Welcome to another year of the Fanfic Reading Challenge (FRC)!
Here's the gist of the challenge:
The event runs for the whole year - Jan 01-Dec 31, 2026
There is no official sign-up. You can make a copy of the challenge spreadsheet and track your fic reading however you want to. You can start at any time of the year.
To participate in the challenge, you read fics that match the tasks in the challenge. Some are easy. Some are more difficult.
This challenge is for any fandom, any ship(s), and you can use more than one fandom and/or ship to complete it.
Fics can count towards more than one task (unless the task says otherwise). Podfics count too.
This challenge operates on the honour system. If you said you completed a fic for a certain task, that's between you and whichever ghost/saint haunts/watches over you. No one is checking your work.
Likewise, if you're unsure about whether a fic fits the task, you are welcome to discuss it with us on the Challenge Discord OR you can use your best judgment. Again, no one is checking your work.
There are prizes! If you finish even one task, you'll be eligible for a fun badge to show off wherever you show off online badges. Here's a link to the 2025 badges to show you how cute they are!
Participation (1 task completed)
Regular Mode (80 tasks completed)
Hard Mode (150 tasks completed)
Extreme Mode (230 tasks completed)
Complete (300 tasks completed)
Category Challenge (extra challenge)
The 2026 Fanfic Reading Challenge! (link)
You will need to download and make your own copy of the above spreadsheet. There is an info page on the first sheet of the spreadsheet that may answer any additional questions. If you need to contact any of the Admin, please send us an ask, or join the Discord.
This year, there is a Virtual Book Club group of tasks, where you are required to ask others for suggestions for various task prompts. You can do this via Tumblr ask, in the specific Discord channel, on some other Discord you belong to, or even by asking your friend who lives next door. We've created a Discord channel to help people complete this, but it's not required to join us there; however we've really become a lovely community of vastly different people who are all joined together in our love of fanfiction, and you would definitely be welcome.
As there is a component of the FRC that includes tracking numbers of words read, most of us use a reading log/tracker to keep count of how many fics we read, including data such as words, of course, chapters, month completed, ship, author, title, fandom, link to the fic, and such. It’s a great place to mark what fics you want to read in the future as well!
We've got four suggested trackers linked below. All of them are quite different from one another - and you're welcome to make a copy of any of them if you'd like - and you can customize them for your personal preferences.
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“my father is a boy and my mother is a girl so i’m mixed” is the funniest possible response to someone asking your gender and it came from 6’5 Viking footballer and notable weird little guy Erling Haaland on a Snapchat
It was a Tuesday in 1981 when the San Francisco police kicked in the door.
Inside the small apartment, they expected to find a hardened criminal. They expected a drug kingpin. They expected resistance.
Instead, they found a 57-year-old waitress in an apron.
The air in the apartment smelled sweet, thick with chocolate and something earthier. On the kitchen counter, cooling on wire racks, were 54 dozen brownies.
The police officers began bagging the evidence. They confiscated nearly 18 pounds of marijuana. They handcuffed the woman, whose name was Mary Jane Rathbun.
She didn't look scared. She didn't look guilty.
She looked at the officers, smoothed her apron, and reportedly said, "I thought you guys were coming."
She was booked into the county jail. The headlines wrote themselves. A grandmother running a pot bakery. It seemed like a joke to the legal system, a quirky local news story about an older woman behaving badly.
But Mary wasn't baking for fun. And she certainly wasn't baking for profit.
To understand why Mary risked her freedom, you have to understand the silence of the early 1980s.
San Francisco was gripping the edge of a cliff. A mysterious illness was sweeping through the city, specifically targeting young men. Later, the world would know it as AIDS. But in those early days, it was just a death sentence that no one wanted to talk about.
Families were disowning their sons. Landlords were evicting tenants. Even doctors and nurses, paralyzed by the fear of the unknown, would sometimes leave food trays outside hospital doors, afraid to breathe the same air as their patients.
Men in their twenties were wasting away in sterile rooms, dying alone.
Mary knew what it felt like to lose a child.
Years earlier, in 1974, her daughter Peggy had been killed in a car accident. Peggy was only 22. The loss had hollowed Mary out, leaving a space in her heart that nothing seemed to fill.
When the judge sentenced Mary for that first arrest, he ordered her to perform 500 hours of community service. He likely thought the manual labor would teach her a lesson.
He sent her to the Shanti Project and San Francisco General Hospital.
It was a mistake that would change American history.
Mary walked into the AIDS wards when others were walking out. She didn't wear a hazmat suit. She didn't hold her breath. She saw rows of young men who looked like ghosts—skeletal, in pain, and terrified.
