[Van voice] Come one, come all to the First Annual [Akilah voice: "Annual?!"] Yellowjackets Casefic Week: Because Trapped Inside This Slick 2020s Thriller Is a Shitty First-Run Syndication 1990s Genre Show (Affectionate) Screaming to Get Out!
Whether we liked season 3 or not, or for that matter season 2 or not, most of this fandom can agree on one thing: the show suffers from the limited runtime and preference for extremely tight serialized storytelling that dominate TV in Current Year. We'd all love more time with these characters, these settings, and these themes: more time to breathe and sit with things, more time for levity, perhaps even more time for vanishing moose and screaming trees and Tai dragging Van to abandoned ice cream parlors to do haruspicy with rabbits and coyotes.
That's where YJ Casefic Week comes in. "Casefic" is an Old Fandom term for a specific kind of filler; back when many first-run Western TV fandoms were for police, legal, or medical procedurals, people would write fics that depicted a typical case that the characters might solve, and that were thus structured like a one-off episode of the show. Here, we encourage you to write something that might be a missing YJ scene, or even a whole episode! (We know that for most people the "whole episodes" will be synopses rather than full longfics or scripts; this is more than fine! None of us are made of time and energy.)
Bonus points for being able to slot it into the canon timeframes and plot structure, but if you're not able to, that's fine too. It's all for the sake of imagining what our beloved cannibal show might be like if it had been possible to make it in a more generous and expansive era of TV.
The event will run from November 9 to 15. The daily themes/challenges are:
Sunday, November 9: Season 1 missing scene Monday, November 10: Season 1 filler episode Tuesday, November 11: Season 2 missing scene Wednesday, November 12: Season 2 filler episode Thursday, November 13: Season 3 missing scene Friday, November 14: Season 3 filler episode Saturday, November 15: Free day! Anything goes as long as it could fit into a hypothetical YJ filler episode.
The event is run by @monstrousgourmandizingcats and @staghunters, both of whom have experience managing major fandom projects--Lottielee Weekend in the former case, the Save Our Souls! zine in the latter. We'll both be on Central European Time throughout the event, but feel free to post in whatever time zone you're in and we'll see and reblog it. We'll be tracking the tags #yjcaseficweek and #yjfillerweek.
This is by nature primarily a fanfic event, but if you do art or edits or meta that fits the concept, that's great too!
Here's a graphic if you'd like to advertise the event on other platforms (with the 3x01 joke at the beginning mistakenly listing the Akilah line as a Gen line, because old TV listings had little flubs like that all the time):
And a smaller one to remember when the event is:
It should be a great time! Let hilarity, hijinx, and even hilarious hijinx ensue!
