Happy Wednesday, Readers!
I know that I’m supposed to be changing my schedule to Fridays, but today’s post involves a collaboration challenge event and I wanted to give people extra time to work on it!
The internet is a beautiful space for exploration and collaboration. I’ve been thinking for a while (inspired by other bloggers like Fujinsei and TheWellRedMage) hosting community collaborations of their own) that I wanted to start doing community collaboration event posts here on Pop Culture Literary in order to get the community more involved with this blogging project. Without knowing how much participation will actually happen, I thought I would kick us off this month.
It’s perfect timing for me as well. Right now I am busily scrambling to throw together a content analysis of required literacy skills evident in cartoons for a graduate showcase on November 9th. When the proposal submissions opened, I decided to put in a proposal to the showcase despite being a new grad student with no prior research to prepare and submit. I didn’t expect to be accepted because I had no prior works to show, and the showcase submission guidelines talked about your submission work in the past-tense. Imagine my surprise when I received the acceptance email!
The acceptance came as a double-edged exciting surprise. On the one hand, I am psyched to participate in my first-ever scientific poster showcase. On the other hand, I now have one month to put my project and poster presentation together amid my other academic duties. As an inevitable fallout, unfortunately, I’ll have to put off blog posts for October and the beginning of November in favor of preparing for the showcase. That’s where you come in, Reader!
So What’s the Challenge?
In the SPIRIT (I’m not sorry) of the month of Halloween, this month’s topic revolves around Halloween. The prompt is this:
What common trope or tropes do you see in “spooky” or “Halloween” related pop culture content? These can be your favorite or least favorite, or even tropes that you have no strong feelings about one way or the other. These tropes can come from any pop culture medium. You’re free to choose content from video games, cartoons, anime, manga, comics, TV shows, movies, or any other genre/medium that you so choose.
I know that October isn’t all about spooky Halloween culture, though. If you have a different October-y topic that you want to cover such as the end of the harvest season, please feel free to do so! I’m always happy to include a wide range of topics in community events!
If you have questions, feel free to contact me and ask. Otherwise, have fun with this challenge!
How Do I Participate?
Participating is easy. You can leave your entry as a comment (try to keep it 500 words or less) here on this very post! If you’re a reader without a WordPress account and you want to participate, feel free to contact me using any method in the About or Contact pages. Another way to enter your piece is to write a post and publish it to your own blog (these don’t have to be under 500 words) and leave a link here in the comments. (Please note that if you don’t want your entry included in a collaboration post, just let me know in your post that you don’t want it included.)
There is no minimum requirement. If you just want to submit a sentence, I highly encourage you to do so! But please try to submit more than a single word. I want to include as much as your individual voice as possible in the collaboration!
All entries received before October 31st will be included in a collaboration post that will (hopefully) go live on October 31st. Any blog posts written and posted to your own WordPress site will be linked (with your permission) from that post as well (but will not be included as a full-text entry). If you miss the deadline, feel free to submit a comment or blog entry anyway! I’m always excited to have participants.
You’re still always welcome and encouraged to participate in community collaboration events even after that. The deadline only exists so that people know when they must submit by in order to be included in the collaboration event post.
You don’t have to be a frequent reader of PopCultureLiterary either. You’re welcome to participate even if this is your first encounter with the blog.
During this community challenge event, I do expect a level of civility among all participants. If you enter into discussion with other users in the comments section, please behave like civil, rational individuals when handling disagreements or when addressing the quality of another user’s work. Remember, this event is open to all, and nobody should feel like they can’t participate because “their writing isn’t good enough.” If you have an idea to contribute, any level of writing skill is perfectly fine!
Most of all, have fun with it! (And thank you for participating!)
Pop Culture Literary 
I’m not sure if this really counts, but whenever All Hallows’ Eve is brought up in anime, there tends to be an explanation behind the origins of Halloween or a character opts to mention that the holiday is not traditionally practiced in Japan. It makes sense considering that anime is primarily a Japanese medium and the (native) audience needs to be made aware of what the holiday entails in case they don’t know.
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I think this absolutely counts! Thanks for sharing. Sorry that I left you hanging like that, some life got a little rough and diverted my attention from the social internet. Keep an eye out for the collaboration post! I’m postponing it for a few more days.
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Oh, glad to hear it!
No need to apologize. Things happen! And okay, sure thing!
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