She saw "her kids."
She began mopping floors and changing sheets. But soon, she noticed something the doctors were missing. The harsh medications the men were taking caused violent nausea. They couldn't eat. They were starving to death as much as they were dying of the virus.
Mary knew a secret about the brownies she had been arrested for.
She knew they settled the stomach. She knew they brought back the appetite. She knew they could help a dying man sleep for a few hours without pain.
So, she made a choice.
She went back to her kitchen. She fired up the oven. She started mixing batter, not to sell, but to save.
Every morning, Mary would bake. She lived on a fixed income, surviving on Social Security checks that barely covered her rent. Yet, she spent nearly every dime on flour, sugar, and butter.
The most expensive ingredient—the cannabis—was donated. Local growers heard what she was doing. They began dropping off pounds of product at her door, free of charge.
She packed the brownies into a basket and took the bus to the hospital.
She walked room to room. She sat by the bedsides of men who hadn't seen their own mothers in years. She held their hands. She told them jokes. And she gave them brownies.
"Here, baby," she would say. "Eat this. It'll help."
And it did.
Nurses watched in amazement as patients who hadn't eaten in days began to ask for food. The constant retching stopped. The mood on the ward shifted from despair to a quiet sort of comfort.
Mary Jane Rathbun became "Brownie Mary."
For over a decade, this was her life. She baked roughly 600 brownies a day. She went through 50 pounds of flour a week. She became the mother to a generation of lost boys.
She washed their pajamas. She attended their funerals. She held them while they took their last breaths.
She did this while the government declared a "War on Drugs."
By the early 1990s, the political climate was hostile. Politicians were competing to see who could be "tougher" on crime. Mandatory minimum sentences were locking people away for decades.
In 1992, at the age of 70, Mary was arrested again.
This time, the stakes were lethal. She was charged with felonies. The district attorney looked at her rap sheet and saw a repeat offender. He threatened to send her to prison.
One prosecutor famously whispered to a colleague that he was going to "kick this old lady's ass."
They underestimated who they were dealing with.
They thought they were prosecuting a drug dealer. In reality, they were attacking the most beloved woman in San Francisco.
When the news broke that Brownie Mary was facing prison, the city erupted.
It wasn't just the activists who were angry. It was the doctors. It was the nurses. It was the parents who had watched Mary care for their dying sons when the government did nothing.
Mary turned her trial into a pulpit.
She arrived at court not as a defendant, but as a grandmother standing her ground. The media swarmed her. Reporters asked if she was afraid of prison. They asked if she would stop baking if they let her go.
Mary looked into the cameras, her voice gravelly and firm.
"If the narcs think I'm gonna stop baking brownies for my kids with AIDS," she said, "they can go fuck themselves in Macy's window."
The quote ran in newspapers across the country.
The court didn't stand a chance.
Testimony poured in. Doctors from San Francisco General Hospital wrote letters explaining that Mary’s brownies were medically necessary. Patients testified that she was an angel of mercy.
The charges were dropped.
Mary walked out of the courthouse a free woman. But she didn't go home to rest. She realized that her personal victory wasn't enough. As long as the law was broken, her "kids" were still in danger.
She needed to change the law.
August 25 was declared "Brownie Mary Day" by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. It was a nice gesture, but Mary wanted policy, not plaques.
She teamed up with fellow activist Dennis Peron. Together, they opened the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club—the first public dispensary in the United States. It was a safe haven where patients could get their medicine without fear of arrest.
But Mary wanted more. She wanted the state of California to acknowledge the truth.
She campaigned for Proposition 215. She traveled the state, despite her failing health. She spoke in her simple, direct way. She didn't talk about liberties or economics. She talked about compassion. She talked about pain.
She forced voters to look at the issue through the eyes of a grandmother.
In 1996, Proposition 215 passed. California became the first state to legalize medical marijuana.
It was a domino effect. Because one woman refused to let her "kids" suffer, the public perception of cannabis shifted. The Economist later noted that Mary was single-handedly responsible for changing the national conversation.
She never got rich.
She had always joked that if legalization ever happened, she would sell her recipe to Betty Crocker and buy a Victorian house for her patients to live in.
She never sold the recipe. She never bought the house.
Mary Jane Rathbun died in 1999, at the age of 77. She passed away in a nursing home, poor in money but rich in legacy.
Today, over 30 states have legalized medical marijuana. Millions of people use it to manage pain, seizures, and nausea.
Most of them have never heard of Mary.
They don't know that their legal prescription exists because a waitress in San Francisco decided that the law was wrong and her heart was right.
They don't know about the 600 brownies a day.
They don't know about the thousands of hospital visits.
