participants had to produce multiple "bad" fanworks: (1) a parodic version of a Dear Author letter (dubbed a "Dear Badger" letter, riffing on one of the comments to the previous Bad Bang [cited above]); (2) a story (of any length); and (3) at least one accompanying illustration.
Because of the complexity of running a traditional gift exchange, the lead time for Bad Bang IV was considerably longer than it had been for previous incarnations of the challenge. From the profile on AO3:
* Nominations open: Monday 2 March 2015
* Nominations close: Sunday 8 March 2015
* Letter post goes up: Monday 9 March 2015
* Signups open: Wednesday 11 March 2015
* Signups close: Wednesday 18 March 2015
* Assignments sent out no later than: Friday 20 March 2015
* Assignments due: Friday 27 March 2015
* Full request list goes live: Saturday 28 March 2015
* Archive opens for reading: Wednesday 1 April 2015
* Author reveal: Wednesday 8 April 2015
Links to Dear Badger letters were collected on a post to the Bang!Mod's DW journal. All 40 people who signed up posted links. Their letters were deliberately written to parody the sort of Dear Author letters that receive strong negative feedback on such sites as FFA and Yuletide_Coal.
In this round of Bad Bang, since stories were to be written as gifts for assigned recipients, the Bang!Mod decided that a way was needed to distinguish between Do Not Wants included as a joke and genuine dislikes that would upset the recipient. The latter were therefore dubbed "vetoes".
Participants were permitted to offer/request between 5 and 10 fandoms from the list of nominated fandoms, specifying between 1 and 20 characters (or "any"). They were guaranteed a match to an author who had offered at least one of the requested characters in at least one requested fandom. Having said that, the writer was free to employ that character/fandom in as large or small a role in the story as they chose. (In regular gift exchanges, recipients are sometimes disappointed in this way. Deliberately doing so was therefore considered, in the context of Bad Bang, to be one way of creating badfic.)
As in many regular gift exchanges, treats could be written—not only by people who had signed up, but by anyone who wished to do so.
There are 161 fanwork posts by the forty people who signed up plus anyone else who wrote a treat. In previous Bad Bangs, the bad art and bad fanfic were created by different participants. However, in Bad Bang IV, both were created by the same person. For this reason, they often appear in the same post. However, there are also some instances where art and fic appear in different (but linked) posts.
Recipients were required to comment on their gifts; and other readers also contributed comments. During the one-week period when the authorship was still unknown, most of these were, in one or another way, in the form of fake wank. In some instances, there were extended comic series of back-and-forth replies between writer and reader.
Category:2014 Challenges
Category:2015 Challenges