Pokémon Fanfiction Olympics

What is it?
To put it in short, the Pokémon Fanfiction Olympics is a cross-forum/cross-community fandom event celebrating the creativity and dedication of our fellow fans. For one solid month, the best authors of Pokémon communities across the internet will compete in a friendly writing challenge designed to jumpstart writing projects and form bonds between fans.


In English:
The Pokémon Fanfiction Olympics is basically NaNoWriMo but between multiple fan communities. Each fan community will form teams of runners and support. The runners (three writers chosen by their community) will serve as the official word count for their community. The support, meanwhile, will be every other member who chooses to engage in the challenge.

Everyone will have exactly one month—the month of February—to write as much as they can. As soon as midnight (EST), March 1 rolls around, pens are down, and the runners’ word counts are totalled and sent to the main committee for comparison. The community with the highest runner word count will be the winner for that year, although this is title is really for bragging rights only; ultimately, this is a friendly competition with more of an emphasis on productivity and cross-forum socializing than anything else.

Also, don’t forget that the support will have just as important role throughout this. First off, support is exactly what it sounds like: support for the runners. They’re the runners’ cheerleaders, and by participating alongside your forum representatives and being active in your forum’s branch of the event, they help maintain general morale all the way to the end. Moreover, if a runner realizes they absolutely cannot finish the month, they may step down, after which a member of the support team may step up to take their place. (Warning: Once a runner steps down from their position, they cannot step back up, so think carefully before doing so!)


How Teams Are Chosen/Rules
Team building (selecting runners and signing up support) varies on a community basis. It’s recommended (and likely) that the strongest writers of each community participate as runners. Please consult your forum mods for details on the team building process, or read on for details on the selection process.

There are only a handful of general rules to team selection and participation:

1. Those who participate in the event must be working on a piece of writing of some kind. This can be short stories/one-shots, chapter fics, scripts (plays/screenplays/comic scripts), RP posts, non-academic nonfiction essays—whatever you’d like. We just require that all items counted for this event be 1) written works (and therefore not art or programming) and 2) not written for your coursework. Sorry, those of you working on a thesis of one sort or another.

2. Assume you’ll be posting your work to one of your community’s forums after the event is over. That is to say, whatever you write must be written within your community’s rules for acceptable content. Please consult your community mods if you have any questions concerning your rules.

3. All runners and those who join the Discord must be able to join every community participating in the event. In other words, if you’ve been banned from one community, you are not eligible to become a runner, although you may join as support. This is to protect the other communities and to keep the event as drama-free as possible.

4. Additional rules may be added by your community mods, and how the event runs for your branch may be up to their discretion. Please don’t hesitate to contact your mods if you have any questions!


Check-Ins/Discord
In order to keep up with everyone’s word counts, your mods will be running weekly check-ins. These consist of … simply asking how you all are doing and what your word count is. Only runners’ word counts will be recorded (to make sure your team isn’t struggling), but check-ins are periods when runners, support, mods, and non-participants can come together to bond, cheer each other on, and share progress.

To help with communication and to bond with fellow participants across all communities, we’ve also founded a neutral zone on Discord. Each community has its own channel, but there are also pan-forum lounge area, a pan-forum word war channel, a pan-forum writing challenge channel, and even a voice channel/channel dedicated to music. Runners, mods, and support are all welcome to join for the duration of the event. We also ask that those joining observe the rules of the server, outlined in its own rules channel, but otherwise, this is meant to be a fun, relaxed area for members from all communities.

To join, simply click this link: discord.gg/v5Eqxc3


Participants
This year, the following forums will be participating:

Canalave Library
Pokécommunity
Serebii

We wish all of our participants the best of luck!