Mary didn't set out to be a hero. She told the Chicago Tribune years before she died, "I didn't go into this thinking I would be a hero."
She was just a mother who had lost her daughter, trying to help boys who had lost their way.
She proved that authority doesn't always equal morality.
She proved that sometimes, the most patriotic thing a citizen can do is break a bad law.
Every August, a few people in San Francisco still celebrate Brownie Mary Day. But her true memorial isn't a date on a calendar.
It is found in every oncology ward where a patient finds relief. It is found in every dispensary door that opens without fear.
It is found in the simple, quiet courage of anyone who sees suffering and refuses to look away.
Mary taught us that you don't need a law degree to change the world. You don't need millions of dollars. You don't need political office.
Sometimes, all you need is a mixing bowl, an oven, and enough love to tell the world to get out of your way.
Sources: New York Times Obituary (1999), "Brownie Mary" Rathbun. San Francisco Chronicle Archives (1992, 1996). History.com, "The History of Medical Marijuana." Weird Everything, FB december 12, 2025
I'd be only too happy to do that. I was suspicious to start, too. It seemed a bit on the nose to have the weed brownie grandma named "Mary Jane," but also, that's a very common combination in a certain place and time, so I thought it was worth the extra effort.
What I did was find sources that made the claim (in this case, that a woman named Mary Jane was a medicinal marijuana activist in California, USA in the 1980s and 90s.) I checked the dates to get some certainty those sources aren't AI slop, then checked that the sources are generally reliable.
Then I followed useful details about the place and time, and other people involved, to explore it more fully.
The first thing I did was search for "Brownie Mary" and see if that turned anything up at all. It turned up a LOT of results. Predictably, some of them were recipes, but not all of them.
Next up, I checked sources and dates. Wikipedia can be dodgy for academic use, but their policy on LLM-generated input is very clear: they don't want slop. I started by reading that page and then went on to read others.
The Atlas Obscura article is from 2018. I found another one from SFWeekly from 2017.
Both of those are decent sources - Atlas Obscura gets a High factual reporting rate from MediaBiasFactCheck, and while MBFC doesn't have a rating for SFWeekly, the verbiage in that article is very close to what GastroObscura has. (Also to what the post itself has, right down to the choice of pull quote.)
Now, we can stop there and feel pretty confident that articles published before the wide availability of LLMs are not, in fact, LLM generated.
...or we can go deeper, and run this all the way back to source.
I spotted references to a Chicago Tribune imterview of Mary Jane Rathbun, published in 1993.
My search string of "Chicago Tribune 1993 Mary Jane Rathbun" hit it in the top 3 results. That article includes some fun new details: she wore a cannabis leaf shaped pendant to her trial!
She also objected to being portrayed as a cuddly grandma up against The Man, so I must retract my flippant tags, above.
The evidence now strongly points to Brownie Mary being a real woman who really went to court for giving AIDS patients weed brownies. But can we get closer? I've now seen several mentions of a 1980 attempt at convicting her too.
The articles have mentioned Sonoma County and a nonprofit called the Shanti Project, so let's hook onto that and see what we get.
Searching for "Mary Jane Rathbun Sonoma County 1980" gets me an article from a law firm; that mentions the prosecuting attorney by name, and points to a book: Lust for Justice: The Radical Life & Law of J. Tony Serra, by Paulette Frankl. It even has an excerpt!
We can run the book down too, just for fun (now we have a primary source.) My favorite used book site has a copy for $1. Amazon gives a view of the back cover, too:
...wow. I should see if my library has that!
The excerpt on the site has a mention of a candelight vigil held for her death in 1999. It took some hunting past things I'd already read and a bunch of shops giving written tributes, but I found a news report about that, too.
There's a lot of information out there, and it's worth digging into. Otherwise it's altogether too easy to think something real and worth knowing is just another bit of slop.
Omg I love this piece. Grace the hanging man, content with his life but cannot avoid the changes coming; the ship his noose, the rope that binds him to his fate; the blood red stars beside him, Olesya and Yáo the angels haunting him in the background. Eva Stratt, the one who holds it all on her back, the world is literally on her shoulders, the Petrova line on her neck. She will not falter, cannot afford to move, and yet still she glares at us. Eva challenges us, daring us to ask if we could do better, if we could hold her burden for even a fraction of the time.
Eve, the mother of sin, who held the world in her hands and was cursed for not knowing.
Eva, director of the task force, who now holds the world, and still must curse man to save it.
In the end, it always falls on a woman. I could never hate you Eva Stratt
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i love explaining the etymology of the word "rickroll" because the story starts with "ok, so at one point 4chan applied a filter to everyone's posts that changed the word egg to duck"
If I ever get comments like this I am fucking deleting them.
This is shit behavior from little shit people who have been trained by social media to demand instant gratification.
Go read an entire real paper book. See how long it takes, and imagine how many times longer than that it took to *write*
Go watch a -Network Television- show WITH COMMERCIALS, and only allow yourself to watch one episode per week.
Teach yourselves patience, you little shits.
Start writing yourselves, and see how far you get. See how long it takes you to get to a GOOD, PUBLISH-WORTHY 1,000 words. 5,000 words. 10,000 words. Not rambles, not snippets, and definitely not AI-generated garbage. Real, coherent story telling. It is a labor of love, to go from a concept, to a story. Sometimes, it's not enough to love the story. It doesn't get finished. Interests shift, inspiration dies. That is part of the human experience.
You are NOT Entitled to the rest of a story that was posted for free, for fun. Fuck you. Double fuck you for the audacity of asking the audience "what if I just do it myself lol"
Sorry I'm a little tipsy and this made me Big Mad.
Someone said recently that we've moved past "babies first fandom" behavior and are now solidly into "people just being assholes" territory, and they're right. It seems like a lot of newer fans are refusing to learn basic fandom etiquette, despite the plethora of fellows both preaching and modeling proper behavior and literally begging them to respect the basic tenets of fandom.
It's like that post (I can't find it but if someone knows what I'm talking about, please feel free to link it) that talks about how Hanlon's Razor ("never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity") should always be followed by the fact that, at a certain point, stupidity becomes willful, and therefore malicious. At first, "babies first fandoms" were just ignorant, but now, that ignorance is willful, and therefore malicious, and it's getting old.
When I was a kid, I really loved Kiki, and that's probably why I made a SECOND poster with her. Or maybe I just wanted to draw some bread, I don't know…
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okay i know we normally do this with more pop-focused festivals but i wanna see how many metalheads are on this site: how many groups do you recognize?
anyway the thing about fanfic is that it's not essentially bad or good; it's essentially amateur. some people are absolutely out there writing award-worthy prose (some fic writers ARE award-winning writers IRL!), but that's not the point. the point is that we're all telling campfire stories. it's a community, and it's a way to spend some more time in the worlds and stories that we love.
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Greatest hits of FIFA cultural exchanges thus far:
Learning about flyovers and pyrotechnics at American games being a thing
Non-americans discovering the size of American football stadiums....for high schools in texas. Also the size of our stadiums in general.
Going to baseball games as a side treat! Lmao.
Non-americans losing their minds over "like, 100 petrol pumps," at buc-ees.
Related: Americans often forget how huge target and Walmart is.
People discovering American BBQ
Non-americans being obsessed with mid American restaurant chains like Golden Corral and Taco Bell
A lot of them really did feel god in this chile's apparently
The rightful obsession with waffle house
New understanding of American Big Drink With Ice supremacy as summer creeps in
Begrudging acceptance of mandatory water breaks during games
Americans realizing we have a Team USA and we are not, in fact, just "hosting our friends" from around the world — mostly because we won our first match and our team is decent??? Not amazing but not the worst.
Side rant: us women's football team is legendary good and we should care about that more like. Hello???
Admitting Americans are right about air conditioning
Related: the english team did warm ups in Florida RIP, and also the there's a video of the French team just being like fuck the heat, fuck the sun, this is so hot...
Americans who do not normally care about international football but fucking love a sport and cheering so we're just hyping whatever team is nearby, like we see a party and just show up and learn the chant. Like sorry many of us don't know shit about soccer but if we see a bunch of people in viking helmets or kilts or holding a bunch of flags and cheering we're game.
TAILGATING!!!!
I already said this but American yellow school bus is an international celebrity
The Scottish drank Boston dry of beer apparently, like they quadrupled what Boston normally sells for fourth of July weekend. SAM ADAMS HAD TO GET AN EMERGENCY BEER DELIVERY.
Also the English team fans got kicked out of The Londoner pub in Dallas after drinking 5,000 beers and going over max capacity lmao
Free refill drinks, tortilla chips & salsa.
So many non-americans are going to be here for the 4th of July for our 250th anniversary which is going to be great and hilarious
Non-americans discovering ranch as a beloved condiment
Non-americans understanding American obsession with hamburger now
Japan's homebase is in Texas and the cultural differences are frankly great and also the Japanese fans are SO NICE and helped clean up the stadium after a match???
All the short videos with the eagle screech (which I think is actually a hawk but whatever)
When they say non Americans discovered Ranch dressing, understand the TSA decided itnwas necessary to put out reminders about the rules about liquids in your carry on.
